It is comparatively easy to rule a small city well, where fraud and self-seeking can be quickly detected; but when Rome began to extend her boundaries and to employ more people in the work of government, unscrupulous politicians appeared. These built up private fortunes during their term of office: they became senators, and the Senate ceased to represent the will of the people and began to govern in the interests of a small group of wealthy men. Members of their families became governors of provinces, first in Italy, and then as conquests continued, across the mountains in Gaul and Spain, and beyond the seas in Egypt and Asia Minor. Except in name, senators and governors ceased to be simple citizens and lived as princes, with officials and servants ready to carry out their slightest wish. Perhaps it may seem odd that the Roman people, once so fond of liberty that they had driven into exile the kings who oppressed them, should afterwards let themselves be bullied or neglected by a hundred petty tyrants; but in truth the people had changed even more than the class of ‘patricians’ to whom they found themselves in bondage. No longer pure Roman or Latin, but through conquest and intermarriage of every race from the stalwart Teuton to the supple Oriental or swarthy Egyptian, few amongst the men and women crowding the streets of Rome remembered or reverenced the traditions of her early days. Rome stood for military glory, luxury, culture, at her best for even-handed justice, but no longer for an ideal of liberty. If national pride was satisfied, and adequate food and amusement provided, the Roman populace was content to be ruled from above and to hail rival senators as masters, according to the extent of their promises and success. A failure to fulfil such promises, resulting in a lost campaign or a dearth of corn, would throw the military tyrant of the moment from his pedestal, but only to set up another in his place. It was an easy transition from the rule of a corrupt Senate to that of an autocrat. ‘Better one tyrant than many’ was the attitude of mind of the average citizen towards Octavius Caesar, when under the title of Augustus he gathered to himself the supreme command over army and state and so became the first of the Emperors. Had he been a tactless man and shouted his triumph to the Seven Hills he would probably have fallen a victim to an assassin’s knife; but he skilfully disguised his authority and posed as being only the first magistrate of the state. Under his guiding hand the Senate was reformed, and its outward dignity rather increased than shorn. Augustus could issue his own ‘edicts’ or commands independently of the Senate’s consent; but he more frequently preferred to lay his measures before it, and to let them reach the public as a senatorial decree. In this he ran no risk, for the senators, impressive figures in the eyes of the ordinary citizen, were really puppets of his creation. At any minute he could cast them away.