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Commemorating Augustus

Commemorating Augustus

Category Archives: Public talks

Conference booking open

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Leeds, Public talks

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The main event of the Commemorating Augustus project this year will be its conference. In line with the project as a whole, the conference deals with receptions of Augustus across the 2000 years between his death and the present day, and it takes place in Leeds right over the very date of Augustus’ bimillennium, from Monday 18th to Wednesday 20th August 2014. We have a great line-up of speakers from across the globe, offering papers which cover the full span of the 2000 years at stake, so it promises to be a very exciting event.

On other parts of the project website, you can find full details of the conference programme, including speakers, titles and abstracts, and details of how to register, including the various different packages and options available.

But the main purpose of this post is to make sure that followers of this blog know that booking is open, and also that a late fee of £25 will apply to any bookings made from 17th July onwards. This means that there is just under a month remaining to make a booking without incurring the fee. Booking closes entirely on 1st August.

Meanwhile, this is also a good time to mention that I am giving a free talk for the general public entitled ‘2000 years of Augustus: the world view’ next Thursday, 26th June, at Leeds City Museum. The talk runs from 13:15-13:45, and is part of the popular Classics in our Lunchtimes series. Full details are available here.

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Augustus INSET day report

29 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, INSET day, Public talks, Teachers and schools

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It’s a busy week here at Commemorating Augustus HQ. The abstract deadline for next summer’s conference is just two days away, and they are coming in thick and fast now. I’m happy to say that the quality of the submissions is very high, and I’m really looking forward to putting the programme together and making it all public.

Before that, though, I should write up a report of the Augustus INSET day in Manchester which I organised a couple of weeks ago with fellow JACT member Peter Liddel. JACT exists as an organisation to support the teaching of Ancient and Classical topics in schools, and one of the things we do is run regular professional training days. Often, topics like Ancient History and Classical Civilisation are taught in schools by people who aren’t subject specialists – for example, modern historians or English literature specialists who have chosen to branch out into ancient history or literature. And of course those who do have a Classics background like to keep up with the latest developments in the field and to learn new material and approaches. So that is where we come in, and what we aimed to do with our Augustus day on November 16th.

Planning the day

Augustus is a popular subject on both Ancient History and Classical Civilisation syllabuses, and if you add in Augustan literature the relevance extends to Latin as well. So we knew he would make a good topic for an INSET day at any time. But with his bimillennium coming up next year, it seemed the perfect opportunity to make sure that teachers were all set to make the most of the occasion in the classroom.

Thanks to Peter’s hard work in applying for and securing funding from the University of Manchester, we were able to offer the day for free to participants, who only needed to cover the cost of their own lunch. That made life simple for us as organisers, because we didn’t need to process booking fees, and obviously it also helped to ensure that we attracted plenty of attendees. Around 50 people came on the day, which is excellent for an event of this type – and I really cannot thank Stephen Jenkin at The Classics Library enough for helping to advertise it.

Meanwhile, as the Augustan expert on the team, my job was to put together a suitable programme of speakers and topics. We aimed for a mixture of academic lectures and interactive workshops, led by both academics and school-teachers, with the idea that participants would be able to benefit from the combination of new research input and direct classroom experience. We also organised the programme of workshops into two ‘threads’ – a historical one dealing with key sources and issues, and a literature / receptions one dealing with Augustan poetry and the responses of later emperors, so that people could choose what was most relevant to them and their teaching.

My own plenary: Commemorating Augustus’ bimillennium

It was also my honour to open the day with a plenary lecture entitled ‘Commemorating Augustus’ bimillennium’. The idea was to introduce the day by saying a little bit about why anniversary commemorations are so popular and how they tend to function, with a particular focus of course on examples from the Augustan period, from the bimillennium of his birth in 1938, and also looking ahead to what is coming up in 2014. The passage which I used as a lynchpin for my discussion was Tacitus Annals 1.9.1, which as it so happens is about discussions in the senate immediately after Augustus’ death:

Then tongues became busy with Augustus himself. Most men were struck by trivial points — that the same day [idem dies] should have been the first on which he assumed imperium and the last of his life — that he should have ended his days at Nola in the same house and room as his father Octavius.

