Julius Caesar vs Augustus

Who were Julius Caesar and Augustus?

Gaius Julius Caesar was born in Rome in July 100 BC into an old but not rich patrician family. He rose through the usual offices, formed an alliance with Pompey and Crassus in 60 BC, and as governor conquered Gaul between 58 and 50 BC. In January 49 BC he crossed the Rubicon with his army, starting a civil war that he won at Pharsalus in 48 BC and in later campaigns in Africa and Spain. In early 44 BC he was named dictator for life. On the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BC, a group of senators stabbed him to death in a meeting hall at Pompey's theatre.

Augustus was born Gaius Octavius on 23 September 63 BC. His mother Atia was the daughter of Caesar's sister Julia, which made him Caesar's great-nephew. When Caesar was killed, Octavius, then 18, was studying at Apollonia across the Adriatic. Caesar's will adopted him as his son and heir. Under the name Gaius Julius Caesar (historians call him Octavian for this period) he raised an army, allied with and then defeated Mark Antony, and after the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC was master of the Roman world. In January 27 BC the Senate gave him the name Augustus. He ruled until his death at Nola on 19 August AD 14.

Caesar vs Augustus: comparison table

Did Caesar and Augustus know each other?

Yes, though they were together only a few times. Suetonius (Augustus 8) says the young Octavius gave the funeral speech for his grandmother Julia, Caesar's sister, at the age of 12. He rode in Caesar's African triumph in 46 BC and was given military honours though he had not fought. In 45 BC he followed Caesar to Spain, surviving a shipwreck to get there, and Caesar seems to have marked him out then. Caesar's will, read after the murder, left him three quarters of the estate and adopted him into the family.

Augustus built his whole early career on that name. In 42 BC the Senate declared Caesar a god, and Octavian called himself divi filius, son of the deified one. He paid Caesar's promised legacy to every citizen in Rome, avenged him at Philippi, and in 29 BC dedicated the Temple of the Deified Julius in the Forum.

How their methods differed

Caesar ruled openly. He took the dictatorship for life, sat on a golden chair in the Senate, put his portrait on coins while alive and was offered a crown in public at the Lupercalia festival in February 44 BC (he refused it, but many thought the scene was a test). He pardoned enemies, like Brutus and Cassius, and some of them killed him. In a letter of 49 BC preserved by Cicero (Letters to Atticus 9.7C) he described mercy and generosity as a new way of conquering, unlike the cruelty of Sulla.

Augustus ruled behind republican forms. In the Res Gestae (chapter 34) he says that in 27 BC he handed the state back to the Senate and people, and that afterwards he exceeded everyone in authority but had no more power than his colleagues in office. He refused the dictatorship when it was offered. He took real power through a bundle of legal grants: command of most of the army's provinces and the powers of a tribune. Suetonius (Augustus 25) reports his favourite saying, make haste slowly.

He was not merciful at the start. In the proscriptions of 43 BC, Octavian, Antony and Lepidus published lists of enemies whose killers would be rewarded. Cicero was among the dead. The historian Ronald Syme, in The Roman Revolution (1939), saw the whole Augustan settlement as a faction taking power and dressing it as restoration. Others stress the long peace and rebuilding that followed. Both readings use the same evidence; you can decide.

One small detail sums up the difference. Caesar replaced the Roman calendar with a 365 day year plus a leap day in 46 BC. After his death, priests added leap days too often, and Augustus quietly corrected it. Caesar made the bold reform; Augustus made it work.

Where they agreed

• Both believed the old Republic, run by a few great families competing for office, could no longer govern an empire.
• Both rewarded veteran soldiers with land and founded colonies across the provinces.
• Both spent heavily on buildings in Rome: Caesar began the Forum of Caesar and the Basilica Julia; Augustus finished them and added his own forum. Suetonius (Augustus 28) reports his boast that he found Rome built of brick and left it in marble.
• Both used writing as propaganda: Caesar's Commentaries in the third person, Augustus's Res Gestae carved on bronze outside his mausoleum.

Both also built their power on conquest and slavery. The Gallic wars killed and enslaved very large numbers of people; Plutarch gives a figure of a million dead and a million enslaved, which cannot be checked but shows the scale ancient writers believed. A fair comparison names that.

Questions to ask Caesar and Augustus

1. Caesar: why did you cross the Rubicon, and what did you expect would happen?
2. Caesar: you pardoned Brutus. Would you do it again?
3. Caesar: did you want to be king, and why did you refuse the crown at the Lupercalia?
4. Caesar: what did you see in your great-nephew in Spain in 45 BC?
5. Augustus: what did you learn from Caesar's murder?
6. Augustus: how do you justify the proscriptions of 43 BC?
7. Augustus: if you restored the Republic, why did power pass to your stepson Tiberius?
8. Augustus: why write the Res Gestae, and what did you leave out?

On Yuga you can ask these aloud to Julius Caesar and Augustus, AI recreations built from their own writings and the ancient historians. Push Augustus on the gap between the Res Gestae and Suetonius. The recreations can be wrong, so cite Suetonius, Plutarch, Cicero and the Res Gestae by chapter.

Which one for your project?

Pick Caesar for a project on the fall of the Republic, military history, the Ides of March, or how a writer shapes his own image. His Gallic War is short, clear and translated everywhere. See questions to ask Julius Caesar.

Pick Augustus for a project on how empires are built after a civil war, propaganda in buildings, coins and poetry (Virgil wrote the Aeneid in his reign), or Rome at peace. The Res Gestae is only about 35 short chapters and makes an excellent primary source.

Pick both for the best single lesson in Roman politics: two men with the same goal, one killed after five years, one ruling for over forty. See ancient Rome key figures for the rest of the cast, and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for how later writers imagined the story.