Death of Augustus His Conversion to Christ

By Colin Kirk

Myth and the Church Augustus Caesar, Son of God, started the Christiancalendar. Moreover, he also contributed massively to thepersona of Christ, to Christianity and to the ChristianChurch. Indeed, Jesus, a Jewish prophet, was transformedin the process to become the God of Christian Europe. Augustus, the Godfather of Europe, spawned a religion aliento Rome and the world of Rome he had created. This was not the work of Augustus himself. However, Augustus was the luminary of the Roman state religion before he was transformed into the second person of the Trinity. The processes involved in these changes are followedthrough the rst four centuries of the Christian era. A brieflook at developments since highlight the Christian churchs continued inuence on the western European knowledgebase. Here you can check out your own mindset, against factors that are still crazily inuential. The cover illustration is of a restored cult gure of Augustus, one of thousands destroyed by Christian zealots let loose in 395. Most of the hood of the toga of Pontifex Maximus is missing. This example is at Thyatira, to where John sent a copy of his Revelations. All seven churches of the Apocalypse were in the Roman province of Asia. Just off the coast is the island of Samos, where Augustus lived when he was in the area. Patmos, where John wrote his Revelations during his exile there, is a bit further out in the Aegean Sea. The reverse of an Augustan aureus, on the spine, shows the winged victory standing on the globethat Augustus had installed as centerpiece of the Roman Curia. It was carried at his funeral to leadthe procession from the forum to his mausoleum. At the end of the fourth century it was removed from the Curia and reinstated three times. Finally Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan, insisted it be takenout and utterly destroyed. Rome and the world of Rome collapsed shortly afterwards. Augustus last 100 days were extremely busy. He was supposedto have suffered from the weariness of old age before then. But after ofcial functions in Rome he went to Capri for a few days, thenon to the Games in Naples, where heindulged in horse play with the athletes and on to Beneventum to review his armies, before they set off to war. His death at the old family home atNola is well documented, down totime and day. Its the year thats in dispute here. Christian historians strove to proveJesus was the Messiah by his dateof birth. They also wanted to knowwhen the Second Coming of Christwould occur. In the process they hadto alter the date of Augustus death. Much was destroyed to cover their tracks. Fortunately enough remainsin the debris to reconstruct the real chronology of the period. Surprisingly much else remainedto be unearthed. Cicero, not Herod,ordered the massacre of the innocents. Wise men from the east visited Augustus. Its all there for the digging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Dec 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483693347

Colin Kirk

Colin Kirk has published poetry, classical history and philosophy. This is the umpteenth rewriting of his first novel. www.colinkirkworks.com

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COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY COLIN KIRK.

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Contents

Death and Afterlife of Augustus

Acknowledgments

Explanation

Death of Augustus

Classical Histories

Ovid’s Letter

Gospel Truth

Evidence from Inscriptions

Legends on Coins

Cremation and Deification

Augustus the God

Augustus Ubiquitous

Pillars of the Church

Metamorphosis and Fasti

Sacred Chronology

Death and Afterlife of Augustus

BIBLICAL CERTAINTY REQUIRES AUGUSTUS to have died in AD 14. For centuries, the year has been an important fixed point, from which dates of earlier and later events were calculated. Unfortunately, it’s wrong. Ovid’s poetry, coinage throughout the Roman Empire and ancient inscriptions show that Augustus died in AD 8.

When the Church gained power at the end of the fourth century, it destroyed nearly all written record of Augustus’ reign. Why? What was gained by shift of Augustus’ death six years later? Was it essential to the Church to get rid of Augustus for some reason?

Augustus’ death and afterlife are considered here to the conclusion that the papacy took over the titles and power of Roman emperors, which is fairly obvious. What is less apparent is that many characteristics of Augustus, together with his mythical biography, had been transferred to Jesus Christ.

Some of the fundamentals of Christian belief and much that is taken for granted in European governance and culture are Augustus’ legacy and have nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth.

Be warned! This account of Augustus’ life, death, and afterlife is a result of detailed analysis of contemporary evidence, as if no interpretation of that evidence had ever been attempted before. Experts in these fields will challenge this account. Their received wisdom is based on sacred chronology.

