himself into a serious legislator. Given so much power and responsibility at a young age

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1 Mary Beard passages word summaries In 50 words or fewer, complete the statement that begins: Mary Beard shows that... C/F Section Group 1: Sarah, Scout, Sam [17/20] Through Mary Beard s witting she shows how, a young inexperienced thug, transforms himself into a serious legislator. Given so much power and responsibility at a young age he displayed ruthless characteristics in the civil war. Though that violence still remained a part of him, it earned him respect from his troops, admiration from Romans and the title of Emperor Augustus. Comment [1]: Spelling - writing Comment [2]: No commas needed Comment [3]: He was not given power he seized it! Comment [4]: good Comment [5]: Insert comma Group 2: Maggie, Malik, (Nathan) [18/20] In a precise, strategic identity metamorphosis, the transformation of Octavian to Augustus, thug to statesman, and ruthless general to reverent leader set the precedent for a new kind of leadership and a new definition of power. Indeed, Octavian s adaptation of the title Augustus, meaning Revered One marked a personal political and ideological transition of great importance to Rome. Comment [6]: Try: In a strategic change of identity, Octavian s transformation Comment [7]: revered Comment [8]: OK, but explain what was new try: he set a precedent for one- man rule and power based on force Comment [9]: this is an empty phrase Group 3: Jason, Titus, Olivia [18/20] Octavian maintained his power by using his army to threaten those who attempted to challenge him. He wanted to be viewed as a statesman but he still wanted people to obey him. Octavian changed his name to Augustus to show he wasn t the same person anymore; that he had changed. Comment [10]: good Comment [11]: True and some of his achievements were in fact very good for Rome Comment [12]: OK, but Beard s suggestion is that Octavian did not really change he was still a brutal guy who was ruthless in his use of power 1

2 Group 4: Bella, Dave, Tristan [17/20] Mary Beard writes about Anthony Everitt s analysis of how Octavian changed his reputation from a thug to a statesman. Through a name change, a tremendous growth in maturity, and keeping his take-no-prisoners demeanor in politics, Octavian would acquire total power and change Rome s government for the rest of its time. Group 5: Max, Kera [19/20] Augustus transformed from Octavian the warlord to Augustus the elder statesman. Augustus instituted a new government alongside nationalizing armies. He owed victories to violence, good luck, treachery, and shrewd judgment. Augustus realized visibility gained power with an army behind him. Augustus s control of the army was central to his power. A/E Section Group 6: Sean, Ryland, Calista [15/20] Augustus was always a bad person. He tried to make himself look better and clean up his image, but he was still an antagonist and the people knew this. He was insecure so he fell back to his army. The people knew that he was not to be messed with. Group 7: Harrison, Cynthia, Vicky [16/20] After being brought to power by Cicero, Octavius betrayed the senator and sided with Antony. Through careful reshaping of his image Octavius became a highly revered statesmen and the first emperor of Rome, by shifting power from public to private. He ruled for 44 years before he died in 14 BC. Comment [13]: Actually, Beard criticizes Everitt for NOT analyzing the change. Comment [14]: OK, but I think you mean responsible and efficient leadership Comment [15]: You could explain what this change was he instituted one- man rule Comment [16]: evolved might be a better word. Or try: Octavian the thug transformed himself into Augustus the responsible statesman. Comment [17]: He institutued one- man rule Comment [18]: Try: and nationalized the army Comment [19]: Good this is perhaps Beard s most important point Comment [20]: This phrase is not specific enough. Beard s point is that his power always rested on the use or the threat of force Comment [21]: Actually, he was pretty successful in manipulating his public image Comment [22]: Yes, in the sense that he had many opponents, but not in a personal sense he was extremely confident Comment [23]: OK, but very colloquial Comment [24]: This is true, but Beard does not write about this HBO portrays it Comment [25]: Good this is an effective point Comment [26]: yes Comment [27]: true, but this is not Beard s most important point Comment [28]: AD, not BC 2

