The imperial bureaucracy that was formed mainly in the second century was another effect of this enlargement of the middle classes. In the second century there came into vogue many humanitarian ideas, which have a certain resemblance to modern ones. There increased solicitude for the general well-being, for order, for justice, and this augmented the number of functionaries charged with insuring universal felicity by administrative means. The movement was supported by intellectual men of the middle classes, especially by jurists, who sought to put their studies to profit, getting from the government employments in which they might make use, well or ill, of their somewhat artificial aptitudes. If the aristocratic idea, personified by Augustus and Tiberius, delayed, it could not stop, the invasion of these bureaucratic locusts; the government showed itself constantly weaker with the intellectual classes. Little by little the whole Empire was bureaucratised; founded by an aristocracy exclusively Roman in statesmen and soldiers, it was finally governed by a cosmopolitan bureaucracy of men of brains: orators, litterati, lawyers. Therefore, to my thinking, they are wrong who believe that the imperial bureaucracy created the unity of the Empire; whereas, the formation of the imperial bureaucracy was one of the consequences of that natural unification, the chief reason for which should be sought in the great economic movement. The economic unification was first and was entire; then came the political unity, made by the imperial bureaucracy, which was less complete than the unifying of material interests.

After the material unity, after the political, there should have been formed the moral and intellectual; but at this point, the forces of Rome gave way. Rome had gathered under its sceptre too many races, too many kinds of culture, religions too diverse; its spirit was too exclusively political, administrative, and judicial; it could not therefore conciliate the ideas, assimilate the customs, weld the sentiments, unify the religions, by its laws and decrees. To this end was necessary the power of ideas, of doctrines, of beliefs that officials of administration could neither create nor propagate. The work was to be accomplished outside of, and in part against, the government. It is the work of Christianity.

Many have asked me how I shall consider Christianity in the sequence of my work. In brief, I may say that I shall follow a different method from that which its historians have taken up to this time: they have studied especially how there was formed that part of Christianity which yet lives and is the soul of it, namely, the religious doctrine. On this account, they generally separate its history from the history of the Empire, making of it the principal argument, considering the history of Roman society as subordinate to it and therefore only an appendix. I propose to reverse the study, taking Christianity as a chapter, important but separate, in the history of the Empire. If for three centuries Christianity has been gradually returning to its origin, that is, becoming purely a religion and a moral teaching, for some centuries in the ancient world it was a thing much more complicated; a government and an administration that willed not only to regulate the relations between man and God, but to govern the intellectual, social, moral, political, and economic life of the people! The historian ought to explain how this new Empire—for it was indeed a new Empire—was formed in Rome and upon its ruins: this is a problem much more intricate than at first appears.

It has been said and often repeated that the Church was in the Middle Ages in Europe the continuation of the Roman Empire, that the Pope is yet the real successor of the Emperor in Rome. In fact he carries one of the Emperor's titles, Pontifex maximus. The observation is just, but it should not make us forget that the Christian Empire, so to call it, and the Roman Empire, were between themselves as radically opposed as two forces that created the one and the other; politics and intellectuality. The diplomatists, the generals, the legislators of Rome created by political means, by wars, treaties, laws, a grand economic and political unity, which they consolidated, quite giving up the formation of a large intellectual and moral unity. The intellectual men, who formed the most powerful nucleus of the Church after the fourth century, took up again the Roman idea of unity and of empire; but they transferred it from matter to mind, from the concrete world of economic and political interests, to the world of ideas and beliefs. They tried to re-do, by pen and word, the work of the Scipios, of Lucullus, and of Caesar, to conquer the world, not indeed invading it with armies, but spreading a new faith, creating a new morality, a new metaphysics which must gather up within themselves the intellectual activities of Graeco-Latin culture, from history to science, from law to philosophy.

The Church of the Middle Ages was therefore the most splendid edifice that the intellectual classes have so far created. The power of this empire of men of letters increased, as little by little the other empire, that of the generals and diplomats, declined. Christianity saw with indifference the Roman Empire decay; indeed, when it could, it helped on the disintegration and was one of the causes of that political and economic pulverising which everywhere succeeded the great Roman unity. Political and economic unity on the one hand, moral and intellectual on the other, seem in the history of European civilisation things opposite and irreconcilable; when one is formed, the other is undone. As the Roman Empire had found in intellectual and moral disunion a means of preserving more easily the economic and political unity, the Church broke to pieces the political and economic unity of the ancient world to make, and for a long time preserve, its own moral and intellectual oneness.

I shall make an effort, above all, to explain the origin, the development, and the consequences of this contradiction, because I believe that explaining this clears one of the weightiest and most important points in all the history of our civilisation; in truth, this contradiction seems to be the immortal soul of it. For instance: in time, Augustus is twenty centuries away from us, but mentally and morally he is, instead, much nearer, because for the last four centuries Europe has been returning to Rome—that is, striving to remake a great political and economic unity at the expense of the intellectual and moral. In this fact particularly, lies the immense historic importance of what is called the classic renaissance. It indicates the beginning of an historic reversion that corresponds in the opposite direction to what occurred in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era. The classic renaissance freed anew the scientific spirit of the ancients from mediaeval metaphysics and therefore created the sciences; rediscovered some basic political and juridical ideas of the ancient world, among them that of the indivisibility of the State, which destroyed the foundations of feudalism and of all the political orders of the Middle Ages; and gave a great impetus to the struggle against the political domination of the Church and toward the formation of the great states. France and England have been in the lead, and for two centuries Europe has been wearying itself imitating them. After the movement of political unification followed the economic. Look about you: what do you see? A world that looks more like the Roman Empire than it does the Middle Ages; it is a world of great states whose dominating classes have almost all the essential ideas of Graeco-Latin civilisation; each, seeking to better its own conditions, is forced to establish between itself and the others the strictest economic relations and to bind into the system of common interests also barbarous countries and those of differing civilisation. But how? By scrupulously respecting all the intellectual and moral diversities of men. What matters it if a people be Roman Catholic or Protestant, Mohammedan or Buddhist, monarchic or republican, provided it buys, sells, takes part in the economic unity of the modern world? This is the policy of contemporary states and was the policy of the Roman Empire. It has often been observed that in the modern world, so well administered, there is an intellectual and moral diversity greater than that during the fearful anarchy of the Middle Ages, when all the lettered classes had a single language, the Latin, and the lower classes held, on certain fundamental questions, the same ideas—those taught by the Church. A correct observation, this, but one from which there is no need to draw too many conclusions; since in our history the material unity and the ideal are naturally exclusive.

We are returning, in a vaster world, to the condition of the Roman Empire at its beginning; to an immense economic unity, which, notwithstanding the aberrations of protectionism, is grander and firmer than all its predecessors; to a political unity not so great, yet considerable, because even if peace be not eternal, it is at least the normal condition of the European states; to an indifference for every effort put forth to establish moral and ideal uniformity among the nations, great and small, that share in this political and economic unity. This is why we understand Augustus and his times much more readily than we do the times of Charlemagne, even though from the latter we possess a greater number of documents; this is why we can write a history of Augustus and rectify so many mistakes made about him by preceding generations. It has often happened to me to find, a propos of the volumes written on Augustus, that my contradiction of tradition creates a kind of instinctive diffidence. Many say: "Yes, this book is interesting; but is it possible that for twenty centuries everybody has been mistaken?—that it was necessary to wait till 1908 to understand what occurred in the year 8?" But those twenty centuries reduce themselves, as far as regards the possibility of understanding Augustus, to little more than a hundred years. Since Augustus was the last representative of a world that was disappearing, his figure soon became obscure and enigmatic. Tacitus and Suetonius saw him already enveloped in the mist of that new spirit which for so many centuries was to conceal from human eyes the wonderful spectacle of the pagan world. Then the mist became a fog and grew denser, until Augustus disappeared, or was but a formless shadow. Centuries passed by; the fog began to withdraw before the returning sun of the ancient culture; his figure reappeared. Fifty years ago, the obscurity cleared quite away; the figure stands in plain view with outlines well defined. I believe that the history I have written is more like the truth than those preceding it, but I do not consider myself on that account a wonder-worker. I know I have been able to correct many preceding errors, because I was the first to look attentively when the moment to see and understand arrived.



Roman History in Modern Education.

When I announced my intention to write a new history of Rome, many people manifested a sense of astonishment similar to what they would have felt had I said that I meant to retire to a monastery. Was it to be believed that the hurrying modern age, which bends all its energies toward the future, would find time to look back, even for a moment, at that past so far away? That my attempt was rash was the common opinion not only of friends and critics, but also of publishers, who everywhere at first showed themselves skeptical and hesitating. They all said that the public was quite out of touch with Roman affairs. On the contrary, facts have demonstrated that also in this age, in aspect so eager for things modern, people of culture are willing to give attention to the events and personages of ancient Rome.

The thing appears strange and bizarre, as is natural, to those who had not considered it possible; consequently, few have seen how simple and clear is its explanation. To those who showed surprise that the history of Rome could become fashionable in Paris salons, I have always replied: My history has had its fortune because it was the history of Rome. Written with the same method and in the same style, a history of Venice, or Florence, or England, would not have had the same lot. One must not forget that the story of Rome occupies in the intellectual world a privileged place. Not only is it studied in all the schools of the civilised world; not only do nearly all states spend money to bring to light all the documentary evidence that the earth still conceals; but while all other histories are studied fitfully, that of Rome is, so to speak, remade every fifty years, and whoever arrives at the right time to do the making can gain a reputation broader than that given to most historians.

There is, so to speak, in the history of Rome an eternal youth, and for the mind in what is commonly called European-American civilisation, it holds a peculiar attraction. From what deep sources springs this perennial youth? In what consists this particular force of attraction and renewal? It seems to me that the chief reason for the eternal fascination of the history of Rome is this, that it includes, as in a miniature drawn with simple lines, well defined, all the essential phenomena of social life; so that every age is able there to find its own image, its gravest problems, its intensest passions, its most pressing interests, its keenest struggles; therefore Roman history is forever modern, because every new age has only to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its own self.

In the intellectual history of the nineteenth century this leading phenomenon of our culture is clearly evident. If any one asked me why, during the past century, Roman history has proved so interesting, I should not hesitate to reply, "Because Europeans and Americans find, there more than elsewhere what has been the greatest political upheaval of the hundred years that followed the French Revolution—the struggle between monarchy and republic." From the fervid admiration for the Roman Republic which animated the men of the French Revolution to the unmeasured Caesarian apologies of Duruy and of Mommsen, from the ardent cult of Brutus to the detailed studies on the Roman administration of the first two centuries, all historians have studied and regarded Roman history mainly from the point of view of the struggle between the two principles that yet to-day rend in incurable discord the mind of old Europe and from which you have emerged fortunate! You are free, in a new world; you have ended the combat between the Latin principle of the impersonal state and the Oriental principle of the dynastic state; between the state conceived as the thing of all, belonging to every one and therefore of no one, and the state personified in a family of an origin higher and nobler than the common in which all authority derives from some hero-founder by a mysterious virtue unaccountable to reason and human philosophy; you have done with the conflict between the human state, simple, without pomp, without dramatic symbols—the republic as we men of the twentieth century understand it, and as you Americans conceive and practise it—and the monarchy of divine right, vainglorious, full of ceremonies and etiquette, despotic in internal constitution, which still exists in Europe under more or less spurious forms. Now it is easy to explain how, in an age in which the contest between these two conceptions and these two forms of the State was so warm, the history of Rome should so stir the mind.

In no other history do these two political forms meet each other in a more irreconcilable opposition of characters in extreme. The Republic, as Rome had founded it, was so impersonal that, in contrast with modern more democratic republics, it had not even a fixed bureaucracy, and all the public functions were exercised by elective magistrates—even the executive—from public works to the police-system. In the ancient monarchy which the Orient had created, the dynastic principle was so strong that the State was considered by inherent right the personal property of the sovereign, who might expand it, contract it, divide it among his sons and relatives, bequeathing his kingdom and his subjects as a land-owner disposes of his estate and his cattle. Furthermore, although to-day the sovereigns of Europe are pleased to treat quite familiarly with the good Lord, the rulers in the Orient were held to be gods in their own right.

