Deeds of the Divine Augustus

Impact

In one sense the Deeds of the Divine Augustus marks the end of Augustus's life and career, but it also marks an important beginning for the imperial government of Rome. In the bronze tablets of the document, Augustus created for all time a record of his own ideal image. He was a pious protector and restorer of the religion of the Roman state. He brought victory and peace to the Roman people. He was the father of the nation in the most literal sense, in that he was the patron who bestowed gifts upon the people as he would his own children. Paradoxically, his absolute rule was the guarantor of freedom for the people, as he protected the republic from any oligarchic aristocratic class that might have subverted it. As the savior of the Roman people, as master of land and sea, as the son of a veritable god and himself having been deified by the senate, Augustus established that the Roman emperor was not a mere mortal but a divine intermediary to govern the world in accord with divine will. The very terms established by Augustus would be the terms that all later emperors would use to describe themselves and which historians and orators would take as the model for emperors considered “good,” while emperors who fell short of these terms—those who failed in war, did not sacrifice their own resources for the good of the state, let religion fall into neglect, or oppressed their subjects—would be considered “bad.” Thus, in the Deeds of the Divine Augustus, Augustus created the ideology of the Roman emperor. This imperial image not only continued through the Middle Ages in the Byzantine Empire, where emperors ruled in direct succession to Rome, but also became the basis of kingship in Western Europe. Although the document itself was lost by the end of antiquity, its ethos permeated European culture and survived until modern times.

The Deeds of the Divine Augustus had a very different sort of impact through its reception by modern critical scholarship. The scientific study of the past through disciplines like history and philology is not much more than a century and a half old; in fact, Augustus's record of his reign played an important role at the very beginning of modern historiography. The existence of the Monumentum Ancyranum had been known since 1555, when Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, serving as the Austrian ambassador to Süleyman the Magnificent of Turkey, read the most easily accessible parts of the Latin inscription and realized they belonged to the catalog of Augustus's achievements mentioned by Suetonius. But in the mid-nineteenth century an entirely new kind of historical investigation began, based on examination of the past through scientific scrutiny of all kinds of evidence, not just surviving literary texts. One part of this movement was the modern form of epigraphy, the study of inscriptions. It was reasoned that public inscriptions would give deep understanding of the workings and everyday experience of life in past eras. The text of the Deeds of the Divine Augustus was called the queen of inscriptions by Theodor Mommsen, the greatest scholar of that era, because it contained complete within itself an entirely new and different view of the history of one of the most crucial periods of Western culture, as it came directly from the period and was not mediated through the tendentious opinions of ancient literary writers or through a long chain of copies. By 1885 French and German expeditions had recovered the full text from Ancyra, and most of the other known copies (two small fragments have turned up since then), allowing Mommsen to publish the first full text of the document. Since then, the Deeds of the Divine Augustus has never lost its status as the most important document of Augustan history.