The Prefecture of Manners, already mentioned, was thrice exercised by the master of the world. For the first time in A.U. 735; for the second time in A.U. 736; for the third and last time in A.u. 743, the year in which the national hero adopted the grotesque and quasimediæval custom of sitting in the disguise of a beggar at his own palace gate, and receiving the alms of courtly and accommodating contributors. This prefecture involved a project of reform more arduous than that of the Senate, and the stone chronicle at Ancyra inadequately recognises the extent or difficulty of the enterprise. Some idea of the difficulty, however, may be formed, if we reflect that Julia, the thrice-wedded daughter of Rome's imperial master, was accustomed to wander through the streets of the great city by night, attended by her Comus-crew, and hold her licentious symposia in the forum, or at the rostra itself, surrounded by the young nobles, her fellow-revellers or paramours. In carrying out his plans for reformation of life, Augustus did not hesitate to revive old usages, or introduce new laws. Encouragement of matrimony, discouragement of celibacy and illicit love, limitation of expenditure and suppression of bribery, were among the objects which he endeavoured to realise by legislative enactments. If the ambitious reformer succeeded no better in his plans for the moral improvement of his subjects than he did in mending the manners of his daughter, he had little reason to boast of the success of his measures. The lovely, wilful, and witty Julia, whose studies had been minutely registered, whose actions carefully watched, whose words scrupulously weighed, who in short was brought up in so frightfully virtuous a manner as to ensure a retributive wickedness in after-life, profited neither by the discipline nor legislation of Augustus, nor even by the excellent example which he condescendingly exhibited in his own person for the imitation of a degenerate society. In vain were her lovers punished with death or banishment; in vain was the fair sinner herself degraded by registration in the list of ignominious mercenaries. Julia remained incorrigible. She never gave up "sinning and supping" till she finally expiated her treason against virtue and the emperor, by exile, solitary confinement and thin potations, in the city of Rhegium and the island of Pandataria. Augustus might well complain that he had two troublesome daughters, Julia and the Republic. The first of the two he never forgave. He left her no legacy in his will, and he refused her a resting-place in his mausoleum. About ten years before the disgrace and banishment of the brilliant and beautiful Julia, the triumvir Lepidus went to join the majority. Lepidus had long been invested with the sacred office of Pontifex Maximus. Augustus does not omit to signalise his generous forbearance in declining this splendid preferment during the lifetime of his old associate. Early in A.U. 742 the motive for further self-abnegation ceased; Lepidus no longer stood in his way, and Augustus was elevated to the chief Pontificate and the formal presidency of the national rites. The other sacerdotal dignities he enjoyed are quietly paraded in this imperial autobiography. As Augur, or diviner, he was entitled to bear the crozier-like wand of office, and announce supernatural signs. As Sodalis Titius, he was privileged to take part in the celebration of the old Sabine rites, or worship of King Tatius. As Frater Arvalis, wearing the corn chaplet with its white band, he had the official right to offer sacrifice for the fertility of the fields, or invoke a blessing on the old Roman territory. As Fetialis, binding his head with a fillet of wool and a wreath of sacred herbs, he had power to demand redress or proclaim war. As one of the Sacred Seven, it was his duty to prepare the couches at the entertainments given to Jupiter and the other gods. As one of the Sacred Fifteen, he had authority to burn the apocryphal books of prophecy; and in this capacity it was that he purified the Sibylline Canon, and deposited it in two golden caskets under the statue of the Palatine Apollo. Nor were these the only religious distinctions associated with the name or person of Augustus. On his return from the peaceful and prosperous administration of Asia, the Senate erected an altar to Fortuna Redux," "the good genius of the State who had brought her hero home." This altar, as we gather from our marble annals, stood at the Porta Capena, the very gate at which Augustus, marching from Campania along the Appian Way-the great line of communication with the East-would necessarily enter Rome. On the day of that entrance, the 12th of October, A.U. 735, a new festival was instituted called the Augustalia; and the priests and vestal virgins were officially enjoined to solemnise the anniversary of this happy event. Analogous honours awaited his return from a successful