Period of civil wars of the 1st century BCE was a time of a great fratricidal struggle between the very citizens of Rome. As Marcus Favonius, Cato’s friend, noted: “Civil war was worse than the most illegal monarchy”1.
Representatives of patrician families, despite their reluctance to accumulate power in the hands of Octavian Augustus, as princeps, preferred to agree to depart from republican principles in favour of order and ending the bloodshed of the Romans. The phrase Pax et Princeps (“Peace under Princeps”) has even been coined.
