Not a hand stirred when the Imperator appeared in public.

There was abundance of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling popular satire against the new monarchy.

When a comedian ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest applause.

The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free.
Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field; he himself and his abler confidants replied to the Cato-literature with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes round the dead body of Patroclus; but as a matter of course in this conflict--where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings was judge--the Caesarians had the worst of it.

No course remained but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles, while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected to a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded was utterly arbitrary.( 4) The underground machinations of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly set forth in another connection.