The happy outcome of the Principate might be held to justify, or at least to palliate, the horrors of the Roman Revolution: hence the danger of an indulgent estimate of the person and acts of Augustus. […] To this partisan and pragmatic interpretation of the Roman Revolution there stands a notable exception. […] Of tough Italic stock, hating pomp and pretence, he wrote of the Revolution as that bitter theme demanded, in a plain, hard style. […] The marshals, diplomats, and financiers of the Revolution may be discerned again in the Republic of Augustus as the ministers and agents of power, the same men but in different garb. […] But even now the work had much farther to go in so far as Italy was concerned: the Revolution had barely begun.