career in Spain and Gaul, A.U. 741. The next division of the inscription is, perhaps, of still greater interest. The Greek copy of Perrot places it beyond all doubt that the Janus Quirinus was thrice shut in the time of Augustus. Hitherto the Latin ter was explicable as an abbreviation of tertio. The recovery of the Greek word Tpic precludes this explanation. It proves that the symbolical gate which had been closed but twice in all preceding time-once in the days of the saintly Numa, once on the cessation of the first Punic war-was shut not a third time, but three times, by the personal representative of the Pax Romana, when the exhausted world slept under the tranquil majesty of the Eternal City. On the second occasion a fanciful impression is said to have prevailed that Janus had never been closed except in a time of peace, and when the Senate decreed in the year 725 of the Foundation that this solemn act should be repealed by Augustus, the Restorer of the Commonwealth, the vision of a golden age glimmered before the dazzled eyes of his idolatrous admirers. Already the people had sighed for peace, and the mystical Virgil given a musical expression to its sighs. Long after, when that summer-dream had almost faded, the sanguine Lucan caught and threw back the melodious echo, with a feeling surely not less Christian than that of the poet of the Apocalypse : "Tunc genus humanum positis sibi consulat armis Inque vicem gens omnis amet. Pax missa per orbem Though subsequently called a temple, the Janus was originally a covered gateway containing the statue of the god that opens heaven, begins the year, and initiates action. Its primitive character is recognised in the Greek translation of the Record, where the words Πύλην Ενυάλιου are employed as the equivalents of the Latin text. The earliest Janus appears to have been a double-gated passage constructed on the road leading from the Quirinal to the Palatium, when the Roman and Sabine cities were united on terms of equality; perhaps intended to facilitate co-operation in war, or restrict intercourse in a period of peace, or perhaps designed as an occasional gate, available for the egress of a departing or the admission of a returning army; open in war to denote that the deity had gone forth to assist the Roman soldier, and shut in peace to prevent the escape of the protecting god. Of the three occasions on which the Janus was closed by Augustus, two can be indicated with certainty. The first was in A.U. 725, not long after the battle of Actium; the second was in A.U. 729, on the return of Augustus from Spain. The ceremony is supposed to have been celebrated a third time in A.U. 744; but as the Dacian rebellion probably interfered with the execution of the senatorial decree which sanctioned its performance, Mommsen surmises that it was not closed again till the peace-period, A.U. 746-753, which followed the German war. Orosius refers the ceremony to the year 752; but as he places the birth of Christ, the Messianic Prince of Peace, in the same year, his German critic regards the date with suspicion. Presently we shall see what can be said in its favour. The next incident chronicled in the marble of Ancyra is the introduction into public life of the grandsons of Augustus, his adopted children. Caius Cæsar, the son of the prudent Agrippa and the wild and beautiful Julia, openly presented himself in the forum in A.U. 749. About three years later Lucius Cæsar, his brother, assumed the robe of manhood-the national gown. Already a place in the Senate, a prospective consulship, and the social precedence, in virtue of which they were constituted princes of the Roman youth, had been formally secured to them. To ride at the head of a cavalcade of young nobles was one of the privileges which this precedence carried with it. Accordingly the wall of the temple records the salutation of the Roman knights to the young Caesars, when they addressed them formally with the title of Prince, proffering at the same time the silver shield and silver spear, the prescriptive symbols of their exalted position. From the honours conferred on the grandchildren of the Imperator we return to the Imperator himself. We have the authority of the marble history for asserting that the pecuniary liberality of Augustus was worthy of his imperial supremacy. On three different occasions he replenished the Senatorial exchequer. On a fourth-in the year of the great earthquakes-he made good the deficit arising from the non-payment of the annual tribute in the Province of Asia. In addition to this exceptional munificence, no fewer than eight donatives are accredited to him. The first, a bequest of his great uncle, Julius Caesar, consisted of a gift of 300 sesterces, or about £3, to every Roman citizen. In the twelfth consulship of Augustus the admitted pensioners on the public bounty, though they subsequently underwent reduction, amounted to no fewer