The Lost Memoirs of Augustus

edited by Anton Powell and Christopher Smith

Book cover: The Lost Memoirs of Augustus

Extent: 230 pages

Publisher: The Classical Press of Wales

Subjects: Classical Studies

Series: Roman World

Language: English

(Paperback) (Published)

(July 2026)

ISBN: 9781914535703

Price: $35.00

Out of stock

Hardback (Published)

(December 2008)

ISBN: 9781905125258

6.1 x 9.17 inches

Price: $80.00

In stock

PDF (Published)

(December 2008)

ISBN: 9781910589427

Price: $35.00

Augustus’ Memoirs, written probably in the mid 20s BC, might have been one of the most revealing texts of Roman history – had they survived. Far longer than his surviving Res Gestae, the Memoirs seem to date from a period at which the wounds of Rome’s civil wars were fresh, and the emperor’s partisan past might be recalled with discomfort. Existing fragments and testimonia have suggested that the work was apologetic in purpose. In this, the first ever comprehensive study of the subject, a cast of internationally-respected scholars reconstruct aspects of the work, its importance for historians, and its relation to Roman literary genre. The book also contains, by kind permission of Oxford University Press, the fragments and testimonia of the Memoirs as they will appear, newly edited by Christopher Smith, in ‘The Fragmentary Roman Historians’.

Cato and the origins of the memoir - Tim Cornell Was there a genre of the memoir? Or, Did Augustus know what he was doing? -Christopher Pelling Octavian the runaway: defending a military reputation in the Memoirs? - Anton Powell Why end at the Cantabrian War? - John Rich Sulla's Memoirs and Roman autobiography - Christopher Smith Felicitas and the Memoirs of Sulla - Alexander Thein Divining a lost text: Augustus' autobiography and the Bios Kaisaros of Nicolaus of Damascus - Mark Toher Alternative memories: tales from the other side in the civil war - Kathryn Welch Augustus, Sulla and the supernatural - Peter Wiseman

  • Edited by Anton Powell
  • Edited by Christopher Smith

"The contributions here... offer a great deal on Augustus' early career, the form and likeliest antecedents for his Commentarii (Sulla looms much larger here than Julius Caesar), and their function in the politics of the early principate...Specialists in the period will find much to mine and debate in a volume that should be in all graduate libraries." Niall W. Slater, Classical World 104.4 (2011)
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