It’s gospel truth, but it’s wrong.

Acknowledgments

Web sites acknowledged with grateful thanks

LacusCurtius Bill Thayer’s web site for Ancient History

New Advent Kevin Knight’s web site for Patristic Literature

Poetry in Translation Tony Kline’s web site for Poetry

Wildwinds Dane Kurth’s web site for Ancient Coins

The Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies Ohio State University’s web site, curator Wendy Watkins

All these web sites are open access and free to all.

In memory of Aaron Swartz

may they stay that way.

Other works quoted in the text are acknowledged in situ. Translators are acknowledged in situ where appropriate. Illustrations, other than of coins, are acknowledged in situ where appropriate. All coin illustrations are from the archives of the Classical Numismatic Group.

Ten years ago, at the outset of this investigation, Paula Botteri, Department of Classical Studies, University of Trieste sent me remarkable photographs of the Res Gestae inscriptions on the walls of Augustus’ temple at Ankara, which I am pleased to acknowledge publicly.

Image16274.JPG

Augustus at age thirty-three, had conquered Rome, the world of Rome and the Egyptian empire. He is about to change from conquering hero to statesman in charge of the Roman peace.

At the same age, Julius Caesar set out to achieve greatness and Alexander died of excess. Augustus calculated his every move. He had no intention of making any of the mistakes of either.

DEATH OF

AUGUSTUS

COLIN KIRK

When evil is upon the earth, I will take birth in the family of a virtuous man and assume a human body to restore tranquility. This avatar will possess great energy, great intelligence and great powers. He will restore order and peace in the world, he will inaugurate a new era of truth and will be adored by spiritual people.

Vishnu speaking in the Mahabharata, the earliest version of a much repeated prophecy that Augustus applied to himself.

He is a newborn man who imposes order on the universe for his own ends, but also to facilitate communication with his own kind. This enumeration takes place on an epic scale and, when order is imposed, the result is dramatic. You can argue with a system, an idea, a date, a resemblance, but I do not see how you can argue with the simple act of enumerating.

Apollinaire, in full sail, writing in The Cubist Painters about Picasso, a somewhat later but no less immodest realisation.

Explanation

TO PRODUCE A CONTEMPORARY biography of Augustus, rather than yet another fictional account, all original sources: classical histories, documents, inscriptions, coins, and other artefacts were studied and places he and Ovid knew were visited. Ovid lived the Augustan peace. His vast poetic output is a commentary on it; invaluable, as most all other written record of the period has been lost, mainly destroyed by Christian zealots.

Almost too much material exists from Augustus’ early life and times but practically nothing after he became sole master of the city and world of Rome. Classical historians fail to deliver much after his final victories of the civil war; poets die out one by one until Ovid alone is left to write his later masterpieces. Some interesting technical material exists: Strabo on Geography, Manilius on Astrology amongst them, but with little reference to Augustus.

One or two useful documents from his reign exist, inscriptions are few and much more badly damaged than transcriptions suggest, but an extensive imperial coinage was minted at Lugdunum, capital of Gaul, and local coins were struck throughout the city and world of Rome. However, whereas numismatics usually assists clarification of historical record, in this case coinages have been interpreted to fit in with received historical wisdom.

For centuries Church authorities managed the western European knowledge base to ensure agreement with Sacred Literature. Sacred Chronology, based exclusively on biblical evidence, required Augustus to die in AD 14; no other date would do. Much effort was put into destruction of records that contradicted this date, or alteration of those deemed fit to survive. The date is wrong.

Augustus died at three in the afternoon on 19 August some years earlier than AD 14. Who bothered to change the date and strove to destroy all contradictory record and why can not be ignored. Compulsion to suppress record of Augustus in his prime suggests Sacred Chronologists had much to hide, not simply a date to shift.

Augustus lived out the last decade of his life during the first decade of Jesus’s life. For four centuries after his death Augustus massively outshone Jesus. On adoption of Christianity as state religion of the Roman Empire, the pillars of the Church had to reverse that situation.

