The Crest-Wave of Evolution / A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19

by Kenneth Morris

XVIII. AUGUSTUS

We left Rome galloping down the Gadarene slope, and scrimmaging for a vantage point whence to hurl herself headlong. Down she came; a riot and roaring ruin: doing those things she ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things she ought to have done, and with no semblance of health in her. There was nothing for it but the downfall of the world; good-bye civilization and all that was ever upbuilded of old. Come now; we should become good Congo forester in our time, with what they call 'long pig' for our daintiest diet. It is a euphemism for your brother man.

But supposing this mist-filled Gadarene gulf were really bridgable: supposing there were another side beyond the roar of hungry waters and the horror; and that mankind,—European mankind,—might pass over, and be saved, were there but staying the rout for a moment, and affording a means to cross?

There is a bardic proverb in the Welsh: A fo Ben, bydded Bont:—'He who is Chief, let him be the bridge': Bran the Blessed said it, when he threw down his giant body over the gulf, so that the men of the Island of the Mighty might pass over into Ireland. And the end of an old cycle, and the beginning of a new, when there is—as in our Rome at that time—a sort of psychic and cyclic impasse, a break-down and terrible chasm in history, if civilization is to pass over from the old conditions to the new, a man must be found who can be the bridge. He must solve the problems within himself; he must care so little for, and have such control of, his personality, that he can lay it down, so to speak, and let humanity cross over upon it. History may get no news of him at all; although he is then the Chief of Men, and the greatest living;—or it may get news, only to belittle him. His own and the after ages may think very little of him; he may possess no single quality to dazzle the imagination:—he may seem cold and uninteresting, a crafty tyrant;—or an uncouth old ex-rail-splitter to have in the White House;—or an illiterate peasant-girl to lead your armies; yet because he is the bridge, he is the Chief; and you may suspect someone out of the Pantheons incarnate in him.

For the truth of all which, humanity has a sure instinct. When there is a crisis we say, Look for the Man. Rome thought (for the most part) that she had found him when Caesar, having conquered Pompey, came home master of the world. If this phoenix and phenomenon in time, now with no competitor above the horizons, could not settle affairs, only Omnipotence could. Every thinking (or sane) Roman knew that what Rome needed was a head; and now at last she had got one. Pompey, the only possible alternative, was dead; Caesar was lord of all things. Pharsalus, the deciding battle, was fought in 48; he returned home in 46. From the year between, in which he put the finishing touches to his supremacy, you may count the full manvantara of Imperial Rome: fifteen centuries until 1453 and the fall of the Eastern Empire.

All opinion since has been divided as to the character of Caesar. To those whose religion is democracy, he is the grand Destroyer of Freedom; to the worshipers of the Superman, he is the chief avatar of their god. Mr. Stobart,* who deals with him sanely, but leaning to the favorable view, says he was "not a bad man, for he preferred justice and mercy to tyranny and cruelty, and had a passion for logic and order"; and adds, "he was a man without beliefs or illusions or scruples." He began by being a fop and ultra-extravagant; and was always, if we may believe accounts, a libertine of the first water. He was, of course, an epileptic. In short, there is nothing in history to give an absolutely sure clue to his real self. But there is that passage in Madame Blavatsky, which I have quoted before, to the effect that he was an agent of the dark forces, and conquered Gaul for them, to abolish the last effective Mysteries; and I think in the light of that, his character, and a great deal of history besides, becomes intelligible enough.—I will be remembered that he stood at the head of the Roman religion, as Potifex Maximus.

——— * On whose book, The Grandeur that was Rome, this paper also largely leans. ———

But it was not the evil that he did that (obviously) brought about his downfall. Caesar was fortified against Karma by the immensity of his genius. Whom should he fear, who had conquered Pompeius Magnus? None in the roman world could reach so high as to his elbow;—for sheer largeness of mind, quickness and daring, he stoood absolutely the Superman among pygmies. He knew his aim, and could make or wait for it; and it was big and real. Other men crowed or fumbled after petty and pinch-beck ends; impossible rhetorical republicanisms; vain senatorial prestiges; —or pleasure pure and simple—say rather, very complex and impure. Let them clack, let them fumble! Caesar would do things and get things done. He wore the whole armor of his greatness, and could see no chink or joint in it through which a hostile dagger might pierce. Even his military victories were won by some greater than mere military greatness.—Karma, perhaps, remembering the Mysteries at Gaulish Bibracte, and the world left now quite lightless, might have a word to say; might even be looking round for shafts to speed. But what, against a man so golden-panoplied? "Tush!" saith Caesar, "there are no arrows now but straws."

One such straw was this: (a foolish one, but it may serve)—

Rome for centuries has been amusing herself on all public occasions with Fourth of July rhetoric against kings, and in praise of tyrannicides. Rome for centuries has been cherishing in her heart what she calls a love of Freedom,—to scourge your slaves, steal from your provincials, and waste your substance in riotous living. All of which Julius Caesar,—being a real man, mind you,—holds in profoundest contempt for driveling unreality; which it certainly is. But unrealities are awfully real at times.

Unluckily, with all his supermannism, he retained some traces of personality. He was bald, and sensitive about it; he always had been a trifle foppish. So when they gave him a nice laurel wreath for his triumph over Pompey, he continued, against all precedent, to wear it indefinitely,—as hiding certain shining surfaces from the vulgar gaze…. "H'm," said Rome, "he goes about the next thing to crowned!" And here is his statue, set up with those of the Seven Kings of antiquity; he allowing it, or not protesting.—They remembered their schoolboy exercises, their spoutings on many Latins for Glorious Fourth; and felt very badly indeed. Then it was unlucky that, being too intent on realities, he could not bother to rise when those absurd old Piccadilly pterodactyls the Senators came into his presence; that he filled up their ridiculous house promiscuously with low-born soldiers and creatures of his own. And that there was a crowd of foolish prigs and pedants in Rome to take note of these so trivial things, and to be more irked by them than by all the realities of his power:—a lean hungry Cassius; an envious brusque detractor Casca; a Brutus with a penchant for being considered a philosopher, after a rather maiden-auntish sort of conception of the part,—and for being considered a true descendant of his well-known ancestor: a cold soul much fired with the ignis fatuus of Republican slave-scourging province-fleecing freedom. An unreal lot, with not the ghost of a Man between them;—what should the one Great Man of the age find in them to disturb the least ofhis dreams?

