A great man for God’s fully come time! HIStory in the making.

Historians debate whether history gets made and shaped by “great men” or whether social contexts – time, place, conditions – shape history (and the players in history). In other words, would Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Jesus, Muhammad, Martin Luther, Napoleon and Hitler have been great no matter what, or were they great because of when and where they lived?

Both theories have merit. Some men transcend time, space, and place and would be great any place and any time. Some moments in history are more ripe for sweeping changes than others.

“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree…”

The Bible mentions one of these “great men.” We get to hear about him every Christmas: Gaius Octavius, later known as Gaius Julius Caesar, and, most finally, Caesar Augustus.

By referring to Augustus, Luke sets the scene for Jesus’ birth. He places us in a time and a place, a context. It’s the great Pax Romana, the Roman peace. Just forty years earlier the world was torn apart as some of the legends in Roman history battled it out for world supremacy in a vast game of RISK: Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra, and, of course, Gaius Octavius.

After years of Civil Wars (44 BC-31 BC), finally the armies of Gaius Octavius came out on top. Peace came at last, and Octavius emerged as the one thing the Romans despised: sole ruler.

It’s ironic. The Roman Senate assassinated Julius Caesar (44 BC) because he coveted a king’s crown. Less than twenty years later Rome accepts a government of one (though Octavius wisely maintained some republican trappings).

How did it happen? The contemporary historian Tacitus says: “He attracted everybody’s goodwill by the enjoyable gift of peace.” Another first century historian, Suetonius, notes that after so many years of civil wars, executions, exiles, and proscriptions, there weren’t many great leaders left, and those who survived were just happy to have any power and privilege left, so they gladly acquiesced to the first Roman emperor: Octavius (he wasn’t given the title Augustus until 27 BC).

Who is Augustus?

Born in 63 BC, it seems Augustus had it good. His father governed the province of Macedonia, so he was born into privilege. His great uncle was the powerful Julius Caesar. This opened doors.

Not only was Caesar his great uncle, but eventually he adopted Octavius as his legal son and heir. This meant that after Caesar’s death, the people naturally looked to Octavius to bring vengeance on the assassins and to lead the ship of the Roman state. It also meant that when the Roman Senate deified Caesar, Octavius became known as the “son of a god.” A helpful title, no?

Octavius did a lot early on. He campaigned with Caesar in Spain at age 18. He became one of two Consuls in Rome at age 19 (43 BC). He was one-third of the famous second Triumvirate that ruled the Roman Empire with Marc Antony and Marcus Lepidus (still barely in his twenties).

After helping to defeat Brutus and Cassius (two of Caesar’s assassins) Octavius defeated Marc Antony at Actium (31 BC) and won control of the eastern empire. If you’ve read Shakespeare, you know that war ended with Antony falling on his sword and Cleopatra clutching an asp to her breast.

Now the last man standing, Octavius returned to Rome and accumulated titles and honors that make him imperator (commander in chief/emperor) and princeps (chief).  In 27 BC, looking for something else to call him, the Senate anoints him Augustus (majestic, sacred, dignified, worthy of honor).

What did Augustus do?

Suetonius said of Augustus, “He could justifiably boast, ‘I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble.’” Before and after gaining supreme power, Augustus made sure to build, build, build, making Rome the greatest city in the western world (You can still glimpse this greatness touring modern day Rome.  It’s not called the “Eternal City” for nothing!).

He didn’t just rebuild and beautify Rome. A list of some of his achievements:

• Three times during his reign (31 BC-14 AD) they closed the doors of a certain temple in Rome that indicated total peace on land and sea. This had only been done twice in previous centuries. This is part of what you learned in Western Civ to call the Pax Romana.
• He reorganized the entire Roman army, an army that helped rule much of the world for another couple of centuries.
• He revamped the empire’s administrative and financial systems, especially the coinage.
• While on the one hand expanding the empire to the borders of Germany (where he ran into the famous Herman the German leading to his immortal quote, “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”), Suetonius said Augustus was no war monger. In fact, according to Suetonius, he attempted to start wars as little as possible.
• He maintained and reestablished the Roman religious customs, rituals, and ceremonies (as Christians we’d argue the value of this).
• He was well regarded as a writer.
• He renamed one of the months in the calendar “August” (after himself, of course).
• He did well enough as emperor to be deified shortly after he died (14 AD).
• Biographers portray him as what we might term a benevolent dictator.
• Augustus was so popular that Suetonius tells us some towns began their civil calendars based on the day on which Augustus had visited them.

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The English historian Michael Grant writes of Augustus:

Augustus was one of the most talented, energetic, and skilful administrators that the world has ever known. The enormously far-reaching work of reorganization and rehabilitation which he undertook in every branch of his vast Empire created a new Roman Peace, in which all but the humblest classes benefited from improved communications and flourishing commerce” (The Roman Emperors, p15).