3 Group 8: Sarah, Di [17/20] Mary Beard argues that Augustus went from a violent young thug to an honorable legislator. He reinvented & renamed himself Octavian and put together a new one man rule government. The Roman army was loyal to him instead of the state, and this was central to his power base. Group 9: Oliver, Tim, Gabriel [19/20] Octavian/Augustus started as a war criminal, but ended up being a great leader of Rome. He used to be a violent warlord in civil conflicts from BC. But as he changed his name to Augustus, he became a leader who strived to improve Roman morals, etc. Group 10: Uchenna, Abby, Alex [18/20] Octavian, Caesar s adopted son, gained power by being a thug and later turned into a statesman. After defeating the conspirators and Antony s armies he gained a monopoly of power. He was the first to realize that power stemmed from visibility. He secured power by reforming the army and government, and using violence. Group 11: Octavian made a successful transition from "thug" to "statesman," but his authority Comment [29]: Try: transformed Comment [30]: No, that was his old name Augustus was his new name Comment [31]: Condense try: established one- man rule Comment [32]: No, instead of the Senate or instead of any single commander Comment [33]: You still have some extra words to use if you condense Comment [34]: good Comment [35]: This is an effective summary, but etc is not specific enough. Beard s point is that despite his transformation and his improved public image, his power still rested on the use and the threat of violence Comment [36]: True, though you don t really need to identify him in a short exercise like this Comment [37]: Good Comment [38]: Good again Comment [39]: Ah, this is the point you should work on try: his power always rested on the use and the threat of violence always rested on the threat of violence and the military. He manipulated public opinion through responsible leadership, promotion of a benign public image, and a massive building program, yet he acquired and maintained power through force. 3

4 1) There was really very little to choose between Antony and Octavian/Augustus. Antony has gone down in history as a dissolute wastrel whose victory would have turned Rome into an Oriental monarchy, and Augustus as the sober founding father of an imperial system that would endure in some guise into the Middle Ages. But if you turn the clock back to 31 and to the end of the civil wars that had followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, the two antagonists look almost interchangeable. For most of the inhabitants of the Roman world, the victory of one or the other would require no more adjustment than the swapping of one talking raven for another. (106) 2) In fact, this is exactly where the main historical problem in the career of Augustus lies. How can we understand his transition from a violent warlord in the civil conflicts of the Roman world between 44 and 31 BC to the venerable elder statesman who died safely in his bed in 14 AD? How do we explain the metamorphosis of a young thug who was reputedly capable of tearing out a man s eyes with his bare hands into a serious-minded legislator apparently concerned to improve Roman morals, increase the birth rate, revive ancient religious traditions, and turn the capital from a city of brick to a city of marble, while at the same time successfully repackaging the traditional political institutions to leave himself in the position of king, in all but title? (106) 3) True, there are plenty of examples from all historical periods, including our own, of freedom fighters and terrorists being transformed into respected government leaders. But the case of Augustus is a unusually extreme. As Octavian, he fought and schemed his way to victory over the course of a decade or more of bitter civil wars in which the supporters of Julius Caesar first turned on those who had assassinated him in the name of liberty, before finishing the job by turning on one another. Octavian then dramatically reinvented himself. It was a change of image and substance marked by a change of name. In 27 BC, he dispensed with Octavian and its murderous associations. He flirted with the idea of calling himself Romulus after the original founder of Rome, but that had some undesirable associations too: not only had he made himself king by killing his brother Remus, which might seem uncomfortably reminiscent of Octavian s fight with Antony, but according to one story Romulus had himself been murdered, just like Caesar, by a posse of senators. So instead he opted for Augustus, a new coinage, meaning something like Revered One. ( ) 4) [The challenge for historians is] to grasp the problem of the transformation of the emperor from thug to statesman, [and] to explain how the transformed Augustus managed to put into place a radically new system of Roman government, replacing what had been a fraying democracy of sorts with one-man rule. (108) 5) [Anthony Everitt, in his biography of Augustus,] tells in some detail the packed and tortuous narrative of Caesar s assassination and its aftermath, when the young Octavian found himself, at eighteen years old, not only Caesar s main heir but also posthumously 4

