so we are now going to look at this topic of the roman empire which means we're going to look at the roman state as it developed and really as it changed politically and developed following the assassination of julius caesar the republican government that had been in place in rome for about five centuries collapsed completely after julius caesar's assassination and it was replaced by a new form of government that has become known in modern times as the principal more popularly though this period of roman history following julius caesar's death has become known as the roman empire and it's a traditional way of referring to it that's why i've made it the title of this video and the next but it's a little bit confusing to just call it the empire because the republic had also created an empire for itself but as you will see the new period of roman history known as the empire or as modern people sometimes call it to make it a little more clear the principal was ruled by leaders who became known as emperors and thus the state they rolled over became known as the empire more formally so that's a long-winded way i suppose i've just pointed out here that rome goes through something of a political transformation here after the death of julius caesar and what i'm going to do in this video is explain the transformation look at what this new state known uh as the principate what it involves in fact what it really involves is the power of one particular individual a man that you're looking at depicted here an idealized form named octavian we will see was the adopted son of julius caesar and he was also named julius caesar's heir in caesar's own will and so he would become the prominent figure of this new era of or the i should say the man who put in motion the new political system that would dominate this next era of roman history so we're going to come back to octavian along the way here quite a few times but i also want to in this video carry forward the story from where we left off when we were last looking at the roman republic you'll remember that the roman republic which had traditionally been governed by the senate had for a variety of reasons fallen into a number of different civil wars as to say i counted out three rounds of civil war that the roman republic endured beginning in the 130s and the third of those rounds of civil war taking place with the rise to power of julius caesar then of course his assassination and you may remember the the civil wars had really been about whether or not it was appropriate that the aristocracy in the senate should really control the roman republic and there were people remember who had argued that because of corruption in the senatorial order or the aristocr aristocracy and because of other problems that the senate wasn't willing to solve that maybe it's not so appropriate that the senate dominates the political affairs of rome any longer and so it was those individuals um known as a papillary so it challenged the traditional role of the senate who had played a role in these civil wars and in fact julius caesar was one of these popolaris figures who had championed non-traditional means of governing the roman state but despite the fact that julius caesar some of his actions do seem to have probably helped rome in terms of reform having said all that it seemed pretty obvious that julius caesar wanted to become a king at least he was he had himself named dictator for life which is probably about as close to a king as you can become and therefore those who resented this in the senate carried out his assassination in 44 bce so what happened though after julius caesar's assassination is the violence between those supporting the senate and those instead in support of alternate means of dealing with rome's problems began to fight again and in particular here there were three men who would emerge as not just allies but potentially three men who could be successors to julius caesar's authority in rome they were all men who were closely associated with caesar and his own rise to power before of course caesar's own death took him out of the picture two of these figures were generals who had fought alongside caesar a third of these allies i'm referring to in this slide here i've already mentioned briefly which is octavian the much younger man only a teenager still actually at the time who was not only adopted by caesar before his death but had actually been named as caesar's own heir in his will well although these three allies would not necessarily get along well with each other going forward because all three of them proved to be pretty ambitious and they don't necessarily want to share power they were willing to work together immediately after joyce sees this assassination in order to make sure to wipe out the forces the leaders the forces that still supported the cause of the senate the optimatis faction as i called them in a previous video and that not only meant well i should maybe start with what i have here in the slide that included driving the actual assassins the leaders of which in the senate have been brutus and cassius driving them out of rome altogether they fled to greece where they were able to put together an army and the the allies of caesars i'm generically referring to them here for now put their own army together and they went over to greece and they fought this big battle and they won the battle that has to say the heirs excuse me the uh allies who are would soon be um fighting each other even over the right to succeed caesar but for now they worked together they were able to defeat the assassins of julius caesar and bruce and cassius these individuals according to ancient writers um committed suicide when they realized that the battle is lost in fact this is the 17th century uh depiction showing brutus and cassius throwing themselves on their swords so the actual assassins were taken out um but even more grim was what these three allies of julius caesar decided to do back in rome because they drew up a list of hundreds of senators that they