Augustus Becomes Emperor

Gaius Octavius — great-nephew and adopted heir of Julius Caesar — was eighteen when Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. Over the next seventeen years he defeated his rivals one by one: Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42, the followers of Sextus Pompey by 36, and finally Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium on 2 September 31 BC. On 16 January 27 BC the Senate, in a carefully staged session, granted him the title Augustus — "the revered one" — along with proconsular command of every province where legions were stationed and the tribunician power for life. Officially the Republic still existed; in fact Augustus was the first Roman emperor. His forty-one-year reign (27 BC – AD 14) gave the Mediterranean world the longest internal peace it had ever known, the Pax Romana, in which Roman law, Roman roads, and Roman naval suppression of piracy made possible the rapid spread of the gospel a generation later. Augustus is named once in the New Testament, in Luke 2:1: "In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered." That census brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem and fulfilled the prophecy of Micah 5:2 that Messiah would be born there.