By a decree of the senate my name has been included in the Salian hymn,[56] and it has been enacted by law that I should be sacrosanct, and that as long as I live I should be invested with the tribunitial power.[57] I refused to be made pontifex maximus in the place of a colleague still living, when the people tendered me that priesthood which my father held. I accepted that office after several years, when he was dead who had seized it during a time of civil disturbance; and at the comitia for my election, during the consulship of Publius Sulpicius and Gaius Valgius, so great a multitude assembled as, it is said, had never before been in Rome.[58]
c. 11.
Close to the temples of Honor and Virtue, near the Capena gate, the senate consecrated in honor of my return an altar to Fortune the Restorer, and upon this altar it ordered that the pontifices and the Vestal virgins should offer sacrifice yearly on the anniversary of the day on which I returned into the city from Syria, in the consulship of Quintus Lucretius and Marcus Vinucius, and it called the day the Augustalia, from our cognomen.[59]
c. 12.
By a decree of the senate at the same time a part of the prætors and tribunes of the people with the consul Quintus Lucretius and leading citizens were sent into Campania to meet me, an honor which up to this time has been decreed to no one but me.[60] When I returned from Spain and Gaul after successfully arranging the affairs of those provinces, in the consulship of Tiberius Nero and Publius Quintilius, the senate voted that in honor of my return an altar of the Augustan Peace should be consecrated in the Campus Martius, and upon this altar it ordered the magistrates and priests and vestal virgins to offer sacrifices on each anniversary.[61]
c. 13.
Janus Quirinus, which it was the purpose of our fathers to close when there was peace won by victory[62] throughout the whole empire of the Roman people on land and sea, and which, before I was born, from the foundation of the city, was reported to have been closed twice in all,[63] the senate three times ordered to be closed while I was princeps.[64]
c. 14.
My sons, the Cæsars Gaius and Lucius, whom fortune snatched from me in their youth,[65] the senate and Roman people, in order to do me honor, designated as consuls in the fifteenth year of each, with the intention that they should enter upon that magistracy after five years.[66] And the senate decreed that from the day in which they were introduced into the forum they should share in the public counsels.[67] Moreover the whole body of the Roman knights gave them the title, principes of the youth, and gave to each a silver buckler and spear.[68]