The name of the man we are to think of tonight has come down as a synonym for infamy:  we imagine him a gloomy and bloodthirsty tyrant; a morose tiger enthroned; a gross sensualist;—­well, I shall show you portraits of him, to see whether you can accept him for that.  The truth is that aristocratic Rome, degenerate and frivolous, parrot-cried out against the supposed deneracy of the imperial, and for the glories of the old republican, regime; for the days when Romans were Romans, and ‘virtuous.’  One came to them in whom the (real) ancient Roman honor more appeared than in another man in Italy, perhaps before or since;—­and they could not understand the honor, and hated the man.  They captured his name in a great net of lies; they breathed a huge fog of lies about him, which come down to us as history.  Now to see whether a plain tale may not put them down.

Once more take your stand, please, on the Mountain of the Gods:  the time, in or about the year 39 B.C.:—­and thence try to envisage the world as Those do who guide but are not involved in the heats and dusts of it.  The Western World; in which Rome, caput mundi, was the only thing that counted. Caput mundi; but a kind of idiot head at that:  inchoate, without co-ordination; maggots scampering through what might have been the brain; the life fled, and that great rebellion of the many lives which we call decay having taken its place.  And yet, it was no true season for Rome to be dead; it was no natural death; not so much decent death at all as the death in life we call madness.  For the Crest-Wave men were coming in; it was the place where they should be.  The cycle of Italy had begun, shall we say, in 94 B.C., and would end in 36 A.D.; —­for convenience one must give figures, though one means only approximations by them;—­and not until after that latter date would souls of any caliber cease to be incarnate in Roman bodies.  Before that time, then, the madness had to be cured and Rome’s mission had to be fulfilled.

The mission was, to homogenize the world.  That was the task the Law had in mind for Rome; and it had to be done while the Crest-Wave remained in Italy and important egos were gathered in Rome.  Some half dozen strong souls, under the Gods’ special agent Octavian, had gone in there to do the work; but the Crest-Wave had flowed into Rome when Rome was already vice-rotten; and how could she expect to run her whole thirteen decades a great and ruling people?  None of those strong souls could last out the whole time.  Octavian himself, should he live to be eighty, would die and not see the cycle finished:  twenty years of it would remain—­to be filled by one worthy to succeed him, or how should his work escape being undone?  The world must be made homogensous, and Rome not its conqueror and cruel mistress, but its well-respected heart and agreed-on center; and all this must be accomplished, and established firmly, before her cyclic greatness had gone elsewhere:—­that is, before 37 A.D.