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.