he prefers to listen to Pliny, who thinks that Augustus, one of the princes most favoured by fortune, experienced at least as much evil as good.  I admit that he found great causes of trouble in his family and that remorse for having crushed the Republic may have tormented him; but I think that he was too wise to grieve over the former, and that Maecenas apparently made him understand that Rome had need of a master.  Had not Augustus been converted on this point, Vergil would never have said of a lost soul: 

  Vendidit hic auro patriam Dominumque potentem
  Imposuit, fixit leges pretio atque refixit.

Augustus would have thought that he and Caesar were alluded to in these lines, which speak of a master given to a free state.  But there is every indication that he applied it just as little to his dominion, which he regarded as compatible with liberty and as a necessary remedy for public evils, as the princes of to-day apply to themselves the words used of the kings censured in M. de Cambray’s Telemachus.  Each one considers himself within his rights.  Tacitus, an unbiassed writer, justifies Augustus in two words, at the beginning of his Annals.  But Augustus was better able than anyone to judge of his good fortune.  He appears to have died content, as may be inferred from a proof he gave of contentedness with his life:  for in dying he repeated to his friends a line in Greek, which has the signification of that Plaudite that was wont to be spoken at the conclusion of a well-acted play.  Suetonius quotes it: 

  [Greek:  Dote kroton kai pantes hymeis meta charas ktypesate.]

262.  But even though there should have fallen to the lot of the human kind more evil than good, it is enough where God is concerned that there is incomparably more good than evil in the universe.  Rabbi Maimonides (whose merit is not sufficiently recognized in the statement that he is the first of the Rabbis to have ceased talking nonsense) also gave wise judgement on this question of the predominance of good over evil in the world.  Here is what he says in his Doctor Perplexorum (cap. 12, p. 3):  ’There arise often in the hearts of ill-instructed persons thoughts which persuade them there is more evil than good in the world:  and one often finds in the poems and songs of the pagans that it is as it were a miracle when something good comes to pass, whereas evils are usual and constant.  This error has [288] taken hold not of the common herd only, those very persons who wish to be considered wise have been beguiled thereby.  A celebrated writer named Alrasi, in his Sepher Elohuth, or Theosophy, amongst other absurdities has stated that there are more evils than goods, and that upon comparison of the recreations and the pleasures man enjoys in times of tranquillity with the pains, the torments, the troubles, faults, cares, griefs and afflictions whereby he is overwhelmed our life would prove to be a great evil, and an actual penalty inflicted upon us to punish us.’  Maimonides adds that the cause of their extravagant error is their supposition that Nature was made for them only, and that they hold of no account what is separate from their person; whence they infer that when something unpleasing to them occurs all goes ill in the universe.