Came, however, the Ides of March in B.C. 44; and the laugh once more was with Karma,—the one great final laugher of the world. Caesar essayed to be Chief of the Romans: he who is chief, let him be the bridge;—this one, because of a few ludicrous personal foibles, has broken down now under the hurry and thunder of the marching cycles. The fact being that your true Chief aspires only to the bridgehood; whereas this one overlooked that part of it, intent on the chieftaincy.—And now, God have mercy on us! there is to be all the round of wars and proscriptions and massacres over again: Roma caput mundi herself piteously decapitate; and with every booby and popinjay rising in turn to kick her about at his pleasure;—and here first comes Mark Anthony to start the game, it seems.

Well; Mark Anthony managed wisely enough at that crisis; you would almost have said, hearing him speak at Caesar's funeral, that there was at least a ha'porth of brains hidden somewhere within that particularly thick skull of his. Half an hour changes him from a mere thing alive on sufferance—too foolish to be worth bothering to kill—into the master of Rome. And yet probably it was not brains that did it, but the force of genuine feeling: he loved dead Caesar; he was trying now to be cautious, for his own skin's sake: was repressing himself;—but his feelings got the better of him,—and were catching,— and set the mob on fire. Your lean and hungry ones; your envious detractors; your thin maiden-auntish prig republican philosophers:—all very wisely sheer off. Your grand resounding Cicero,—vox et praeterea almost nihil (he had yet to die and show that it was almost, not quite,) sheers off too, into the country, there to busy himself with an essay on the Nature of the Gods (to contain, be sure, some fine eloquence), and with making up his mind to attack Anthony on behalf of Republican Freedom.—Anthony's next step is wise too: he appoints himself Caesar's executor, gets hold of the estate, and proceeds to squander it right and left buying up for himself doubtful support.—All you can depend on is the quick coming-on of final ruin and dismay: of all impossibilities, the most impossible is to imagine Mark Anthony capable of averting it. As to Caesar's heir, so nominated in the will—the persona from whom busy Anthony has virtually stolen the estate,—no one gives him a thought. Seeing who he was, it would be absurd to do so.

And then he turned up in Rome, a sickly youth of eighteen; demanded his moneys from Anthony; dunned him till he got some fragment of them;—then borrowed largely on his own securities, and proceeded to pay—what prodigal Anthony had been much too thrifty to think of doing—Ceasar's debts. Rome was surprised.

This was Caesar's grand-nephew, Octavius; who had been in camp at Apollonia in Illyricum since he had coolly proposed to his great-uncle that the latter, being Dictator, and about to start on his Parthian campaign, should make him his Master of the Horse. He had been exempted from military service on account of ill-health; and Julius had a sense of humor; so he packed him off to Apollonia to 'finish' a military training that had never begun. There he had made a close friend of a rising young officer by the name of Vipsanius Agrippa; a man of high capacities who, when the news came of Caesar's death, urged him to lose no time, but rouse the legions in their master's name, and march on Rome to avenge his murder.—"No," says Octavius, "I shall go there alone."

Landing in Italy, he heard of the publication of the will, in which he himself had been named heir. That meant, to a very vast fortune, and to the duty of revenge. Of the fortune, since it was now in Mark Anthony's hands, you could predict nothing too surely but its vanishment; as to the duty, it might also imply a labor for which the Mariuses and Sullas, the Caesars and Pompeys, albeit with strong parties at their backs, had been too small men. And Octavius had no party, and he was no soldier, and he had no friends except that Vipsanius back in Apollonia.

His mother and step-father, with whom he stayed awhile on his journey, urged him to throw the whole matter up: forgo the improbably fortune and very certain peril, and not rush in where the strongest living might fear to tread. Why, there was Mark Anthony, Caesar's lieutenant—the Hercules, mailed Bacchus, Roman Anthony—the great dashing captain whom his soldiers so adored— even he was shilly-shallying with the situation, and not daring to say Caesar shall be avenged. And Anthony, you might be sure, would want no competitor—least of all in the boy named heir in Caesar's will.—"Oh, I shall go on and take it up," said Octavius; and went. And paid Caesar's debts, as we have seen, presently: thereby advertising his assumption of all responsibilities. Anthony began to be uneasy about him; the Senatorial Party to make advances to him; people began to suspect that, possibly, this sickly boy might grow into a man to be reckoned with.

I am not going to follow him in detail through the next thirteen years. It is a tortuous difficult story; to which we lack the true clues, unless they are to be found in the series of protrait-busts of him taken during this period. The makers of such busts were the photographers of the age; and, you may say, as good as the best photographers. Every prominent Roman availed himself of their services. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his Tragedy of the Caesars, arranges, examines, and interprets these portraits of Augustus; I shall give you the gist of his conclusions, which are illuminating.—First we see a boy with delicate and exceedingly beautiful features, impassive and unawakend: Octavius when he came to Rome. A cloud gathers on his face, deepening into a look of intense anguish; and with the anguish grows firmness and the clenched expression of an iron will: this is Octavian in the dark days of the thirties.—the anguish passes, but leaves the firmness behind: the strength remains, the beauty remains, and a light of high serenity has taken the place of the aspect of pain: this is Augustus the Emperor. The same writer contrasts this story with that revealed by the busts of Julius: wherein we see first a gay insouciant dare-devil youth, and at last a man old before his time; a face sinister (I should say) and haunted with ugly sorrow.

