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 Cæsar, 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 facile philosophy of the plump little plagiarist Horace was enough for him, “To-day 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 Æneas to see the sufferers in Avernus and poured his restless melancholy 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 Saviour and restorer of the reign of Saturn. But his vassal of Judea, his great Oriental client, may have had a presentiment of the birth of Jesus, of the true King, who was coming to supplant the king of evil. HEROD THE GREAT