own; they were to spring up, grow and swarm, and cover the
entire mount.

Ah! the all-powerfulness of Augustus, his four and forty years of total,
absolute, superhuman power, such as no despot has known even in his
dreams! He had taken to himself every title, united every magistracy in
his person. Imperator and consul, he commanded the armies and exercised
executive power; pro-consul, he was supreme in the provinces; perpetual
censor and princeps, he reigned over the senate; tribune, he was the
master of the people. And, formerly called Octavius, he had caused
himself to be declared Augustus, sacred, god among men, having his
temples and his priests, worshipped in his lifetime like a divinity
deigning to visit the earth. And finally he had resolved to be supreme
pontiff, annexing religious to civil power, and thus by a stroke of
genius attaining to the most complete dominion to which man can climb. As
the supreme pontiff could not reside in a private house, he declared his
abode to be State property. As the supreme pontiff could not leave the
vicinity of the temple of Vesta, he built a temple to that goddess near
his own dwelling, leaving the guardianship of the ancient altar below the
Palatine to the Vestal virgins. He spared no effort, for he well realised
that human omnipotence, the mastery of mankind and the world, lay in that
reunion of sovereignty, in being both king and priest, emperor and pope.
All the sap of a mighty race, all the victories achieved, and all the
favours of fortune yet to be garnered, blossomed forth in Augustus, in a
unique splendour which was never again to shed such brilliant radiance.
He was really the master of the world, amidst the conquered and pacified
nations, encompassed by immortal glory in literature and in art. In him
would seem to have been satisfied the old intense ambition of his people,
the ambition which it had pursued through centuries of patient conquest,
to become the people-king. The blood of Rome, the blood of Augustus, at
last coruscated in the sunlight, in the purple of empire. And the blood
of Augustus, of the divine, triumphant, absolute sovereign of bodies and
souls, of the man in whom seven centuries of national pride had
culminated, was to descend through the ages, through an innumerable
posterity with a heritage of boundless pride and ambition. For it was
fatal: the blood of Augustus was bound to spring into life once more and
pulsate in the veins of all the success