![]() It is a vision of a carefully prepared transition plan clicking into place, with the co-operation of all the main parties: even the rumoured poisoning of the figs that may have killed Augustus is explained as an act of complicity by his wife Livia, when her elderly husband's unexpected recovery of health threatened to upset the conspirators' timetable. The First Emperor: Caesar Augustus and the Triumph of Romeīy Anthony Everitt 432pp, John Murray, £25Īnthony Everitt confronts the challenge by opening with a boldly coherent novelistic reconstruction of Augustus's last days. The problem is vastly amplified in the case of a subject dead for two millennia, whose unparalleled achievements were predicated on his close management of appearances. ![]() ![]() ![]() Even where a historical figure is the greatest letter-writer of his era, or an obsessive diarist, the biographer will hit potholes in the narrative that can either be filled with spurious assertion or cautiously bridged with prevarication. ![]()
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