*Conditions of service.* It was not until 6 A. D. that the term of enlistment and the conditions of discharge were definitely fixed. From that date service in the praetorian guard was for sixteen years, in the legions for twenty and in the _auxilia_ for twenty-five. At their discharge the praetorians received a bonus of 5000 denarii ($1000), while the legionaries were given 3000 denarii ($600) in addition to an assignment of land. The discharged legionaries were regularly settled in colonies throughout the provinces. To meet this increased expense Augustus was obliged to establish a military treasury (the _aerarium militare_), endowed out of his private patrimony, and supported by the revenue derived from two newly imposed taxes, a five per cent inheritance tax (_vincesima hereditatium_) which affected all Roman citizens, and a one per cent tax on all goods publicly sold (_centesima rerum venalium_).
*The fleets.* For the policing of the coast of Italy and the adjacent seas Augustus created a permanent fleet with stations at Ravenna and Misenum. Conforming to the comparative unimportance of the Roman naval, in contrast to their military establishment, the personnel of this fleet was recruited in large measure from imperial freedmen and slaves. Only after Augustus were these squadrons and other similar ones in the provinces placed under equestrian prefects.
The military system of Augustus strongly emphasized and guaranteed the supremacy of Italy and the Italians over the provincials. Both the officers and the elite troops were drawn almost exclusively from Italy or the latinized parts of the western provinces. In like manner the reservation of the higher grades of the civil administration, the second prop of Roman rule, for Roman senators and equestrians, as well as the exclusion of the provincial imperial cult from Italian soil, marked clearly the distinction between the conquering and the subject races of the empire. Yet it was Augustus himself who pointed the way to the ultimate romanization of the provincials by the bestowal of citizenship as one of the rewards for military service and by the settlement of colonies of veterans in the provinces.
*The ideals of Augustus.* A counterpart to the governmental reorganization effected by Augustus was his attempt to revive the old time Roman virtues which had fallen into contempt during the last centuries of the republic. This moral regeneration of the Roman people he regarded as the absolutely essential basis for a new era of peace and prosperity. And the reawakening of morality was necessarily preceded by a revival of the religious rites and ceremonies that in recent times had passed into oblivion through the attraction of new cults, the growth of skepticism, or the general disorder into which the public administration had fallen as a result of civil strife.