We naturally wonder at the business capacity of a man who carried on the Government of dominions so extensive and so various; and the work would indeed have been beyond the grasp of any single individual had not Augustus continued the old Roman policy of letting well alone. The Roman Empire at this period was largely decentralized; cities, tribes, nationalities governed themselves according to their previous laws and customs; no ancient polity was destroyed or remodelled unless it proved to be out of sympathy with the general order; the details of local administration were attended to on the spot in accordance with local usage, by the local officials and magistrates. If the ancient constitution of a town broke down, the Roman was ready with his sacred model, the double chief magistrate and the Senate, a model which was faithfully copied in all the Roman military colonies, but so long as men could govern themselves, the Romans were content to allow them to do so; they were not at this time afflicted with a pedantic passion for uniformity. Thus the Emperor was relieved of the mass of detail under which he would otherwise have sunk. In his choice of men Augustus preferred officials who either as non-Romans, such as Licinus and Cornelius Gallus, or by reason of comparatively mean extraction felt their dependence upon his favour. When he found a representative of the ancient nobility who could be trusted, such as Marcus Lepidus, the son of the former triumvir, he placed power in his hands; such men served to balance the pretensions of the new officials, but he was careful not to revive the organization of the oligarchy. One danger, however, escaped the prevision of the acute Augustus: he did not see until it was too late the effect of his pretensions to a divine ancestry upon his own family. As years went on, and the representatives of the Julian stock were to be found chiefly in the men and women of the third generation, as the great poem of Virgil was more and more widely known, the faith in the sanctity of the posterity of Anchises assumed inconvenient dimensions, and the tendency to press this faith was largely helped by the presence in the Imperial Household of representatives of ancient dynasties. East and West alike sent young men to Rome, in whom the traditions of exalted lineage were lively and unbroken, who did not need the evidence of portents and the testimony of poets to assure them that they were set apart from the rest of mankind. These youths were the playmates of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Augustus; their influence stimulated the dynastic ambition of such men as Caius Cæsar, and his nephew and namesake the future Emperor Caligula; the young princes, as they considered themselves, were impatient of the constitutional forms of Rome, and the restraints upon the monarchy; they despised families whose progenitors had not come over with Æneas. Fate had not been kind