Virgil and Horace, though defenders of the Augustan regime and neither of them religious believers, were political conservatives.
And both were beneficiaries of the largess of Maecenas, friend of Augustus and the regime.
The phenomenon is familiar from many ages when conservatism meant primarily resistance to anarchy, chaos, violent turmoil, and fanaticism.
Think of Moliere and his king.
Or Dryden, Pope, and Swift and the monarchy of their age.
Like an enlightened monarch or a patriot king, a dictator can expand the sphere of ordered liberty and enrich his country and his people, opposed by a self-seeking oligarchy wrapped in the virtuous mantle of republicanism or seeking such wrapping.
Of course, not every conservative in the sense given has a sinecure, or is a poet.
Anyway, a conservative, so understood, could "steal the Whigs' clothes," follow Bismarck, or vote for Bernie Sanders.
Particularly if he saw the appropriators of the name as mere nitwits, doctrinaire boobies, and whores of an unscrupulous and dangerous plutocracy.
Much like the Senate disempowered by the Emperors.
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