Augustus is called the first Roman emperor, but he never used the word, and the care he took not to is the whole story of how he survived. Rome had killed his adoptive father for looking too much like a king, so the settlement of 27 BC was built entirely out of republican parts. The Senate gave him the name Augustus, meaning simply "the revered," and the style of princeps, "first citizen" — the man at the head of the queue, not above it. Imperator he had held since 38 BC as a victory title, the sort any successful general might be acclaimed with. He took tribunician power and censorial power, both borrowed from offices that had always existed, and he pointedly declined to keep standing for the consulship, because holding it year after year was exactly what a monarch would do. Nothing in the arrangement was formally new. Everything about it was.

King & Country put him in a gilded muscled cuirass and the red cloak of a commander, pteruges at the shoulder and waist, the scroll held out at arm's length in his right hand — which is the honest emphasis, because the scroll did far more of the work than the armour ever did. He is the last chapter of a story that begins with Gaius Julius Caesar and turns on The Death of Caesar, the murder that handed a nineteen-year-old a name worth an army; the battles that followed were largely won for him by General Marcus Agrippa. In a diorama he wants distance rather than a melee — a step of marble, a standard-bearer, a scattering of togate figures at a respectful remove — the leadership vignette that a shelf of legionaries is arranged around.

Model: ROM039 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set