Augustus had a huge private fortune. He possessed whole principalities, of which Josephus gives us a very striking example in the will of Herod, who bequeathed his property to the family of the Cæsars: such kings and tetrarchs very often left all that they had to the emperors. The stewards of the countries which belonged to these last, were the _procuratores Cæsaris_: they were generally knights, but never senators; they might even be imperial freedmen, though perhaps this was not yet the case under Augustus. In the provinces, the emperor was so absolute, that Augustus, for instance, changed the whole registration of land in Gaul without asking any body’s leave, were it only for form’s sake. The soldiers all swore fealty to the emperor, certainly also to the _imperium populi Romani_; but no one was bound to the consul. The establishment of the prætorian cohorts was no innovation. There had been such troops from the earliest times, being a sort of guards or orderlies, like the “_guides des généraux_” during the French revolution: they are to be met with in the Punic wars, and also in the civil wars, on both sides; and they had arisen out of the former _evocati_. Augustus had taken them back with him, and had founded twenty-eight military colonies, as a means of checking any popular movement; and that he might likewise curb these veterans themselves, he formed the _cohortes prætoriæ_, which in Italy represented in fact the armed Roman people: they were chiefly enlisted, or raised by conscription, from the districts of Latium which had been the strongholds of the Marian party. At first, he kept them scattered in Italy, so as to cause no alarm; but by degrees they were drawn nearer and nearer, until at last the _castrum prætorium_ before the city was built. Under Augustus there were about eight thousand of them.