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The text presents a first-person funerary inscription offering an official summary of a ruler's public life, listing offices held, military and diplomatic actions, legislative measures, public benefactions, and building projects. This edition reproduces the original Latin text alongside a Greek translation and an English rendering, and it includes a historical introduction recounting the inscription's discovery and transmission. Philological notes, textual variants, and a bibliography accompany the texts, with the Greek often supplying readings where the Latin is damaged and the commentary explaining emendations and interpretive choices for students and scholars.
The corroborations of the inscription by other inscriptions, coins and later historians, as well as by allusions in contemporary literature, form an interesting study. And the trustworthiness of the record becomes more manifest the more one compares its statements with those of other writers. Only one point has been found where Augustus makes what might be challenged as a perversion of fact. (Cf. c. 2, note 16.)