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The Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar Augustus to the Internet - Softcover

D'Epiro, Peter

 
9780307388438: The Book of Firsts: 150 World-Changing People and Events from Caesar Augustus to the Internet
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307388433 ISBN 13: 9780307388438
Verlag: Anchor, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The Book of Firsts is an entertaining, enlightening, and highly browsable tour of the major innovations of the past twenty centuries and how they shaped our world.

Peter D’Epiro makes this handy overview of human history both fun and thought-provoking with his survey of the major “firsts”—inventions, discoveries, political and military upheavals, artistic and scientific breakthroughs, religious controversies, and catastrophic events—of the last two thousand years. Who was the first to use gunpowder? Invent paper? Sack the city of Rome? Write a sonnet? What was the first university? The first astronomical telescope? The first great novel? The first Impressionist painting? The Book of Firsts explores these questions and many more, from the earliest surviving cookbook (featuring parboiled flamingo) and the origin of chess (sixth-century India) to the first civil service exam (China in 606 AD) and the first tell-all memoir about scandalous royals (Byzantine Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora). In the form of 150 brief, witty, erudite, and information-packed essays, The Book of Firsts is ideal for anyone interested in an enjoyable way to acquire a deeper understanding of history and the fascinating personalities who forged it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter D’Epiro received a BA and MA from Queens College and a PhD in English from Yale University. He has taught English at the secondary and college levels and worked as an editor and writer for thirty years. He has also written (with Mary Desmond Pinkowish) Sprezzatura: 50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World and What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists—Fully Explicated, which has appeared in British, German, Russian, Lithuanian, and Korean editions. He has recently completed an English verse translation of Dante’s Inferno, and his other publications include a book and several articles on Ezra Pound’s Cantos and a book of translations of African-American poetry into Italian. He has a grown son, Dante, and lives with his wife, Nancy Walsh, in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

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1. Who was the first Roman emperor?

Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, aka Augustus
(reigned 27 BC-AD 14)


Long before they had an emperor, the ancient Romans had an empire. Beginning with Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain, all wrested from Carthage in the third century BC, the Roman republic had strung together an imperial bastion of overseas possessions. By the time Octavian seized sole control of the Roman world by defeating his former ruling partner Mark Antony at the naval battle of Actium in 31 BC, the legions sent out from the Eternal City on the Tiber had conquered territories comprising most of Western Europe and great swaths of northern Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, Syria, and Judea. In the following year, Octavian converted the late Cleopatra's massively wealthy Egyptian kingdom into just another province of Rome.

After several generations of butchery in the successive civil wars between Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, the assassins of Julius Caesar (led by Brutus and Cassius) and the avengers of Caesar (led by Octavian and Mark Antony), and, finally, between Octavian and Antony, the Roman world was ready for peace and unity at just about any price. It received them from a cagey young man, handsome and intelligent but sickly and not overly courageous, who had the fortune of being Julius Caesar's great-nephew, adoptive son, and chief heir.

Caesar had been king of Rome in all but name, and that's why, in 44 BC, he was murdered at a meeting of the senate. Having thrown out their last king more than four centuries earlier, the Romans were fiercely proud of their republic presided over by magistrates elected for one-year terms. Not only had Caesar had himself declared dictator for life, he also affected an un-Roman monarchical demeanor with his purple robes, scorn for the senate, and godlike haughtiness. The Roman nobles feared Caesar, but they hated him even more.

The lesson was not lost on young Octavian (63 BC-AD 14). He graciously accepted from the senate the honorific Augustus ("revered, majestic, worthy of awe") on January 13, 27 BC, when, in a staged little drama, he offered to resign the extraordinary powers he had exercised since Caesar's death, and the senate made him a counteroffer he couldn't refuse. But there would be no regal pretensions in the public manner or official status of Augustus. He was content to be princeps civitatis--first citizen--and princeps senatus--leader of the senate (hence the English term Principate for his regime). Meanwhile, he was lavished concurrently with the key offices of the old Roman constitution--consul, proconsul, tribune--which guaranteed his control of the civil government while fostering the illusion that he had restored the republic by acting only as a senior colleague of its traditional political leaders.

But Augustus's main basis of power, as commander in chief of Rome's armies, derived from his being proclaimed imperator, the origin of our word emperor. An imperator was, at first, a Roman military commander--the general of an army. Then the word was applied to a general who had been acclaimed by his soldiers after a victory and to a proconsul who held the military command of a province. But the power of an imperator was always meant to be limited in time and place.

When the senate eventually created Augustus imperator over the entire empire and for life, prefixing the title to his name, it officially sanctioned his control over all the military forces and foreign possessions of Rome, and this is why historians consider him the first Roman emperor. Subsequent emperors were invested with the same title, which required the armies of Rome to swear allegiance to them personally rather than to the state.

Vested with overall command of the Roman army, navy, provinces, and a large personal army guard, the Praetorians, Augustus convened the senate and initiated legislation that it rubber-stamped. He made and unmade senators, he handpicked cronies to govern the most critical territories of the empire in his name, and he deprived the popular assemblies of their legislative or veto powers. The old majestic formula for the twin pillars of the Roman state--senatus populusque Romanus, the Roman senate and people--had become a sham.

Though crafty and manipulative, Augustus, "that subtle tyrant" in Edward Gibbon's phrase, was ruthless during his reign only when he had to be, preferring to overlook petty affronts. He ruled the Roman Empire for more than forty years, during which he ushered in the era of peace known as the pax Romana, promoted family values (though failing signally with his own debauched daughter and granddaughter), and patronized the best writers of Rome's Golden Age. Virgil's Aeneid, Horace's patriotic odes, and Livy's epic history of Rome glorified the ancient Roman military and moral virtues that Augustus was attempting to resurrect. (No paragon of virtue himself, the Revered One and Father of His Country was addicted to women and dice.) His massive building program led him to boast that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. For his own dwelling, he chose a site above the ancient sanctuary where Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, had supposedly been suckled by a she-wolf on the Palatine Hill. Augustus's residence was thus called the Palatium--the source of our word palace.

The emperor's last years were clouded by a catastrophic Roman defeat under the inept governor Varus in Germany, in which three legions--more than twenty thousand men--were cut down in AD 9. Augustus would bang his head against a door and shout, "Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!" After a favorite nephew and two grandsons died young, he reconciled himself to bequeathing his position--and Rome's twenty-five legions--to his stepson and adopted son Tiberius who, though a capable general and administrator, had always struck the emperor as too proudly aloof, morose, and temperamental to continue the Augustan constitutional charade. But Tiberius went on to have a long reign of his own (AD 14-37), and the sometimes admirable, sometimes deranged men known as Roman emperors succeeded to the throne until 476 in the Western Empire and 1453 in the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, besides inspiring Russian czars, German kaisers, and even an Italian ex-socialist known as il Duce.

In the account he himself wrote of his remarkable career, which was engraved on two bronze pillars in Rome and carved in stone throughout the empire, Augustus sometimes blusters like Shelley's Ozymandias: "In my triumphs there were led before my chariot nine kings or children of kings" and "Twenty-six times I provided for the people . . . hunting spectacles of African wild beasts . . . ; in these exhibitions about three thousand and five hundred animals were killed." He also can't resist one final iteration of the big lie at the center of his administration: "After that time I excelled all in authority, but I possessed no more power than the others who were my colleagues in each magistracy."

The first, greatest, and longest-reigning of all the Roman emperors died in his mid-seventies in AD 14, in the month that had been renamed August in his honor, and he was promptly deified by the compliant senate. On his deathbed, he summoned his friends and, in the tradition of comic actors, asked for their applause if they thought he had played his part well in the farce of life.

Did the hypocritical role assumed by this political actor fool anyone? It all depends on your definition of fool. Roman aristocrats realized they could prosper by administering Rome and the empire in Augustus's name if they just threw a little sycophancy into their lives. The chief writers of the time obtained funds and farms from Augustus's cultural minister Maecenas, whose name has become synonymous with enlightened patronage. The soldiers got...

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Verlag
Anchor
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307388433
ISBN 13 
9780307388438
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
640
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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