The transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire is usually dated to Augustus (27 BC), but the constitutional transformation was deliberately obscured by Augustus himself, who maintained the forms of republican government while concentrating unprecedented personal power.

Augustus held no permanent office that the Republic hadn't known. His power derived from the combination of proconsular imperium (military command authority), tribunician power (which gave him legal sacrosanctity and the right to veto any legislation), the consulship which he held repeatedly, and the informal authority (auctoritas) that came from his position as the richest and most powerful man in the Roman world and the adopted son of the deified Julius Caesar.

The Augustan settlement's genius was its appeal to different constituencies. Senators retained their prestige and most of their traditional functions; equestrians gained expanded administrative roles; the urban plebs received games, subsidized grain, and the physical transformation of Rome; the armies received regular pay, land grants on discharge, and a commander who stayed in post. The civil wars had made everyone desperate for stability; Augustus delivered it at the cost of genuine republican governance.

The literature of the Augustan age — Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid — reflects the complex negotiation of this settlement. Virgil's Aeneid simultaneously celebrates Roman destiny and contains notes of genuine pathos about the cost of empire. Ovid's eventual exile reveals the limits of the Augustan cultural program: even Rome's greatest love poet could be removed when his work seemed to conflict with the regime's moral agenda.