considered to be if not an actual league with the assassins were at least sympathetic and politically supportive of what they had done and they also included on that list two thousand other lesser aristocrats we could call them who had been supportive of those senators and basically if your name was on the list then the idea was you're gonna be arrested you're going to be executed and your property was going to be seized from you and it led basically to a bloodbath therefore in rome and what the probably the most famous and tragic really of the executions carried out in this way was that of cicero the senator that i've mentioned several times here he actually had not been a uh he hadn't been an active participant at all in the assassination of julius caesar and he was it seems horrified by the use of more political violence at the same time he had been uh sympathetic to the motivation to assassinate him as in fact we would see as we've seen in our own reading and so in any case the idea is that these uh allies friends you could call my guest of julius caesar uh avenged caesar in part by having individuals like cicero executed this is a 19th century depiction of cicero's head which is of course been cut off from the body being uh brought and presented to these people associated with julius caesar for their viewing pleasure as a groom as that may sound this here um seated in the center of the pictures mark anthony one of the allies of julius caesar that played an important role in what i'm now describing this is mark anthony's wife at the time a woman named fulvia who was not only very politically active in assisting her husband but she was apparently personally really ticked off by some of the things that that cicero had said uh about julius caesar and even about marc anthony and and as you may remember cicero is known for his way with words so when he would speak out against other people you do it quite well and persuasively in any case the story goes that the woman fulvia the wife of mark anthony was so angry with cicero that when the head was brought to her that she pushed pins golden pins into his tongue to sort of mock i guess the fact that he could no longer speak so eloquently against her political cause anyway it's a strange sort of story but as you can see here's a lot of violence that continues following caesar's assassination in 44 bce once the assassins were uh killed defeated in battle taken out in rome that sort of thing at that point these three men who were associated with julius caesar decided despite their conflicting ambition to each be the dominant power in rome they decided to consolidate their standing in rome by working together for a time and so these three potential successors to julius caesar actually formed an alliance even a government it became called as the second triumvirate which i don't think actually i want to spend too much time on here given all the uh history that we're looking at here i don't want to overly complicate this but uh you can see here on this map how in fact rome was for a short time divided between these three would-be successors to julius caesar's authority um octavian the man who will win out in the struggle we will see ultimately was given as you can see control of italy and the western part of the empire uh a man who we're not even really going to worry about here the third individual named lepidus was given part of africa and you can see anthony mark anthony was given the east and he uh he is someone we're going to talk a little bit more about here as it turns out after the division of the empire before too long passed uh one of these three individuals who formed the second triumvirate was sort of shoved aside poor lepidus and what that left behind were two contenders to rule the roman state two contenders one of them mark anthony the other as you see octavian i've already said a brief amount about both uh mark anthony was of course um older than octavian as you can see here by 20 years older and uh anthony had been a general who had actually played the key role in defeating the assassins in the east he's a pretty powerful and influential man and he clearly had the aspiration to replace julius caesar as the new dominant power in rome from his point of view it was kind of obnoxious for this teenager octavian to show up and sort of throw around the fact that he was not only the son of julius caesar but in fact that he was also his named heir i think it's probably true that mark anthony maybe didn't take octavian quite as seriously as he should have well you'll remember from the map i just showed you that anthony had been it agreed given control over the eastern half of the empire and the western half of course had been instead given over to octavian anthony thought that this gave him a huge advantage and it does seem in a way that it might have given him an advantage in this looming showdown now between these two individuals because the wealthier part of the empire was actually in the east and the reason for that was that was where most of the cities the roman empire were located and it's where most of the richest of the agricultural lands like in the egyptian nile valley for example were located although to be a little more specific here anthony did not as a roman leader control egypt which still had yet to be formally brought into the roman state but instead mark anthony became an ally of queen cleopatra who did rule egypt now cleopatra was a hellenistic monarch meaning she was descended from one of the generals of alexander the great who had created a kingdom in egypt like the founder of that egyptian state was the general ptolemy and so the ptolemaic monarchy therefore of egypt had actually been in place for centuries at this point in cleopatra courses that representative that dynasty at this stage but she became not just an ally of marc anthony but apparently also they were romantically involved in fact she seems to have borne him several children she'd actually already because of our contact with joyce caesar had a romantic