Who was the first Roman emperor?

Why not Julius Caesar?

It is the most common mix-up in Roman history. Julius Caesar won a civil war, was named dictator for life in early 44 BC and was murdered on the Ides of March a few weeks later. He refused the title of king, and the system he dominated was still, on paper, the Republic. The word “emperor” didn’t yet mean what it would.

The heir nobody feared

In March 44 BC a sickly student of eighteen, Gaius Octavius, heard two pieces of news in Apollonia, across the sea from Italy. Caesar had been stabbed to death. And in his will, Caesar had adopted him as his son. His family begged him to refuse. Instead he took the most dangerous name in the world, Caesar, and Caesar’s veterans flocked to him. Historians call him Octavian for this stage of his life.

With Mark Antony and Lepidus he crushed Caesar’s killers at Philippi in 42 BC. Then the partners turned on each other. In 31 BC Octavian’s admiral Agrippa won the sea battle of Actium, off western Greece, and in 30 BC Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives. Egypt became Rome’s granary, and Octavian was alone at the top.

January, 27 BC

Then he did something astonishing. He walked into the Senate and handed back his powers. The Republic, he announced, was restored. The senators, who knew exactly who commanded the legions, begged him to stay in charge. Three days later they gave him a new name: Augustus, “the revered one.”

Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws.

He wore no crown and never called himself king. He was princeps, the first citizen, living in a modest house on the Palatine. But he kept the provinces where the legions stood, plus Egypt and its grain, held a tribune’s veto for life and controlled the money. The old shout for a victorious general, imperator, became part of his name. It gives us the word emperor.

What he left behind

Augustus ruled for forty years, until he died at Nola in August AD 14 and his stepson Tiberius took over. His generals pushed the frontier to the Danube, and the empire ran from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. With Agrippa he rebuilt Rome: aqueducts, baths, a new forum and the first Pantheon. Suetonius says he could boast that he found Rome built of brick and left it in marble. He listed his achievements in the Res Gestae, carved on temple walls; the best copy survives in Ankara, Turkey. And in 8 BC the month Sextilis was renamed in his honor. You still call it August.