magnanimity, and the fascinations of his popular qualities,--were
all, in the circumstances of those times, and in _his_ position, of a
tendency dangerously uncivic.
So remarkable was the opposition, at all points, between the second
Cæsar and his rival, that whereas Anthony even in his virtues seemed
dangerous to the state, Octavius gave a civic coloring to his most
indifferent actions, and, with a Machiavelian policy, observed a
scrupulous regard to the forms of the Republic, after every fragment
of the republican institutions, the privileges of the republican
magistrates, and the functions of the great popular officers, had been
absorbed into his own autocracy. Even in the most prosperous days of the
Roman State, when the democratic forces balanced, and were balanced
by, those of the aristocracy, it was far from being a general or common
praise, that a man was of a civic turn of mind, _animo civili_. Yet this
praise did Augustus affect, and in reality attain, at a time when the
very object of all civic feeling was absolutely extinct; so much are
men governed by words. Suetonius assures us, that many evidences were
current even to his times of this popular disposition (_civilitas_) in
the emperor; and that it survived every experience of servile adulation
in the Roman populace, and all the effects of long familiarity with
irresponsible power in himself. Such a moderation of feeling, we are
almost obliged to consider as a genuine and unaffected expression of his
real nature; for, as an artifice of policy, it had soon lost its uses.
And it is worthy of notice, that with the army he laid aside those
popular manners as soon as possible, addressing them as _milites_, not
(_according_ to his earlier practice) as _commilitones_. It concerned
his own security, to be jealous of encroachments on his power. But of
his rank, and the honors which accompanied it, he seems to have been
uniformly careless. Thus, he would never leave a town or enter it by
daylight, unless some higher rule of policy obliged him to do so; by
which means he evaded a ceremonial of public honor which was burdensome
to all the parties concerned in it. Sometimes, however, we find that
men, careless of honors in their own persons, are glad to see them
settling upon their family and immediate connections. But here again
Augustus showed the sincerity of his moderation. For upon one occasion,
when the whole audience in the Roman theatre had risen upon the entrance
of his two adopted sons, at that time not seventeen years old, he
was highly displeased, and even thought it necessary to publish
his displeasure in a separate edict. It is another, and a striking
illustration of his humility, that he willingly accepted of public
appointments, and sedulously discharged the duties attached to them, in
conjunction with colleagues who had been chosen with little regard to
his personal partialities. In the debates of the senate, he showed the
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