Augustan Age

27 BCE–14 CE

The Augustan Age began after Octavian became Augustus in 27 BC and lasted until his death in AD 14. Augustus kept many republican forms while concentrating power in his own hands. His rule brought political settlement, cultural patronage, moral legislation, military restructuring, and a new imperial language of peace and renewal.

This phase mattered because it created the durable model of Roman imperial government. Augustus solved some immediate problems of civil war but also made succession and the emperor’s personal authority central to Roman politics. The empire that followed depended heavily on the balance he constructed.

The Augustan Age is useful for novels about the new imperial order after decades of civil war. Robert Graves’s I, Claudius looks back on Augustus’s household from inside the Julio-Claudian world, while Robert Harris’s Roman fiction and Steven Saylor’s later books connect republican memory to the new regime. This phase suits stories about propaganda, succession, poets, marriage politics, veterans, provincial settlement, and the unease beneath official peace.

Related people for Augustan Age

Arminius18 BCE–21 Augustus64 BCE–14 Cicero107 BCE–44 BCE Claudius11 BCE–54 Cleopatra70 BCE–31 BCE Domitian51–96 Germanicus16 BCE–19 Horace66 BCE–9 BCE Julius Caesar101 BCE–45 BCE Livy60 BCE–17 Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa64 BCE–13 BCE Mark Antony83–30 BCE Nero37–68 Ovid44 BCE–17 Publius Quinctilius Varus47 BCE–9 Tiberius43 BCE–37 Titus39–81 Trajan53–117 Vespasian9–79 Virgil71 BCE–20 BCE