The child:  for he must not be a man yet.  And seeing what was at stake, he must be better equipped than Augustus:  he must be trained from childhood by Augustus.  Because he was to work in the midst of much more difficult conditions.  Augustus had real men to help him:  the successor probably would have none.  When the Crest-Wave struck it, Rome was already mean and corrupt and degenerate.  Augustus, not without good human aid, might hope to knock it into some kind of decency during the apex-time of the thirteen decades.  His reign would fall, roughly, in the third quarter of the cycle, which is the best time therein; but his successor would have to hold out through the last quarter, which is the very worst.  The Crest-Wave would then be passing from Italy:  Rome would be becoming ever a harder place for a Real Man to live and work in.  Meaner and meaner egos would be sneaking into incarnation; decent gentlemanly souls would be growing ever more scarce.  By ‘mean egos’ I intend such as are burdened with ingrate personalities:  creatures on whom sensuality has done its disintegrating work; whose best pleasure is to exempt themselves from any sense of degradation caused by fawning on the one strong enough to be their master, by tearing down as they may his work and reputation, circulating lies about him, tormenting him in every indirect way they can.  Among such as these, and probably quite lonely among the, the successor of Augustus would lave to live, fulfilling Heaven’s work in spite of them.  Where to find a Soul capable, or who would dare undertake the venture?  Well; since it was to be done, and for the Gods,—­no doubt the Gods would have sent their qualified man into incarnation.

In B.C. 39 Octavian proclaimed a general amnesty; and among these who profited by it was a certain member of the Claudian gens,—­one of that Nero family to which Rome owed so much—­

     Testis Metaurum flumen et Hasdrubal
     Devictus

He had been a friend of Caesar’s and an enemy of Octavian’s; and had been spending his time recently in fleeing from place to place in much peril; as had also his wife, aged eighteen, and their three-year-old son.  On one occasion this lady was hurrying by night through a forest, and the forest took fire; she escaped, but not until the heat singed the cloak in which the baby boy in her arms was wrapped.  Now they returned, and settled in their house on the Palatine not far from the house of Octavian.

In Rome at that time marriage was not a binding institution.  To judge by the lives of those prominent enough to come into history, you simply married and divorced a wife whenever convenient.  Octavian some time before had married Scribonia, to patch up an alliance with her kins-man Sextus Pompey, then prominent on the high seas in the role—­I think the phrase is Mr. Stobart’s—­of gentleman-pirate.  As she was much older than himself, and they had nothing