Augustus

After the murder of Julius Caesar (his great uncle) the 19yr old Gaius Octavius fights 5 civil wars to become Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor, the man who would be king.
There is a moment about halfway through Augustus where the emperor is walking through the streets of Rome on his way to the Senate. Crowds have gathered to cheer him on. A free slave who had been Octavius’s foster nurse is in the crowd, and she calls his name. He warmly greets her and they exchange some words. He tells her;
“I must council – I must order the Senate to take from me that which I have loved most in this life….
I have given to Rome a freedom that only I cannot enjoy.”
That is essentially what lies at the heart of Augustus by John Williams, show more the recontextualisation of the life of his beloved daughter, Julia, his ‘little Rome’, who he banishes to a remote island for the crime of adultery. Julia is the tragic hero of the book, and her story, as Williams tells it, is fascinating.
In his introduction to the book, John McGahern describes it as a ‘brilliant play of lights’. I cannot think of a better description of Augustus than that. In structure, in form and with a brilliant use of language, it’s John Williams’ gift to the world of literature. I really liked Stoner, loved Butcher’s Crossing, but Augustus is the work of a literary genius.
I loved the way the author could conjure up so many different, unique voices. Writing an epistolary novel was risky, but was executed perfectly. For example:
VIII. Letter: Gaius Cilnius |Maecenas to Titus Livius (12BC)
“And it seems to me that moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgements rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgement is easy and knowledge is difficult.”
or
III. Letter: Lucius Varius Rufus to Publius Vergilius Maro from Rome (39BC)
“It was only then that the gods gave him their golden lyre, and bade him play not as they but as he wished. The gods are wise in their cruelty; for now he sings, who would not have sung before.”

I could go on, in truth I’ve never read a book so quotable. I underlined most of it. As a reader it was perfection, because I lived a life, I learnt more from this one book that I have the previous 100 or so, and I shared the experience with three wonderful friends (thanks Mark, Debi & Lisa). Please read their fabulous reviews.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7163289960 Mark
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7070546612 Debi
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7095717741 Lisa
This may well define my year. I started off with very little knowledge of ancient Rome, now it has become an obsession. We are only half way through January and I declare that this will be the best book I’ll read all year. Or will it? That’s the kind of challenge we like as readers, isn’t it? show less

My first read (adult) of 2025 and what a stimulating start to the year.

Augustus! (Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, born Gaius Octavius.) That enigmatic teen who founded the Roman Empire, taking up the chaotic mantel left behind by assassinated Julius Caesar and then transformed Rome into a stable land of laws with a powerful ruler--himself--reigning for 41 years, until his death in his seventies.

This epistolary novel tweaked and turned what I had nearly memorized from watching the classic BBC/PBS series "I, Claudius" so many times, based on another work of historical fiction by Robert Graves. The differences were fascinating and thought-provoking.

How much can we really know about the personal life and thoughts of such a remarkable person show more in a time and culture so far from our own? I don't think any one can really know but with Williams, we get a finely-tuned exploration of what it might be to be the one who answers the call to greatness and power without hesitation, and what personal sacrifices that must entail.

Through letters and decrees, through thoughts and personalities of dozens of contemporary eye-witness writers, each one reveals his or her interactions and opinions of Augustus throughout his life. Each one unfolding for us the history as they were living it, all done in brilliant verisimilitude by Williams.

And suspense. Who would have thought there could be suspense in a story we all know? But Williams did it. Add also humor, sensuality, skullduggery, betrayals, and wisdom.

I read this as part of a global online group of four. Each was a laser-attentive and highly active reader (hello Dave, Mark, and Lisa). We agreed we had quite an immersive experience and never left Rome for long. Each of us came away agreeing this novel was richly rewarding and gave us unqualified admiration for Williams.

