Pat Southern takes us through the life of Octavius/Octavian/Augustus, attempting to focus on the life of the man rather than the history of the Triumvirate and the establishment of the Principate. She does so competently enough with almost half of the book devoted to Octavian's youth and the Triumvirate, the majority of the rest of the book narrating the next quarter of a century and considering some knotty questions about Augustus's exact constitutional position at various points, and the final two decades of his life taken at something of a gallop.

The book could have done with some better editing -- in particular the endnotes (one per paragraph of text) quickly became irritating in the way they often repeated the text verbatim only with sources and references added. I lost count of the number of times she mentioned that after Augustus lost his temper in the Senate he admitted that he would not have done so if Agrippa or Maecenas had been there to restrain him. ( )