In the tenth century ad the Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus conceived a peculiar project, to preserve all historical knowledge by reducing it to categorized excerpts from the classical historians. Among the remains of this prodigious undertaking are the excerpts of a biographical work dealing with the early life of Augustus by a friend of the Princeps, Nicolaus of Damascus. These excerpts deal with crucial events in the last decades of the Roman Republic and provide a singular account of the most notorious event in Roman history. For nearly a century the edition of the fragments of Nicolaus by Jacoby in his Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker has endured as the authoritative text and analysis of the Bios Kaisaros – and with good reason, given that scholar's akribea and comprehensive knowledge of Greek historiography. And although there have been five editions of the Bios in four languages since Jacoby, all have generally followed him in their Greek texts, dating and basic understanding of the nature of the work. Although I differ with Jacoby on the fundamental questions of the date of the Bios and the significance of how it relates to the autobiography of Augustus, long acquaintance with just one of the fragmentary authors in Jacoby's collection has only enhanced my admiration and wonder for that indispensable work of scholarship. Nevertheless, the analysis here is based on the ample evidence for the career of Nicolaus found in the fragments of his autobiography and in the works of Josephus to reconstruct when and why Nicolaus undertook his work on Augustus. A significant consideration throughout is the Bios as a literary artifact in relation to its historiographical context. This is not an issue Jacoby neglected, but in general work on the Bios has tended to treat it as a text to be mined for its “sources” (especially in the scholarship before Jacoby's edition) or used to confirm or contradict facts of Roman history found in other ancient sources.

The Greek text of Nicolaus has had the benefit of excellent editors. My text is based on an examination of photocopies of the two codices of the Bios, but it differs very little from the texts of de Boor and Buttner-Wobst found in the editio princeps of Constantine's encyclopedia and that of Jacoby.