He declared a general amnesty for the former supporters of his enemies, and provided land for over 120,000 former soldiers. As soon as he arrived, he began addressing the problems that were plaguing Rome. Octavian's arrival alone caused a wave of optimism to ripple throughout Italy. The political situation was unstable, and there was a constant threat of renewed warfare. Decades of war had taken a terrible toll on the People of Rome.

With Mark Antony's defeat, no one remained to oppose Octavian. Octavian returned to Rome two years after defeating Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium. 4 From Nerva to the abolition of the Principate.

Various other changes were affected over the course of the Empire, reducing the electoral powers of the various Roman assemblies and shifting those powers to the Senate as well as doing away with elections entirely in favour of appointments by the emperor. After more constitutional changes in 23 BC, Augustus was granted greater proconsular authority over all imperial provinces, which allowed him to override any other Roman governors, marking the completion of the various offices that most Roman emperors would hold until the transformation of the Principate into the Dominate in the late third century. By holding various republican offices, Augustus, as Octavian was known after 27 BC, was able to disguise the autocratic nature of his regime and claim a restoration of the republic. Concurrently, he held the Roman consulship, granting him authority within the ordinary legal structure which did not exceed any of the other magistrates. The creation of the Principate and the Roman Empire is traditionally dated to 27 BC with the first Augustan constitutional settlement, where Octavian, the victor of the final war of the Roman Republic, gave up his extraordinary powers and was vested with proconsular authority over the imperial provinces, which he held along with the tribunician power granted to him by the Senate in 36 BC. The Roman Empire's constitution emerged as a transformation of the late Roman Republic's constitution, utilising various late Republican precedents, to legitimise the granting of incredible legal powers to one man and the centralisation of legal powers into bodies which that man controlled. The history of the constitution of the Roman Empire begins with the establishment of the Principate in 27 BC and is considered to conclude with the abolition of that constitutional structure in favour of the Dominate at Diocletian's accession in AD 284.

Roman empire extended timeline wiki