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AUGUSTALES——AURELIANUS.
which they commanded interfered with. The augurs had authority to prevent the erection of buildings which would do this. They had also the power of consecrating priests, as well as of inaugurating a part of the localities intended for religious purposes, and the places where public business was carried on. They were always present at the comitia, and were authorized, if the signs which they saw or which were reported to them justified the proceeding, to announce the fact and postpone the business. If the constitutional character of a public act was called in question, the college of augurs had the exclusive power of deciding whether there was a flaw (vltium) in it, or not. If there were, the act was necessarily annulled.
By the end of the republican period the augurs, and the whole business of the auspices, had ceased to be regarded as deserving serious attention.
Augustales. A religious association at Rome, formed for the maintenance of the worship paid to the deified Csesars. (See municipium and sodalitas.)
Angnstinus (AurSlius). The greatest of the Latin Christian fathers. He was born 354 A.D. at Tagaste in Numidia. His father was a pagan, his mother, M5nica, a zealous Christian. After a wild life as a young man, he became professor of rhetoric in Tagaste, Carthage, Rome, and Milan, where he was converted to Christianity through the influence of Ambrose, and baptized in 387. He returned to Africa, and was ordained presbyter in 391, and bishop of Hippo in Numidia in 396. He died there in 430, after doing much good in the city during its siege by the Vandals. His literary activity was extraordinary. Four years before his death he reckons up the number of his works, exclusive of letters and sermons, as 93, making up 233 books. Among them are six books De Mustca, and essays on rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar. These productions, which testify to his interest in learning, were instalments of an encyclopaedic work on the seven liberal arts, modelled upon the Disciplines of Varro. Among his other writings two attracted especial notice on account of the extraordinary effect which they produced in after times. These are The Confessions, a history of his inner life in thirteen books, written in the form of a confession to the Almighty; and the De Civitate Dei, a work in twenty-two books, demonstrating the providential action of God in the development of human history.
Augustus [" consecrated by augury"]. An honorary title given in the year 27 b.c. to Octavianus, the founder of the Roman empire. It was not hereditary, but was taken by the succeeding emperors at the instance of the senate, a formality which was afterwards dispensed with. Thus it gradually became an official title. Properly speaking, it could only be assumed by the actual holder of the imperial dignity, not ! by his colleague. Marcus Aurelius was the first who broke through this rule. In 161 A.D. he conferred the entire imperial authority, with the title of Augustus, upon Lucius Verus, after whose death he elevated his son Commddus to the same position. This arrangement had the advantage of dispensing with the necessity of a further recognition of the colleague by the senate and people after the death of the reigning emperor. It was frequently adopted, until, under Diocletian, it developed into the division of the empire into an eastern and western portion, each under its own Augustus.
The title of Augustus was reserved exclusively for the emperor; but the corresponding feminine style of Augusta was assumed, as the highest of all honours, by the great ladies of the imperial house. The first of those who bore it was Livia, on whom her husband Octavianus conferred it by will. She was followed by Antonia, who received it from her grandson Caligula, The first lady who took it as consort of the reigning Caesar was Agrippina, the third wife of Claudius. After Domitian’s time it became the rule to confer the title of Augusta not only on the consort of the reigning emperor, but on others among their near relations, especially their daughters. This was generally done upon some appropriate occasion, and never without the special consent of the Csesar. In later times it was generally the senate who took the initiative in the matter.
Anlsenm. See theatre.
Anle. See house (Greek).
Aulds, Auletlke, Aulodlke. See Music.
Anrellanns (Ccelius). A Latin writer on medicine, a native of Sicca in Numidia, who flourished in the 5th century A.D. He was the author of two works on Acute and Chronic Diseases, the first in three, the second in five books. These are translations, fairly literal, but abridged, of works by the Greek physician Soranus, who lived in the last half of the 2nd century A.D. Caelius also wrote a compendium of the whole
