Augustus. Buchan John

      

       JOHN BUCHAN

      (LORD TWEEDSMUIR)

       AUGUSTUS

      “Immensa Romanae pacis majestas.”

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       John Buchan

      John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875. In his youth, his father immersed him in the history, legends and myths of Scotland, and he was an avid reader, stating some years later that John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress was a “constant companion” to him. Buchan’s education was uneven, but at the age of seventeen he obtained a scholarship to study classics at Glasgow University, where he began to write poetry. His first work, The Essays and Apothegms of Francis Lord Bacon, was published in 1894, and a year later he enrolled at Oxford University to study law.

      In 1900, Buchan moved to London, and two years later accepted a civil service post in South Africa. In the years leading up to World War I, he worked at a publishers, and also wrote Prester John (1910) – which later became a school reader, translated into many languages – as well as a number of biographies. In 1915, Buchan became a war correspondent for The Times, and published his most well-known book, the thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. After the war he became a director of the news agency Reuters.

      Over the course of his life, Buchan would eventually publish some one hundred books, forty or so of which were novels, mostly wartime thrillers. In the latter part of his life he worked in politics, serving as Conservative MP for the Scottish universities and Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland (1933-34). In 1935, Buchan moved to Canada, where he became the thirty-fifth Governor General of Canada. He died in 1940, aged 64.

      AUGUSTUS

      Museo Civico, Ancona

       BOOKS BY JOHN BUCHAN

      SCHOLAR-GIPSIES, 1896

      JOHN BURNET OF BARNS, 1898

      A HISTORY OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE, 1898

      GREY WEATHER, 1899

      A LOST LADY OF OLD YEARS, 1899

      THE HALF-HEARTED, 1900

      THE WATCHER BY THE THRESHOLD, 1902

      THE AFRICAN COLONY, 1903

      THE TAXATION OF FOREIGN INCOME, 1905

      A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS, 1906

      SOME EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BY-WAYS, 1908

      PRESTER JOHN, 1910

      SIR WALTER RALEIGH, 1911

      THE MOON ENDURETH, 1912

      SALUTE TO ADVENTURERS, 1915

      THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS, 1915

      GREENMANTLE, 1916

      POEMS, SCOTS AND ENGLISH, 1917

      MR. STANDFAST, 1919

      THE SOUTH AFRICAN FORCES IN FRANCE, 1920

      FRANCIS AND RIVERSDALE GRENFELL, 1920

      THE PATH OF THE KING, 1921

      A HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR, 1921-22

      HUNTINGTOWER, 1922

      MIDWINTER, 1923

      THE THREE HOSTAGES, 1924

      LORD MINTO: A MEMOIR, 1924

      JOHN MACNAB, 1925

      THE ROYAL SCOTS FUSILIERS, 1925

      THE DANCING FLOOR, 1926

      HOMILIES AND RECREATIONS, 1926

      WITCH WOOD, 1927

      THE RUNAGATES‘ CLUB, 1928

      MONTROSE, 1928

      THE COURTS OF THE MORNING, 1929

      CASTLE GAY, 1930

      THE KIRK IN SCOTLAND, 1930 (With Sir George Adam Smith)

      THE BLANKET OF THE DARK, 1931

      SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1932

      JULIUS CAESAR, 1932

      THE GAP IN THE CURTAIN, 1932

      THE MAGIC WALKING-STICK, 1932

      THE MASSACRE OF GLENCOE, 1933

      A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY, 1933

      GORDON AT KHARTOUM, 1934

      THE FREE FISHERS, 1934

      OLIVER CROMWELL, 1934

      THE KING’S GRACE, 1935

      THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS, 1935

      THE ISLAND OF SHEEP, 1936

      AUGUSTUS, 1937

      MEMORY HOLD-THE-DOOR, 1940

      CANADIAN OCCASIONS, 1940

      SICK HEART RIVER, 1941

      THE LONG TRAVERSE, 1941

      TO MY FRIEND

      WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING

      FOUR TIMES PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA

      PREFACE

      THIS book is an attempt to understand a little part of the mind of a great man. In my youth I was fascinated by Julius Caesar, and was ready to believe, with Mommsen and his school, that the constructive ideas commonly attributed to his great-nephew were born of his genius. As my studies continued I felt this view to be untenable, and not less that other which seems to be taking its place to-day, and which would make Agrippa the true architect of the Roman empire. I came to see that Augustus, while he had able colleagues—and one of his gifts was his power to choose collaborators—was always the master designer and the chief executant. I seemed to find in his work a profound practical intelligence which is even rarer in history than a seminal idealism. Consequently since my undergraduate days Augustus has inspired me with a lively interest, which has been sustained by such experience as I have had, under varied conditions, of those problems of government which are much the same in every age. Two Canadian winters have enabled me to complete a task begun many years ago.

      Gibbon complained that he had to “collect the actions of Trajan from the glimmerings of an abridgment or the doubtful light of a panegyric.” The authorities for Augustus are scarcely more satisfactory. The chief contemporary sources are lost: the thirteen books of Augustus’s own autobiography; the three books of the correspondence between him and Cicero; the memoirs of Agrippa; the works of Asinius Pollio and Messalla Corvinus; the thirty books of Livy which covered the period from 44 to 9 B.C.; the pamphlets of men like Oppius and Julius Saturninus, and most of Nicolaus of Damascus. Much of our material, too, for the understanding of Roman thought and society is gone: nearly all the minor poets; a good deal of Cicero; the plays which were not paraphrases from the Greek, after Plautus or Terence, but true transcripts of Roman life. Some of these lost sources are no doubt embodied in the work of later chroniclers, but it is impossible to know what is an authentic borrowing and what is the author’s gloss. Apart from minor contemporaries like Strabo and Velleius, we are chiefly dependent on authors who lived from half a century to two centuries later—Plutarch, Appian, Suetonius, the two Plinys, and Dio Cassius, and these were moralists or gossip-writers,