Whence it is easy to understand how terrible must have been the struggle between the two principles so antagonistic, from the time when in the Empire, immeasurable and complicated, the institutions of the Republic proved inadequate to govern so many diverse peoples and territories so vast. The Romans kept on, as at first, rebelling at the idea of placing a man-god at the head of the State, themselves to become, when finally masters of the world, the slaves of a dynasty. The conflict between the two principles lasted a century, from Caesar to Nero, filled the story of Rome with hideous tragedies, but ended with the truce of a glorious compromise; for Rome succeeded in putting into the monarchic constitution of empire some essentially republican ideas, among others, the idea of the indivisibility of the State. Not only Augustus and his family, but also the Flavians and the Antonines, never thought that the Empire belonged to them, that they might dispose of it like private property; on the contrary, they regarded it as an eternal and indivisible holding of the Roman people which they, as representatives of the populus, were charged to administer.

It is therefore easy, as I have said, to explain how, as never before, the history of Rome was looked upon as a great war between the monarchy and the republic. Indeed, the problem of the republic and the monarchy, always present to the minds of writers of the nineteenth century, has been perhaps the chief reason for the gravest mistakes committed by Roman historiography during this period—mistakes I have sought to correct. For example, the republicans have pinned their faith to all the absurd tales told by Suetonius and Tacitus about the family of the Caesars, through preconceived hate for the monarchy; and the monarchists have exaggerated out of measure the felicity of the first two centuries of the Empire, to prove that the provinces lived happy under the monarchic administration as never before or after. Mommsen has fashioned an impossible Caesar, almost making of that great demagogue a literary anticipation of Bismarck.

Little by little, however, as the contest between republic and monarchy gradually spent itself in Europe, in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, the interest for histories of Rome conceived and written in this spirit, declined. The real reason why Mommsen and Duruy are to-day so little read, why at the beginning of the twentieth century Roman history no longer stirs enthusiasm through their books is, above all, this: that readers no longer find in those pages what corresponds directly to living reality. Therefore it was to be believed that Roman history had grown old and out of date; whereas, merely one of its perishing and deciduous forms had grown old, not the soul of it, which is eternally living and young. So true is this, that a writer had only to consider the old story from new points of view, for Caesar and Antony, Lucullus and Pompey, Augustus and the laws of the year 18 B.C., to become subjects of fashionable conversation in Parisian drawing-rooms, in the most refined intellectual centre of the world.

It has never been difficult for me to realise that contemporary Europe and America, the Europe and America of railroads, industries, monstrous swift-growing cities, might find present in ancient Rome a part of their own very souls, restless, turbulent, greedy. In the Rome of the days of Caesar, huge, agitated, seething with freedmen, slaves, artisans come from everywhere, crowded with enormous tenement-houses, run through from morning till night by a mad throng, eager for amusements and distractions; in that Rome where there jostled together an unnumbered population, uprooted from land, from family, from native country, and where from the press of so many men there fermented all the propelling energies of history and all the forces that destroy morality and life—vice and intellectuality, the imperialistic policy, deadly epidemics; in that changeable Rome, here splendid, there squalid; now magnanimous, and now brutal; full of grandeurs, replete with horrors; in that great city all the huge modern metropolises are easily refound, Paris and New York, Buenos Ayres and London, Melbourne and Berlin. Rome created the word that denotes this marvellous and monstrous phenomenon, of history, the enormous city, the deceitful source of life and death—urbs—the city. Whence it is not strange that the countless urbes which the grand economic progress of the nineteenth century has caused to rise in every part of Europe and America look to Rome as their eldest sister and their dean.

Furthermore, into the history of Rome, the historic aristocracy of Europe may look as into the mirror of their own destiny, as everywhere they try to retain wealth and power, playing in the stock-exchange, marrying the daughters of millionaire brewers, giving themselves to commerce; a nobility that resorts, in the effort to preserve its prestige over the middle classes, to the expedients of the most reckless demagogy. Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, Antony, Caesar, exemplify in stupendous types the aristocracy that seeks to conserve riches and power by audaciously employing the forces that menace its own destruction.

Several critics of my work, particularly the French, have observed that the policy of expansion made by Rome in the times of Caesar, as I have described it, resembles closely the craze for imperialism that about ten years ago agitated England. It is true, for imperialism in the time of Caesar was what has existed for the last half century in England—a means of which one part of the historic aristocracy availed itself to keep power and renew decaying prestige, satisfying material interests and flattering with intoxications of vanity the pride of the masses. So, too, the contesting parties in France—the socialist, which represents the labouring classes; the radical, which represents the middle classes; the progressive and the monarchic, which represent the wealthy burghers and the aristocracy—may discover some of their passions, their doings, their invectives, in the political warfare that troubled the age of Caesar; in those scandals, those judicial trials, in that furor of pamphlets and discourses. This is so true, that in consequence my book met a singular fate in France; that of being adopted by each party as an argument in its own favour. Drumont made use of it to demonstrate to France what befalls a country when it allows its national spirit to be corrupted by foreign influx, seeking to persuade his fellow-citizens that the Jews in France do the same work of intellectual and moral dissolution that the Orientals brought about in Rome. Radical writers, like Andre Maurel, have sought arguments in my work to combat the colonial and imperialistic policy. The imperialists also, like Pinon, have looked for arguments to support their stand-point. Was I not merely demonstrating that the policy of expansion is a kind of universal and constant law, which periodically actualises itself through the working of the same forces, in the same ways?

