So remarkable was the opposition, at all points, between the second Caesar
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.
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