Why is Augustus considered the first Roman Emperor and not Julius Caesar ?
There is an article discussing this on Wikipedia. In the discussion of who was the first Roman Emperor one has to understand that at the end of the Roman Republic there was no new, and certainly not a single, title created with which to indicate the individual who had the supreme power as a monarch. Insofar as Emperor could be seen as the English translation of imperator, then Julius Caesar had been an emperor, like several Roman generals before him. Instead, by the end of the civil wars in which Julius Caesar had led his armies, it became clear on the one hand that there was certainly no consensus to return to the old-style monarchy, and that on the other hand the situation where several officials, bestowed with equal power by the senate, fought one another had to come to an end. Julius Caesar — and a few years later Octavian in an even more subtle and gradual way — worked towards several goals: accumulating offices and titles that were of the highest importance in the Republic; mak