It is not to be thought that the age of Caesar, so disturbed, so stormy, is our only mirror in the story of Rome. When I write the account of the imperial society of the first and second centuries, our own time will be able to recognise even more of itself, to see what must be the future of Europe and America, if for a century or two they have no profound political and social upheavals. In that great pax Romana lasting two centuries, we may study with special facility a phenomenon to be found in all rich civilisations cultured and relatively at peace—the phenomenon to me the most important in contemporary European life, the feminising of all social life; that is, the victory of the feminine over the masculine spirit. Do not fancy that the feminists, the problems and the disputes they excite in modern society, are something quite new and peculiar to us; these are only special forms of a phenomenon more general, the growing influence that woman exercises on society, as civilisation, culture, and wealth steadily increase. Here, too, the history of Rome is luminously clear. In it we see evolving that vast contest between the feminine spirit and the masculine, which is one of the essential phenomena in all human history. We see the masculine spirit—the spirit of domination, of force, of mastery, of daring—ruling complete, when the small community had to fight its first hard battles against nature and men. The father commanded then as monarch in his family; the woman was without right, liberty, personality; had but to obey, to bear children and rear them. But success, power, wealth, greater security, imperceptibly loosened the narrow bondage of the first struggles; then the feminine spirit—the spirit of freedom, of pleasure, of art, of revolt against tradition—gradually acquired strength, and began bit by bit to undermine at its bases the stern masculine rule.

The hard conflict of two centuries is sown with tragedies and catastrophes. Supported by tradition, exasperated by the ever bolder revolts of woman, the masculine spirit every now and then went mad; and brutally tore away her costly jewels and tried to deny her soft raiment and rare perfumes; and when she had already grown accustomed to appearing in the world and shining there, he willed to drive her back into the house, and put beside her there on guard the fieriest threats of law. Sometimes, despairing, he filled Rome with his laments; protested that the liberty of the woman cost the man too dear; cried out that the bills of the dressmaker and the jeweller would send Rome, the Empire, the world, to ruin. In vain, with wealth, in a civilisation full of Oriental influences, woman grew strong, rose, and invaded all society, until in the vast Empire of the first and second centuries, at the climax of her power, with beauty, love, luxury, culture, prodigality, and mysticism she dominated and dissolved a society which in the refinements of wealth and intellectuality had lost the sharp virtues of the pioneer.

It is unnecessary to dilate further on this point; it will be better rather to dwell a moment on the causes and the effects of this singular phenomenon. The history of Rome has been and can be so rich, so manifold, so universal, because in its long record ancient Rome gathered up into itself, welded, fused, the most diverse elements of social life, from all peoples and all regions with which it came into contact. It knew continued war and interrupted peace for centuries. It held united under its vast sway, states decrepit with the oldest of civilisations, and peoples hardly out of primitive barbarism. It exploited with avidity the intelligence, the laboriousness, the science of the former; the physical force, the war-valour and the daring of the latter; it absorbed the vices, the habits, the ideas of the Hellenised Orient, and transfused them in the untamed Occident. Taking men, ideas, money, everywhere and from every people, it created first an empire, then a literature, an architecture, an administration, and a new religion, that were the most tremendous synthesis of the ancient world. So the Roman world turned out vaster and more complex than the Greek, although never assuming proportions exceeding the power of the human mind; and as it grew, it kept that precious quality, wanting in the Greek, unity; hence, the lucid clearness of Roman history. There is everything in it, and everything radiates from one centre, so that comprehension is easy. Without doubt it would be rash to declare that the history of Rome alone may serve as the outline of universal history. It is quite likely that there may be found another history that possesses the same two qualities for which that of Rome is so notable—universality and unity—but one thing we may affirm: up to this time the history of Rome alone has fulfilled this office of universal compendium, which explains how it has always been studied by the learned and lettered of every part of the civilised European-American world, and how in modern intellectual life it is the history universal and cosmopolitan par excellence. This condition of things has a much greater practical importance than is supposed. Indeed it would be a serious mistake to believe that cosmopolitan catholicity is an ideal dower purely of Roman history, for which all the sons of Rome may congratulate themselves as of a thing doing honour only to their stirp. This universality forms part, I should say, of the material patrimony of all the Latin stock; we may number it in the historic inventory of all the good things the sons of Rome possess and of all their reasonable hopes for the future.

This affirmation may at first appear to you paradoxical, strange, and obscure, but I think a short exposition will suffice to clear it. The universality of the history of Rome, the ease of finding in it models in miniature of all our life will have this effect, that classical studies remain the educational foundation of the intelligent classes in all European-American civilisation. These studies may be reformed; they may be as they ought, restricted to a smaller number of persons; but if it is not desired—as of course it cannot be—that in the future all men be purely technical capacities and merely living machines to create material riches; if, on the contrary, it is desired that in every nation the chosen few that govern have a philosophical consciousness of universal life, no means is better suited to instil this philosophic consciousness than the study of ancient Rome, its history, its civilisation, its laws, its politics, its art, and its religions, exactly because Rome is the completest and most lucid synthesis of universal life.

Classical studies are one of the most powerful means of intellectual and moral influence on the Anglo-Saxon and German civilisations that the Latins possess, representing under modern conditions, for the Latin nations, a kind of intellectual entail inherited from their ancestors. The young Germans and Englishmen who study Greek and Latin, who translate Cicero or construe Horace, assimilate the Latin spirit, are brought ideally and morally nearer to us, are prepared without knowing it to receive our intellectual and social influence in other fields, are made in greater or less degree to resemble us. Indeed, it can be said, that, material interests apart, Rome is still in the mental field the strongest bond that holds together the most diverse peoples of Europe; that it unites the French, the English, the Germans, in an ideal identity which overcomes in part the diversity in speech, in traditions, in geographical situation, and in history. If common classical studies did not make kindred spirits of the upper classes in England, France, and Germany, the Rhine and the Channel would divide three nations mentally so different as to be impenetrable each to another.

Therefore the cosmopolitan universality of Roman history is a kind of common good which the Latin races ought to defend with all their might, having care that no other history usurp its place in contemporary culture; that it remain the typical outline, the ideal model of universal history in the education of coming generations. The Latin civilised world has need that every now and then an historian arise to reanimate the history of Rome, in order to maintain its continued supremacy in the education of the intelligent; to prevent other histories from usurping this pre-eminence.

