Of course, Augustus had considered all this, and had made his own plans. He would choose a member of his own family, one, that is, who inherited the name and fame of Cæsar by blood or adoption, would adopt him as a son (for he had no son of his own), make him his heir, associate him as far as possible in his own dignity and authority, and thus mark him out as the natural heir to the principate. This would make it difficult for Senate or army to refuse him; beyond that Augustus knew that he could not go. He was unlucky in losing one after another the youths whom he thus destined to succeed him, and eventually had to fall back on his stepson Tiberius: a great soldier, as we have seen, and a man of integrity and ability, but of reserved and even morose temper, and one with whom the shrewd and genial Augustus had little in common.
When Augustus died there was an anxious moment. There was no reason why the principate should be confined to the family of the Cæsars, nor any reason but expediency for having a _princeps_ at all. But, after all, the will of the dead ruler prevailed, and Tiberius slipped into his place without opposition; the Senate accepted him as plainly marked out by Augustus, and the army raised no difficulty, though his nephew Germanicus Cæsar was young, popular, and in actual command of the army on the Rhine. Some mocking voices were heard, and throughout his principate of twenty-three years Tiberius had to endure continual annoyance from the old republican families, but there was no real attempt to quarrel with the principate as an institution of the Roman State.
I have dwelt on this point at some length in order to show what a singular creation this principate of Augustus was. To proclaim monarchy outright would probably have been fatal; to take the whole work on himself would be to leave the old governing families idle and discontented; on the other hand, to do the necessary work as a yearly elected magistrate, according to the old practice, was plainly impossible. Election by the people of the Roman city would have little force in the eyes of the Empire, and it was this Empire as a whole that Augustus wished to represent. The course he took shows him a shrewd, observant, tactical diplomatist, if ever there was one. He is not a man on whose character we dwell with sympathy or enthusiasm; he does not kindle our admiration like C. Gracchus or Cæsar; but he was essentially the man for the hour.