e feelings and ideas it is, of
course, impossible to conjecture. But as a man's religious convictions
are largely the result of his own experience and of that of the society
in which he lives, and as Augustus' own experience for the twenty years
before he took this work in hand had been full of trial and temptation,
I am disposed to guess that he was rather expressing a popular
conviction which he shared himself than merely standing apart and
administering a remedy. And this view seems to me to be on the whole
confirmed by the tone and spirit of the great literary works of the age.

Augustus did not become pontifex maximus till the year 12 B.C., nineteen
years after he had crushed Antony at Actium; he waited with scrupulous
patience until the headship of the Roman religion became vacant by the
death of Lepidus.[911] But this did not prevent him from pursuing his
religious policy with great earnestness before that date, for he had
long been a member of the pontifical college, as well as augur and
quindecemvir. No sooner had he returned to Rome from Egypt than the work
of temple restoration began, the outward and visible sign to all that
the _pax deorum_ was to be firmly re-established. The fact of the
restoration he has told us in half a dozen words in his own Res
Gestae:[912] "Duo et octaginta templa deum in urbe ex decreto senatus
refeci," adding that not one was neglected that needed repair. Among
them was that oldest and smallest temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the
Capitol to which I referred in a former lecture;[913] and his personal
interest in the work is attested by Livy, who says that he himself heard
Augustus tell how he had found an inscription, relating to the second
_spolia opima_ dedicated there, when he went into the temple bent on the
work of restoration.[914] It needs but a little historical imagination
to appreciate the psychological importance of all this work. We have to
think not only of the bystanders who watched, but of the very workmen
themselves, rejoicing at once in new employment and in the revival of an
old sense of religious duty. Little more than twenty years earlier, no
workman could be found to lay a hand upon the newly-built temple of
Isis, when the consul Aemilius Paulus gave orders for its destruction as
a centre of _superstitio_;[915] now abundant work was provided which
every man's conscience would approve. When I think of the Rome of that
year 28, with all its fresh hope and confidence