It is useless to cherish illusions as to the task: its accomplishment has become much more arduous than it was fifty years ago; perhaps because the masses have acquired greater power in every part of the European-American world, and democracy advances more or less rapidly, invading everything—the democracy of the technical man, the merchant, the workman, the well-to-do burgher, all of whom easily hold themselves aloof from a culture in itself aristocratic. The accomplishment will become always more and more arduous; for Roman studies, feeling the new generations becoming estranged from them, have for the last twenty-five years tended to take refuge in the tranquil cloisters of learning, of archaeology, in the discreet concourse of a few wise men, who voluntarily flee the noises of the world, Fatal thought! Ancient Rome ought to live daily in the mind of the new social classes that lead onward; ought to irradiate its immortal light on the new worlds that arise from the deeps of the modern age, on pain of undergoing a new destruction more calamitous than that caused by the hordes of Alaric. The day when the history of Rome and its monuments may be but material for erudition to put into the museums by the side of the bricks of the palace of Khorsabad, the cuneiform inscriptions, and the statues of the kings of Assyria, Latin civilisation will be overwhelmed by a fatal catastrophe.

To hinder the extinction of the great light of Rome in the world, to prolong indefinitely this ideal survival, which is the continuation of its material Empire, destroyed centuries ago, there is but one way—to renew historic studies of Rome, and to maintain intact their universal value which forms part of common culture. This is what I have tried to do, seeking to lead back to Roman history the many minds estranged from it, distracted by so many cares and anxieties and present questionings, and to fulfil a solemn duty to my fatherland and the grand traditions of Latin culture. If other histories can grow old, it is indeed the more needful, exactly because it serves to educate new generations, to reanimate Roman history, incorporating in it the new facts constantly discovered by archaeological effort, infusing it with a larger and stronger philosophical spirit, carrying into it the matured experience of the world, which learns not only by studying but also by living.

I do not hesitate to say that every half-century there opens among civilised peoples a contest to find the new conception of Roman history, which, suited to the changed needs, may revivify classical studies; a competition followed by no despicable prize, the intellectual influence that a people may exercise on other peoples by means of these studies. To win in this contest we must never forget, as too many of us have done in the past thirty years, that a man can rule and refashion the world from the depths of a library, but only on condition that he does not immure himself there; that, while the physical sciences propose to understand matter in order to transform it, historico-philosophical discipline has for its end action upon the mind and the will; that philosophical ideas and historic teachings are but seeds shut up to themselves unless they enter the soil of the universal intellectual life.

No: the time-stained marbles of Rome must not end beside cuneiform-inscribed bricks or Egyptian mummies, in the vast dead sections of archaeological halls; they must serve to pave for our feet the way that leads to the future. Therefore nothing could have been pleasanter or more grateful to me, after receiving the invitation tendered me by the College de France, and that from South America, than to accept the invitation of the First Citizen of the United States to visit this world which is being formed. In Paris, that wonderful metropolis of the Latin world, I had the joy, the highest reward for my long, hard labour, to show to the incredulous how much alive the supposedly dead history of Rome still is, when on those unforgettable days so cosmopolite a public gathered from every part of the city in the small plain hall of the old and august edifice. Coming into your midst, I feel that the history of Rome lives not only in the interest with which you have followed these lectures, but also, even if in part without clear cognisance, in things here, in the life you lead, in what you accomplish. The heritage of Rome is, for the peoples of America still more than for those of Europe, an heredity not purely artistic and literary, but political and social, which exercises the most beneficent influence on your history. In a certain sense it might be said that America is to-day politically, more than Europe, the true heir of Rome; that the new world is nearer—by apparent paradox—to ancient Rome than is Europe. Among the most important facts, however little noticed, in the history of the nineteenth century, I should number this: that the Republic, the human state considered as the common property of all—the great political creation of ancient Rome—is reborn here in America, after having died out in Europe. The Latin seed, lying buried for so many centuries beneath the ruins of the ancient world, like the grains of wheat buried in Egyptian tombs, transported from the other side of the ocean, has sprung up in the land that Columbus discovered. If there had been no Rome; if Rome had wholly perished in the great barbarian catastrophe; if in the Renaissance there had not been found among the ruins of the ancient world, together with beautiful Greek statues and manuscripts, this great political idea, there would to-day be no Republic in North America. With the word would probably have perished also the idea and the thing; and there is no assurance that men would have been able so easily and so well to rediscover it by their own effort.

I am a student and not a flatterer. I therefore confess to you frankly, ending these lectures, that I do not belong to that number of Europeans who most enthusiastically admire things American. I think that Americans in general, in North America as in South, so readily recognise in themselves a sufficient number of virtues, that we Europeans hardly need help them in the belief, easy and agreeable to all, that they stand first in the world. Having come from an old society, which has a long historical experience, the most vivid impression made upon me in the two Americas has been just that of entering into a society provided with but meagre historical experience, which therefore easily deludes itself, mistaking for signs of heroic energy and proofs of a finished superiority, the passing advantages of an order chiefly economic, which come from the singular economic condition of the world. In a word, I do not believe that you are superior to Europe in as many things as you think; but a superiority I do recognise, great and, for me at least, indisputable, in the political institutions with which you govern yourselves. The Republic, which you have made to live again, here in this new land, is the true political form worthy of a civilised people, because the only one that is rational and plastic; while the monarchy, the form of government yet ruling so many parts of Europe, is a mixture of mysticism and barbarity, which European interests seek in vain to justify with sophistries unworthy the high grade of culture to which the Continent has attained. To search out the reasons why the old Oriental monarchy holds on so tenaciously in Europe, still threatening the future, would be useless here; certain it is that, when you meet any European other than a Frenchman or a Swiss, you can feel yourselves as superior to him in political institutions as the Roman civis in the times of the Republic felt himself above the Asiatic slave of absolute monarchy. This superiority—never forget it!—you owe to Rome; for its possession, be grateful to the city that has encircled you with such glory, by infusing so tenacious a life into the "Respublica."



