What it is
The Res Gestae Divi Augusti — "the achievements of the deified Augustus" — is a first-person summary of Augustus's career, public expenditures, military undertakings and honours, composed by Augustus himself and published after his death in 14 CE. By his own instruction it was inscribed on two bronze pillars before his mausoleum in Rome; copies in Latin and Greek were set up in temples across the provinces. The most complete surviving copy is the Monumentum Ancyranum, cut into the walls of the temple of Rome and Augustus at Ancyra (modern Ankara), with further fragments from Pisidian Antioch and Apollonia. The Roman original is lost; the provincial copies preserve the text.
Historical context
Augustus wrote the document at the end of a reign that had converted the dictatorship Caesar died for into a durable, deniable monarchy. The Res Gestae is the regime's own account of that conversion, set down by the one man who could give it authoritative shape. It is not a confession and not a chronicle; it is a curated public ledger, and the curation is the point.
What it argues — by what it omits
The text presents Augustus as the restorer of the Republic, the servant of the senate and people, the general who ended civil war, and the benefactor who paid for the army, the grain, the games and the buildings out of his own resources. The famous formulation of the settlement of 27 BCE is its constitutional core: he claims to have excelled all others in auctoritas — in moral authority and standing — while holding no more potestas, no more formal power, than his colleagues in each magistracy. That sentence is the Principate's self-description in miniature: rule by auctoritas, with the offices of the Republic left formally intact.
What the document leaves out is as deliberate as what it includes. The proscriptions, the defeated Romans of the civil wars, the name of Antony, the means by which the auctoritas was made unanswerable — none of it appears. The proscription of 43 BCE becomes "I drove into exile the men who slaughtered my father." The Res Gestae is the founding instance of a genre the European tradition would read for two millennia: the ruler's own account, true in its particulars and shaped at every turn.
Reception and influence
Read against Tacitus's Annals — written a century later and from the opposite vantage — the Res Gestae becomes one half of the longest-running argument in Roman historiography about what the Augustan settlement actually was. Augustus offers the official memory; Tacitus supplies the counter-reading. The platform reads the two together because neither is intelligible without the other. The document is also a primary source of the first order for the administrative reach of the early Principate — the donatives, the grain distributions, the building programme, the settlement of veterans — quantified in the regime's own figures.
Citing the Res Gestae
Standard citation is by chapter and section (e.g. RG 34 for the auctoritas/potestas sentence). Cooley's edition gives both the Latin and Greek texts with full apparatus; cite the chapter rather than any one inscription, since the text is reconstructed from several copies. See our Sources page.