In that passage, one of the ‘trivial points’ which the senators notice is that the date of Augustus’ death in AD 14 is also the anniversary of the date on which he took up his first consulship (i.e. assumed imperium) in 43 BC. It is the date which the Romans called “fourteen days before the Kalends of September”, but we call August 19th.

There is no ‘real’ relationship between these two occasions, of course – it is simply that the names or numbers used to date them look the same. But, as Denis Feeney has pointed out in his excellent Caesar’s Calendar, Tacitus’ Latin very clearly shows up how powerful that similarity can feel. His senators call the two dates ‘the same day’ (idem dies), as though they had somehow collapsed into one single moment, in spite of the fact that they were actually separated by no less than 56 years.

It is similar to our modern concept of ‘on this day in history’ – a sheer coincidence really, but one which it is very tempting to treat as a sort of worm-hole through time. Tacitus’ senators use their example as a prompt to think about the relationship between a past event (the start of Augustus’ political career) and a present one (his death), and about the span between the two. Similarly, we too use anniversaries today to think about what the past means to us; to discuss, debate and reinterpret it in terms which make sense to us in the present.

Augustus himself of course did this in a big way, writing imperial anniversaries into the Roman calendar on a scale which had never been seen before. And as I pointed out in my talk, he would very definitely have understood and applauded the idea of people commemorating his bimillennium. He, after all, made very canny use indeed of a round-number anniversary when he celebrated the Ludi Saeculares, and if later emperor Philip the Arab could proclaim that his own ludi saeculares marked a millennium since Rome’s foundation, then I’m pretty sure Augustus would have done so too, given half the chance.

Tips for marking Augustus’ bimillennium in the classroom

I finished my lecture with some suggestions for suitable ways of marking Augustus’ bimillennium in the classroom. My top tip, really, was simply for teachers to capitalise on the interest which the anniversary will raise in whatever way best suits them and their pupils. As for Tacitus’ senators, the anniversary is above all a good reason to think about Augustus and what his life and career mean for us today – and that thinking can take any form. But if I had to home in on one way of thinking about Augustus at the time of his bimillennium, I would suggest using it to weigh up the positives and negatives of his career, and to reach an overall evaluation of him.

This is partly because it suits the occasion which we are marking – his death, which also means the end of his career and the first chance to judge it as a completed whole. But also because it is an useful exercise to perform with Augustus anyway, and one which both school pupils and University students often struggle with. Was he the good guy who just wanted to bring about peace and prosperity? Or the bad guy who slaughtered his enemies in a ruthless quest for political power? The truth is that the material to support both arguments is there in the ancient sources – so what do we do with that?

Rounding off, I suggested a few ways of opening up that discussion, several of which take their cue from scenarios in the ancient sources. I will share those here for any teachers who are looking for ideas, but weren’t able to attend our event:

  1. Get your pupils to write a modern obituary of Augustus. How would we sum him up today?
  2. Going back to Tacitus, use the full text of Annals 1.9-10, where he reports a ‘pros and cons’ debate about Augustus’ career amongst the senatorial classes. You could get your pupils to re-enact that debate, arguing opposite sides and adding their own points to supplement the ones included by Tacitus.
  3. Hang the discussion on the question which Augustus himself asked on his death-bed: “Did I play my part well in this comedy called life?” (Suetonius, Augustus 99). Yes or no?
  4. Or you could adapt the basic scenario set out in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis. In the original text, it is Claudius who finds himself up before panel of gods, tasked with judging whether or not he is worthy to become one of their number. But it would be very easy to adapt this idea, and have students playing a panel of gods judging Augustus instead. You could have Apollo singing his praises, but Hercules still boiling with anger at his treatment of Antony; Mars thrilled with his new temples, but Pluto unimpressed with the administrative burden caused by having to deal with so many deaths during the triumviral period. The possibilities are endless!

A round-up of the other sessions

Of course, the nice thing about giving the opening talk at an academic event is that you can then relax and enjoy the rest of the day. My first stop was a workshop on Augustan coinage given by Clare Rowan of the University of Warwick. Though we hadn’t planned it, there was some nice overlap between Clare’s session and mine, because she got us all looking at the coins minted for Augustus’ ludi saeculares. It was a really lively session, and I learnt plenty of new things from it myself. Sadly, I don’t have a time turner, so I couldn’t attend the parallel session on Augustus and the poets given by my Leeds colleague Bev Scott. But having seen Bev talk about Ovid’s Heroides in the past, I already know how brilliant she is at conveying the complex concepts involved in thinking about ancient literature in a really accessible and engaging way.

After lunch, it was time for the second plenary lecture: this time from Alison Cooley, also of the University of Warwick, about that most difficult but rewarding source for the age of Augustus: the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Alison recently published a new edition, translation and commentary for this text (of which my copy is already very well-thumbed!), so she was in a perfect position to help our audience understand how to approach it and think about how to get the most out of it.

We then finished the day with two more parallel sessions, which again I had to (reluctantly) choose between. I went first to a session on Suetonius run by Sarah Holliday of Aylesbury Grammar School and Nina Wallace of Queen Mary’s College, Basingstoke – both JACT committee members like myself. Sarah and Nina teach in quite different types of schools, so they were able to share and compare perspectives on how to get their different groups of pupils interested in Suetonius, and what responses his Life of Augustus tends to provoke. For me as a University lecturer, I found this session especially useful for the insights into the practicalities of classroom teaching (which is useful for my role on the JACT committee), and for understanding where students are coming from when they arrive with us to begin their degrees. Meanwhile, another JACT committee member, Peter Reason of Gower College, Swansea, applied some of the models which Bev Scott had already set out in her earlier workshop to a particular Augustan poetry case-study: Horace, Virgil and the battle of Actium.

I had followed the historical thread up to this point, but I then switched to literature and reception for the final session, going to hear Manchester’s own Shushma Malik talking about how both Nero and then Vespasian had responded to Augustus’ legacy. Shushma did a brilliant job of getting everyone fired up and contributing to the discussion – not always easy for the last session of the day! – and really demonstrated how much we can get out of assessing Augustus’ impact not only during his lifetime, but long after his death. That, of course, is very much what my conference next year is all about, too. I was sorry to miss the parallel workshop by James Harrison of Bootham School York on ‘Augustus the contradiction’, especially since he was dealing with exactly the issue I had raised at the end of my own plenary – the difficulty of finding our way through source material which says such conflicting things about Augustus. But having talked through James’ material with him beforehand, and having seen how excited he was about it all on the day itself, I’m certain it was a great session.

Judging from the feedback forms which people completed on the day, the whole programme went down very well, with people feeling that they had both learnt new things about Augustus and picked up new practical tips for teaching him. That’s exactly what we were aiming for, so it’s satisfying to know that we hit the mark. I was particularly pleased myself to find two-thirds of our respondents saying that they were now planning to do something to mark the bimillennium in their own schools as a result of the day – and that of the remaining third, all but one already had similar plans in mind before they arrived. Given that part of the remit of my project is to encourage people to make good use of Augustus’ bimillennium, and to help support them in doing so, that is very pleasing indeed.

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Augustus INSET day

04 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, INSET day, Public talks, Teachers and schools

≈ 1 Comment

JACT / University of Manchester Ancient History INSET

Augustus and his bimillennium: making the most of 2014

 Saturday 16th November 2013
Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester

As part of the Commemorating Augustus project we are pleased to offer this one-day INSET (IN-SErvice Training) event on teaching Augustus in the classroom

The day is aimed at established, new and prospective teachers of Ancient History and Classical Civilisation. It is designed to support those who already teach or would like to teach Augustan topics in the classroom: both historical and literary. It also looks ahead to the bimillennium of Augustus’ death in 2014, offering tips on how to get the most out of this occasion in a school setting.

Interactive workshop sessions will focus on working with historical primary sources and on the relationship between Augustus and the poets. Two plenary lectures will also offer insights into current research on Augustus. Dr. Penny Goodman (University of Leeds) will talk about Augustus’ coming bimillennium, while Dr. Alison Cooley (University of Warwick) will talk about her recent work on the Res Gestae Divi Augusti.

The event is FREE to attend, but participants should register their attendance on Eventbrite.

Two options are available for lunch:

  1. A buffet selection (including vegetarian and vegan options) available at the venue for a cost of £10, payable on the day.
  2. Local cafes and sandwich outlets.

You will be asked to indicate which you think you will prefer when you register your attendance with Eventbrite, so that we can plan approximate numbers for the buffet. However, this does not commit you to either option – you can still choose either way on the day.

Schedule

10.00-10.30 – Coffee and Welcome (North Foyer, Samuel Alexander Building).

10.30-11.30 – Plenary Talk (Samuel Alexander Lecture Theatre): Commemorating Augustus’ bimillennium. (Penny Goodman, University of Leeds)

11:30-12:15 – Parallel Sessions (select one)

  • Workshop 1a (A 202): Coinage (Clare Rowan, University of Warwick)
  • Workshop 1b (A 214): Augustus and the poets (Beverley Scott, University of Leeds)

12:15-13:15 – Break for lunch.

13:15-14:15 – Plenary Talk (Samuel Alexander Lecture Theatre): The Res Gestae Divi Augusti (Alison Cooley, University of Warwick)

14:15-14:45 – Afternoon break.

14:45-15:30 – Parallel Sessions (select one)

  • Workshop 2a (A 202): Suetonius (Sarah Holliday, Aylesbury Grammar School and Nina Wallace, Queen Mary’s College, Basingstoke)
  • Workshop 2b (A 214): Horace, Virgil and Actium (Peter Reason, Gower College, Swansea).

15:30-16.15 – Parallel Sessions (select one)

  • Workshop 3a (A 202): Augustus the contradiction (James Harrison, Bootham School York)
  • Workshop 3b (A 214): Responding to Augustus’ legacy: the example of Nero (Shushma Malik, University of Manchester)

16.15 – Departure.

You can choose which of the parallel sessions to attend on the day.

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One year today! A project update

19 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Conference, Public talks, Research

≈ 1 Comment

Today marks exactly one year until the bimillennium of Augustus’ death. Put another way, he died 1999 years ago today.

That’s actually a rather neat illustration of how round-number anniversaries work. We are one year closer to the event in time this year than we will be next year, but there is still some strange sense that next year we will be closer. It is pure numerology really. Like any anniversary, it is really just about the resemblance between two dates. Simply put, 19th August 2014 matches up with 19th August AD 14 better than 19th August 2013 does.

But it’s also about the fact that we can’t think about everything all the time. This time next year I will be in the middle of running a big conference about Augustus, and the ways in which people have responded to him over the past two thousand years. I’m really looking forward to it and it’s definitely something worth doing – but obviously I couldn’t do that every single day. Round number anniversaries also work for us because they help us to focus our interests, spurring us on to do something appropriate on a designated occasion, but also making it OK not to do that every single day in between.

So I’m working on Augustus today, because that’s my main research project for the moment, and will continue to be until this time next year (and indeed a little beyond). But there’s no big event going on for this year’s anniversary. Instead, it seems like a good time to update this blog with a report on how the project as a whole is coming along.

The conference

This is what I’ll be doing this time next year for the bimillennium itself. I began circulating the call for papers in April, and I’ve been thrilled by the response. The deadline for abstracts isn’t until 1st December, but because I asked people to contact me in advance to discuss their topics (in order to prevent overlaps), I already have a good sense of how interested people are. At the time of writing, I’ve had offers for nearly 40 papers, covering almost all of the major topics I hoped would come up. Obviously no individual papers are confirmed yet. I will need to wait until the formal abstracts come in, review them carefully with the help of the conference committee, and then send out official confirmations. So as excited as I am about some of the proposals I’ve received, I can’t really share any details about them yet. But I can definitely promise a good spread of topics at the conference, covering Augustus’ death and its immediate impact, later Roman emperors, provincial responses, late antiquity, the Byzantine empire, early Christian thought, early medieval literature, early modern philosophy and literature, 20th-century literature, contemporary popular culture, political theory and Augustan monuments.

