The genius of Augustus: Rome's first Emperor | Gregory Aldrete and Lex Fridman

And you have a whole group of people who want to be the next Caesar. So the most obvious is Mark Antony, who is Caesar's right-hand man, his lieutenant. He's a very good general. He's very charismatic. Everybody kind of expects Mark Antony to just become the next Caesar. But there's also another of Caesar's lieutenants, a guy named Lepidus, sort of like Antony but not quite as great as him. There's the Senate itself, which wants to reassert its power, kind of become the dominant force in Rome again. There's the assassins who killed Caesar, led by Brutus and another guy, Cassius. They now want to seize control. And finally, there's a really weird dark horse candidate to fill this power vacuum, and that's Julius Caesar's grand-nephew, who at the time is a 17-year-old kid named Octavian. Who cares? He's nobody, absolutely nobody. But when Caesar's will is opened after his death, so posthumously read, in his will, Caesar posthumously, and this is a little weird, posthumously adopts Octavian as his son. Now again, who cares? Antony gets the troops, Antony gets the money, the other people get everything. What does Octavian get? He gets to now rename himself Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. Who cares? Well, around the Mediterranean, there's about 12 legions full of hardened soldiers who are just kind of used to following a guy named Gaius Julius Caesar. And even though it's not quite logical, this 18-year-old, he's now 18-year-old kid, inherits an army overnight. So he becomes a player in this game for power. And the next 30, 40 years is going to be those groups all vying with one another. There's another candidate too, Pompey's son. Pompey was Caesar's great rival. He has a couple sons, and one of them, a guy named Sextus Pompey, basically becomes a warlord who seizes control of Sicily, one of the richest provinces, has a whole navy. He's vying to be one of these successors too. So for the next 40 years, it's, as you said, another civil war to see which guy emerges. Is it going to be the Senate? Is it going to be the assassins? Is it going to be Antony? Is it going to be Lepidus? Is it going Sextus Pompey? Is it going to be Octavian? So now looking back at all that history, it just feels like history turns on so many interesting accidents, because Octavian, later renamed Augustus, turned out to be actually, depends how you define good, but a good king-slash-emperor, different than Caesar in terms of humility, at least being able to play, not to piss off everybody, but he could have been so many other people. That could have been the fall of Rome. So it's a fascinating little turn of history. Maybe Caesar saw something in this individual. It's not an accident that he was in the will. Yeah, it's, I mean, Caesar clearly did see something in him. And Octavian, I mean, to cut to the end, is the one who emerges from all that as the victor. We can talk about how he does it, but he's the one who sort of ends up in the same position as Caesar. It takes him 30 years, but he defeats all the foes. He's the sole guy. He now faces Caesar's riddle. How do you rule Rome as one guy and not get killed? And Octavian's, what makes him stand out, what makes him fascinating to me is he wasn't a good general. In fact, he was a terrible general. He lost almost every battle he commanded. But what he is, is he's politically savvy, and he's very good at what today we would call manipulation of your public image and propaganda. So he basically defeats Mark Antony partially by waging a propaganda war against him. I mean, Antony starts out as a legitimate rival, and there are two Romans vying for power. At the end of this war, propaganda war, Octavian has managed to portray Antony as a foreign aggressor allied with an enemy king or queen, in this case, Cleopatra, and who is an official enemy of the Roman state, and that's all propaganda. So he takes what's a civil war and makes it look like a war against a foreign enemy. And when Octavian becomes the sole ruler, he looks at what Caesar did wrong, and he very carefully avoids the same mistakes. So the first thing is just how he lives his life. He's very modest. He lives in an ordinary house like other aristocrats. He wears just a plain toga, nothing fancy. He's respectful to the Senate. He treats them with respect. He eats simple foods. I mean, he's someone who cared about the reality of power, not the external trappings. Clearly, there's some rulers who love, I want to dress in fancy clothes. I want to be surrounded by gold, everything. This is what makes me feel good. Octavian's the opposite. He doesn't care about any of that. He wants real power. And then the other thing is, how is he going to rule Rome without looking like a king? And his solution to this is brilliant. He basically pretends to resign from all his public offices. Not pretends, he does. So he holds no official office. But what he does is he manipulates so that the Roman Senate votes him the powers of the key Roman offices, but not the office itself. So the highest office in the Roman state is the consul. Consuls have the power to command armies, do all sorts of things, run meetings of the Senate. Octavian gets voted the powers of a consul. So he can command armies, control meetings of the Senate, do all this, but he's not one of the two consuls elected for every year. So he's just kind of floating or drifting off to the side of the Roman government. He gets the power of a tribune, which has all sorts of powers. He can veto anything he wants, but he's not one of the tribunes elected for any one year. So the state, the republic, appears to continue as it always has. Each year, they hold the same elections. They elect the same number of people. Notionally, those people are in charge. But floating off to the side, you have this guy, Octavian, who has equivalent power not just to any one magistrate or official, but to all of them. So at any moment, he can just sort of pop up and say, no, let's not do this, let's do something else. And he also keeps the army under his personal control. Isn't this a fascinating story? What do you think is the psychology of Augustus of Octavian? Yeah. And he later changed his name to Augustus when he sort of becomes first emperor. And the other thing he does is he hides his power behind all these different names. So Caesar called himself dictator for life, right? So everybody knew what he was. Octavian, we even have a source that talks about it, says he wondered what to call himself. Do I call myself king? No, can't do that. Dictator for life? No way. Maybe I'll call myself Romulus. That was the founder of Rome. No, no, Romulus was a king. And finally, a solution is he takes a bunch of titles, which are all ambiguous, and no one of them sounds that impressive, but collectively they are. So for example, one of the titles he gets is Augustus, which is something tied to Roman religion. Something that is Augustus in Latin has two possible meanings. One is someone who is Augustus is very pious. They respect the gods deeply. Well, that sounds nice, doesn't it? While on the other hand, an alternative meaning for Augustus is something that is itself divine. So is he just a deeply religious pious person or is he himself sacred? There's that ambiguity. He calls himself princeps, which means first citizen. Okay. What the hell does that mean? Am I a citizen just like everybody else or am I the first citizen, which means I'm superior to all the others. So every title he takes has this weird ambiguity. He calls himself imperator, which is traditionally something that soldiers shout at a victorious general who's won a battle. And now he takes this as a permanent title. So it implies he's a good general. And by the way, it's from imperator that we get the word emperor and empire. So originally it's a military title, a spontaneous military acclamation. It's just fascinating that he figured out a way through public image, through branding, to gain power, maintain power, and still pacify the boiling turmoil that led to the civil wars. Well, two things I think work in his favor as well. One is he brings peace and stability. So by this point, the Romans have experienced a hundred years almost of civil war and chaos. So at that point, maybe you've had family members die in these wars or been prescribed, your property has been confiscated, who knows what. And here's a guy who brings peace and stability and doesn't seem oppressive or cruel or whatever. So you're like, okay, fine. I don't care. Maybe he's killed the Republic, but at least we're not dying in the streets anymore. So that's a big thing he does. And secondly, even though Augustus always seemed kind of sickly, his constitution, he lives forever. He rules for like 50 years. And by the time he dies, there's no one literally almost left alive who can remember the Republic. So at that point, by the time he dies, this is the only system we know. That's another just fascinating accident of history. Because as we talked about with Alexander the Great, who knows if he lived for another 40 years. If over time, the people that hate the new thing die off and then their sons come into power, that could be a very different story. Maybe we'll be talking about the Greek Empire. Yeah, that's a fluke of fate, but it's hugely influential on history.