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Updated: June 27, 2025
But the crowning touch of Augustus's religious policy was yet to come; this was the establishment of the worship of the Genius of the emperor. After Actium and in the earlier years of his reign it is certain that Augustus would not have thought of putting himself, even in the spiritualised form of his Genius, before the people as an object of worship.
Tacitus intended to have completed his labours by a history of Augustus's reign, which, however, he did not live to write. This is a great misfortune. But he has left us his opinion on the character and policy of Augustus in the first few chapters of the Annals, and a very valuable opinion it is.
It was thus no longer the Senate inviting the magistrates and the citizens in good and regular standing to perform a certain divine function, but it was the emperor inviting all the members of the community, citizens and non-citizens alike, to join with him in worshipping the gods of the new state. A great part of Augustus's success was unquestionably due to a certain form of moral courage.
Absurd details rise in the dream. An old crone is selling roasted chestnuts in the shadow of the temple of Castor and Pollux; a tipsy soldier is reeling to his quarters with his helmet stuck on wrong side foremost; a knot of Hebrew money-changers, with long curls and high caps, are talking eagerly in their own language, clutching the little bags they hide in the sleeves of their yellow Eastern gowns the men who mourned for Cæsar and for Augustus, whose descendants were to burn Rienzi's body among the thistles by Augustus's tomb, whose offspring were to breed the Pierleoni; a bright-eyed, skinny woman of the people boxes her daughter's ears for having smiled at one of the rich men's parasites, and the girl, already crying, still looks after the fashionable good-for-nothing, under her mother's upraised arm.
Thus, even in Augustus's time, when ill health and disappointment had soured his nature and disposed him to arbitrary actions, literature had felt the change. The exile of Ovid was a blow to the muses. We have seen how it injured his own genius, a decline over which he mourns, knowing the cause but impotent to overcome it.
His family remained one of the chief in Rome down to the time of Marcellus, the nephew of Augustus, who was the son of Octavia, Augustus's sister, and Caius Marcellus. He died in the office of ædile while yet a bridegroom, having just married Augustus's daughter Julia. In honour of his memory his mother Octavia established a library, and Augustus built a theatre, both of which bore his name.
Is she daughter, or grand-daughter, of the famous Madame de Cosel, in King Augustus's time? Is she young or old, ugly or handsome? I do not wonder that people are wonderfully surprised at our tameness and forbearance, with regard to France and Spain.
In those old Roman days a gentleman's education was not complete until he had taken a theological course at the seminary and learned how to translate entrails. Caesar Augustus's education received this final polish. All through his life, whenever he had poultry on the menu he saved the interiors and kept himself informed of the Deity's plans by exercising upon those interiors the arts of augury.
And Aunt Clara, Uncle Augustus's wife, you know, who is rather quick, said it depended whether the minister of the Gospel was a gentleman or a shoe-black, because Mrs. Donnithorne was attending a dissenting chapel then where the preacher was quite a common uneducated sort of person. And after that they would not talk to each other, and, altogether, I remember, it was very unpleasant.
Yonder is quite a large town clustering round the extreme peak of a mountain at least three thousand feet high, and utterly bald of vegetation; there is Eza perched upon a rock rising perpendicularly from the sea, so that a stone thrown from the church-tower would fall straight into the waves below through fifteen hundred feet of space; far away in the distance, and close upon the shore, looking as white as a band of pearls, are the villas of Mentone, and just in front of them the castle-crowned heights of Monaco; yonder, almost touching the clouds, is the famous sanctuary of Laghetto, and there is Augustus's monument at La Tarbia a solitary round tower, so solidly built that it has resisted the ravages of eighteen centuries.
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