enhanced by a physical beauty and grace which helped to secure reverence for his person and office, and established a sentiment which the unworthiness of some of his successors could not wholly destroy. He and not Iulius was the founder of the Empire, and it was to him that succeeding emperors looked back as the origin of their power.
Yet his achievements have interested men less than the conquest of Gaul and the victories in the civil war won by the marvellous rapidity and splendid boldness of Iulius. Consequently modern estimates of the character and aims of Augustus have been comparatively few. An exhaustive treatise is now appearing in Germany by V. Gardthausen, which will be a most complete storehouse of facts. Without any pretence to such elaboration of detail, I have tried in these pages to do something to correct the balance, and to give a picture of the man as I have formed it in my own mind. The only modest merit which I would claim for my book is that it is founded on a study as complete as I could make it of the ancient authorities and sources of information without conscious imitation of any modern writer. These authorities are better for the earlier period to about B.C. 24, while they had the Emperor’s own Memoirs on which to rely. The multiform activities of his later life are chiefly to be gathered from inscriptions and monuments, which record the care which neglected no part however remote of the Empire. In these later years such histories as we have are more concerned with wars and military movements than with administration. Suetoniusis full of good things, but is without chronological or systematic order, and is wanting in the critical spirit to discriminate between irresponsible rumours and historical facts. Dio Cassius, plain and honest always, grows less and less full as the reign goes on. Velleius, who might at least have given us full details of the later German wars, is seldom definite or precise, and is tiresome from devotion to a single hero in Tiberius, and by an irritating style.
