against the collective power of Rome, might yet present a front of
resistance to any single partisan who should happen to acquire a brief
ascendancy; or, at the worst, as a merely defensive power, might offer a
retreat, secure in distance, and difficult access; or might be available
as a means of delay for recovering from some else fatal defeat. It is
certain that Augustus viewed Egypt with jealousy as a province, which
might be turned to account in some such way by any aspiring insurgent. And
it must have often struck him as a remarkable circumstance, which by good
luck had turned out entirely to the advantage of his own family, but which
might as readily have had an opposite result, that the three decisive
battles of Pharsalia, of Thapsus, and of Munda, in which the empire of the
world was three times over staked as the prize, had severally brought upon
the defeated leaders a ruin which was total, absolute, and final. One hour
had seen the whole fabric of their aspiring fortunes demolished; and no
resource was left to them but either in suicide, (which, accordingly, even
Caesar had meditated at one stage of the battle of Munda, when it seemed to
be going against him,) or in the mercy of the victor.

That a victor in a hundred fights should in his hundred-and-first,
[Footnote:
"The painful warrior, famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil'd,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd."
_Shakespeare's Sonnets._]
as in his first, risk the loss of that particular battle, is inseparable
from the condition of man, and the uncertainty of human means; but that
the loss of this one battle should be equally fatal and irrecoverable with
the loss of his first, that it should leave him with means no more
cemented, and resources no better matured for retarding his fall, and