In 30 B.C., the Roman forces of Octavian—later to be known as Caesar Augustus—invaded Egypt and defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra. After the deaths of his adversaries, Octavian remained in Alexandria, the Egyptian capital, and insisted on visiting one major tourist site. He had to see the tomb of the city’s founder, the famous Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great. When invited to tour other sites, such as the mausoleum of Cleopatra’s family, the last pharaonic dynasty to rule Egypt, Octavian sniffed. “I came to see a king, not a row of corpses” (Everitt 196).
Unlike Julius Caesar, his great-uncle and adoptive father, Octavian spurned the idea of cruising down the Nile. Instead, he high-tailed it back to Italy and eventually celebrated his triumph in Rome. In doing so, he missed the opportunity to come face-to-face with a kindred spirit, a native ruler who reigned over twelve centuries before Octavian set foot on Egyptian soil.
This man is Ramesses II, and if the Greek writer Plutarch had known this pharaoh’s story, he might have paired his biography with Octavian’s in his Parallel Lives. Both men have much in common. For starters, neither was born to rule. Ramesses’s father and grandfather were military men who served King Tut and his successors. Octavian’s father was an Italian trader, not a member of Rome’s elite families.
For Ramesses, the tide turned when he was around ten years old. The ruling pharaoh had no heir and named Ramesses’s grandfather as successor. When pharaoh died, Ramesses went from army brat to the son of the crown prince. And his father and grandfather wasted no time preparing Ramesses for the throne by giving the newly minted prince his own household, complete with multiple wives from Egypt’s elite families. His grandfather and father ruled for two and thirteen years respectively (Clayton 140). Ramesses ascended the throne with over a decade of experience under his belt, and several children to continue the family line.
Octavian followed a different trajectory. While his father’s family lacked high status, his mother, Atia, had Caesar blood in her veins. During this time in Rome’s history, Caesar was just a family name and had no regal connotations. Atia’s mother was Julius Caesar’s older sister. Widowed young, Atia remarried into a more aristocratic family and left the young Octavian in the care of his grandmother Julia. According to biographer Anthony Everitt, Octavian and his great-uncle Julius probably first encountered each other at this time (35). When Octavian turned eighteen, Julius Caesar invited his nephew to join him on campaign in Spain.
Like Ramesses, who learned the art of war from his father, Octavian learned under Julius Caesar. Octavian’s training was cut short in 44 B.C., when assassins killed Julius Caesar in the Senate on March 15. Not long after the murder, Caesar’s will was read out, naming Octavian adopted son and primary heir. Despite the risks—Caesar’s assassins had not been apprehended—Octavian returned to Rome to claim his inheritance, a rash action his mother begged him not to take.
One thousand, two hundred thirty years earlier, Ramesses also displayed a rash side while on campaign. The Egyptian army was poised outside Kadesh, located in modern-day Syria, intent on winning the city back from the Hittites. Ramesses’s men captured two Hittite spies and brought them before Pharaoh. The prisoners claimed that Hittite forces were still far off. But Ramesses learned the hard way that spies often lie. In reality, the Hittites waited at Kadesh, ready to attack the Egyptians. When an over-confident Ramesses sent the first of his four chariot divisions ahead, Hittite troops decimated them. The Hittites then came for the second division, led by Ramesses himself. Ramesses claimed that while the rest of his men fled, he held off the foe single-handedly until the third and fourth divisions arrived. The final result: total victory for the Egyptians—at least according to the inscriptions Ramesses commissioned on temple walls when he returned home.
The reality was a little less glorious. The Hittites also claimed a victory, but the battle turned into a stalemate with neither side really gaining ground. If Ramesses hadn’t been so eager to believe the spies, his army might have been better prepared for the Hittite attack.
Octavian’s rashness had better results. As Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian could now take his great-uncle’s name as his own. So Gaius Octavius became Gaius Julius Ceasar Octavianus, though after the adoption he preferred to use the name Caesar. The move paid off because Julius Caesar’s troops remained loyal to their commander in death and rallied around Octavian as his adopted son. Because Julius Caesar had been the most powerful man in Rome, the name carried political weight as well. Thanks to that family connection, Octavian became consul, the highest position in the Senate, even though he was only nineteen. (Goldsworthy 124).
While Caesar’s name came with power, it didn’t guarantee military greatness. Just as Ramesses flubbed the Battle of Kadesh, Octavian lacked military genius—not that he would own his failings any more than Ramesses would. The credit for his great victory over Julius Caesar’s assassins belongs to Mark Antony, and Octavian’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra happened thanks to the efforts of one Marcus Agrippa. With Antony dead and Agrippa willing to play the role of loyal servant, Octavian could paint himself as a warrior on par with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Celebrate a triumph through the streets of Rome, build victory monuments, and people would come to believe in Octavian’s military genius.
Yes, Ramesses and Octavian were both masters of spin, but they were also men of the people. Since pharaohs were absolute monarchs, to say Ramesses needed to garner popular support may seem odd. But remember, Ramesses was born a commoner, and while he was the third member of his family to wear the crown, his dynasty had ruled for only a dozen or so years. Also, his grandfather had demonstrated that a nonroyal could claim the throne. Ramesses had to shore up his power fast before another upstart attempted a coup.
