OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS

OCTAVIUS AUGUSTUS

 When Christ appeared upon the earth, criminals ruled the world unopposed. He was born subject to two sovereigns, the stronger far away at Rome, the weaker and wickeder close at hand in Judea.

One lucky adventurer after wholesale slaughter had seized the empire, another had murdered his way to the throne of David and Solomon. Each rose to high position through trick­ery, through civil wars, betrayals, cruelty, massacres. They were born to understand one another, were, as a matter of fact, friends and accomplices, as far as was possible between a sub­ordinate rascal and his rascal chief.

Son of the usurer of Velletri, Augustus showed himself cow­ardly in war and vindictive in victory, false to his friends, cruel in reprisals. To a condemned man who begged only for burial he answered, "That is the business of the vultures." To the Perugians begging for mercy during the massacre he cried, "Moriendum esse!" On a mere suspicion he wanted to tear out the eyes of the Praetor Quintus Gallius before order­ing his throat cut. Possessed of the empire, with his enemies crushed and scattered, with the power all in his own hands, he put on a mask of mildness and of his youthful vices kept only his lust. It was told of him, that in his youth, he had sold his body twice, first to Caesar, and again in Spain to Hirtius for 300,000 sestertia. Now he amused himself with the wives of his friends, with almost public adulteries, and with posing as the restorer of morality.

This filthy, sickly man was sovereign of the western world when Jesus was born, nor did he ever know that One had been born who would bring the dissolution of all that he had founded. The flippant philosophy of the plump little bootlegger Horace was enough for him, "Today let us enjoy wine and love: hopeless death awaits us: there is not a day to be lost!" In vain Virgil, the man of the countryside, friend of woods, of quiet flocks and golden bees, he who had gone down with Aeneas to see the sufferers in Avernus and poured his restless depression into the music of poetry; in vain Virgil, the loving pious Virgil, had foretold a new era, a new order and a new race, a kingdom of heaven less spiritual, less brilliant than that which Jesus was to announce, but infinitely nobler and purer than the kingdom of Hell which was then making ready. In vain, because Au­gustus saw in these words only a pastoral fancy and perhaps believed that he, the corrupt master of the corrupt, was the proclaimed Savior and restorer of the reign of Saturn.

But his vassal of Judea, his great Oriental client, may have had a premonition of the birth of Jesus, of the true King, who was coming to supplant the king of evil.