august is not named for an emperor’s birthday. it is named for a conquest. it happened on a day like today, 1 august in the year 30 before our era: the legions of octavian —the future augustus— entered alexandria almost without meeting resistance.
mark antony, seeing the game was lost, took his own life; cleopatra did the same a few days later. with them died ptolemaic egypt, the greek dynasty that had reigned since the days of alexander the great, and the last great independent kingdom of the mediterranean vanished. according to suetonius and cassius dio, the plunder of the pharaohs was so colossal that, back in rome, octavian settled the state’s debts and handed out money among the people —the congiaria he would later list himself in his res gestae— to the point that money grew plentiful in the city, interest rates fell and the price of land soared.
and egypt did not become just another province. octavian kept it almost as a private estate: it was governed by a prefect of equestrian rank, not a senator, appointed personally by him, and no senator could even set foot in the country without his explicit permission —a prohibition tacitus was still recording generations later, already under tiberius. the granary that would feed rome for centuries was, in practice, his.
the name of the month does not celebrate his cradle: it celebrates the month in which he became master of the world.
years later, the senate, in a gesture of calculated flattery, renamed sextilis —the old sixth month of the calendar— as augustus. and here is the detail almost no one tells: according to suetonius, augustus preferred this month to september, in which he had actually been born, precisely because it was in sextilis that he had achieved his first consulship and his greatest military victories. the name does not commemorate his birth: it commemorates the month in which he became master of the known world.
now the historiographical nuance, which is worth not skipping. a late legend, attributed to the medieval monk johannes de sacrobosco, holds that a day was “stolen” from february so that august would not end up shorter than july and the emperor would not come off worse against his predecessor. it is a catchy story, but blackburn and holford-strevens disprove it in detail in the oxford companion to the year: the lengths of all the months had already been fixed by the julian reform of the calendar, decades before sextilis changed its name. no one stretched august at february’s expense; augustus had no need to steal a day from any month. it was enough for him to win an entire month by right of conquest.
the irony survives in the very calendar we use today. every time the date of 1 august is written down, it invokes —almost no one realising it— the fall of alexandria, the end of three centuries of greek kings in egypt and the silent birth of an empire that would rule the mediterranean for the following five hundred years. as rüpke recalls in his history of the roman calendar, few monuments have survived the passage of time as well as a simple name repeated twelve times a year.
