The emperor, his minister, and his advocates, thus working for the same end, beyond doubt produced some effect. The _Odes_ of Horace in the first three books, which are devoted to politics, show an attitude of antagonism and severe expostulation; he boldly rebukes vice, and calls upon the strong hand to punish it:
"Quid tristes querimoniae, Si non supplicio culpa reciditur? Quid leges sine moribus Vanae proficiunt?" [10]
But when, some years later, he wrote the _Carmen Saeculare_, and the fourth book of the Odes, his voice is raised in a paean of unmixed triumph. "The pure home is polluted by no unchastity; law and morality have destroyed crime; matrons are blessed with children resembling their fathers; already faith and peace, honour and maiden modesty, have returned to us," &c. [11] This can hardly be mere exaggeration, though no doubt the picture is coloured, since the popularity of Ovid's _Art of Love_, even during Horace's lifetime, is a sufficient proof that profligacy did not lack its votaries.
To the student of human development the most interesting feature in this attempted reform of manners is the universal tendency to connect it with the deification of the emperor. It was in vain that Augustus claimed to return to the old paths; everywhere he met this new apotheosis of himself crowning the restored edifice of belief; so impossible was it for him, as for others, to reconstruct the past. As the guardian of the people's material welfare, he became, despite of himself, the people's chief divinity. From the time that Virgil's gratitude expressed itself in the first Eclogue--
"Namque erit ille mihi semper deus: illius aram Saepe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus," [12]
the emperor was marked out for this new form of adulation, and succeeding poets only added to what Virgil had begun. Even in his _Epistles_, where the conventionalities of mythology are never employed, Horace compares him with the greatest deities, and declares that altars are raised to his name, while all confess him to be the greatest person that has been or will be among mankind. [13] Propertius and Ovid [14] accept this language as proper and natural, and the striking rapidity with which it established itself in universal use is one of the most speaking signs of the growing degeneracy. Augustus himself was not cajoled, Tiberius still less, but Caius and his successors were; even Vespasian, when dying, in jest or earnest used the words "ut puto deus fio." As the satirist says, "Power will believe anything that Flattery suggests." [15]