ABSTRACT
The Second Triumvirate and the Principate of Augustus is famously a Golden Age in literature and art, emulated in later epochs in which classical dignity and grace were valued, earning them too the title Augustan. Augustan sculpture shows the enemy defeated after the battle; Virgil displays the huge struggle to bring the Roman People into being on-going, manifestly so in the second half of the Aeneid. This burgeoning of literature and art rested on a basis of enhanced prosperity, and that in turn not just on the access of wealth that came into Rome when Egypt was made into a province, or even on the steady income from the taxes of an Empire at peace, but on an upsurge of confidence and gratitude that marked the end of the Civil Wars. It could even be argued that Augustus could afford to take love elegies lightly: they exemplified the freedom that had existed before the Republic fell.
