5 - Augustus

Summary

The drawing of characters is one of the most splendid, and, at the same time, one of the most difficult ornaments of Historical Composition.

Blair

It is when Gibbon turns his attention to Augustus that we first see how his command of style is instrumental in the presentation of decline. This early portrait prepares the ground for the explanation of Roman decay Gibbon advances in Volume I, while consolidating his ascendancy over his reader. He remarked on how his military experience contributed to his literary career:

The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legion, and the Captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman empire.

But an acquaintance with military manoeuvring, ‘those disciplined evolutions which harmonise and animate a confused multitude’ may have helped Gibbon as much to order his narrative in Volume I as to understand his subject-matter. In the portrait of Augustus, he begins to drill the felicities of his prose with a deftness of generalship which shows up strongly when set in the context of the contemporary debate on Augustus' character.

In France the question of Augustus' status was influenced by Louis XIV's appropriation of Augustan values. Augustan majesty was harnessed to the glory of the Sun King, and a dominant tradition of panegyric arose.