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: