e ability of its inhabitants dissipated itself in
devastating wars, instead of spending itself in fruitful effort. All
that changed, and without any one's foresight or intent, when the
Roman policy, urged by the internal forces that stirred the Republic,
had destroyed that old order of things.

The ancients understood that peoples, like individual men, can
regulate their destiny only in part; that about us, above us, are
forces complex and obscure, which we can hardly comprehend, which
invest us, seize us, impel us whither we had not thought to go, now
to shipwreck on the rocks of misadventure, now to the discovery of
islands of happiness, or to find, like Columbus, an America on the
way to India. The Greeks called this power; the Latins, Fortuna, and
deified it; erected temples and made sacrifices to it; dedicated to
it a cult, of which Augustus was a devotee, and which contained more
secret wisdom of life than all the superb theories on human destiny
conceived by European genius in the delirium of this quarter-hour of
measureless might in which we are living. No, man is not the voluntary
artificer of his whole destiny; fortune and misfortune, triumph and
catastrophe, are never entirely proportioned to personal merit or
blame; every generation finds the world organised in a certain order
of interests, forces, traditions, relations, and as it enjoys the good
that preceding generations have accomplished, so in part it expiates
the errors they have committed; as it draws advantage from beneficent
forces acting outside of it and independent of its merit, so it
suffers from the sinister forces that it finds--even though blameless
itself--acting through the great mass of the world, among men and
their works. From this relation to the unseen follows a rule of wisdom
that modern men, full of unbounded pride, and persuaded that they
are the beginning and end of the universe, too often forget: we must
indeed press on with all our powers to the accomplishment of a great
task, for although our destiny is never entirely made by our own
hands, there is no destiny on the earth for the lazy; but, since
a part of what we are depends not on ourselves, but upon what the
ancients called Fortune, we dare never be too much elated over
success, nor abased by failure. The wheel of destiny turns by a
mysterious law, alike for families and for peoples: those in high
position may fall; those in low, may rise.

Certainly Caesar never suspected