Worship of deceased emperors became anathema. It had not been an especially generalised phenomenon. It applied almost exclusively to Augustus. Other deified emperors were worshipped briefly. Then they were easily forgotten. Not so Augustus. The founding father, who bequeathed his names and honours to his successors, was generally revered: by the population generally as well as the ruling elite.

Until they were consecrated as Christian churches, Augustus’ temples throughout the city and world of Rome, were maintained, restored, refurbished; they were in continuous use as shrines to him and Julia Augusta, known also as Livia.

Sacred Chronology came into vogue in the third and fourth centuries but is more than an historic curiosity. Indeed, it is still influential, not least in academic let alone ecclesiastical circles. Sacred Chronology, traced from second century origins to twenty-first century acceptance, demonstrates how influential it has been, and is.

Demonstration that Augustus died several years earlier than Sacred Chronology dictates has to precede Augustus: A Contemporary Biography in explanation of fundamental differences from previous accounts of his life. Accurate lifespan is not without relevance.

In addition, during examination of processes by which Jesus was made to outshine Augustus, it became apparent that transfer of mythical biography had occurred. Mythical biographies of Augustus and his two deified human predecessors: Romulus worshipped as Quirinus and Julius Caesar worshipped as Divine Julius, contributed extensively to Jesus’s mythical biography. In some cases their mythical biographies reinforced Jewish precedents, in others they are sole source.

Paul was naturally influenced by the maelstrom of religious ideas with which Tarsus, a centre of worship of Divine Augustus, was awash in his youth: examples are adoption and citizenship, which are Roman not Jewish concepts. Augustus was Son of God forty years before Jesus was born. Rome contributed mythology and philosophy to Christianity; mythical narrative and alien concepts of which Jesus the Jew was totally unaware.

Development of Christian doctrine rightly acknowledges nuances of change over decades, let alone major mutations over centuries, as human response to collective spiritual turmoil. However, expectation of bedrock belief in Jesus teaching as foundation of Christian doctrine is somewhat undermined by appreciation of extent of extraneous material imported from worship of Quirinus, Divine Julius, and especially Divine Augustus Son of God.

Worship of Augustus continued long after his death. Therefore his biography is completed by acknowledgement of the Augustus cult and some insight into what was involved. Influence of Augustus cult material on development of Christian doctrine is acknowledged as considerable.

Sayings of Jesus and Paul’s Letter to the Romans demonstrate mid-first-century Christian thinking as it arrived in Rome. Comparison of them with Jerome’s New Testament and the Nicene Creed of 389 demonstrate importation of much further material. Where did it all come from?

Examination of the afterlife of Augustus, in such record as exists, leads to the conclusion that Roman, especially Augustan cult mythology, contributed considerably to what was initially a Jewish cult, influenced by radical Greek cynicism from contemporary Alexandria. Paul’s unique contributions were cutting-edge Jewish spirituality, influenced subsequently by avant-garde Greek philosophical thinking.

Death of Augustus and Augustus: A Contemporary Biography are separate works, intended to be read as a continuum in explanation one of the other. There are no footnotes, bibliographies, or acknowledgements; everything to be read has been incorporated into the text, where it belongs.

Virtually all classical authors quoted can be accessed on line, both in the original and English translation, as can almost the entire coinage of Augustus and every document and monumental inscription from his life time. This book is dedicated to all those who have made it possible for everyone to have easy access anywhere in the world to works and artefacts previously hidden away in academic libraries and museums. May they be honoured in cyberspace in saecula saeculorum: forever and ever.

This protestant ending of the Lord’s Prayer is Etruscan in origin. Saecula measured time from birth of a generation until each member of it had died and all personal memory of them had died out too, reckoned to be about 125 years. When I die all personal recollection of my grandfather will die too. Unlike generation which measures interval between bodily renewal, saecula is concerned with death, as the spiritual baggage of each age passes away.

Death of Augustus

CAESAR AUGUSTUS, ARGUABLY MOST influential of all people of all time, devoted his youth to the pursuit of power, years during which his duplicity and violence signalled outstanding leadership. For fifteen years, he spent extravagantly on arms, destroyed remnants of democratic authority at home, bribed minor monarchs abroad and conquered vast territories.