We get no contemporary account of Augustus; no interpeting biography from the hand of any one who knew him. We have to read between the lines of history, and with what intuition we can muster: and especially the story of that lonely soul struggling through the awful waters of the years that followed Caesar's death. We see him allying himself first with one party, then with another; exercising (apparently) no great or brilliant qualities, yet by every change thrown nearer the top; till with Anthony and Lepidus he is one of the Triumvirate that rules the world. Then came those cruel proscriptions. This is the picture commonly seen:—a cold keen intellect perpetually dissembling; keen enough to deceive Anthony, to decieve the senate, to decieve Cicero and all the world; cruel for policy's sake, without ever a twinge of remorse or compunciton: a marble-cold impassive mind, and no heart al all, with master-subtlety achieving mastery of the world.—Alas! a boy in his late teens and early twenties, so nearly friendless, and with enemies so many and so great… A boy "up aginst" so huge and difficult circumstances always, that (you would say) there was no time, no possibility, for him to look ahead: in every moment the next agonizing perilous step that must be taken vast enough to fill the whole horizon of his mind, of any human mind perhaps;—ay, so vast and compelling that every day with wrenches and torsion that horizon must be pushed back and back to contain them,—a harrowing painful process, as we may read on his busts… As to the proscriptions, Dio, a writer, as Mr. Baring-Gould says, "never willing to allow a good quality to one of the Caesars, or to put their conduct in other than an unfavorable light," says that they were brought about mainly—"by Lepidus and Anthony, who, having been long in honor under Julius Caesar, and having held many offices in state and army, had acquired many enemies. But as Octavian was associated with them in power, an appearance of complicity attached to him. But he was not cruel by nature, and he had no occasion for putting many to death; moreover, he had resolved to imitate the example of his adoptive father. Added to this, he was young, was just entering on his career, and sought rather to gain hearts than to alienate them. No sooner was he in sole power than he showed no signs of severity, and at that time he caused the death of very few, and saved very many. He proceeded with the utmost severity against such as betrayed their [proscribed?] masters or friends; but was most favorable to such as helped the proscribed to escape."

It was that "appearance of complicity" that wrote the anguish on his face: the fact that he could not prevent, and saw no way but to have a sort of hand in, things his nature loathed. In truth he appears to us now rather like a pawn, played down the board by some great Chess-player in the Unseen: moving by no volition or initiative of its own through perils and peace-takings to Queenhood on the seventh square. But we know that he who would enter the Path of Power must use all the initiative, all the volition, possible in any human being, to attain the balance, to master the personality, to place himself wholly and unreservedly in the power, under the control, of the Higher thing that is "within and yet without him"' The Voice of his Soul, that speaks also through the lips of his Teacher; whether that Teacher be embodied visibly before men or not. He obeys; he follows the gleam; he sufferes, and strives, and makes no question; and his striving is all for more power to obey and to follow. In this, I think, we have our clue to the young Octavian.—'Luck' always favored him; not least when, in dividing the world, Anthony chose the East, gave Lepidus Africa, and left the most difficult and dangerous Italy to the youngest partner of the three.

He had two friends, men of some genius both: Vipsanius Agrippa the general, and Cilnius Maecenas the statesman. Both appear to us as great personalities; the master whom they served so loyally and splendidly remains and Impersonality,—which those who please may call a 'cold abstraction.' While Octavian was away campaigning, Maecenas, with no official position, ruled Rome on his behalf; and so wisely that Rome took it and was well content. As for those campaigns, 'luck' or Agrippa won them for him; in Octavian himself we can see no qualities of great generalship. And indeed, it is likely he had none; for he was preeminently a man of peace. But they always were won. Suetonius makes him a coward; yet he was one that, when occasion arose, would not think twice about putting to sea in an open boat during a storm; and once, when he heard that Lepidus was preparing to turn against him, he rode alone into that general's camp, and took away the timid creature's army without striking a blow: simply ordered the soldiers to follow him, and they did. If he seems now a colorless abstraction, he could hardly have seemed so then to Lepidus' legions, who deserted their own general—and paymaster—at his simple word of command. Or to Agrippa, or to Maecenas, great men who desired nothing better than to serve him with loyal affection. Maecenas was an Etruscan; a man of brilliant mind and culture; reputed somewhat luxurious when he had nothing to do, but a very dynamo when there was work.—A man, be it said, of great ideals on his own account: we see it in his influence on Virgil and Horace. In his last years some coldness, unexplained, sprung up between him and his master; yet when Maecenas died, it was found he had made Augustus his sole heir.—But now Augustus is still only Octavian, moving impassively and impersonally to his great destiny; as if no thing of flesh and blood and common human impulses, but a cosmic force acting;—which indeed the Impersonal Man always is.

What he did, seems to have done, or could not help doing, always worked out right, whether it carries for us an ethical look or no. The problems and difficulties that lay between that time and Peace flowed to him: and as at the touch of some alchemical solvent, received their solution. We get one glimpse of the inner man of him, of his beliefs or religion. He believed absolutely in his Genius (in the Roman sense); his luck, or his Karma, or—and perhaps chiefly—that God-side of a man which Numaism taught existed:—what we should call, the Higher Law, the Warrior, and the Higher Self. There, as I think, you have the heart of his mystery; he followed that, blindly,—and made no mistakes. In the year 29 B.C. it led him back to Rome in Triumph, having laid the world at his feet. He had been the bridge over that chasm in the cycles; the Path through all the tortuosities of that doubtful and wayward time; over which the Purposes of the Gods had marched to their fulfilment. He had been strong as destiny, who seemed to have little strength in his delicate body. With none of Caesar's dash and brilliance, he had repeated Caesar's achievement; and was to conquer further in spiritual

"regions Caesar never knew."

