CHARACTERS AND EVENTS OF ROMAN HISTORY

 FROM CÆSAR TO NERO

 THE LOWELL LECTURES OF 1908

 BY

 GUGLIELMO FERRERO, LITT. D. 

 AUTHOR OF

 "THE GREATNESS AND DECLINE OF ROME, " ETC. 

 TRANSLATED BY

 FRANCES LANCE FERRERO

 [Illustration]

 The Chautauqua Press

 CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK

 [Copyright deleted]

 By G. P. Putnam's Sons

 Fifth Printing

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 Chautauqua, N. Y. 

PREFACE

In the spring of 1906, the Collège de France invited me to deliver, during November of that year, a course of lectures on Roman history. I accepted, giving a résumé, in eight lectures, of the history of thegovernment of Augustus from the end of the civil wars to his death;that is, a résumé of the matter contained in the fourth and fifthvolumes of the English edition of my work, _The Greatness and Declineof Rome_. 

Following these lectures came a request from M. Emilio Mitre, Editorof the chief newspaper of the Argentine Republic, the _Nacion_, andone from the _Academia Brazileira de Lettras_ of Rio de Janeiro, todeliver a course of lectures in the Argentine and Brazilian capitals. I gave to the South American course a more general character thanthat delivered in Paris, introducing arguments which would interest apublic having a less specialized knowledge of history than the publicI had addressed in Paris. 

When President Roosevelt did me the honour to invite me to visit theUnited States and Prof. Abbott Lawrence Lowell asked me to deliver acourse at the Lowell Institute in Boston, I selected material from thetwo previous courses of lectures, moulding it into the group that wasgiven in Boston in November-December, 1908. These lectures were laterread at Columbia University in New York, and at the University ofChicago in Chicago. Certain of them were delivered elsewhere--beforethe American Philosophical Society and at the University ofPennsylvania in Philadelphia, at Harvard University in Cambridge, andat Cornell University in Ithaca. 

Such is the record of the book now presented to the public at large. It is a work necessarily made up of detached studies, which, however, are bound together by a central, unifying thought; so that the readingof them may prove useful and pleasant even to those who have alreadyread my _Greatness and Decline of Rome_. 

The first lecture, "The Theory of Corruption in Roman History, " sumsup the fundamental idea of my conception of the history of Rome. Theessential phenomenon upon which all the political, social, and moralcrises of Rome depend is the transformation of customs produced by theaugmentation of wealth, of expenditure, and of needs, --a phenomenon, therefore, of psychological order, and one common in contemporarylife. This lecture should show that my work does not belong amongthose written after the method of economic materialism, for I holdthat the fundamental force in history is psychologic and not economic. 

The three following lectures, "The History and Legend of Antony andCleopatra, " "The Development of Gaul, " and "Nero, " seem to concernthemselves with very different subjects. On the contrary, they presentthree different aspects of the one, identical problem--the strugglebetween the Occident and the Orient--a problem that Rome succeeded insolving as no European civilisation has since been able to do, makingthe countries of the Mediterranean Basin share a common life, inpeace. How Rome succeeded in accomplishing this union of Orient andOccident is one of the points of greatest interest in its history. Thefirst of these three lectures, "Antony and Cleopatra, " shows howRome repulsed the last offensive movement of the Orient againstthe Occident; the second, "The Development of Gaul, " shows theestablishing of equilibrium between the two parts of the Empire; thethird, "Nero, " shows how the Orient, beaten upon fields of battle andin diplomatic action, took its revenge in the domain of Roman ideas, morals, and social life. 

The fifth lecture, "Julia and Tiberius, " illustrates, by one of themost tragic episodes of Roman history, the terrible struggle betweenRoman ideals and habits and those of the Græco-Asiatic civilisation. The sixth lecture, "The Development of the Empire, " summarises in afew pages views to be developed in detail in that part of my work yetto be written. 

I have said that not all history can be explained by economic forcesand factors, but this does not prevent me from regarding economicphenomena as also of high importance. The seventh lecture, "Wine inRoman History, " is an essay after the plan in accordance with which, it seems to me, economic phenomena should be treated. 

The last lecture deals with a subject that perhaps does not, properlyspeaking, belong to Roman history, but upon which an historian of Romeought to touch sooner or later; I mean the rôle which Rome can stillplay in the education of the upper classes. It is a subject importantnot only to the historian of Rome, but to all those who are interestedin the future of culture and civilisation. The more specialisationin technical labour increases, the greater becomes the necessity ofgiving the superior classes a general education, which can preparespecialists to understand each other and to act together in allmatters of common interest. To imagine a society composed exclusivelyof doctors, engineers, chemists, merchants, manufacturers, isimpossible. Every one must also be a citizen and a man in sympathywith the common conscience. I have, therefore, endeavoured to showin this eighth lecture what services Rome and its great intellectualtradition can render to modern civilisation in the field of education. 

These lectures naturally cannot do more than make known ideas ingeneral form; it would be too much to expect in them the precisionof detail, the regard for method, and the use of frequent notes, citations, and references to authorities or documents, that belongto my larger work on Rome; but they are published partly because Iconsider it useful to popularise Roman history, and partly becausesome of the pleasantest of memories attach to them. Their origin, thecourse on Augustus given at the Collège de France, which proved one ofthe happiest occasions of my life, and their development, leadingto my travels in the two Americas, have given me experiences of thegreatest interest and pleasure. 

I am glad of the opportunity here to thank all those who havecontributed to make the sojourn of my wife and myself in the UnitedStates delightful. I must thank all my friends at once; for to nameeach one separately, I should need, as a Latin poet says, "a hundredmouths and a hundred tongues. "

GUGLIELMO FERRERO. 

TURIN, February 22, 1909. 

CONTENTS

 "CORRUPTION" IN ANCIENT ROME, AND ITS COUNTERPART IN MODERN HISTORY . . . . . . . . . 1 THE HISTORY AND LEGEND OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 THE DEVELOPMENT OF GAUL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 NERO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 JULIA AND TIBERIUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 WINE IN ROMAN HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE . . 207 ROMAN HISTORY IN MODERN EDUCATION . . . . . . . 239 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

"Corruption" in Ancient Rome And Its Counterpart in Modern History

Two years ago in Paris, while giving a course of lectures on Augustusat the Collège de France, I happened to say to an illustrioushistorian, a member of the French Academy, who was complimenting me:"But I have not remade Roman history, as many admirers think. Onthe contrary, it might be said, in a certain sense, that I have onlyreturned to the old way. I have retaken the point of view of Livy;like Livy, gathering the events of the story of Rome around thatphenomenon which the ancients called the 'corruption' of customs--anovelty twenty centuries old!"

Spoken with a smile and in jest, these words nevertheless were moreserious than the tone in which they were uttered. All those who knowLatin history and literature, even superficially, remember withwhat insistence and with how many diverse modulations of tone arereiterated the laments on the corruption of customs, on the luxury, the ambition, the avarice, that invaded Rome after the Second PunicWar. Sallust, Cicero, Livy, Horace, Virgil, are full of afflictionbecause Rome is destined to dissipate itself in an incurablecorruption; whence we see, then in Rome, as to-day in France, wealth, power, culture, glory, draw in their train--grim but inseparablecomrade!--a pessimism that times poorer, cruder, more troubled, hadnot known. In the very moment in which the empire was ordering itself, civil wars ended; in that solemn _Pax Romana_ which was to haveendured so many ages, in the very moment in which the heart shouldhave opened itself to hope and to joy, Horace describes, in threefine, terrible verses, four successive generations, each corruptingRome, which grew ever the worse, ever the more perverse andevil-disposed:

 Aetas parentum, peior avis, tulit Nos nequiores, mox daturos Progeniem vitiosiorem. 

"Our fathers were worse than our grandsires; we have deteriorated fromour fathers; our sons will cause _us_ to be lamented. " This is thedark philosophy that a sovereign spirit like Horace derived from theincredible triumph of Rome in the world. At his side, Livy, the greatwriter who was to teach all future generations the story of the city, puts the same hopeless philosophy at the base of his wonderful work:

 Rome was originally, when it was poor and small, a unique example of austere virtue; then it corrupted, it spoiled, it rotted itself by all the vices; so, little by little, we have been brought into the present condition in which we are able neither to tolerate the evils from which we suffer, nor the remedies we need to cure them. 

The same dark thought, expressed in a thousand forms, is found inalmost every one of the Latin writers. 

This theory has misled and impeded my predecessors in different ways:some, considering that the writers bewail the unavoidable dissolutionof Roman society at the very time when Rome was most powerful, mostcultured, richest, have judged conventional, rhetorical, literary, these invectives against corruption, these praises of ancientsimplicity, and therefore have held them of no value in the history ofRome. Such critics have not reflected that this conception isfound, not only in the literature, but also in the politics and thelegislation; that Roman history is full, not only of invectives inprose and verse, but of laws and administrative provisions against_luxuria, ambitio, avaritia_--a sign that these laments were notmerely a foolishness of writers, or, as we say to-day, stuff fornewspaper articles. Other critics, instead, taking account of theselaws and administrative provisions, have accepted the ancient theoryof Roman corruption without reckoning that they were describing asundone by an irreparable dissolution, a nation that not only hadconquered, but was to govern for ages, an immense empire. In thisconception of corruption there is a contradiction that conceals agreat universal problem. 

Stimulated by this contradiction, and by the desire of solving it, tostudy more attentively the facts cited by the ancients as examples ofcorruption, I have looked about to see if in the contemporary worldI could not find some things that resembled it, and so make myselfunderstand it. The prospect seemed difficult, because modern men arepersuaded that they are models of all the virtues. Who could think tofind in them even traces of the famous Roman corruption? In the modernworld to-day are the abominable orgies carried on for which the Romeof the Cæsars was notorious? Are there to-day Neros and Elagabaluses?He who studies the ancient sources, however, with but a little of thecritical spirit, is easily convinced that we have made for ourselvesout of the much-famed corruption and Roman luxury a notion highlyromantic and exaggerated. We need not delude ourselves: Rome, even inthe times of its greatest splendour, was poor in comparison with themodern world; even in the second century after Christ, when it stoodas metropolis at the head of an immense empire, Rome was smaller, less wealthy, less imposing, than a great metropolis of Europe orof America. Some sumptuous public edifices, beautiful privatehouses--that is all the splendour of the metropolis of the empire. He who goes to the Palatine may to-day refigure for himself, from theso-called House of Livia, the house of a rich Roman family of thetime of Augustus, and convince himself that a well-to-do middle-classfamily would hardly occupy such a house to-day. 

Moreover, the palaces of the Cæsars on the Palatine are a grandioseruin that stirs the artist and makes the philosopher think; but ifone sets himself to measure them, to conjecture from the remains theproportions of the entire edifices, he does not conjure up buildingsthat rival large modern constructions. The palace of Tiberius, forexample, rose above a street only two metres wide--less than sevenfeet, --an alley like those where to-day in Italian cities live onlythe most miserable inhabitants. We have pictured to ourselvesthe imperial banquets of ancient Rome as functions of unheard ofsplendour; if Nero or Elagabalus could come to life and see thedining-room of a great hotel in Paris or New York--resplendent withlight, with crystal, with silver, --he would admire it as far morebeautiful than the halls in which he gave his imperial feasts. Thinkhow poor were the ancients in artificial light! They had few wines;they knew neither tea nor coffee nor cocoa; neither tobacco, nor theinnumerable _liqueurs_ of which we make use; in face of our habits, they were always Spartan, even when they wasted, because they lackedthe means to squander. 

The ancient writers often lament the universal tendency to physicalself-indulgence, but among the facts they cite to prove this dismalvice, many would seem to us innocent enough. It was judged by thema scandalous proof of gluttony and as insensate luxury, that at acertain period there should be fetched from as far as the Pontus, certain sausages and certain salted fish that were, it appears, verygood; and that there should be introduced into Italy from Greece thedelicate art of fattening fowls. Even to drink Greek wines seemed fora long time at Rome the caprice of an almost crazy luxury. As lateas 18 B. C. , Augustus made a sumptuary law that forbade spending forbanquets on work-days more than two hundred sesterces (ten dollars);allowed three hundred sesterces (fifteen dollars) for the days of theKalends, the Ides, and the Nones; and one thousand sesterces (fiftydollars) for nuptial banquets. It is clear, then, that the lordsof the world banqueted in state at an expense that to us would seemmodest indeed. And the women of ancient times, accused so sharply bythe men of ruining them by their foolish extravagances, would cut apoor figure for elegant ostentation in comparison with modern damesof fashion. For example, silk, even in the most prosperous times, wasconsidered a stuff, as we should say, for millionaires; only a fewvery rich women wore it; and, moreover, moralists detested it, becauseit revealed too clearly the form of the body. Lollia Paulina passedinto history because she possessed jewels worth several millionfrancs: there are to-day too many Lollia Paulinas for any one of themto hope to buy immortality at so cheap a rate. 

I should reach the same conclusions if I could show you what the Romanwriters really meant by corruption in their accounts of the relationsbetween the sexes. It is not possible here to make critical analysesof texts and facts concerning this material, for reasons that youreadily divine; but it would be easy to prove that also in thisrespect posterity has seen the evil much larger than it was. 

Why, then, did the ancient writers bewail luxury, inclinationto pleasure, prodigality--things all comprised in the notorious"corruption"--in so much the livelier fashion than do moderns, although they lived in a world which, being poorer and more simple, could amuse itself, make display, and indulge in dissipation so muchless than we do? This is one of the chief questions of Roman history, and I flatter myself not to have entirely wasted work in writing mybook [1] above all, because I hope to have contributed a little, if not actually to solve this question, at least to illuminate it;because in so doing I believe I have found a kind of key that opensat the same time many mysteries in Roman history and in contemporarylife. The ancient writers and moralists wrote so much of Romancorruption, because--nearer in this, as in so many other things, tothe vivid actuality--they understood that wars, revolutions, the greatspectacular events that are accomplished in sight of the world, do notform all the life of peoples; that these occurrences, on the contrary, are but the ultimate, exterior explanation, the external irradiation, or the final explosion of an internal force that is acting constantlyin the family, in private habit, in the moral and intellectualdisposition of the individual. They understood that all the changes, internal and external, in a nation, are bound together and in partdepend on one very common fact, which is everlasting and universal, and which everybody may observe if he will but look about him--on theincrease of wants, the enlargement of ideas, the shifting of habits, the advance of luxury, the increase of expense that is caused by everygeneration. 

[Footnote 1: _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_. 5 vols. New York andLondon. ];

Look around you to-day: in every family you may easily observe thesame phenomenon. A man has been born in a certain social condition andhas succeeded during his youth and vigour in adding to his originalfortune. Little by little as he was growing rich, his needs and hisluxuries increased. When a certain point was reached, he stopped. Themen are few who can indefinitely augment their particular wants, orkeep changing their habits throughout their lives, even after thedisappearance of vigour and virile elasticity. The increase of wantsand of luxury, the change of habits, continues, instead, in the newgeneration, in the children, who began to live in the ease which theirfathers won after long effort and fatigue, and in maturer age; who, inshort, started where the previous generation left off, and thereforewish to gain yet new enjoyments, different from and greater thanthose that they obtained without trouble through the efforts of thepreceding generation. It is this little common drama, which we seere-enacted in every family and in which every one of us has been andwill be an actor--to-day as a young radical who innovates customs, to-morrow as an old conservative, out-of-date and malcontent in theeyes of the young; a drama, petty and common, which no one longerregards, so frequent is it and so frivolous it seems, but which, instead, is one of the greatest motive forces in human history--ingreater or less degree, under different forms, active in all times andoperating everywhere. On account of it no generation can live quietlyon the wealth gathered, with the ideas discovered by antecedentgenerations, but is constrained to create new ideas, to make new andgreater wealth by all the means at its disposal--by war and conquest, by agriculture and industry, by religion and science. On account ofit, families, classes, nations, that do not succeed in adding totheir possessions, are destined to be impoverished, because, wantsincreasing, it is necessary, in order to satisfy them, to consume theaccumulated capital, to make debts, and, little by little, to go toruin. Because of this ambition, ever reborn, classes renew themselvesin every nation. Opulent families after a few generations aregradually impoverished; they decay and disappear, and from themultitudinous poor arise new families, creating the new _élite_ whichcontinues under differing forms the doings and traditions of the old. Because of this unrest, the earth is always stirred up by a fervourfor deeds or adventure--attempts that take shape according to theage: now peoples make war on each other, now they rend themselves inrevolutions, now they seek new lands, explore, conquer, exploit; againthey perfect arts and industries, enlarge commerce, cultivatethe earth with greater assiduity; and yet again, in the ages morelaborious, like ours, they do all these things at the same time--anactivity immense and continuous. But its motive force is always theneed of the new generations, that, starting from the point at whichtheir predecessors had arrived, desire to advance yet farther--toenjoy, to know, to possess yet more. 

The ancient writers understood this thoroughly: what they called"corruption" was but the change in customs and wants, proceeding fromgeneration to generation, and in its essence the same as that whichtakes place about us to-day. The _avaritia_ of which they complainedso much, was the greed and impatience to make money that we see to-daysetting all classes beside themselves, from noble to day-labourer; the_ambitio_ that appeared to the ancients to animate so franticallyeven the classes that ought to have been most immune, was what we call_getting there_--the craze to rise at any cost to a condition higherthan that in which one was born, which so many writers, moralists, statesmen, judge, rightly or wrongly, to be one of the most dangerousmaladies of the modern world. _Luxuria_ was the desire to augmentpersonal conveniences, luxuries, pleasures--the same passion thatstirs Europe and America to-day from top to bottom, in city andcountry. Without doubt, wealth grew in ancient Rome and grows to-day;men were bent on making money in the last two centuries of theRepublic, and to-day they rush headlong into the delirious strugglefor gold; for reasons and motives, however, and with arms andaccoutrements, far diverse. 

As I have already said, ancient civilisation was narrower, poorer, and more ignorant; it did not hold under its victorious foot the wholeearth; it did not possess the formidable instruments with which weexploit the forces and the resources of nature: but the treasures ofprecious metals transported to Italy from conquered and subjugatedcountries; the lands, the mines, the forests, belonging to suchcountries, confiscated by Rome and given or rented to Italians; thetributes imposed on the vanquished, and the collection of them; theabundance of slaves, --all these then offered to the Romans and to theItalians so many occasions to grow rich quickly; just as the giganticeconomic progress of the modern world offers similar opportunitiesto-day to all the peoples that, by geographical position, historicaltradition, or vigorous culture and innate energy, know how to excelin industry, in agriculture, and in trade. Especially from the SecondPunic War on, in all classes, there followed--anxious for a life moreaffluent and brilliant--generations the more incited to follow theexamples that emanated from the great metropolises of the Orient, particularly Alexandria, which was for the Romans of the Republic whatParis is for us to-day. This movement, spontaneous, regular, natural, was every now and then violently accelerated by the conquest ofa great Oriental state. One observes, after each one of the greatannexations of Oriental lands, a more intense delirium of luxury andpleasure: the first time, after the acquisition of the kingdom ofPergamus, through a kind of contagion communicated by the sumptuousfurniture of King Attalus, which was sold at auction and scatteredamong the wealthy houses of Italy to excite the still simple desiresand the yet sluggish imaginations of the Italians; the second time, after the conquest of Pontus and of Syria, made by Lucullus and byPompey; finally, the third time, after the conquest of Egypt made byAugustus, when the influence of that land--the France of the ancientworld--so actively invaded Italy that no social force could longerresist it. 

In this way, partly by natural, gradual, almost imperceptiblediffusion, partly by violent crises, we see the mania for luxury andthe appetite for pleasure beginning, growing, becoming aggravatedfrom generation to generation in all Roman society, for two centuries, changing the mentality and morality of the people; we see theinstitutions and public policy being altered; all Roman historya-making under the action of this force, formidable and immanent inthe whole nation. It breaks down all obstacles confronting it--theforces of traditions, laws, institutions, interests of classes, opposition of parties, the efforts of thinking men. The historicalaristocracy becomes impoverished and weak; before it rise to power themillionaires, the _parvenus_, the great capitalists, enriched in theprovinces. A part of the nobility, after having long despised them, sets itself to fraternise with them, to marry their wealthy daughters, cause them to share power; seeks to prop with their millions thepre-eminence of its own rank, menaced by the discontent, the spiritof revolt, the growing pride, of the middle class. Meanwhile, anotherpart of the aristocracy, either too haughty and ambitious, or toopoor, scorns this alliance, puts itself at the head of the democraticparty, foments in the middle classes the spirit of antagonism againstthe nobles and the rich, leads them to the assault on the citadels ofaristocratic and democratic power. Hence the mad internal strugglesthat redden Rome with blood and complicate so tragically, especiallyafter the Gracchi, the external polity. The increasing wants ofthe members of all classes, the debts that are their inevitableconsequence, the universal longing, partly unsatisfied for lack ofmeans, for the pleasures of the subtle Asiatic civilisations, infusedinto this whole history a demoniac frenzy that to-day, after so manycenturies, fascinates and appals us. 

To satisfy their wants, to pay their debts, the classes now setupon each other, each to rob in turn the goods of the other, inthe cruelest civil war that history records; now, tired of doingthemselves evil, they unite and precipitate themselves on the worldoutside of Italy, to sack the wealth that its owners do not knowhow to defend. In the great revolutions of Marius and Sulla, the democratic party is the instrument with which a part of thedebt-burdened middle classes seek to rehabilitate themselves byrobbing the plutocracy and the aristocracy yet opulent; but Sullareverses the situation, makes a coalition of aristocrats and themiserable of the populace, and re-establishes the fortunes of thenobility, despoiling the wealthy knights and a part of the middleclasses--a terrible civil war that leaves in Italy a hate, adespondency, a distress, that seem at a certain moment as if they mustweigh eternally on the spirit of the unhappy nation. When, lo! thereappears the strongest man in the history of Rome, Lucullus, and dragsItaly out of the despondency in which it crouched, leads it into theways of the world, and persuades it that the best means of forgettingthe losses and ruin undergone in the civil wars, is to recuperateon the riches of the cowardly Orientals. As little by little thetreasures of Mithridates, conquered by Lucullus in the Orient, arrivein Italy, Italy begins anew to divert itself, to construct palacesand villas, to squander in luxury. Pompey, envious of the glory ofLucullus, follows his example, conquers Syria, sends new treasures toItaly, carries from the East the jewels of Mithridates, and displayingthem in the temple of Jove, rouses a passion for gems in the Romanwomen; he also builds the first great stone theatre to rise inRome. All the political men in Rome try to make money out of foreigncountries: those who cannot, like the great, conquer an empire, confine themselves to blackmailing the countries and petty states thattremble before the shadow of Rome; the courts of the secondary kingsof the Orient, the court of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, --all areinvaded by a horde of insatiable senators and knights, who, menacingand promising, extort money to spend in Italy and foment the growingextravagance. The debts pile up, the political corruption overflows, scandals follow, the parties in Rome rend each other madly, thoughhail-fellow-well-met in the provinces to plunder subjects and vassals. In the midst of this vast disorder Cæsar, the man of destiny, rises, and with varying fortune makes a way for himself until he beckonsItaly to follow him, to find success and treasures in regions new--notin the rich and fabulous East, but beyond the Alps, in barbarous Gaul, bristling with fighters and forests. 