He began his thirty-third year with lasting peace achieved throughout a world where social disintegration and bloody conflict had been endemic during ten generations. Against all odds, he persevered with his ideas of governance of the city and world of Rome. He survived and prevailed. Indeed, social changes he instituted are still prevalent.

His years of maturity were expended on aggrandisement of the city he had tamed and Romanisation of vast territorial expansion gained whilst taming her.

Everyone benefited. Defunct institutions were reformed, arts excelled, commerce burgeoned, traditional values and religious practices surfaced again, unimaginable wealth flaunted spectacular shows and magnificent buildings. Everything blossomed anew effortlessly.

The price was military monarchy.

An elite leadership, aloof from society, used Praetorian guards to impose order and powerful priesthoods to propagate rigid social mores. Finally, worship of the God Augustus, Son of God, flourished for over three hundred years, as patron of the city and world of Rome.

Structures of social control, propagation of constraint amongst normal humanity, tolerance of wealth creation by fraudulent, corrupt and occasionally violent elites were features of the Pax Romana that persist to this day. Sufficient advantage accrued generally to content most of the people most of the time. Dissenting voices were few. Many were ignored or tolerated. Some were silenced.

Substantial historic record of the rise to power of Augustus trails off once he achieved power and peters out almost completely for the period before his death. Eminent modern historians of the city and world of Rome, from Gibbon in the eighteenth century on, have avoided this barren waste.

But academics deplore vacuums. Flurries of words give credence to speculation on dissension in the ruling house. Tiberius or Gemanicus is dispatched on yet another Illyrian or Germanic campaign. Augustus simply disappears.

In chapter 3 of Volume 1 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon painted a brilliant sketch of all military, civil and religious power drawn into one man’s hands. After brief reference to grant of the sacred title Augustus, which occurred decades before his death, Gibbon swiftly switched to the succession and then hastened on to subsequent events.

Conversely, Mommsen, a century later, concluded his enthralling History of Rome with Divine Julius at the height of his powers and avoided the bleak prospect of a half-baked account of his adopted son’s life and works.

Syme wrote The Roman Revolution as presage of the fascist dictatorships of the early twentieth century. He claimed not to follow the life of one man but to portray a revolutionary movement, which allowed him to conclude with the revolution achieved.

Their avoidance of the period is understandable. There is no or very little contemporary history of the latter half of the life of Augustus. History of the period is scant and comes to a complete halt about a decade before the death of Augustus.

Historians impose narrative structure on vignettes of significant events that happen haphazardly. Significant events are those that change people’s perception or orientation. In life dramatic events hasten time, whereas shortage of events slows it down. History reverses this process. A Chinese aphorism craves the good fortune of not living in interesting times. Shortage of dramatic events after Caesar’s victory, in a world at peace and with burgeoning prosperity, is part explanation of discontinuation of the historic account.

Gibbon made this point in his inevitably brief account of the reign of Antoninus Pius:

His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Tacitus offers an alternative explanation:

Many famous historians have recounted achievements and setbacks of ancient Romans. Indeed, there was no shortage of brilliant minds to record events under Augustus, until flattery was required and they shied off.

One such brilliant mind was Livy’s. He didn’t shy off. He wrote his monumental history of Rome in 142 books: Ad Urbe Condita, from the Foundation of the City to the death of Augustus, whilst living in Rome during Augustus’ lifetime. He kept Books 121 to 142 on rise to power and reign of Augustus under wraps until after Augustus died… editus post excessum Augusti.

Unfortunately, this part of Livy’s work is all but lost. Books 134 to142, which cover the reign of Augustus, have survived in the Periochae. This distillation of an abbreviation covers three decades in half a page.

For books to survive from classical times they had to have readers keen and wealthy enough to commission hand written copies. Hence abbreviations were made of lengthy books to retain most salient facts. The small number of books that survived in their entirety were either of practical importance to professional people, magnificent products of human intelligence or of religious significance.

Apart from someone wanting to copy books for them to survive, there was also the problem of someone wanting to destroy them so they did not survive. Bigotry, hypocrisy, and ignorance, as well as straightforward censorship, were responsible for destruction of books that religious and political leaders did not approve of. Augustus himself, if not originator of this practice, certainly made extensive use of it.

