WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Monumentum Ancyranum: The Deeds of Augustus cover

Monumentum Ancyranum: The Deeds of Augustus

Chapter 7: III. Divisions of the Text.
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

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.

III. Divisions of the Text.

The text may be roughly divided into three sections. Chapters one to fourteen give the various offices held by Augustus, and the honors bestowed upon him; chapters fifteen to twenty-four recount his expenditures for the good of the state and the people; and the remaining chapters, twenty-five to thirty-five, give the statement of his various achievements in war, and his works of a more peaceful character. This classification will not hold rigorously, but is true in the main.

The division into chapters or paragraphs is marked in the Latin text by making the first line of each chapter project a little to the left of the remaining lines. Each such paragraph is relatively complete. And the use of such a topical method marks a new manner of composition quite different from the old annalistic style of Roman historiography.