But this insane effort to prey on every part of the Empire finallytires Italy; quarrels over the division of spoils embitter friends;the immensity of the conquests, made in a few years of recklessenthusiasm, is alarming. Finally a new civil war breaks out, terribleand interminable, in which classes and families fall upon each otheranew, to tear away in turn the spoils taken together abroad. Out ofthe tremendous discord rises at last the pacifier, Augustus, who isable gradually, by cleverness and infinite patience, to re-establishpeace and order in the troubled empire. How?--why? Because thecombination of events of the times allows him to use to ends of peacethe same forces with which the preceding generations had fomented somuch disorder--desires for ease, pleasure, culture, wealth growingwith the generations making it. Thereupon begins in the whole Empireuniversal progress in agriculture, industry, trade, which, on a smallscale, may be compared to what we to-day witness and share; a progressfor which, then as now, the chief condition was peace. As soon as menrealised that peace gives that greater wealth, those enjoyments morerefined, that higher culture, which for a century they had sought bywar, Italy became quiet; revolutionists became guardians and guards oforder; there gathered about Augustus a coalition of social forces thattended to impose on the Empire, alike on the parts that wished it andthose that did not, the _Pax Romana_. 

Now all this immense story that fills three centuries, that gatherswithin itself so many revolutions, so many legislative reforms, somany great men, so many events, tragic and glorious, this vast historythat for so many centuries holds the interest of all cultured nations, and that, considered as a whole, seems almost a prodigy, you can, onthe track of the old idea of "corruption, " explain in itsprofoundest origins by one small fact, universal, common, of the verysimplest--something that every one may observe in the limited circleof his own personal experience, --by that automatic increase ofambitions and desires, with every new generation, which prevents thehuman world from crystallising in one form, constrains it to continualchanges in material make-up as well as in ideals and moral appearance. In other words, every new generation must, in order to satisfy thatpart of its aspirations which is peculiarly and entirely its own, alter, whether little or much, in one way or another, the conditionof the world it entered at birth. We can then, in our personalexperiences every day, verify the universal law of history--a lawthat can act with greater or less intensity, more or less rapidity, according to times and places, but that ceases to authenticate itselfat no time and in no place. 

The United States is subject to that law to-day, as is old Europe, as will be future generations, and as past ages were. Moreover, tounderstand at bottom this phenomenon, which appears to me to be thesoul of all history, it is well to add this consideration: It isevident that there is a capital difference between our judgment ofthis phenomenon and that of the ancients; to them it was a malevolentforce of dissolution to which should be attributed all in Romanhistory that was sinister and dreadful, a sure sign of incurabledecay; that is why they called it "corruption of customs, " and solamented it. To-day, on the contrary, it appears to us a universalbeneficent process of transformation; so true is this that we call"progress" many facts which the ancients attributed to "corruption. "It were useless to expand too much in examples; enough to cite a few. In the third ode of the first book, in which he so tenderly salutesthe departing Virgil, Horace covers with invective, as an evil-doerand the corrupter of the human race, that impious being who inventedthe ship, which causes man, created for the land, to walk acrosswaters. Who would to-day dare repeat those maledictions against thebold builders who construct the magnificent trans-Atlantic liners onwhich, in a dozen days from Genoa, one lands in Boston or New York?"Coelum ipsum petimus stultitia, " exclaims Horace--that is to say, inanticipation he considered the Wright brothers crazy. 

Who, save some man of erudition, has knowledge to-day of sumptuarylaws? We should laugh them all down with one Homeric guffaw, if to-dayit entered somebody's head to propose a law that forbade fair ladiesto spend more than a certain sum on their clothes, or numbered thehats they might wear; or that regulated dinners of ceremony, fixingthe number of courses, the variety of wines, and the total expense; orthat prohibited labouring men and women from wearing certain stuffsor certain objects that were wont to be found only upon the personsof people of wealth and leisure. And yet laws of this tenor werecompiled, published, observed, up to two centuries ago, without anyone's finding it absurd. The historic force that, as riches increase, impels the new generations to desire new satisfactions, new pleasures, operated then as to-day; only then men were inclined to consider it asa new kind of ominous disease that needed checking. To-day men regardthat constant transformation either as beneficent, or at least as sucha matter of course that almost no one heeds it; just as no one noticesthe alternations of day and night, or the change of seasons. On thecontrary, we have little by little become so confident of the goodnessof this force that drives the coming generation on into the unknownfuture, that society, European, American, among other liberties haswon in the nineteenth century, full and entire, a liberty that theancients did not know--freedom in vice. 

To the Romans it appeared most natural that the state should surveyprivate habits, should spy out what a citizen, particularly a citizenbelonging to the ruling classes, did within domestic walls--should seewhether he became intoxicated, whether he were a gourmand, whetherhe contracted debts, spending much or little, whether he betrayed hiswife. The age of Augustus was cultured, civilised, liberal, and inmany things resembled our own; yet on this point the dominating ideaswere so different from ours, that at one time Augustus was forcedby public opinion to propose a law on adultery by which all Romancitizens of both sexes guilty of this crime were condemned to exileand the confiscation of half their substance, and there was givento any citizen the right to accuse the guilty. Could you imagine itpossible to-day, even for a few weeks, to establish this regime ofterror in the kingdom of Amor? But the ancients were always inclinedto consider as exceedingly dangerous for the upper classes thatrelaxing of customs which always follows periods of rapid enrichment, of great gain in comforts; behind his own walls to-day, every one isfree to indulge himself as he will, to the confines of crime. 

How can we explain this important difference in judging one of theessential phenomena of historic life? Has this phenomenon changednature, and from bad, by some miracle, become good? Or are we wiserthan our forefathers, judging with experience what they could hardlycomprehend? There is no doubt that the Latin writers, particularlyHorace and Livy, were so severe in condemning this progressivemovement of wants because of unconscious political solicitude, becauseintellectual men expressed the opinions, sentiments, and also theprejudices of historic aristocracy, and this detested the progress of_ambitio, avaritia, luxuria_, because they undermined the dominance ofits class. On the other hand, it is certain that in the modernworld every increase of consumption, every waste, every vice, seemspermissible, indeed almost meritorious, because men of industry andtrade, the employees in industries--that is, all the people thatgain by the diffusion of luxuries, by the spread of vices or newwants--have acquired, thanks above all to democratic institutions, andto the progress of cities, an immense political power that in timespast they lacked. If, for example, in Europe the beer-makers anddistillers of alcohol were not more powerful in the electoral fieldthan the philosophers and academicians, governments would more easilyrecognise that the masses should not be allowed to poison themselvesor future generations by chronic drunkenness. 

Between these two extremes of exaggeration, inspired by aself-interest easy to discover, is there not a true middle way that wecan deduce from the study of Roman history and from the observation ofcontemporary life?

In the pessimism with which the ancients regarded progress ascorruption, there was a basis of truth, just as there is a principleof error in the too serene optimism with which we consider corruptionas progress. This force that pushes the new generations on to thefuture, at once creates and destroys; its destructive energy isspecially felt in ages like Cæsar's in ancient Rome and ours inthe modern world, in which facility in the accumulation of wealthover-excites desires and ambitions in all classes. They are the timesin which personal egoism--what to-day we call individualism--usurpsa place above all that represents in society the interest of thespecies: national duty, the self-abnegation of each for the sakeof the common good. Then these vices and defects become alwaysmore common: intellectual agitation, the weakening of the spiritof tradition, the general relaxation of discipline, the loss ofauthority, ethical confusion and disorder. At the same time thatcertain moral sentiments refine themselves, certain individualismsgrow fiercer. The government may no longer represent the ideas, theaspirations, the energetic will of a small oligarchy; it must makeitself more yielding and gracious at the same time that it is becomingmore contradictory and discordant. Family discipline is relaxed;the new generations shake off early the influence of the past; thesentiment of honour and the rigour of moral, religious, and politicalprinciples are weakened by a spirit of utility and expediency bywhich, more or less openly, confessing it or dissimulating, men alwaysseek to do, not that which is right and decorous, but that which isutilitarian. The civic spirit tends to die out; the number of personscapable of suffering, or even of working, disinterestedly for thecommon good, for the future, diminishes; children are not wanted; menprefer to live in accord with those in power, ignoring their vices, rather than openly opposing them. Public events do not interest unlessthey include a personal advantage. 

This is the state of mind that is now diffusing itself throughoutEurope; the same state of mind that, with the documents at hand, Ihave found in the age of Cæsar and Augustus, and seen progressivelydiffusing itself throughout ancient Italy. The likeness is so greatthat we re-find in those far-away times, especially in the upperclasses, exactly that restless condition that we define by the word"nervousness. " Horace speaks of this state of mind, which we considerpeculiar to ourselves, and describes it, by felicitous image, as_strenua inertia_--strenuous inertia, --agitation vain and ineffective, always wanting something new, but not really knowing what, desiringmost ardently yet speedily tiring of a desire gratified. Now itis clear that if these vices spread too much, if they are notcomplemented by an increase of material resources, of knowledge, ofsufficient population, they can lead a nation rapidly to ruin. We donot feel very keenly the fear of this danger--the European-Americancivilisation is so rich, has at its disposal so much knowledge, somany men, so many instrumentalities, has cut off for itself such ameasureless part of the globe, that it can afford to look unafraidinto the future. The abyss is so far away that only a few philosophersbarely descry it in the gray mist of distant years. But the ancientworld--so much poorer, smaller, weaker--felt that it could notsquander as we do, and saw the abyss near at hand. 

To-day men and women waste fabulous wealth in luxury; that is, theyspend not to satisfy some reasonable need, but to show to others oftheir kind how rich they are, or, further, to make others believe themricher than they are. If these resources were everywhere saved as theyare in France, the progress of the world would be quicker, and thenew countries would more easily find in Europe and in themselvesthe capital necessary for their development. At all events, our agedevelops fast, and notwithstanding all this waste, abounds in a plentythat is enough to keep men from fearing the growth of this wantonluxury and from planning to restrain it by laws. In the ancient world, on the other hand, the wealthy classes and the state had only toabandon themselves a little too much to the prodigality that for ushas become almost a regular thing, when suddenly means were wanting tomeet the most essential needs of social life. Tacitus has summarisedan interesting discourse of Tiberius, in which the famous emperorcensures the ladies of Rome in terms cold, incisive, and succinct, because they spend too much money on pearls and diamonds. "Our money, "said Tiberius, "goes away to India and we are in want of the preciousmetals to carry on the military administration; we have to give upthe defence of the frontiers. " According to the opinion of anadministrator so sagacious and a general so valiant as Tiberius, inthe richest period of the Roman Empire, a lady of Rome could not buypearls and diamonds without directly weakening the defence of thefrontiers. Indulgence in the luxury of jewels looked almost like hightreason. 

Similar observations might be made on another grave question--theincrease of population. One of the most serious effects ofindividualism that accompanies the increase of civilisation andwealth, is the decrease of the birth-rate. France, which knows how totemper its luxury, which gives to other peoples an example of savingmeans for the future, has on the other hand given the example ofegoism in the family, lowering the birth-rate. England, for a longtime so fecund, seems to follow France. The more uniformly settled andwell-to-do parts of the North American Union, the Eastern States andNew England, are even more sterile than France. However, no one ofthese nations suffers to-day from the small increase of population;there are yet so many poor and fecund peoples that they can easilyfill the gaps. In the ancient world this was not the case; populationwas always and everywhere so scanty that if for some reason itdiminished but slightly, the states could not get on, findingthemselves at the mercy of what they called a "famine of men, " amalady more serious and troublesome than over-population. In the RomanEmpire the Occidental provinces finally fell into the hands of thebarbarians, chiefly because the Græco-Latin civilisation sterilisedthe family, reducing the population incurably. No wonder that theancients applied the term "corruption" to a momentum of desires which, although increasing culture and the refinements of living, easilymenaced the sources of the nation's physical existence. 

There is, then, a more general conclusion to draw from thisexperience. It is not by chance, nor the unaccountable caprice ofa few ancient writers, that we possess so many small facts on thedevelopment of luxury and the transformation of customs in ancientRome; that, for example, among the records of great wars, ofdiplomatic missions, of catastrophes political and economic, we findgiven the date when the art of fattening fowls was imported intoItaly. The little facts are not so unworthy of the majesty of Romanhistory as one at first might think. Everything is bound together inthe life of a nation, and nothing without importance; the humblestacts, most personal and deepest hidden in the _penetralia_ of thehome, that no one sees, none knows, have an effect, immediate orremote, on the common life of the nation. There is, between thesesmall, insignificant facts and the wars, the revolutions, thetremendous political and social events that bewilder men, a tie, ofteninvisible to most people, yet nevertheless indestructible. 

Nothing in the world is without import: what women spend fortheir toilet, the resistance that men make from day to day to thetemptations of the commonest pleasures, the new and petty needsthat insinuate themselves unconsciously into the habits of all; thereading, the conversations, the impressions, even the most fugaciousthat pass in our spirit--all these things, little and innumerable, that no historian registers, have contributed to produce thisrevolution, that war, this catastrophe, that political overturn, whichmen wonder at and study as a prodigy. 

The causes of how many apparently mysterious historical events wouldbe more clearly and profoundly known, of how many periods would thespirit be better understood, did we only possess the private recordsof the families that make up the ruling classes! Every deed we do inthe intimacy of the home reacts on the whole of our environment. With our every act we assume a responsibility toward the nation andposterity, the sanction for which, near or far away, is in events. This justifies, at least in part, the ancient conception by which thestate had the right to exercise vigilance over its citizens, theirprivate acts, customs, pleasures, vices, caprices. This vigilance, thelaws that regulated it, the moral and political teachings that broughtpressure to bear in the exercise of these laws, tended above all tocharge upon the individual man the social responsibility of his singleacts; to remind him that in the things most personal, aside from theindividual pain or pleasure, there was an interest, a good or an evil, in common. 

Modern men--and it is a revolution greater than that finished inpolitical form in the nineteenth century--have been freed from thesebonds, from these obligations. Indeed, modern civilisation has madeit a duty for each one to spend, to enjoy, to waste as much as he can, without any disturbing thought as to the ultimate consequences ofwhat he does. The world is so rich, population grows so rapidly, civilisation is armed with so much knowledge in its struggle againstthe barbarian and against nature, that to-day we are able to laugh atthe timid prudence of our forefathers, who had, as it were, a fearof wealth, of pleasure, of love; we can boast in the pride of triumphthat we are the first who dare in the midst of a conquered world, toenjoy--enjoy without scruple, without restriction--all the good thingslife offers to the strong. 

But who knows? Perhaps this felicitous moment will not last forever;perhaps one day will see men, grown more numerous, feel the needof the ancient wisdom and prudence. It is at least permitted thephilosopher and the historian to ask if this magnificent but unbridledfreedom which we enjoy suits all times, and not only those in whichnations coming into being can find a small dower in their cradle asyou have done--three millions of square miles of land!

The History and Legend of Antony and Cleopatra

In the history of Rome figures of women are rare, because only mendominated there, imposing everywhere the brute force, the roughness, and the egoism that lie at the base of their nature: they honoured the_mater familias_ because she bore children and kept the slavesfrom stealing the flour from the bin and drinking the wine from the_amphore_ on the sly. They despised the woman who made of her beautyand vivacity an adornment of social life, a prize sought after anddisputed by the men. However, in this virile history there doesappear, on a sudden, the figure of a woman, strange and wonderful, akind of living Venus. Plutarch thus describes the arrival of Cleopatraat Tarsus and her first meeting with Antony:

 She was sailing tranquilly along the Cydnus, on a bark with a golden stern, with sails of purple and oars of silver, and the dip of the oars was rhythmed to the sound of flutes, blending with music of lyres. She herself, the Queen, wondrously clad as Venus is pictured, was lying under an awning gold embroidered. Boys dressed as Cupids stood at her side, gently waving fans to refresh her; her maidens, every one beautiful and clad as a Naiad or a Grace, directed the boat, some at the rudder, others at the ropes. Both banks of the stream were sweet with the perfumes burning on the vessel. 

Posterity is yet dazzled by this ship, refulgent with purple andgold and melodious with flutes and lyres. If we are spellbound byPlutarch's description, it does not seem strange to us that Antonyshould be--he who could not only behold in person that wonderfulVenus, but could dine with her _tête-a-tête_, in a splendour oftorches indescribable. Surely this is a setting in no wise improbablefor the beginning of the famous romance of the love of Antony andCleopatra, and its development as probable as its beginning; thefollies committed by Antony for the seductive Queen of the Orient, the divorce of Octavia, the war for love of Cleopatra, kindled in thewhole Empire, and the miserable catastrophe. Are there not to be seenin recent centuries many men of power putting their greatness to riskand sometimes to ruin for love of a woman? Are not the love lettersof great statesmen--for instance, those of Mirabeau andof Gambetta--admitted to the semi-official part of modernhistory-writing? And so also Antony could love a queen and, like somany modern statesmen, commit follies for her. A French critic of mybook, burning his ships behind him, has said that Antony was a Roman_Boulanger_. 

The romance pleases: art takes it as subject and re-takes it; but thatdoes not keep off the brutal hands of criticism. Before all, it shouldbe observed that moderns feel and interpret the romance of Antonyand Cleopatra in a way very different from that of the ancients. FromShakespeare to De Heredia and Henri Houssaye, artists and historianshave described with sympathy, even almost idealised, this passion thatthrows away in a lightning flash every human greatness, to pursuethe mantle of a fleeing woman; they find in the follies of Antonysomething profoundly human that moves them, fascinates them, and makesthem indulgent. To the ancients, on the contrary, the _amours_ ofAntony and Cleopatra were but a dishonourable degeneration of thepassion. They have no excuse for the man whom love for a womanimpelled to desert in battle, to abandon soldiers, friends, relatives, to conspire against the greatness of Rome. 

This very same difference of interpretation recurs in the history ofthe _amours_ of Cæsar. Modern writers regard what the ancients tellus of the numerous loves--real or imaginary--of Cæsar, as almost anew laurel with which to decorate his figure. On the contrary, theancients recounted and spread abroad, and perhaps in part invented, these storiettes of gallantry for quite opposite reasons--as source ofdishonour, to discredit him, to demonstrate that Cæsar was effeminate, that he could not give guarantee of knowing how to lead the armiesand to fulfil the virile and arduous duties that awaited every eminentRoman. There is in our way of thinking a vein of romanticism wantingin the ancient mind. We see in love a certain forgetfulness ofourselves, a certain blindness of egoism and the more materialpassions, a kind of power of self-abnegation, which, inasmuch as it isunconscious, confers a certain nobility and dignity; therefore we areindulgent to mistakes and follies committed for the sake of passion, while the ancients were very severe. We pardon with a certaincompassion the man who for love of a woman has not hesitated to buryhimself under the ruin of his own greatness; the ancients, on thecontrary, considered him the most dangerous and despicable of theinsane. 

Criticism has not contented itself with re-giving to the ancientromance the significance it had for those that made it and thepublic that first read it. Archaeologists have discovered uponcoins portraits of Cleopatra, and now critics have confronted theseportraits with the poetic descriptions given by Roman historians andhave found the descriptions generously fanciful: in the portraits wedo not see the countenance of a Venus, delicate, gracious, smiling, nor even the fine and sensuous beauty of a Marquise de Pompadour, buta face fleshy and, as the French would say, _bouffie_; the nose, a powerful aquiline; the face of a woman on in years, ambitious, imperious, one which recalls that of Maria Theresa. It will be saidthat judgments as to beauty are personal; that Antony, who saw heralive, could decide better than we who see her portraits half effacedby the centuries; that the attractive power of a woman emanates notonly from corporal beauty, but also--and yet more--from her spirit. The taste of Cleopatra, her vivacity, her cleverness, her exquisiteart in conversation, is vaunted by all. 

Perhaps, however, Cleopatra, beautiful or ugly, is of littleconsequence; when one studies the history of her relations withAntony, there is small place, and that but toward the end, for thepassion of love. It will be easy to persuade you of this if you followthe simple chronological exposition of facts I shall give you. Antonymakes the acquaintance of Cleopatra at Tarsus toward the end of 41B. C. , passes the winter of 41-40 with her at Alexandria; leaves her inthe spring of 40 and stays away from her more than three years, tillthe autumn of 37. There is no proof that during this time Antonysighed for the Queen of Egypt as a lover far away; on the contrary, heattends, with alacrity worthy of praise, to preparing the conquest ofPersia, to putting into execution the great design conceived by Cæsar, the plan of war that Antony had come upon among the papers of theDictator the evening of the fifteenth of March, 44 B. C. All ordersocial and political, the army, the state, public finance, wealthprivate and public, is going to pieces around him. The triumviratepower, built up on the uncertain foundation of these ruins, istottering; Antony realises that only a great external success cangive to him and his party the authority and the money necessary toestablish a solid government, and resolves to enter into possession ofthe political legacy of his teacher and patron, taking up its centralidea, the conquest of Persia. 

The difficulties are grave. Soldiers are not wanting, but money. Therevolution has ruined the Empire and Italy; all the reserve funds havebeen dissipated; the finances of the state are in such straits thatnot even the soldiers can be paid punctually and the legions every nowand then claim their dues by revolt. Antony is not discouraged. Thehistorians, however antagonistic to him, describe him as exceedinglybusy in those four years, extracting from all parts of the Empire thatbit of money still in circulation. Then at one stroke, in the secondhalf of 37, when, preparations finished, it is time to put hand to theexecution, the ancient historians without in any way explaining to usthis sudden act, most unforeseen, make him depart for Antioch to meetCleopatra, who has been invited by him to join him. For what reasondoes Antony after three years, all of a sudden, re-join Cleopatra?The secret of the story of Antony and Cleopatra lies entirely in thisquestion. 

Plutarch says that Antony went to Antioch borne by the fiery anduntamed courser of his own spirit; in other words, because passionwas already beginning to make him lose common sense. Not finding otherexplanations in the ancient writers, posterity has accepted this, which was simple enough; but about a century ago an erudite Frenchman, Letronne, studying certain coins, and comparing with them certainpassages in ancient historians, until then remaining obscure, was ableto demonstrate that in 36 B. C. , at Antioch, Antony married Cleopatrawith all the dynastic ceremonies of Egypt, and that thereupon Antonybecame King of Egypt, although he did not dare assume the title. 

The explanation of Letronne, which is founded on official documentsand coins, is without doubt more dependable than that of Plutarch, which is reducible to an imaginative metaphor; and the discoveryof Letronne, concluding that concatenation of facts that I have setforth, finally persuades me to affirm that not a passion of love, suddenly re-awakened, led Antony in the second half of 37 B. C. ToAntioch to meet the Queen of Egypt, but a political scheme wellthought out. Antony wanted Egypt and not the beautiful person ofits queen; he meant by this dynastic marriage to establish the Romanprotectorate in the valley of the Nile, and to be able to dispose, for the Persian campaign, of the treasures of the Kingdom of thePtolemies. At that time, after the plunderings of other regions ofthe Orient by the politicians of Rome, there was but one state richin reserves of precious metals, Egypt. Since, little by little, theeconomic crisis of the Roman Empire was aggravating, the Roman polityhad to gravitate perforce toward Egypt, as toward the country capableof providing Rome with the capital necessary to continue its policy inevery part of the Empire. 