Little contemporary history is available because not much happened, or sycophancy was required or what was written was lost or destroyed. To some extent, each explanation is valid.

Early years of Augustan peace were years of construction, reconstruction and innovation. There was no shortage of human follies, but they made love not war, so little of historical significance there. There is little evidence that Augustus appreciated sycophancy. His entourage may have increasingly expected it for him but he himself was remarkably tolerant of straight talking, looked for it from his cronies.

Clearly wholesale destruction of historic records and accounts has taken place in attempt to destroy Augustus’ image. He was revered until Christian hegemony could brook no rival to Christ. Ambrosius and Lawrence, the main culprits, are still revered as Christian saints: ironically Ambrosius as patron saint of learning and his henchman, Lawrence, as patron saint of archivists.

Moreover, there is a further reason for dwindling record to peter out completely. The last years of the life of Augustus are not lost years. They simply did not occur. They are bogus years, required by Sacred Chronology to justify pseudo-historical data in the New Testament, especially in the Gospel accredited to Luke.

Even without survival of contemporary historic accounts the raw material of history persists. Poets continued to entertain with material reflective of the times. Some late Augustan poetry is still extant, most notably Ovid’s. Also during these years Manilius wrote Astronomica an extraordinary poetic account of heavenly bodies, their movements and influence on human affairs. The Christian Church guarded a valuable text on astrology.

Coins were minted, precious in an age when artefacts were few and ephemeral. There are some documents, mostly fragmentary, extant. Some monumental inscriptions are informative of the period, most notably Augustus’ own account of his achievements: Res Gestae, still partly visible on the walls of his temple at Ankara.

Moreover, the age of Augustus can be read in farmsteads and small holdings planted in countryside, roads, and aqueducts supplying cities, town plans based on military camp design, remains of monumental building programmes.

Much of Iberia and Gaul as far east as the Rhine were transformed under influence of Augustus and his colleagues. Permanent succeeded transitory settlements. Brick and stone replaced timber and daub buildings. Celtic cultures were supplanted by those of Greece and Rome. Revolutionary innovations were tried out in these newly developed parts of the world of Rome in the West.

In the East, defunct and decaying Greek culture was re-energised, especially throughout Anatolia, where St Paul was born and bred, which became the major experimental arena for Augustan reforms and subsequently for the development of Christian doctrine.

Ovid’s works have survived almost in their entirety, examples of magnificent products of human intelligence preserved by their admirers. Ovid wrote throughout the latter half of the life of Augustus, until some little time after his death. Indeed, his is the only strictly contemporary reference to the death of Augustus extant.

In addition, Luke’s Gospel is thought to provide more nearly contemporary record of the accession of Tiberius than those of first century historians: Velleius, Suetonius, and Tacitus, although allusions to Judeo-Roman history are almost certainly very late additions taken from Josephus’ Histories.

Millions of coins were struck, year in and year out, at dozens of mints throughout the world of Rome. Hundreds of different designs were used in the lifetime of Augustus. But there is a curious gap in production, of several years’ duration, at the end of his reign, as counted by Sacred Chronology.

Historians insist Augustus died during the third hour after noon on 19 August AD 14. It is a crucial date. Many dates given for events during previous and subsequent decades have been calculated from the day Augustus died.

In fact, evidence from primary sources—near-contemporary historians, poets, inscriptions, and coins—demonstrates he had been dead several years by then. But whatever the year, the third hour after noon on 19 August, can be relied upon. At the time there was a degree of uncertainty as to what year it was, but the hours of day and night were called and calendars were consulted daily to observe the nuances of religious celebrations aright.

Classical Histories

IN SPITE OF TACITUS’ denial, there are indications in later classical literature of several contemporary accounts by eminent historians of the years of Augustan peace. Dio Cassius, the third-century historian, records his preference of the accounts of some of them to others. But Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (From the Foundation of the City) is the only one to have survived in various states of deterioration. Livy’s Roman history was dated AUC, years reckoned from the foundation of Rome, a system copied especially in the nineteenth century, by Mommsen amongst others. Apart from historians, who aped Livy, no one used this system. The start date is disputed. But apart from that, Livy’s history is magnificent.

