Monumentum Ancyranum: The Deeds of Augustus
The Monumentum Ancyranum, or "The Deeds of the Divine Augustus," is the first Roman emperor's own account of his life and reign, composed to be inscribed on bronze tablets before his mausoleum. This edition, prepared for the University of Pennsylvania's Translations and Reprints series, presents an English version alongside the Latin and Greek texts preserved on a temple wall at Ancyra. In plain, ledger-like statements, Augustus catalogs his offices, conquests, public works, gifts to the people, and the honors heaped upon him, framing decades of upheaval as the restoration of peace and order.
The work matters as both autobiography and propaganda, the carefully shaped self-portrait of a ruler who transformed a republic into an empire while insisting he had merely served it. Its themes of power, piety, and legacy, recorded in the emperor's own measured voice, make it one of the most valuable inscriptions to survive from the ancient world.
How it begins
The method employed in this edition of the Monumentum Ancyranum is suggested by the purpose for which it is intended. That purpose is primarily to adapt it as one of the series of Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History , published by the Department of History of the University of Pennsylvania. The English version is the core of the work. At the same time the opportunity has been seized to present the original texts in such form as to be of real philological service. That there is room for such an edition of the Monumentum Ancyranum there can be no doubt. The critical edition published by Mommsen in 1883, Res Gestæ Divi Augusti , must long remain for scholars the sufficient hand-book for the study of the greatest of inscriptions. But that edition, with its Latin notes, is not adapted for ordinary school or college use, or for historical study by those who do not readily use Latin. And although Roman histories constantly refer to this great source for the life and times of Augustus, there has been no accessible English translation.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.