political _coterie_ that gained definite control of the government
on the ruin of Antony. At Actium, the future Augustus did not fight a
real war, he only passively watched the power of the adversary go
to pieces, destroyed by its own internal contradictions. He did not
decide to conquer Egypt until the public opinion of Italy, enraged
against Antony and Cleopatra, required this vengeance with such
insistence that he had to satisfy it.

If Augustus was not a man too quick in action, he was, instead, keenly
intelligent in comprehending the situation created by the catastrophe
of Antony in Italy, where already, for a decade of years, public
spirit, frightened by revolution, was anxious to return to the ways
of the past, to the historic sources of the national life. Augustus
understood that he ought to stand before Italy, disgusted as it
was with long-continued dissension and eager to retrace the way
of national tradition, as the embodiment of all the virtues his
contemporaries set in opposition to eastern "corruption,"--simplicity,
severity of private habits, rigid monogamy, the anti-feministic
spirit, the purely virile idea of the state. Naturally, the exaltation
of these virtues required the portrayal in his rival of Actium, as
far as possible, the opposite defects; therefore the efforts of his
friends, like Horace, to colour the story of Antony and Cleopatra,
which should magnify to the Italians the idea of the danger from
which Augustus had saved them at Actium; which was meant to serve as a
barrier against the invading Oriental "corruption," that "corruption"
the essence of which I have already analysed.

In a certain sense, the legend of Antony and Cleopatra is chiefly an
antifeminist legend, intended to reinforce in the state the power of
the masculine principle, to demonstrate how dangerous it may be to