42. Defeat and death of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. Dissensions soon break out between Octavianus Caesar and Antony. 31. Antony is completely defeated by Octavianus Caesar at Actium. He flies to Egypt with Cleopatra. Octavianus pursues him. Antony and Cleopatra kill themselves. Egypt becomes a Roman province, and Octavianus Caesar is left undisputed master of Rome, and all that is Rome's. The state of the Roman world at this time is best described in two lines of Tacitus:--"Postquam bellatum apud Actium, atque OMNEM POTESTATEM AD UNUM CONFERRI PACIS INTERFUIT." (Hist. lib. i. s. 1.) The 44th year of the reign of Augustus, and the 1st year of the 195th Olympiad, is commonly assigned as the date of THE NATIVITY OF OUR LORD. There is much of the beauty of holiness in the remarks with which the American historian, Eliot, closes his survey of the conquering career and civil downfall of the Roman Commonwealth:-- "So far as humility amongst men was necessary for the preparation of a truer freedom than could ever be known under heathenism, the part of Rome, however dreadful was yet sublime. It was not to unite, to discipline, or to fortify humanity, but to enervate, to loosen, and to scatter its forces, that the people whose history we have read were allowed to conquer the earth, and were then themselves reduced to deep submission. Every good labour of theirs that failed was, by reason of what we esteem its failure, a step gained nearer to the end of the well-nigh universal evil that prevailed; while every bad achievement that may seem to us to have succeeded, temporarily or lastingly, with them was equally, by reason of its success, a progress towards the good of which the coming would have been longed and prayed for, could it have been comprehended. Alike in the virtues and in the vices of antiquity, we may read the progress towards its humiliation. ["The Christian revelation," says Leland, in his truly admirable work on the subject (vol. i. p. 488), "was made to the world at a time when it was most wanted; when the darkness and corruption of mankind were arrived at the height.... if it had been published much sooner, and before there had been a full trial made of what was to be expected from human wisdom and philosophy, the great need men stood in of such an extraordinary divine dispensation would not have been so apparent."] Yet, on the other hand, it must not seem, at the last, that the disposition of the Romans or of mankind to submission was secured solely through the errors, and the apparently ineffectual toils which we have traced back to these times of old. Desires too true to have been wasted, and strivings too humane to have been unproductive, though all were overshadowed by passing wrongs, still gleam as if in anticipation or in preparation of the advancing day.