The Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius, Cleopatra, Virgil, Horace, the most glorious era of Rome and the foundations of Greco-Roman civilization. The fascinating story of Emperor Augustus and his daughter by the author of the famous "Stoner".

Julius Caesar surprises by naming his intellectual nephew Octavius as his successor. Despite initial hesitation and conspiracies against him, the young man, going through fire and iron, manages to defeat his internal and external enemies. The all-powerful Emperor Octavius Augustus begins to change everything with the motto "if it is someone's fate to change the world, it is his duty to first change himself."

The novel, written in epistolary form, tells the story of the emperor and his glorious era through memoirs, diaries, letters, descriptions of his contemporaries, from Julius Caesar, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, and Virgil to the women he married. The central role is played by the adventure of Augustus' beloved daughter Julia, who, violating her father's laws on marriage and adultery, found herself exiled to a remote island.

Augustus offers, on one hand, the impressive panorama of an era that many characterize as revolutionary, as the Roman Empire grew, reorganized, enjoyed a period of internal peace, the famous Pax Romana, and "imbibed" the Greek spirit, resulting in the flourishing of arts, philosophy, literature, and poets such as Virgil and Ovid. On the other hand, the book is also a story full of conspiracies of the Senate, court intrigues, political battles, civil wars, marriages of convenience, and forbidden love affairs of the most famous inhabitants of Rome.

In this glamorous background, Williams introduces us to another solitary man - like in Stoner, but this time all-powerful - and raises questions of sovereignty, individual responsibilities, relationships with enemies and friends, as he himself has stated, "the machinations are similar in universities, the Roman Empire, and modern Washington."