cus led the forces. But
the princes returned to Rome without effecting important results.

(M1054) Soon after, in the year A.D. 14, Augustus died in his
seventy-seventh year, after a reign of forty-four years from the battle of
Actium, and fifty from the triumvirate--one of the longest reigns in
history, and one of the most successful. From his nineteenth year he was
prominent on the stage of Roman public life. Under his auspices the empire
reached the Elbe, and Egypt was added to its provinces. He planted
colonies in every province, and received from the Parthians the captured
standards of Crassus. His fleets navigated the Northern Ocean; his armies
reduced the Pannonians and Illyrians. He added to the material glories of
his capital, and sought to secure peace throughout the world. He was both
munificent and magnificent, and held the reins of government with a firm
hand. He was cultivated, unostentatious, and genial; but ambitious, and
versed in all the arts of dissimulation and kingcraft. But he was a great
monarch, and ruled with signal ability. After the battle of Actium, his
wars were chiefly with the barbarians, and his greatest generals were
members of the imperial family. That he could have reigned so long, in
such an age, with so many enemies, is a proof of his wisdom and
moderation, as well as of his good fortune. That he should have triumphed
over such generals as Brutus, and Antonius, and Sextus--representing the
old parties of the republic, is unquestionable evidence of transcendent
ability. But his great merit was his capacity to rule, to organize, and to
civilize. He is one of the best types of a sovereign ruler that the world
has seen. It is nothing against him, that, in his latter years, there were
popular discontents. Such generally happen at the close of all long
reigns, as in the case of Solomon and Louis XIV. And yet, the closing
years of his reign were melancholy, like those of the French monarch, in
view of the extinction of literary glories, and the passing away of the
great lights of the age, without the appearance of new stars to take their
place. But this was not the fault of Augustus, whose intellect expanded
with his fortunes, and whose magnanimity grew with his intellect--a man who
comprehended his awful mission, and who discharged his trusts with dignity
and self-reliance.

Tiberius Caesar, the third of the Roman emperors, found no opposition to
his elevation on the death of Augustus. He