Bereft of historical sensitivity and untutored in the milestones of world history, Americans let slip by, all but unnoticed, the bimillennium of the death of one of the truly towering figures in Western history. While the works of Alexander the Great and Napoleon disappeared with their exit from the stage of history, and where George Washington and Winston Churchill worked on a smaller canvas, Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus created and dominated a political system that set the Western world on its path for the succeeding two thousand years. In forgetting the death of Rome’s first emperor and ignoring his legacy, Americans continue to impoverish their understanding of the world they now bestride.
On August 19, 14 A.D. , Augustus died peacefully at the age of seventy-seven, after ruling the Roman Empire and much of the civilized world for forty years. History continues to be fascinated with his uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, but it was Augustus who succeeded where the brilliant Caesar had failed; it was Octavian (as he was then known) who emerged triumphant from the decades of civil war that consumed Republican Rome; it was a frail boy in his teens who first challenged, and then vanquished, some of the greatest names in history: Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony. His chief political creation, the principate, survived in the western half of the empire for nearly 500 years after his death, and in an altered state for another full millennium in Constantinople, where the