than 320,000. The sum total of moneys, here particularised, as expended in benevolent purposes, was no less than 619,800,000 sesterces, or, on a rough estimate, about five millions sterling. Of course in this liberal distribution the army was not forgotten. In the second year, after his grand triumph, the conqueror gave a thousand sesterces to each of the veterans of his numerous legions, 120,000 in all. Again and again he recruited the strength of the permanent military chest, paying in, now in his own name, now in that of Tiberius, the princely contribution of 170,000,000 sesterces. Nor was this all. For in the year after the battle of Actium Augustus raised enormous sums for lands appropriated as military settlements, and he announces with a conscious but sedate self-applause, that of all the promoters of such enterprises in Italy or the provinces he was the first as he was the only one, who had ever given a pecuniary equivalent for the property of which the rightful owners had been dispossessed. The social and political reform of Augustus had its material counterpart in the construction or renovation of the public buildings of Rome. The restorer of the commonwealth was also the architect of the city. The well known epigram in which Augustus boasted that he had found Rome brick and left it marble, is justified by the business-like detail of his achievements in masonry, still legible in the inscription of Ancyra. The Augustan edifice which stands first in order in this catalogue is the Curia, called after his adoptive father the Curia Julia. Near the Curia stood the Chalcidicum, which Mommsen confidently declares to have been a temple sacred to Minerva Chalcidice, though this is by no means the universal opinion. On the Palatine, where Augustus was born, stood the imperial resi dence, constructed soon after his famous victory. In the same patrician locality rose the temple of Apollo, the radiant god who had been his champion in the great fight against Antony, and had veiled his face in horror at the fall of his father, the murdered Julius. This temple was celebrated for its magnificence. To the portico which encircled it, Propertius, in a dainty little poem, applies the epithet golden. The columns, more than fifty in number, were of African marble. Between them stood the statues of the daughter of Danaus, and that of the father of the maiden band with sword unsheathed. Here too was a statue of Apollo playing on a lyre, while around the altar, vivid as reality, stood the sculptured oxen of Myron. In the interior was another statue of Apollo, between that of his mother Latina, and that of his sister Diana, the work of Scopas, Cephisodorus, and Timotheus. The temple itself of Parian marble rose dazzlingly white, as in the verse of Virgil. The gates were of ivory, blossoming with storied life. Over the pediment might be seen the chariot of the sun. Adjoining the temple was a valuable library, stored with the choicest product of the intellect of Greece and Rome. At the south-eastern extremity of the Forum rose, at the bidding of Augustus, the shrine of the deified Dictator, with its front to the Capitol. At the entrance of the valley of the Velabrum stood the Lupercal, rebuilt by Augustus. Over a precipice eighty feet in height rose the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus restored by him. On the same imposing elevation rose two other shrines of the Olympian lord, that of Jupiter the Spoil-bearer, and that of Jupiter the Thunderer. The latter had bells hanging to its pediment, and was an offering of gratitude for a providential preservation in a journey, when a slave who had preceded the emperor's litter with a torch had been struck dead by lightning, Augustus himself had escaped unhurt. On the Quirinal rose the new temple of Quirinus, the celestial name of Father Romulus, who was believed to have ascended into heaven. On the Aventine stood the temples of Minerva, of Juno Regina, and, according to Orelli, who is followed by Mommsen, of Jupiter Libertas, the Zeus Eleutherios of the Greck text. On the summit of the Via Sacra rose the temple of the Lares; the Velia was beautified by that of the Penates. On the hill which he had selected as a site for his own residence Augustus erected the temple of Juventus, or Youth, and that of Cybele, the Great Mother. In the Circus Maximus he rebuilt the Pulvinar, on which reclined the images of deity, and where the imperial family sat as spectators of the public games. In the Campus Martius he reconstructed the stone theatre, formerly erected by Pompey, fragments of which, it is said, are still recognisable on the Palazzo Pio and the adjacent edifices. Behind the Curia Julia stood the Julian Forum, which the great uncle had commenced and the great nephew finished. Adjoining the Julian Forum was that of Augustus, one of the finest of his public works. Near it rose the magnificent temple of its presiding |