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Historical person
64 BCE–14
Augustus, born Gaius Octavius, was Julius Caesar’s adopted heir and the founder of the Roman principate. After defeating Caesar’s assassins and then his former ally Mark Antony and Cleopatra, he became Rome’s dominant ruler and in 27 BC received the name Augustus. His long reign reorganised the army, taxation, provincial government and public culture, creating a durable imperial system while preserving the outward forms of the republic.
John Williams’s Augustus presents the emperor through imagined letters, memoirs and official documents, revealing the personal costs of political mastery. He is also important in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and in Colleen McCullough’s later Masters of Rome novels. Fiction frequently contrasts the cultivated image of peace and restoration with the proscriptions, civil wars and family coercion that made Augustan stability possible.
Historical context
Series
The Mark Antony series presents a biographical saga of the Roman commander from the Catilinarian crisis to his defeat by Octavian. Antony’s youth is shaped by the execution of his stepfather, service under Aulus Gabinius in Judaea and Egypt, and the campaigns in Gaul that bind him to…
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The Masters of Rome series reconstructs the final century of the Roman Republic from the rise of Gaius Marius in 110 BCE to the settlement that made Octavian Augustus in 27 BCE. Across seven novels, military commands, elections, family alliances, provincial wealth and personal patronage become instruments in…
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The Caesar’s Spies series follows Iacomus Artemidorus, code-named Septem, and the intelligence unit operating for Julius Caesar and later Mark Antony. The sequence begins with the attempt to prevent Caesar’s assassination in March 44 BC and continues through the pursuit of the conspirators, the struggle among Antony, Cicero…
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The Publius Ovidius Mysteries reimagine the exiled poet Ovid as an unwilling investigator in Tomis on the Black Sea. His self-importance, literary knowledge and connections to Rome make him both useful and dangerous to Marcus Avitius, the provincial adviser responsible for maintaining order. The frontier setting places local…
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The Emperor series is a highly fictionalised retelling of Julius Caesar’s life and the violent end of the Roman Republic. It follows Caesar from youth through war, political ascent and conquest, then continues beyond his assassination into the struggle between Octavian, Antony and Caesar’s killers.
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Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy reconstructs the final decades of the Roman Republic through Tiro, Cicero’s enslaved secretary and eventual freedman. Imperium follows the advocate’s prosecution of Verres and campaign for the consulship; Lustrum places his consulship inside the Catilinarian crisis; and Dictator carries him through exile, Caesar’s civil…
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The Lucius Sestius Mysteries follow the historical Roman senator Lucius Sestius Quirinalis through the destruction of the Republic and the consolidation of Augustus’s principate. Beginning as a young lawyer under Julius Caesar, Forsyth’s Lucius is repeatedly drawn into murder inquiries whose evidence threatens the political settlement of the…
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The Legion XXII series follows Titus Cervianus, a civilian surgeon transformed into a capsarius and soldier with Legio XXII Deiotariana in Roman Egypt. His medical skill gives the campaigns a distinctive viewpoint, moving between the wounded body, the tensions inside the legion and the strategic demands of Augustus’s…
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The Claudius Series is Robert Graves’s two-volume fictional memoir of the Roman emperor Claudius and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. I, Claudius follows the imperial family from Augustus to Caligula through Claudius’s wary, observant voice, while Claudius the God covers his own reign and the forces that undermine it. Together…
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The Eagles of Rome series follows the Roman centurion Lucius Cominius Tullus on the German frontier before and after the destruction of Varus’s legions in the Teutoburg Forest. The stories cover his early service, the ambush of AD 9 and the later Roman campaigns to recover the lost…
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Epic Historical Adventure is Colin Falconer's publisher-defined collection of stand-alone historical thrillers rather than a continuous narrative sequence. The novels range from Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and the Mongol Empire to the Ottoman court, the conquest of Mexico, colonial India, shipwreck and twentieth-century Palestine. Most volumes can be…
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The Quintus Roman Thrillers follow Julius Quintus Quirinius through the early Augustan principate as he rises from ordinary legionary to decanus, optio, centurion, speculator and evocatus. His service begins with decimation in Hispania and an oath to support the family of Ursus, the comrade killed by his own…
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Michelle Moran’s Egyptian Royals Collection follows three royal women whose lives are reshaped by dynastic rupture and imperial power. Nefertiti rises beside Akhenaten during the Amarna religious revolution; Nefertari struggles to overcome that discredited legacy at the court of Ramesses II; and Cleopatra Selene is carried to Rome…
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The Roma Trilogy follows generations of the fictional Pinarius family across the long history of Rome. Roma begins with the city’s legendary foundation and continues through the Republic and the rise of Augustus; Empire carries the family through the Julio-Claudian, Flavian and adoptive-emperor periods; Dominus follows the later…
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Standalone books
Non Fiction
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