With none of Anthony's soldiership, he had easily brought Anthony down.—Why did Cleopatra lose Actium for Anthony?

We face the almost inexplicable again in the whole story of Octavian's dealings with Cleopatra. She is one of the characters history has most venomously lied about. Mr. Wiegand has shown some part of the truth about her in his biography; but I do not think he has solved the whole problem; for he takes the easy road of making Octavian a monster. Now Augustus, beyond any question, was one of the most beneficent forces that ever appeared in history; and no monster can be turned, by the mere circumstance of success achieved, into that. Cleopatra had made a bid to solve the world-problem on an Egyptian basis: first through Caesar, then through Anthony. We may dismiss the idea that she was involved in passionate attachments; she had a grand game to play, with World-stakes at issue. The problem was not to be solved through Caesar, and it was not to be solved through Anthony; but it had been solved by Octavian. There was nothing more for her to do, but step aside and be no hindrance to the man who had done that work for the Gods that she had tried and been unable to do. So she sailed away from Actium.

Julius Caesar in his day had married her; and young Caesarion their son was his heir by Egyptian, but not by Roman, law. When, in the days of Caesar's dictatorship, she brought the boy to Rome, Caesar refused to recognise her as his wife, or to do the right thing by Caesarion. To do either would have endangered his position in Rome; where by that time he had another wife, the fourth or fifth in the series. He feared the Romans; and they feared Egypt and its Queen. It seemed very probably at that time that the headship of the world might pass to Egypt; which was still a sovereign power, and immensely rich, and highly populated, and a compact kingdom;—whereas the Roman state was everywhere ill-defined, tenebrous, and falling to pieces. At this distance it is hard to see in Egypt anything of strength or morale that would have enable it to settle the world's affairs; as hard, indeed, as it is to see anything of the kind in Rome. But Rome was haunted with the bogey idea; and terribly angry, aftewards, with Anthony for his Egyptian exploits; and hugely relieved when Actium put an end to the Egyptian peril. Egypt, it was thought, if nothing else, might have starved Italy into submission. But in truth the cycles were all against it: Cleopatra was the only Egyptian that counted,—the lonely Spacious Soul incarnate there.

When Octavian reached Alexandria, all he did was to refuse to be influenced by the queen's wonderfully magnetic personality. He appears to me to have been uncertain how to act: to have been waiting for clear guidance from the source whence all his guidance came. He also seems to have tried to keep her from committing suicide. It is explained commonly on the supposition that he intended she should appear in his triumph in Rome; and that she killed herself to escape that humiliation. I think it is one of those things whose explanation rests in the hands of the Gods, and is not known to men. You may have a mass of evidence, that makes all humanity certain on some point; and yet the Gods, who have witnessed the realities of the thing, may know that those realities were quite different.

Then her two elder children were killed; and no one has suggested, so far as I know, that it was not by Octavians's orders. It is easy, even, to supply him with a motive for it; one in keeping with accepted ideas of his character:—as he was Caesar's heir, he would have wished Caesar's own children out of the way;—and Caesar's children by that (to Roman ideas) loathed Egyptian connexion. His family honor would have been touched….

Up to this point, then, such a picture as this might be the true portrait of him:—a sickly body, with an iron will in it; a youth with no outstanding brilliancies, who never lost his nerve and never made mistakes in policy; with no ethical standars above those of his time:—capable of picking his names coldly on the proscription lists; capable of having Cleopatra's innocent children killed;—one, certainly, who had followed the usual custom of divorcing one wife and marrying another as often as expediency suggested. Above all, following the ends of his ambition unerringly to the top of success.

The ends of his ambition?—That is all hidden in the intimate history of souls. How should we dare say that Julius was ambitious, Augustus not? Both apparently aimed at mastery of the world; from this human standpoint of the brain-mind there is nothing to choose, and no means of discrimination. But what about the standpoint of the Gods? Is there no difference, as seen from their impersonal altitudes, between reaching after a place for your personality, and supplying a personality to fill a place that needs filling? There is just that difference, I think, between the brilliant Julius and the staid Octavian. The former might have settled the affairs of the world,—as its controller and master and the dazzling obvious mover of all the pieces on the board. I do not believe Octavian looked ahead at all to see any shining pinnacle or covet a place on it; but time and the Law hurled one situation after another at him, and he mastered and filled them as they came because it was the best thing he could do…. If we say that the two men were as the poles apart, there are but tiny indications of the difference: the tactlessness and small vanities that advertise personality in the one; the supreme tact and balance that affirm impersonality in the other. The personality of Julius must tower above the world; that of Augustus was laid down as a bridge for the world to pass over. Julius gave his monkeys three chestnuts in the morning and four at night;—you remember Chwangtse's story;—and so they grew angry and killed him. Augustus adjusted himself; decreed that they should have their four in the morning. His personality was always under command, and he brought the world across on it. It never got in the way; it was simply the instrument wherewith he (or the Gods) saved Rome. He—we may say he—did save Rome. She was dead, this time; dead as Lazarus, who had been three days in the tomb, etc. He called her forth; gave her two centuries of greatness; five of some kind of life in the west; fifteen, all told, in west and east. Julius is always bound to make on the popular eye the larger impression of greatness. He retains his personality with all its air of supermanhood; it is easy to see him as a live human being, to imagine him in his habit as he lived,—and to be astounded by his greatness. But Augustus is hidden; the real man is covered by that dispassionate impersonality that saved Rome. If all that comes down about the first part of his life is true, and has been truly interpreted, you could not call him then even a good man. But the record of his reign belies every shadow that has been cast on that first part. It is altogether a record of beneficence.

H.P. Blavatsky speaks of Julius as an agent of the dark forces.
Elsewhere she speaks of Augustus as an Initiate.

