91 Books Like Augustus

It’s not Hadrian’s love affair with the beautiful boy Antinous that swept me off my feet, nor the way Hadrian makes him a god after his mysterious death and builds a city dedicated to worshiping him.

That’s only a small part of a book overflowing with the emperor’s interior life, his fears and doubts and dreams. Yourcenar spent most of her life on and off writing this book, her life’s work. Filled with the exhilaration and perplexity of achieving absolute power and then holding onto it, we experience Hadrian as a profoundly paradoxical genius from the inside out. 

The short reign of Julian the Apostate is one of the “what ifs” of history. Raised as a Christian, Julian was a secret pagan. When he unexpectedly became emperor, he reversed the privileges of the Church and promoted his own Neo-Platonist cult, intending to restore paganism. Even though we know how things really turned out, it is fascinating to speculate about what might have happened if he had succeeded. 

Gore Vidal has filled this novel with war, politics, sex, religion, heresy, and philosophy. I have tried to follow his example (though I have been more sympathetic to eunuchs than he was).

Here’s another true story written as a novel, this time an autobiography, which I love. Again, the locations are fantastic,  it’s something of a travelogue, and there’s a strong element of cross-cultural fluidity.

The hero of the book is a Muslim exile from Granada who was brought up in Fez and became an itinerant merchant, journeying through the Sahara and what is now Sudan before settling in Cairo. On his way back to Fez, he was captured by pirates, sent to Rome, converted to Christianity, became a translator and researcher for the Pope, and wrote a description of Africa. Oh, and then he goes back to North Africa and converts back to Islam.

Brilliant!

A surreal picaresque, apparently narrated by the ghost of Columbus, who knows exactly how posterity has treated him and sets out to tell the ‘true’ story of his life and adventures. Written in a lively, vernacular style, full of jokes, arguments, boasts, anachronisms, score-settling, and shifts of tone and genre, it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

This book tests the limits of the memoir, and shows that historical novels can be great fun, and don’t always have to respect their sources. 

This enthralling evocation of the long life of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, uses fictional letters and other invented documents to tell his story, from the point when, as a teenager, he found himself the heir of the assassinated dictator Julius Caesar, to his final days as sole ruler of a vast empire. Emerging as victor from a protracted civil war, Augustus managed to impose a degree of stability across the Roman world, though at a cost. Could the bloodthirsty youth have really turned into the modest statesman? His contemporaries found him hard to read. Williams charts with subtlety and insight the phases in Augustus’ self-reinvention, shining a particular spotlight on his fraught relationship with Julia, his daughter, whom he found himself obliged to send into exile, as a conspicuous offender against his flagship legislation on adultery.

The title of this book, written by one of my colleagues at Royal Holloway, recalls the classic work of Ronald Syme, whose The Roman Revolution appeared in 1939 against the backdrop of the rise of Nazi Germany. Alston narrates in detail the crucial period from Caesar’s murder on the Ides of March 44 BC through to the death of the first emperor Augustus (Caesar’s adopted son) more than half a century later. This was the time of Brutus, Antony, and Cleopatra which so appealed to Shakespeare, and Alston disentangles skillfully the complex political and military events and demonstrates the achievement of Augustus who claimed to restore the Republic while establishing the Empire which ruled the Mediterranean world for the next 400 years.

Reliving the lives of two famous Romans in a new fictional light is what makes this five-book series a dazzling example of magical realism. The entire settings, that is Ancient Rome during the Republic, is real and has existed in the form it is presented. The characters, though, have taken on a more personal shape, independent from the historical image we know. Caesar and Brutus become larger-than-life characters, allowing more to be told about them, their feelings, their ambitions, and giving us a version of them we may never read in history books. We become closer to them, and try to understand them more as human beings engulfed by history rather than historical figures. It is an unparalleled humanisation of history through fiction.

This is my favorite of McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. Though fictional, they are impeccably researched, rendering the collapse of the Republic in truly astonishing detail. McCullough manages to render the twists and turns of Roman politics in a way that a reader can not only follow them, but understand why they mattered so much. You’ll feel as though you are right there in the Forum or the dining-room with Caesar, Antony, Pompey, Servilia, Fulvia, and the rest. McCullough’s vivid prose drives home that these were real people, living real lives, with the same petty concerns and daily frustrations as all of us, even when they were also shaping the fates of nations.

It would seem strange not to include at least one work on Julius Caesar in any list of recommended reading on the Republic’s fall, and Stevenson’s book strikes just the right balance between Caesar’s career and the wider Republican background against which Caesar must be set. The challenging evidence for Caesar’s life and motivations is presented with great clarity, including his own writings, and so too are the often contradictory judgments made by modern scholars. Stevenson taught me during my MA at the University of Auckland, so I was delighted to see this book appear, and he has provided an invaluable contribution to the ongoing debates over Caesar’s responsibility for the Republic’s collapse and the transformation from Republic to Empire.

I think this is the single best edition of Julius Caesar’s original compositions: the footnotes, maps, battle diagrams, and appendices offer a treasure trove of information for the Roman history buff without overwhelming the casual reader.

(I had a particular interest in Appendix C, on “Roman Calendars, Dates, and Time,” where I learned that the main reason winter operations rarely occurred in ancient warfare was the inability to feed their animals.)

The translations struck me as contemporary sounding yet never sacrifice accuracy for clarity. I recommend this book as a perfect gateway for the fan of ancient Rome to enter the realm of authentic ancient Roman literature.