Gaius Octavius — Octavian, then Augustus — was Julius Caesar's nineteen-year-old great-nephew when Caesar was murdered in March 44 BCE. Named in Caesar's will as adopted son and heir, he marched on Rome, made himself consul at twenty, formed the Second Triumvirate with Mark Antony and Lepidus, defeated Caesar's assassins at Philippi in 42 BCE, eliminated his colleagues over the next decade, and crushed Antony and at the naval battle of Actium in 31 BCE. From that point he was sole master of the Mediterranean world. Across the next forty-one years he reorganised everything — military command, provincial administration, taxation, the calendar — under the constitutional fiction that the Republic had been restored. He took the name Augustus ('the revered one') in 27 BCE; his stabilised the empire from Britain to Egypt; he reshaped Rome itself ('I found a city of brick,' he is said to have remarked, 'and left it a city of marble'); he sponsored Virgil, Horace, Livy, and Ovid; and he died at seventy-five in 14 CE at Nola, having ruled the longest of any Roman head of state. The month of August carries his name.
All Figures
First Roman Emperor
Augustus
63 BCE – 14 CE
The teenager Caesar adopted as heir who, after thirteen years of civil war, ended the Roman Republic, founded the Empire, and ruled it as its first princeps for forty-one years of peace.
Lifetime
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