The Republic, as we have seen, had had its method of ruling the provinces:  it was to send out young profligates to fleece and exploit them, and make them hate Rome.  This must be changed, and a habit formed of ruling for the benefit of the subject peoples.  Two or three generations of provincials must have grown up in love with Rome before the end of the cycle, or the Empire would then inevitably break.  By 37 A.D., the Crest-Wave would have left Italy, and would be centering in Spain.  Spain, hating Rome, would shake off the Roman yoke; she would have the men to do it;—­and the rest of the world would follow suit.  Even if Spain should set herself to the Gods’ work of union-making, what path should she take towards it?  Only that of conquest would be open; and how should she hope to conquer, and then wipe out the evil traces of her conquering, and create a homogeneity, all within her possible cycle of thirteen decades?  Rome’s great opportunity came, simply because Rome had done the conquering before ever the Crest-Wave struck her; in days when the Crest-Wave was hardly in Europe at all.  Even so, it would be a wonder if all could be finished in the few years that remained.

By Rome it never could have been done at all:  it was the office of a Man, not of a state or nation.  The Man who should do it, must do it from Rome:  and Rome had first to be put into such condition as to be capable of being used.  It devolved upon Augustus to do that first, or his greater work would be impossible.  He had to win Rome to acquiescence in himself as Princeps.  So his primary need was a personality of infinite tact; and that he possessed.  He was the kind of man everybody could like; that put everyone at ease; that was friendly and familiar in all sorts of society; so he could make that treacherous quagmire Rome stable enough to be his pied-a-terre. That done, he could stretch out his arms thence to the provinces, and begin to weld them into unity.  For this was the second part and real aim of his work:  to rouse up in the Empire a centripetalism, with Rome for center, before centripetalism, in Rome itself, should have given place to the centrifugal forces of national death.

Rome ruled the world, and Augustus Rome, by right of conquest; and that is the most precarious right of all, and must always vanish with a change in the cycles.  He had to, and did, transmute it into a stable right:  first with respect to his own standing in Rome,—­which might be done, with tact for weapon,—­ in a few years; then with respect to Rome’s standing in the world,—­which could not be done in less than a couple of lifetimes, and with the best of good government as means.  If the work should be interrupted too early it would all fall to pieces.  So then he must have one successor at least, a soul of standing equal to his own:  one that could live and reign until 37 A.D.  Let the Empire until that year be ruled continuously from Rome in such a manner as to rouse up Roman—­that is, World, —­patriotism in all its provinces, and the appearance of the Crest-Wave in a new center would not be the signal for a new break-up of the world.  The problem was, then, to find the man able to do this.