 The general who won the last civil war of the Roman Republic, Gaius Octavian, became the master of the state. In the years after 30 BC, Octavian set out to reform the Roman constitution, and to found the Principate. The ultimate consequence of these reforms was the abolition of the republic, and the founding of the Roman Empire. Octavian was given the honorific Augustus ("venerable") by the Roman Senate, and became known to history by this name, and as the first Roman Emperor. Octavian's reforms did not, at the time, seem drastic, since they did nothing more than reorganize the constitution. The reorganization was revolutionary, however, because the ultimate result was that Octavian ended up with control over the entire constitution, which itself set the stage for outright monarchy. When Diocletian became Roman Emperor in 284, the Principate was abolished, and a new system, the Dominate, was established. This system survived until the ultimate fall of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in 1453.