Cæsar already understood this; his mysterious and obscure connectionwith Cleopatra had certainly for ultimate motive and reason thispolitical necessity; and Antony, in marrying Cleopatra, probably onlyapplied more or less shrewdly the ideas that Cæsar had originated inthe refulgent crepuscle of his tempestuous career. You will ask mewhy Antony, if he had need of the valley of the Nile, recurred to thisstrange expedient of a marriage, instead of conquering the kingdom, and why Cleopatra bemeaned herself to marry the triumvir. The replyis not difficult to him who knows the history of Rome. There wasa long-standing tradition in Roman policy to exploit Egypt butto respect its independence; it may be, because the country wasconsidered more difficult to govern than in truth it was, or becausethere existed for this most ancient land, the seat of all the mostrefined arts, the most learned schools, the choicest industries, exceedingly rich and highly civilised, a regard that somewhatresembles what France imposes on the world to-day. Finally, it may bebecause it was held that if Egypt were annexed, its influence on Italywould be too much in the ascendent, and the traditions of the oldRoman life would be conclusively overwhelmed by the invasion of thecustoms, the ideas, the refinements--in a word, by the corruptionsof Egypt. Antony, who was set in the idea of repeating in Persiathe adventure of Alexander the Great, did not dare bring about anannexation which would have been severely judged in Italy and whichhe, like the others, thought more dangerous than in reality it was. On the other hand, with a dynastic marriage, he was able to secure forhimself all the advantages of effective possession, without runningthe risks of annexation; so he resolved upon this artifice, which, I repeat, had probably been imagined by Cæsar. As to Cleopatra, hergovernment was menaced by a strong internal opposition, the causes forwhich are ill known; marrying Antony, she gathered about her throne, to protect it, formidable guards, the Roman legions. 

To sum up, the romance of Antony and Cleopatra covers, at least in itsbeginnings, a political treaty. With the marriage, Cleopatra seeksto steady her wavering power; Antony, to place the valley of the Nileunder the Roman protectorate. How then was the famous romance born?The actual history of Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most tragicepisodes of a struggle that lacerated the Roman Empire for fourcenturies, until it finally destroyed it, the struggle between Orientand Occident. During the age of Cæsar, little by little, without anyone's realising it at first, there arose and fulfilled itself a factof the gravest importance; that is, the eastern part of the Empire hadgrown out of proportion: first, from the conquest of the Pontus, madeby Lucullus, who had added immense territory in Asia Minor; then byPompey's conquest of Syria, and the protectorate extended by him overall Palestine and a considerable part of Arabia. These new districtswere not only enormous in extension; they were also populous, wealthy, fertile, celebrated for ancient culture; they held the busiestindustrial cities, the best cultivated regions of the ancient world, the most famous seats of arts, letters, science, therefore theirannexation, made rapidly in few years, could but trouble the alreadyunstable equilibrium of the Empire. Italy was then, compared withthese provinces, a poor and barbarous land; because southern Italy wasruined by the wars of preceding epochs, and northern Italy, naturallythe wealthier part, was still crude and in the beginning of itsdevelopment. The other western provinces nearer Italy were poorer andless civilised than Italy, except Gallia Narbonensis and certain partsof southern Spain. So that Rome, the capital of the Empire, came tofind itself far from the richest and most populous regions, amongterritories poor and despoiled, on the frontiers of barbarism--in sucha situation as the Russian Empire might find itself to-day if it had acapital at Vladivostok or Kharbin. You know that during the last yearsof the life of Cæsar it was rumoured several times that the Dictatorwished to remove the capital of the Empire; it was said, to Alexandriain Egypt, to Ilium in the district where Troy arose. It is impossibleto judge whether these reports were true or merely invented by enemiesof Cæsar to damage him; at any rate, true or false, they show thatpublic opinion was beginning to concern itself with the "Easternperil"; that is, with the danger that the seat of empire must beshifted toward the Orient and the too ample Asiatic and Africanterritory, and that Italy be one day uncrowned of her metropolitanpredominance, conquered by so many wars. Such hear-says must haveseemed, even if not true, the more likely, because, in his last twoyears, Cæsar planned the conquest of Persia. Now the natural basis ofoperations for the conquest of Persia was to be found, not in Italy, but in Asia Minor, and if Persia had been conquered, it would not havebeen possible to govern in Rome an empire so immeasurably enlargedin the Orient. Everything therefore induces to the belief that thisquestion was at least discussed in the coterie of the friends ofCæsar; and it was a serious question, because in it the traditions, the aspirations, the interests of Italy were in irreconcilableconflict with a supreme necessity of state which one day or otherwould impose itself, if some unforeseen event did not intervene tosolve it. 

In the light of these considerations, the conduct of Antony becomesvery clear. The marriage at Antioch, by which he places Egypt underthe Roman protectorate, is the decisive act of a policy that looksto transporting the centre of his government toward the Orient, to beable to accomplish more securely the conquest of Persia. Antony, theheir of Cæsar, the man who held the papers of the Dictator, who knewhis hidden thoughts, who wished to complete the plans cut off by hisdeath, proposes to conquer Persia; to conquer Persia, he must rely onthe Oriental provinces that were the natural basis of operations forthe great enterprise; among these, Antony must support himself aboveall on Egypt, the richest and most civilised and most able to supplyhim with the necessary funds, of which he was quite in want. Thereforehe married the Cleopatra whom, it was said at Rome, Cæsar himself hadwished to marry--with whom, at any rate, Cæsar had much dallied andintrigued. Does not this juxtaposition of facts seem luminous to you?In 36 B. C. , Antony marries Cleopatra, as a few years before he hadmarried Octavia, the sister of the future Augustus, for politicalreasons--in order to be able to dispose of the political subsidies andfinances of Egypt, for the conquest of Persia. The conquest of Persiais the ultimate motive of all his policy, the supreme explanation ofhis every act. 

However, little by little, this move, made on both sides fromconsiderations of political interest, altered its character under theaction of events, of time, through the personal influence of Antonyand Cleopatra upon each other, and above all, the power that Cleopatraacquired over Antony: here is truly the most important part of allthis story. Those who have read my history know that I have recountedhardly any of the anecdotes, more or less odd or entertaining, with which ancient writers describe the intimate life of Antony andCleopatra, because it is impossible to discriminate in them the partthat is fact from that which was invented or exaggerated by politicalenmity. In history the difficulty of recognising the truth graduallyincreases as one passes from political to private life; because inpolitics the acts of men and of parties are always bound together byeither causes or effects of which a certain number is always exactlyknown; private life, on the other hand, is, as it were, isolated andsecret, almost invariably impenetrable. What a great man of state doesin his own house, his valet knows better than the historians of latertimes. 

If for these reasons I have thought it prudent not to accept in mywork the stories and anecdotes that the ancients recount of Antony andCleopatra, without indeed risking to declare them false, it is, on thecontrary, not possible to deny that Cleopatra gradually acquired greatascendency over the mind of Antony. The circumstance is of itselfhighly probable. That Cleopatra was perhaps a Venus, as the ancientssay, or that she was provided with but a mediocre beauty, as declarethe portraits, matters little: it is, however, certain that she wasa woman of great cleverness and culture; as woman and queen ofthe richest and most civilised realm of the ancient world, she wasmistress of all those arts of pleasure, of luxury, of elegance, that are the most delicate and intoxicating fruit of all maturecivilisations. Cleopatra might refigure, in the ancient world, thewealthiest, most elegant, and cultured Parisian lady in the world ofto-day. 

Antony, on the other hand, was the descendant of a family of thatRoman nobility which still preserved much rustic roughness in tastes, ideas, habits; he grew up in times in which the children werestill given Spartan training; he came to Egypt from a nation which, notwithstanding its military and diplomatic triumphs, could beconsidered, compared with Egypt, only poor, rude, and barbarous. Uponthis intelligent man, eager for enjoyment, who had, like othernoble Romans, already begun to taste the charms of intellectualcivilisation, it was not Cleopatra alone that made the keenest ofimpressions, but all Egypt, the wonderful city of Alexandria, thesumptuous palace of the Ptolemies--all that refined, elegant splendourof which he found himself at one stroke the master. What was thereat Rome to compare with Alexandria?--Rome, in spite of its imperialpower, abandoned to a fearful disorder by the disregard of factions, encumbered with ruin, its streets narrow and wretched, provided asyet with but a single _forum_, narrow and plain, the sole impressivemonument of which was the theatre of Pompey; Rome, where the life wasyet crude, and objects of luxury so rare that they had to be broughtfrom the distant Orient? At Alexandria, instead, the Paris of theancient world, were to be found all the best and most beautiful thingsof the earth. There was a sumptuosity of public edifices that theancients never tire of extolling--the quay seven _stadia_ long, the lighthouse famous all over the Mediterranean, the marvellouszoölogical garden, the Museum, the Gymnasium, innumerable temples, theunending palace of the Ptolemies. There was an abundance, unheard offor those times, of objects of luxury--rugs, glass, stuffs, papyruses, jewels, artistic pottery--because they made all these things atAlexandria. There was an abundance, greater than elsewhere, of silk, of perfumes, of gems, of all the things imported from the extremeEast, because through Alexandria passed one of the most frequentedroutes of Indo-Chinese commerce. There, too, were innumerable artists, writers, philosophers, and _savants_; society life and intellectuallife alike fervid; continuous movement to and fro of traffic, continual passing of rare and curious things; countless amusements;life, more than elsewhere, safe--at least so it was believed--becauseat Alexandria were the great schools of medicine and the greatscientific physicians. 

If other Italians who landed in Alexandria were dazzled by so manysplendours, Antony ought to have been blinded; _he_ entered Alexandriaas King. He who was born at Rome in the small and simple house of animpoverished noble family who had been brought up with Latin parsimonyto eat frugally, to drink wine only on festival occasions, to wearthe same clothes a long time, to be served by a single slave--this manfound himself lord of the immense palace of the Ptolemies, wherethe kitchens alone were a hundred times larger than the house of hisfathers at Rome; where there were gathered for his pleasure the mostprecious treasures and the most marvellous collections of works ofart; where there were trains of servants at his command, and everywish could be immediately gratified. It is therefore not necessary tosuppose that Antony was foolishly enamoured of the Queen of Egypt, tounderstand the change that took place in him after their marriage, ashe tasted the inimitable life of Alexandria, that elegance, that ease, that wealth, that pomp without equal. 

A man of action, grown in simplicity, toughened by a rude life, hewas all at once carried into the midst of the subtlest and most highlydeveloped civilisation of the ancient world and given the greatestfacilities to enjoy and abuse it that ever man had: as might have beenexpected, he was intoxicated; he contracted an almost insane passionfor such a life; he adored Egypt with such ardour as to forget for itthe nation of his birth and the modest home of his boyhood. And thenbegan the great tragedy of his life, a tragedy not love-inspired, butpolitical. As the hold of Egypt strengthened on his mind, Cleopatratried to persuade him not to conquer Persia, but to accept openlythe kingdom of Egypt, to found with her and with their children a newdynasty, and to create a great new Egyptian Empire, adding to Egyptthe better part of the provinces that Rome possessed in Africa and inAsia, abandoning Italy and the provinces of the West forever to theirdestiny. 

Cleopatra had thought to snatch from Rome its Oriental Empire by thearm of Antony, in that immense disorder of revolution; to reconstructthe great Empire of Egypt, placing at its head the first general ofthe time, creating an army of Roman legionaries with the gold of thePtolemies; to make Egypt and its dynasty the prime potentate of Africaand Asia, transferring to Alexandria the political and diplomaticcontrol of the finest parts of the Mediterranean world. 

As the move failed, men have deemed it folly and stupidity; but he whoknows how easy it is to be wise after events, will judge this confusedpolicy of Cleopatra less curtly. At any rate, it is certain that herscheme failed more because of its own inconsistencies than through thevigour and ability with which Rome tried to thwart it; it is certainthat in the execution of the plan, Antony felt first in himselfthe tragic discord between Orient and Occident that was so long tolacerate the Empire; and of that tragic discord he was the firstvictim. An enthusiastic admirer of Egypt, an ardent Hellenist, he islured by his great ambition to be king of Egypt, to renew the famousline of the Ptolemies, to continue in the East the glory and thetraditions of Alexander the Great: but the far-away voice of hisfatherland still sounds in his ear; he recalls the city of his birth, the Senate in which he rose so many times to speak, the _Forum_ of hisorations, the Comitia that elected him to magistracies; Octavia, thegentlewoman he had wedded with the sacred rites of Latin monogamy; thefriends and soldiers with whom he had fought through so many countriesin so many wars; the foundation principles at home that ruled thefamily, the state, morality, public and private. 

Cleopatra's scheme, viewed from Alexandria, was an heroic undertaking, almost divine, that might have lifted him and his scions to thedelights of Olympus; seen from Rome, by his childhood's friends, by his comrades in arms, by that people of Italy who still so muchadmired him, it was the shocking crime of faithlessness to hiscountry; we call it high treason. Therefore he hesitates long, doubting most of all whether he can keep for the new Egyptian Empirethe Roman legions, made up largely of Italians, all commanded byItalian officers. He does not know how to oppose a resolute _No_ tothe insistences of Cleopatra and loose himself from the fatal bondthat keeps him near her; he can not go back to live in Italy afterhaving dwelt as king in Alexandria. Moreover, he does not dare declarehis intentions to his Roman friends, fearing they will scatter; to thesoldiers, fearing they will revolt; to Italy, fearing her judgment ofhim as a traitor; and so, little by little, he entangles himselfin the crooked policy, full of prevarications, of expedients, ofsubterfuges, of one mistake upon another, that leads him to Actium. 

I think I have shown that Antony succumbed in the famous war notbecause, mad with love, he abandoned the command in the midst of thebattle, but because his armies revolted and abandoned him when theyunderstood what he had not dared declare to them openly: that hemeant to dismember the Empire of Rome to create the new Empire ofAlexandria. The future Augustus conquered at Actium without effort, merely because the national sentiment of the soldiery, outraged by theunforeseen revelation of Antony's treason, turned against the man whowanted to aggrandise Cleopatra at the expense of his own country. 

And then the victorious party, the party of Augustus, created thestory of Antony and Cleopatra that has so entertained posterity; thisstory is but a popular explanation--in part imaginatively exaggeratedand fantastic--of the Eastern peril that menaced Rome, of both itspolitical phase and its moral. According to the story that Horace hasput into such charming verse, Cleopatra wished to conquer Italy, toenslave Rome, to destroy the Capitol; but Cleopatra alone could nothave accomplished so difficult a task; she must have seduced Antony, made him forget his duty to his wife, to his legitimate children, to the Republic, the soldiery, his native land, --all the dutiesthat Latin morals inculcated into the minds of the great, and thata shameless Egyptian woman, rendered perverse by all the arts of theOrient, had blotted out in his soul; therefore Antony's tragicfate should serve as a solemn warning to distrust the voluptuousseductions, of which Cleopatra symbolised the elegant and fataldepravity. The story was magnified, coloured, diffused, not because itwas beautiful and romantic, but because it served the interests of thepolitical _coterie_ that gained definite control of the governmenton the ruin of Antony. At Actium, the future Augustus did not fight areal war, he only passively watched the power of the adversary goto pieces, destroyed by its own internal contradictions. He did notdecide to conquer Egypt until the public opinion of Italy, enragedagainst Antony and Cleopatra, required this vengeance with suchinsistence that he had to satisfy it. 

If Augustus was not a man too quick in action, he was, instead, keenlyintelligent in comprehending the situation created by the catastropheof Antony in Italy, where already, for a decade of years, publicspirit, frightened by revolution, was anxious to return to the waysof the past, to the historic sources of the national life. Augustusunderstood that he ought to stand before Italy, disgusted as itwas with long-continued dissension and eager to retrace the wayof national tradition, as the embodiment of all the virtues hiscontemporaries set in opposition to eastern "corruption, "--simplicity, severity of private habits, rigid monogamy, the anti-feministicspirit, the purely virile idea of the state. Naturally, the exaltationof these virtues required the portrayal in his rival of Actium, asfar as possible, the opposite defects; therefore the efforts of hisfriends, like Horace, to colour the story of Antony and Cleopatra, which should magnify to the Italians the idea of the danger fromwhich Augustus had saved them at Actium; which was meant to serve as abarrier against the invading Oriental "corruption, " that "corruption"the essence of which I have already analysed. 

In a certain sense, the legend of Antony and Cleopatra is chiefly anantifeminist legend, intended to reinforce in the state the power ofthe masculine principle, to demonstrate how dangerous it may be toleave to women the government of public affairs, or follow theircounsel in political business. 

The people believed the legend; posterity has believed it. Two yearsago when I published in the _Revue de Paris_ an article in which Idemonstrated, by obvious arguments, the incongruities and absurditiesof the legend, and tried to retrace through it the half-effaced linesof the truth, everybody was amazed. From one end of Europe to theother, the papers résuméd the conclusions of my study as an astoundingrevelation. An illustrious French statesman, a man of the finestculture in historical study, Joseph Reinach, said to me:

 After your article I have re-read Dion and Plutarch. It is indeed singular that for twenty centuries men have read and reread those pages without any one's realising how confused and absurd their accounts are. 

It seems to be a law of human psychology that almost all historicpersonages, from Minos to Mazzini, from Judas to Charlotte Corday, from Xerxes to Napoleon, are imaginary personages; some transfiguredinto demigods, by admiration and success; the others debased by hateand failure. In reality, the former were often uglier, the latter moreattractive than tradition has pictured them, because men in generalare neither too good nor too bad, neither too intelligent nortoo stupid. In conclusion, historic tradition is full of deformedcaricatures and ideal transfigurations; because, when they are dead, the impression of their political contemporaries still serves the endsof parties, states, nations, institutions. Can this man exalt in apeople the consciousness of its own power, of its own energy, ofits own value? Lo, then they make a god of him, as of Napoleon orBismarck. Can this other serve to feed in the mass, odium and scornof another party, of a government, of an order of things that it isdesirable to injure? Then they make a monster of him, as happened inRome to Tiberius, in France to Napoleon III, in Italy to all who forone motive or another opposed the unification of Italy. 

It is true that after a time the interests that have colouredcertain figures with certain hues and shades disappear; but then thereputation, good or bad, of a personage is already made; his name isstamped on the memory of posterity with an adjective, --the great, thewise, the wicked, the cruel, the rapacious, --and there is no humanforce that can dissever name from adjective. Some far-away historian, studying all the documents, examining the sequence of events, willconfute the tradition in learned books; but his work not only will notsucceed in persuading the ignorant multitude, but must also contendagainst the multiplied objections offered by the instinctiveincredulity of people of culture. 

You will say to me, "What is the use of writing history? Why spend somuch effort to correct the errors in which people will persist justas if the histories were never written?" I reply that I do not believethat the office of history is to give to men who have guided the greathuman events a posthumous justice. It is already work serious enoughfor every generation to give a little justice to the living, rather than occupy itself rendering it to the dead, who indeed, incontradistinction from the living, have no need of it. The study ofhistory, the rectification of stories of the past, ought to serveanother and practical end; that is, train the men who governnations to discern more clearly than may be possible from their ownenvironment the truth underlying the legends. As I have already said, passions, interests, present historic personages in a thousand formswhen they are alive, transfiguring not only the persons themselves, but events the most diverse, the character of institutions, theconditions of nations. 

It is generally believed that legends are found only at the dawnof history, in the poetic period; that is a great mistake; thelegend--the legend that deceives, that deforms, that misdirects--iseverywhere, in all ages, in the present as in the past--in the presenteven more than in the past, because it is the consequence of certainuniversal forms of thought and of sentiment. To-day, just as ten ortwenty centuries ago, interests and passions dominate events, alterthem and distort them, creating about them veritable romances, moreor less probable. The present, which appears to all to be the samereality, is instead, for most people, only a huge legend, traversed bycontemporaries stirred by the most widely differing sentiments. 

However the mass may content itself with this legend, throbbingwith hate and love, with hope and the fear of its own self-createdphantoms, those who guide and govern the masses ought to try to divinethe truth, as far as they can. A great man of state is distinguishedfrom a mediocre by his greater ability to divine the real in his worldof action beneath its superfice of confused legends; by his greaterability to discriminate in everything what is true from what is merelyapparently true, in the prestige of states and institutions, in theforces of parties, in the energy attributed to certain men, in thepurposes claimed by parties and men, often different from theirreal designs. To do that, some natural disposition is necessary, aliveliness of intuition that must come with birth; but this facultycan be refined and trained by a practical knowledge of men, byexperience in things, and by the study of history. In the ages dead, when the interests that created their legends have disappeared, wecan discover how those great popular delusions, which are one of thegreatest forces of history, are made and how they work. We may thusfortify the spirit to withstand the cheating illusions that surroundus, coming from every part of the vast modern world, in which somany interests dispute dominion over thoughts and will. In this sensealone, I believe that history may teach, not the multitude, which willnever learn anything from it, but, impelled by the same passions, will always repeat the same errors and the same foolishnesses; butthe chosen few, who, charged with directing the game of history, haveconcern in knowing as well as they can its inner law. Taken in thisway, history may be a great teacher, in its every page, every line, and the study of the legend of Antony and Cleopatra may itself evenserve to prepare the spirit of a diplomat, who must treat betweenstate and state the complicated economic and political affairs ofthe modern world. And so, in conclusion, history and life interchangemutual services; life teaches history, and history, life; observingthe present, we help ourselves to know the past, and from the study ofthe past we can return to our present the better tempered and preparedto observe and comprehend it. In present and in past, history can forma kind of wisdom set apart, in a certain sense aristocratic, abovewhat the masses know, at least as to the universal laws that governthe life of nations. 

The Development of Gaul

In estimating distant historical events, one is often the victim ofan error of perspective; that is, one is disposed to consider as theoutcome of a pre-established plan of human wisdom what is the finalresult, quite unforeseen, of causes that acted beyond the foresight ofcontemporaries. At the distance of centuries, turning back to considerthe past, we can easily find out that the efforts of one or twogenerations have produced certain effects on the actual condition ofthe world; and then we conclude that those generations meant toreach that result. On the contrary, men almost always face the futureproposing to themselves impossible ends; notwithstanding which, theirefforts, accumulating, destroying, interweaving, bring into beingconsequences that no one had foreseen or planned, the novelty orimportance of which often only future generations realise. Columbus, who, fixed in the idea of reaching India by sailing west, findsAmerica on his way and does not recognise it at once but is persuadedthat he has landed in India, symbolises the lot of man in history. 

Of this phenomenon, which is to me a fundamental law of history, there is a classic example in the story of Rome: the conquest of Gaul. Without doubt, one of the greatest works of Rome was the conquest andRomanisation of Gaul: indeed that conquest and Romanisation of Gaulis the beginning of European civilisation; for before the Græco-Latincivilisation reached the Rhine over the ways opened by the Romansword, the continent of Europe had centres of civilisation onthe coast or in its projecting extremities, like Italy, Bætica, Narbonensis; but the interior was still entirely in the power of aturbulent and restless barbarism, like the African continent to-day. Moreover, what Rome created in Asia and Africa was almost entirelydestroyed by ages following; on the contrary, Rome yet lives inFrance, to which it gave its language, its spirit, and the traditionsof its thought. Exactly for this reason it is particularly importantto explain how such an outcome was brought about, and by what historicforces. From the propensity to consider every great historicalevent as wholly a masterpiece of human genius, many historians haveattributed also this accomplishment to a prodigious, well-nigh divinewisdom on the part of the Romans, and Julius Cæsar is regarded asa demigod who had fixed his gaze upon the far, far distant future. However, it is not difficult, studying the ancient documents withcritical spirit, to persuade oneself that even if Cæsar was a man ofgenius, he was not a god; that from beginning to end, the real storyof the conquest of Gaul is very different from the commonly acceptedversion. 