INDEX

Acrobats, the great number of, 218 Acte, the beautiful, 114 Actium, the mistakes of Antony at, 60; the peace after, 216 AEgean Islands, the vineyards of the, 200 Agriculture in Gaul, the extent of, 84 Agrippa, the builder of the Pantheon, 103; the successor of, 165 Agrippina, the power of, 103; the love of the Republic of, 114; miraculous escape of, 120; death of, 122 Alaric, the destruction caused by, 258 Alcohol, the distillers of, 26 Alesia, the city of, 91, 94; the battle at, 197 Alexander the Great, mentioned, 48 Alexandria, the position of, 15 Allier, the valley of the, 92 Alps, the peoples beyond the, 20; the fear of crossing the, 73 Ambitio of the ancients, the, 14 America, the discovery of, Amor, the kingdom of, 25 Amores, the, by Ovid, 151 Amours, the, of Antony, 41 Amphore, the wine of the, 39 Ancient Rome, corruption in, 3 ff Anglo-Saxons, traits of the, 197 Anicetus, the diabolical plan of, 119 Antony, the history of, 37 ff; the love of, 40; meets Cleopatra, 44; the bewilderment of, 57 Antifeminist reaction, the, 111 Antioch, the departure for, 45; the marriage at, 51 Antium, the return to, 119 Antonines, the power of the, 246 Aquileia, son of Julia born at, 155; the trade in, 192 Arabia, part of, annexed, 49 Archaeological discoveries, the effect of, 259 Archaeologists, the discoveries of, 43 Archelaus, the revolt against, 166 Architectural effort at Rome, 134 Argentine Republic, the mention of, 86 Arles, a large market for wines, 192 Armenia, the revolt in, 161 Arras, the district of, 90 Arrianus, the work of, 199 Ars Armandi, the, by Ovid, 163 Artists, the numerous, of the East, 55 Asia Minor, the addition to the Empire of, 49 Asiatic civilisation, 17 Athens, the influence of, 202 Atrides, the legend of, 138 Attalus, King, 16; the bequest of, 187 Augustus, the age of, 25 Augustus Caesar, lectures on, 3; the wise laws of, 158; troubles of, 176; the death of, 209 Avaritia, the complaint of the, 14

B

Bacchante, a miserable, 155 Bacchus, the plant of, 182 Baetica, civilisation in, 72 Baiae, the Court at, 119 Banquets, the, of ancient Rome, 7 Barbarian, the struggle against the, 34 Barbarism, the primitive, 254 Belgae, the victory over the, 77 Beverages, in Roman history, 181 ff; the growing use of, 186 Birrus of Laodicea, the, 88 Bismarck, mentioned, 64; compared to Caesar, 247 Biturigi, the, a tribe of Gaul, 86 Black Sea, the country around, 182 Borebiste, a Gaetic warrior, 191 Boulanger, a Roman, 41 Brennus, the conspirator, 130 Britannicus, the exclusion of, 103; the death of, 115 Brutus, the cult of, 243 Buddhist, the position of the, 236 Burrhus, the political work of, 104

C

Cadurci, a tribe of Gaul, 86 Caesar, Caius, adopted by Augustus, 158; the political position of, 160 Caesar, Julius, the wisdom of, 72; mistakes of, 75 Caesar, Lucius, adopted by Augustus, 158, the popularity of, 164 Caesars, the palaces of the, 7 Caleti, the, a tribe of Gaul, 86 California, grape-culture in, 187 Caligula, the death of, 115 Calumnies, the, about Julia, 174 Campania, the cities of, 218 Canals, the construction of, 213 Capri, the monster of, 155 Carmen Seculare, the, by Horace, 151 Carthusian, the patience of the, 91 Castles, the Roman, on the Rhine, 192 Catiline, the conspiracies of, 130 Cato, the love of tradition of, 105; as a wine drinker, 184 Celt, the genius of the, 88 Cereals, the growth of, in Gaul, 85 Cervisia, the supplications of, 196 Champagne, the reputation of, 206 Chian, a cask of, for a banquet, 199 Christianity, the work and spreading of, 231 ff Christians, the, in the time of Nero, 131 "Christofle," the making of, in Gaul, 91 Church, the position of the, 232 Cicero, the letters of, 74; the influence of, 172 Civil wars, the impression of the, 148 Civis, the Roman, 264 Classic renaissance, the, 235 Claudii, the haughty line of the, 159 Claudius, Emperor, the death of, 103 Cleopatra, the legend of, 37 ff; described, 40; policy, of, 58 Clodia, the famous, 74 College de France, the, 3, 260 Columbus, mentioned, 71 Comitia, the election of the, 58 Commentaries, the, of Caesar, 191 Conflagration, the, of Rome, 129 Corday, Charlotte, 63 Corruption of customs, the, 3 Costumes of Rome, the, 181 Cradle of Jesus, the, 166 Crassus, the demagogy of, 249 Cultivation, in Rome, 181 Cultus, a Gallic term, 91 Cydnus, the river, 39

D

Dalmatia, the malcontents at, 166 Danube provinces, the, 88, 91 Dechelette, the great work of, 91 Diamonds, the importation of, 220 Diocletian, the edict of, 88 Dion Cassius, the historian, 63, 80 Dionysius, the Greek judge, 183 Dionysos, the beverage of, 183 Dithyrambics, the, of Horace, 196 Drusus, mentioned, 93; the exalted position of, 104 Duodecember, a fourteenth month, 79 Duruy, the apologies of, 243 Dynasty of Egypt, the, 215

E

"Eastern peril," the, 50 Economic strength, the, of Rome, 224 Economic unity, the, of the world, 236 Education, the laborious, 194 Egnatius Mecenius, the story of, 183 Egypt, the conquest of, 16, 46 Elagabalus, the splendour of, 6, 8 Elegies, the revolutionary, of Ovid, 152 Empire, the extent of the, 217 Ephesus, the city of, 219 Euthanasia, the death of the happy, 210 External policy, the, of Rome, 164

F

Fabius Pictor, the word of, 183 Falernian, the discovery of, 198 "First Citizen of the Republic," the, 157 Feminism, the increase of, in Rome, 108 "Festivals of Youth," the, at Rome, 124 Flavians, the power of the, 246 Flax, the cultivation of, 85 Folies Bergeres, the, mentioned, 129 Fortuna, the, of the Romans 98 Forum, the impressive monument of the, 55 Franco-Prussian War, the, 202 Frankfurt, the treaty of, 202 Freedmen, the position of, 212 French Revolution, the, 205 Frontiers, the strengthening of the, 109

