Everitt on Augustus: "Perhaps the most instructive aspect of Augustus' approach to politics was his twin recognition that in the long run power was unsustainable without consent, and consent could best be won by associating radical constitutional change with a traditional and moralizing ideology."

Augustus saw Rome's downfall into constant civil war, which he was a major contributor to, as a loss of the moral rudder from Roman greatness of centuries before. So he passed moralising laws. These, like modern statutory restrictions aimed at morality, had no discernible effect.

This traditionalist view of morality, such as promiscuity, and not breeding enough heirs, is not the same as Harpurian or republican views of morality. The Harpurian view of morality is one of decreasing violence through moral expression, and eventually, with moral perfection, the replacement of the state with individual moral virtue. For instance Harpur believed that war would eventually become morally impossible.

Republican morality is predicated in the absence of violence. Augustus' view of morality was a political narrative designed to bind his imperial rule to the history of Roman greatness. It is not much different to the modern passage of nationalist and moralistic laws.

btw Augustus' was a horrible hypocrite and did not follow his own moralising laws.

Propaganda has changed little in politics. A quote from Augustus' Res Gestae [wiki and English].

Augustus in Res Gestae said, "At the age of nineteen on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of faction."

Colin Wells comments after that excerpt in the Roman Empire:

'Liberty' and 'faction' are stock words of the political vocabulary. I am always for liberty, you are always for faction. Like 'democracy' today, 'liberty' could mean anything you wanted it to mean, and nobody was ever against it.

Liberty is used often on this site, and normally in the meaning of freedom under a political system or the state. Faction is also used often, as political parties and special interests are factions in modern systems. Under a system of liberty factions are not a problem unless they resort to violence. Augustus' plan was violence all along, even under Roman law, it was illegal to raise private armies without the permission of the Senate. The increasing civil strife in Rome can be traced to the ability of individuals to raise threatening armies and often of the Senate to give the leaders of those armies legal status afterwards. Pompey made his name with a privately raised army during the civil wars of Sulla's time.

Interesting to see though that propaganda has changed little. In fact Augustus put Virgil and Horace, the well known poets, to work writing a history of Rome and events that supported his traditionalist and imperial view of Rome that inevitably pointed to the necessity of a benign imperial rule.