I hope to demonstrate that Cæsar threw himself into the midst ofGallic affairs, impelled by slight incidents of internal politics, not only without giving any thought whatever to the future destinyof Gaul, but without even knowing well the conditions existing there. Gaul was then for all Romans a barbarous region, poor, gloomy, fullof swamps and forests in which there would be much fighting and littlebooty: no one was thinking then of having Roman territory cross theAlps; everyone was infatuated by the story of Alexander the Great, dreaming only of conquering like him all the rich and civilisedOrient; everyone, even Cæsar. Only a sequence of political accidentspushed him in spite of himself into Gaul. 

In 62 B. C. , Pompey had returned from the Orient, where he had finishedthe conquest of Pontus, begun by Lucullus, and annexed Syria. On hisreturn, the conservative party, irritated against him because he hadgone over to the opposite side, and having been given something tothink of by the prestige that the policy of expansion was winningfor the popular party, had succeeded by many intrigues in keepingthe Senate from ratifying what he had done in the East. This internalstruggle closed the Orient for several years to the adventurousinitiatives of the political imperialists; for as long as theadministration of Pompey remained unapproved, it was impossible tothink of undertaking new enterprises or conquests in Asia and Africa;and therefore, of necessity, Roman politics, burning for conquest andadventure, had to turn to another part of Europe. 

The letters of Cicero prove to us that Cæsar was not the first tothink that Rome, having its hands tied for the moment in the East, ought to interfere in the affairs of Gaul. The man who first had theidea of a Gallic policy was Quintus Metellus Celerus, husband of thefamous Clodia, and consul the year before Cæsar. Taking advantage ofcertain disturbances arisen in Gaul from the constant wars between thediffering parts, Metellus had persuaded the Senate to authorise him tomake war on the Helvetians. At the beginning of the year 59, that is, the year in which Cæsar was consul, Metellus was already preparingto depart for the war in Gaul, when suddenly he died; and then Cæsar, profiting by the interest in Rome for Gallic affairs, had the missionpreviously entrusted to Metellus given to himself and took up bothMetellus's office and his plan. Here you see at the beginning of thisstory the first accident, --the death of Metellus. An historian curiousof nice and unanswerable questions might ask himself what would havebeen the history of the world if Metellus had not died. Certainly Romewould have been occupied with Gallic concerns a year sooner and bya different man; Cæsar would probably have had to seek elsewhere abrilliant proconsulship and things Gallic would have for ever escapedhis energy. 

However it be, charged with the affairs of Gaul accidentally andunexpectedly, Cæsar went there without well knowing the condition ofit, and, in fact, as I think I proved in a long appendix published inthe French and English editions of my work, he began his Gallic policywith a serious mistake; that is, attacking the Helvetians. A superiormind, Cæsar was not long in finding his bearings in the midst of thetremendous confusion he found in Gaul; but for this, there is no needto think that he carried out in the Gallic policy vast schemes, longmeditated: he worked, instead, as the uncertain changes of Romanpolitics imposed. I believe that there is but one way to understandand reasonably explain the policy pursued by Cæsar in Gaul, his suddenmoves, his zigzags, his audacities, his mistakes; that is, to studyit from Rome, to keep always in mind the internal changes, the partystruggle, in which he was involved at Rome. In short, Gaul was forCæsar only a means to operate on the internal politics of Rome, ofwhich he made use from day to day, as the immediate interest of thepassing hour seemed to require. 

I cite a single example, but the most significant. Cæsar declared Gaula Roman province and annexed it to the Empire toward the end of57 B. C. ; that is, at the end of his second year as proconsul, unexpectedly, with no warning act to intimate such vigorous intent, --asurprise; and why? Look to Rome and you will understand. In 57 B. C. , the democratic party, demoralised by discords, upset by the popularagitation to recall Cicero from unjust exile, discredited by scandals, especially the Egyptian scandals, seemed on the point of going topieces. Cæsar understood that there was but one way to stop thisruin: to stun public opinion and all Italy with some highly audacioussurprise. The surprise was the annexation of Gaul. Declaring Gaul aRoman province after the victory over the Belgæ, he convinced Romethat he had in two years overcome all Gallic adversaries. And so, theconquest of Gaul--this event that was to open a new era, this event, the effects of which still endure--was, at the beginning in the mindthat conceived and executed it, nothing but a bold political expedientin behalf of a party, to solve a situation compromised by manifolderrors. 

But you will ask me: how from so tiny a seed could ever grow so mightya tree, covering with its branches so much of the earth? You know thatat the close of the proconsulship in Gaul, there breaks out a greatcivil war; this lasts, with brief interruptions and pauses, untilthe battle of Actium. Only toward 30 B. C. , is the tempest lulled, andduring this time Gaul seems almost to disappear; the ancient writershardly mention it, except from time to time for a moment to let usknow that some unimportant revolt broke out, now here, now there, inthe vast territory; that this or that general was sent to repress it. 

The civil wars ended, the government of Rome turns its attention tothe provinces anew, but for another reason. Saint Jerome tells us thatin 25 B. C. , Augustus increased the tribute from the Gauls: we findno difficulty in getting at the reason of this fact. The thing mosturgent after the re-establishment of peace was the re-arrangement offinance; that signified then, as always, an increase of imposts:but more could not be extorted from the Oriental provinces, alreadyexhausted by so many wars and plunderings; therefore the idea todraw greater revenues from the European provinces of recent conquest, particularly from Gaul, which until then had paid so little. Soyou see a-forging one link after another in the chain: Cæsar for apolitical interest conquers Gaul; thirty years afterward Augustus goesthere to seek new revenues for his balance-sheet; thence-forwardthere are always immediate needs that urge Roman politics into Gallicaffairs: and so it is that little by little Roman politics becomepermanently involved, by a kind of concatenation, not by deliberateplan. 

We can easily follow the process. Augustus had left in Gaul to exactthe new tribute, a former slave of Cæsar's, afterward liberated, --aGaul or German whom Cæsar had captured as a child in one of hisexpeditions and later freed, because of his consummate administrativeability. It appears, however, that, for the Gauls at least, thisability was even too great. In a curious chapter Dion tells us thatLicinius, this freedman, uniting the avarice of a barbarian to thepretences of a Roman, beat down everyone that seemed greater than he;oppressed all those who seemed to have more power; extorted enormoussums from all, were they to fill out the dues of his office, or toenrich himself and his family. His rascality was so stupendous thatsince the Gauls paid certain taxes every month, he increased tofourteen the number of the months, declaring that December, the last, was only the tenth; consequently it was necessary to count two more, one called Undecember and another, Duodecember. 

I would not guarantee this story true, since, when there is introducedinto a nation a new and more burdensome system of taxes, there arealways set in circulation tales of this kind about the rapacity ofthe persons charged with collecting them: but true or false, the taleshows that the Gauls were much irritated by the new tribute; indeedthis irritation increased so much that in the winter from the year 15till the year 14 B. C. , Augustus, having to remain in Gaul on accountof certain serious complications, arisen in Germany, was obliged togive his attention to it during his stay. The prominent men ofGaul presented vigorous complaints to him against Licinius and hisadministration. Then there occurred an episode that, recounted threecenturies later with a certain naïveté by Dion Cassius, has beenoverlooked by the historians, but which seems to me to be of primeinterest in the history of the Latin world. Dion writes:

 Augustus, not able to avoid blaming Licinius for the many denunciations and revelations of the Gallic chiefs, sought in other things to excuse him; he pretended not to know certain facts, made believe not to accept others, being ashamed to have placed such a procurator in Gaul. Licinius, however, extricated himself from the danger by a decidedly original expedient. When he realised that Augustus was displeased and that he was running great risk of being punished, he conducted that Prince to his house, and showing him his numerous treasuries full of gold and silver, enormous piles of objects made of precious metals, said:--"My lord, only for your good and that of the Romans have I amassed all these riches. I feared that the natives, fortified by such wealth, might revolt, if I left them to them: therefore I have placed them in safe-keeping for you and I give them to you. " So, by his pretext that he had thus broken the power of the barbarians for the sake of Augustus, Licinius saved himself from danger. 

This incident has without doubt the smack of legend. Ought wetherefore to conclude that it is wholly invented? No, because inhistory the distortions of the truth are much more numerous thanare inventions. This page of Dion is important. It preserves forus, presented in a dramatic scene between Augustus and Licinius, therecord of a very serious dispute carried on between the notable men ofGaul and Licinius, in the presence of Augustus. The Gauls complain ofpaying too many imposts: Licinius replies that Gaul is very rich;that it grows rich quickly and therefore it ought to pay as much as isdemanded of it, and more. Not only did the freedman show rooms full ofgold and silver to his lord; he showed him the great economic progressof Gaul, its marvellous future, the immense wealth concealed inits soil and in the genius of its inhabitants. In other words, thischapter of Dion makes us conclude that Rome--that is, the smalloligarchy that was directing its politics--realised that the Gaulconquered by Cæsar, the Gaul that had always been considered asa country cold and sterile, was instead a magnificent province, naturally rich, from which they might get enormous treasure. Thisdiscovery was made in the winter of 15-14 B. C. ; that is, forty-threeyears after Cæsar had added the province to the Empire; forty-threeyears after they had possessed without knowing what they possessed, like some _grand seigneur_ who unwittingly holds among the commonthings of his patrimony some priceless object, the value of which onlyan accident on a sudden reveals. 

This chapter of Dion allows us also to affirm that he who firstrealised the value of Gaul and opened the eyes of Augustus, was nogreat personage of the Roman aristocracy whose names are written insuch lofty characters on the pages of history, whose images are yetfound in marble and bronze among the museums of Europe; no one ofthose who ruled the Empire and therefore according to reason andjustice had the responsibility of governing it well: it was, instead, an obscure freedman, whose ability the masters of the Empire scornedto exploit except as to-day a peasant uses the forces of his ox, hardly deigning to look at him and yet deeming all his labour but theowner's natural right. 

So stands the story. The Gallic freedman observed, and understood, andwas forgotten; posterity, instead, has had to wonder over the profoundwisdom of the Roman aristocrat, who understood nothing. Moreover, ifin 14 B. C. Licinius had to make an effort to persuade the surprisedand diffident Augustus that Gaul was a province of great future, it isclear that Gaul must already have begun to grow rich by itself withoutthe Roman government's having done anything to promote its progress. 

From what hidden sources sprang forth this new wealth of Gaul? All thedocuments that we possess authorise us to respond that Gaul--to beginfrom the time of Augustus--was able to grow rich quickly, because theevents following the Roman conquest turned and disposed the generalconditions of the Empire in its favour. Gaul then, as France now, wasendowed with several requisites essential to its becoming a nation ofgreat economic development: a land very fertile; a population densefor the times, intelligent, wide-awake, active; a climate that, eventhough it seemed to Greeks and Romans cold and foggy, was bettersuited to intense activity than the warm and sunny climate of theSouth; and finally, --a supreme advantage in ancient civilisation, --itwas everywhere intersected, as by a network of canals, by navigablerivers. In ancient times transport by land was very expensive;water was the natural and economic vehicle of commerce: thereforecivilisation was able to enter with commerce into the interior ofcontinents only by way of the rivers, which, as one might say, were toa certain extent the railroads of the ancient world. 

To these advantageous conditions, which, being physical, existedbefore the Roman conquest, the conquest added some others: it brokedown the political barrier that previously cut off these convenientmeans of penetration, the rivers; it suppressed the wars betweenthe Gallic tribes, the privileges, the tyrannies, the tolls, themonopolies; it saved the enormous resources that were previouslywasted in these constant drains; it put again the hoe, the spade, thetools of the artisan, into hands that had before been wielding thesword; and finally, it consolidated (and this was perhaps the mostimportant effect) the jurisdiction of property. When Cæsar invadedGaul, the great landowners still cultivated cereals and textile plantsbut little; they put the greater part of their fortune into cattle, exactly because in that regime of continual war and revolution landseasily kept changing proprietors. Furthermore, the more frequentcontact with Rome acquainted the Gauls with Roman agriculture and itsabler methods, with Latin life and its studied order. 

By the combination of all these causes, population and productionincreased rapidly. The gain in population was so considerable thatthe ancients themselves noticed it. Strabo (Bk. 4, ch. I, §2) observesthat the Gallic women are fecund mothers and excellent nurses. Withthe population, wealth increased on all sides, in agriculture as inindustry and in trade. 

The new and more stable jurisdiction of the landed proprietarygenerated another most important effect; it promoted rapidly thecultivation of cereals and textile plants, of wheat and flax. "AllGaul produces much wheat, " says Strabo, and we read his notice withoutsurprise, because we know that France is, even to-day, the region ofEurope most fertile in cereals. There is no reason to suppose that itmust have been barren of them twenty centuries ago. Other documentaryevidence, particularly inscriptions, confirms Strabo, informing usthat, especially in the second century, Rome bought the customarygrain to feed the metropolis not only in Egypt, but also in Gaul. In short, Gaul seems to have been the sole region of Europe fertileenough to be able to export grain, to have been for Rome a kind ofCanada or Middle West of the time, set not beyond oceans but beyondthe Alps. 

The cultivation of flax, to the ancient world what cotton is to-day, progressed rapidly in Gaul along with that of wheat, so that Gaul wasearly able to rival Egypt also in this respect. That Gaul and Egyptshould have so much in common at the same time, was something sointeresting and seemed so strange that Pliny himself wrote:

 Flax is sowed only in sandy places and after a single ploughing. Perhaps Egypt may be pardoned for sowing it, because with it she buys the merchandise of India and Arabia. But, look you!--even Gaul is famous for this plant. What matters it, if huge mountains shut away the sea; if on the ocean side it has for confines what is called emptiness? Notwithstanding that, Gaul cultivates flax like Egypt: the Cadurci, the Caleti, the Ruteni, the Biturigi, the Morini, who are considered tribes of the ends of the earth . . . But what am I saying? All Gaul makes sails, --till the enemies beyond the Rhine imitate them, and the linen is more beautiful to the eyes than are their women. 

These descriptions show Gaul to be one of the new countries, like theArgentine Republic or the United States, in which the land has stillalmost its natural pristine fecundity and brings forth a marvellousabundance of plants that clothe and nourish man. We know that in Gaulunder the Empire there were immense fortunes in land in face of whichthe fortunes of wealthy Italian proprietors shrink like the fortunesof Europe when compared with the great ranch fortunes of the ArgentineRepublic or the United States. Twenty years ago they began to excavatein France the ruins of the great Gallo-Roman villas: these areconstructed on the plan of the Italian villa, decorated in the sameway, but are much larger, more sumptuous, more sightly; one feelsin them the pride of a new people which has adopted the Latincivilisation, but has infused into that, derived from the wealth oftheir land, a spirit of grandeur and of luxury that poorer and olderLatins did not know, exactly as to-day the Americans infuse a spiritof greater magnitude and boldness into so many things that they takefrom timid, old Europe. Perhaps there was also in this Gallic luxury, as in the American, a bit of ostentation, intended to humiliate themasters remaining poorer and more modest. 

But Gaul was a nation not only rich in fertilest agriculture; side byside with that, progressed its industry. This, according to mynotion, is one of the vital points in ancient history. Under the Romandomination, Gaul was not restricted to the better cultivation of itsproductive soil; but alone among the peoples of the Occident, became, as we might now say, an industrial nation, that manufactured not onlyby and for itself, but like Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, sold also toother peoples of the Empire and outside of its own boundaries; ina word, exported. The more frequent contact with the Orient betteracquainted the Gauls with the beautiful objects made by the artisansof Laodicea, of Tyre, of Sidon; and the clever genius of the Celt, always apt in industry, drew from them incentive to create a Gallicindustry, partly imitative, partly original, and to seek a large_clientèle_ for these industries in Italy, in Spain, beyond the Rhine, among the Germans, in the Danube provinces. This is proved by anumber of important passages in Pliny, confirmed by inscriptions andarchæological discoveries. 

Pliny has already told us that the Gauls manufactured many linensails; we know also that they made not only rough sails, but also finelinen for clothing, which had a wide market. There have been found inthe Orient numerous fragments of an inscription containing the famousedict of Diocletian on maximum sale prices allowed, an inscriptionof value to us for its nomenclature of ancient fabrics. In thisnomenclature is mentioned the _birrus_ of Laodicea, an imitation ofthe _birrus_ of the Nervii, which was a very fine linen cloth, wornby ladies of fashion. Laodicea was one of the most ancient centres ofOriental textile fabrics; the Nervii were one of the most remote ofthe Gallic peoples, living--the coincidence is noteworthy--about whereFlanders is now. If at Laodicea they made at the end of the thirdcentury an imitation of Nervian linen, that means that the Nervii hadsucceeded in manufacturing and finding market for cloth so desirableas to rouse the Laodiceans, competing for trade, to imitate it. Whatproof more persuasive that during the early centuries of the Empirethe Gauls greatly improved their industries and widened their markets?

They had mastered weaving, but they did not stop there; they inventednew methods of dyeing, using vegetable dyes instead of the customaryanimal colours of the Orient. Pliny says:

 The Gaul imitates with herbs all colours, including Tyrian purple; they do not seek the mollusk on the sea bottom; they run no risk of being devoured by sea monsters; they do not exploit the anchorless deep to multiply the attractions of the courtesan, or to increase the powers of the seducer of another's wife. They gather the herbs like cereals, standing on the dry ground; although the colour that they derive does not bear washing. Luxury could thus be gratified with greater show at the cost of fewer dangers. 

It is clear, then, according to Pliny, at one time, it was believedthat the competition of Gallic dyers might have ruined the Oriental, and would have done so, had the tenacity of their vegetable colouringequalled its beauty. In another passage Pliny tells us that theseGallic stuffs were used especially by the slaves and the populace. 

The wool industry made no less progress in Gaul than weaving anddyeing. From numerous passages in Juvenal and Martial it appearsthat the woollen clothing worn by the populace of Rome in the secondcentury was woven in Gaul, particularly in the districts to-dayknown as Arras, Langres, Saintonge. Pliny attributes to the Gauls theinvention of a wool, that, soaked in acid, became incombustible, andwas used to make mattresses. 

Glass-making was another art carried from the East across theMediterranean into Gaul. Still another industry, metallurgy, afterweaving, contributed greatly to enrich Gaul. Undoubtedly even beforethe Roman conquest, Gaul worked gold mines; it seems, however, thatsilver mines remained untouched until about the time of Augustus. Atany rate, the discovery of some deposits of gold and silver then gavea spur to several flourishing industries; jewelry-making, and--anoriginal Gallic industry of much importance--silver-plating andtinning. Here is another extract from Pliny, from which you willsee that in those times they already made in France "Christofle"silver-plate:

 They cover [writes Pliny] the copper with tin in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish it from silver. It is a Gallic invention. Later they began to do the same thing with silver, silver-plating especially the ornaments of horses and carriages. The merit of the invention belongs to the Biturigi, and the industry was developed in the city of Alesia. After the same fashion there has been spread everywhere a foolish profusion of objects not only silver-, but gold-plated. All that is called _cultus_, elegance!

We might almost say that Gallic industry did to the old industries ofthe ancient world what German wares have done compared with older andmore aristocratic products of France, of England, popularising objectsof luxury for the many and the merely well-to-do. 

Finally, if any one hesitated to trust fully these very importantpassages in Pliny, he would be quite convinced by reading the greatwork of Dechelette. This author, studying with Carthusian patience andthe ablest critical acumen the Gallic ceramics to be found scatteredamong the museums, has demonstrated most commendably that in the firstcentury of the Empire many manufactories of ceramics were opened andflourished in Gaul, especially in the valley of the Allier, and thatthey sold their vases in Spain, in the Danube regions, to the Germans, and in Italy. 

Dechelette has proved that many ceramics found among the ruins ofPompeii, now admired in the museums of Pompeii and Naples, were madein Gaul, --discoveries most noteworthy, which, in connection with theextracts from Pliny, disclose in essence that real Roman Gaul whosesumptuous relics but half tell the tale of its wealth. 

This tremendous development of Gaul was without doubt an effect of theRoman conquest; but an effect that neither Cæsar, nor any other manof his times had foreseen or willed, but which Augustus was first torecognise in the winter of 15-14 B. C. , and to which, astute man thathe was, he gave heed as he ought; that is, not as due his own merit, but as an unexpected piece of good fortune. I have already said thatone of the greatest cares of Augustus, as soon as the civil wars werefinished, was to reorganise the finances of the Empire; that to findnew entries for the treasury, he had turned his attention in 27 B. C. To the province conquered by his father, regarding it merely fromthe common point of view, as poor and of little worth like theother European territories. Then, at a stroke, he realised that thatterritory so lightly valued, was producing grain like Egypt, linenlike Egypt; that the arts of civilisation for which Egypt was so richand famous were beginning to prosper there! Augustus was not the manto let slip so tremendous a piece of good luck. Until then he hadhesitated, like one who seeks his way; in that winter from 15-14 B. C. , he found finally the grand climax of his career, to make Gaul theEgypt of the West, the province of the greatest revenues in Europe. From that time on to the end of his life, he did not move from Europe;he lived between Italy and Gaul. Like him, Tiberius, Drusus, all themen of his family, devoted all their efforts to Gaul, to consolidatingRoman dominion there, to advancing its progress, to increasing therevenues, to making it actually the Occidental Egypt. From Velleius welearn that under Tiberius Gaul rendered to the Empire as much as didEgypt, and that Gaul and Egypt were considered alike the two richestimperial provinces. 

As a political interest had at first impelled Cæsar to annex Gaul, animmediate financial interest urged Augustus to continue the work, to take care of the new province. Then the historic law that I havealready enunciated to you, the law by which the efforts of men resultfar differently from that which they had intended, was verified anewby Augustus also, and in a new form. He had created his Gallic policyto augment the revenues of the Empire; the consequences of this fiscalpolicy, necessity-inspired, were greater than he and his friends everdreamed. The winter of 15-14 B. C. Is a notable date in the story ofLatin civilisation, for then the destiny of the Empire was irrevocablysettled; the Roman Empire will be made up of two parts, the Orientaland the Occidental, each part sufficiently strong to withstandbeing overcome by the other; it will be neither an Asiatic, nor aCeltic-Latin, but a mixed Empire: between both parts, Italy will rulefor two centuries more, and Rome, an immense city, at once Orientaland Latin, will keep the metropolitan crown won from the enfeebledEast, and dominate the immature barbarian West. 

