One of the great determining events in ancient and modern history took place on January 1, 27 B.C.E., when Gaius Caesar Octavianus, returned from his successful campaigns in the East, was solemnly invested with the civil and military primacy of the Roman world. The importance of that particular historic moment is due of course not to anything in itself, but to the fact that it was the external and overt stamp put upon the development of centuries. The basic governmental scheme of ancient society—the city-state—was bankrupt. Its affairs were being wound up, and the receiver was in possession. The reconstitution by Augustus appeared to the men of his day as the inauguration of an epoch. Poets hailed the dawn of a new day, and unqualifiedly saluted its great figure as a living god.[275] But we shall receive a false impression of the time and its condition, if we assume it to resemble an empire of modern type. The Roman empire as founded by Augustus was simply the expression of the fact that between the Euphrates and the Ocean, between the Danube and the great African Desert, all the various forms of constituted authority were subject to revision by the will of the Roman people, _i.e._ those who actually lived, or had an indefeasible right to live, within the walls of the Roman city. The _populus Romanus_ had chosen to delegate functions of great extent and importance to a single man, to Augustus; but the power wielded by Augustus was not in any sense the power of an unrestrained master, nor was the rule of the Roman people the actual and direct government of the nations subject to it. It would be quite impossible to enumerate the various communities which, under Augustus, as they had before, maintained their customs as the unbroken tradition of many centuries. In the mountains of Asia Minor it is likely that such a people as the Carduchi, whom Xenophon encountered there, were still under Augustus determining their mutual rights and obligations by rules that were either the same as those of Xenophon’s time or directly derived from those rules.[276] So the cartouches on the Egyptian monuments might have been read by the clerks of Amen-hem-et, and would have excited no queries from them. The communities of the Mediterranean enforced their law—that is, the rules which constrained the individual member to respect the claims of his fellows—without noticeable break. The difference was that there was a limit to which it might be enforced, and that limit was set by the caprice of another and a paramount people.