The war against the Germans won, Emperor Aurelius chooses the victorious General Maximus as his successor to the Roman empire. Commodus, Aurelius' heir, is jealous of this and enslaves Maximus to the gladiatorial arenas.

"Winner of the 1973 National Book Award. In Augustus, the third of his great novels, John Williams took on an entirely new challenge, a[n] historical novel set in classical Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him, transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in Butcher's Crossing...