Highly recommend with five very bright stars.. show less

I've never been particularly interested in political novels or had any great fascination with ancient Rome, but this beautifully written novel held me transfixed nonetheless. It's a cliché to say it "brings history alive," but it does indeed bring history alive. Told in epistolary form as a compendium of letters and journal entries by characters both integral and incidental, we get to know Octavius Caesar the August from the perspective of those who love him and of those who despise him, but we don't hear directly from the titular character until near the end of the novel (and the end of his life), as he writes to an old friend and ruminates in moving fashion over his accomplishments and regrets, his beloved city of Rome, and the show more legacy he leaves behind. These multiple viewpoints give Augustus a richness and believability that almost makes one forget that one is reading a masterful work of historical fiction and not a collection of actual historical documents, yet it still reads like a novel, not a history. From a historical novel there is not much else one can ask.I just wanted to add that it seems as if this work gets short shrift compared to Williams' other novels, Stoner and Butcher's Crossing, possibly because they are on the great NYRB imprint and Augustus isn't, denying it that sort of instant audience. I've read all three, and Augustus is at least as good a novel as the brilliant Stoner (maybe even better, I haven't decided), and better than the very good Butcher's Crossing. I would love to see more people reading and talking about it; it won the National Book Award for a reason! show less

Williams's use of polyphony — we don't hear from Augustus himself until the valedictory final chapter — makes this a more interesting and engaging portrait than Memoirs of Hadrian which I read recently. We hear from the top dog's inner retinue — Agrippa, Maecenas, the ambiguous Livia — as well from the literary stars of the day including Vergil, Horace, and (too briefly for me) Ovid, and more peripheral characters like his childhood nurse. Anthony and Cleopatra get plenty of screentime. We get senatorial decrees and edicts and lots of "burn upon reading" letters from one intriguer to another. It's hot stuff actually and really smartly put together. The Augustus here is as ruthless and calculating as I'd imagined him to be, but show more ends up waxing somewhat more philosophical, as he looks back on it all, than I'd have expected of such an accomplished dictator. Still, I think it's a reasonable depiction. But the star of the show is Julia, who despite her long sufferings as a three-time political bride and "brood sow" comes out of it as a complex and strong personality.

Having recently read the poems of exile, I just wish Williams had gone there and told us exactly what Ovid did to incur Caesar's wrath (he does mention with heavy irony, a few days before his death, that he's about to pardon the poor poet). show less

How to describe this painstakingly detailed, compellingly readable, simply complex, fictionalised biography, that explores the high price of duty, and is set in ancient times but is painfully relevant in 2017? Not like that.

There are myriad perspectives: it’s like viewing the ancient world through a kaleidoscope or the facets of a gemstone.

Or maybe it’s more like a hall of mirrors and windows, where you’re barely sure which is which and what distortions there may be. Versailles, perhaps: another palace of opulence and intrigue.

It is non-linear: like a narrative tapestry, sewn with backstitch.

It’s a scrapbook of documents and fragments in different styles, and for different purposes (a little like the Bible).

There’s a show more woman’s sexual awakening: her acknowledgement and embracing of it, regardless of taboos and risks.

An adoring father ensures his daughter has the education usually denied to girls.

There is an agonising sacrifice, a cruel example of being hoist by one’s own petard.

The storytelling is like Charon’s gently rocking boat, like Augustus’ final journey: the shimmering reflections are disorienting, and the direction is unpredictable, but the destination is sure.

Content and Structure

The story starts just before the murder of Julius Caesar, leaving his great nephew and adopted son, Gaius Octavius, as heir. He is young (18), academic rather than martial, with slightly poor health, quietly spoken, inscrutable, loyal to friends, but is shrewd. The story ends when Octavius, now Emperor Augustus, dies aged 76. In between there are complex machinations: rumours, political plots, wars, marriages and divorces of convenience, births, deaths, assassinations, friendships forged and broken, rituals, parties, and journeys - literal and metaphorical.

It is told via letters, memoirs, poems, military orders, doctor’s orders, journals, memos, senatorial proceedings, consular orders, petitions, and poems. They are from a wide variety of protagonists, some written at the time, and others with the benefit of hindsight: all the key events, and many apparently trivial ones, are described by friend and foe, as they happened, and immediately contrasted by another view, written decades later. No one is objective. (I have not investigated where it departs from or adds to authenticated history.)

There are three parts. The first is mostly political scheming and battle tactics, told and spun by men. The second gives voice to many of the women, especially Augustus’ adult daughter, Julia. There’s still political and domestic intrigue, and some male narrative, but there’s a more human and intensely personal face as well. In the short third part, we finally hear from the eponymous emperor as he evaluates his long life and anticipates his imminent death and the consequences for his empire and people.

Julia

“I had been a wife, a goddess, and the second woman of Rome. If I felt anything [about being widowed]… it was relief.”

