Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor by Anthony Everitt (Random House 2006) is a workman-like treatment of the subject of Augustus, intended for a general audience.
[Augustus] himself is a shadowy figure. Many books have been written about his achievements, but they have tended to focus on the Augustan age, rather than on the man as he was. My hope is to make Augustus come alive. As well as narrating his own doings, I place his story in his times and describe the events and personalities that affected him. Shipwrecks, human sacrifice, hairbreadth escapes, unbridled sex, battles on land and at sea, ambushes, family scandals, and above all the unforgiving pursuit of absolute power Augustus lived out an extraordinary and often terrifying drama. The stage is crowded with larger-than-life personalities…
So writes the author in his Preface. After my second read-through of the book, I'm still not enthusiastic about it. In fact, rather than breathlessly following an ‘often terrifying drama,’ I got bored at times, and more often than not, Augustus did not ‘come alive,’ at least not to me.
The book is one of the many new popular history books, a worthy undertaking, bringing history back into the eye of the general public. However, it should also be readable to the more knowledgeable history enthusiast and the professional. Mr. Everitt, known to many Roman history buffs through his Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, has done an enormous amount of research. The problem, for this reviewer at least, is how he made use of it.
Also by Anthony Everitt:
