The Voice
Augustus Caesar scripted conversations with his own wife.
Every important statement he made to the Senate, to the Assembly, to the troops, and even to Livia — written down first, committed to notebooks, then repeated aloud. He feared “saying either too much or too little if he spoke off-hand.” The most powerful man in the Western world rehearsed his pillow talk.
Suetonius, the Roman biographer who had access to Augustus’s private letters, tells us his “articulation of words, constantly practised under an elocution teacher, was pleasant and rather unusual.” The Latin word is peculiaris — not strange, but distinctive. Belonging to him alone. He’d worked with a vocal coach his entire life. The result was an instrument of studied clarity, not theatrical power.
It wasn’t a commanding voice. When it “proved inadequate for addressing a large crowd, he called a herald” to amplify. This was a parlor voice in a palace. A voice that persuaded one senator at a time.
And the rhetoric was deliberately plain. Augustus “cultivated a style which was neat and chaste,” and his chief aim was “to express his thought as clearly as possible.” He loathed ornate language. He mocked Mark Antony’s bombastic prose, asking whether Antony wrote “to be admired rather than understood.” He called overwrought vocabulary “the stink of farfetched words.”
The stink of farfetched words. That phrase is so characteristically blunt that Suetonius preserved it verbatim.
How We Know
Suetonius’s Divus Augustus (c. 121 AD), written about a century after Augustus’s death. Suetonius served as secretary to Emperor Hadrian and had access to the imperial archives — including Augustus’s personal correspondence. The man was obsessed with physical and behavioral detail. How his subjects ate. Slept. Dressed. Spoke. Not merely what they decreed.
Chapters 84 through 89 of the Life of Augustus are the most detailed account of any ancient ruler’s communication habits that survive. Suetonius quotes directly from Augustus’s letters, preserving colloquialisms, pet phrases, and stylistic preferences that would otherwise be lost entirely.
The Res Gestae Divi Augusti — Augustus’s own autobiographical inscription, commissioned for display after his death, surviving in a copy carved on the walls of the Temple of Augustus in Ankara — gives us his voice in his own carefully chosen words.
For the sound of educated Roman Latin itself, we draw on ancient grammarians, inscriptional evidence, and transcriptions of Latin words into Greek and other writing systems. The “restored” classical pronunciation, reconstructed by scholars from around 1900, gives us a reliable approximation of how his words landed on Roman ears.
The Accent
Forget every pronunciation you’ve heard in movies.
Classical Latin, the language Augustus spoke, sounds nothing like church Latin. The letter C was always hard — “come,” never “city.” Caesar was KAI-sar, not SEE-zer. The diphthong AE sounded like “eye” — Caesarem was roughly KAI-sa-rem. V was pronounced as W — veni, vidi, vici was WEH-nee, WEE-dee, WEE-kee. The R was trilled. H was fully aspirated. Double consonants were two separate sounds.
Augustus’s own name: OW-GOOS-toos, with a long U in the second syllable. His favorite maxim, festina lente (“make haste slowly”): fes-TEE-na LEN-teh.
Within this educated register, Augustus favored the “Attic” style — direct, economical, unadorned. The opposite of the “Asiatic” style Mark Antony preferred, with its elaborate periods and emotional crescendos. Augustus was also fond of vivid colloquialisms that sliced through senatorial formality. “Quicker than boiled asparagus” for extreme speed. “On the Greek Kalends” for never — since the Greek calendar had no Kalends. And the metaphor of fishing with a golden hook: the loss if the line breaks can never be compensated by any catch.
In Their Own Words
“Festina lente.” — Make haste slowly. His favorite maxim. He repeated it so often that gold coins were minted with emblematic images — a crab and a butterfly, later a dolphin and an anchor — to represent the concept. Two words that run the largest empire on earth.
“I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.” The grandest claim, in the plainest words. That’s the Augustan style distilled.
“That which has been done well has been done quickly enough.” The companion maxim to festina lente: speed without quality is waste.
“Have I played my part in the farce of life creditably enough? If I have pleased you, kindly signify appreciation with a warm goodbye.” His deathbed. August 19, 14 AD. The Latin — Acta est fabula, plaudite! — quotes the closing line of Roman comedies. “The play is over — applaud!” He died as he’d governed. Performing.
“Men who pursue small advantages with no small hazard resemble those who fish with a golden hook, the loss of which, if the line should happen to break, could never be compensated by all the fish they might take.” Risk management, 2,000 years before anyone called it that.
What They Sounded Like in Context
2 BC. Augustus is sixty. The Senate has just awarded him the title Pater Patriae — Father of the Country. It’s the only honor that makes him cry.
He speaks from a written text — he always speaks from a written text — in that sweet, distinctive, professionally trained voice. He replies: “Having attained my highest hopes, Fathers of the Senate, what more have I to ask of the immortal gods than that I may retain this same unanimous approval of yours to the very end of my life?”
He addresses each senator by name. Without a prompter. He does this every time. When a senator attempts flattery, Augustus stops it with a look and a wave of the hand. No words. He doesn’t need to raise his voice. He has legions for that.
He doesn’t know he’ll live another sixteen years. Doesn’t know his exiled daughter Julia will die in penury. Doesn’t know Tiberius will prove adequate but joyless. Doesn’t know that his system — the Principate, the careful fiction that he’s merely the first citizen of a republic — will endure for five centuries.
On this day, Rome is at peace for the first time in a generation. And the architect of that peace is weeping, which is the most human thing he’s done in public in forty years.
Sources
- Suetonius, Divus Augustus, in De Vita Caesarum, c. 121 AD. Chapters 25, 28, 53, 84, 86, 87, 99.
- Barrett, Anthony A., Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor (Yale University Press, 2023); Goldsworthy, Adrian, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome (Yale University Press, 2014).
- Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Temple of Augustus and Roma, Ankara.
- Allen, W. Sidney, Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (Cambridge University Press, 1965; 2nd ed. 1978).
- “Festina Lente,” Wikipedia, citing Erasmus, Adagia II.1.1 (1508), and Augustan coinage.