On 11 January 29 B.C., the Roman Senate voted to close the doors of the Temple of Janus. This small shrine stood in the Forum, in the heart of the city, and its bronze doors were always kept open when Rome was at war. Since Rome was usually at war, the doors were rarely closed. In fact, tradition said that they had been shut only twice since the foundation of the city many centuries earlier.

Augustus himself was not in Rome in January 29 B.C. He was still in the eastern Mediterranean, where he had gone to fight his greatest rivals, the Roman Mark Antony and Antony’s partner, Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt. Augustus defeated them off the coast of Greece at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., one of history’s greatest naval battles. The next year, he turned eastward and followed them to Egypt. Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide and Augustus annexed Egypt. This victory had made Augustus the first man in Rome. He was only 33.

By voting to close the doors of the Temple of Janus, the Senate implied that Rome was finally at peace. The message delighted Augustus, who is supposed to have considered the door-closing to be his greatest honour. He returned to the message of peace and prosperity often during his 42-year reign, a theme that was reflected both in his material accomplishments and in the revised story of Rome that Augustus and his team told.

Studying One of History’s Greatest Reformers

The year 29 B.C. represented a new beginning for Rome, one that came not a moment too soon. Rome had suffered a century of spiralling crises, beginning in 133 B.C. Augustus inherited a city torn by instability: crime in the streets, assassination, civil war, rebellion; a declining birth rate in the wake of a culture of egotism, narcissism, and decadence; a mere skeleton of a civil service; little progress in integrating the provincial elites of an empire that spanned 3,000 miles and comprised 50 million inhabitants. Augustus turned all this around. Indeed, he is one of history’s great reformers.

He ended a century of unrest, violence, and civil war and inaugurated the era of the Pax Romana, or Roman Peace. True, it was not an age of democracy, nor was prosperity evenly shared – not in a society that depended on slavery. Nor was the empire free of rebellions, all brutally repressed. But looking at the era overall, Augustus did a remarkable job of revitalising Rome, revamping civic institutions, widening the leadership class, rebuilding infrastructure, and recasting the story of his country and its mission. Throughout, he demonstrated a deft hand and a diplomat’s touch.

Augustus “renovated” the Roman Republic, as he put it. In fact, he replaced the republic with the Roman monarchy, but he understood that the Roman people were not ready for a monarchy, so he proved flexible with his political arrangements and sensitive with public relations. Although in practice Rome’s first emperor, Augustus called himself merely the princeps or “first citizen”. He created a dynasty that lasted for a hundred years and a monarchy that lasted much longer, albeit with various changes and adjustments. The last Roman emperor in the West was deposed only in the year 476 A.D.

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Leaders Need Vision, Wisdom, and Finesse

During the years of his rise to power, while he was competing with Antony, Augustus was a warlord. Even then, however, he had a vision. His great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, tried to reform Rome but was cut down by assassins’ daggers on the Ides of March, 15 March 44 B.C., when Augustus was still a teenager. After picking up the fallen leader’s mantle, Augustus was determined to achieve Caesar’s power and to carry out Caesar’s programme, but to do it better, with more wisdom and finesse – although with no less military power, when that was needed.

Augustus recognised the necessity of surrounding himself with a strong team and was skilled at choosing advisors. His closest and most important colleague was Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s virtual alter ego. Agrippa was a boyhood friend and a brilliant man of action. He was a superb general, admiral, administrator, and diplomat. He was also loyal.

Agrippa was not, however, a member of the nobility, although his family was well-off. The Roman elite was snobby in the extreme, and earlier leaders might have balked at having a Number Two of such low rank. Augustus proved more open-minded and he and Agrippa represent one of history’s great leadership teams.

One of the secrets of his success was Augustus’s willingness to extend the circle of power. Another close advisor was Maecenas, whose ancestors were Etruscans. Then there were the people on Augustus’s ever-growing staff. They were not only Roman knights (wealthy men but not senators) but even freedmen, that is, ex-slaves. Earlier Roman officials would have shrunk in horror before giving power to such low-status people, but Augustus recognised talent. His staff represented the beginning of Rome’s first civil service, which would grow under later emperors. Alongside this new power structure, he was also adept enough to recognise and manage the influence of the old elites. He worked with a newly created executive committee of the Senate, and he chose senators to govern certain provinces.

