nd other great generals who had preceded him.
The purely philanthropic motive does not bulk largely in these gifts to
the citizens, because the people whose armies had won the victories were
part owners at least of the spoils, and because the victorious leader who
built the structure was actuated more by the hope of transmitting the
memory of his achievements to posterity in some conspicuous and
imperishable monument than by a desire to benefit his fellow citizens.

These two motives, the one egoistic and the other altruistic, actuated all
the Roman emperors in varying degrees. The activity of Augustus in such
matters comes out clearly in the record of his reign, which he has left us
in his own words. This remarkable bit of autobiography, known as the
"Deeds of the Deified Augustus," the Emperor had engraved on bronze
tablets, placed in front of his mausoleum. The original has disappeared,
but fortunately a copy of it has been found on the walls of a ruined
temple at Ancyra, in Asia Minor, and furnishes us abundant proof of the
great improvements which he made in the city of Rome. We are told in it
that from booty he paid for the construction of the Forum of Augustus,
which was some four hundred feet long, three hundred wide, and was
surrounded by a wall one hundred and twenty feet high, covered on the
inside with marble and stucco. Enclosed within it and built with funds
coming from the same source was the magnificent temple of Mars the
Avenger, which had as its principal trophies the Roman standards recovered
from the Parthians. This forum and temple are only two items in the long
list of public improvements which Augustus records in his imperial
epitaph, for, as he proudly writes: "In my sixth consulship, acting under
a decree of the senate, I restored eighty-two temples in the city,
neglecting no temple which needed repair at the time." Besides the
temples, he mentions a large number of theatres, porticos, basilicas,
aqueducts, roads, and bridges which he built in Rome or in Italy outside
the city.

But the Roman people had come to look for acts of generosity from their
political as well as from their military leaders, and this factor, too,
must be taken into account in the case of Augustus. In the closing years
of the Republic, candidates for office and men elected to office saw that
one of the most effective ways of winning and holding their popularity was
to give public entertainments, and they vied with one anot