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The Sources
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Augustus
In this course, Professor Matthew Nicholls (University of Oxford) explores the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Across twenty-one lectures, we consider a range of issues including: (i) the historical sources for reign of Augustus and their reliability; (ii) the events that led to the creation of the principate, particularly the Battle of Actium; (iii) the various constitutional settlements that formalised Augustus’ powers; (iv) his military achievements; (v) the importance of contemporary poetry (Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid) and coinage for understanding his reign; (vi) the significance of key figures around Augustus, such as Livia, Marcus Agrippa, Tiberius and Germanicus; (vii) the extent to which Augustus really ‘restored the republic’ as he claimed he did; (viii) Augustus’ involvement in religious life at Rome and in the provinces; (ix) his administrative changes in Rome and in the provinces; (x) his management of various different sections of Roman society – the senatorial elite, the equestrian order, the army, the people of Rome and the provincial elites; (xi) challenges to his rule; (xii) his management of the succession; and (xiii) the importance of his own record of his achievements, the Res Gestae.
The Sources
In this lecture we provide an introduction to the figure of Augustus and think about the different kinds of sources that are available, focusing in particular on: (i) the literary sources: Suetonius, Tacitus and Cassius Dio; (ii) the poetry of Ovid, Propertius, Horace and Virgil; (iii) the material culture, including coins, buildings, statues and inscriptions; and (iv) the importance of being critical readers of the source material.
Augustus was Rome's first emperor, and he transformed the Roman world.
00:00:06He put in place a principate, a system of rule
00:00:09by one man that lasted for four centuries after his death,
00:00:11and he ruled for a very long time – 31 BC to
00:00:14AD 14 – with a long career before that date as well.
00:00:17He's a remarkable figure,
00:00:20and his long and complicated reign leaves us lots of questions.
00:00:22Two questions that you're particularly asked to cover in this course are:
00:00:25‘Did he restore the republic?’ – what would that mean? can he be said to have done it?
00:00:28did he talk about doing it? –
00:00:32and ‘What were the benefits of imperial rule for people at Rome and around the empire?’
00:00:34Augustus himself certainly talked about those benefits.
00:00:38Do we believe him? What other voices can we recover?
00:00:41So, thinking about questions like that,
00:00:44we need to think about scholarly debates and also about
00:00:46the evidence that we have to address those questions.
00:00:49We're talking about a period of time two thousand years ago.
00:00:51Many voices from that time are now silent and lost. We do have some testimony.
00:00:54We've got some wonderful literary sources. So there’s Suetonius,
00:00:58who wrote a biography of the first twelve emperors,
00:01:01and his biography of Augustus is one of his longest.
00:01:04It's really rich and interesting: he used documentary sources,
00:01:08he used some gossip, he wrote in quite a racy, pacy sort of style,
00:01:10so it's very nice to read. But he was writing a century later,
00:01:14he had particular interests, and particular focuses
00:01:17that don’t always match the questions we're interested in, so we have to read carefully.
00:01:19There's a wonderful historical writer called Tacitus,
00:01:23who wrote just a little bit earlier than Suetonius
00:01:26but around the same time, about a century after Augustus’ death.
00:01:29He was writing grand narrative history, a very elevated genre of writing.
00:01:32We know he used documentary sources, but he never talks about that directly.
00:01:36He occupies this grand rhetorical tradition of historical writing,
00:01:40where you don't reveal your sources,
00:01:44but you let a great narrative unfold. So we
00:01:46might like footnotes and references and facts and figures,
00:01:48he doesn't really give us those.
00:01:51Instead, he gives us moral instruction, the lessons from history,
00:01:52so he, too, is an author we can read
00:01:55with great pleasure and with wonderful facts to be gleaned,
00:01:57but kind of reading against the grain there can be useful too.
00:01:59We have Dio,
00:02:03who wrote a century later again.
00:02:04Like Tacitus,
00:02:06Dio
00:02:06was a senator.
00:02:07Like Tacitus,
00:02:08he thinks very hard about the place of the Senate and
00:02:09of the individual senator under tyrannical emperors – can you resist?
00:02:11can you find a useful role for yourself? has the emperor left the Senate a job to do?
00:02:15So he too has his preoccupations, and his focuses. He's writing
00:02:18a couple of centuries after Augustus's death. We have to wonder,
00:02:21at that distance of time, how accurate, how detailed can he be?
00:02:24But he, too leaves a wonderful record,
00:02:27albeit fragmentary and sometimes surviving only in excerpts.
00:02:30So these are our main historical writers. There are others like Velleius
00:02:33Paterculus,
00:02:36who's closer in date to Augustus.
00:02:36All great, all with their limits, so where else do we turn?
00:02:39We have the poets and we'll talk about them. Poets can be wonderful
00:02:42witnesses to contemporary life – poets like Ovid, Propertius,
00:02:46Horace, Virgil, writing at the time of Augustus. They're eyewitnesses,
00:02:50but they're not trying to be eyewitnesses. They're trying to write poetry.
00:02:53They're trying to entertain us or make us think or
00:02:56ask questions about human life and the human condition,
00:02:59about love, about morals, about religion.
00:03:02They’re not always writing directly about Augustus and his regime,
00:03:04rarely writing directly about anything, actually,
00:03:08so poetry is a wonderful source, but is it a historical source?
00:03:11We'll look at that.
00:03:14And then there's material culture:
00:03:15coins, buildings, statues.
00:03:18All terrific stuff, again survives and scraps and patches,
00:03:21but the patches are wonderful, there are so many things we can look at.
00:03:24But when you're looking at coins, when you're looking at inscriptions,
00:03:27works of art, buildings, you're seeing what the regime wanted you to see.
00:03:29You're looking at a set of images,
00:03:33carefully crafted and curated by Augustus or the people
00:03:35around him or the people trying to impress him.
00:03:38You're seeing often
00:03:40a regime's-eye view of the regime. So we can look at that material,
00:03:41but as with all our sources, we have to set it in context,
00:03:45we have to think about its date, about the circumstances of its creation,
00:03:48its original audience, the purpose of the authors or creators of that content,
00:03:51so we can look at all that, and we will do,
00:03:56but as you're doing that just remember to be critical readers,
00:03:57critical thinkers about the
00:04:00the value, the veracity, the agenda, the texture,
00:04:02the feel of the source material that we're looking at.
00:04:05
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Nicholls, M. (2023, May 23). Augustus - The Sources [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/augustus/the-sources-778dd9de-b7b6-433b-bf1a-22562c90a59f
MLA style
Nicholls, M. "Augustus – The Sources." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 23 May 2023, https://massolit.io/courses/augustus/the-sources-778dd9de-b7b6-433b-bf1a-22562c90a59f