How did Augustus die?

The last journey

In the summer of AD 14 Augustus was seventy-five and had ruled for more than forty years. His stepson and heir, Tiberius, was leaving for Illyricum, across the Adriatic, and the old emperor decided to see him off as far as Beneventum. On the way an illness began, Suetonius says, with an attack of diarrhea. He cruised the coast of Campania and its islands and spent four idle days on Capri (Augustus 97–98).

Off Puteoli, the passengers and crew of a ship just in from Alexandria put on white clothes and garlands, burned incense and called out that through him they lived, sailed the seas and enjoyed their freedom and their fortunes. Delighted, he gave each of his companions forty gold pieces, on condition they spend it on Alexandrian goods. At Naples he watched games held in his honor, went on with Tiberius to Beneventum, and on the way back grew worse. At Nola he took to his bed, called Tiberius back and spent a long time with him alone.

The last day

Suetonius describes the final day closely (Augustus 99). Augustus kept asking whether there was any disturbance outside on his account. He called for a mirror and had his hair combed and his sagging jaw set right. Then he asked the friends around him whether they thought he had played the comedy of life well, and added the lines an actor speaks at the end of a play, asking the audience to clap and send him off with applause.

He sent them away, asked after a young relative who was ill, and then, kissing Livia, spoke his last words: “Live mindful of our wedlock, Livia, and farewell.” They had been married for more than fifty years. He died, Suetonius says, the easy death he had always prayed for. The only sign of wandering was a moment of terror, when he cried out that forty young men were carrying him off. It proved a prophecy: forty soldiers of the guard carried out his body. He died in the afternoon of August 19, in the same room as his father, thirty-five days before his seventy-sixth birthday (Augustus 100).

Did Livia poison him?

Tacitus says some suspected the emperor’s wife of a crime. Rumor had it that a few months earlier Augustus had sailed in secret, with one trusted friend, Fabius Maximus, to the island of Planasia to visit his exiled grandson Agrippa Postumus, and that there were tears and signs of affection on both sides. Fabius told his wife, she told Livia, and soon Fabius was dead, perhaps by his own hand (Annals 1.5).

Cassius Dio, a century after Tacitus, adds the detail everyone remembers. Augustus liked to pick figs from the trees himself, so Livia smeared poison on some still hanging, ate the clean ones and let him eat the others (56.30). Dio offers it only as something people said.

Most historians doubt it. Augustus was seventy-five and had been ill for weeks. But the timing fed the gossip. Livia had soldiers guard the house and the roads, Tacitus says, and hopeful bulletins went out until a single announcement told Rome that Augustus was dead and Tiberius in charge. Whether Tiberius found him still alive, Tacitus admits, nobody knew. Within days Agrippa Postumus was killed by a centurion, which Tacitus calls the first crime of the new reign (Annals 1.6).

From Nola to the Mausoleum

The town councillors along the road carried the body toward Rome by night, out of the August heat, and the knights took it from Bovillae into the city. After the funeral it was burned on the Field of Mars, and a former praetor swore he had seen the emperor’s spirit rise to heaven; Dio says Livia paid him a million sesterces. The ashes went into the great round Mausoleum Augustus had built by the Tiber, and on September 17 the Senate declared him a god. He had died in the month that bore his name. Tacitus asks how few were left by then who had ever seen the Republic (Annals 1.3).