1.1.16 to 1.1.18

Government and administration Remembering, however, that Caesar had been assassinated because of his resort to naked power, Octavian realized that the governing class would welcome him as the terminator of civil war only if he concealed his autocracy beneath provisions avowedly harking back to republican traditions. From 31 until 23 BC the constitutional basis of his power remained a continuous succession of consulships, but in January 27 BC he ostensibly "transferred the State to the free disposal of the Senate and people," earning the misleading, though outwardly plausible, tribute that he had restored the republic. At the same time, he was granted a 10-year tenure of an area of government (provincia )comprising Spain, Gaul, and Syria, the three regions containing the bulk of the army. The remaining provinces were to be governed by proconsuls appointed by the Senate in the old republican fashion. Octavian, however, believed that his supreme prestige—crystallized in the meaningful term auctoritas —safeguarded him against any defiance by these personages; and he was indeed able, more or less indirectly, to influence their appointments, just as he was able (on the rare occasions when he regarded it as desirable) to influence the appointments to the consulships and other metropolitan offices that continued to exist in "republican" fashion. Four days after these measures, his name Caesar, acquired through adoption in Julius's will, was supplemented by "Augustus," an appellation with an antique religious ring, believed to be linked etymologically with auctoritas and with the ancient practice of augury. The word augustus was often contrasted with humanus; its adoption as the title representing the new order cleverly indicated, in an extraconstitutional fashion, his superiority over the rest of mankind. With the aid of writers such as Virgil, Livy, and Horace, all of whom in their different ways shared the same ideas, he showed his patriotic veneration of the old Italian faith by reviving many of its ceremonials and repairing numerous temples.