contributed grain. Syria unveiled her altars, Persia the mystery
and magnificence of her gods.

Such was Rome. Augustus was less noteworthy; so unnecessary even
that every student must regret Actium, Antony's defeat, the
passing of Caesar's dream. For Antony was made for conquests; it
was he who, fortune favoring, might have given the world to Rome.
A splendid, an impudent bandit, first and foremost a soldier,
calling himself a descendant of Hercules whom he resembled; hailed
at Ephesus as Bacchus, in Egypt as Osiris; Asiatic in lavishness,
and Teuton in his capacity for drink; vomiting in the open Forum,
and making and unmaking kings; weaving with that viper of the Nile
a romance which is history; passing initiate into the inimitable
life, it would have been curious to have watched him that last
night when the silence was stirred by the hum of harps, the cries
of bacchantes bearing his tutelary god back to the Roman camp,
while he said farewell to love, to empire and to life.

Augustus resembled him not at all. He was a colorless monarch; an
emperor in everything but dignity, a prince in everything but
grace; a tactician, not a soldier; a superstitious braggart,
afraid of nothing but danger; seducing women to learn their
husband's secrets; exiling his daughter, not because she had
lovers, but because she had other lovers than himself; exiling
Ovid because of Livia, who in the end poisoned her prince, and
adroitly, too; illiterate, blundering of speech, and coarse of
manner--a hypocrite and a comedian in one--so guileful and yet so
stupid that while a credulous moribund ordered the gods to be
thanked that Augustus survived him, the people publicly applied to
him an epithet which does not look well in print.