Augustus

Francisco Gil-White

Book 3 of rome

Description:

After Julius Caesar was assassinated, there ensued of period of internal wars, and for a

while no clear leader emerged until at last Augustus defeated all of his rivals and made

himself emperor, thus closing the final chapter of the ‘Roman Republic’ and opening the

first chapter of what is alternatively called the ‘Roman Empire’ or ‘Roman Principate.’

This has finally brought us to our destination, because the rule of Augustus goes

from the year 30 BCE to the year 14 CE, and thus carries us into the dawn of the first

century, where I promised that we would stop. The point of our journey was to see if we

could understand better why the Romans carried out a genocide of the Jewish people that

began, precisely, in the first century. I have argued that the Law of Moses was an

ideological—which is to say, political—threat to the repressive Roman aristocratic

system.