Of Livy’s 142 Books, only earlier sections of high drama are extant in full: Books 1 to 10: on foundation of Rome plus her growing influence in Italy and Books 21 to 45: on Rome’s early failure to halt Hannibal, through to her final triumph over him. The earliest of these are the foundation of Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, still most profound of all political philosophies.

In Roman times, Livy’s History was popularised as an Epitome, an abbreviation compiled amongst others by Pliny 2, who says in a letter that he was working on it when Vesuvius erupted in August 79. But even that version proved too long. A further abbreviation, known as the Periochae, made some three hundred years later, is all that now survives of the later books. The final Book 142 is distilled down to:

Reference is made to war against German tribes across the Rhine directed by Drusus. His horse fell, crushed his leg causing a fracture that lead to his death thirty days later. His brother Nero had rushed there when he heard the news and bore the body back. It was entombed in the mausoleum of Gaius Julius. The oration was given by his step father Caesar Augustus. And the highest funeral honours paid.

The mausoleum of Gaius Julius is now called that of Caesar Augustus, in the square named for him in Rome. Augustus built it to house the ashes of the Divine Julius and his heirs forever. Drusus was Augustus’ younger and Nero, later Emperor Tiberius, his elder stepson, the sons of Livia Augusta by Tiberius Claudius Nero, her first husband. The events referred to happened some two decades before the death of Augustus. He had already buried his daughter Julia’s first husband Marcellus in his monumental mausoleum over a decade earlier. Indeed most of the following generation of his family, and some of the one after that, arrived there before him.

This passage, which ends the Periochae, is a miserable relic of contemporary chronicles Livy held back for publication after the death of Augustus. According to conventional chronology, Drusus died twenty-three years before the death of Augustus.

It is idle to speculate on Livy’s account of Augustus’ final decades, but his general approach appears balanced and objective. There is no reason to anticipate he changed his method of work. Therefore, text that disappeared offended those who destroyed it or failed to copy it. As the early Republican Era is covered in what remains, pagan imperial censorship is unlikely to be culpable.

It is recorded that Augustus read what Livy published in his lifetime and called him a lover of Pompey; no more likely to have reassured Livy of goodwill from on high than Stalin’s Pravda review of Lady Macbeth of Minsk did Shostakovich. But both works, at least in part, survived the potentates offended by them. Augustus’ respect for Livy is demonstrated by their cooperation on preparation of the Fasti Capitolinus, a monumental inscription in celebration of the Republic as monarchy superseded it.

The full text of Livy’s History was still available late first century for Pliny 2 to précis, and later still Tacitus was able to link from the end of it to the beginning of his Annals. Evidence abounds that several histories of Augustus’ later life survived the Julio-Claudian dynasty, arguably more likely to take offence at Livy’s account than their successors, who bore no relationship to the founding father. In spite of what Tacitus says, histories of this period were written, and later historians through to Dio Cassius had access to them, but not for much longer.

Destruction occurred soon after. Interests that wanted Livy’s dates obliterated and favourable memory of Augustus diminished would certainly include sacred chronologists, motivated towards destruction on both counts.

The various names of Augustus in the Periochae of Book 142 of Livy’s History are worth noting. He was born Gaius Octavius, as were his father, grandfather, and forefathers before them. A pet name for use in the family and amongst friends was essential to distinguish one generation from another. Augustus was called Thurinus by his familiars during his childhood and youth.

These Octavians, there were others, originated from Thurium, a Greek city on the Italian southern coast. They still had property there. Suetonius says that about the time Augustus was born, his father, en route to take up the governorship of Macedonia, had a conclusive victory nearby over remnants of the slave rebellion, originally led by Spartacus.

The convention of calling Augustus Octavian, from his name after adoption by Divine Julius, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, is bizarre. There was debate as to whether post-mortem adoption was legitimate. There is no record of whether or not there were appropriate formalities and if so whether they were gone through. Young Caesar lived his early years through chaos, much of it of his own making. He developed no appreciation of rules and regulations not of his own making. The old rules no longer existed. Indeed, amongst much else,