Did she mean by that merely an initiate of the Official Mysteries as they still existed at Eleusis and elsewhere? Many men, good, bad and indifferent, were that: Cicero,—who was doubtless, as he says, a better man for his initiation: Glamininus and his officers; most of the prominent Athenians since the time of Pericles and earlier. I dare say it had come to mean that though you might be taught something about Karma and Reincarnation, you were not taught to make such teachings a living power in your own life or that of the world. There is nothing of the Occultists, nothing of the Master Soul, in the life and actions of Cicero; but there was very much, as I shall try to show, in the life and actions of Augustus. And, we gather from H.P. Blavatsky, the only Mysteries that survived in their integrity to anything like this time had been those at Bibracte which Caesar destroyed. (Which throws light, by the bye, on Lucan's half-sneering remark about the Druids,—that they alone had real knowledge about the Gods and the things beyond this life.) So it seems to me that Augustus' initiation implied something much more real,—much more a high status of the soul,—than could have been given him by any semi-public organized body within the Roman world.

Virgil, in the year 40 B.C., being then a pastoral poet imitating Theocritus,—nothing very serious,—wrote a strange poem that stands in dignity and depth of purpose far above anything in his model. This was the Fourth Eclogue of his Bucolics, called the Pollio. In it he invokes the "Sicilian Muse" to inspire him to loftier strains; and proceeds to sing of the coming of a new cycle, the return of a better age, to be ushered in, supposedly, by a 'child' born in that year:—

Ultima Cumaci venit jam carminis aetas;
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo;
Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
Jam nora progenies coelo demittitur alto.

This was taken in the Middle Ages as referring to the birth of Jesus; and on the strength of having thus prophesied, Virgil came to be looked on as either a true prophet or a black magician. Hence his enormous reputation all down the centuries as a master of the secret sciences. The chemist is the successor to the alchemist; and in Wales we still call a chemist fferyll, which is Virgil Cymricized. Well; his reputation was not altogether undeserved; he did know much; you can find Karma, Reincarnation, Devachan, Kama-loka—most of the Theosophical teachings as to the postmortem-prenatal states,— taught in the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. But as to this Pollio Eclogue: even in modern textbooks one often sees it asserted that he must have been familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures;—because in the Book of Isaiah the coming of a Messiah to the Jews is prophesied in terms not very unlike those he used. To my mind this is far-fetched: Virgil had Gaul behind him, if you must look for explanations in outside things; and at least in after ages Celtic Messianism was as persistent a doctrine as Jewish. A survival, of course; in truth the initiated or partly initiated among all ancient peoples knew that avatars come. Virgil, if he understood as much about Theosophy as he wrote into the Sixth Aeneid, would also have known, from whatever source he learnt it, the truth about cycles and Adept Messengers.

There has been much speculation as to who the child born in the year of Pollio's consulship, who was to bring in the new order of ages, could have been. But we may note that in the language of Occultism (and think of Virgil as an Occultist), the 'birth of a child' had always been a symbolical way of speaking of the inititation of a candidate into the (true) Mysteries. So that it does not follow by any means that he meant an actual baby born in that year; he may have intended, and probably did intend, some Adept then born into his illumination,—or that, according to Virgil's own ideas, might be thought likely soon to be. One cannot say; he was a very wise man, Virgil. At least it indicates a feeling,—perhaps peculiar to himself, perhaps general,—that the world stood on the brink of a great change in the cycles, and that an Adept Leader might be expected, who should usher the new order in.

His eyes may have been opened to the possibilities of the young Octavian. It is possible that the two were together at school in Rome, studying rhetoric under Epidius, in the late fifties; and certainly Virgil had recently visited Rome and there interviewed the Triumvir Octavian; and had obtained from him an order for the restitution of his parental farm near Mantua, which had been given to one of the soldiers of Philippi after that battle. Two or three of the Eclogues are given to the praises of Octavian; whom, even as early as that, Virgil seems to have recognised as the future or potential savior of Rome. The points to put side by side are these: Virgil, a Theosophist, expected the coming of an avatar, an Initiate who should save Rome;—H.P. Blavatsky speaks of Augustus as an Initiate;—Augustus did save Rome.

When did he become an Initiate? Was there, at some time, such a change in his life that it was as if a new Soul had come in to take charge of that impersonal unfailing personality? There are tremendous mysteries connected with incarnation; the possibility of a sudden accession of entity, so to say,—a new vast increment of being. As Octavius and Octavian, the man seems like one without will or desires of his own, acting in blind obedience to impersonal forces that aimed at his supremacy in the Roman world. As Augustus, he becomes another man altogether, almost fathomlessly wise and beneficient; a Master of Peace and Wisdom. He gave Rome Peace, and taught her to love peace. He put Peace for a legend on the coinage; and in the west Pax, in the east Irene, became favorite names to give you children. He did what he could to clean Roman life; to give the people high ideals; to make the empire a place,—and in this he succeeded,—where decent egos could incarnate and hope to progress; which, generally speaking, they cannot in a chaos. His fame as a benefactor of the human race spread marvelously: in far-away India (where at that time the Secret Wisdom and its Masters were much more than a tradition), they knew of him, and struck coins in his honor; coins bearing the image and superscription of this Roman Caesar.