I am still keen to receive more proposals, though. My initial plan was to run the whole conference on a plenary basis – that is, not to have parallel sessions, but only a single session at any one time so that all delegates can attend all of the papers. But doing it that way does mean that only a limited number of papers can be presented in the time available. Meanwhile, earlier in the summer my colleague Emma Stafford ran an absolutely excellent conference entitled Hercules: a hero for all ages, and applied a genius solution to the problem of parallel sessions. She simply ensured that every paper was recorded (in audio format), and the recordings uploaded afterwards to a password-protected website. This means that all of the delegates now can listen to each others’ papers – and, as a bonus, the conference team was able to offer ‘virtual delegate’ status to people who couldn’t attend in person, but wanted to be able to listen to the papers presented.

So if the number and quality of the abstracts submitted in December mean that (at least some) parallel sessions will be needed to fit them all in, I will go with Emma’s solution of recording the papers, rather than having to turn down good proposals because there isn’t space for them on the programme. And that means there is definitely room for more material.

Some ‘hot topics’ which are really important for Augustus’ reception history, but which I haven’t had proposals on yet, include:

  • Augustus in medieval Christian legend
  • Dante
  • Petrarch
  • Early modern royalty (e.g. Charles II, Louis XIV)
  • Alexander Pope
  • Voltaire
  • Augustus in the visual arts

If you have anything to say on receptions of Augustus in any of those contexts, please get in touch with a proposal!

The monograph

And this is my own personal day-to-day research focus at the moment. While the conference deals with receptions of Augustus right from his death up to the present day, the monograph is a close study of his two big bimillennia: his birth in 1938 and his death in 2014. I’m studying them from a receptions perspective, in the sense that I am looking at what they reveal about the public perception of Augustus in each period, how he was used to serve contemporary agendas, and how looking at all this can help us to understand Augustus better for ourselves. But I’m also setting them in a wider framework of commemorative practices, and particularly anniversary commemorations. Here, I’m looking at how the commemorative context encourages or suppresses particular responses to Augustus, how his bimillennia compare with other round-number anniversary commemorations, and what difference it makes to commemorate an event which took place so long ago and in a culture of which no-one can now claim direct membership.

Obviously the 2014 anniversary hasn’t happened yet, so there’s not much I can study! But I’m pleased to say that a growing number of commemorations of various different kinds are emerging as we get closer to the date. I’ve put a list here of the ones which are already in the public arena, but actually there are about as many again which I know are being planned but which haven’t been publicly announced yet. So I am confident I’ll have plenty to talk about, and am looking forward to seeing as many of them as possible for myself and talking to the people involved.

Meanwhile, I’m concentrating on the first half of the monograph: i.e. the introductory material setting up the issues of anniversary commemorations and Augustus’ receptions, and the chapters covering the 1938 bimillennium and its impact. I reckon I have about 15,000 words of fairly solid academic prose in the bag now, which includes the two introductory chapters, and the beginnings of the third chapter. This is the exciting one, where I get into the 1938 bimillennium commemorations in real detail, and there is so much to say! As I’ve already indicated in my previous posts on my research trip to New York and the paper which I gave at the colloquium which launched the project in May, I have uncovered a whole world of commemorative events which extend way beyond the ones everyone knows about in fascist Italy, and I am enjoying teasing out what they can tell us about Augustus’ role in the discourses of the day, and how they help to illuminate the historical Augustus in the process.

