what the future monarchy was to be, and which reduced, not merely rigid constitutionalists, but even moderates and men of compromise, to despair. With Caesar conciliation was not accompanied by its requisite complement, compromise; he was tender of everything but sentiment, and did not care to estimate the force of what he must have considered mere prejudice; but, in spite of the modifications introduced into his theory of government by Augustus, it was he who pointed out that the necessary basis for the future Principate was the tribunician power combined with some kind of military imperium.
The murder of Caesar had, in words of the time, abolished the rex but not the regnum,[1] and the Triumvirate of 43 B.C. was but a suspension of hostilities between the rival claimants. In form it was a provisional government, like that of the early Decemvirate, for the reform of the constitution, and received the sanction of the people;[2] but so purely was it an agreement between the contending personalities that its renewal was contrived in 38 B.C. without any reference to the comitia.[3] For ten years (38-28 B.C.) Octavian's position was far more irregular than that of Caesar had ever been, and, even after the defeat and death of Antonius, his sole claim to power was an imperium, which had never been conferred, irregularly continued from a usurped Triumvirate. These indefinite powers resting, as he himself describes them, "on universal consent,"[4] were essential to the accomplishment of the work that had to be done before the forms of the constitution were restored. The consulships which he held did not give the requisite authority, and the value of the tribunicia potestas, which he had possessed from 36 B.C.,[5] was negative rather than positive. In the course of his sixth consulship (28 B.C.) he considered the time to be ripe for a final settlement. It assumed the form of a surrender. He issued a solemn decree in which he cancelled the irregular ordinances of the Triumvirate,[6] and he fixed January 1, 27 B.C. as the date
- ↑ Cic. ad Fam. xii. 1, 1 "nam, ut adhuc quidem actum est, non regno, sed rege liberati videmur."
- ↑ Monumentum Ancyranum i. 8-9 "Populus . . . me . . . trium virum rei publicae constituendae creavit."
- ↑ App. B.C. v. 95.
- ↑ Mon. Anc. vi. 13-15 "In consulatu sexto et septimo, bella ubi civilia exstinxeram, per consensum universorum potitus rerum omnium, rem publicam ex mea potestate in senatus populique Romani arbitrium transtuli."
- ↑ Dio Cass. xlix. 15.
- ↑ Tac. Ann. iii. 28 "sexto . . . consulatu . . . quae triumviratu jusserat abolevit."
