What kind of emperor was augustus

In 47 B. He was shipwrecked along the way, and had to cross enemy territory to reach his great-uncle—an act that impressed Caesar enough to name Octavius his heir and successor in his will. In 43 B. In 41 B. In retaliation, Octavian declared war on Cleopatra.

In that four-year span, Octavian secured his rule on multiple fronts. And to win over the people, he worked to improve and beautify the city of Rome. During his years reign, Augustus nearly doubled the size of the empire, adding territories in Europe and Asia Minor and securing alliances that gave him effective rule from Britain to India.

He expanded the Roman network of roads, founded the Praetorian Guard and the Roman postal service and remade Rome with both grand a new forum and practical gestures police and fire departments. His second wife, Scribonia, bore his only child, Julia the Elder. He divorced in 39 B. The family tree became more complicated after Augustus had his stepson Tiberius briefly marry his daughter, and then adopted Tiberius outright as son and successor in A.

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Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. Augustus has already adopted her two older sons with Agrippa, but both will die young, leaving Tiberius to succeed. Three Roman legions led by Varus are wiped out by allies turned enemies among the Germanic tribes at Teutoburg Forest. Augustus dies in a family villa at Nola.

Discarding the young Augustus, however, proved difficult, for his soldiers served him and not the Senate. They declared a triumvirate — a board of three supreme magistrates to restore the state, and effectively a joint dictatorship. The first thing the triumvirs did was to order the murder of prominent opponents including Cicero.

Marching unopposed into Rome, they posted up proscription lists with names of men who were set outside the protection of law. Quite a few of the proscribed managed to escape abroad, but hundreds died.

In later years there was a whole genre of stories of dramatic escapes and grim deaths, of rescue and betrayal. Opinion was less certain about which of the triumvirs was most brutal in their pursuit of the proscribed, as after the event each tried to shift the blame to his allies. Yet many were shocked that the young Augustus should have had so many enemies he wanted to kill. Antony got most of the credit, both for winning the war and treating captured aristocrats and the remains of the dead with fitting respect.

The alliance between the three triumvirs was always based on self interest and came under increasing pressure in the years that followed. By 36 BC the triumvirate became an alliance between two when Lepidus was marginalised. Augustus kept him in comfortable captivity for the rest of his life, a gesture that mixed mercy with cruelty as it prolonged the humiliation of an ambitious man.

The estates of the proscribed were insufficient, and so more and more confiscations were arbitrarily imposed on the towns of Italy. Augustus got most of the blame for the confiscations in an Italy exhausted by civil war and desperate for stability.

As relations with Antony broke down, it was better to wage war against a foreign threat, and so Cleopatra, queen of Egypt , was demonised as a sinister eastern temptress who had corrupted a noble Roman, and turned him against his own people. In 41 BC, Antony had taken the queen as a lover, renewing the affair three years later.