Harry Mount

On the way to the Forum

Jochen Bleicken’s biography comes to praise the first emperor, not to bury him, finds Harry Mount

It’s strange that tourists rarely visit the most famous site in Roman history. The spot in Pompey’s assembly hall where Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, 44 bc, is right in the middle of Rome, in Largo di Torre Argentina. When I was there, the tourists were only interested in the feral cats that stroll across the murder scene.

Jochen Bleicken shrewdly begins this long, occasionally heavygoing but unequalled biography with that murder. It’s only because Caesar appointed his great-nephew Gaius Octavius (known later as Augustus) as his adopted son and heir that the latter rose to such heights. But for that crucial adoption, Augustus wasn’t that posh. His real father was a praetor in Velitre, a little town in the Alban mountains; his mother was from a small-town, senatorial background. Upper class, yes; elite, ruling class, no.

That relatively ungrand beginning explains a lot about the hard-working, self-aware, self-denying character that propelled Augustus to greatness. He ate sparingly —sardines, figs and cheese — and drank Rhaetian wine moderately, helping him to live to 75. He didn’t have too many self-indulgent baths, rode and walked into old age, and he’d often hop the last part of a walk to keep in shape. He left imperial excess — the orgies and the boozing — to the emperors who followed.

Augustus’s semi-posh background also explains his obsession with ancestry and the need to show his connections to the greats of Roman history. The Ara Pacis Augustae — the Altar of Augustan Peace, that sublime sculpture on the banks of the Tiber — is an altar to genealogy. Augustus is depicted alongside the royal flush of Roman history: Aeneas, Romulus, Remus and the goddess Roma. Augustus’s Forum followed the same pattern: there he is again, next to statues of his supposed ancestors, Mars, Venus, Aeneas and Romulus.

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