I said that he went to work like an Occultist: like one with an understanding of the inner laws of life, and power to direct outward things in accordance with that knowledge. Thus:—the task that lay before him was to effect a complete revolution. Rome could not go on under the old system any longer. That system had utterly broken down; and unless an efficient executive could be evolved, there was nothing for it but that the world should go forward Kilkenny-catting itself into non-existence. Now an efficient executive meant one-man rule; or a king, by whatsoever name he might be called. But the tradition of centureis made a king impossible. There were strongly formed astral molds; and whoever should attempt to break them would, like Caesar, ensure his own defeat. Whoever actually should break them,—well, the result of breaking astral molds is always about the same. H.P. Blavatsky said that she came to break molds of mind; and so she did; but it was not in politics; and the while she was laying her trains of thought-dynamite, and exploding them gloriously, she was also building up fair and glorious mansions of thought to house those made homeless. The situation we are looking at here is on a different plane, the political. You break the astral molds there; and they may be quite worthless, quite effete and contemptible,—yet they are the things which alone keep the demon in man under restraint. It is the old peril of Revolutions. They may be started with the best of intentions, in the name of the highest ideals; but, unless there be super-human strength (like Ts'in Shi Hwangti's) or superhuman wisdom (like Augustus') to guide them, as surely as they succeed in breaking the old molds, they degenerate into orgies,—blood, vice, and crime.

Augustus effected his revolution and kept all that out; he substituted peace and prosperity for the blood and butchery of a century. And it was because he went to work with the knowledge of an Occultist that he was able to do so.

He carefully abstained from breaking the molds. He labored to keep them all intact,—for the time being, and until new ones should have been formed. Gently and by degrees he poured a new force and meaning into them; which, in time, would necessarily destroy them; but mean-while others would have been growing. He took no step without laboriously ascertaining that there were precedents for it. Rome had been governed by Consuls and Tribunes; well, he would accept the consulate, and the tribuniciary power; because it was necessary now, for the time being at any rate, that Rome should be governed by Augustus. It is as well to remember that it was the people who insisted on this last. The Republican Party might subsist among the aristocracy, the old governing class; but Augustus was the hero and champion of the masses. Time and again he resigned: handed back his powers to the senate, and what not;—whether as a matter of form only, and that he might carry opinion along with him; or with the real hope that he had taught things at last to run themselves. In either case his action was wise and creditable; you have to read into him mean motives out of your own nature, if you think otherwise. Let there be talk of tyrants, and plots arising, with danger of assassination,—and what was to become of re-established law, order, and the Augustan Peace? The fact was that the necessities of the case always compelled the senate to reinstate him: it was too obvious that things could not run themselves. If there had been any practicable opposition, it could always have made those resignations effectual; or at least it could have driven him to a show of illegalism, and so, probably, against the point of some fanatic theorist's dagger. In 23 B.C. there was a food shortage; and the mob besieged the senate house, demanding that new powers should be bestowed on the Caesar: they knew well what mind and hands could save them.

But he would run up no new (corrugated iron or reinforced concrete) astral molds, nor smash down any old ones. There should be no talk of a king, or, perpetual dictator. Chief citizen, as you must have a chief,—since a hundred years had shown that haphazard executives would not work. Primus inter Pares in the senate: Princeps,—not a new title, nor one that implied royalty,—or meant anything very definite; why define things, anyhow, now while the world was in flux? Mr. Stobart, who I think comes very near to showing Augustus as he really was, still permits himself to speak of him as "chilly and statuesque." But can you imagine the mob so in love with a chilly and statuesque—tyrant, or statesman, or politician,—as to besiege the senate-house and clamor for an extension of his powers? And this chilly statuesque person was the man who delighted in sharing in their games with children!

Another reason why there was no talk of a king: he was no Leader of a spiritual movement, but merely dealing with politics, with which the cycles will have their way: a world of ups and downs, not stable because linked to the Heart of Things. Supposing he should find one to appoint as his worthy successor: with the revolutions of the cycles, could that one hope to find another to succeed him? Political affairs move and have their being at best in a region of flux, where the evils, and especially the duties, of the day are sufficient therefor. In attending to these,— performing the duties, fighting the evils,—Augustus laid down the lines for the future of Rome.

He tried to revive the patriciate; he wanted to have, cooperating with him, a governing class with the ancient sense of responsibility and turn for affairs. But what survived of the old aristocracy was wedded to the tradition of Republicanism, which meant oligarchy, and doing just what you liked or nothing at all. The one thing they were not prepared to do was to cooperate in saving Rome. At first they showed some eagerness to flatter him; but found that flattery was not what he wanted. Then they were inclined to sulk, and he had to get them to pass a law making attendance at the senate compulsory. Mean views as to his motives have become traditional; but the only view the facts warrant is this: he lent out his personality, not ungrudgingly, to receive the powers and laurels that must fall upon the central figure in the state, while ever working to vitalize what lay outward from that to the circumference, that all Romans might share with him the great Roman responsibility of running and regenerating the world. Where there was talent, he opened a way for it. He made much more freedom than had ever been under the Republic; gave all classes functions to perform; and curtailed only the freedom of the old oligarchy to fleece the provinces and misdirect affairs.

And meanwhile the old Rome that he found on his return in 29,— brick-built ignobly at best, and now decaying and half in ruins, —was giving place to a true imperial city. In 28, eighty-two temples were built or rebuilt in marble; among the rest, one to Apollo on the Palatine, most magnificent, with a great public library attached. The first public library in Rome had been built by Asinius Pollio nine years before; soon they became common. Agrippa busied himself building the Pantheon; also public baths, of which he was responsible for a hundred and seventy within the limits of the city. Fair play to the Romans, they washed. All classes had their daily baths; all good houses had hot baths and swimming-tanks. The outer Rome he found in brick and left in marble:—but the inner Rome he had to rebuild was much more ruinous than the outer; as for the material he found it built of—well, it would be daring optimism and euphemism to call those Romans bricks—says someone.

