Retrospective Parentage

Abstract

Abstract No one would have called Augustus a ‘father of Europe’ in his own lifetime. For his contemporaries, Europe was a geographical concept rather than a political unit or cultural identity, and in any case his empire also included territory in the geographical regions of Asia and Africa. Nonetheless, two thousand years later, he is regularly claimed by Europeans as a cultural ancestor. This chapter shows how this claim evolved, from early references to Charlemagne as pater Europae to the empires of the Habsburgs and Victorian Britain to a post-war Europe seeking a shared identity. Importantly, although it rests on claims of continuity between antiquity and the present, it could only have been articulated after a coherent sense of European cultural identity emerged in the context of early modern imperialism. Two periods of intensive engagement with Augustus occurred at the bimillennia of his birth in 1938 and death in 2014. Their commemorative geography reveals a stark gulf between the European and the African and Asian parts of Augustus’ former empire. Though in some places Augustus was used as a means of bridging cultural divides, the strength of his historical identification with Europe is probably too strong for this to be genuinely effective.