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The statue found at Livia's villa at Prima Porta was made after my death, but based on an earlier bronze. It shows me in military dress, my arm raised, a cupid riding a dolphin at my feet — the divine lineage, the claim to Venus through Julius Caesar.

I did not invent this imagery. I hired the best sculptors in the empire and told them what Rome needed to believe: that the civil wars were over, that a new age had begun, that the man in the breastplate was not a warlord who had defeated all rivals but the guardian of peace. Propaganda and governance are not so different. Both are the art of persuading people to live together without killing each other.