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The Value of Prudent Financial Management

Augustus knew that to secure peace in Rome he would have to deliver prosperity. The first thing he did was reduce the military budget by demobilising half of Rome’s legions. The newly conquered Egypt was enormously wealthy due to the farmland fertilised by the annual flooding of the Nile. Augustus used that wealth to buy land around the empire on which he settled these veterans. This policy kept the peace while spreading Roman customs and mores far beyond Italy. He also contributed to the central treasury from his own purse, primarily from the profits of conquest, made tax collection around the empire more efficient, and reformed and expanded Rome’s coinage.

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Investing in a Flourishing City

Infrastructure was one of Augustus’s major initiatives. He gave Rome a new forum, the Forum of Augustus. He also built a victory arch, a sundial, and a mausoleum, a massive structure dedicated to himself and his dynasty. The mausoleum symbolised the permanence that Augustus wanted to give his new regime. From the Senate he accepted a stunning new altar of peace.

While many of these great public works served as totems of his rule, Augustus also demonstrated the importance of infrastructure as an essential investment in the future. He appointed Agrippa as aedile, a kind of minister of public works for the city. The ever-energetic Agrippa paved streets, repaired sewers, and gave Rome three new aqueducts, which in turn made possible new fountains, pools, and baths. Augustus’s family members built or renovated temples, baths, theatres, parks, and covered porches.

Augustus made it safer to do business in the empire’s capital by creating Rome’s first police force and fire brigade. In a city of approximately a million people, he paid special attention to the poor. He made grain distribution more efficient and kept many employed through his building programme.

On his deathbed, Augustus would say, “I found a Rome of bricks; I leave to you one of marble.” It was meant to be a metaphor for the empire’s strength, but it was literally true of much of the city.

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Decentralising Decisions

Augustus recognised that there was more to the empire than the city of Rome. Indeed, after defeating Antony and Cleopatra and returning to Rome, Augustus spent another decade outside Italy on a series of military and political trips, more time abroad than any other emperor for the next 100 years. He spread prosperity to the provinces by encouraging local initiative.

One of the most successful cases was Augustus’s collaboration with the King of Judea, Herod. Although recognised in both the New Testament and the Talmud as a bloody tyrant, Herod was also a builder on a magnificent scale. In Judea, he built a new port with one of the ancient world’s finest artificial harbours, Caesarea Maritima, “Caesarville-by-the-Sea” (today in Israel). Herod also rebuilt the capital of Samaria and made a major contribution to the building of a new city near the site of what had been Augustus’s headquarters at the Battle of Actium. The city was called Nicopolis, “Victory City” (today near Preveza, Greece).

Under Augustus, commerce flourished. The Roman navy, based in two new harbours in Italy built by Augustus and Agrippa, patrolled the seas and prevented piracy. It was a golden era of trade and exchange.

I found a Rome of bricks; I leave to you one of marble.

Caesar Augustus

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Building a Shared Identity Through Vision and Narrative

Augustus knew the importance of sharing his vision of a new Rome. His very name demonstrates his emphasis on storytelling. “Augustus” means “The Reverend” or “The Revered One”. Although we know him as Augustus today, he did not receive this title until the age of 35, when the Senate granted it to him as a signal honour. He had been born Gaius Octavius, becoming Caesar Octavianus after the assassination of his adoptive father Julius Caesar. The later assumption of Augustus emphasised the loftiness of his vision.

Nations are built through stories that unite their people in a sense of shared belonging and common goals. Augustus’s new Rome was designed to appeal both to the elite and the masses. The very term Augustan Age means a period of peace, prosperity, and cultural flowering under an enlightened and orderly political patron. Writers such as the poets Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, as well as the historian Livy, flourished. Their literary masterpieces offered an elevated vision of an empire that was on the rise again.