This book could just as easily have borne the name of Augustus’ daughter. It’s almost as much about her, and we read far more of her words than his. She sometimes wields influence and lies to her own advantage (as well as being a victim of such), but because we hear her through her private journal, she seems the most honest of anyone. We understand her motives and her desires. Especially her desires. I came to love Julia.

“This body… began its service late, for it was told that it had no rights, and must by the nature of things be subservient to dictates other than its own.”

“A breeze… I could hear it rustle among the cypresses and plane trees as it touched my silken tunic like a caress.”

“This body… has served me, while seeming to serve others… and the lover to whom I gave pleasure was a victim of my own desire.”

Duty, Destiny, and Personal Pain

Power and wealth come with a price. The plot is full of manipulation, sometimes selfish and sometimes altruistic, but the deeper theme is the huge personal cost of submitting to fate and duty.

Augustus’ sister Octavia, married and remarried at her brother’s dictat, says “I sometimes think that the meanest slave has more freedom than we women have known.” But another woman, closer to the emperor's heart suffers more. And Augustus himself, nearing death, believes his life “accommodated to… public necessity” and thus, “I have been more nearly ruled than ruler.” I'm not sure if he makes final peace with his role in the fate of his beloved daughter.

Truth and Lies: Then and in 2017

“How do you oppose a foe who is wholly irrational and unpredictable - and yet who, out of animal energy and the accident of circumstance, has attained the most frightening power?” (Maecenas of Marcus Antonius)

I read this as Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States and when the news was full of discussion and fear about temperament, power, and truth versus "alternative facts"

Sometimes people knowingly defend and spread outright lies for their own benefit. Here, that’s Augustus accepting Marcus Antonius’s description of his Parthian disaster as a triumph. The hope was that he would desert Egypt (and Cleopatra) to become a true Roman again, and the need was to inspire citizens ground down by years of war and civil war.

Everyone has an agenda, whether it be mere survival or something more selfish and acquisitive, and motives change with circumstances. How can one know what is true and who to trust?

No surprise that in old age, Augustus thinks all histories “are lies… There are no untruths… few errors of fact; but they are lies”. Reading of himself, he sees “a man who bore my name but a man I hardly know.” Thus, “All lives are mysterious, I suppose, even my own.”

"He discovered in all others those vices he would not recognise in himself."
Julia, on Livia's son, Tiberius. Or possibly contemporary political commentary.

Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing - and his fourth/first book

John Williams wrote three brilliant, but very different novels (plus a youthful novella he later disowned).

They’re ostensibly about complex relationships between men, but in utterly different settings. This is about politics and war in ancient Rome. Women’s power is mostly covert. Butcher’s Crossing is a bildungsroman about a privileged 19 century young man on a long and perilous buffalo hunt. Women barely feature. Stoner is about a quiet man who loves and lives for literature in academia. The few women in it are seen from the perspective of and in relation to men. That makes the strong female narrative in Augustus all the more surprising. But here, as in Stoner, the intense and devoted father-daughter relationship of childhood is tragically sacrificed: the lesser of several evils, for the greater good.

See the end of my review of his first (disowned) novel, Nothing But The Night, HERE, for a comparison of all four.

Philosophical Quotes

• “If it is one’s destiny to change the world, it is his necessity first to change himself.”
• “A man may live like a fool for a year, and become wise in a day.”
• “The death of an old enemy is curiously like the death of an old friend.”
• “To care not for oneself is of little moment, but to care not for those whom one has loved is another matter. All has become a matter of indifferent curiosity, and nothing is of consequence.”
• “Erotic love is the most unselfish… it seeks to become one with another, and hence to escape the self.”
• “A people may endure an almost incredible series of darkest failures without breaking; but give them respite and some hope for the future, and they may not endure an unexpected denial of that hope.”
• “Those [anti-adultery] laws… were not intended so much to be obeyed as to be followed; I believed that there was no possibility of virtue without the idea of virtue.”

• Perspective changes with maturity:
“The young man... sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey... where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality...
The man of middle years... sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail… and has learned that he is mortal...
But the man of age... must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and failures merge.”