Public talks

I’m also getting out and about and talking about my work to all sorts of different audiences. I’ve already blogged here about two of these talks: one at Leeds Museum on a survey about public perceptions of Augustus which I gave in January, and one about the 1938 commemorations which I gave at the project launch colloquium. Since then, I’ve also given a talk on how to get the most out of Augustus’ anniversary next year in a classroom context at the JACT annual general meeting. This was a great event, which was more a conference than an AGM really, and which one of the other participants, Prof. Kate Cooper, has blogged in full here. It included a fantastic keynote speech from the JACT president, Caroline Lawrence, about her famous Roman Mysteries series and the ancient theory of the four humours, which she has also published in blog form. And in fact Caroline also tweeted a picture of me giving my own talk, so you can see me in action here:

Anniversary talk at JACT AGMSource credit: Caroline Lawrence

The slide shown in the picture was my montage of logos from recent and forthcoming anniversary commemorations, which I used to explain how anniversaries work and why they fascinate people. But the real focus of my talk was on how to use the anniversary to help school pupils get to grips with some of the aspects of Augustus’ career which they often find difficult – especially trying to make sense of the very different responses, from flowing praise to attempted assassinations, which he provoked (both in his own lifetime and ever since). I’ve now written up my talk in the form of an article for the JACT magazine, The Journal of Classical Teaching, and that should come out in September.

Other upcoming Augustus gigs include:

  • 1st October: presenting my research on the 1938 commemorations in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, Liverpool
  • 31st October: a talk on Augustus for pupils at Fettes College, Edinburgh
  • 16th November: a full day event on Augustus for current and prospective Classics or Ancient History teachers in Manchester
  • 26th June 2014: another talk at Leeds Museum on what people are doing to commemorate Augustus in his bimillennial year
  • 31st July 2014: two sessions on Augustus’ own use of anniversaries and varying responses to him through time at the ARLT summer school in Durham

Quite a busy schedule, then. Apart from the Fettes College talk, I believe all of those are open to anyone who wants to come – although obviously they are aimed at different audiences and the ARLT summer school charges a fee. So do come along and see me in action if you are interested!

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The Roman emperors survey: talk at Leeds City Museum

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by weavingsandunpickings in Augustus, Julius Caesar, Leeds, Public talks, Roman emperors survey, Students

≈ 2 Comments

My last post explained how, in January 2012, I conducted a survey on Roman emperors in Leeds city centre with the help of my students. A year later, in January 2013, I gave a public talk on what we found out from the survey as part of the monthly Classics in our Lunchtimes series at Leeds City Museum. This post covers a few of the main findings.

Our survey consisted of eight questions altogether, but the most important of them all was really the first one, which went as follows:

We would like to find out which Roman emperors people are most familiar with. If I ask you to name a Roman emperor, what is the first name that comes to mind?

Above all, of course, we wanted to find out people’s views on Augustus. But we deliberately didn’t mention him at the start of the survey, in order not to influence people’s answers. Our aim was to find out who was really at the forefront of people’s minds – to know what they would say spontaneously when asked to think of Roman emperor.

The results were fascinating. 20% of people said they couldn’t think of an answer, and another 5% gave names such as Zeus, Napoleon or Hercules – none of whom were ever emperors of Rome! But that means 75% of the people whom we bounced up to in the streets of Leeds were able to answer our question and name a famous Roman – and I think this says a lot about the profile and importance of Roman history in 21st-century Britain. A famous cliché has it that if you ask someone to name a famous Belgian, they can never think of an answer (although of course there are plenty of good answers in reality). Our survey found that the ancient Romans are in a happier position.

Headline results for question 1.

In fact, the most popular answer by far was ‘Julius Caesar’, clocking in at nearly 50%. But most Roman historians would say that this isn’t really an accurate answer to our question either, since we had asked people to name a Roman emperor, and Julius Caesar was not an emperor. He held absolute power over the Roman empire for a short time as a dictator, but in his day this was an emergency office, only intended to be held temporarily. The regular political system was still government by elected magistrates, so there was no accepted role of emperor for him to hold – and his contemporaries soon expressed their displeasure at his attempt to create one by assassinating him.

