COLLINGWOOD'S VIEW OF HISTORY	725
it is geared to the actualities of Here and Nrrro Ti^ £	c t. •
senseof these all-important actualities w*.the^^rrlon^Tt     ^
secret of Augustus^
and their possession of this gift explains why it wi that Augustus^!
Liu Pang succeeded in solving problen* that had defeated ffiLTre
bri hant forerunners Divus Julms and Ts>in She Hwang-ti.' The verc
bril hance of their ideas had been the undoing Of those twoTmen of geniu7
for it had enticed them to fly straight into the light, like moths plunging
into the flame of a candle. The clarity with which they perceivedliek
goal had made them so impatient of approaching it by any roundabout
road that, instead of being content to feel their way between the natural
obstacles they had tried to ride roughshod over the perilous broken
ground of actualities that were none the less actual for being irrational
Caesar the God invited assassination by allowing his partisans to make
the provocative gesture of paying him royal honours; Augustus the
politician discovered 'that a monarchy could be grafted upon the con-
stitution of Rome by developing the implications of proconsulare im-
perium and tnbunicia potestas'; but this Augustan 'modification' of the
republican constitution of Rome was the antithesis of the 'eternal object'
that had been Divus Julius's will-o'-the-wisp; and, if any twentieth-
century dictator-aspirant were to follow ColEngwood's prescription by
trying to 're-enact' Augustus's 'experience for himself5,2 he would soon
find himself in queer street; for, just because Augustus's sly policy fitted
Augustus's own political milieu like a glove, it was bound, if tried in
any other political milieu, to prove there an egregious misfit. Since a
'sensitiveness to the exigencies of his own Here and Now was the secret
of Augustus's success, the only profitable lesson that a twentieth-century
American aspirant to an oecumenical dictatorship could learn from 'the
crafty nephew of Julius'3 would be the hint that his cue was to develop
with equal tact, care, and patience the implications of the presidential
prerogative in the written and the customary constitution of the United
States. A cue that, taken in these general terms, might put him on the
road towards an Augustan success would infallibly lead him into a Julian
disaster if he were ever to try to translate it from the general into the
particular by setting out to develop the implications of proconsulare im-
perium and tribunicia potestas in the second half of the twentieth century
of the Christian Era at Washington, D,C.
Collingwood's contention that Augustus's political contrivance is *a
permanent addition to political ideas' and *an eternal object' thus
proves to be untenable; and it is, indeed, implicitly contradicted
by Collingwood himself in another passage published in the same
book.
'The Republic of Plato is an account, not of the unchanging ideal of
political life, but of the Greek ideal as Plato received it and reinterpreted
it. The Ethics of Aristotle describes, not an eternal morality, but the
morality of the Greek gentleman. Hobbes's Leviathan expounds the
political ideas of seventeenth-century absolutism in their English form.
1 See V. vi. 186-^9.     t	* Colttngwood, op. cit., p. 163.
3 Bryce, quoted in I. i. 343.