Augustus’s genius was to give up a good deal of his legitimate powers as a magistrate or consul or whatever, but build up his personal authority so everyone semi-voluntarily agreed that he could do what he liked because he was so brilliant as a person. His difficulty came with passing that onto his successors, but that’s a difficulty for another book. He spent decades building a system of government from the outside in until he was the sole ruler of the Roman Empire and no one could quite remember how they’d all agreed to it, but they did think he deserved it.
Reminder that Mark Zuckerberg idolises Augustus.
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