Side by side with this religious cultus of the emperor was a willingness to surrender all political power into his hands. Little by little he engrossed all the offices of state, and so completely had proscription and indulgence in turn done their work that none were found bold enough to resist these insidious encroachments. [16] The privileges of the senate and the rights of the people were gradually abridged; and that pernicious policy so congenial to a despotism, of satisfying the appetite for food and amusement and so keeping the people quiet, was inaugurated early in his reign, and set moving in the lines which it long afterwards followed. Freedom of debate, which had been universal in the senate, was curtailed by the knowledge that, as often as not, the business was being decided by a secret council held within the palace. Eloquence could not waste itself in abstract discussions; and even if it attempted to speak, the growing servility made it perilous to utter plain truths. Thus the sphere of public speaking was greatly restricted. Those who had poured forth before the assembled people the torrents of their oratory were now by what Tacitus so graphically calls the _pacification_ of eloquence [17] confined to the tamer arena of the civil law courts. All those who felt that without a practical object eloquence cannot exist, had to resign themselves to silence. Others less serious-minded found a sphere for their natural gift of speech in the halls of the rhetoricians. It is pitiable to see men like Pollio content to give up all higher aims, and for want of healthier exercise waste their powers in noisy declamation.
History, if treated with dignity and candour, was almost as dangerous a field as eloquence. Hence we find that few were bold enough to cultivate it. Livy, indeed, succeeded in producing a great masterwork, which, while it did not conceal his Pompeian sympathies, entered so heartily into the emperor's general point of view as to receive high praise at his hands. But Livy was not a politician. Those who had been politicians found it unwise to provoke the jealousy of Augustus by expressing their sentiments. Hence neither Messala nor Pollio continued their works on contemporary history; a deprivation which we cannot but strongly feel, as we have few trustworthy accounts of those, times.