Time had brought southern Europe to the point where national distinctions were disappearing. No nation could now stand apart. Greek or Egyptian or Gaul, all were, or might be, or soon would be, Romans; and if any ego with important things to say should incarnate anywhere, what he said should be heard all round the Middle Sea. This too is a part of the method of natural Law; which now splits the world into little fragments, the nations, and lets them evolve apart, bringing to light by the intensive culture of their nationalisms what hidden possibilities lie latent in their own soils and atmospheres;—an anon welds them into one, that all these accomplished separate evolutions may play upon each other, interact,—every element quickening and quickened by the contact. In the centrifugal or heterogenizing cycles national souls are evolved; in the centripetal or homogenizing they are given freedom to affect the world. We have seen what such fusion meant for China; perhaps some day we may see what such fusion may mean for the world entire. In Augustus' time, fusion was to do something for the Mediterranean basin. If he had been an Occultist, to know it, his great cards lay in Italy and Spain: the former with her cycle of productiveness due to continue, shall we say until about 40 A.D.?—the latter with hers due soon to begin.

Well, it does look rather as if he knew it. We shall see presently how he dealt with Italy; within two years of his triumph he was turning his attention to Spain, still only partly conquered. We may picture that country, from its first appearance in history until this time we are speaking of, as in something like modern Balkan conditions. Hamilcar Barca, a great proud gentlman, the finest fruit of an ancient culture, had thought no scorn to marry a Spanish lady; as a king of Italy nowadays found it nowise beneath him to marry a Montenegrin princess. In either case it meant no unbridgable disparity in culture. Among any of the Spanish people you should have found men who would have been at home in Greek or Carthaginian drawing-rooms, so to say; though the break-up of a forgotten civilization there had left the country in fragments and small warfares and disorder. If you read the earliest Spanish accounts of their conquests in the new world, you cannot escape the feeling that, no such long ages ago, Spain was in touch with America; not so many centuries, say, before Hamilcar went to Spain. Such accounts are no doubt unscientific; but may be the more intuitional and true and indicative for that. When Augustus turned his eyes on Spain, Basque and Celtic chieftains in the northern mountains and along the shores of Biscay, the semi-decivilized membra disjecta of past civilizations, were always disposed to make trouble for the Roman south. He could not have left them alone, except at the cost of keeping huge garrisons along the border, with perpetual alarms for the province. So he went there in person, and began the work of conquering those mountains in B.C. 27. It was a long and difficult war with hideous doings on both sides: the Romans crucified the Spaniards, and the Spaniards jeered at them from their crosses. This because Augustus was too sick to attend to things himself; half the time he was at death's door. Not till he could afford to take Agrippa from work elsewhere was any real progress made. But at one point we see his own hand strike into it; and the incident is very instructive.

Spain had her Vercingetorix in one Corocotta, a Celt who kept all Roman efforts useless and all Roman commanders tantalized and nervous till a reward of fifty thousand dollars was offered for his capture. Augustus, recovered a little, was in camp; and things were going ill with the Spainiards. One day an important-looking Celt walked in, and demanded to see the Caesar upon business connected with the taking of Corocotta. Led into the Caesar's presence, he was asked what he wanted.—"Fifty-thousand dollars," said he; "I am Corocotta." Augustus laughed long and loud; shook hands with him heartily; paid him the money down, and gave him his liberty into the bargain; whereafter soon this Quijote espanol married a Roman wife, and as Caius Julius Corocottus "lived happily ever after." It was a change from the 'generous' Julius' treatment of Vercingetorix; but that Rome profited by the precedent thus established, we may judge from Claudius' treatment of the third Celtic hero who fell into Roman hands,—Caradoc of Wales.

Spain was only one of the many places where the frontier had to be settled. The empire was a nebulous affair; you could not say where it began and ended; and to bring all out of this nebulosity was one of the labors that awaited Augustus. Even a Messenger of the Gods is limited by the conditions he finds in the world; and is as great as his age will allow him to be. Though an absolute monarch, he cannot change human nature. He must concentrate on points attackable, and do what he can; deflect currents in the right direction; above all, sow ideals, and wait upon the ministrations of time. He must take conditions as he finds them, following the lines of least resistance. It is nothing to him that posterity may ask, Why did he not change this or that?—and add he was no better than he should be. At once to change outer things and ways of feeling that have grown up through centuries is not difficult but impossible; and sometimes right courses, violently taken, are wronger than wrong ones. Augustus was a man of peace, if anybody ever was, yet (as in Spain) made many wars. The result of this Spanish conquest was that the Pax Romana came into Spain, bringing with it severa centuries of high prosperity; the world-currents flowed in there at once and presently the light of Spain, such as it was at that time, shone out over the Roman world. Most of the great names of the first century A.D. are those of Spaniards.

After Spain, the most immediate frontier difficulty was with Parthia; and there Augustus won his greatest victory. At Carrhae the Parthians had routed Crassus and taken the Roman eagles. Rome was responsible for the provinces of Asia; and she was nominally at war with Parthia,—so those provinces were in trim to be overrun at any time. The war, then, must be finished; and could Rome let it end on terms of a Parthian victory? Where (it would be argued) would then be Roman prestige? Where Roman authority (a more real and valuable thing)? Where the Pax Romana?—All very true and sound; everybody knew that for the war to reopen was only a question of time;—Julius had been on the point of marching east when the liberators killed him. Yes, said Augustus; the matter must be attended to. But Parthia was a more of less civilized power: a state at least with an established central government; and when you have that, there is generally the chance to settle things by tact instead of by fighting. He found a means. He opened negotiations, and brought all his tact to bear. He was the chief, and a bridge again. Over which presently came Phraates king of Parthia, amenable and well-disposed, to return the eagles and such of the prisoners as were still alive. Rome had won back her prestige; Parthia was undegraded; peace had won a victory that war would have spent itself in vain striving after.

