Since the battle of Actium the civil wars were happily at an end; for nearly half a generation Rome had enjoyed the blessings of peace and the new constitution which Augustus had given her. The emperor had often announced his resolve to retire into private life, but had always allowed himself to be persuaded not to carry it out because the welfare of the state forbade it; he alone seemed to guarantee peace and safety, his rule seemed inseparable from domestic tranquillity, and the man who desired the one could not but desire the other. The emperor strove to keep this single idea in fresh variations constantly in mind among the Romans, and those honours pleased him best which gave public expression to this feeling. The senate, on the emperor’s return had dedicated the altar of the imperial peace. The poets, each after his fashion, sang the praises of peace and order:
“Fealty, peace itself, and honour, and the ancient
Moral awe, the long-forgotten virtue,
Now dares to return, it approaches, its horn
Full of blessing.”
There was, however, a danger that the rising generation might soon come to accept the benefits of peace as a matter of course, without definitely realising to whom they owed these blessings, and it was therefore desirable to keep in remembrance among the emperor’s contemporaries the difference between the unquiet past and the blissful present, and to give official recognition to the fact that the period of civil war was over and that a century of peace and prosperity had taken its place.
Such turning-points imply an invitation to take a backward glance and to reckon the sum of development up to this point. So had a poet done at the end of the previous century:
“How fair, O man, with thy palm-branches
Standest thou in the century’s decline,” etc.
The Rome of the period was also to take a backward glance.