were regularly offered to heaven for his safety, each new year and the various anniversaries of his birth and achievements were marked by solemn public prayers for his well-being
and that of his family; throughout Rome his personal household tutelary spirit (Lar) was venerated in the various 'parish chapels' alongside the public Lares Compitales. The pomp
and circumstance of the great priestly colleges (of all of which he was himself a member) were refurbished, and comparable institutions created and consolidated at lower levels of
society. The glittering high-point was the magnificent celebration of the Secular Games in the summer of 17 B.C., the tenth anniversary of the new order, a massive public
thanksgiving for the past and present grandeur of Rome.
Temple Of Mars Ultor, vowed after the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC, but constructed mainly in the last decade of the century as the dominant feature in the new
Augustan Forum (dedicated in 2 B.C.). The temple and forum are strongly influenced by the architecture of classical Athens.
Domestic Policy
Hand in hand with this religious renaissance went a determination to restore that high moral seriousness and restraint which had, in pious memory or myth, assured the greatness of
the old res publica. Sallust had not been the only man to incriminate and castigate, albeit over-ingenuously, the sad and steep decline from such sober standards as the root cause of
the many and grave ills that had beset Rome in the febrile brilliance of the last generations of the Republic. However much we must allow for some measure of hypocrisy in this area,
Augustus set a public example in the simplicity of his personal life-style, the modesty of his house on the Palatine and its furnishings (the austerity of which later astonished
Suetonius) in contrast with the splendour of the public buildings with which he beautified Rome (below, pp. 771 £), and in his dress and table-a legacy, perhaps, of his paternal