Welcome to our new course in Valencia on Augustus, the sixth chapter in the History of Rome cycle at the L’Iber Museum.
NEW COURSE · HISTORY OF ROME CYCLE · L’IBER MUSEUM
How Rome stopped being a republic without anyone daring to say so
In short: new course «Augustus, the Man Who Changed Rome» — the sixth chapter in Museo L’Iber’s History of Rome cycle, 9 sessions (2 March to 29 June 2027) on the transformation of the Republic into an Empire after Caesar’s assassination, taught by Dr. Alejandro Noguera Borel.
We present a new course in Valencia on Augustus, the sixth in our History of Rome cycle at the L’Iber Museum. Over nine sessions, from 2 March to 29 June 2027, we cover the years from the assassination of Julius Caesar to the death of Augustus. This is, in fact, the exact moment when the Roman Republic, with almost five hundred years of history behind it, became an Empire. And no one ever signed its death certificate. The course is taught by Dr Alejandro Noguera Borel, historian and director of the L’Iber Museum.
| Dates | 2 March – 29 June 2027 |
| Duration | 9 sessions of 90 min · alternate Tuesdays |
| Time | 6:30 – 8:00 PM (CET) |
| Format | In person and online (Zoom) · recorded classes |
| Venue | Tapestry Hall, Palacio de Malferit |
The course in Valencia on Augustus
This is the sixth consecutive course in the History of Rome cycle that Dr Alejandro Noguera teaches at the L’Iber Museum. We began several years ago with the founding of the city. Since then we have covered the monarchy, the Republic, its crises and its collapse. Now we reach the moment that changes everything.
Specifically, the course covers the period from the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC to the death of Augustus in 14 AD. These are six decisive decades. In them, a republic of almost five hundred years was wound up, wars were won and lost on three continents, and a system of government was built that, with variations, survived for another five centuries.
There are nine sessions. Five narrate the political history in chronological order. The other four are thematic sessions: society, the enemies of the East, the Germanic peoples, culture and propaganda. We interweave them deliberately, because this is the story of flesh-and-blood people: ambitions, love affairs, betrayals and decisions that changed the fate of an entire world.
Course programme
Session 1 · 2 March · “Caesar’s Revenge” Political history
From the assassination to Philippi (44–42 BC)
The tyrannicides believed that once the tyrant was dead, the Republic would restore itself. They hadn’t reckoned with Caesar’s will, with Mark Antony, and above all with an eighteen-year-old boy named Octavian. The session opens with the Ides of March. It moves through the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate, one of the most ruthless acts of vengeance in Roman history. And it culminates at Philippi, where Brutus and Cassius took the last republican hope to their graves.
Session 2 · 9 March · “Who Paid for the Civil Wars?” Thematic session
Society and economy
The civil wars were not fought only on the battlefield. They were also fought on the Italian farms confiscated to pay veterans, in the workshops of newly wealthy freedmen, and in the forums, where fortunes changed hands overnight. We will also discuss slavery as a productive engine, and the women who managed entire estates while their husbands were proscribed. And we’ll answer an uncomfortable question: who actually paid for all of it?
Session 3 · 6 April · “Antony, Cleopatra and the Dream of the East” Political history
The eastern project (41–33 BC)
The most famous love affair of antiquity was also a political alliance of the first order: Cleopatra needed legions, Antony needed the treasury of Egypt. But there’s more to it. Antony became Hellenized in the East: he adopted its customs, its court, even its public image, to the point where Rome stopped recognizing him as one of its own. Two rival visions of the world were at stake: a Rome looking towards the western Mediterranean, and an empire that would look towards Alexandria and the Hellenistic East. We’ll examine the Donations of Alexandria and the propaganda machine that turned Cleopatra — and an increasingly eastern Antony — into the threat Rome needed in order to justify a civil war as though it were a foreign one.