fling with him as well and produced a son by julius caesar so she's a pretty important figure actually in roman affairs at this point in time but she became an ally of marc antony now and that's a pretty powerful ally to have considering how wealthy egypt was in the ancient world and uh considering the the population base that it also gave anthony to that is to say the military resource therefore that that anthony had access to military power so we got antony cleopatra in the east but then of course as i said in the west we've got this guy named octavian relatively young person and it does seem again that octavia might have been in dire straits as it became obvious that apparently roma is not big enough to share for even just two people so octavian though as it turns out was pretty shrewd and what he decided to do was win over people in italy and as much of the empire really as possible by portraying himself as a man defending traditional roman values he made himself out to be an individual who believed in the pie toss that had been celebrated by roman writers as the base of the roman way of life patos again meaning putting rome first before everything else he played up a lot his connection that he believed he had with ancient roman ways of living and he contrasted that traditional and really moral uh roman person himself with marc anthony who he claimed had been seduced by eastern culture and was really no longer properly roman it is interesting to note that the eastern half of the roman state was predominantly greek speaking that was just one of the legacies of alexander the great's conquests as well as the generals from alexander the greats time would establish greek speaking ruling dynasties in the east so greek was really the more common language in the east not latin and therefore antony's association with not just cleopatra but his sort of power base in the east seemed to be very much wrapped up in greek culture and in fact empty really seems to have presented himself like a greek hellenistic king would have which is not particularly appropriate for roman culture because romans of course had for a long time believe that it was in their dna that they just didn't like being ruled by kings that's why they had become a republic after all so anthony therefore could betray uh portray excuse me octavian could betray anthony as having been seduced i guess both literally and figuratively in the terms of cleopatra but seduced by this eastern style of leadership like the eastern style of monarchy and basically octavian warned people in italy that if they allowed anthony to win this looming battle and showdown that was inevitable between east and west that basically romans would become enslaved to greek-speaking eastern monarchies incidentally this map also uh indicates the fact that cleopatra and anthony as part of their alliance it was agreed that their children would be assigned different portions of the eastern part of the empire and thus you can see uh different names here showing places where different children right were associated allowed to take title to these regions so basically from octavian's point of view it's as if anthony is giving the eastern portions of the empire away you see to these hellenistic monarchs so by the time we get to the 30s it's pretty obvious there's going to be a problem and in fact there is this big battle that finally took place in 31 bce it's a naval battle actually the battle of actium and it took place off the coast of greece and as you can see from my text here it did not go so well for marc anthony and cleopatra's forces but it did go well for octavian and so this victory that octavian won at actium made it clear that he was going to become the dominant ruler of the roman state the story went that after anthony and cleopatra's forces were smashed at actium and by the way many of the forces deployed to fight in that battle switched sides during the battle over to octavian so clearly octavian sort of what would you call it messaging uh seems to have worked for some but after the victory anthony and cleopatra retreated back to the east and there anthony and cleopatra each apparently committed suicide uh realizing that it was better to commit suicide you see versus what other fate that octavian would have in store for these individuals he would have almost certainly paraded both of these individuals in chains in rome in a sort of parade and humiliated them and executed them publicly one of the traditions that has developed since ancient times according to some authors is that cleopatra committed suicide by holding poisonous snakes asps up to her wrists and they bitter and poisoned her and she died that way but it is interesting here you see in a painting from pompeii an ancient city in rome that was overwhelmed by a volcanic eruption in the first century you could see one of the pains in the wall appears to show cleopatra committing poison by by drinking it in any case anthony and cleopatra did kill themselves and once that happens octavian seemed to be in an unchallenged position he not only had no viable opposition in the form of the optimates faction right the faction that had supported the traditional role the senate they had been totally smashed years before in in battle and by prescription arrest and execution but as you can see here there's also no longer any rival left standing who had been associated with julius caesar himself and on top of all of this octavian as you can see had literally been named the heir to julius caesar and in fact that is why by the way he had been adopted as julius caesar's son is to to better legitimize the fact that he was that heir so at this point the question is of course what will octavian do with his power i mean is he going to proceed in the same way as his adoptive father had done in rural rome almost like a king would well it turns out that in some ways he he he did have well in a lot of ways he did have the ambition to roll rome as a king would do but he at the same time was also clever enough even at a young age it was very clever enough to recognize that you know look what had happened to julius caesar i mean ultimately he made he didn't make clearly enough efforts to assure roman people that he cared about the values of the republic and it allowed for this senatorial faction of course to murder him in the name of what they called liberty so politically octavian recognized that he would need to be much more careful than julius caesar had been when it came to consolidating his power and determining rome's political future well there's no question that some of the things that octavian did are very much are reminiscent of not just julius caesar but of the popolares figures from rome's past civil wars but and i'm going to explain just a little bit more of that but before i do i want to give you a general picture of where i'm going with this although it is true that he did a number of things octavian did to appease um the popolaris at the same time he would go out of his way to show a certain amount of respect for the traditional role of the senate in roman society so it means he even makes some um they might be cosmetic in a lot of ways but he does make some conce some efforts let's say to play up to to respect uh what had been the optomontes faction and for a variety of reasons it works it octavian you will see is credited with finally ending the civil wars that have bedeviled their own republic for about a hundred years and creating an internal peace for rome that would last for a very long time in fact we're going to get to the long-term internal piece created by octavian's success in the next video in this particular video i just want to continue looking a little bit more at what octavian actually did to make this happen well as you can see here we don't want to be naive about this one of the reasons why octavian would be a strong and successful ruler for the roman state at this point beyond all of his political posturing and ideas and so forth a lot of it did come down to the fact that the legions of the roman army supported him and they they supported him it seems because they perceived him to be someone who would not only look out for their interest but the person who was traditionally roman who would also stabilize the state so there's some um idealism probably there but as well self-interest because octavian promised his soldiers land when they retired from service and of course he even followed through on that not just a promise and it's kind of interesting to notice that because that is something that had become a feature of the popolaris during the previous civil conflicts of the roman republic you may or may not remember in a previous video that this is exactly what the popularis general marius had promised his soldiers decades before and now octavian is offering the same once octavian had no visible rival in rome after the battle of actium he allowed most of his legions to essentially stand down and he only kept a certain number of them i think it was something like a 100 150 000 or something as a standing army and but the rest he allowed to go back to normal living although he had auxiliary forces of course that could be called up if need be so he settled those who retired or shouldn't say retired but who went off of act of service he gave those individuals land and the rest of the army of course he promised the same when they were finished with their service so there was there was no military um figure there's or there's no one in the roman state at this point with an armed force that could even hope to challenge octavian but um beyond that another factor in octavian's success going forward would not just be the backing of the army it would also be how fabulously wealthy he was because you see after victory at actium after the defeat of cleopatra and anthony he essentially annexed egypt to be part of the roman state but having done that he decided not to have egypt become a province of the roman state as was the case for other congress lands in rome thus far in its history instead he took over personal control of egypt and he administered it as his personal property and that meant that the wealthiest part of the mediterranean basically becomes august octavians um actually he's i just realized by slide i'm prematurely referring to him here as augustus and so since i'm talking about him i'm gonna fix that right now so we'll call him augustus in a minute for reasons you will see for now we're still gonna stick with the name octavian so in any case the point here is that he had this tremendous amount of wealth he can draw on to well to give to his uh not just allies but to help appease a variety of different groups in roman society and this leads me to another example of how octavian's actions not only help stabilize his power but are really reminiscent of the popolaris faction in the recent roman past was that some of that money that he now gained control over he actually gave directly to common people in rome you might remember the word plebes used in this slide here refers to the common people of rome and of course people especially in the city of rome which was a massive city you know probably close to a million people at this point are very important to win them over and giving them money is one way to do it another way to do it would be to provide them with free grain which octavian would have quite a bit of access to having seized control of egypt essentially this personal property and furthermore we will see octavian as well as his successors recognize the need to appease the common people the plebes by holding gains for them to provide entertainment something we'll talk more about again soon so he's a piece of the army he's appeased the plebes the common people there's no way he could appease all these groups worry not to have just not just about presenting a traditional roman image a lot of this is also about following through and giving them an actual uh stake in octavian success in terms of money food land whatever it is so the things i've described so far seem again