Speaking of Cleopatra, I have shown you how great was the Orientalperil that threatened in the last century of the Republic to wipe outRome. What miraculous force saved it? Gaul. Suppose that the army ofCæsar had been exterminated at Alesia; suppose that Rome, discouraged, had abandoned its Gallic enterprise as it had done with Persia, afterthe disaster of Crassus and the failure of Antony; or suppose thatGaul had been a poor province, sterile and unpopulous, like many aDanube district; Rome could not have held out long as the seat ofimperial government, just as to-day the capital of the Russian Empirecould not maintain itself at Vladivostok or Harbin. It would have beennecessary to move the metropolis to a richer and more populous region. That Gaul grew rich and was Romanised, changed the state of things. When Rome possessed beyond the Alps in Europe a province as large andas full of resources as Egypt; when there was the same interest indefending it as in defending Egypt, Italy was well placed to governboth. The Egypt of the Occident counterbalanced the Egypt of theOrient, and Rome, half way between, was the natural and necessarymetropolis of the wide-spread Empire. Gaul alone, revived, soto speak, the Empire in the West and prevented the Europeanprovinces--even Italy itself--from becoming dead limbs safelyamputable from the Oriental body. Gaul upheld Italy and Rome in Europefor three centuries longer; Gaul stopped it on the way to the Asiaticconquests run through by Alexander. Had it not been for Gaul, AsiaMinor, Syria, and Egypt would have formed the real Empire of Rome, and Italy would have been lost in it: without Gaul, the OrientalisedEmpire would have tried to conquer Persia and probably succeeded indoing so, abandoning the poor and unproductive lands of the untamedOccident. In short, Gaul created in the Roman Empire that dualitybetween East and West which gives shape to all the history of ourcivilisation; it kept the artificial form of the Empire, circularabout an island sea; it inspired the Empire with that doubleself-contradictory spirit, Latin and Oriental, at once its strengthand its weakness. 

Next time I will show you the continuation of this struggle of twominds, in a characteristic episode, the story of the Emperor Nero. Now, before closing, let me set before you briefly some generalconsiderations drawn from the history of Roman Gaul which areapplicable to universal history. 

From what I have told you, it follows that the fortunes of peoples andstates depend in part on what might be called the historic situationof every age, the situation that is created by the general state ofthe world in every successive epoch and which no people or state canmould at its own pleasure. Without doubt, a nation will never conquera noteworthy greatness if the men that compose it fail of a certainculture, a certain energy, a social _morale_ sufficiently vigorous;but though these qualities are necessary, they are not equallyproductive in all periods, but serve more or less, in differentperiods, according as general circumstances are disposed about apeople. Gaul was fertile, and its people possessed before the conquestthe qualities that they displayed later: and yet, as long as Gaulremained apart from the Empire, without continuous and numerouscommunications with the vast Mediterranean world; as long as itwas split into so many petty rival states, occupied in serious warsagainst the Germanic tribes, its fertility remained hidden in theearth, and the ability of its inhabitants dissipated itself indevastating wars, instead of spending itself in fruitful effort. Allthat changed, and without any one's foresight or intent, when theRoman policy, urged by the internal forces that stirred the Republic, had destroyed that old order of things. 

The ancients understood that peoples, like individual men, canregulate their destiny only in part; that about us, above us, areforces complex and obscure, which we can hardly comprehend, whichinvest us, seize us, impel us whither we had not thought to go, nowto shipwreck on the rocks of misadventure, now to the discovery ofislands of happiness, or to find, like Columbus, an America on theway to India. The Greeks called this power; the Latins, Fortuna, anddeified it; erected temples and made sacrifices to it; dedicated toit a cult, of which Augustus was a devotee, and which contained moresecret wisdom of life than all the superb theories on human destinyconceived by European genius in the delirium of this quarter-hour ofmeasureless might in which we are living. No, man is not the voluntaryartificer of his whole destiny; fortune and misfortune, triumph andcatastrophe, are never entirely proportioned to personal merit orblame; every generation finds the world organised in a certain orderof interests, forces, traditions, relations, and as it enjoys the goodthat preceding generations have accomplished, so in part it expiatesthe errors they have committed; as it draws advantage from beneficentforces acting outside of it and independent of its merit, so itsuffers from the sinister forces that it finds--even though blamelessitself--acting through the great mass of the world, among men andtheir works. From this relation to the unseen follows a rule of wisdomthat modern men, full of unbounded pride, and persuaded that theyare the beginning and end of the universe, too often forget: we mustindeed press on with all our powers to the accomplishment of a greattask, for although our destiny is never entirely made by our ownhands, there is no destiny on the earth for the lazy; but, sincea part of what we are depends not on ourselves, but upon what theancients called Fortune, we dare never be too much elated oversuccess, nor abased by failure. The wheel of destiny turns by amysterious law, alike for families and for peoples: those in highposition may fall; those in low, may rise. 

Certainly Cæsar never suspected when he was fighting the Gauls, thatthe great-grandsons of the vanquished would live in villas modelled onthe Roman, but more sumptuous; that the great Gallic nobles would havethe satisfaction of parading before the people that conquered them alatinity more impressive and magnificent; and that some day the Gaulput by him to fire and sword would get the better, in empire, inwealth, in culture, of even Italy. 

Nero

On the 13th of October of 54 A. D. , when Emperor Claudius died, theSenate chose as his successor his adopted son, Nero, a young man ofseventeen, fat and short-sighted, who had until then studied onlymusic, singing, and drawing. This choice of a child-emperor, wholacked imperial qualities and suggested the child kings of Orientalmonarchies, was a scandalous novelty in the constitutional history ofRome. The ancient historians, especially Tacitus, considered the eventas the result of an intrigue, cleverly arranged by Nero's mother, Agrippina, a daughter of Germanicus and granddaughter of Agrippa, thebuilder of the Pantheon. According to these historians, Agrippina, a highly ambitious woman, induced Claudius to marry her afterMessalina's death, although she was a widow and had a child, and assoon as she entered the emperor's mansion she began to open the wayfor the election of her son. In order to exclude Britannicus, the sonof Messalina, from succession, she persuaded Claudius to adopt Nero;then, with the help of the two tutors of the young man, Seneca andBurrhus, created in the Senate and among the Prætorians, a partyfavourable to her son; no sooner did she feel that she could rely onthe Senate and the Prætorians, than she poisoned Claudius. 

Too many difficulties prevent our accepting this version. To cite oneof them will suffice: if Agrippina wished--as she surely did--that herson should succeed Claudius, she must also have wished that Claudiuswould live at least eight or ten years longer. As a great-grandson ofDrusus, a grandson of Germanicus and the last descendant of his line, the only line in the whole family enjoying a real popularity, Nero wassure of election if he were of age at the death of Claudius. After theterrible scandal in which his mother had disappeared, Britannicus wasno longer a competitor to be feared. There was only one danger forNero, if Claudius should die too soon, the Senate might refuse totrust the Empire to a child. 

I believe that Claudius died of disease, probably, if we can judgefrom Tacitus's account, of gastroenteritis, and that Agrippina'scoterie, surprised by this sudden death, which upset all their plans, decided to put through Nero's election in spite of his youth, in orderto insure the power to the line of Drusus, which had so much sympathyamong the masses. As a matter of fact, the admiration for Drususand his family triumphed over all other considerations: Nero becameemperor at seventeen; but when the election was over, Rome--againaccording to the tales of the ancient historians--saw a stillgreater scandal than his election. The young man--and this iscredible--hastened to engage as his master the first zither-playerof Rome, Terpnos; continued his study of singing; and bought statues, pictures, bronzes, beautiful slaves, while his mother seized theactual control of the State. 

Agrippina insisted on being kept informed of all affairs; directedthe home and foreign policy; and if she did not reach the point ofpartaking in the sessions of the Senate, which would have been thesupreme scandal, she called it to meet in her palace and, concealedbehind a black curtain, listened to its discussions. In short, theEmpire fell into the hands of a woman; Rome saw the evolution ofcustoms, through which woman had for four centuries been freeingherself from her ancient slavery, suddenly a fact accomplished byher visible intervention in politics--the intervention that the greatkeepers of tradition, first among them Cato, had always decried as themost frightful cataclysm that could menace the city. 

This story is also the exaggeration of a simpler truth. Even if Nerohad been a very serious young man, at his age he could not by himselfhave governed the Empire; it would have been necessary for him toserve a long apprenticeship and to listen to experienced counsellors. Burrhus and Seneca, his two teachers, were naturally destined to behis counsellors; but why should not his mother also have helped him?Like all the women of her family, Agrippina was of superior mind, ofhigh culture, and, as Tacitus himself admits, led a most respectablelife, at least to the time of her marriage with Claudius. Brought up, as she was, in that family which for eighty years had been governingthe Empire, she was well informed about affairs of State. Is itpossible to suppose that such a woman would shut herself up in herhome to weave wool, when, with her talent, her energy, her experience, she could be of so much service to her son and to the State? We do notneed to attribute to Agrippina a monstrous ambition, as does Tacitus, in order to explain how the Empire was ruled during the first twoyears, by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina; it was a natural consequenceof the situation created by the premature death of Claudius. Tacitushimself is forced to recognise that the government was excellent. 

Helping her son in the apprenticeship of the Empire, Agrippina did herduty; but during restless times when misunderstanding is almost alaw of social life, it is often very dangerous to do one's duty. Theperiod of Agrippina and Nero was full of confusion; though apparentlyquiet, Italy was deeply torn by the great struggle that gives thehistory of the Empire its marvellous character of actuality, thestruggle between the old Roman military society and the intellectualcivilisation of the Orient. 

The ancient aristocratic and military Roman society had had so greatand world-wide a success, that the ideas, the institutions and thecustoms, that had made it a perfect model of State, considered as anorgan of political and military domination, exercised a great prestigeon the following generations. Even during the time of which we speak, every one was forced after eight years of peace, to admit that theEmpire had been created by those ideas, those institutions and thosecustoms; that for the sake of the Empire they must be maintained, and alike in family as in State, must be opposed all that formsthe essence of intellectual civilisation; that is to say, allthat develops personal selfishness at the expense of collectiveinterest--luxury, idleness, pleasure, celibacy, feminism, and atthe same time, all that develops personality and intelligence at theexpense of tradition--liberty of women, independence of children, variety of personal tendencies, and the critical spirit in all forms. 

In spite of the resistance offered by traditions, peace and wealthfavoured everywhere the diffusion of the intellectual civilisation ofthe Hellenised Orient. The woman now become free, and the intellectualman now become powerful, were the springs to set in motion thisrevolution. Under Claudius, in vain had they exiled Seneca, thebrilliant philosopher and the peace-advocating humanitarian, who haddiffused in high Roman society so many ideas and sentiments consideredby the traditionalists pernicious to the force of the State; he hadcome back far more powerful, and ruled the Empire. Husbands, burdenedby the excessive expenses, by the too frequent infidelities, by thetyrannical caprices of their wives, in vain regretted the good oldtime when husbands were absolute masters; the invading feminismweakened everywhere the strength of the aristocratic and militarytraditions. 

So contradiction was everywhere. The Republic had still its oldaristocratic constitution, but the nobility was no longer spurred bythat absorbing and exclusive passion for politics and war, whichhad been its power. Society life, pleasure, amateur philosophyand literature, mysticism, and, above all, sports, dissipated in athousand directions its energy and activity. Too many young menwere to be found in the nobility who, like Nero, preferred singing, dancing, and driving, to caring for their clients or enduring thetroubles of public office. 

Augustus and Tiberius had done their utmost to strengthen the greatLatin principle of parsimony in public and private life: in order toset a good example they had lived very simply; they had caused newsumptuary laws to be passed and tried to enforce the old ones;they had spent the State moneys, not for the keeping of artists andwriters, nor for the building of monuments of useless size, but tobuild the great roads of the Empire, to strengthen the frontiers;they had made the public treasure into an aid fund for all sufferingcities, stricken by earthquake, fire, or flood. And yet the Orientalinfluence, so favourable to unproductive and luxurious expenditure, gained ground steadily. The merchant of Syrian and Egyptian objects_de luxe_, in spite of the sumptuary laws, found a yearly increasingpatronage in all the cities of Italy. The exactingness of the desirefor public spectacles increased, even in secondary cities. The Italianpeople were losing their peasant's petty avarice and growing fondof things monumental and colossal, which was the great folly of theOrient. They found the monuments of Rome poor; everywhere, even inmodest _municipia_, they demanded immense theatres, great temples, monumental basilicas, spacious forums, adorned with statues. In spiteof the principles insisted upon with so much vigour by Augustus andTiberius, public finances had, thanks to the weak Claudius and theextravagant Messalina, already gone through a period of great wasteand disorder. 

These contradictions, and the psychological disorder that followed, explain the discords and struggles very soon raging around the youngEmperor. The public began to feel shocked by the attention thatAgrippina gave to State affairs, as by a new and this time intolerablescandal of feminism. Agrippina was not a feminist, as a matter offact, but a traditionalist, proud of the glory of her family, attachedto the ancient Roman ideas, desirous only of seeing her son developinto a new Germanicus, a second Drusus. Solely the necessity ofhelping Nero had led her to meddle with politics. But not in vain hadCato declaimed so loudly in Rome against women who pretend to governstates; not in vain had Augustus's domination been at least partlyfounded on the great antifeminist legend of Antony and Cleopatra, which represented the fall of the great Triumvir as the consequence ofa woman's influence. The public, although willing to give all possiblefreedom to women in other things, still remained quite firm on thispoint: politics must remain the monopoly of man. So to the popularimagination, Agrippina soon became a sort of Roman Cleopatra. Manyinterests gathered quickly to reinforce this antifeminist reaction, which, although exaggerated, had its origin in sincere feeling. 

Agrippina, as a true descendant of Drusus, meant to prepare her sonto rule the Empire according to the principles held by his greatancestors. Among these principles was to be counted not onlythe defence of Romanism and the maintenance of the aristocraticconstitution, but also a wise economy in the management of finances. Agrippina is a good instance of that well-known fact--the Britishhave noticed it more than once in India--that in public administrationdiscreet and capable women keep, as a rule, the spirit of economywith which they manage the home. This is why, especially in despoticstates, they rule better than men. Even before Claudius's death, Agrippina had vigorously opposed waste and plunder; it also appearsthat the reorganisation of finances after Messalina's death was duechiefly to her. 

The continuation under Nero of this severe régime displeased a greatnumber of persons, who dreamed of seeing again the easy sway ofMessalina. From the moment they were satisfied that Agrippina, likeAugustus and Tiberius, would not allow the public money to be stolen, many people found her insistent interference in public affairsunbearable. In short, Agrippina became unpopular, and, as alwayshappens, because of faults she did not have. A noble deed, whichshe was trying to accomplish in defence of tradition, definitivelycompromised her situation. 

Her son resembled neither Agrippina nor the great men of her family. He had a most indocile temperament, rebellious to tradition, in nosense Roman. Little by little, Agrippina saw the young Emperor developinto a precocious _debauché_, frightfully selfish, erratically vain, full of extravagant ideas, who, instead of setting the example ofrespect toward sumptuary laws, openly violated them all; and acrosswhose mind from time to time flashed sinister lightnings of cruelty. Nero's youth--the fact is not surprising--did not resist the mortalseductions of immense power and immense riches; but Agrippina, theproud granddaughter of the conqueror of Germany, must have chafedat the idea of her son's preferring musical entertainments to thesessions of the Senate, singing lessons to the study of tactics andstrategy. 

She applied herself, therefore, with all her energy to the work oftearing her son from his pleasures, and bringing about his returnto the great traditions of his family. Nero resisted: the strugglebetween mother and son grew complicated; it excited the passion of thepublic, which felt that this conflict had a greater importance thanany other family quarrel, that it was actually a struggle betweentraditional Romanism and Oriental customs. Unfortunately, every onesided with Nero: the sincere friends of tradition, because they didnot want the rule of a woman, whoever she might be; those that longedfor Messalina's times, because they saw personified in Agrippina theaustere and inflexible spirit of the _gens Claudia_. The situation wassoon without an issue. The accord of Agrippina with Seneca and Burrhuswas troubled, because the two teachers of the young Emperor, underthe impression of public malcontent, had somewhat withdrawn from her. Nero, who was sullen, cynical, and lazy, feared his mother too much tohave the courage to oppose her openly, but he did not fear her enoughto mend his ways. The mother, on her side, was set to do her duty tothe end. Like all situations without an issue, this one was suddenlysolved by an unexpected event. 

Insisting on wanting to make a Roman of this young _debauché_, Agrippina made him into a murderer. Nero, progressing from one capriceto another, finally imagined a great folly: to divorce Octavia and toraise to her place a beautiful freed-woman called Acte. According toone of the fundamental laws of the State, the great law of Augustus onmarriage, which forbade marriages between senators and freedwomen, theunion of Nero and Acte could be only a concubinage. Agrippina wantedto avoid this scandal; and, as Nero persisted in his idea, it seemsthat she actually thought of having him deposed and of securing thechoice of Britannicus, a very serious young man, as his successor. Atrue Roman, Agrippina was ready to sacrifice her son for the sake ofthe Republic. 

The threat was, or appeared to be, so serious to Nero, that it madehim step over the threshold of crime. One day during a great dinnerto which he had been invited by Nero, Britannicus was suddenly seizedwith violent convulsions. "It is an attack of epilepsy, " said Nerocalmly, giving orders to his slaves to remove Britannicus and carefor him. The young man died in a few hours and every one believed thatNero had poisoned him. 

This dastardly crime aroused at first a sense of horror and frightamong the people, but the impression did not last long. In spite ofall his faults, Nero was liked. In Rome they had respected Augustusand hated Tiberius; they had killed Caligula and jeered at Claudius;Nero seemed to be the first of the Roman Emperors who stood a chanceof becoming popular. Contrary to Agrippina's ideas, it was hisfrivolity that pleased the great masses, because this frivolitycorresponded to the slow but progressive decay of the old Romanvirtues in them. They expected from Nero a less hard, less severe, less parsimonious government--in a word, a government less Roman thanthe rule of his predecessors, a government which, instead of force, glory, and wisdom, meant pleasure and ease. 

So it happened that many soon forgot the unfortunate Britannicus, andsome even tried to justify Nero by invoking State necessity. Agrippinaalone remained the object of the universal hatred, as the sole causeof so many misfortunes. Implacable enemies, concealed in the shadow, were subtly at work against her; they organised a campaign of absurdcalumnies in the Court itself, and it is this campaign from whichTacitus drew his material. 

Some wretches finally dared even accuse her of conspiracy againstthe life of her son. Agrippina, refusing to plead for herself, stillweathered the storm, because Nero was afraid of her, and though hetried to escape from her authority, did not dare to initiate anyenergetic move against her. To engage in a final struggle with soindomitable a woman, another woman was necessary. This woman wasPoppæa Sabina, a very handsome and able dame of the great Romannobility. Poppæa represented Oriental feminism in its most dangerousform: a woman completely demoralised by luxury, elegance, societylife, and voluptuousness, who eluded all her duties toward the speciesin order to enjoy and make others enjoy her beauty. 

Corrupted as that age was, Poppæa was more corrupt. As soon as sheobserved the strong impression she had made on Nero, she conceivedthe plan of becoming his wife; her beauty would then be admired by thewhole Empire, would be surrounded by a luxury for which the means ofher husband were not sufficient, and with which no other Roman damecould compete. There was one obstacle--Agrippina. 

Agrippina protected Octavia, a true Roman woman, simple and honest:Agrippina would never consent to this absolutely unjustifiabledivorce. To force Nero to a decisive move against his mother, Poppæahad her husband sent on some mission to Lusitania and became themistress of the Emperor. From that point the situation changed. Dominated by Poppæa's influence, Nero found the courage to forceAgrippina to abandon his palace and seek refuge in Antony's house; hetook from her the privilege of Prætorian guards, which he himselfhad granted her; he reduced to a minimum the number and time of hisvisits, and carefully avoided being left alone with her. Agrippina'sinfluence, to the general satisfaction, rapidly declined, while Nerogained every day in popularity. Agrippina, however, was too energetica woman peaceably to resign herself: she began a violent campaignagainst the two adulterers, which deeply troubled the public. In Rome, where Augustus had promulgated his stern law against adultery; inRome, where Augustus himself had been obliged to submit to his ownlaw, when he exiled his daughter and his grand-daughter and almostexterminated the whole family; in Rome, a young man of twenty-twodared all but officially introduce adultery and polygamy into thePalatine! In her struggle against Nero, Agrippina once more stood ontradition: and Nero was afraid. 

Poppæa was probably the one who suggested to Nero the idea of killingAgrippina. The idea had been, as it were, floating in the air fora long time, because Agrippina was embarrassing to many persons andinterests. It was chiefly the party that wanted to sack the imperialbudget, to introduce the finance of great expenditure, which could nottolerate this clever and energetic woman, who was so faithful tothe great traditions of Augustus and Tiberius, who could neither befrightened nor corrupted. One should not consider the assassination ofAgrippina as a simple personal crime of Nero, as the result of hisand Poppæa's quarrels with his mother. This crime, besides personalcauses, had a political origin. Nero would never have dared commitsuch a misdeed, in the eyes of the Roman almost a sacrilege, if he hadnot been encouraged by Agrippina's unpopularity, by the violent hatredof so many against his mother. 

Nero hesitated long; he decided only when his freedman, Anicetus, the commander of the fleet, proposed a plan that seemed to guaranteesecrecy for the crime: to have a ship built with a concealed trap. Itwas the spring of the year 59 A. D. ; the Court had moved to Baiæ, onthe Gulf of Naples. If Nero succeeded in getting his mother on boardthe vessel, Anicetus would take upon himself the task of buryingquickly below the waves the secret of her death; the people who hatedAgrippina would easily be satisfied with the explanations to be giventhem. 

Nero executed his part of the plan in perfect cold-blood. He madebelieve he had repented and was anxious for a reconciliation with hismother; he invited her to Baiæ and so profusely lavished kindnessesand amiabilities upon her, that Agrippina finally believed in hissincerity. 

After spending a few days at Baiæ, Agrippina decided to return toAntium; in a very happy frame of mind and full of hopes that her sonwould soon show himself to the world the man she had dreamed, thedescendant of Drusus, she boarded one evening the fatal ship; Nerohad escorted her thither and pressed her to his heart with the mostdemonstrative tenderness. 

A calm night diffused its starry shadows over the quiet sea, whichwith subdued murmur lulled in their sleep the great summer homesalong the shore. The ship departed, carrying toward her sombre destinyAgrippina, absorbed in her smiling dreams. When the moment came andthe wrecking machine was set to work, the vessel did not sink as fastas they had hoped: it listed, overturning people and things. Agrippinahad time to understand the danger; with admirable presence of mind shejumped overboard and escaped by swimming, while, during the confusionon the boat, the hired murderers killed one of Agrippina's freedwomen, mistaking her for Agrippina herself. The ship finally sank; themurderers also took to the water; everything returned to its wontedcalm; the starry night still diffused its silent shadows; the seastill cradled with subdued murmur the homes along the coast--all menslept except one. 

