Chapter 37

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.