I started my review of Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor thus:
"[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.
We discussed this in our first chat about the biography by Anthony Everitt. I said I was even more bored than before and thought the depiction of Octavian rather bloodless, and some participants agreed that it was a bit hard to get a handle on Octavian the person (and on others): one comment was, "I find the characters here pretty skeletal." Two members mentioned that they had read or were reading Augustus: The Golden Age of Rome by G. P. Baker.
I do have that book myself and have to note up front that I'm a great fan of Baker, whose style of biography has gone out of fashion as maybe too individualistic, and the prose too quaint for some. So I'm sort of biased. I went back to it and did some speed reading. I have to say that the book gives me a much better feel of the era and events, and the people who shaped them, and Baker's Augustus certainly comes alive.
I've gotten as far as Octavian returning to Rome after Philippi. On the surface, the factual story so far as reported by Baker is not much different than the one by Everitt, but it is much more differentiated. Cicero, however, does not come off well at all in Mr. Baker's thinking: he deserved to be proscribed.
I will get back to this soon as I read further, time permitting.
I also had promised to search for the chat transcript of Everitt's Cicero biography, Cicero:
The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician, which I was pretty sure we discussed in the past. We did, in two chats, though this must have been before I started the blog. It turns out that, the snobs we are ;-), some of us thought that Everitt, in giving short thrift to Cicero's writings, "underestimates his readers' intelligence." We did discuss Cicero the man more than the book itself. N.S. Gill has written a review of the book.
