To him we owe in large measure the glories of “the Augustan age,” with its poets, historians, and artists; it was the “Augustan peace,” and the encouragement and patronage of Augustus, that enable Horace to write his perfect lyrics and his good-natured comments on human life, Ovid to pour forth his abundant stream of beautiful versification, Tibullus and Propertius to sing of the Italian country and its deities and festivals, and Livy, the greatest of Roman historians, to do in noble prose what Virgil had done in noble verse—to inspire Romans and Italians with enthusiasm for the great deeds of their ancestors. But the world owes Augustus a still greater debt than this; for he laid securely the foundations of an imperial system strong enough to save for us, through centuries of danger, the priceless treasures of Græco-Roman civilisation.
Now that we have seen the Empire made comparatively secure by Augustus, and set in the way of development on what seem to be rational principles, let us pause and try to gain some idea of the social life going on within it: excluding that of the city of Rome, which is no longer of the old paramount importance. How did the inhabitants of the Empire live and occupy themselves during the first two centuries of our era?
The first point to make quite sure of is that this life was in the main a life in towns. Roman policy had always favoured the maintenance of existing towns, except in the very rare cases where they were deemed too dangerous. Carthage and Corinth had been destroyed by Rome on this pretext, but they had been founded afresh by Julius Cæsar, and were now beginning a long and vigorous city life. In the East, where city-states abounded, Rome retained and adorned them, or built new ones, as Pompey did after crushing Mithradates and Tigranes. In the West, in Gaul and Spain, where they did not exist at all, she founded some, and by a wonderfully wise policy favoured the natural growth of others. The people of these western provinces lived chiefly in some kind of villages, scattered over a district which we may call a canton, often, perhaps, as big as an English county of to-day. The Roman policy was either to found a city to serve as the centre of the canton, and to endow it with magistrates and senate on the Roman model: or to give the canton its senate and magistrates, and leave it to develop its own town-centre.