Apollo, to be sure, did not always retain the exalted position to which Augustus had raised it, but even it never entirely lost its prominence, whereas the general idea of the supremacy of the imperial cult was now established for all time to come.  But this secular celebration of Augustus is interesting aside from the relation of Juppiter and Apollo, for it affords another illustration of the skilful combination of new and old in the Augustan reorganisation.  In form the festival is avowedly the old one, but in two respects at least it introduces a new element.  In the first place participation in the old festival, as in all the old festivals, had been confined to Roman citizens.  Others might look on, but they could not take part, nor were they the recipients of any of the blessings which were to follow.  But now every free member of the community, with wife and child, might join in the celebration, and thus the note was struck which was to be the keynote of all that was best in the changes introduced by the empire whose “highest and most beautiful task,” as Professor Mommsen puts it, “and the one which she fulfilled most perfectly, was gradually to reconcile and thus to put an end to the contrast between the ruling city and the subordinate communities, and thus to change the old Roman law of city-citizenship into a community of the state which embraced all the members of the empire.”  But even this was not all; under the guise of this restoration of an old republican institution a blow was struck at the very foundation of all republican institutions, namely the power of the Senate.  It was par excellence Augustus’s festival, arranged by him or by those to whom he had committed the details.  The Senate had little or nothing to say about it and yet the control of such religious celebrations had hitherto formed an inalienable part of the Senate’s power.  Even in the procession itself the republican magistrates do not seem to have been officially present.  It was thus no longer the Senate inviting the magistrates and the citizens in good and regular standing to perform a certain divine function, but it was the emperor inviting all the members of the community, citizens and non-citizens alike, to join with him in worshipping the gods of the new state.

A great part of Augustus’s success was unquestionably due to a certain form of moral courage.  For all his diplomacy and his desire to feel the pulse of the people he was never lacking in the courage of his own convictions.  This can be seen nowhere better than in his attitude toward his adoptive father Julius Caesar.  From the very beginning when he took upon himself, even at the cost of temporary impoverishment, the payment of Caesar’s legacy, he was supremely true to the man whose successor he was, and this faithfulness is especially apparent in the field of religion.  Here there are two cults, both relating to Julius Caesar, for which Augustus was largely responsible, that of the god Julius himself, and that of Mars the Avenger.