When his first operations against Sextus’s Sicilian bases proved disastrous, he felt obliged to make a new compact with Antony at Augustus Caesar (27 BCE - 14 CE) was the name of the first and, by most accounts, greatest Roman emperor.
On the one hand, to describe someone as “augustus” simply indicated that he was a deeply pious individual who was filled with respect for the gods.On the other, to label someone as “augustus” implied that he was holy or deserving of religious veneration.The duality of this term—somehow projecting modesty while also singling out its object as nearly a divine being—is typical of the extraordinary facility that Octavian possessed for manipulating words and images to promote himself and his reign.It has become a convention for historians, when describing the career of this man, to refer to him as Octavian during the first stage of his life up to 27 B.C., but then to switch to calling him Augustus once he had effectively become the sole ruler of the Roman world. Thus, to create a Dictator for Life was to directly contradict the most fundamental characteristic of the original office and was too equivalent to being a king.To solve this vexatious dilemma, Octavian turned to his facility at propaganda and devised a remarkably clever solution. All rights reserved. Augustus’ calculatedly unpretentious behavior helped to sustain the fiction that he was not, in fact, an absolute monarch—and it worked.Whereas Julius Caesar had been assassinated after only a few years, Augustus enjoyed a long reign of almost half a century, and ultimately died of natural causes.
While his position was monarchical in reality, he obviously could not openly label himself as a king.Octavian briefly considered taking the name Romulus after the legendary founder of Rome, but rejected this idea because Romulus himself had been a king.
It is from the Latin term imperator that the modern English words “emperor” and “empire” are derived.While the word “augustus” associated him with religion, the title imperator emphasized his role as a successful military leader. On the 11 Nov. 2005 Dateline NBC program dealing with the birth of Jesus, John Dominic Crossan listed the following titles of Augustus: "divine" [or deified], "son of God," "God," "God from God."