And:

It brought stability, security and prosperity to an unprecedented proportion of the population for more than two hundred years; it ensured the survival and eventual transmission of the political, social, economic and cultural heritage of the classical world – Roman and Greek alike; and it supplied the framework within which both Judaism and Christianity were disseminated” (The Roman Emperors, p15).

Of course, Augustus was no saint. Literally. He worshipped the pagan gods of the Romans. He won power brutally. He ordered the political deaths of many enemies. Suetonius relates how once he personally tore out the eyes of an enemy. His second wife, Livia, he stole from another man, though she was pregnant at the time. And while Augustus preached strict morality to fellow Romans, he was a serial adulterer, perhaps even a statuatory rapist. Suetonius half-heartedly defends his adulteries:

Not even his friends could deny that he often committed adultery, though of course they said, in justification, that he did so for reasons of state, not simple passion – he wanted to discover what his enemies were at by getting intimate with their wives or daughters.”

And:

And as an elderly man he is said to have still harboured a passion for deflowering girls – who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife.”

“When the time had fully come…”

Yet it was during the reign of Augustus, during a census ordered by the emperor, that Christ was born.  This census helped to fulfill prophecy by forcing Mary and Joseph to go “up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David” (Luke 2:4).

Augustus’ Roman peace created, as Prof. Grant said, a time of general prosperity, communication, and commerce.  The Roman peace created the perfect melting pot for people to hear the incredible good news about a truly great man born in Bethlehem as they traveled throughout the entire Roman world (on Roman built roads, no less). Because everywhere someone could travel in the Roman world, thanks to the great Augustus, one of Jesus’ followers had gone carrying God’s holy Word and spreading the good news of great joy for all the earth:  “A Savior from sins has been born!”

It’s about this Roman government (under a less great emperor, Nero), that the apostle Paul writes, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13:1).

Again, we see God’s hand in HIS-story. We also see the balance between the theories of “great men” and social context. Jesus was, no doubt about it, a great man, THE great man in history. Yet, God sent His Son only when the time had fully come. And part of that fully come time was preparing a time and place right for the Messiah to arrive: the Roman Empire of Augustus.

Two thousand years ago, a child was born who seemed to change everything. This child was declared by his father to be the heir of all his glory; his kingdom and his rule would be described with the word “Gospel.” He proclaimed himself the savior of his people. That child’s name was Octavian. By age 33 he was the undisputed emperor of the world, and he was given a new name, Augustus, the “exalted one.” Augustus raised the expectations of what a leader could accomplish and what a society could achieve. He ended wars and built roads. He found a republic built of brick and left it an empire built of marble. By the time he died, his empire was at peace and the Roman people worshipped him as a god. Yet far from imperial Rome, far from the purple of empire and the riches of power, a teenage girl—a virgin, yet pregnant—was on the move. She traveled to Bethlehem so the great Caesar could count her. While she was there, she gave birth to the one child who didn’t just seem to change everything, but actually did. This child changed man’s relationship with God, his life, his death, his destiny. He did not come to bring fear, but great joy for all of God’s people. The promise made long ago in the Garden was now kept, and the path back to Eden was being blazed, because God himself had come in the flesh: the Christ and the Lord in one person. Here was the child who changes everything. Glory to God in the highest!” (Jonathan Schroeder in Planning Christian Worship )

Author’s Note:

The primary source literature referred to in this article is the book The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. Many editions are available in English. Also, you can read about Augustus and the succeeding emperors (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero) in the Annals of Tacitus.

This time and these people have attracted literary attention as well. Two of Shakespeare’s plays are set in this era:  Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Robert Graves wrote two stunning novels, fictional autobiographies of the emperor Claudius (fourth emperor of Rome, mentioned in Acts 11:28), I, Claudius and Claudius the God.  Augustus features prominently in the first book.

These novels were turned into a Masterpiece Theatre series in 1976, which you can watch in on Youtube here.

Hollywood has tackled the story of Antony and Cleopatra at least twice, once in 1934, starring Claudette Colbert, and again in 1963 featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison.

HBO’s series “Rome” also tells the story of this time, though I haven’t watched it and am guessing that it includes a lot of gratuitous violence, sex, and language and is not for younger viewers.

The classic film Spartacus deals with the years just before Augustus, when Julius Caesar is rising.  Meanwhile Ben-Hur is subtitled “a movie about the Christ,” so you get to see the Rome of Tiberius.

And, for fun (and again not for younger audiences), Monty Python irreverently (and blasphemously in some bits) tackled the post-Augustan era in their film Life of Brian (1979), from which the movie clip above came.