Session 4 · 20 April · “The Eternal Rival: Parthians and Enemies of the East” Thematic session
The eastern problem
The Parthians were the one power the Roman Empire never managed to subdue. And yet theirs was a deeply Hellenized world: their kings minted coins with Greek legends, their courts imitated Hellenistic customs, and many of their client kingdoms were, culturally, as Greek as they were Persian. We’ll look at their army, their political structure and their role as permanent arbiter of the Middle East: Armenia as a chessboard, Judaea and the client kingdoms, and the wound of Carrhae, which Antony tried and failed to avenge. Also Augustus’s masterstroke in 20 BC, when he recovered the captured eagles through diplomacy and sold it to Rome as a military victory. This is the eastern problem that every one of his successors would inherit.
Session 5 · 4 May · “Actium: The Battle for the World” Political history
31–30 BC
The greatest naval battle of antiquity didn’t last as long as the textbooks say. In this session we reconstruct what really happened off the cape of Actium: why Antony and Cleopatra fled, and what that flight actually meant. We’ll also cover the conquest of Egypt, the death of the two lovers, and the annexation of the richest kingdom in the Mediterranean as the victor’s personal property. This was the day it was decided that the West would be Roman, not Hellenistic.
Session 6 · 18 May · “Beyond the Rhine: The Germanic Peoples” Thematic session
The peoples of the north
We’ll study the Germanic peoples by setting archaeology against the Roman sources, starting with Tacitus: their social organization, their military technology, and their shifting relationship with Rome. We’ll look at the planned province between the Rhine and the Elbe, which Augustus came close to achieving. And at Arminius, the Cheruscan prince trained in the Roman army who ultimately betrayed it. In 9 AD, in the Teutoburg Forest, three entire legions vanished: the greatest military disaster of the reign. The session closes with the Cantabrian Wars and the final integration of Hispania.
Session 7 · 1 June · “The Art of Not Looking Like a King” Political history
The constitutional revolution of the Principate
This is the most sophisticated political operation in ancient history. In this session we analyse the constitutional settlements of 27 and 23 BC: how absolute power is accumulated by spreading it across ordinary magistracies, how a Senate is tamed without being abolished, and how auctoritas — moral authority — can be worth more than any legal title. Caesar failed because he wanted to look like a king. Augustus succeeded precisely because he refused to. And beside him, in the shadows and holding no official post whatsoever, Livia wielded a real power that traditional historiography has taken centuries to acknowledge.
Session 8 · 15 June · “The Golden Age” Thematic session
Culture, art and propaganda
Augustus found Rome built of brick and left it built of marble. In this session we look at how a regime builds its legitimacy through beauty: Virgil’s Aeneid as a state epic, the circle of Maecenas, Horace, and the mysterious exile of Ovid. Also the Ara Pacis, the Forum of Augustus and the Mausoleum, along with the marriage and morality laws that tried to redesign citizens’ private lives. Ultimately, all these projects share a single conviction: power that goes untold and uncelebrated does not last.
Session 9 · 29 June · “The Twilight of the Father of the Fatherland” Political history
The succession and death of Augustus (14 AD)
The man who controlled everything could not control his own succession. Marcellus, Agrippa, Gaius and Lucius: the heirs who died before him, one after another, in a string of tragedies Augustus experienced as a personal curse. The exile of his daughter Julia, condemned over scandals that were, above all, a political threat. Livia’s long shadow, and the Tiberius solution: an heir nobody had wanted in the first place, whom Augustus himself accepted almost reluctantly. Finally, we’ll look at his last days at Nola and the Res Gestae as monumental autobiography and political testament — the account Augustus himself wanted to leave for posterity. And we’ll close the course with the big question that sums up everything we’ve seen: did Augustus found an empire, or merely postpone its collapse?
Who is this course in Valencia on Augustus for?
- Anyone who has followed the previous courses in the cycle: this one picks up exactly where The Twilight of the Republic left off. There’s nothing you need to catch up on.
- Anyone joining for the first time: the first session sets out all the context you need. No prior study of history or the classics required.
- Teachers, philologists, archaeologists and guides looking to update their knowledge with recent scholarship.
- University students of History, Art History, Classical Philology, Archaeology, Law, Tourism or Fine Arts.
- Anyone with genuine intellectual curiosity who wants to understand, not just to know facts.
The course requires attention, not a degree.
