With his victory at Actium still hanging in the balance, Shakespeare's Octavius speaks prophetically of a new era of peace:

That the 'universal peace' Octavius envisions nearly coincides with that proclaimed thirty years later at Christ's nativity (Luke, ii, 14) is, of course, beyond the capacity of Octavius to see; but a tradition of Christian historiography extending from the early Church Fathers through the Renaissance regards the proximity of these two events with a different awareness. Christian historians viewing the advent of the Pax Romana retrospectively could see in it an adumbration of the Pax Christiana, and they could see in the closeness with which one event followed the other the unfolding of a providential plan. Thus Eusebius, for instance, speaks of the twin triumphs of monarchy and monotheism as emanations from a common source: