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.