- Click here for the Dish's appraisal.
- Click here for the article - which is behind a paywall.
Along with his better known uncle Julius - Augustus was considered a warning by the framers of the Constitution. An ambitious person who was able to consolidate power and rule directly - no input was necessary from the general population unless he thought it expeditious.
The irony is that despite all this, it's the Roman Empire (with the coliseum and aqueducts and the rest) that we remember and what is emulated in the architecture American government. Consolidated governments can sometimes enhance peace and prosperity - at least for a while. This creates the obvious dilemma.
From the article:
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.
. . . After the Ides of March, the teenaged Octavian figured in no one’s political calculations. Mark Antony was the dominant figure, and Brutus and Cassius retained significant forces. Yet within just a few years, it would be Antony and Octavian fighting for the ultimate supremacy of the Western world. To read of Octavian’s cautious, calculating, and sure moves during the two decades of civil war, leading to his victory at Actium in 31 B.C., is to encounter political genius of the rarest kind. With his indispensable partner, Agrippa, Octavian then did what had escaped even the great Caesar: establish a durable and impregnable political system to capitalize on his military victory. Thus ended both a century of civil war and Rome’s traditional freedoms. To a world desperate for stability, Augustus was accepted as the unquestioned and irreplaceable arbiter of order.
Augustus’s legacy did not stop with politics, for the Rome of our dreams, too, is largely his creation, carried to its ultimate expression by his successors. The world might not still be fascinated with a city of brick had not Augustus left it one of marble, to paraphrase his famous saying. The fora, baths, Colosseum, and palaces of eternal Rome maintained, even enhanced, their spell over men’s imaginations by their ruins, as much as in their pristine prime. Even the anti-monarchical Americans drew legitimacy from Rome’s material forms. Washington, D.C. is modeled more on imperial Rome than Greece, with its Capitol Hill and classic architecture.
