Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/206

 i86 A Short History of The World talk of a king, a word abhorrent to Rome since the expulsion of the Etruscans five centuries before. Caesar refused to be King, but adopted throne and sceptre. After his defeat of Pompey, Caesar had gone on into Egypt and had made love to Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, the goddess queen of Egypt. She seems to have turned his head very completely. He had brought back to Rome the Egyptian idea of a god-king. His statue was set up in a temple with an inscription " To the Unconquerable God." The expiring republicanism of Rome flared up in a last protest, and Caesar was stabbed to death in the senate at the foot of the statue of his mtirdered rival, Pompey the Great. Thirteen years more of this conflict of ambitious personalities followed. There was a second Triumvirate of Lepidus, Mark Antony and Octavian Caesar, the latter the nephew of Julius Caesar. Octavian like his uncle took the poorer, hardier western provinces where the best legions were recruited. In 31 B.C., he defeated Mark Antony, his only serious rival, at the naval battle of Actium, and made him- self sole master of the Roman world. But Octavian was a man of different quality altogether from JuUus Caesar. He had no foolish craving to be God or King. He had no queen-lover that he wished to dazzle. He restored freedom to the senate and people of Rome. He declined to be dictator. The grateful senate in return gave him the reality instead of the forms of power. He was to be called not King indeed, but " Princeps " and " Augustus." He became Augustus Caesar, the first of the Roman emperors (27 B.C. to a.d. 14). He was foUowed by Tiberius Caesar (a.d. 14 to 37) and he by others, Caligula, Claudius, Nero and so on up to Trajan (a.d. 98), Hadrian (a.d. 117), Antoninus Pius (a.d. 138) and Marcus Aurelius (a.d. 161- 180). All these emperors were emperors of the legions. The soldiers made them, and some the soldiers destroyed. Gradually the senate fades out of Roman history, and the emperor and his administrative officials replace it. 1 he boundaries of the empire crept forward now to their utmost limits. Most of Britain was added to the empire, Transylvania was brought in as a new province, Dacia ; Trajan crossed the Euphrates. Hadrian had an idea that reminds us at once of what had happened at the other end of the old world. Like Shi- Hwang-ti he built walls against the northern barbarians ; one across Britain and a palisade between the Rhine and the Danube. He abandoned some of the acquisitions of Trajan. The expansion of the Roman Empire was at an end.