Your instructor: Dr Alejandro Noguera Borel
Dr Alejandro Noguera Borel is a historian specializing in Ancient History and Classical Archaeology. He holds a degree in History from the Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne and a degree in Classical and Oriental Archaeology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he also obtained a diploma in Classical and Oriental Languages jointly awarded with the Collège de France. He also holds a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Valencia and a Master’s in Museology from the Complutense University of Madrid.
He has been teaching since the nineteen-nineties. Since then he has taught at the University of Valencia, the Universitat Politècnica de València, the Cardenal Herrera-CEU San Pablo University, the University of Athens, and the Fundación Libertas 7, where he has taught the history of both Rome and Greece. He has also written, edited and translated academic and popular works in Spanish, French, English, Italian and Valencian.
For several years now he has been building a rigorous yet accessible cycle on the history of Rome at the L’Iber Museum. We began with the founding of the city and have arrived, course by course, at the fall of the Republic. This is the sixth chapter in that journey.
→ View Dr Noguera Borel’s full CV
Course objectives
By the end of this course in Valencia on Augustus, participants will be able to:
- Reconstruct the sequence of events from 44 BC to 14 AD and understand why things happened as they did — not as something inevitable, but as the result of specific decisions.
- Understand the Principate as a political system: its actual legal mechanisms, how it differed from Caesar’s dictatorship and from the later Empire, and the reasons for its extraordinary durability.
- Place Rome within its international context: who the Parthians were, what the Germanic peoples meant for imperial strategy, and how the system of client kingdoms worked.
- Read ancient sources critically: telling fact apart from narrative, information from propaganda, historical events from myths constructed afterwards.
- Recognize the Augustan imprint on Western art, literature, political vocabulary and institutions — because that imprint reaches all the way to the present day.
What the course in Valencia on Augustus includes
- Digital dossier per session: annotated timeline, maps, translated ancient sources and basic bibliography. Sent after each class.
- Sources studied in class: the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Suetonius, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Velleius Paterculus and Nicolaus of Damascus. Also coins, inscriptions and monuments, treated as documents.
- Visual presentations: reconstructions of Augustan Rome, campaign maps, genealogical trees of the Julio-Claudian family and comparative timelines.
- Recordings of every session, available during the course and for the following three months. If you miss a class, you won’t miss out.
- Private course channel for questions and extra materials between sessions.
- Certificate of participation issued by the L’Iber Museum.
Enrolment for the course in Valencia on Augustus
| Option | Price | Book |
|---|---|---|
| Full course €190 until 15 January 2027, then €220 | from €190 | Buy → |
| Previous students and Friends of the Museum | €190 | Buy → |
| Students under 26 | €150 | Buy → |
| Single session (please specify which one in your order) | €30 | Buy → |
Payment plans available. As a result, the full course works out 19 % cheaper than adding up all nine individual sessions. You can also book by email or phone if you prefer.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need prior knowledge of Roman history?
No. The first session provides all the context you need. The course requires attention, not a degree.
Can I take the course if I don’t live in Valencia?
Yes. Classes are streamed live via Zoom and recorded. The 6:30 PM (CET) time slot falls in the morning in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile.
What happens if I miss a session?
Nothing — every class is recorded and stays available during the course and for the following three months.
Is there a discount if I took the previous course or I’m a Friend of the Museum?
Yes. Previous students and Friends of the Museum pay €190 instead of €220.
Is it better to take the full course or individual sessions?
The full course: it actually costs 19% less than adding up all nine individual sessions, and includes materials, a certificate and access to the digital resources.
How do I enrol in the course in Valencia on Augustus?
You can enrol online directly from this website, in the Enrolment section. You can also write to info@museoliber.org, call +34 963 918 675, or come by Calle Caballeros, 20-22, in Valencia.
Enrolment in the course in Valencia on Augustus
You can reserve your place on the course in Valencia on Augustus by email or by phone. Places are limited.
Email: info@museoliber.org
Phone: +34 963 918 675
Address: Carrer de los Caballeros, 20-22, Valencia
The online format lets you follow the course from anywhere in the world. The 6:30 PM (CET) time slot works with the morning in Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile.
