As well as his Res Gestae, disseminated on stone across the Empire, Augustus is known to have written thirteen books of memoirs, now lost except for a cluster of fragments embedded in other authors (Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian, Dio and Nicolaus of Damascus). To mark the imminent publication of eighteen fragments in a new Oxford edition by Christopher Smith (in T. J. Cornell et al., Fragments of the Roman Historians; the text is helpfully reproduced here), a group of historians explore the memoirs from various angles. They ask what Republican models Augustus had for the autobiographical form; what the fragments reveal about his priorities and preoccupations; what we can learn about the structure and bias of the memoirs from more complete historical accounts; whether the memoirs were an awkward apologia or the unabashed self-justification of a divinely anointed world leader; and why they did not survive as a classic.

As Tim Cornell argues, autobiography was a natural offshoot of the competitive environment of the Republic, part of a politician or soldier's legacy along with portrait busts and inscriptions. Cato's Origines, for example, accounted for his own rise (and the invention of an ideal of moral austerity) along with that of Rome. Yet Christopher Pelling, in one of the most penetrating chapters, dismisses the idea that Augustus inherited any distinctive model and tells us to forget modern expectations of intimate confession (despite the space evidently given to superstitious details, for example that Augustus recalled putting his left shoe on the wrong foot on the day he later experienced a mutiny). Memoirs were an individual's account of living through bigger events — not so much a window onto the life itself as a memorandum to put the record straight (as the adopted Greek word hypomnema(ta) indicates). The record was, of course, particularly contested in the last years of the Republic and the transition to Empire, which is why Augustus’ unique contribution represents such a loss.

We can track the end of an age of innocent autobiography and the beginning of a new era of suspicion through Cicero's correspondence, Pelling claims. Instead of indicating confidence in one's achievements, life-stories had come to be associated with bias and self-aggrandizement, especially if written in the first person (which perhaps explains why Cicero of all people did not write a full-length memoir). But Augustus clearly chose this way of distancing himself from Julius Caesar's brisk and irreligious third-person commentarii. Personal accounts of dreams, omens and fortuitous escapes, along with the downplaying of his aristocratic background, brought him, surprisingly, closer to the charismatic aura of Sulla, who had written his own life-story in twenty-two books (Smith, Alexander Thein and Peter Wiseman all home in on this equally fragmentary text as the best oblique perspective on Augustus’ memoirs). Augustus trod carefully in the footsteps of the butcher-dictator. His interpretation of Caesar's comet was that it ratified his father's divinity; he left it to others to read it as a heaven-sent blessing on his own future. Yet in many ways he built on the idea of exceeding even Sulla's felicitas: for example, surviving to dedicate a temple to Jupiter Tonans, which Sulla had vowed but not lived to see. Unlike Sulla, who was writing his memoirs up until his death, he knew where to stop: at his conquest of the Cantabrians in 25 b.c. — which, as John Rich points out, was his last military venture, the halfway point of his life and the beginning of his programme of provincial pacification. (This chosen endpoint might incidentally confirm the mould of Republican autobiography once proposed by R. G. Lewis, rejected here by Pelling, where life-stories peak at the summit of earthly felicitas — the triumph.)

The memoirs can thus tell us interesting things about periodization and how lives get mapped onto larger events. Pelling even speculates that the book began, like the Res Gestae, with ‘When I was nineteen years old’ — the moment when Augustus entered history as Caesar's heir. Mark Toher is more sceptical about being able to reconstruct the memoirs from later historiography and warns against circular arguments. Yet through close readings of Plutarch, Appian and Nicolaus, both these contributors indirectly extract a knowing Augustus who pursued a ‘rhetoric of honesty’ while suppressing material that was too damning or self-inflating. About the variants Toher makes the important point that ‘even after the Augustan era, the historiographical tradition on the assassination of Caesar and its aftermath was still evolving and episodes and details were still being invented’ (139). Antony and Octavian are found filling identical slots in the fluid mythography of military prowess, cowardly retreat and miraculous escape (paradigmatic for Virgil's Aeneas too, as Anton Powell points out, and also for Horace, hero of his own poems). Many contemporaries offered alternatives to Augustus’ war-memories, and some had an interest in exposing the early embarrassments and atrocities that the memoirs plastered over. Yet Kathryn Welch argues that survivors from the ‘other side’, among them Pollio and Messalla, may have given the Augustan settlement its best publicity. What emerges from most of the chapters is how hard our surviving historical sources push against the lost testimony of the memoirs. As Smith and Powell remind us, Suetonius explicitly censors Augustus for covering up his savage blinding of a praetor after he mistook the writing-tablets under the man's cloak for a sword. Augustus’ voice, Pelling concludes, was less partisan than one might expect, yet all the more chilling for that. This thought-provoking collection makes us feel the sagacity and the contentiousness of the imperial writing-tablets even in their absence.