In Augustus: from Revolutionary to Emperor (2014), a recent biography of Gaius Octavius (63 bce–14 ce), known to the world as Octavian or the ‘first emperor’ Augustus, A. Goldsworthy notes about his subject that ‘in spite of his remarkable story and profound influence on the history of an empire which has shaped the culture of the western world, Caesar Augustus has slipped from the wider consciousness … Julius Caesar is famous, and so are Antony and Cleopatra, Nero, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, perhaps Hadrian, and a few of the philosophers – but Augustus is not’ (p. 2). Part of the reason may be that this complex man has been hard to pin down, and his involvement in and influence on the development of Rome (and the idea of Rome) was already regarded in ancient sources in contradictory and ambiguous terms. The passionate, savage and daring young man, who assumed control of the Roman Republic by eliminating his opponents one by one, stands side by side with the image of a far more moderate princeps acting for the welfare of his people. Even in modern biographies we find different representations of Augustus, from the benevolent restorer of peace and order after decades of civil war to the power-hungry semi-fascist dictator. This ambiguity is deepened by the manner in which Augustus himself tried to self-fabricate his image as a statesman for posterity, thereby widening the discrepancy between how people saw him and how he himself wanted to be seen. The complexity of this legacy is also reflected in his cultural afterlife. Thus he appears as ruthless and manipulative in two of Shakespeare's plays, while in the famous BBC dramatisation of Robert Graves's I Claudius he is a rather naïve and unthreatening man, easily outmanoeuvred by his scheming wife Livia.

It is this complexity and ambiguity of ‘Caesar Augustus’ that is the topic of P.’s book. She aims to show, first, how our modern representations of Augustus are not only determined by professional Classicists but also by novelists, journalists, producers and audiences outside the field of classical studies, and, second, how ambiguities surrounding the reception of Augustus have resulted in his varied representations in literature, film and TV series from the 1960s until the turn of the millennium. In terms of method, P. combines semiotics and classical reception studies, aiming to show that ‘Caesar Augustus’ as an empty signifier in itself has given rise to many signifieds, which reveal just as much (and perhaps even more) about the (ideological) perspective of the person responsible for the literary or visual text than they do about Augustus himself. Grounded in a postmodern historiographic approach, this study emphasises that no ‘true’ or ‘real’ Augustus exists, but that we, as scholars and readers, continually construct him by projecting our contingent cultural assumptions back on to antiquity in our attempts to understand and analyse his personality, life and achievements. While this has become a generally accepted notion in literary studies and cultural history, the occasionally militant tone of the ‘introduction’ suggests that P. still feels that ‘old-fashioned’ Classicists, with their devotion to positivist source criticism and outdated belief in objective truth, need to be forcefully convinced and converted.

In order to contextualise and explain the ambiguities of ‘Caesar Augustus’, Chapter 2 first deals with the nature and methods of classical historiography as moral narratives. P. critically discusses two of the main ancient sources, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, to show how they are mainly responsible for the two-sidedness of Augustus’ image. She then continues to trace this ambivalence in K. Vonnegut's 1965 postmodern novel, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine, a satire on American culture and politics and one of his lesser-known works. P. uses her analysis of the uses of Augustus in this novel as a template for her treatment of later literary and visual texts. Her interpretation of Vonnegut's text as dealing with greed and generosity in the US of the 1960s and as a satire on the vacuity of American morality is sound. Less convincing is the attempt to see the novel as drawing an analogy between the US and the Roman Republic/Empire at the time of Augustus. In fact, there is only one explicit link to be found, namely in the speech Senator Rosewater makes to rally his party members behind his economic programme. P. gives an excellent close reading of this speech and its context, but has to admit that ‘the meaning and significance of Caesar Augustus for the book as a whole is never explicitly explained, but remains for the reader to determine’ (p. 47).

P.’s reading of Vonnegut's novel in an Augustan framework in Chapter 3, ‘Pater patriae, Pax Americana: Augustus’ Empire in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater’, results in a mixed bag: insightful discussions of the American obsession with the ideal of the Roman Republic, as reflected in its various cultural expressions, are juxtaposed with speculative pages about the Bush and Trump administrations, only to come to the conclusion that in the political landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ‘Augustus has been largely absent as a character … because [he] is simply not that useful’ (pp. 64–5). Vonnegut's novel seems to be an exception, but only because (with the exception of Rosewater's speech) P. starts to impose her own semiotic model of ‘Caesar Augustus’ upon the text, rather than tracing its actual appropriation of Augustus. On occasion rhetorical strategy is employed to make her case: ‘It surely reminds the reader of the cultural revival of the Augustan period’ (p. 71), ‘in a strikingly Augustan manner, Eliot Rosewater decides to pursue the world as his poem’ (p. 72), ‘The Augustus-like overtones of Eliot's role as the worshipped father of his country’ (p. 75). For P., the two sides of Augustus are clearly reflected in father and son Rosewater, which leads to the rather generalised conclusion that ‘Vonnegut's way of constructing the characters of these two antiheroes shows the relevance and the use of Augustus in modern ideological polemics’ (p. 77).

P.’s reading of Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988) in Chapter 4 is far more sound. In fact, her analysis of the text as dealing with the tension and analogy between political power (Augustus) and artistic power (Ovid), and with the control of meaning and interpretation, makes this one of the highlights of her study. Chapter 5, ‘Augustus in Historical Fiction’, offers similarly nuanced readings of four examples of historical fiction: Elisabeth Dored's Jeg elsket Tiberius (1959), on which I would have liked to have read more, John Williams’s Augustus: a Novel (1971), Alan Massie's Augustus: a Novel (1986) and François Fontaine's Le sang des Césars (1989). P. usefully explains the different uses of history by writers of ‘historical fiction’ and ‘postmodern fiction’, with the former modelling themselves largely on the format of Roman historiographic writing, thereby confirming or creating (new) master narratives (something that postmodern writing always tries to deconstruct).

Chapter 6, ‘Augustus on Screen’, focuses on representations of Augustus in the media industry from the 1960s onwards. Along with its analyses of Cleopatra and I, Claudius, this chapter is invaluable for its readings of lesser known TV series (pp. 158–69), while ending with the HBO–BBC–RAI production Rome (2005–2007). The conclusion (Chapter 7) is a masterful semiotic reading of the name ‘Caesar Augustus’ as a perfect sign that can be used to represent whatever one has need of: a symbol of ultimate power, however begotten, and what it means for the person wielding it and for those under that power. P.’s book makes it very clear that ‘Caesar Augustus’ always has been and will continue to be a signifier for all seasons.