Augustus' Youth and Augustan Youth

Evan Jewell, Assistant Professor of History
Rutgers University - Camden

As the young Octavian became the ageing Augustus, his unprecedented longevity created a representational problem: how could the princeps grow old while embodying a regime whose future depended upon his continued vitality? Augustus’ portraiture offered one solution. His eventual adoption and retention of an idealising, conspicuously unageing image, both in the round and in his coins, resisted the physiognomic ageing visible in earlier portraits. Yet the increasingly elaborate commemoration of Augustus’ birthdays and longevity simultaneously advertised the passage of the very time his portraits sought to suppress. Indeed, portraits produced in the provinces incorporated signs of his agedness, unlike those from the urbs.