G

Gaetic warrior, the rule of a, 191 Gaeto-Thracian, the great empire of, 191 Gallia Narbonensis, the position of, 50 Gallic, affairs, the midst of, 73; roads, the network of, 213 Gallo-Roman villas, the, 87 Gambetta, the love letters of, 40 Gambrinus, the god, 202 Gaul, the development of, 20, 69 ff.; conquest of, 72; the annexation of, 77; the wealth of, 83 Gauls, the irritation of the, 79; the genius of the, 81 Genoa, the situation of, 23 German historians, the work of, 152 Germanicus, the historical importance of, 103 Germany, conditions in, 79, 165; policy toward Rome, 166 Glass-making in Gaul, 90 Government, the, at Rome, 213 Governors, the position of the, 312 Gracchi, the struggle of the, 17 Graeco-Latin civilisation, the, 72,235 Grape-culture, the spread of, 186 Grape harvest, the abundance of the, 185 Greatness and Decline of Rome, the, 10 Greece, the contact of Rome with, 185 Greek wines in Rome, 8 Gymnasium, the, at Alexandria, 55

H

Hannibal, the army of, 189 Harbours, the building of, 213 Hebrew people, the position of the, 166 Hellenist, an ardent, 58 Helvetia, customs in, 191 Helvetians, the, 74; the attack on the, 75 Herculaneum, the city of, 218 Heritage of Rome, the, 261 Herod the Great, the death of, 166 History, as considered by Ferrero, 65 Horace, the invectives of, 23 Houssaye, Henri, mentioned, 41

I

Ides, the days of the, 9 Ierapolis, the prosperity of, 219 Ilium, the district of Troy, 50 India, the precious metals of, 30; wine exported to, 200 Indo-Chinese, the commerce of the, 55 Inscriptions, the story left by the, 221 Istrian wine, the favourite of Livia, 199

J

Jerome, Saint, the story of, 78 Jeunesse doree, the, of Rome, 124 Jewelry making in Gaul, 90 Jewels as a luxury, 31 Jews in France, the, 250 Jove, the temple of, 19 Judas, the mention of, 63 Judea, the revolt at, 166 Julia, the exile of, 137; the episode of, 150; discord with, 154; unfaithfulness of, 157; the accusation of, 170; the fate of, 177 Julian, the laws of, 151 Julian-Claudian house, the power of the, 188 Jurisdiction of property, the, in Gaul, 84 Jurists, the influence of, 230 Juvenal, passages from, 90

K

Kalends, the days of the, 9 Karbin, mentioned, 50 Khorsabad, the palace of, 259 Knights, the social position of the, 212 Ladies, the, of Rome, 30 Langres, the district of, 90 Laodicea, the birrus of, 88; the city of, 219 Lares, the veneration of the, 190 Latin morals, the severity of, 61 Latin spirit, the similarity of the, 256 Laws of Julian, the, 151 Legislative reforms, the, 21 Leibach, the trade through, 192 Lepidus mentioned, 172 Letronne, the researches of, 45 Lex de adulteriis, the, 148 Lex de maritandis ordinibus, the, 147 Lex Julia de adulteriis, the, 169 Lex sumptuaria, the, 148 Libertine poet, a, in the year 8 B.C., 151 Licinius, the characteristics of, 79 Linen, the manufacture of, 219 Litterati, the many, 218 Livia, the mother of Tiberius, 162; the position of, 168 Livia, the House of, 7 Livy, the point of view of, 3 Lollia Paulina, the fame of, 9 Lucullus, the rising power of, 18; wine used by, 184 Lusitania, a mission to, 117 Luxuria, the desire of, 14 Luxury, of Rome, 125; spread of, 186

M

Macrobius, the writings of, 155 Mamertine, a kind of wine, 199 Mania, the all absorbing, of Nero, 128 Marcellus, the privileges accorded, 160 Marius, the revolution of, 18 Martial, passages from, 90 "Mass," the so-called, 182 Mater familias, the honour of, 39 Maurel, Andre, the writings of, 251 Mazzini, the great, 63 Mediterranean world, the vast, 97 Merchandise, the great interchange of, 218 Mesia, the metropolis of, 219 Messalina, the death of, 103 Middle Ages, the cathedrals of the, 140 Military power, the weakening of the, at Rome, 167 Military Republic, the, 136 Military triumph, the, of Rome, 197 Minos, the historic, 63 Mirabeau, the love letters of, 40 Mithridates, defeat of, 19; the conquests of, 197 Mohammedan, the position of the, 236 Mommsen, the apologies of, 243 Morales, the two, at Rome, 155 Morini, the, a tribe in Gaul, 86 Mosca olearia, a new species of, 190 Municipia, the splendour of the, 110 Museum, the, at Alexandria, 55 Mythology, the imagination of, 197

N

Naiads, the maidens of Cleopatra dressed as, 40 Naples, the ruins of, 92; the city of, 218 Naples, the Gulf of, 119 Napoleon I., mentioned, 63, 210 Natural History, the, by Pliny, 183 Nero, Emperor, 96, elected, 103; frivolity of, 105; debauches of, 114; the cowardice of, 121; careless government of, 125; St. Paul contrasted with, 133; the suicide of, 135 Newspapers, the fortunate lack of, in Rome, 173 Nile, the Roman protectorate in the valley of the, 46 Nimes, the inhabitants of, 175 Nones, the days of the, 9 Notre Dame, the cathedral of, 140 Nuptial banquets, the cost of, 9

O

Octavia, divorce of, 40; the wife of Nero, 124, 127 Oil, the exportation of, 218 Oligarchy, the, at Rome, 81 Olive groves, the wealth of the, 189 Olympus, the delights of, 59 Opimius, the consulate of, 198 Orient, the metropolises of the, 15 Oriental Empire, the, of Rome, 57 Oriental state, the conquest of an, 15 Orientalism, the invasion of, 225 Ostia, Tiberius starts for, 163 Ovid, the representatives of, 149; the work of, 150

