We cannot be certain that this was encouraged by Augustus himself. There is nothing in his character that indicates any special sympathy with the point of view demanded by it; nothing of that daemonic strain noticeable in Alexander, which makes it easy to believe that the latter was one of the first to be convinced by the salutation of the priests of Ammon. But Augustus recognized at once the value for unity that the tendency to deify the monarch possessed. The reverence for the living monarch, to be transformed into an undisguised worship at his death, was, however, to be superimposed upon existing forms. Nothing was more characteristically Roman than Augustus’ eagerness to make it clear that the vast domain of the empire was to remain, as before, a mass of disparate communities of which the _populus Romanus_ was only one, although a paramount one, and that in each of these communities every effort was to be made to maintain the ancestral ritual in government and worship. What he added was simply the principle that to keep the community together, to prevent the chaos and anarchy of a dissolution of the empire, it was necessary to bestow on the _princeps_, on the First Citizen of the paramount Roman people, such powers and functions as would assure the coherence of the whole. These powers he selected himself. Such a step as that taken by the Constitution of Caracalla, which attempted to enforce a legal merging of all the communities into a single state, would have been nothing else than abhorrent to Augustus.[280] And, indeed, it was a distinctly un-Roman idea. In Rome Augustus was chiefly intent upon a restoration of everything that could well be restored in the social, religious, and political life of the people. Certain of the political elements, such as the actual sovereignty of the _populus_, as far as it could be physically assembled in the Campus Martius, had to be abandoned, as demonstrably inconsistent with the larger purpose which Augustus had set himself. But in every other respect, he did not, as Julius Caesar had done, compel the Romans to face the unpleasant fact that a revolution had taken place, but professed to be simply a restorer of the ancient polity. Perhaps he did not face the facts himself. At any rate he seems sincerely to have believed that morality and sobriety could be reconstituted by statute, and that one, by dint of willing, might live under Caesar as men lived under Numa—barring such un-Sabine additions as marble palaces and purple togas.