in the year 9 before our era, the greek cities of the province of asia voted that their new year should fall on the birthday of a living man. that man had been born on 23 september 63, in the consulship of cicero and gaius antonius. suetonius gives the date the roman way — the ninth day before the kalends of october —, the hour — shortly before sunrise — and the place: the palatine, in the quarter called ad capita bubula, «at the ox heads». his name was gaius octavius. a calendar caveat before going on: that 23 september belongs to the roman calendar before caesar’s reform, which had drifted out of step with the solar year. the one asia fixed half a century later was already julian. what was inherited was the label of the day, not the solar day.
rival versions of his family circulated, and suetonius sets them side by side. the gens octavia had been prominent at velitrae, but the branch he came from stayed in the equestrian order «down to the father of augustus». augustus himself wrote that he came from an old and wealthy equestrian family, in which his father was the first senator; mark antony threw in his face a great-grandfather who had been a freedman and a ropemaker and a grandfather who was a money-changer. the self-presentation is his own, and that is how it has to be read. what is not in dispute is the mother: atia was the daughter of julia, sister of julius caesar. octavius was therefore the dictator’s great-nephew, and that kinship is what makes everything that came after intelligible.
what came after was the work of a will. according to suetonius, caesar named as heirs three grandsons of his sisters, and to gaius octavius he left three quarters; at the foot of the document, he adds, he adopted him into his family and his name. whether that clause amounts to an adoption in the roman legal sense has been debated for more than a century; the formal adoption came later, through the comitia, in 43, when the eighteen-year-old who had received the news at apollonia already had the means to impose it. from march 44 to the fall of alexandria, in 30, fourteen years went by.
in 27 came the name. augustus tells it in his res gestae: in his sixth and seventh consulships, once the civil wars had been extinguished, he transferred the republic from his power to the discretion of the senate and the roman people, «and for this merit i was named augustus by decree of the senate». suetonius adds who proposed it — munatius plancus — and against what alternative: some wanted to call him romulus, as a second founder. augustus won, a name «not only new but more ample». it is usually glossed as «venerable»; the root is augere, to increase, and the sacred sense is supplied by suetonius himself: places consecrated by augural rite are called augusta.
rome waited for his death to call him a god. in asia, with him still alive, they wrote it in marble and began to count the year from his birth.
the proposal in asia was signed by a roman. the dossier preserved at priene — one of several copies; the text usually quoted is assembled from those of apamea, eumeneia, dorylaeum and metropolis — opens with an edict of the proconsul paullus fabius maximus, who proposes that all the cities have a single new moon, that of the birthday of the «most divine caesar», the ninth day before the kalends of october, and that on that day everyone enter office. it is followed by the decree with which the assembly of the greeks of asia, the koinon, approves it. the decree awards maximus the crown that had been promised to whoever found the greatest honours for caesar, because he had found, says the stone, «what the greeks did not know until now»: to begin counting time from his birth. and the crown would always be proclaimed at the games of pergamum in honour of rome and augustus, and at those of each city.
the rest is administration, and it is worth not skipping, because the decree is not simply a pious text. the year of asia was macedonian and lunisolar, and it already began around the autumn equinox. the decree nails it to 23 september, synchronises the greek day with the roman one, calls the first month «kaisar», as had already been voted, lists the twelve months with their days until they add up to three hundred and sixty-five, fixes the intercalary day in the month of xandikos, orders edict and decree to be engraved on stelae of white marble in the kaisareia of the chief cities, and adds a provision on the date of the elections, «as is written in the cornelian law». the praise of augustus is political too: the man who «put an end to war».
in the middle of the paperwork comes the sentence that made the stone famous: «the birthday of the god was, for the world, the beginning of the good tidings that came through him». good tidings, in greek, euangélia. it has to be read with three caveats. the word is in the plural — εὐανγελίων, genitive — and it was the ordinary term for announcing a victory or a proclamation. the ending is restored by the editors, as is the expression «the birthday». and a second occurrence that the old editions printed a few lines higher up has disappeared from the current edition: there is only one, and it is not whole on the stone.
some eighty years later, that word opens the gospel of mark: «the beginning of the gospel of jesus christ». the oldest christian use, paul’s, lies some sixty years on. whether mark is answering the language of the imperial cult on purpose is a reading debated since deissmann. craig evans defends it — the evangelist, he writes, seems to have deliberately echoed a central theme of the imperial cult — and at the same time stresses that the quotation from isaiah that follows brings the «good tidings» of the jewish tradition; others see only the common vocabulary of the age. what is certain is the coincidence of the word, not the intention.
augustus did get a month of his own, but not the month of his birth. the senate renamed sextilis in 8 bce, a year after the decree of asia, and suetonius specifies that he preferred it to september, the month in which he was born, because in it he had won his first consulship and his most notable victories. in rome the title of god came with his death, in 14 of our era. in asia, with him still alive, they already called him a god in writing, and counted the year from the day he was born.
