Augustus And Argos

This is the time of night when I turn from prose fiction to graphic fiction and find something relevant to Poul Anderson:

Anderson imagines a Roman in the reign of Augustus who speculates that the Empire might either conquer the whole world or, as then current policy suggested, stay approximately as it was. Gaiman shows us Augustus formulating the latter policy and tells us why he did it.
-copied from Poul Anderson And Neil Gaiman.

My favorite Sandman story is "August," in which Caesar Augustus, like Manuel Argos, says that the alternative to him is chaos. That was our Terrestrial past but we do not want those alternatives to be repeated in our interstellar future.

In "The Discovery of the Past," (see here) Anderson writes that a heretical offshoot of the religion of a subjugated people transformed Romans and barbarians and generated new civilizations. Gaiman's Augustus, plotting against the gods of Rome, chooses the future in which the Romans are eaten from outside by barbarians and from inside by strange gods. Why does he do this? Read The Sandman.