lassical Civilization. Essay Assignment on the Age of Augustus

Essay on classic civilizations. The specific essay topic is as follows:

Should Augustus’ autobiography, the Res Gestae, be dismissed as an exaggerated and distorted work of propaganda, or does it have value as a historical source?

One of the 5 sources needed must be the primary source but the other 4 could be any of the given secondary sources.

Primary:

Res gestae divi Augusti. Text, Translation and Commentary ed. Alison Cooley (Cambridge, 2009)
translated by T. Bushell (1913) at http://web.archive.org/web/20170226023749/http://classics.mit.edu/Augustus/deeds.html

Secondary (books):

A. H. M. Jones, Augustus (1970)

P. Southern, Augustus (1998)

Barbara Levick, Augustus: Image and Substance (2010)

D. Earl, The Age of Augustus (1968)

K. Galinsky, The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus (Cambridge, 2005)

M. Goodman, The Roman World, 44BC – AD180 (Routledge, 1997), chapter 4.

R. Mellor, The Roman Historians (Routledge, 1999) pp. 179-183 (on the autobiography of Augustus)

Secondary (articles available via JSTOR):

A. Gordon, “Notes on the “Res Gestae” of Augustus”, California Studies in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 1, (1968), pp. 125-138

Requirements:

Your paper should be between 1500 and 2000 words, in 12 point Times New Roman font. Your paper should have a clear structure, with an introduction, developing paragraphs, conclusion and thesis statement. All the topics are argumentative, presented in an either-or style. However, you are allowed to take a position somewhere in the middle if you wish. You are not restricted to three paragraphs. You must make use of proper citation (in the form of footnotes), and a bibliography should list all the works consulted for the paper.