And meanwhile the old Rome that he found on his return in 29,—­ brick-built ignobly at best, and now decaying and half in ruins, —­was giving place to a true imperial city.  In 28, eighty-two temples were built or rebuilt in marble; among the rest, one to Apollo on the Palatine, most magnificent, with a great public library attached.  The first public library in Rome had been built by Asinius Pollio nine years before; soon they became common.  Agrippa busied himself building the Pantheon; also public baths, of which he was responsible for a hundred and seventy within the limits of the city.  Fair play to the Romans, they washed.  All classes had their daily baths; all good houses had hot baths and swimming-tanks.  The outer Rome he found in brick and left in marble:—­but the inner Rome he had to rebuild was much more ruinous than the outer; as for the material he found it built of—­well, it would be daring optimism and euphemism to call those Romans bricks—­says someone.

Time had brought southern Europe to the point where national distinctions were disappearing.  No nation could now stand apart.  Greek or Egyptian or Gaul, all were, or might be, or soon would be, Romans; and if any ego with important things to say should incarnate anywhere, what he said should be heard all round the Middle Sea.  This too is a part of the method of natural Law; which now splits the world into little fragments, the nations, and lets them evolve apart, bringing to light by the intensive culture of their nationalisms what hidden possibilities lie latent in their own soils and atmospheres;—­an anon welds them into one, that all these accomplished separate evolutions may play upon each other, interact,—­every element quickening and quickened by the contact.  In the centrifugal or heterogenizing cycles national souls are evolved; in the centripetal or homogenizing they are given freedom to affect the world.  We have seen what such fusion meant for China; perhaps some day we may see what such fusion may mean for the world entire.  In Augustus’ time, fusion was to do something for the Mediterranean basin.  If he had been an Occultist, to know it, his great cards lay in Italy and Spain:  the former with her cycle of productiveness due to continue, shall we say until about 40 A.D.?—­the latter with hers due soon to begin.

Well, it does look rather as if he knew it.  We shall see presently how he dealt with Italy; within two years of his triumph he was turning his attention to Spain, still only partly conquered.  We may picture that country, from its first appearance in history until this time we are speaking of, as in something like modern Balkan conditions.  Hamilcar Barca, a great proud gentlman, the finest fruit of an ancient culture, had thought no scorn to marry a Spanish lady; as a king of Italy nowadays found it nowise beneath him to marry a Montenegrin princess.  In either case it meant no unbridgable disparity in culture.  Among any of the Spanish people you