Drusus, as he himself had predicted, never wrote a great treatise on philosophy, and never drew up a cosmology that set at rest all the problems of the universe; nor did Cornelia become a Latin Sappho or Corinna, and her wise lore never went further than to make her friends afraid to affect a shammed learning in her presence.  But they both did the tasks that fell to them better because they had “tasted the well of Parnassus” and “walked in the grove with the sages.”  And Drusus, through an active life, played an honourable part as a soldier and a statesman:  with his beloved Imperator in the battles of Thapsus and Munda, when the last of the oligarchs were beaten down; then, after the great crime of murder, with his friend Marcus Antonius; and then, when Cleopatra’s evil star lured both her and Antonius to their ruin, he turned to the only man whose wisdom and firmness promised safety to the state—­and he joined himself to the rising fortunes of Octavius, the great Augustus, and fought with him to the end, until there was no longer a foreign or civil enemy, and the “Pax Romana” gave quiet to a subject world.

So Drusus had share with Maecenas and Agrippa and the other imperial statesmen in shaping the fabric of the mighty Roman Empire.  Not in his day did he or Cornelia know that it was wrong to buy slaves like cattle, or to harbour an implacable hate.  They were but pagans.  To them the truth was but seen in a glass darkly; enough if they lived up to such truth as was vouchsafed.  But in their children’s day the brightness arose in the East, and spread westward, and ever westward, until the Capitoline Jupiter was nigh forgotten, the glories of the Roman eagles became a tradition, the splendour of the imperial city a dream.  For there came to the world a better Deity, a diviner glory, a more heavenly city.  The greater grew out of the less.  Out of the world-fabric prepared by Julius Caesar grew the fabric of the Christian Church, and out of the Christian Church shall rise a yet nobler spiritual edifice when the stars have all grown cold.

THE END