Augustus made celebration a theme of his regime. In 29 B.C., after returning from Egypt, for example, he staged a magnificent triumph, a sort of victory parade, to dramatise the end of the civil wars. As an impresario, Augustus outdid all earlier Roman leaders by staging bigger, better, and more frequent games and shows, sponsoring gladiatorial contests, wild beast hunts, and mock naval battles. These established goodwill among the public, created a sense of civic pride, and demonstrated the power and glory of the empire.

Augustus worked hard at bringing women into the story of Rome. He was not a feminist, but he was a politician. He understood that women were influential, even if they could not vote or hold public office. He was, it seems, a pioneer in honouring his mother with a state funeral; as far as we know, it was Rome’s first state funeral for a woman. But the real sign of his respect for women was the way he treated his wife, Livia.

Livia was one of Augustus’s most trusted counsellors. He took her with him on his travels around the empire, despite the previous Roman male practice of leaving their wives at home. He was a trendsetter, as other Roman men followed his example and began travelling with their wives on business abroad. When discussing important matters with Livia, Augustus wrote memoranda in advance and read them from a notebook to get things just right. For her part, Livia saved her husband’s letters, kept them in a shrine, and pulled them out whenever they could be used to shore up her own political position after his death.

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Great Story, Lasting Legacy

At the end of his life, Augustus commissioned a record of his deeds which he had inscribed on bronze tablets and erected in Rome. It is called Res Gestae Divi Augusti or “The Exploits of the Deified Augustus”, since, after his death, the Senate declared Augustus a god. He also ordered copies set up in the cities of the empire, both in Latin and Greek, so that the two major peoples of the Roman world could read it. This was, in effect, the official version of his legacy, and it aimed at giving Augustus’s story longevity.

In the text, Augustus recorded many of his achievements, from the victories he won and the people he conquered to the temples he built, cities he restored, and the grain and cash payments that he lavished on the citizens of Rome. However, his most important message was the restoration of peace and the establishment of constitutional government after an era of civil war. He wrote: “When I had extinguished the flames of civil war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the Senate and the Roman people. For this service on my part, I was given the title of Augustus by decree of the senate.”

Augustus was eager to show that, under his leadership, Rome was a government of laws and not of men. He summed up his constitutional position thus: “I took precedence of all in rank, but of power I possessed no more than those who were my colleagues in any magistracy.” He proudly recorded that the Senate and Roman people honoured him with the title of Pater Patriae, “Father of His Country”.

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The Comedy of Life

Augustus died on 19 August 14 A.D., just over a month short of his 77th birthday. The story goes that when his friends reached his bedside before the end, Augustus asked them if they thought he had concluded the “comedy of life” appropriately – that is, if he had spoken like a comic actor at the end of the show. He added, “If the play has anything of merit, clap and send us out joyfully.”

If the details are true, Augustus left the world with wit and humility. It was a last lesson in leadership, appropriate for a man who, although one of his country’s most consequential reformers, knew the advantage of understatement.

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Following in Augustus’s Footsteps

To be sure, there are things about Augustus that a good leader should not take as a model. His ruthlessness, for example, or his violence on the way up, or his vanity, or his terrible relations with his daughter and only birth child. Yet balanced against this are his good judgement, his intelligence, his ambition, his vision, and his genuine desire to make his country and its empire better, richer, and more peaceful.

He succeeded to a remarkable degree – and he did so by demonstrating principles that still matter today. He showed the importance of wisely stewarding a nation’s finances and investing in its future through infrastructure and services. As he did so, he showed the value of innovation, finding new answers to the problems his people faced. Among his team, he provided an object lesson in the value of meritocracy and of casting a wide net in the search for talent, something that has never been taken more seriously than it is today.

Augustus was also adept at recognising his obligations. He knew that success rested on what might now be called his “key stakeholders”. Augustus had to deliver on the people’s priorities, while maintaining the support of the old elites in the Senate, a challenge that will sound familiar to many in governance today. Augustus’s sense of his own role as the writer of a particular chapter in Rome’s history helped, by and large, to keep his priorities pointing in the right direction. He was proud of handing on a stronger city to his successors and understood his legacy as the real measure of his success.

More than 2,000 years later, it is a legacy we still remember. Augustus stands as one of history’s supreme examples of practical wisdom in the art of governance.