P

Paintings, of Pompeii, the, 229 Palatine, a journey to the, 7; polygamy in, 118 Palestine, the annexation of, 49; uprising in, 166 Pandataria, Julia, exiled to, 172, 177 Pannonia, the malcontents at, 166 Pannonians, the customs of the, 193 Pantheon, the, mentioned, 103 Parthians, the Empire of the, 167 Passum, as a drink, 183 Pater familias, the power of the, 172 Paul of Tarsus, a great and simple man, 131; the persecution of, 134 Pax Romana, the, 4; the extent of the, 210 Pearls, the importation of, 30, 220 Penetralia, the, of the home, 32 Pergamon, the city, 219 Pergamus, the kingdom of, 16, 187 Periplus of the Erytrian Sea, the, a manual, 199 Persia, the conquest of, 44 Philosophers, the many, 209 Philosophy, the ancient, of Rome, 233 Phylloxera, a new species of, 190 Piedmont, the peasants of, 187 Pinon, the imperialist, 251 Pisa, inscriptions at, 164 Piso, the conspiracy of, 135 Plutarch, description of, 39 Po, the valley of the, 192 Poetry, the, of Horace, 195 Poets, the position of, 9 B.C., 146 Political barrier, the, between Gaul and Rome, 84 Political events, the, of Rome, 33 Political personnel, the, of Rome, 217 Polybius, the period of, 183 Pompadour, the Marquise de, mentioned, 43 Pompeii, the ruins of, 92; the city of, 218 Pompey, the conquests of, 19; the theatre of, 55 Pontifex maximus, the title of, 232 Pontus, salted fish from the, 8 Poppaea Sabina, the skill of, 116; death of, 137 Populus, the representatives of the, 246 Pozzuoli, the city of, 218 Praetor, the office of the, 157 Precious metals, the distribution of, 218 Praetorian guards, the, 117 Praetorians, the influence of the, 104 Princeps, the authority of the, 188 Proconsuls, the, of Rome, 182 Procurator, the origin of the office of, 212 Proprietors, the government of the, 211 Prosperity, the growing, 148 Protestant, the present position of the, 236 Provinces, the peace in the, 176 Ptolemies, the, at Alexandria, 19 Ptolemies, the kingdom of the, 46 Public finance, the lack of, 144 Punic War, the Second, 3, 214

Q

Quaestor, the office of the, 211 Quintilius Varus, the governor of Syria, 166 Quintus Metullus Celerus, the consul, 74

R

Reinach, Joseph, the historian, 63 Republic, the last century of the, 14, 198 Respublica, the glory of the, 264 Revue de Paris, the, 63 Rheims, the vicinity of the city of, 206 Rhetian wine, the preference for, 199 Rhine, the river, 72 Roads, the construction of, 213 Rodi, Tiberius to go to, 162 Roman Catholic, the position of the, 236 Roman Empire, the dissolution of the, 140, 210 Roman history in modern education, 239 Roman nobility, the, 54 Roman protectorate, the, 46 Roman society, the dissolution of, 5 Romanism, the defence of, 111 Rome, in the beginning, 5 Romulus as a lawmaker, 183 Royal palaces, the closing of, 215 Ruteni, the, a tribe of Gaul, 86

S

Saint Mark, the wonder of, 140 Saintonge, the district of, 90 Savants, the, of the East, 55 Scipio Africanus, the work of, 153 Scipios, the policy of the, 226 Second Punic War, the, 3,214 Seine, the banks of the, 206 Sempronius Gracchus, a famous tribune, 56 Senate, the Roman, 103; sessions of the, 105 Seneca, the political work of, 104 Sesterces, the value of the Roman, 223 Sicily, the peasants of, 187 Sidon, the artisans of, 88; the city of, 219 Silk, the importation of, 220 Silver-plating, the art of, 228 Slaves, the abundance of, in Rome, 15 Slaves, the position of, 212 Social development, the, of the Roman Empire, 207 ff Social laws, the, 148, 153 Socialists, the invectives of the, 250 Soldi, the hunt for, 173 Spain, the pro-consulship of, 184 Spartacus, the days of, 189 Stadium, the erection of the, at Rome, 125 State, the supervision of the, 24 Statues, the erection of, 152 Strabo, observations of, 85 Strenua inertia, the, 29 Suetonius, the ancient writer, 127 Sulla, the revolution of, 18 Sulmona, the birth of Ovid at, 149 Summer homes, the, at Naples, 120 Syria, the annexation of, 73; the conquest of, 16

T

Tacitus, the opinion of, 30, 152 Tarsus, Cleopatra at, 39 Terpnos, a zither-player, 105 Textile plants, in Gaul, 85 Theatres, the great demand for, 110 Theresa, Maria, mentioned, 43 Thracian slave, the escape of a, 189 Tiber, the banks of the, 203 Tiberius, a great general, 7, 30, 93, 109, 145; the life of, 153; difficulties of, 157; suggested retirement of, 162 Traditions, aristocratic, 153 Tributes, the, imposed on the vanquished, 15; collection of, 212 Triumvir, the fall of the great, 111 Troy, the ancient city of, 50 Tunis, grape-culture at, 187 Tyranny, the, at Rome, 135 Tyre, the prosperity of, 88, 219 Tyrian purple, the, 89

U

Undecember, a thirteenth month, 79 Urbs, the meaning of, 249 Usury, the pitiless, 186

V

Vladivostok, mentioned, 50 Villa, the luxury of a Roman, 194 Valtellina, the valley of the, 199 Varus, the catastrophe of, 166 Vatican field, the stadium in the, 124 Velleius, the report of, 93 Veneto, the peasants of the, 187 Venosa, an old poet from, 195 Venus, Cleopatra compared to, 39 Vices, the extent of, 27 Villas, the, of Gaul, 99 Vine-tenders, the, of Rome, 182 Vineyards, the destruction of the, 390 Virgil, the fame of, 23 Viticulture, the, of Italy, 196

W

Wine, in Roman history, 179 ff; an inferior variety made in Italy, 182; as a medicine, 183 Wine-dealers, the, of Rome, 182 Women of to-day and yesterday, 29 Wool industry, the, of Gaul, 90

X

Xerxes, the fame of, 63

THE END