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The First Emperor
of China and the founders of the Roman Empire
Caesar Augustus is usually called the first Roman emperor, but
his fortune depended on his adoptive father Julius Caesar. Shihuangdi 秦始皇帝, literally First Emperor,
is the unambiguous founder of imperial China. These three men were all great
imperial conquerors.
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1. The conquests of Caesar and Augustus.
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2. The unification of China by Qin.
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Their political achievements were even more
important. They instituted similar centralized monarchies to govern the
enormous territories, brining prolonged peace to lands ravaged by centuries
of war. In the process, they destroyed the old form of government: a republic
in the West, feudalistic parceling of sovereignty in the East. The creative
destruction antagonized the old ruling classes, senatorial aristocrats in
Rome and, in China, feudalistic aristocrats and their ideological heir,
Confucians. The resistances were fierce. Caesar was assassinated. The First
Emperor escaped three close-call attempts, but his Qin Dynasty fell shortly
after his death and his posthumous reputation did not escape assassination.
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3. The assassination of Caesar.
The assassination of
Caesar in the senatorial debating chamber. A group of aristocrats, led by Brutus
and Cassius, stabbed him dead beneath
Pompey’s statue. (Photo Scala,
Florence.)
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4. The attempted assassination of the First
Emperor.
The attempted
assassination of the future First Emperor (right) by Jing Ke, who gained
audience as a diplomatic envoy with a dagger hidden inside a scroll of map.
Tackled by an attendant (left), Jing threw his
dagger, which struck a pillar. (Rubbing of a second century tomb relief.)
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Caesar destroyed the Republic in a civil
war, but offered no durable political institution to replace it. This had to
wait for his heir Octavian, who won another round of civil war to become
Augustus. In contrast, the First Emperor established the political
architecture of imperial China, which would last for more than two millennia.
Augustus and the Han Dynasty that succeeded Qin were more successful in
compromising with the elites, Roman senators and Chinese literati-officials,
whom they made junior partners in lording over the common people.
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5. Augustus.
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A contemporary statue of
Augustus. (Musei Vaticani, Rome). The outstretched right hand is a gesture
of authority, part of a standard artistic motif called an adlocutio (giving a speech), seen in
many works, for example the equestrian statute of Marcus Aurelius.
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6. The First Emperor of China.
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The ancient Chinese left
no image of themselves. Later artists produced many imaginary “portraits”
of the First Emperor with no resemblance to each other. This one, probably
the most popular in Chinese literature, strikes a curiously Roman posture
unseen in the “portraits” of subsequent emperors.
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Augustus and the First Emperor each projected his image of an ideal emperor in writing. A few
months before his death, Augustus wrote
his Res Gestae (Achievements), which was placed on
bronze tablets in front of his mausoleum. Unlike Chinese rulers accustomed to
hiding in palaces, the First Emperor diligently toured the country to inspect
conditions on the ground. He left stone inscriptions on various mountains he ascended,
publicity more attuned to the Romans than the Chinese. The texts of both
emperors survived. Physical remnants suffered the ravage of time.
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7. Augustus' Achievements.
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A detail showing the first lines of Augustus’ Res Gestae, from the
temple of Augustus and Roma, Ankara.
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8. The First Emperor's inscription.
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A surviving part of the First Emperor’s stele erected on Mount
Langya, Shangdong.
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