morning. His
personality was always under command, and he brought the world
across on it. It never got in the way; it was simply the
instrument wherewith he (or the Gods) saved Rome. He--we may say
he--did save Rome. She was dead, this time; dead as Lazarus,
who had been three days in the tomb, etc. He called her forth;
gave her two centuries of greatness; five of some kind of life
in the west; fifteen, all told, in west and east. Julius is
always bound to make on the popular eye the larger impression of
greatness. He retains his personality with all its air of
supermanhood; it is easy to see him as a live human being, to
imagine him in his habit as he lived,--and to be astounded by his
greatness. But Augustus is hidden; the real man is covered by
that dispassionate impersonality that saved Rome. If all that
comes down about the first part of his life is true, and has been
truly interpreted, you could not call him _then_ even a good man.
But the record of his reign belies every shadow that has been
cast on that first part. It is altogether a record of beneficence.

H.P. Blavatsky speaks of Julius as an agent of the dark forces.
Elsewhere she speaks of Augustus as an Initiate.

Did she mean by that merely an initiate of the Official Mysteries
as they still existed at Eleusis and elsewhere? Many men, good,
bad and indifferent, were that: Cicero,--who was doubtless, as
he says, a better man for his initiation: Glamininus and his
officers; most of the prominent Athenians since the time of
Pericles and earlier. I dare say it had come to mean that though
you might be taught something about Karma and Reincarnation, you
were not taught to make such teachings a living power in your own
life or that of the world. There is nothing of the Occultists,
nothing of the Master Soul, in the life and actions of Cicero;
but there was very much, as I shall try to show, in the life and
actions of Augustus. And, we gather from H.P. Blavatsky, the
only Mysteries that survived in their integrity to anything like
this time had been those at Bibracte which Caesar destroyed.
(Which throws light, by the bye, on Lucan's half-sneering remark
about the Druids,--that they alone had real knowledge about the
Gods and the things beyond this life.) So it seems to me that
Augustus' initiation implied something much more real,--much more
a high status of the soul,--than could have been given him by any
semi-public organized body within th