But the crowning touch of Augustus’s religious policy was yet to come; this was the establishment of the worship of the Genius of the emperor.  After Actium and in the earlier years of his reign it is certain that Augustus would not have thought of putting himself, even in the spiritualised form of his Genius, before the people as an object of worship.  But the tendency to emperor-worship which Oriental influence had brought with it was not without its effects on the emperor himself, and perhaps these effects were all the stronger because of his valiant struggle against it.  Then too the state was already worshipping the gods of his family, even Vesta Augusta, the goddess of his own hearth.  He had become in substance, even if not yet in name, the father of his country.  It had been an immemorial custom that the members of the household should worship the Genius of the master of the house.  In every household in Rome that custom still existed.  It was a very logical step, and one therefore which a Roman could easily take, to carry out the analogy of the family and to allow the whole state to worship the Genius of the emperor, who was the head of the family of the state.  The idea therefore was not at all incongruous, nor was the way in which it was carried out, though the latter was so ingenious as to deserve special consideration.

In the old days when Rome was a farming community, the guardianship of the gods over the fields was one of the most important elements in religious life.  The gods were above all the protectors of the boundary lines, and thus it came to pass that where two roads crossed and thus the corners of four farms came together the deities protecting these farms were worshipped together as the Lares Compitales, the Lares of the compita or cross-roads.  Curiously enough this worship was later extended to the crossing of city streets, and as was natural it became more highly organised in the city than it had been in the country.  Regular associations, collegia, were formed to look after the details of the worship, headed by the magistri vicorum, who were however not public officials but merely the elected heads of these colleges, men mainly from the lower ranks of society.  The contagion of civil and political strife affected these colleges as well as their more aristocratic parallels, higher up in the social scale, and turned them into local political clubs.  The part played by these clubs in the civil struggles which occupied the last century of the republic was such that the Senate in B.C. 64 was compelled to dissolve them, though they were restored again six years later and existed until Caesar destroyed them entirely.  But now Augustus was creating a new organisation for the city, dividing it into fourteen regions, each region containing a certain number of subdivisions called vici.  The old “colleges of the cross-roads” afforded him just the sort of opportunity which he never failed to seize, that of seeming to restore