Politics had become the possession of a regime, not an establishment, and there was no role for him, unless he were somehow to create a new one. Many familiar faces were missing—dead, in exile or still fighting in distant corners of the empire. They had been largely replaced by the “underworld,” some of them members of the Catullan and Clodian counterculture of the early 60s and 50s, who had always rejected the old solid Roman virtues of duty and loyalty to tradition.