Within this one, Anxiety watched: a son was awaiting the news thathis mother was dead, and that he was free to celebrate a criminalmarriage. The escaped murderers soon brought the news so impatientlyexpected--but Nero's joy was short. At dawn, a freedman of Agrippinaarrived at the Emperor's villa. Agrippina, picked up by a boat, hadsucceeded in reaching one of her villas near by; she sent the freedmanto tell the Emperor about the accident and to assure him of hersafety. Agrippina alive! It was like a thunderbolt to Nero, and helost his head: he saw his mother hurrying on to Rome, denouncingthe abominable attempt to Senate and people, rousing against him thePrætorian guard and the legions. Thoroughly frightened, he summonedSeneca and Burrhus and laid before them the terrible situation. Itis easy to imagine the shock of the old preceptors. How could herisk such a grave imprudence? And yet there was no time to lose inreproaches. Nero begged for advice: Seneca and Burrhus were silent, but they, also frightened, asked of themselves what Agrippina woulddo. Would she not provoke a colossal scandal, which would ruineverything? An expedient, the same one, occurred to both of them:but so sinister was the idea that they dared not speak it. This time, however, both the philosopher and the general were deceived as well asNero: Agrippina had guessed the truth and given up the struggle. Whatcould she, a lone woman do against an Emperor who did not stop evenat the plan of murdering his mother? She realised, during that awfulnight, that only one chance of safety was left to her--to ignore whathad taken place; and she sent her freedman with the message thatmeant forgiveness. But fear kept Nero and his counsellors fromunderstanding; and when they could easily have remedied the precedingmistake, they compromised all by a supreme error. Finally Seneca, thepacificator and humanitarian philosopher, thought he had found the wayof making half-openly the only suggestion which seemed wise to him: heturned to Burrhus and asked what might happen, if an order were giventhe Prætorians to kill Nero's mother. Burrhus understood that hiscolleague, although the first to give the fatal advice, was tryingto shift upon him the much more serious responsibility of carrying itout; since, if they reached the decision of having Agrippina disposedof by the Prætorians, no one but he, the commander of the guard, couldutter the order. He therefore protested with the greatest energy thatthe Prætorians would never lay murderous hands on the daughter ofGermanicus. Then he added cogitatively that, if it were thoughtnecessary, Anicetus and his sailors could finish the work alreadybegun. Thus Burrhus gave the same advice as Seneca, but he, like hiscolleague, meant to pass on to some one else the task of execution. Hechose better than Seneca: Anicetus, if Agrippina lived, ran a seriousrisk of becoming the scapegoat of all this affair. In fact, as soon asNero gave his assent, Anicetus and a few sailors hastened to the villaof Agrippina and stabbed her. 

The crime was abominable. Nero and his circle were so awed by it thatthey attempted to make the people believe that Agrippina hadcommitted suicide, when her conspiracy against her son's life had beendiscovered. This was the official version of Agrippina's death, sent by Nero to the Senate. But this audacious mystification had nosuccess. The public divined the truth, and roused by the voice oftheir age-long instincts, they cried out that the Emperor no less thanany peasant of Italy must revere his father and his mother. Through asudden turn of public feeling, Agrippina, who had been so much hatedduring her life, became the object of a kind of popular veneration;Nero, on the other hand, and Poppæa inspired a sentiment of profoundhorror. 

If Nero had found the living Agrippina unbearable, he soon realisedthat his dead mother was much more to be feared. In fact, scared as hewas by the popular agitation, not only had he temporarily to give upthe plan of divorcing Octavia and marrying Poppæa, but felt obligedto stay several months at Baiæ, not daring to return to Rome. He was, however, no longer a child: he was twenty-three years old and had sometalent. Men of intelligence and energy were also not wanting in his_entourage_. The first shock once over, the Emperor and his coterierallied. The first impression had indeed been disastrous, but hadbrought about no irreparable consequences--the only consequences thatcount in politics. One could therefore hope that the publicwould gradually forget this murder as they had forgotten that ofBritannicus. One only needed to help them forget. Nero resolved togive Italy and Rome the administrative revolution that had found inAgrippina so determined an opponent, the easy, splendid, generousgovernment that seemed to suit the popular taste. 

He began by organising among the _jeunesse dorée_ of Rome the"festivals of youth. " In these true demonstrations against the oldaristocratic education, now in the house of one and then in the gardenof another, the young patricians met under the Emperor's directions. They sang, recited, and danced, displaying all the tendencies thattradition held unworthy of a Roman nobleman. Later, Nero built inthe Vatican fields a private stadium, where he amused himself withdriving, and invited his friends to join him. He surrounded himselfwith poets, musicians, singers; enormously increased the budgetof popular festivals; planned and started immense constructions;introduced into all parts of the administration a new spirit ofcarelessness and ease. Not only the sumptuary laws, but all lawscommanding the fulfilment of human duties toward the species, such asthe great laws of Augustus on marriage and adultery, were no longerapplied; the surveillance of the Senate over the governors, that ofthe governors over the cities, slackened. In Rome, in all Italy, inthe provinces, the treasuries of the Republic, the possessions andthe funds of the cities, were robbed. In the midst of this unbridledplundering, which appeared to make every man rich quickly, and withoutwork, a delirium of luxury and pleasure reigned: in Rome especially, people lived in a continuous orgy; the nobility answered in crowdsthe invitations of Nero; the Senate, the great houses, where theconquerors of the world had been born, swarmed with young athletes anddrivers, who had no other ambition but that of adding the prize of arace to the war trophies of their ancestors; the imperial palace wasinvaded by a noisy horde of zitherists, actors, jockeys, athletes, among whom Burrhus and, still more, Seneca, were beginning to feelmost ill at ease. 

Agrippina's death, even though it had yet deferred Nero's marryingPoppæa, had made possible the change in the government that a part ofthe people wished. We owe to this new principle the immense ruins ofancient Rome; but this fact does not authorise us to consider it aRoman principle: it was, instead, a principle of Oriental civilisationwhich had forced itself upon the Roman traditions after a long andpainful effort. The revolution, however, had been long preparing andcorresponded to the popular aspirations. It would, therefore, haveredounded to the advantage of the Emperor, who had dared to breakloose from a superannuated tradition, had not Agrippina's spectrestill haunted Rome. To their honour be it said, the people of Rome andItaly had not yet become so corrupted by Oriental civilisation as toforget parricide in a few festivals. 

The party of tradition, though weakened, existed. They began a bravefight against Nero, using the assassination of Agrippina as theadverse party had exploited the antifeminist prejudices of the massesagainst Agrippina herself. They denounced the parricide to the people, in order to attack the champion of Orientalism and irritate againsthim the indifferent mass, which, not understanding the great strugglebetween the Orient and Rome, remained unstirred. Hoping the excitementof spirit had somewhat subsided, Nero had finally carried out his oldplan of divorcing Octavia and marrying Poppæa; but the divorce causedgreat popular demonstrations in Rome in favour of the abused wife andagainst the intruder. 

Moreover, thanks to his extravagance, Nero made things very easy forhis enemies, the defenders of tradition. His habits of dissipationexaggerated all the faults of his character, chiefly his morbid needof showing himself off, of defying the public, their prejudices, theiropinions. It is difficult to discern how much is true and how much isfalse in the hideous stories of debauchery handed down to us by theancient writers, particularly Suetonius. 

Although one might believe--and I believe it for my part--that thereis a great deal of exaggeration in such tales, it is certain thatNero's personality played too conspicuous a part in his administrativerevolution. Ready as the people were to admire a more generous andluxurious government than that of Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius, they still liked to look to the chief of State as to a man of gravityand austerity, who let others amuse themselves, though he himself bebored. The vain and bizarre young man, who was always the guest ofhonour at his own _fêtes_, who never hesitated to satisfy his mostextravagant caprices, who spent so much money to divert himself, shocked the last republican susceptibilities of Italy. The wise feltalarmed: with such expenses, would it not all end in bankruptcy?For all these causes, they soon began to reproach Nero for hisprodigality, although the people enjoyed it, just as they had beenmalcontent with Tiberius for his parsimony. His caprices, everstranger, little by little roused even that part of the public whichwas not fanatically attached to tradition. At that time Nero developedhis foolish vanity of actor, his caprice for the theatre, which soonwas to become an all-absorbing mania. The chief of the Empire, theheir of Julius Cæsar, dreamed of nothing else than descending fromthe height of human grandeur to the scene of a theatre, to experiencebefore the public the sensations of those players whom the Romannobility had always regarded as instruments of infamous pleasure!

Disgusted with Nero's mismanagement and follies, Seneca took the deathof Burrhus as an opportunity to retire. Then Nero, freed from thelast person who still retained any influence over him, gave himselfup entirely to the insane swirl of his caprices. He ended one day bypresenting himself in the theatre of Naples. Naples was yet then aGreek city. Nero had chosen it for this reason; he was applauded withfrenzy. But the Italians of the other cities protested: the chief ofthe Empire appearing in a theatre, his hand on the zither and noton the sword! Imagine what would be the impression if some day asovereign went on the stage of the _folies Bergères_ as a "number" fora sleight-of-hand performance!

Public attention, however, was turned from this immense scandal by afrightful calamity--the famous conflagration of Rome, which began thenineteenth of July of the year 64 and devastated almost all quartersof the city for ten days. What was the cause of the great disaster?This very obscure point has much interested historians, who have triedin vain to throw light on the subject. As far as I am concerned, Iby no means exclude the hypothesis that the fire might have beenaccidental. But when they are crushed under the weight of a greatmisfortune, men always feel sure that they are the victims of humanwickedness: a sad proof of their distrust in their fellow men. Theplebs, reduced to utter misery by the disaster, began to murmurthat mysterious people had been seen hurrying through the differentquarters, kindling the fire and cumbering the work of help; theseincendiaries must have been sent by some one in power--by whom?

A strange rumour circulated: Nero himself had ordered the city to beburned, in order to enjoy a unique sight, to get an idea of the fireof Troy, to have the glory of rebuilding Rome on a more magnificentscale. The accusation seems to me absurd. Nero was a criminal, but hewas not a fool to the point of provoking the wrath of the whole peoplefor so light a motive, especially after Agrippina's death. Tacitushimself, in spite of his hatred of all Cæsar's family and hisreadiness to make them responsible for the most serious crimes, doesnot venture to express belief in this story--sufficient proof thathe considers it absurd and unlikely. Nevertheless, the hatred thatsurrounded Nero and Poppæa made every one, not only among the ignorantpopulace, but also among the higher classes, accept it readily. It wassoon the general opinion that Nero had accomplished what Brennus andCatiline's conspirators could not do. Was a more horrible monster everseen? Parricide, actor, incendiary!

The traditionalist party, the opposition, the unsatisfied, exploitedwithout scruple this popular attitude, and Nero, responsible for asufficient number of actual crimes, found himself accused also ofan imaginary one. He was so frightened that he decided to give theclamouring people a victim, some one on whom Rome could avenge itssorrow. An inquiry into the causes of the conflagration was ordered. The inquest came to a strange conclusion. The fire had been startedby a small religious sect, recently imported from the Orient, asect whose name most people then learned for the first time: theChristians. 

How did the Roman authorities come to such a conclusion? That is oneof the greatest mysteries of universal history, and no one will everbe able to clear it. If the explanation of the disaster as accepted bythe people was absurd, the official explanation was still more so. TheChristian community of Rome, the pretended volcano of civil hatred, which had poured forth the destructive fire over the great metropolis, was a small and peaceful congregation of pious idealists. 

A great and simple man, Paul of Tarsus, had taken up again among themthe great work in which Augustus and Tiberius had failed: he aimed atthe remaking of popular conscience, but used means until then unknownin the Græco-Latin civilisation. Not in the name of the ancestors, ofthe traditions, of ideals of political power, did he seek to persuademen to work, to refrain from vice, to live honestly and simply; butin the name of a single God, whom man had in the beginning offendedthrough his pride, in the name of the Son of God, who had taken humanform and volunteered to die as a criminal on the cross, to appeasethe Father's wrath against the rebellious creature. On the Græco-Romanidea of duty, Paul grafted the Christian idea of sin. Doubtless thenew theology must have seemed at first obscure to Greeks and Romans;but Paul put into it that new spirit, mutual love, which the dry Latinsoul had hardly ever known, and he vivified it with the example of anobscure life of sacrifice. 

Paul was born of a noble Hebrew family of Tarsus, and was a man ofhigh culture. He had, to use a modern expression, simplified himself, renounced his position in a time when few could resist the passion forluxury, and taken up a trade for his living; with the scanty profitfrom his work as a tent-maker, alone and on foot he made measurelessjourneys through the Empire, everywhere preaching the redemption ofman. Finally, after numberless adventures and perils, he had come toRome and had, in the great city frenzied by the delirium of luxury andpleasure, repeated to the poor, who alone were willing to hear him:"Be chaste and pure, do not deceive each other, love one another, helpone another, love God. "

If Nero had known the little society of pious idealists, he surelywould have hated it, but for other motives than the imaginaryaccusations of his police. In this story St. Paul is exactly theantithesis of Nero. The latter represents the atrocious selfishness ofrich, peaceful, highly civilised epochs; the former, the ardent moralidealism which tries to react against the cardinal vices of power andwealth through universal self-sacrifice and asceticism. Neither ofthese men is to be comprehended without the other, because the moraldoctrine of Paul is partly a reaction against, the violent folly forwhich Nero stood the symbol; but it certainly was not philosophicalconsiderations of this kind that led the Roman authorities to rageagainst the Christians. The problem, I repeat, is insoluble. Howeverthis may be, the Christians were declared responsible for the fire; agreat number were taken into custody, sentenced to death, executed indifferent ways, during the festivals that Nero offered to the peopleto appease them. Possibly Paul himself was one of the victims of thispersecution. 

This diversion, however, was of no use. The conflagration definitelyruined Nero. With the conflagration begins the third period ofhis life, which lasts four years. It is characterised by absurdexaggerations of all kinds, which hastened the inevitable catastrophe. One grandiose idea dominates it: the idea of building on the ruins anew Rome, immense and magnificent, a true metropolis for the Empire. In order to carry out this plan, Nero did not economise; he began tospend in it the moneys laid aside to pay the legions. The people ofItaly, however, and even of Rome, which grew rich on these publicexpenditures, did not show themselves thankful for this immensearchitectural effort. Every one was sure that the new city would beworse than the old one!

Nero himself, exasperated by this invincible hate, exhausted by hisown excesses, lost what reason he had still left, and his governmentdegenerated into a complete tyranny, suspicious, violent, and cruel. 

Piso's conspiracy caused him to order a massacre of patricians, whichleft terrible rancour in its wake; in an access of fury, he killedPoppæa; he began to imagine accusations against the richest men of theEmpire, in order to confiscate their estates. His prodigality and thegeneral carelessness had completely disorganised the finances of theEmpire; he had to recur to all kinds of expedients to find money. Finally he undertook a great artistic tour in Greece--that provincewhich had been the mother of arts--to play in its most celebratedtheatres. This time indignation burst all bounds. The armies of Gauland Spain, for a long time irregularly paid, led by their officers, revolted. This act of energy sufficed. On the 9th of June, 68 A. D. , abandoned by all the world, Nero was compelled to commit suicide. 

So the family of Julius Cæsar disappears from history. After so muchgreatness, genius, and wisdom, the fall may seem petty and almostlaughable. It is absurd to lose the Empire for the pleasure of singingin a theatre. And yet, bizarre as the end may seem, it was not theresult of the vices, the follies, and the crimes of Nero alone. In hisway, Nero himself was, like all members of his family, the victim ofthe contradictory situation of his times. 

It has been repeated for centuries, that the foundation of monarchywas the great mission of Cæsar's family. I believe this to be a greatmistake. The lot of the family would have been simple and easy, if ithad been able to found a monarchy. The family of Cæsar had to solveanother problem, much more difficult, --in fact insoluble; a problemthat may be compared, from a certain point of view, to that whichconfronted the Bonapartes in the nineteenth century. The Bonapartesfound old monarchical, legitimistic, theocratic Europe agitated byforces which, although making it impossible for the ancient regimeto continue, were not yet able to establish a new society, entirelydemocratic, republican, and lay. The family of Cæsar found theopposite situation: an old military and aristocratic republic, whichwas changing into an intellectual and monarchical civilisation, basedon equality, but opposing formidable resistance to the forces oftransformation. In these situations the two families tried in all waysto reconcile things not to be conciliated, to realise the impossible:one, the popular monarchy and imperial democracy; the other, themonarchical republic and Orientalised Latinity. The contradictionwas for both families the law of life, the cause of greatness; thisexplains why neither was ever willing to extricate itself from it, inspite of the advice of philosophers, the malcontent of the masses, thepressure of parties, and the evident dangers. This contradictionwas also the fatality of both families, the cause of their ruin; itexplains the shortness of their power, their restless existence, andthe continuous catastrophes that opened the way to the final crash. 

Waterloo and Sedan, the exile of Julia and the tragic failure ofTiberius's government, all the misfortunes great and small whichstruck the two families, were always consequences of the insolublecontradiction they tried to solve. You have had a perfectlycharacteristic example of it in the brief story I have been tellingyou. Agrippina becomes an object of universal hatred and dies byassassination because she defends tradition; her son disregardstradition and, chiefly for this very reason, is finally forced to killhimself. Doubtless the fate of the Bonapartes is less tragic, becausethey, at least, escaped the infamous legend created by contemporaryhatred against Cæsar's family, and artfully developed by thehistorians of successive generations. I hope to be able to provein the continuation of my _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, thatthe history of Cæsar's family, as it has been told by Tacitus andSuetonius, is a sensational novel, a legend containing not much moretruth than the legend of Atrides. The family of Cæsar, placed in thecentre of the great struggle going on in Rome between the old Romanmilitarism, and the intellectual civilisation of the Orient, between nationalism and cosmopolitism, between Asiatic mysticismand traditional religion, between egoism over-excited by culture andwealth, and the supreme interests of the species, had to injure toomany interests, to offend too many susceptibilities. The injuredinterests, the offended susceptibilities, revenged themselves throughdefaming legends. 

The case of Nero is particularly instructive. He was half insane anda veritable criminal: it would be absurd to attempt in his favourthe historical rehabilitation to which other members of the family, Tiberius for instance, have a right. And yet it has not been enoughfor succeeding generations that he atoned for his follies and crimesby death and infamy. They have fallen upon his memory: they haveoverlooked that extenuating circumstance of considerable importance, his age when elected; they have gone so far as to make him into aunique monster, no longer human and even the Antichrist!

Surely he first shed Christian blood; but if we consider the tendencyhe represented in Roman history, we can hardly classify him among thegreat enemies of Christianity. Unwittingly, Augustus and Tiberius weretwo great enemies of the Christian teachings, because they soughtby all means to reinforce Roman tradition, and struggledagainst everything that would one day form the essence ofChristianity--cosmopolitism, mysticism, the domination of intellectualpeople, the influence of the philosophical and metaphysical spiriton life. Nero, on the contrary, with his repeated efforts tospread Orientalism in Rome, and chiefly with his taste for art, wasunconsciously a powerful collaborator of future Christian propaganda. We must not forget this: the masses in the Empire became Christianonly because they had first been imbued with the Oriental spirit. 

Nero and St. Paul, the man that wished to enjoy all, and the manthat suffered all, are in their time two extreme antitheses: withthe passing of centuries, they become two collaborators. While onesuffered hunger and persecution to preach the doctrine of redemption, the other called to Italy and to Rome, to amuse himself, thegoldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, musicians, whomRome had always rebuffed. 

Both disappeared, cut off by the violent current of their epoch;centuries went by: the name of the Emperor grew infamous, while thatof the tent-maker radiated glory. In the midst of the immense disorderthat accompanied the dissolution of the Roman Empire, as the bondsamong men relaxed, and the human mind seemed to be incapable ofreasoning and understanding, the disciples of the saint realisedthat the goldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, andmusicians of the Emperor could collect the masses around the churchesand make them patiently listen to what they could still comprehend ofPaul's sublime morality. When you regard St. Mark or Notre Dame or anyother stupendous cathedral of the Middle Ages, like museums for thework of art they hold, you see the luminous symbol of this paradoxicalalliance between victim and executioner. 

Only through the alliance of Paul and Nero could the Church dominatethe disorder of the Middle Ages, and, from antiquity to the modernworld, carry through that formidable storm the essential principlesfrom which our civilisation developed: a decisive proof that, ifhistory in its details is a continuous strife, as a whole it is theinevitable final reconciliation of antagonistic forces, obtained inspite of the resistance of individuals and by sacrificing them. 

Julia and Tiberius

"He walked with head bent and fixed, the face stern, a taciturn manexchanging no word with those about him. . . . Augustus realised thesesevere and haughty manners, and more than once tried to excuse themin the Senate and to the people, saying that they were defects oftemperament, not signs of a sinister spirit. "

This is the picture that Suetonius gives us of Tiberius, the manwho, in 9 B. C. , after the death of Agrippa and Drusus, stood next toAugustus, his right hand and pre-established successor. At that timeAugustus was fifty-four years old; not an old man, but he was ill andhad presided over the Republic for twenty-one years. Many people musthave asked themselves what would happen if Augustus should die, or should definitely retire to private life. The answer was notuncertain: since Rome was engaged in the conquest of Germany, thechief of the Empire and of the army ought to be a valiant general anda man of expert acquaintance with Germanic affairs. Tiberius was thefirst general of his time and knew Germany and the Germans better thanany other Roman. 

The passage from Suetonius, just quoted, indicates that Tiberius wasnot altogether popular, yet it was the accepted opinion that Romeand Italy might well be content to rely upon so capable a general anddiplomat, if Augustus failed. This attitude, however, changed whenthe death of Drusus entirely removed the alternative of choice betweenhimself and Tiberius, and the latter, up to that time universallyadmired, began to be met, even among the nobility, by a strongopposition. How can this apparently inexplicable fact be made clear?The theory of corruption so dear to the ancients, which I have alreadyexplained, gives us the key to the mystery. Those who have beendisposed to see in that theory merely a plaything of poets, orators, philosophers, will now realise that it had power enough to kill theperson and destroy the family of the first citizen of the Empire. Thatkind of continuous fear of luxury, of amusements, of prodigality, onaccount of which the ancients called corruption so many things thatwe define as progress, was not a sentiment always equally alive in themind of the multitude. The Romans, like ourselves, loved to live andto enjoy; this is so true that philosophers and legislators constantlytook pains to remind them of the danger of allowing too much libertyto the appetites; but more effective than the counsels of philosophersand the threats of the law, great public calamities inspired in themasses, at least temporarily, a spirit of puritanism and austerity. Of this the consequences of the battle of Actium afforded noteworthyproof. 

Those who have read the fourth volume of _The Greatness and Decline ofRome_ may perhaps remember how I have described the conservativeand traditionalist movement of the first decade of the governmentof Augustus. Frightened by the revolution, men's minds had revertedprecipitously to the past. A new party, which one might call thetraditionalist, had sought to re-establish the old-time order, in thestate, in customs, in ideas; to combat the corruption of customs; andof this party Augustus had been the right arm. Indeed, to so greatan extent had this party stirred up public spirit and prevailed uponthose in power that in 18 B. C. It succeeded in passing some greatsocial laws on luxury, on matrimony, on dress. With these laws, Romeproposed to remake, by terrible measures, the old, prolific, austerenobility of the aristocratic era. The _lex de maritandis_ _ordinibus_aimed with a thousand vexatious restrictions to constrain the nobilityto marry and have children; the _lex sumptuaria_ studied to restrainextravagance; the _lex de adulteriis_ proclaimed martial law in thefamily, menacing an unfaithful wife and her accomplice with exile forlife and the confiscation of half their substance; legislation of theharshest, this, which should scourge Rome to blood, to keep her fromfalling anew into the inveterate vices from which the civil wars wereborn. 

The impression of the civil wars could not last forever. In fact, in the decade that followed the promulgation of the social laws, thepuritan fervour, which had up to that time heated all Italy, beganto cool. Wealth increased; the confidence that order and peace wereactually re-established, spread everywhere; the generation that hadseen the civil wars, disappeared; peace and growing prosperity stirredin the next generation a desire for freedom and pleasure that wouldnot endure the narrow traditionalism and the puritanism of thepreceding generation; consequently also the laws of 18 B. C. Becameintolerable. 

