in which a less reverently minded man would have seen nothing but the evidence of his own surpassing ability. It was not merely political astuteness which led him to act in everything as an ordinary citizen, to vote, to ask for votes, to live without magnificence or ostentatious expenditure; such conduct was the result partly of personal inclination, partly of a sense of the infinite smallness of such things as marble columns and silken raiment, costly banquets and trains of servants in comparison with the greatness of the destiny imposed upon him. If at the great shows in the circus he sat on the platform on which were placed the statues of the gods, he did not thereby assert equality with them, but claimed their protection and bore witness to the favour which they bestowed not only on him, but on the people whose destinies he guided with their approbation and in virtue of the powers which they had granted. In the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius we may detect a certain flavour of approbation when these historians tell us that Tiberius or other Emperors refused divine honours or limited them, and we might be tempted to infer from this that the assumption of divinity by the Emperors was contrary to the feeling of the times; but both Tacitus and Suetonius wrote more than a century after Octavian had been declared “Augustus,” and in their days the unitarian faith of the Jews had begun generally to influence the educated classes at Rome; Horace could jest lightly at the Jewish Sabbath; in the time of Suetonius, if it was not observed as a day of rest all over the Empire, as Josephus boasts, it was certainly a well known institution. It might be urged that whatever the religious attitude of Augustus in other respects, he cannot have believed in his descent from the goddess Venus, and that Virgil’s great poem in all that concerns Æneas and Anchises is conscious imposture. To argue in this way is again to misinterpret polytheism. The faith in Fauns and Satyrs is not absolutely extinct in Italy even today; the survival of such a faith suggested the plot of Hawthorne’s exquisite romance, _Transformation_. Charles Leland discovered traces of it in Tuscany and Umbria.