But the frontier was enormous, and nowhere else marched with that of an established power. There was no winning by peace along that vast northern line from the Black to the North Sea, at the most vital spot of which an unlucky physical geography makes Italy easily invadable and rather hard to defend. Negotiations would not work here, since there was no union to negotiate with; only ebullient German tribes whose game was raiding and whose trade plunder. So the Alps had to be held, and a line drawn somewhere north of them,—say along the Danube and the Rhine or Elbe; a frontier that could be made safe with a minimum of soldiers. All this he did; excluding adventurous schemes: leaving Britain, for example, alone;—and was able to reduce the army, before he died, to a mere handful of 140,000 men.—Varus and his lost legions? Well; there is something to be said about that. Augustus was old, and the generals of the imperial family, who knew their business, were engaged elsewhere. And Germany was being governed by a good amiable soul by the name of Quintilius Varus, who persisted in treating the Germans as if they had been civilized Italians. And there was a young Cheruscan who had become a Roman citizen, spoke Latin fluently, and had always been a good ally of Rome. His Latin cognomen was Arminius; of which German patriotism has manufactured a highly improbable Hermann. The trustful Varus allowed himself to be lured by this seemingly so good friend into the wilds of the Saltus Teutobergiensis, where the whole power of the Cheruscans fell on and destroyed him. Then Tiberius came, and put the matter right; but there was an ugly half hour of general panic first. There had been no thought of adding Germany to the empire but only as to whether the frontier should be on the Elbe or the Rhine. Varus' defeat decided Augustus for the Rhine.

Now we come to what he did for Italy: his second trump card, if we call Spain his first. Spain belonged to the future, Italy to the present. Her cycle was half over, and she had done nothing (in B.C. 29) very worthy with it. First, an effort should be made towards the purificatior of family-life: a pretty hopeless task, wherein at last he was forced to banish his own daughter for notorious evil-living. He made laws; and it may be supposed that they had some effect in time. A literary impulse towards high dignified ideals, however, may be much more effective than laws. He had Maecenas with his circle of poets.

Of course, poetry written to order, or upon imperial suggestion, is not likely to be of the highest creative kind. But the high creative forces were not flowing in that age; and we need not blame Augustan patronage for the limitations of Augustan literature. There is no time to argue the question; this much we may say: the two poets who worked with the emperor, and wrote under his influence and sometimes at his suggestion, left work that endures in world-literature; that is noble and beautiful, and still interesting. I mean Virgil and Horace, of course. Ovid, who was not under that influence, but of the faction opposed to it, wrote stuff that it would be much better were lost entirely.

The poet's was the best of pulpits, in those days: poets stood much nearer the world then than for all the force of the printing-press they can hope to do now. So, if they could preach back its sacredness to the soil of Italy; if they could recreate the ideal of the old agricultural life; something might be done towards (among other things) checking the unwholesome crowding to the capital,—as great an evil then as now. Through Maecenas and directly Augustus influenced Virgil, the laureate; who responded with his Georgics.

It is a wonderful work. Virgil was a practical farmer; he tells you correctly what to do. But he makes a work of art of it all poetical. He suffuses his directions for stock-raising and cabbage-hoeing with the light of mythology and poetry. He gives you the Golden Age and Saturn's Italy, and makes the soil seem sacred. He had the Gaul's feeling for grace and delicacy, and brought in Celtic beauty to illumine the Italian world. The lines are impregnated with the soul, the inner atmosphere, of the Italian land; full of touches such as that lovely

Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,

of violets and popies and narcissus; quinces and chestnut trees. All that is of loveliness in rural (and sacred) Italy is there; the landscapes are there, still beautiful; and the dignity and simplicity of the old agricultural life. It is a practial treatise on farming; yet a living poem.

Horace too played up for his friend Maecenas and for Caesar. Maecenas gave him that Sabine farm; and Horace made Latin songs to Greek meters about it: made music that is a marvel to this day, so that it remains a place of pilgrimage, and you can still visit, I believe, that

fons Bandusia splendidiot vitro

that he loved so well and set such sweet music to. He give you that country as Virgil gives you the valley vistas, not unfringed with mystery, of Appenines and the north. Between them, Italy is there, as it had never been interpreted before. If—in Virgil at least—there is a direct practical purpose, there is no less marvelous art and real vision of Nature.

And then Augustus set both of them to singing the grandeur of Rome; to making a new patriotism with their poetry; to inspiring Roman life with a sense of dignity,—a thing it needed sorely: Virgil in the Aeneid (where also, as we have seen, he taught not a little Theosophy); Horace in the Carmen Saeculare and some of the great Odes of the third and fourth books. The lilt of his lines is capable of ringing, and does so again and again, into something very like the thrill and resonance of the Grand Manner. Listen for it especially in the third and fourth lines of this:

Quid debeas, o Roma, Neronibus
Testis Metaurum flumen et Hasdrubal
Devictus, et pulcher fugatis
Ille dies Latio tenebris.

I am not concerned here to speak of his limitations; nor of Virgil's; who, in whatever respect the Aeneid may fall short, does not fail to cry out in it to the Romans. Remember the dignity and the high mission of Rome!—By all these means Augustus worked towards the raising of Roman ideals.

To that end he wrote, he studied, he made orations. He searched the Latin and Greek literatures; and any passage he came on that illumined life or tended towards upliftment, he would copy out and send to be read in the senate; or he would read it there himself to the senators; or publish it as an edict. There is a touch of the Teacher in this, I think. He has given Rome Peace; he is master of the world, and now has grown old. He enjoys no regal splendor, no pomp or retinue; his life is as that of any other senator, but simpler than most. And his mind is ever brooding over Rome, watchful for the ideas that may purify Roman life and raise it to higher levels.

Many things occurred to sadden his old age. His best friends were dead; Varus was lost with his legions; there had been the tragedy of Julia, whom he had loved well, and the deaths of the young princes, her sons. He was a man of extraordinarily keen affections, and all these losses came home to him sorely.

But against every sadness he had his own achievements to set. There was Rome in its marble visibly about him, that he had found in brick and in ruins; Rome now capable of centuries of life, that had been, when he came to it, a ghastly putridity.