Res Gestae Divi Augusti

The Res Gestae Divi Augusti ("The Deeds of the Divine Augustus") is a first-person account of the achievements of the emperor Augustus, composed by Augustus himself and completed shortly before his death in AD 14, meant for public inscription rather than private reading. It catalogues his political offices, military victories, public building projects, land grants to veterans, and lavish gifts of money and games to the Roman people, presenting his forty-year rise from an eighteen-year-old heir of the murdered Julius Caesar to the unrivalled founder of the Roman imperial system, all cast carefully as the restoration of the Republic rather than its overthrow. No copy from Rome itself survives; the fullest surviving text is a bilingual Latin-Greek inscription on the walls of the Temple of Rome and Augustus at Ancyra (modern Ankara), known as the Monumentum Ancyranum, with fragmentary parallel copies found at Apollonia and Antioch in Pisidia. As the only extended firsthand political testament left by a Roman emperor, it remains one of the most important primary sources for the reign of Augustus and the birth of the Principate.