How did Augustus Caesar make Rome an empire?
He didn’t. Rome created its empire hundreds of years before him. It began with the conquest of other Italian territiories and city states. Then the three Punic wars added North Africa. At one moment about 150 BC, Attalus III, king of Pergamon in what is now Turkey left his kingdom to the Roman senate in his will. Rome got involved with Greece and the kings of Macedonia and wound up taking over Greece about 147 BC. What Augustus did was to add Egypt with the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in 17 BC. Augustus became the first man whom we call emperor because the senate voted him the majus imperium for life. This was the power to punish Roman citizens wirth death or beating without trial and was voted to every general who campaigned in foreign parts for the length of the campaign only. The man who held that power was called imperator, hence our English word emperor. In modern English, an empire is a state consisting of several nations ruled over by one central one. So first Rome got an emp