to be sort of a checklist for what the popular faction would want and and julius caesar himself had done a lot of things that had appeased the wish list of the you know filled out the wish list of the apopillaries but octavian as i mentioned a minute ago also went out of his way to to appeal to those in rome who were still more sympathetic to the role of the senate the traditional role of the senate now of course the leaders of the san diego montes they're dead right they're gone or they're exiled they're just not present anymore having said that octavian realized going forward that if he didn't show a certain amount of respect for the senate it could very well at some point lead him to sharing the fate of his adoptive father you know assassination and so um one thing that octavia knew had been unpopular about julius caesar is you might remember julius caesar had tripled the size of the senate and he had filled it with aristocrats and allies he had gained through his conquest of gaul so octavian decided to roll back some of that stuff but he shrunk the size of the senate back down to about 600 and he removed some of the gaulish members of the senate to appease those who were italian-born however he did make sure that those who stayed in the senate were individuals who were supportive of his new position in rome and but he also made sure that that elites from around italy and not just people from the city of rome who are still eligible to sit in that senate so it's it's one of the overriding themes of roman civilization is that there is this gradual um maybe not just gradual but it's kind of a stop and start process but this extension over a course of roman history of political power and rights that is given to more and more people outside of the city of rome itself um something we'll come back to in the next video but octavian is thought of as having contributed to that process of giving more rights and basically stake in the empire to people outside of rome because he as you can see here was found it important to put people from around italy not just the city of rome elites uh into the senate so he reduced the size he got rid of the calls which is somewhat appeasing to people from rome but he left the italians in and uh but he also went out of his way to show respect for the senate octavian's ruling style was to be willing to give out um not just prestigious positions of power in the roman state to people of the senatorial order but also give them lucrative positions in the state and the idea was that as long as they were loyal to octavian they would therefore have their own role to play as elites governing the state and when you put that together with the with the at least outward and cosmetic uh words of respect that octavian showed toward the senate there's no question that uh it it it made it much easier for the surviving members of the senatorial order to fall in a line under octavian that would have been the case under julius caesar and i think it's also true that the fact that all of octavian's rivals had been vanquished led to a new period of peace and common realm that clearly many of the senatorial elite who had survived felt was maybe worth conforming to there's probably some genuine popularity that octavian enjoyed by being perceived as the man who ended this constant political violence even a popularity that some of the surviving senators could get behind so he went out of his way therefore to appease not only the popolaris faction but he also went out of his way to at least show respect to the other mates faction those who had survived and those who of course now were willing to be loyal to octavian so after all of this was done after he had given stability it seemed back to the roman state in 27 bce octavian then declared that his job in restoring the roman republic had been completed successfully completed and then he said that that is all he ever had wanted to do and that now that he was done with that he was going to retire from public life and that he was going to instead just go work on a farm somewhere i think he said he wanted to be a turnip farmer or something ridiculous like that and what we read in the sources is that when the senate was informed of this that they became very sad they ripped their toga and shrieked and couldn't believe that this stud basically would help save the roman state would choose to depart from public affairs at this point and according to the story the senate begged octavian to remain in public life and to show him the respect the senate believed he deserved they gave him this nickname of augustus maybe nickname sounds a little bit too informal sort of this formal um i don't want to say title because that implies it's something that can be held by other people it's an it's a sort of nickname showing honor and respect to octavian the word is augustus as you can see here and what it meant in latin was i suppose the simplest translation for it is revered but augustus implies that that octavian is somehow closer to the gods than everybody else there's this title or nickname of incredible respect that's given to octavian since octavian had been adopted by julius caesar that meant he had taken caesar's name meaning caesar and so for that reason octavian sometimes is either known as augustus but sometimes he's called augustus caesar so clearly julius caesar and augustus are not the same people right one is the guy was assassinated the other is the guy who who after that assassination showed up and managed to become the new ruler of rome as augustus as time went by the word caesar was so associated with the power of augustus that sometimes the word caesar could even be used to refer to the emperors themselves just more generically like the caesars or a caesar can imply somebody with the power of an emperor so that that word caesar can be used in a lot of different ways but for the rest of this video i'm now going to call octavian augustus because that's the nickname title whatever you want to call it that became most important as time went