On his return to Rome new honors and new ovations awaited him. The dignity and pride of Roman citizenship seemed to have been lost entirely in the crouching servility with which the most distinguished and most highly stationed citizens prostrated themselves at the feet of the all-powerful ruler. Resistance to Cæsar had apparently disappeared. All bowed to his surpassing genius and ability, and to these qualities he added acts of clemency, kindness, and gentleness, which won him the hearts even of those who, from political principle, had opposed him. But while thus openly the more than imperial power of Cæsar was generally recognized, and while the Senate and the tribunes had been degraded to the position of mere tools to his autocratic will, there still remained in the hearts of a number of high-minded patriots the hope and anxious desire to save the republican form of government from the grasping ambition of the conqueror, who was evidently not satisfied with being Imperator in fact, but wanted to be also Imperator in name. At least the repeated attempts of the most intimate friends and most trusted lieutenants of Cæsar to induce him to accept the crown at the hands of a subservient people, and his rather hesitating conduct in refusing these proposals, seemed to confirm this suspicion. These enthusiastic Republicans cautiously disguised their hostility to the Imperator under the mask of devoted friendship. Their hope was, perhaps, that Cæsar’s imperial régime would be but temporary and that, like Sulla, he would sooner or later get tired of his dictatorship, and resign his imperial honors. But Cæsar did not think of abdicating the honors he had won; on the contrary, every act and every public utterance of his indicated that he wished to prolong and augment them rather than to abandon them. In public he was anxious to show his preëminence. He appeared dressed in the costume of the kings of Alba, and with royal insignia. One day, when the entire Senate waited upon him in front of the temple of Venus, he remained seated while he was addressed, during the entire ceremony. His statue at the Capitol was placed beside those of the ancient kings of Rome, as though he were to continue their line. New titles of honor, not to say worship, were added to those which had been conferred upon him at the first moment of his brilliant victories, and his lieutenants and followers welcomed and adopted them as something that was due to his superhuman wisdom and greatness. He was called not only “Father of the Country,” but “Demi-God,” the “Invincible God,” “Jupiter Julius,”--as though Jupiter himself had taken mortal form and shape in him.