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The office of Pontifex Maximus, of which he could not decently deprive Lepidus as long as he lived,It had formed a sort of honourable retirement in which Lepidus was shelved, to use a familiar expression, when Augustus got rid of him quietly from the Triumvirate. Augustus assumed it A.U.C. 740, thus. centring the last of all the great offices of the state in his own person; that of Pontifex Maximus, being of high importance, from the sanctity attached to it, and the influence it gave him over the whole system of religion. he assumed as soon as he was dead. He then caused all prophetical books, both in Latin and Greek, the authors of which were either unknown, or of no great authority, to be brought in; and the whole collection, amounting to upwards of two thousand volumes, he committed to the flames, preserving only the Sibylline oracles; but not even those without a strict examination, to ascertain which were genuine. This being done, he deposited them in two gilt coffers, under the pedestal of the statue of the Palatine Apollo. He restored the calendar, which had been corrected by Julius Caesar, but through negligence was again fallen into confusion, In the thirty-six years since the calendar was corrected by Julius Casar, the priests had erroneously intercalated eleven days instead of nine. See JULIUS, c. xl. to its former regularity; and upon that occasion, called the month Sextilis, Sextilis, the sixth month, reckoning from March, in which the year of Romulus commenced. by his own name, August, rather than September, in which he was born; because in it he had obtained his first consulship, and all his most considerable victories. So Cicero called the day on which he returned from exile, the day of his "nativity" and his "new birth," παλιγεννεσίαν, a word which had afterwards a theological sense, from its use in the New Testament. He increased the number, dignity, and revenues of the priests, and especially those of the Vestal Virgins. And when, upon the death of one of them, a new one was to be taken, Capi. There is a peculiar force in the word here adopted by Suetonius; the form used by the Pontifex Maximus, when he took the novice from the hand of her father, being Te capio amata, "I have you, my dear," implying the forcible breach of former ties, as in the case of a captive taken in war. and many persons made interest that their daughters names might be omitted in the lists for election, he replied with an oath, "If either of my own grand-daughters were old enough, I would have proposed her."