by we actually have a text that was written by octavian or augustus as i should now call him a text written by him before he died in which he bragged i think is the only word i can think of in which he bragged about boasted about all of his accomplishments for the roman state and this text is called the achievements of the divine augustus became known as the divine augustus because after augustus died we will see he was made into a god in the roman state more about that in a few minutes we actually had the text of this in our reading but um among the things you will see there here's an inscription by the way of it it was actually inscribed on his tomb this is a modern recreation of that inscription but among the things he bragged about in this text was how he said he would never accept any title or power in the roman state that was not consistent with the roman republic that was not consistent with roman tradition augustus throughout his entire career always made it seem as if he simply wanted to restore the republic and that is all he had done and it is true he did not take for example like julius caesar had done he did not take the title of dictator either for one year or for life but neither did he certainly never wanted to look like he was trying to become a king because that would hugely fly in the face right of roman republican traditions but having said that it's not correct to look at augustus as just a particularly influential guy in the republic instead augustus really did become so powerful and influential he was like a king in rome but he never used the name what augustus did is he adopted many of the titles in the offices of the republic but he avoided taking any title or office that didn't exist during the republic and in that sense he could portray himself as being traditional so for example you guys might remember the uh title of consul there were two consoles you may remember in the roman republic he often would take that title of counsel for himself or uh he might we'll look at some other titles coming up here that he would take but he eventually became high priest um he became a censor in charge of looking at the citizenship list i mean there's a lot of different titles he would take over time that's not very traditional because those are supposed to be different people in the roman republic and he takes all them many of them for himself at different times but they are traditional titles that he takes the title that he regarded it seems as most important for himself was that a princeps and as you can see here that title meant leading citizen leading citizen it was a traditional title of respect that had typically been given to the most important person in the senate and so the senate awarded him with this honorary title of princess and augustus used that title more than any other the rest of his life and it seems pretty obvious why that the title princess is something you would associate with the senate and the roman republic the princess was somebody who is respected and listened to traditionally but not somebody who actually has any actual royal power so that's the way augustus wants to see himself he's like hey i'm not a king here people don't have to do what i say they just listen to me because i'm so wise and influential but the reality is that that influence was so strong that and no one got promoted to the senate at this point unless augustus wanted them there that he essentially was a king it's that word princeps by the way that has been used to give the name of this new state created in rome by augustus it's called the principate by modern historians to distinguish it from the traditional roman republic that preceded his time rome however according to augustus and many other roman leaders at the time rome was still a republic in reality it was essentially a monarchy in all but name with this princess in charge of it well there are other titles that augustus took for himself one of them not surprisingly was that of imperator which in english is the word emperor for the romans imperator or emperor was it just meant somebody who can command truth it means commander and so it's a military title and it is true that augustus was in command of troops and even used those troops to take new lands for the roman state including what you see here in egypt the uh light green areas here are the areas that were conquered by the end of augustus's reign for the roman empire the dark green come a little bit later we'll get to that stuff in the next video it turns out that although augustus did not prefer the title emperor or imperator or over princeps eventually some of his successors did prefer the title imperator and and that's because later on we will see controlling the army was all important and because later on imperator becomes the most prominent title of augustus's successors it gradually becomes to history thought of that all these individuals including augustus looking backward that their primary title was emperor so today people would say well augustus was the first roman emperor and that's not wrong it's just that augustus in his own time would have said well i really prefer princeps anyway that's the origin of the title of emperor and since since augustus forward on forward rome is now ruled by these emperors thus it has become common to refer to this new roman state as the roman empire with a capital r capital e but again modern historians to avoid confusion often refer to it as the principate in order to make it very clear that we're talking about the roman state as it was constructed by augustus because the idealized depiction of augustus caesar or octavian if you wanted to call that still as a military commander he was presented by the way this way his whole life even when he became old i always presented as a youthful idealized figure um i already mentioned that in terms of his what would you call it propaganda he uh when he had that looming showdown with mark anthony he presented himself as a traditional man concerned about traditional roman values and he