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“Impressive…Mr. Goldsworthy…moves nimbly around other important
evidence about Augustus’ life…The resulting life is, in one sense,
deeply unified. This is a welcome corrective to traditional
presentations.”
— Wall Street Journal
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Perkins's narration introduces us to a man who changed his world utterly, ending a generation of civil war and transforming the decaying and corrupt Roman Republic into the greatest empire the world had yet seen.
— AudioFile
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“Goldsworthy’s true expertise is as a military historian, and this is
what really gives his biography its strength and bite: his depiction of
Augustus’ relationship with his legions is masterly.”
— London Sunday Times
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“Like Goldsworthy’s biography of Julius Caesar, this is essential reading for anyone interested in ancient Rome.”
— Independent (London)
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“[Goldsworthy’s] insights and
inferences are superb throughout…Augustus
is a first-rate popular biography by a skilled and knowing hand, a fine
companion to Goldsworthy’s Caesar volume.”
— Washington Post
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“Adrian Goldsworthy’s substantial new biography…is a fascinating study of
political life in ancient Rome, and the parallels with our own political system
are numerous and interesting. But the discontinuities between America and the
Roman Empire are just as revealing.”
— Christian Science Monitor
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“Historian and biographer Goldsworthy showcases his deep
knowledge of ancient Rome in this masterful document of a life whose
themes still resonate in modern times…The overall effect
that Goldsworthy generates is of meeting a man whose life seems hardly
distant from the modern experience. While ancient cultural practices can
often feel foreign, the political motivations and machinations, the
familial relations and emotions, ring as true today as at the turn of
the Common Era.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“The narrative covers Augustus’ military and political efforts (Romans
would see no divergence in these roles), what we can know of his
interior life, and the world in which he dominated. Never shy to admit
when scholars simply do not have enough evidence and ever willing to be
critical of biased ancient sources, the author is a historian at his
best. And Augustus is a subject worthy of such treatment, a man of
contradictions—brutal and merciful, initiator of opportunistic civil
wars, and establisher of lasting civil concord—who claimed to have found
Rome in ‘mud bricks’ and ‘left it in marble.’”
— Library Journal (starred review)
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“Goldsworthy questions why Augustus has slipped off of many
historians’ lists of great leaders, which include Julius Caesar, Alexander,
Hannibal, and Hadrian. He provides plenty of reasons why he should be at the top
of those lists.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“For all his importance, Augustus is often an enigma behind a classical façade. Goldsworthy’s Augustus reveals all the drama and detail surrounding Rome’s first emperor. Brimming with energy, scholarship, and wisdom, it is a history book to savor.”
— Barry Strauss, author of Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar and the Genius of Leadership
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“Goldsworthy peers like a master jeweler into the strange cold diamond at the heart of Roman history—the emperor Augustus—and reveals the whole Roman world reflected in its facets. But the book itself is warm with human sympathy, elegant writing, and the sheer joy and love of history it evokes in its reader.”
— J. E. Lendon, author of Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity