The beginning of Augustus' own retrospective is famous.

It is hard not to admire, at least from an artistic point of view, the insouciance with which the old autocrat here passes off the constitutional authority of his youth as a faction and its subjugation to his will as an exercise in liberation. It is very good rhetoric, but it was never entirely his own. Caesar, we know, had said much the same thing half a century before. At Corfinium in 49, he had told Lentulus Spinther that his goal in taking up arms was to restore both his liberty and that of the Roman people, which was then being crushed by an aristocratic faction (“ut se et populum Romanum factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem vindicaret”). Though the key phrase, like libertas itself, had become something of a cliché among writers of the late Republic, the particular “factions” recalled in these two passages were much the same, and the similar collocation of words in so short a space – factio, oppressum, libertatem vindicare – may well indicate a deliberate association of Augustus' cause with his uncle's.