Twenty-nine years after the battle of Actium the Senate, by the voice of one of the noblest of their order, Marcus Valerius Messala, hailed Augustus as the “Father of his Country.” The now aged Emperor burst into tears, and declaring that he had reached the summit of his ambition, prayed to the gods that they would allow him, so long as life lasted, to continue to be worthy of the confidence thus expressed by his countrymen. The title had perhaps been somewhat soiled by use; Cicero had arrogated it to himself after that exhibition of consummate statesmanship which quelled the conspiracy of Catiline, but it was none the less a tribute to the singleness of purpose with which Augustus had devoted himself to the welfare of the vast Empire committed to his care. In the press of daily business and vexatious details Augustus may often have failed to perceive how general was the recognition of his services to the State, and we can pardon the display of uncontrolled emotion which interrupted his customary calm on receiving this solemn assurance that his labours had not been in vain. As a matter of fact at this time, and for the rest of his life, Augustus had no enemies save those of his own household. There was no political opposition to the Emperor; small conspiracies such as those of Murena and Cæpio there had been, the work of hot-headed youths who wished to emulate the example of Brutus, and there were, as we have seen, intrigues in the Emperor’s own family. As Suetonius mentions among the plots directed against Augustus one in which Lucius Æmilius Paullus, the husband of the younger Julia was concerned, we are at liberty to suspect that in her case, as in her mother’s, it was thought better to punish a graver offence as a case of domestic misconduct. It was on this occasion that the poet Ovid learned that there is a limit to the liberties which a man of fashion can allow himself, and was forced to withdraw from his butterfly existence at Rome to the mosquito-haunted swamps at the mouth of the Danube, where he wrote poems more worthy of his dignity than any he had previously composed.