reate the new Empire of
Alexandria. The future Augustus conquered at Actium without effort,
merely because the national sentiment of the soldiery, outraged by the
unforeseen revelation of Antony's treason, turned against the man who
wanted to aggrandise Cleopatra at the expense of his own country.

And then the victorious party, the party of Augustus, created the
story of Antony and Cleopatra that has so entertained posterity; this
story is but a popular explanation--in part imaginatively exaggerated
and fantastic--of the Eastern peril that menaced Rome, of both its
political phase and its moral. According to the story that Horace has
put into such charming verse, Cleopatra wished to conquer Italy, to
enslave Rome, to destroy the Capitol; but Cleopatra alone could not
have accomplished so difficult a task; she must have seduced Antony,
made him forget his duty to his wife, to his legitimate children,
to the Republic, the soldiery, his native land,--all the duties
that Latin morals inculcated into the minds of the great, and that
a shameless Egyptian woman, rendered perverse by all the arts of the
Orient, had blotted out in his soul; therefore Antony's tragic
fate should serve as a solemn warning to distrust the voluptuous
seductions, of which Cleopatra symbolised the elegant and fatal
depravity. The story was magnified, coloured, diffused, not because it
was beautiful and romantic, but because it served the interests of the
political _coterie_ that gained definite control of the government
on the ruin of Antony. At Actium, the future Augustus did not fight a
real war, he only passively watched the power of the adversary go
to pieces, destroyed by its own internal contradictions. He did not
decide to conquer Egypt until the public opinion of Italy, enraged
against Antony and Cleopatra, required this vengeance with such
insistence that he had to satisfy it.

If Augustus was not a man too quick in action, he was, instead, keenly
intelligent in comprehending the situation created by the catastrophe
of Antony in Italy, where already, for a decade of years, public
spirit, frightened by revolution, was anxious to return to the ways
of the past, to the historic sources of the national life. Augustus
understood that he ought to stand before Italy, disgusted as it
was with long-continued dissension and eager to retrace the way
of national tradition, as the embodiment of all the virtues his
contemporaries set in opposition to ea