5 adopted in his will. Unable to dislodge Mark Antony, the other main defender of the Caesarian cause and twenty years his senior, he joined forces with him and together, after a short-lived truce with the assassins, they defeated the army of Brutus and Cassius in Greece in 42. (108) 6) Nine further years of civil conflict were to follow, largely but not exclusively between the supporters of Octavian and of Antony This is an even more intricate tale, featuring rivalry, marriage alliances between the various parties, and brief periods of reconciliation interspersed with vicious fighting until Antony, notoriously in partnership with Cleopatra of Egypt (who had earlier been the mistress of Julius Caesar himself), escaped from defeat at Actium, on the coast of northern Greece, to commit suicide in Egypt. ( ) 7) Like most successful warlords-turned-statesmen, Octavian owed his victory to the usual mixture of violence, good luck, treachery, and shrewd judgment. (109) 8) The establishment of the Augustan regime of one-man rule was not primarily a matter of momentary decisions or actions The regime was established much more by the gradual readjustment of political expectations among both the elite and the people, and by the gradual redefinition of the very idea of the government and political activity. (110) 9) With the advent of the rule of Augustus, the locus of power shifted from public to private spaces. To be sure, many of the old institutions, including the Senate, continued to operate. But if any specific, individual decisions were crucial in the pattern of political change that Augustus inaugurated, these were likely not made in the Senate house or the Forum but in Augustus own home. (111) 10) [Anthony Everitt] tends to shy away from facing directly the big questions of Augustus success: what was the basis of his power? Why was it that he could succeed in supplanting the traditions of republican politics where Julius Caesar himself had failed? How did he manage to transform himself and his image from warlord to statesman? ( ) 11) At times the version of Augustus that emerges from [Everitt s biography] is that of a sensible, efficient, and slightly [moderate] British civil servant. He was a careful drafter of speeches. He had a commitment to clean government. He replaced the corrupt mechanisms of the Republic with something resembling an honest state bureaucracy. He introduced orderly governance throughout the empire. He held somber commitments to the public interest. He took no steps to restrict free speech. No secret police knocked on doors of dissident writers, for he understood that independence of 5

6 spirit was central to a Roman s idea of himself. He made the citizens feel more like stakeholders than victims. (112) 12) Alternatively, you could see him as a chief executive of a large organization; and at his side was Livia, his trophy wife who made sure she stood by her man and looked the part. (112) 13) In fact, most of Augustus aims sound so utterly unobjectionable as they are described in [Everitt s account] that it is hard to understand why there remain so many undeniable hints of potentially violent opposition. [Everitt] deals briskly with what seems to have been a serious conspiracy in BC. He passes quickly over the fact that when Augustus reviewed the composition of the Senate in 28 BC, he turned up, according to [the ancient historian] Suetonius, wearing armor beneath his tunic and had the senators frisked on their way into the meeting. (112) 14) Whatever the exact circumstances that lie behind any of these incidents, together they suggest that Augustus monopoly of power provoked much more serious opposition than Everitt (or, to be fair, most recent historians) care to admit. Violence, or more often the lurking threat of violence, must have been a constant undercurrent in the Augustan regime. It is in this setting that we should understand the continuing circulation of the stories of the emperor s ruthlessness, if not brute sadism, during the civil wars. However benign an image he might choose to present in middle age, it did his power no harm for everyone to know that he had once been capable of blinding a man with his own hands. Scratch the surface and perhaps he still was. As in many political systems, the economy of force operated through anecdote and rumor, as much as through the spilling of blood. ( ) 15) Augustus was the first Roman politician to realize that power in part stemmed from visibility, or at least to act on that realization. More portrait statues survive of him than of any other Roman ever, and they have been found throughout the empire often, it seems, made from a model distributed from Rome. And in the capital itself, he repeatedly stamped the cityscape with his own image in various forms. (113) 16) [The Forum of Augustus] was a vast development in gleaming marble, adjacent to and towering over the old Roman Forum, which had been the political center of the traditional Republic. Its decorative program did not simply underline the power of the emperor; it also demonstrated his direct descent from Rome two mythical founders, Romulus and Aeneas. If he didn t actually take the name of Romulus, he certainly found other ways to convey the idea that he had re-founded Rome, and to identify his destiny with that of the city. ( ) 6

7 17) But the Augustan regime was not based on myth and image-making alone. As I have already hinted, the deployment and control of force went hand in hand with the softer side of political domination Augustus control of the Roman army was absolutely central to his power base. (114) 18) As the civil wars that brought Augustus to power themselves illustrate, the Republic collapsed in part because Roman armies were semi-private institutions owing their loyalty to their own commander rather than to the state. Augustus nationalized the armies and directed their loyalty to himself. He did this by a vast program of structural reform: regularizing recruitment, conditions of service, and pay (from the state treasury), and providing a generous retirement package at the end of a fixed period of service, sixteen years by the end of his reign. The importance that Augustus must have given to this is indicated by the vast financial outlay it entailed. One estimate has it that army costs alone devoured more than half the annual tax revenue of the whole Roman Empire. (114) Works Cited Beard, Mary. Looking for the Emperor. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations. New York: W.W. Norton, Print. 7

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