Quotes about Rome

• “Rome, where no man knows his enemy or his friend, where license is more admired than virtue, and where principle has become servant to self.”
• “The appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos.”
• “Even their gods serve the state, rather than the other way round.”
• “Copulation has become an act designed to obtain power, either social or political; an adulterer may be more dangerous than a conspirator, both to your person and his country.”
• “I have conquered the world, and none of it is secure.” (Julius Caesar)

Other Quotes

• “We shall do the boy honor, we shall do him praise, and we shall do him in.”
• “History will not know the truth, if history ever can.”
• “I could trust the poets because I was unable to give them what they wanted.”
• “Thinking that allusive loquacity is subtlety.”
• “She was cold, and thus could feign warmth with utter success.”

There Could Have Been More

Apparently, the only writing advice his wife ever gave him was "You have gone on too long. You need to stop sooner." - about this book, and he took her advice! See this interview with Nancy Gardner Williams: HERE. show less

[Augustus] is [[John Williams]]'s last of three novels and won him the National Book Award, very deservedly so. I found this historical novel about the Roman Emperor Augustus to be smart, emotional, and creatively done. I'm so glad I read this after reading [[Mary Beard]]'s [SPQR] because I think I understood all of what Williams did much more deeply. He grounds his book in accurate and detailed historical detail, and creates memorable and flushed out characters of those involved.

Williams chooses to use the technique of letters and journals to tell this story. Octavius Caesar (Augustus) is revealed through the experiences of his friends, enemies, wives, and daughter. His daughter, Julia, is explored particularly well. It was nice to show more have an active female voice in this world of men. In a last, brief section, Augustus finally gets his own voice, summing up his life in a succinct letter.

Much of Williams's view of Augustus seems to be that history happened to him. Yes, he made decisions over his time as Emperor and greatly influenced the empire and life of Rome, but "fate" and "destiny" is also an important concept here. As Augustus says at the end of his life "It was destiny that seized me that afternoon at Apollonia nearly sixty years ago, and I chose not to avoid its embrace."

Williams also explores the rise to power and loss/changing of friendships, dutiful marriage vs. love, and the drama of choosing a successor - a problem for most long-lived emperor/kings.

I really enjoyed this work and recommend it highly to anyone with a grounding in Roman history. I can't say how it would work for someone who didn't know a bit of the history first. It paired very well with [SPQR]. show less

"It is said that in the ancient days of our history, human rather than animal sacrifices were offered to the gods; today we are proud to believe that such practices have so receded into the past that they are recorded only in the uncertainty of myth and legend. We shake our heads in wonderment at that time so far removed (we say) from the enlightenment and humanity of the Roman spirit, and we marvel at the brutality upon which our civilization is founded. I, too, have felt a distant and abstract pity for that ancient slave or peasant who suffered beneath the sacrificial knife upon the altar of a savage god; and yet I have always felt myself to be a little foolish to do so.

For sometimes in my sleep there parade before me the tens of show more thousands of bodies that will not walk again upon the earth, men no less innocent than those ancient victims whose deaths propitiated an earlier god; and it seems to me then, in the obscurity or clarity of the dream, that I am that priest who has emerged from the dark past of our race to speak the rite that causes the knife to fall. We tell ourselves that we have become a civilized race, and with a pious horror we speak of those times when a god of the crops demanded the body of a human being for his obscure function. But is not the god that so many Romans have served, in our memory and even in our time, as dark and fearsome as that ancient one? Even if to destroy him, I have been his priest; and even if to weaken his power, I have done his bidding. Yet I have not destroyed him, or weakened his power. He sleeps restlessly in the hearts of men, waiting to rouse himself or to be aroused. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose."

I am in awe of this author. An author of only four novels, the first of which he repudiated. Whenever I complete one of his works, I’m immediately abuzz with ideas and instantly aflush with a sublime hum from an iron rod caught in the teeth from ancient history; that connection is the human experience ringing across millennia. I’m also immediately saddened, for I know I’m only hastening the end of this great artist’s oeuvre with each reading. It’s hard for me to reckon the fact that I’ve no one with whom to talk about this great contribution to literature.

I’ve never been interested in writing an epistolary novel. 𝘈𝘶𝘨𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘴 couldn’t have been written any other way. Since I’ve seen how Williams can reinvent a form three different times now (the Western, the campus novel, the historical novel), I feel a deep affinity for a man who must’ve had as much glee deconstructing and reconstituting fiction as I have with my own literary experiments. I’ve read 𝘋𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘢 and enjoyed it, but never wanted to write an epistolary novel. I can say the same for 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘸𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴. But after closing the final pages to 𝘈𝘶𝘨𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘴? I don’t know . . . I’m mightily inspired to try. show less