August

   , AGUSTAN AGE

   Latin Augustus means enerable, a title conferred by the Senate in 27 B.C. on Gaius Octavianus, who thus became the first Roman emperor. He then changed his name to Augustus Caesar and was the founder of the Imperial Roman government. Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, for whom the month of July, consisting of thirty-one days, had been named. The month named for Octavianus was August, originally Sextilis, the sixth month in the old Roman calendar, which started in March. As Augustus Caesar, he resented the fact that July was longer than his month. He therefore stole a day from February so that August would also have thirty-one days.

   The Augustan Age, which began approximately in 43 B.C. and continued to about A.D. 18, was marked by peace, the historic "Pax Romana," and was indeed the most illustrious period in Roman history. Its writers were brilliant, polished, and sophisticated. Vergil published his Georgics and completed the Aeneid; Horace, his Odes, Books I-III, and Epistels, Book I. Livy began his monumental history of Rome; Ovid, the author of Metamorphoses, a mythological history of the world from the creation to the Augustan Age.

   "Augustan Age" came to be applied to the apogee of any nation's cultural achievements, primarily to its "classical" period in literature.