Outside the Vienna Secession building stands one of the more theatrical bronze monuments in Europe: the Marc Anton Gruppe, cast in 1899 by the Austrian sculptor Arthur Strasser. It shows Mark Antony in full Roman dress, seated in a chariot pulled not by horses but by four lions — two fully grown, two younger, all rendered with remarkable musculature and a controlled ferocity that has not softened in 125 years of Viennese weather. The patina has gone deep green. The lions look ready to move. Antony sits above them with the bearing of a man accustomed to commanding things that could kill him.

Gaius Octavius was eighteen years old when Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and nobody thought he mattered. He was Caesar’s great-nephew, slight and sickly, without military reputation or political standing. He had one asset: Caesar’s will named him adopted son and primary heir. He used that asset with a patience and calculation that none of his older, more experienced rivals understood until it was too late.

The name by which history knows him — Augustus, the revered one — was a title conferred by the Senate in 27 BC, seventeen years after Caesar’s death and four years after he had defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, eliminating the last serious rival to his control of the Roman world. Between the teenager nobody feared and the man the Senate was now calling Augustus lay fourteen years of civil war, shifting alliances, calculated betrayals, and the systematic elimination of everyone who stood between Octavian and sole power. He was very good at it.

In 8 AD, Augustus exiled Ovid to Tomis on the Black Sea — modern Constanța in Romania, the edge of the civilized world as Rome understood it — for reasons he described cryptically as a poem and a mistake. The poem was the Ars Amatoria, a didactic work on the art of seduction published nearly a decade earlier, which Augustus had apparently decided was a contribution to the moral looseness he had spent his reign trying to suppress. The mistake is unknown and has generated scholarly speculation for two thousand years. Ovid spent the remaining ten years of his life on the Black Sea shore writing poems of exile — the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto — that constitute the most sustained literary response to political persecution in antiquity, and he died without recovering the imperial favor he spent those years petitioning for.

Virgil died in 19 BC having asked that the Aeneid be burned. He had spent eleven years on it, had not finished it to his satisfaction, and left instructions that the manuscript be destroyed rather than published incomplete. Augustus overruled the request. Two of Virgil’s literary executors, Varius and Tucca, published what existed. The unfinished poem became the foundational text of Western literature, the work that every subsequent European writer of ambition had to read and respond to, the poem against which Dante measured himself when he chose Virgil as his guide through Hell. The work Virgil thought too imperfect to survive has survived everything.