he followed through on that when he was actually in charge of the roman state because he really felt that there needed to be a revival of roman values and roman religious practices so he revitalized the official state cults um meaning worship of roman gods that were thought to protect the roman state he also strongly encouraged romans to be more mindful of rome itself over their own personal lives and he really tried actually to crack down on like adulteries and what he thought was rampant sexual behavior he was some he was sort of a conservative moralist in a lot of ways as it turns out here he is depicted as high priest that's one of the titles he eventually took for himself a high priest of rome indicated by the hooded nature of his dress here i am augustus as it turns out had years before this point already proclaimed his adoptive father was a god right after joseph caesar had died which seems a little out of step doesn't it with this sort of posturing as a republican but um but julius caesar was proclaimed as a god and therefore part of the state cult that was very important from augustus caesar forward would be the worship of what was called the divine julius here you see a coin from this past period of time and it says caesar augustus on the left side of the image here on that side of the coin but on the back it says the divine julius and then that's a comet with these sort of rays coming out of it right the association you see of julius with this miracle of a comment with the sign of the comet as it turns out augustus never had himself deified however when he died his successor made him a god and that began a tradition that would continue until the roman emperors became christian themselves centuries later so worshiping the emperors became part of the traditional state cults in the roman state i'm going a little long i realized i'm going to try to wrap this up pretty quickly but but i do want to point out here that part of of augustus's sort of image can be seen by looking at this epic poem written by virgil in in the first century known as the aeneid the aeneid was a epic poem that traced the story of the legendary founder of the latin people named emius you might remember from livy's history that aeneas was this refugee supposedly from the trojan war a prince actually of troy who had survived the trojan war and had wandered around the mediterranean as a refugee with his family actually with his father and his son until the point that he eventually after all these trials and tribulations landed in italy and founded the latin people but aeneas had been betrayed in that story and now told again in this epic poem called the aeneid as a man who made great sacrifices in order to finally arrive in italy and follow through on his destiny for the latin people despite the on his own sort of personal pain and loss that it involved virgil presents in the poem in the aeneas as the epitome of the roman value pietas that is to say putting the interests of what becomes rome ahead of his own interests because everything is willing to give up to make it to italy and found the latin people but it's pretty obvious when you read the aeneid that when we read about aeneas we're really also supposed to see that this is octavian that this is the kind of guy that octavian is as well that's really the double meaning i guess you would say of the amniot this is a modern or 18th century depiction of virgil reading his epic poem to uh octavia and this is his sister uh octavia here that the scene that's supposedly being read to these two in this painting is this really famous scene where aeneas is brought down to the underworld where he is able to visit with his now dead father and his dead father prophesized to aeneas all this important stuff he's going to do in terms of founding the latin people and during that prophecy so to speak with his dead father in the underworld aeneas also learns about this basically stud is going to one day come and fulfill everything rom stands for meaning in other words augustus himself so the the need is taken to be not only really it's propaganda in a way for um for augustus but it also is a very eloquent restatement of roman values of of pietas and about the roman conception of what what rome's mission is in the world in fact there's a scene when uh the dead father of aeneas is basically prophesying to him about what rome is going to be like you know once of course and he has plays his role in founding it in which aeneas is told by his dead father hey there are going to be it's in poetic form i'm just going to put up my own words here in non-poetic way but the father tells him this there are other cultures out there that will do things better than we romans do so he says you know people mesopotamia they're a lot better at astronomy than we are and the greeks are better than at us than sculpture and so forth but he says but what we romans will do well is govern because we through law and justice we battle down the proud and we provide justice to the world and we spare the conquered people this is idealized statement in the aeneid about this roman mission to spread their law their justice their mercy throughout the world and create peace and octavian or augustus is seen in the epic poem as the culmination of that roman mission so it's a beautiful um it's a beautiful way of demonstrating not only roman values and traditions as octavian sees them but it's also a way of seeing uh how octavian or augustus was able to successfully build this image up for himself as not being a king but instead as being the ultimate leader for the roman republic carrying out its values rome would continue to call itself a republic for almost three centuries and yet as you can hopefully see through what i've said here in reality it became a monarchy and all but name so what we're going to do in the next video is continue our look at this new era of rome called the roman empire or the principate we're going to look at the internal peace that augustus caesar brought to rome and what that would mean