To understand this change in public spirit which had such seriousconsequences, there is no better way than by studying the mostcelebrated writer of this new generation, Ovid, who represents it mostadmirably both in life and works. Ovid was born at Sulmona in 43 B. C. He was about the same age as Tiberius, --of a knight's family--thatis, of the wealthy middle class. He was destined by his father to thestudy of oratory and jurisprudence, evidently to make a political manof him, a senator, a future consul or proconsul, and to contribute tothe great national restoration that his generation proposed to itselfand of which Augustus was architect, preparing a new family for thepolitical aristocracy that was governing the Empire. Ovid's fatherhad all the requirements demanded by law and custom: a considerablefortune, the half-nobility of the equestrian order, an intelligentson, the means to give him the necessary culture--a favourablecombination of circumstances which was wholly undone by a bit ofunforeseen contrariety, the son's invincible inclination for what hisfather called, with little respect, a "useless study, " literature. The young man had indifferently studied oratory and law, gone to Rome, married, made friendships in the high society of the capital, beenelected to the offices preceding the quæstorship; but when the timearrived for presenting himself as candidate for the quæstorshipitself--that is, the time for beginning the true _curriculum_ of themagistracies, he had declared that he would rather be a great poetthan a consul, and there was no persuading him farther on the longroad opened to political ambitions. 

With the episode of Julia and Tiberius in mind, I have stated thatOvid's life epitomises the new generation, because it shows usin action the first of the forces that dissolved the aristocraticgovernment and the nobility artificially reconstituted by Augustusat the close of the civil wars--intellectualism. The case of Oviddemonstrates that intellectual culture, literature, poetry, insteadof being, for the Roman aristocracy, as in older times, a simpleornament, secondary to politics, had already a prime attraction forthe man of genius; that even among the higher classes, devoted bytradition only to military and political life, there appeared, by theside of the leaders in war and politics, the professional literaryman. The study of Ovid's work shows something even more noteworthy:that, profiting by the discords in the ruling class, these literarymen feared no longer to express and to re-enforce the discontent, the bad feeling, the aversion, that the efforts of the State tore-establish a more vigorous social order was rousing in one part ofthe public. 

Ovid's first important work was the _Amores_, which was certainly outby the year 8 B. C. Although in a different form from that in whichwe now have it. To understand what this book really was when it waspublished, one must remember that it was written, read, and whatis more, _admired_, ten years after the promulgation of the _lex demaritandis ordinibus_ and of the _lex de adulteriis_; it should beread with what remains of the text of those laws in hand. 

We are astonished at the book, full of excitements to frivolity, todissipation, to pleasure, to those very activities that appeared tothe ancients to form the most dangerous part of the "corruption. "Extravagances of a libertine poet? The single-handed revolt of acorrupt youth, which cannot be considered a sign of the times? No. Ifthere had not been in the public at large, in the higher classes, inthe new generation, a general sympathy with this poetry, subversive ofthe solemn Julian laws, Ovid would never have been recognised in thehouses of the great, petted and admired by high society. The greatsocial laws of Augustus, the publication of which had been celebratedby Horace in the _Carmen Seculare_, wounded too many interests, tormented too many selfishnesses, intercepted too many liberties. 

His revolutionary elegies had made Ovid famous, because theseinterests and these selfishnesses finally rebelled with the newgeneration, which had not seen the civil wars. Other incidents beforeand after the publication of the _Amores_ also show this reactionagainst the social laws. Therefore Augustus proposed about this timeto abolish the provision of the _lex de maritandis ordinibus_ thatexcluded celibates from public spectacles; and by his personalintervention sought to put a check upon the scandalous trials foradultery that his law had originated--two acts that were so muchadmired by a part of the public that statues were erected to him bypopular subscription. 

In short, this new movement of public opinion explains the oppositionexerted from this time on against Tiberius and makes us understand howthere arose the conflict in which this mysterious personage was to beentangled for the rest of his life, and to lose, by no fault of hisown, so great a part of his reputation. I hope to prove that theTiberius of Tacitus and Suetonius is a fantastic personality, the heroof a wretched and improbable romance, invented by party hatred;that Tiberius remained, as a German historian has defined it, anundecipherable enigma, simply because there has never been the will torecognise how much alive the aristocratic republican traditionsstill were, and what force they still exerted in the State and in thefamily. 

Tiberius was but an authentic Claudius--that is, a true descendant ofone of the oldest, the proudest, the most aristocratic families of theRoman nobility, a man with all the good qualities and all the defectsof the old Roman aristocracy, a man who regarded things and men withthe eyes of a senator of the times of Scipio Africanus--a livinganachronism, a fossil, if you will, from a by-gone age, in a worldthat wished to tolerate no more either the vices or the virtues of theold aristocracy. He thought that the Empire ought to be governed by alimited aristocracy of diplomats and warriors, rigidly authoritative, exclusively Roman, which should know how to check the generalcorrupting of customs, the current extravagance and dissipation, beginning its task by imposing upon itself an inexorableself-discipline. Even though he belonged to the generation of Ovid--tothe generation that had not seen the civil wars--Tiberius, bysingular exception, kept aloof from the undisciplined frivolity of hiscontemporaries. He desired the severe application of the sociallaws of the year 18, as of all the traditional norms of aristocraticdiscipline. His generation therefore soon found him an enemy, especially after Drusus's death seemed to leave neither doubt norchoice as to the successor of Augustus. From this contemporaryattitude arises the tacit aversion in the midst of which, after thelapse of so many centuries, we still feel Tiberius living and working, an aversion which steadily grows even while he renders the most signalservices to the Empire. 

There was between him and his generation irreconcilable discord. However, it is not likely that this blind and secret hatred alonecould have seriously injured Tiberius, whose power and merits were sogreat, if it had not been considerably helped by incidents of variousnature. The first and most important of these was the discord that hadarisen, shortly after the death of Drusus, between Tiberius and hiswife Julia, the daughter of Augustus and the widow of Agrippa. 

Tiberius had married her against his will in the year 11, after thedeath of Agrippa, by order of Augustus, and had at first tried tolive in accord with her; the attempt was vain, and the spirits of thehusband and wife were soon parted in fatal disagreement. "He lived atfirst, " writes Suetonius, "in harmony with Julia; but soon grew cooltoward her, and finally the estrangement reached such a point afterthe death of their boy born at Aquileia, that Tiberius lived in aseparate apartment"--a separation, as we would call it, in "bed andboard. " What was the reason of this discord? No ancient historian hasrevealed it; however, we can guess with sufficient probability fromwhat we know of the characters of the pair and the discord thatdivided Roman society. If Tiberius was not the monster of Capri, Juliawas certainly not the miserable Bacchante of the scandalous Romanchronicle. Macrobius has pictured her in human lights and shadows, aprobable image, describing her as a highly cultured woman, lavishin tastes and expenditure, fond of beautiful literature, of thefine arts, and of the company of handsome and elegant young men. Shebelonged to the new generation of which Ovid was spokesman and poet;while Tiberius represented archaic traditionalism, the spirit of apast generation. 

It is easy to understand how these two persons, incarnating theirreconcilable opposition of two epochs, two _morales_, two societies, of Roman militarism and of Oriental culture, could not live together. A man like Tiberius, severe, simple, who detested frivolous pleasures, caring more for war than for society life, could not live in peacewith this beautiful and vivacious creature, who loved luxury, prodigality, brilliant company. It is not rash to suppose thatthe _lex sumptuaria_ of the year 18 was the first grave cause ofdisagreement. Julia, given, as Macrobius describes her, to profuseexpenditure and pretentious elegance, could not take this lawseriously; while it was the duty of Tiberius, who always protested bydeed as by word against the barren pomp of the rich, to see that hiswife serve as an example of simplicity to the other matrons of Rome. 

Very soon there occurred an accident, not uncommon in unfortunatemarriages, but which for special reasons was, in the family ofTiberius, far more than wontedly dangerous. Tacitus tells us thatafter Julia was out of favour with Tiberius, she contracted a relationwith an elegant young aristocrat, one Sempronius Gracchus, of thefamily of the famous tribunes. Accepting as true the affirmation ofTacitus, in itself likely, we can very well explain the behaviour andacts of Tiberius in these years. The misdoing of Julia offendednot only the man and husband, but placed also the statesman, therepresentative of the traditionalist party, in the gravest perplexity. 

According to the _lex de adulteriis_, made by Augustus in the year18, the husband ought either to punish the unfaithful wife himself ordenounce her to the prætor. Could he, Tiberius, provoke so frightfula scandal in the house of the "First Citizen of the Republic"; drivefrom Rome, defamed, the daughter of Augustus, the most noted lady ofRome, who had so many friends in all circles of its society? Suetoniusspeaks of the disgust of Tiberius for Julia, "_quam neque criminariaut demittere auderet_"--whom he dared neither incriminate norrepudiate. On the other hand, did not he, the intransigeanttraditionalist, who kept continually reproving the nobility for theirlaxity in self-discipline, merit rebuke, for allowing this thing togo on, not applying the law? The difficulty was serious; the _lex deadulteriis_ began to be a torment to its creators. Unable to separatefrom, unwilling to live with, this woman who had traduced him and whomhe despised, Tiberius was reduced to maintaining a merely apparentunion to avoid the scandal of a trial and divorce. 

This proceeding, however, was an expedient in that condition of thingsboth insufficient and dangerous. The discord between Tiberius andJulia put into the hands of the young nobility, up to that timeunarmed, a terrible weapon against the illustrious general, who was, meanwhile, fighting the Germans. The young nobility, inimical to thesocial laws and to Tiberius, rallied about Julia, and the effects ofthis alliance were not slow in appearing. Julia had had five sons byAgrippa, of whom the eldest two, Caius and Lucius, had been adoptedby Augustus. In the year 6 B. C. , the eldest, Caius, reached the age offourteen. He was therefore but a lad; notwithstanding his youth, therewas suddenly brought forward the strange, almost incredible, proposalto make a law by which he might at once be elected consul for the year754 A. U. C, when he would be twenty years old. 

Who made this proposal? Augustus, if we believe Suetonius, out ofexcessive fondness for his adopted sons. Dion, on the contrary, tellsthese things differently. He says that from the beginning Augustusopposed the law, and so leads us to doubt that it was either proposedor desired by that Prince. The facts are that a party in Rome keptinsisting till Augustus supported this law with his authority, andthat from the first he was unwilling to be accessory to an electionthat overturned without reason every Roman constitutional right. 

Who then were these strange admirers of a child of fourteen, who tomake him consul did not hesitate to do violence to tradition, to thelaws, to good sense, and, finally, to the adoptive father? It was theopposition to Tiberius, the party of the young nobility and Julia, whowere seeking a rule less severe, and, if not the abolition, at leastthe mitigated application of the great social laws. They aimed to putforward the young Caius, to set him early before public attention, tohasten his political career, in order to oppose a rival to Tiberius;to prepare another collaborator and successor of Augustus, to makeTiberius less indispensable and therefore less powerful. 

In brief, here was the hope of using against Tiberius at once thematernal pride and affection of Julia, the tenderness of Augustus, andthe popularity of the name of Cæsar, which Caius carried. The peoplehad never greatly loved the name of the Claudii, a haughty line ofinvincible aristocrats, always hard and overbearing with the poor, always opposed to the democratic party. The party against Tiberiushoped that when to a Claudius there should be opposed a Cæsar, thepublic spirit would revert to the dazzling splendour of the name. 

Now we understand why Augustus had at first objected. The privilegesthat he had caused to be conceded to Marcellus, to Drusus, toTiberius, were all of less consequence than those demanded forCaius and had all been justified either by urgent needs of State, orservices already rendered; but how could it be tolerated that withoutany reason, without the slightest necessity, there should be madeconsul a lad of fourteen, of whom it would be difficult to predicteven whether he would become a man of common sense? Moreover Augustuscould not so easily bring himself to offend Tiberius, who would notadmit that the chief of the Republic should help his enemies offer himso great an affront. How could it be, that while he, amid fatiguesand perils in cold and savage regions, was fighting the Germans andholding in subjection the European provinces, that _jeunesse dorée_of good-for-nothings, cynics, idlers, poets, which infested the newgeneration, was conniving with his wife to set against him a childof fourteen?--to gain, as it were, sanction from a law that the Statewould not be safe till by the side of this Claudius should be placed aCæsar, beardless and inexpert, as if the name of the latter outweighedthe genius and experience of the former? And Augustus, the head of theRepublic, would he have tolerated such an outrage? Tiberius not onlyresisted the law but exacted the open disapproval of Augustus; infact, at the beginning, Augustus stood out against it as Tiberiuswished; but difficulties grew by the way and became grave. 

Julia and her friends knew how to dispose public opinion ably intheir own favour, to intrigue in the Senate, to exploit the increasingunpopularity of the social laws, of the spreading aversion to Tiberiusand the admiration for other members of Augustus's family. Theproposal to make Caius consul became in a short time so popularfor one or another of these reasons, and as the symbol of a futuregovernment less severe and traditionalistic, that Augustus felt lessand less able to withstand the current. On the other hand, to yieldmeant mortally to offend Tiberius. Finally, as was his wont, thisastute politician thought to extricate himself from the difficulty bya transaction and an expedient. Dion, shortly after having said thatAugustus finally yielded to the popular will, adds that, to make Caiusmore modest, he gave Tiberius the tribunician power for five years andcharged him with subduing the revolt in Armenia. Augustus's idea isclear: he was trying to please everybody--the partisans of Caius Cæsarby not opposing the law, and Tiberius, by giving the most splendidcompensation, making him his colleague in place of Agrippa. 

Unfortunately, Tiberius was not the man to accept this compensation. No honour could make up for the insult Augustus had done him, thoughyielding but in part to his enemies, because by so doing even Augustushad seemed to think it necessary to set him beside a lad of fourteen;he would go away; they might do as they pleased and charge Caius withdirecting the war in Germany. Indignant at the timid opportunism ofAugustus, disgusted with the wife whom he could neither accuse norrepudiate, Tiberius demanded permission of Augustus to retire toRodi to private life, saying that he was tired and in need of repose. Naturally Augustus was frightened, begged and pleaded with him toremain, sent his mother Livia to beseech him, but every effort wasfutile; Tiberius was obstinate, and finally, since Augustus did notpermit his departure, he threatened to let himself die of hunger. Augustus still tried to stand firm; one day, two days, three days, helet him fast without giving the required consent. At the end of thefourth day, Augustus had to recognise that Tiberius had serious intentto kill himself, and yielded. The Senate granted him permission todepart; and Tiberius at once started for Ostia, "without saying aword, " writes Suetonius, "to those who accompanied him, and kissingbut a few. "

It would be impossible to decide whether this retaliation ofTiberius's self-love was equal to the offence; and perhaps it isuseless to discuss the point. It is certain, however, that theconsequences of the departure of Tiberius were weighty. The firstresult was that the party of the young nobility, the party averse tothe laws of the year 18, found itself master of the field; perhapsbecause the opposing party lost with Tiberius its most authoritativeleader; perhaps because Augustus, irritated against Tiberius, inclinedstill more toward the contrary party; perhaps because public opinionjudged severely the departure of Tiberius, who, already littleadmired, became decidedly unpopular. Julia and her friends triumphed, and not content with having conquered, wished to domineer; shortlyafterward they obtained the concession of the same privileges as thosegranted to Caius for his younger brother Lucius. At the sametime, Augustus prepared to make Caius and Lucius his two futurecollaborators in place of Tiberius; Ovid set his hand to a book stillmore scandalous and subversive than the _Amores_, the _Ars Amandi_;public indulgence covered with its protection all those accused ongrounds of the laws of the year 18; and finally, the two boys, Caiusand Lucius, became popular, like great personages, all overItaly. There have been found in different cities of the peninsulainscriptions in their honour, one of which, very long and curious, isat Pisa; it is full of absurd eulogies of the two lads, who had as yetdone nothing, good or bad. Italy must have been tired enough of a tooconservative government, which had lasted twenty-five years, of anEmpire reconquered by traditional ideas, if, in order to protest, itlionised the two young sons of Agrippa in ways that contradicted everyidea and sentiment of Roman tradition. 

In conclusion, the departure of Tiberius, and the severe judgment thepublic gave it, still further weakened the conservative party, alreadyfor some years in decline, by a natural transformation of the publicspirit. Perhaps the party of tradition would have been entirely spent, had not events soon reminded Rome that its spirit was the life of themilitary order. The departure of Tiberius, the man who representedthis spirit, rapidly disorganised the army and the external policyof Rome. Up to that time Augustus had had beside him a powerfulhelper--first Agrippa, afterwards Tiberius; but then he found himselfalone at the head of the Empire, a man already well on in years; andfor the first time it appeared that this zealous bureaucrat, thisfastidious administrator, this intellectual idler, who could do anenormous amount of work on condition that he be not forced to issuefrom his study and encounter currents of air too strong for him, wasinsufficient to direct alone the politics of an immense empire, whichrequired, in addition to the sagacity of the administrator and theingenuity of the legislator, the resoluteness of the warrior and theman of action. 

The State rapidly fell into a stupor. In Germany, where it wasnecessary to proceed to the ordering of the province, everything wassuspended; the people, apparently subdued, were not bound to pay anytribute, and were left to govern themselves solely and entirelyby their own laws--a strange anomaly in the history of the Romanconquests, which only the departure of Tiberius can explain. At sucha distance, when he was no longer counselled by Tiberius who so wellunderstood German affairs, Augustus trusted no other assistants, fearing lack of zeal and intelligence; distrusting himself also, hedared initiate nothing in the conquered province. The Senate, inertas usual, gave it not a thought. So Germany remained an uncertainty, neither a province nor independent, for fifteen years, a fact whereinis perhaps to be found the real cause of the catastrophe of Varus, which ruined the whole German policy of Rome. 

Furthermore, in Pannonia and Dalmatia, when it was known that the mostvaliant general of Rome was in disgrace at Rodi, the malcontents tookfresh courage, reopened an agitation that could but terminate ina revolt, much more dangerous than any preceding. In the Orient, Palestine arose in 4 B. C. , on the death of Herod the Great, againsthis son, Archelaus, and against the Hellenised monarchy, demandingto be made a Roman province like Syria, and a frightful civil warillumined with its sinister glare the cradle of Jesus. The governorof Syria, Quintilius Varus, threw himself into Judea and succeeded incrushing the revolt; but Augustus, unable to bring himself either togive full satisfaction to the Hebrew people or to execute entirely thetestament of Herod, decided as usual on a compromise: he dividedthe ancient kingdom of Herod the Great among three of his sons, andchanged Archelaus's title of king to the more modest one of ethnarch. Then new difficulties arose with the Empire of the Parthians. Inshort, vaguely, in every part of the Empire and beyond its borders, there began to grow the sense that Rome was again weakening; a senseof doubt due to the decadence of the spirit of tradition and of theparty representing it; to the new spirit of the new generation; andfinally, to the absence of Tiberius, the one capable general of thetime, which gradually disorganised even the western armies, the bestin the Empire. 

This dissolution of the State naturally fed in the traditionalistparty the hope of reconquering. Tiberius had sincere friends andadmirers, especially among the nobility, less numerous than those ofJulia, but more serious, because his merits were real. Many peopleamong the higher classes--even though, like Augustus, they consideredthe obduracy of Tiberius excessive--thought that Rome no morepossessed so many examples of illustrious men as to be able to retireits best general at thirty-seven. Very soon there arose in the circlesabout Augustus, in the Senate, in the comitia, a bitter contentionbetween Tiberius's friends and his enemies; this was really a strugglebetween the traditionalist party, which busied itself conserving, together with the traditions of the old Romanism, the military andpolitical power of Rome, and the party of the young nobility, which, without heeding the external dangers, wished to impel habits, ideas, the public spirit, toward the freer, broader forms of the Orientalcivilisation, even at the risk of dissolving the State and the army. Julia and Tiberius personify the two parties; between them standsAugustus, who ought to decide, and is more uncertain than ever. Theoretically Augustus always inclined more toward Tiberius, but fromdisgust at his departure, from solicitude for domestic peace, fromhis little sympathy with his step-son, he was driven to the oppositeparty. 

In this duel, what was the behaviour and the part of Livia, the motherof Tiberius? The ancient historians tell us nothing; it is, at allevents, hardly probable that Livia remained an inactive witness ofthe long struggle waged to secure the return of Tiberius and hisreinstatement in the brilliant position once his. Moreover, Suetoniussays that during his entire stay at Rodi, Tiberius communicated withAugustus by means of Livia. At any rate, the party of Tiberius wasnot long in understanding that he could not re-enter Rome, as long asJulia was popular and most powerful there; that to reopen the gates ofRome to the husband, it was necessary to drive out the wife. This wasa difficult enterprise, because Julia was upheld by the party alreadydominant; she had the affection of Augustus; she was the motherof Caius and Lucius Cæsar, the two hopes of the Republic, whosepopularity covered her with a respect and a sympathy that made heralmost invulnerable. Tiberius, instead, was unpopular. However, thereis no undertaking impossible to party hate. Exasperated by the growingdisfavour of public opinion, the party of Tiberius decided on adesperate expedient to which Tiberius himself would not have dared sethand; that is, since Julia had a paramour, to adopt against her theweapon supplied by the _lex Julia de adulteriis_, made by her father, and so provoke the terrible scandal that until then every one hadavoided in fear. 

Unfortunately, we possess too few documents to write in detail thehistory of this dreadful episode; but everything becomes clear enoughif one sees in the ruin of Julia a kind of terrible political andjudicial blackmailing, tried by the friends of Tiberius to remove thechief obstacle to his return, and if one takes it that the friendsof Tiberius succeeded in procuring proofs of the guilt of Julia andcarried them to Augustus, not as to the head of the State, but to thefather. 

Dion Cassius says that "Augustus finally, although tardily, came torecognise the misdeeds of his daughter, " which signifies that at agiven moment, Augustus could no longer feign ignorance of her sins, because the proofs were in the power of irreconcilable enemies, whowould have refused to smother the scandal. These mortal enemies ofJulia could have been no other than the friends of Tiberius. Julia hadviolated the law on adultery made by himself; Augustus could doubt itno more. 

To understand well the tragic situation in which Augustus was placedby these revelations, one must remember various things: first thatthe _lex de adulteriis_, proposed by Augustus himself, obliged thefather--when the husband could not, or would not--to punish the guiltydaughter, or to denounce her to the prætor, if he had not the courageto punish her himself; second, that this law arranged that if thefather and the husband failed to fulfil their proper duty, any onewhoever, the first comer, might in the name of public morals makethe denunciation to the prætor and stand to accuse the woman and heraccomplice. Tiberius, the husband, being absent at Rodi, he, Augustus, the father, must become the Nemesis of his daughter--must punish heror denounce her; if not, the friends of Tiberius could accuse herto the prætor, hale her before the quæstor, unveil to the public theshame of her private life. 

