Imperial Image: Types of Sources

Context for the authors and coins

Coins

• Used everyday to buy and sell services / goods

• Great many people would see them

• Pictures rarer in ancient rome than in the modern era, so pictures on coins were payed attention to

• Not everyone could read, so pictures were important and often misinterpreted

Res Gestae Divi Augusti

• Written 14-13AD, or at the end of his life (acc. Mark scheme)

• Augustus’ own record of his deeds

• So highly biased, obviously

• But contemporary

Suetonius: The lives of the Twelve Caesars: Augustus

• One of the most complete sources we have on Augustus: Life of Augustus

• Suetonius was writing well after Augustus’ death, do not confuse his work with contemporary sources

Ovid: Metamorphoses

• 8AD, so contemporary if towards the end

• Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea in the same year

• Many of the transformations in the book are slow and painful, and something of the original is retained — by including this story is Ovid suggesting that despite Augustus’ transformation into the father of Rome’s peace, does some of his ruthlessness remain? Alternatively, and this is my own idea, does this mean that Augustus  is wrong for trying to separate Caesar the God from Caesar the Man — some part of his problematic human life (civil wars, dictatorship) will always remain even if he is now deified.

Propertius

• c.50-15BC

• Wrote four books of Elegies — Praise poems

• Reasonably wealthy family

• Mostly wrote about love, but Maecenas at times seems to have urged him to write about politics and Augustus

• Not from Rome, but from Italy

  • May have been educated in Rome or Greece

Horace

• Under Maecenas

• Fought in the army of Brutus at Phillipi (42BC)

• Born in southern Italy, educated in Rome

• Son of a freedman (some social barriers, but some rose to high positions)

Virgil

• Under Maecenas

• Wrote the Aeneid