CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH, B.C. 63-44
Iam nova progenies
cœlo demittitur alto.
Birth of
Augustus, Sept.
23, B.C. 63.In a house at the eastern corner of the Palatine, called "At the Oxheads,"[1] on the 23rd of September, b.c. 63—some nine weeks before the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators by Cicer's order—a child was born destined to close the era of civil wars thus inaugurated, to organise the Roman Empire, and to be its master for forty-four years.
The father of the child was Gaius Octavius, of the plebeian gens Octavia, and of a family that had long occupied a high position in the old Volscian town of Velitræ. Two branches of the Octavii were descended from C. Octavius Rufus, quæstor in b.c. 230. The elder branch had produced five consuls and other Roman magistrates, but of the younger branch Gaius Octavius, the father of Augustus, was the first to hold curule office. According to the inscription, after-
2
- ↑ Ad capita bubula. Lanciani (Remains of Ancient Rome, p. 139) says that this was the name of a lane at the eastern corner of the Palatine. Others have thought it to be the name of the house, as the ad malum Punicum in which Domitian was born (Suct., Dom. I). So later we hear of a house at Rome quœ est ad Palmam (Codex Theod., p. 3). The house may have had its name from a frieze with ox-heads on it, like the tomb of Metella, which came to be called Capo-di-bovc. It seems less easy to account for a lane being so called. See also p. 205.
