d aristocrat, she killed herself, and Egypt became a Roman province.

As for Octavian, he was a very wise young man and he did not repeat the
mistake of his famous uncle. He knew how people will shy at words. He
was very modest in his demands when he returned to Rome. He did not want
to be a "dictator." He would be entirely satisfied with the title of
"the Honourable." But when the Senate, a few years later, addressed him
as Augustus--the Illustrious--he did not object and a few years later
the man in the street called him Caesar, or Kaiser, while the soldiers,
accustomed to regard Octavian as their Commander-in-chief referred to
him as the Chief, the Imperator or Emperor. The Republic had become an
Empire, but the average Roman was hardly aware of the fact.

In 14 A.D. his position as the Absolute Ruler of the Roman people had
become so well established that he was made an object of that divine
worship which hitherto had been reserved for the Gods. And his
successors were true "Emperors"--the absolute rulers of the greatest
empire the world had ever seen.

If the truth be told, the average citizen was sick and tired of anarchy
and disorder. He did not care who ruled him provided the new master gave
him a chance to live quietly and without the noise of eternal street
riots. Octavian assured his subjects forty years of peace. He had no
desire to extend the frontiers of his domains, In the year 9 A.D. he
had contem-plated an invasion of the northwestern wilderness which was
inhabited by the Teutons. But Varrus, his general, had been killed with
all his men in the Teutoburg Woods, and after that the Romans made no
further attempts to civilise these wild people.

They concentrated their efforts upon the gigantic problem of internal
reform. But it was too late to do much good. Two centuries of revolution
and foreign war had repeatedly killed the best men among the younger
generations. It had ruined the class of the free farmers. It had
introduced slave labor, against which no freeman could hope to compete.
It had turned the cities into beehives inhabited by pauperized
and unhealthy mobs of runaway peasants. It had created a large
bureaucracy--petty officials who were underpaid and who were forced to
take graft in order to buy bread and clothing for their families.
Worst of all, it had accustomed people to violence, to blood-shed, to a
barbarous pleasure in the pain and suffering of others.

Outwardly, the Roman state dur