In a way, Caesar’s popularity in our survey is rather sad for Augustus. A generation after Caesar, Augustus (at that time called Octavian) was the person who did succeed in creating a stable system of rule by emperor, and in persuading the people around him to accept it as a long-term political solution. It says a lot about how low his public profile currently is that in spite of that achievement, when the people of Leeds are asked to name a Roman emperor, they don’t think of the man who invented the entire system of rule by emperor in Rome. They think of Julius Caesar instead.

Our findings also helped to show why that was, though. The answers to question 1 generated a sort of ‘Roman emperors top ten’, showing which of them stood highest in the local public consciousness and which of those were better known than others. The ordering in which they occur on this list actually matches up pretty closely with how often they appear in films and on television, and whether they are shown as strong central characters or secondary players in the stories of others. Later questions also uncovered that although the most common source which people gave for their knowledge about Augustus was ‘school’, the second most common was ‘TV’ – a clear sign of how important this medium is for people’s engagement with the ancient world.

If you would like to listen to the whole talk, a full audio recording complete with my Powerpoint slides are available now on the Classics Talks at Leeds blog. There, I say a little bit more about how both Julius Caesar and Augustus are portrayed on screen, and the relationship between the qualities which Augustus wanted to be remembered for and how the people of Leeds actually see him. I also answer a few audience questions on how Augustus has been seen in different historical contexts since his death at the end. Eventually, the full results from both this survey and a second survey conducted after 2014 will be published as one of the outcomes of my current research into Augustus’ bimillennium. But until then, I hope this little taster shows something of the interesting insights which an afternoon’s work on the streets of Leeds can reveal.

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Countdown to the BimillenniumAugust 19, 2014
Suetonius, Augustus 100.1: "He died in the same room as his father Octavius, in the consulship of two Sextuses, Pompeius and Appuleius, on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of September at the ninth hour, just thirty-five days before his seventy-sixth birthday."

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On This Day Two Thousand Years Ago

No upcoming events

2012 anniversaries

  • Charles Dickens bicentenary (birth)
  • Gaius Caligula bimillennium (birth)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau tercentenary (birth)
  • The Queen's Diamond Jubilee
  • Titanic centenary

2013 anniversaries

  • Beatle's first album 50th anniversary
  • Benjamin Britten centenary (birth)
  • C.S. Lewis 50th anniversary (death)
  • David Lloyd George 150th anniversary (birth)
  • Diderot tricentenary (birth)
  • Doctor Who 50th anniversary
  • Emily Davison, suffragette, centenary (death)
  • First Bollywood film centenary
  • Football Association 150th anniversary
  • Giuseppe Verdi bicentenary (birth)
  • John F Kennedy assassination 50th annivesary
  • John Snow bicentenary (birth)
  • London Underground 150th anniversary
  • Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech 50th anniversary
  • Munich agreement 75th anniversary
  • Orson Welles radio adaptation of 'War of the Worlds' 75th anniversary
  • Peter Cushing centenary (birth)
  • Pride and Prejudice bicentenary
  • Richard Wagner bicentenary (birth)
  • Sir Thomas Bodley 400th anniversary (death)

2014 anniversaries

  • Battle of Bannockburn 700th anniversary
  • Battle of Bouvines 800th anniversary
  • Charlemagne 1200th anniversary (death)
  • Christoph Willbard Gluck tercentenary (birth)
  • D-Day 1944 70th anniversary
  • Dylan Thomas centenary (birth)
  • Fall of the Berlin Wall 25th anniversary
  • First World War centenary
  • Forth Road Bridge 50th anniversary
  • George I tercentenary (coronation)
  • Jean-Philippe Rameau 250th anniversary (death)
  • Louis IX of France (St. Louis) 800th anniversary (birth)
  • Michelangelo 450th anniversary (death)
  • Star Spangled Banner bicentenary
  • William Shakespeare 450th anniversary (birth)

2015 anniversaries

  • Battle of Agincourt 600th anniversary
  • Battle of Waterloo bicentenary
  • De Montfort Parliament 750th anniversary
  • Signing of the Magna Carta 800th anniversary
  • Women's Institute centenary

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