He could well afford to be generous, for he was now Master of the World; master as not even his grand-uncle Cæsar, by whom he had been adopted as a son, had been world-master. Cæsar was assassinated in the very year following his election as dictator. Octavius put down his last rival, Antony, at Actium in 31 B.C., and his world-mastery endured until his death in 14 A.D. I have said that Octavius was a very prudent man. He wished all the old forms of republican government to go on just as they had before. And so they did go on, but Octavius must have known, and everybody else must have known, that they went on just because he allowed them to do so, that he could stop them or alter them at any moment if he pleased, that the government was in form republican--government by persons elected by the people--but that it really was government by one man. And far better it should be so. The other way had been tried and had failed terribly; it had resulted in fearful lawlessness. Now the Pax Romana, that peace of the world under the controlling power of Rome, really did begin to be something like a real fact. It had been very much of a fiction up to now. Of course there were troubles on the frontier. {212} Those Parthians, who had defeated Antony, had to be dealt with; and they were dealt with, and that disgrace to the Roman arms was wiped out. I am not sure that the most troublous spot in all the Empire of Rome was not that little kingdom of Judæa (sometimes it was a kingdom, under a petty king like Herod, but oftener it was under a Roman governor who had the title of procurator), which never seems to have been able to rest for long together. {213} CHAPTER XVI THE DISPERSAL OF THE JEWS It is rather puzzling to find, now and again, in this greatest of all stories, that several different people are called by the same name, and also that the same person is called by different names. Now, besides this Herod of whom we have been talking, there were several others. There was Herod Antipas, his son, before whom Christ was sent by Pontius Pilate, and also there was Herod Agrippa, his grandson, who was king of Judæa for a while, reigning, with such limited power as the Romans allowed him, from A.D. 37 to his death in 44. But for the most part, during all the early years of the Christian Era, Judæa was governed by one or other Roman procurator and was not even in name a kingdom.