Deeds of the Divine Augustus

Audience

The first audience of the Deeds of the Divine Augustus was the new emperor Tiberius and the Roman Senate, who heard it read out during Augustus's funeral. But his will also instructed that the text be inscribed on bronze tablets to be affixed to the mausoleum he had built many years before in the center of Rome for himself and his family. This is one indication that the intended audience was specifically all the people of Rome. Other indications come from the text of the document, which always addresses the people of the city of Rome in the first place, listing what gifts and services Augustus had given them in particular, while mentioning the other parts of the empire only in relation to their overlordship of the provinces. Augustus's mausoleum was no ordinary private tomb. It was in the midst of a public park created by Augustus that included a grove of poplars around the place of his cremation, a gigantic sundial made from an obelisk he had captured in Egypt, and the famous Altar of Peace, which he had dedicated. This setting gave a context to people in Rome to read of Augustus's achievements as victor, builder, and benefactor. Similarly, the claims in the document of world conquest gave credence to the tomb as a site in the cult of the deified Augustus.

Although the Deeds of the Divine Augustus could not be as amenable to an audience of provincials as it was to the Roman citizens of the capital, within a few months of Augustus's death, Tiberius and the senate sent copies of the text to all of the provincial governors with orders that it be published. In practice, the text (or, in the east, a translation into Greek made on the spot) was probably read out at meetings of local senates or other bodies of aristocrats. But the governor of Galatia (central Turkey) decided to set up inscribed copies on marble plaques at the Temple of Augustus and Rome (Monumentum Ancyranum) in Ancyra and at least two other places in his territories, at Apollonia and Antioch, Pisidia (roughly the modern-day province of Antalya in Turkey), in both Latin and Greek versions. It is only because these copies survived into the Renaissance that the text can still be read in the modern day.