In her 2021 book The Good Kings, Egyptologist Kara Cooney argues that Ramesses crafted a form of celebrity kingship. He commissioned monuments on a grand scale and re-carved statues of his predecessors so they now bore his features. Many of these statues stood outside temple walls, accessible to anyone, rather than inside where only the priests could give offerings. Since Pharaoh was considered a living god, these images provided everyone access to divinity (Cooney 253). He elevated lower-class individuals to higher positions in the government and priesthood, creating a cohort of loyalists (Cooney 252). While previous pharaohs rarely portrayed their potential successors on monuments, Ramesses advertised his sons. He even built a labyrinthine tomb in the Valley of the Kings for the sons who predeceased him.
Octavian’s Rome was a republic, whose Senate was comprised of elected leaders from elite families. As mentioned earlier, Octavian used his adopted name, Caesar, to gain entry into the Senate and used his great-uncle’s popularity to his advantage. Although he belonged to one of Rome’s aristocratic families, Julius Caesar rose in politics by championing average Roman people. He also gained popularity among the soldiers, not only for his successes as a military commander, but for his willingness to share their hardships and fight beside them.
Octavian may have lacked his great-uncle’s military prowess, but he inherited plenty of Julius Caesar’s political savvy, which he then took up a notch. For all his ability to charm the masses, Julius Caesar couldn’t win over all of his fellow aristocrats. He accepted the title of dictator and seemed a little too interested in the possibility of becoming a king—something abhorrent to Romans. Octavian, on the other hand, rejected the idea of kingship. He didn’t even call himself an emperor—a term derived from the Latin imperator, an honorific given to Roman military commanders (Sommer 34). Instead, Octavian styled himself a princeps, a first among equals. Like Ramesses, he built monuments—allegedly transforming Rome from a city of bricks to one of marble (Pietkiewicz)—and recruited his own group of loyalists to shore up his power. He even advertised his family, portraying them as perfect models of Roman virtue and constructing a family mausoleum. He lived in a house on the Palatine, the highest hill in Rome. But he avoided regal trappings, dressing in simple tunics, which he claimed his wife made herself.
If Octavian had taken that journey up the Nile and passed the Ramesseum and Abu Simbel, Ramesses’s great temples, what would he have thought? If he could have viewed the pharaoh’s mummified remains, would he have dismissed Ramesses as a mere corpse?
Likewise, what might Ramesses have made of Octavian? Would he have seen a kindred spirit? Or would he have turned up his nose at this foreigner? Ramesses would’ve claimed bragging rights when it came to family. After all, he fathered well over one hundred children, while Octavian had only one daughter. That daughter, Julia, got caught breaking Rome’s adultery laws and spent the last twelve years of her life in exile. Of the five grandchildren she bore, none of the boys succeeded Octavian. The role of princeps passed to Octavian’s stepson instead. A little over five decades later, Octavian’s line died out with Nero, although the name Caesar remained as a title for the man in power.
Having fathered at least fifty sons, Ramesses’s line continued after his death. The monarchs of Egypt’s nineteenth and twentieth dynasties traced their ancestry back to him. Of the fifteen pharaohs that followed him, nine bore the name Ramesses.
Of course, in the realm of posterity, Octavian might have the last laugh. The name Caesar has become synonymous with kingship, and the words kaiser and czar derive from it. Octavian even left his mark on our calendar. Three years after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, the Senate awarded him the honorific Augustus, by which he is better known. They also renamed the eighth month—the month he conquered Egypt—August.
But while both men left their mark on history and both wielded absolute power, there remains one last difference. As pharaoh, Ramesses owned being an absolute monarch, while Octavian cloaked his power in the guise of being first among equals. In this regard, Ramesses appears honest and Octavian duplicitous.
SOURCES/RECOMMENDED READING:
Brand, Peter J. Ramesses II, Egypt’s Ultimate Pharaoh. Lockwood Press, 2023
Clayton, Peter A. Chronicle of the Pharaohs the Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers and Dynasties of Ancient Egypt. Thames & Hudson, 2012.
Cooney, Kara. The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World. National Geographic, 2021.
Everitt, Anthony. Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor. Random House, 2006.
Goldsworthy, Adrian Keith. Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. Yale University Press, 2014.
Pietkiewicz, Stefanie. “From Brick to Marble: Did Augustus Really Transform Rome?” UCLA Institute for Digital Research & Education, https://idre.ucla.edu/featured/from-brick-to-marble-did-augustus-really-transform-rome. Accessed 25 June 2024.
Sommer, Michael. The Complete Roman Emperor: Imperial Life at Court and on Campaign. Thames & Hudson, 2010.
IMAGE: Covers of Brand’s Ramesses II, Egypt’s Ultimate Pharaoh and Goldsworthy’s Augustus: First Emperor of Rome
Karen L. Kobylarz 