What should he do? Many a father had disdainfully refused to be theexecutioner of his own daughter, leaving to others the grim office ofapplying the _lex Julia_. Could he imitate such an example? He was thehead of the Republic, the most powerful man of the Empire, the founderof a new political order; he could decide peace and war, govern theSenate at his pleasure, exalt or abase the powerful of the earth witha nod; and exactly for this reason he dared not evade the bitter task. He feared the envy, the moral and levelling prejudices of the middleclasses, which needed every now and then to slaughter in the courtssome one belonging to the upper classes, in order to delude themselvesthat justice is equal for all. To him had been granted the greatestprivileges; but precisely on this account was it dangerous to try tocover his daughter with a privileged protection as prey too delicatefor public attack. And then, if he himself gave the example ofdisobeying his law, who would observe it? The tremendous scandal wouldunnerve all the moral force of his legislation, which was the baseof his prestige. The moment was terrible. Imagine this old man ofsixty-two wearied by forty-four years of public life, embitteredby the difficulties that sprang up about him, disquieted by thedissolution of State of which he was the impotent witness, findinghimself all at once facing these alternatives--either destroy hisdaughter, or undo all the political work over which he had labouredfor thirty years; and no temporising possible!

Augustus was not a naturally cruel man, but before these alternativeshis mind seems to have been for a moment convulsed by an access ofgrief and rage, the distant echo of which has come down to us. Onemoment, as Suetonius says, he had the idea of killing Julia. Thenreason, pity, affection, gentler habits, prevailed. He did not givethe sentence of death, but he was too practised a politician notto understand that she could not be saved; and as he had immolatedCicero, Lepidus, Antony, so he immolated her also to the necessityof preserving before Italy his prestige of severe legislator andimpartial magistrate. To avoid the trial, he resolved to punish herhimself with his power of _pater familias_ according to the _lexJulia_, exiling her to Pandataria and announcing the divorce to herin the name of Tiberius. He then despatched to the Senate a record ofwhat he had done, and went away to the country, where he remained along time, says Suetonius, seeing no one, the prey to profound grief. 

It seems that Julia's fall was a surprise to the public. In a dayit learned that the highly popular daughter of Augustus had beencondemned to exile by her father. This unexpected revelation leta storm loose in the metropolis. Even though there were not thenpublished in Rome those vile newspapers, the pests of moderncivilisation, that hunt their _soldi_ in the mud and slime of thebasest human passions, the taste for scandalous revelations, theenvy of genius and fortune, the pleasure of wreaking cruelty uponthe unarmed, the low delight in pouring the basest feelings upon thehonour of a woman abandoned by all--these passions animated mindsthen, as they do to-day; nor were there then wanting, more thannow, wretches that profited by them, to gather money or satisfy badinstincts, without being able to dispose of a single, miserablesheet of paper. On every side delators sprang up, and an epidemic ofslanders embittered Rome; every man who had name or wealth or somerelation with the family of Augustus, ran the risk of being accused asa lover of Julia. Several youths of high society, frightened by thesecharges, committed suicide; others were condemned. About Juliawere invented and spread the most atrocious calumnies, which formedthereafter the basis for the infamous legends that have remainedin history attached to her name. The traditionalist party naturallyabetted this furor of accusations and inventions, made to persuade thepublic that a fearful corruption was hidden among the upper classesand that to cure it fire and sword must be used without pity. 

The friends of Julia, the party of the young nobility, disconcerted atfirst by the explosion, did not delay to collect themselves and react;the populace of Rome made some great demonstrations in favour of Juliaand demanded her pardon of Augustus. Many indeed, recognising that herpunishment was legal, protested against the ferocity of her enemies, who had not hesitated to embitter with so terrible a scandal the oldage of Augustus; protested against the mad folly of incrimination withwhich every part of Rome was possessed. Most people turned, the moreenvenomed, against Tiberius, attacking him with renewed fury as thecause of all the evil. He it was, they insisted, who had conceived theabominable scandal, willed it, imposed it upon Rome and the Empire!

If Livia and the friends of Tiberius had thought to bring him inby the gate where Julia went out, they were not slow in recognisingthemselves deceived. The fall of Julia struck Tiberius on the reboundin his distant island. His unpopularity, already great, grew by allthe disgust that the scandal about Julia had provoked, and becameso formidable that one day about this time the inhabitants of Nimesoverturned his statues. It was the beginning of the Christian era, buta dark silence brooded over the Palatine; the defamed Julia was makingher hard way to Pandataria; Tiberius, discredited and detested, waswasting himself in inaction at Rodi; Augustus in his empty house, disgusted, distrustful, half paralysed by deep grief, would hear tono counsels of peace, of indulgence, of reconciliation. Tiberius andJulia were equally hateful to him, and as he did not allow himselfto be moved by the friends of Julia, who did not cease to implore herpardon, so he resisted the friends of Tiberius, who tried to persuadehim to reconciliation. What mattered it to him if the administrationof the State fell to pieces on all sides; if Germans threatenedrevolt; if Rome had need of the courage, of the valour, of theexperience of Tiberius?

Tiberius from his retreat in Rodi kept every one in Rome afraid, beginning with Augustus. Too rich, too eager now for pleasures andcomforts, Rome was almost disgusted with the virtues and thedefects that had in fact created it, and which survived inTiberius--aristocratic pride, the spirit of rigour in authority, military valour, simplicity. Peace had come, extending everywhere, with wealth, the desire for enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, freedom, loosening everywhere the firmest bonds of social discipline, persuading Rome to lay down the heavy armour it had worn for so manycenturies. 

In this family quarrel, which comprises a struggle of everlastingtendencies, Julia represented the new spirit that will prevail, Tiberius, the old, destined to perish; but for the time being, bothspirits, however opposed, were necessary; for peace did not expand itsgifts in the Empire without the protection of the great armiesthat fought on the Rhine and on the Danube. If the spirit of peacerefreshed Rome, Italy, the Provinces, only the old aristocratic andmilitary spirit could keep the Germans on the Rhine. As in all greatsocial conflicts, the two opposing parties were both, in a certainmeasure and each from its own point of view, right. Just for thatreason, the equilibrium could be found only by a continual strugglein which men on one side and on the other were destined in turn totriumph or fall according to the moment; a struggle in which Augustus, fated to act the part of judge--that is, to recognise, with a finalformal sanction, a sentence already pronounced by facts--had againsthis will in turn to condemn some and reward others. 

Julia will remain at Pandataria, and Tiberius will return to Romewhen the danger on the Rhine becomes too threatening, yet without muchlessening the conclusive vengeance of Julia. That will come in thelong torment of the reign of Tiberius; in the infamy that will pursuehim to posterity. After having been pitilessly hated and persecuted inlife, this man and this woman, who had personified two social forceseternally at war with each other, will both fall in death into thesame abyss of unmerited infamy: tragic spectacle and warning lesson onthe vanity of human judgments!

Wine in Roman History

In history as it is generally written, there are to be seen only greatpersonages and events, kings, emperors, generals, ministers, wars, revolutions, treaties. When one closes a huge volume of history, one knows why this state made a great war upon that; understands thepolitical thinking, the strategic plans, the diplomatic agreementsof the powerful, but would hardly be able to answer much more simplequestions: how people ate and drank, how the warriors, politicians, diplomats, were clad, and in general how men lived at any particulartime. 

History does not usually busy itself with little men and small facts, and is therefore often obscure, unprecise, vague, tiresome. I believethat if some day I deserve praise, it will be because I have triedto show that everything has value and importance; that all phenomenainterweave, act, and react upon each other--economic changes andpolitical revolutions, costumes, ideas, the family and the state, land-holding and cultivation. There are no insignificant eventsin history; for the great events, like revolutions and wars, areinevitably and indissolubly accompanied by an infinite number ofslight changes, appearing in every part of a nation: if in life thereare men without note, and if these make up the great majority ofnations--that which is called the "mass"--there is no greater mistakethan to believe they are extraneous to history, mere inert instrumentsin the hands of the oligarchies that govern. States and institutionsrest on this nameless mass, as a building rests upon its foundations. 

I mean to show you now by a typical case the possible importance ofthese little facts, so neglected in history. I shall speak to youneither of proconsuls nor of emperors, neither of great conquests norof famous laws, but of wine-dealers and vine-tenders, of the fortunedand famous plant that from wooded mountain-slopes, mirrored in theBlack Sea, began its slow, triumphal spread around the globe toits twentieth century bivouac, California. I shall show you how thebranches and tendrils of the plant of Bacchus are entwined about thehistory and the destiny of Rome. 

For many centuries the Romans were water-drinkers. Little wine wasmade in Italy, and that of inferior quality: commonly not even therich were wont to drink it daily; many used it only as medicine duringillness; women were never to take it. For a long time, any woman inRome who used wine inspired a sense of repulsion, like that excited inEurope up to a short time ago by any woman who smoked. At the timeof Polybius, that is, toward the middle of the second century B. C. , ladies were allowed to drink only a little _passum_, --a kind of sweetwine, or syrup, made of raisins. About the women too much given to thebeverage of Dionysos, there were terrifying stories told. It was said, for instance, that Egnatius Mecenius beat his wife to death, becauseshe secretly drank wine; and that Romulus absolved him (Pliny, _Nat. Hist. _, bk. 14, ch. 13). It was told, on the word of Fabius Pictor, who mentioned it in his annals, that a Roman lady was condemned bythe family tribunal to die of hunger, because she had stolen fromher husband the keys of the wine-cellar. It was said the Greek judgeDionysius condemned to the loss of her dower a wife who, unknown toher husband, had drunk more than was good for her health: this storyis one which shows that women began to be allowed the use of wine as amedicine. It was for a long time the vaunt of a true Roman to despisefine wines. For example, ancient historians tell of Cato that, whenhe returned in triumph from his proconsulship in Spain, he boastedof having drunk on the voyage the same wine as his rowers; whichcertainly was not, as we should say now, either Bordeaux or Champagne!

Cato, it is true, was a queer fellow, who pleased himself by throwingin the face of the young nobility's incipient luxury a piece of almostbrutal rudeness; but he exaggerated, not falsified, the ideas and thesentiments of Romanism. At that time, it was a thing unworthy of aRoman to be a practised admirer of fine wines and to show too greata propensity for them. Then not only was the vine little and illcultivated in Italy, but that country almost refused to admit itsability to make fine wines with its grapes. As wines of luxury, onlythe Greek were then accredited and esteemed--and paid for, like Frenchwines to-day; but, though admiring and paying well for them, theRomans, still diffident and saving, made very spare use of them. Lucullus, the famous conqueror of the Pontus, told how in his father'shouse--in the house, therefore, of a noble family--Greek wine wasnever served more than once, even at the most elegant dinners. Moreover, this must have been a common custom, because Pliny says, speaking of the beginning of the last century of the Republic, "Tantavero vino græco gratia erat ut singulæ potiones in convitu darentur";that is, translating literally, "Greek wine was so prized that onlysingle potions of it were given at a meal. " You understand at once thesignificance of this phrase; Greek wine was served as to-day--at leaston European tables--Champagne is served; it was too expensive to givein quantity. 

This condition of things began to change after Rome became a worldpower, went outside of Italy, interfered in the great affairs of theMediterranean, and came into more immediate contact with Greece andthe Orient. By a strange law of correlation, as the Roman Empirespread about the Mediterranean, the vineyard spread in Italy;gradually, as the world politics of Rome triumphed in Asia and Africa, the grape harvest grew more abundant in Italy, the consumption ofwine increased, the quality was refined. The bond between thetwo phenomena--the progress of conquest and the progress ofvine-growing--is not accidental, but organic, essential, intimate. As, little by little, the policy of expansion grew, wealth and cultureincreased in Rome; the spirit of tradition and of simplicity weakened;luxury spread, and with it the appetite for sensations, including thatof the taste for intoxicating beverages. 

We have but to notice what happens about us in the modern world--whenindustry gains and wealth increases and cities grow, men drink moreeagerly and riotously inebriating beverages--to understandwhat happened in Italy and in Rome, as gradually wars, tribute, blackmailing politics, pitiless usury, carried into the peninsula thespoils of the Mediterranean world, riches of the most numerous andvaried forms. The old-time aversion to wine diminished; men andwomen, city-dwellers and countrymen, learned to drink it. The cities, particularly Rome, no longer confined themselves to slaking theirthirst at the fountains; as the demand and the price for wineincreased, the land-owners in Italy grew interested in offering thecup of Bacchus, and as they had invested capital in vineyards, they were drawn on by the same interest to excite ever the more theeagerness for wine among the multitude, and to perfect grape-cultureand increase the crop, in imitation of the Greeks. The wars andmilitary expeditions to the Orient not only carried many Italians, peasants and proprietors, into the midst of the most celebratedvineyards of the world, but also transported into Italy slaves andnumerous Greek and Asiatic peasants who knew the best methods ofcultivating the vine, and of making wines like the Greek, just as thepeasants of Piedmont, of the _Veneto_, and of Sicily, have in the lasttwenty years developed grape-culture in Tunis and California. 

Pliny, who is so rich in valuable information on the agricultural andsocial advances of Italy, tells us that it opened its hills and plainsto the triumphal entrance of Dionysus between 130 and 120 B. C. , aboutthe time that Rome entered into possession of the kingdom of Pergamus, the largest and richest part of Asia Minor, left to it by bequestof Attalus. Thenceforward, for a century and a half, the progress ofgrape-growing continued without interruption; every generation pouredforth new capital to enlarge the inheritance of vineyards alreadygrown and to plant new ones. As the crop increased, the effort wasredoubled to widen the sale, to entice a greater number of people todrink, to put the Italian wines by the side of the Greek. 

At the distance of centuries, these vine-growing interests do notappear even in history; but they actually were a most important factorin the Roman policy, a force that helps us explain several mainfacts in the history of Rome. For example, vineyards were one of thefoundations of the imperial authority in Italy. That political formwhich was called with Augustus the principality, and from which wasevolved the monarchy, would not have been founded if in the lastcentury of the Republic all Italy had not been covered with vineyardsand olive orchards. The affirmation, put just so, may seem strange andparadoxical, but the truth of it will be easy to prove. 

The imperial authority was gradually consolidated, because, beginningwith Augustus, it succeeded in pacifying Italy after a century ofcommotion and civil wars and of foreign invasions, to which thesecular institutions of the Republic had not known how to opposesufficient defence; so that, little by little, right or wrong, theauthority of the _Princeps_, as supreme magistrate, and the power ofthe Julian-Claudian house, which the supreme magistrate had organised, seemed to the Italian multitude the stable foundation of peaceand order. But why was Italy, beginning with the time of Cæsar, sodesperately anxious for peace and order? It would be a mistake to seein this anxiety only the natural desire of a nation, worn by anarchy, for the conditions necessary to a common social existence. Thecontrast of two episodes will show you that during the age of Cæsarannoyance at disorder and intolerance of it had for a special reasonincreased in Italy. Toward the end of the third century B. C. , Italyhad borne on its soil for about seventeen years the presence ofan army that went sacking and burning everywhere--the army ofHannibal--without losing composure, awaiting with patience the hourfor torment to cease. A century and a half later, a Thracian slave, escaping from the chain-gang with some companions, overran thecountry, --and Italy was frightened, implored help, stretched out itsarms to Rome more despairingly than it had ever done in all the yearsof Hannibal. 

What made Italy so fearful? Because in the time of Hannibal it hadchiefly cultivated cereals and pastured cattle, while in the days ofSpartacus a considerable part of its fortune was invested in vineyardsand olive groves. In pastoral and grain regions the invasion of anarmy does relatively little damage; for the cattle can be driven inadvance of the invader, and if grain fields are burned, the harvest ofa year is lost but the capital is not destroyed. If, instead, an armycuts and burns olive orchards and vineyards, which are many years ingrowing, it destroys an immense accumulated capital. Spartacus wasnot a new Hannibal, he was something much more dangerous; he was a newspecies of _Phylloxera_ or of _Mosca olearia_ in the form of brigandbands that destroyed vines and olives, the accumulated capital ofcenturies. Whence, the emperor became gradually a tutelary deity ofthe vine and the olive, the fortune of Italy. It was he who stoppedthe barbarians still restless and turbulent on the frontiers of Italy, hardly over the borders; it was he who kept peace within the countrybetween social orders and political parties; it was he who lookedafter the maintenance and guarding of the great highways of thepeninsula, periodically clearing them of robbers and the evil-disposedthat infested them; and the land-owners, who held their vineyardsand olive groves more at heart than they did the great republicantraditions, placed the image of the Emperor among those of theirLares, and venerated him as they had earlier revered the Senate. 

Still more curious is the influence that this development of Italianviticulture exercised on the political life of Rome; for example, in the barbarous provinces of Europe, wine was an instrumentof Romanisation, the effectiveness of which has been too muchdisregarded. In Gaul, in Spain, in Helvetia, in the Danube provinces, Rome taught many things: law, war, construction of roads and cities, the Latin language and literature, the literature and art ofGreece; more, it also taught to drink wine. Whoever has read the_Commentaries_ of Cæsar will recall that, on several occasions, hedescribes certain more barbarous peoples of Gaul as prohibiting theimportation of wine because they feared they would unnerve andcorrupt themselves by habitual drunkenness. Strabo tells us of a greatGæto-Thracian empire that a Gætic warrior, Borebiste by name, foundedin the time of Augustus beyond the Danube, opposite Roman possessions;while this chieftain sought to take from Greek and Latin civilisationmany useful things, he severely prohibited the importation of wine. This fact and others similar, which might be cited, show that theseprimitive folk, exactly like the Romans of more ancient times, fearedthe beverage which so easily intoxicates, exactly as in China all wisepeople have always feared opium as a national scourge, and so many inFrance would to-day prohibit the manufacture of absinthe. 

This hesitation and fear disappeared among the Gauls, after theircountry was annexed to the Empire; disappeared or was weakened amongall the other peoples of the Danube and Rhine regions, and even inGermany, when they fell under Roman dominion; even also while theypreserved independence, as little by little the Roman influenceintensified in strength. By example, with the merchants, inliterature, Rome poured out everywhere the ruddy and perfumed drinkof Dionysos, and drove to the wilds and the villages, remote and poor, the national mead--the beverage of fermented barley akin to modernbeer. 

The Italian proprietors who were enlarging their vineyards--especiallythose of the valley of the Po, where already at the time of Strabo thegrape-crop was very abundant--soon learned that beyond the Alps livednumerous customers. Under Augustus, Arles was already a large marketfor wines, both Greek and Italian; during the same period, therepassed through Aquileia and Leibach considerable trade in Italian winewith the Danube regions. In the Roman castles along the Rhine, amongthe multitudes of Italians who followed the armies, there was notwanting the wine-dealer who sought with his liquor to infuse into thetorpid blood of the barbarian a ray of southern warmth. Everywherethe Roman influence conquered national traditions; wine reigned on thetables of the rich as the lordly beverage, and the more the Gauls, thePannonians, the Dalmatians, drank, the more money Italian proprietorsmade from their vineyards. 

I have said that Rome diffused at once its wine and its literature:it also diffused its wine through its literature, a fact upon whichI should like to dwell a moment, since it is odd and interestingfor diverse reasons. We always make a mistake in judging the greatliterary works of the past. Two or three centuries after they werewritten, they serve only to bring a certain delight to the mind;consequently, we take for granted they were written only to bring usthis delight. On the contrary, almost all literary works, even thegreatest, had at first quite another office; they served to spreador to counteract among the author's contemporaries certain ideas andsentiments that the interests of certain directing forces favoured oropposed; indeed very often the authors were admired and remuneratedfar more for these services rendered to their contemporaries than forthe lofty beauty of the literary works themselves. 

This is the case with the odes of Horace. To understand all that theymeant to say to contemporaries, one must imagine Roman society as itwas then, hardly out of a century of conquests and revolutions, indisorder, unbalanced, and still crude, notwithstanding the luxuriesand refinements superficially imitated from the Orient; a societyeager to enjoy, yet still ill educated to exercise upon itself thatdiscipline of good taste, without which civilisation and its pleasuresaggravate more than restrain the innate brutality of men. During thefirst period of peace, arrived after so great disturbance, thatpoetry so perfect in form, which analysed and described all themost exquisite delights of sense and soul, infused a new spirit ofrefinement into habits, and co-operated with laborious educationin teaching even the stern conquerors of the world to enjoy all thepleasures of civilisation, alike literature and love, the luxury ofthe city and the restfulness of the villa, fraternal friendship andgood cookery. It taught, too--this master poetry of the senses--toenjoy wine, to use the drink of Dionysos not to slake the thirst, butto colour, with an intoxication now soft, now strong, the most diverseemotions: the sadness of memories, the tendernesses of friendship, thetransports of love, the warmth of the quiet house, when without thefurious storm and the bitter cold stiffen the universe of nature. 

In the poetry of Horace, therefore, wine appears as a proteiform god, which penetrates not only the tissues of the body but also the inmostrecesses of the mind and aids it in its every contingency, sad orgay. Wine consoles in ill fortune (i. , 7), suffuses the senses withuniversal oblivion, frees from anxiety and the weariness of care, fills the empty hours, and warms away the chill of winter (i. , 9). Butthe wine that has the power to infuse gentle forgetfulness into theveins, has also the contrasting power of rousing lyric fervour in thespirit, the fervour heroic, divining, mystic (iii. , 2). Finally, wineis also a source of power and heroism, as well as of joy and sensuousdelight; a principle of civilisation and of progress (ii. , 14). 

I wish I could repeat to you all the Dionysic verse of this old poetfrom Venosa, whose subjects and motives, even though expressed in thechoicest forms, may seem common and conventional in our time and tous, among whom for centuries the custom of drinking wine daily withmeals has been a general habit. But these poems had a very differentsignificance when they were written, in that society in which many didnot dare drink wine commonly, considering it as a medicine, or as abeverage injurious to the health, or as a luxury dangerous to moralsand the purse; in that time when entire nations, like Gaul, hesitatedbetween the invitations of the ruddy vine-crowned Bacchus, come withhis legions victorious, and the desperate supplications of Cervisia, the national mead, pale and fleeing to the forests. In those times andamong those men, Horace with his dithyrambics affected not only thespirit but the will, uniting the subtle suggestion of his verses toall the other incentives and solicitations that on every side werepersuading men to drink. He corroded the ancient Italian traditions, which opposed with such repugnance and so many fears the efforts ofthe vintners and the vineyard labourers to sell wine at a high price;in this way he rendered service to Italian viticulture. 

The books of Horace, while he was still living, became what we mightcall school text-books; that is, they were read by young students, which must have increased their influence on the mind. Imagine thatto-day a great European poet should describe and extol in magnificentverses the sensuous delight of smoking opium; should deify, in amythology rich in imagery, the inebriating virtues of this product. Imagine that the verses of this poet were read in the schools: youmay then by comparison picture to yourself the action of the poems ofHorace. 

The political and military triumph of Rome in the Mediterranean worldsignified therefore the world triumph of wine. So true is this, thatin Europe and America to-day the sons of Rome drink wine as theirnational daily beverage. The Anglo-Saxons and Germans drink it inthe same way as the Romans of the second century B. C. , on formaloccasions, or as a medicine. When you see at an European or Americantable the gold or the ruby of the fair liquor gleaming in the glasses, remember that this is another inheritance from the Roman Empire andan ultimate effect of the victories of Rome; that probably we shoulddrink different beverages if Cæsar had been overcome at Alesia orif Mithridates had been able decisively to reconquer Asia Minor fromRome. It astonishes you to see between politics and enology, betweenthe great historical events and the lot of a humble plant, so close abond. 

I can show you another aspect of this phenomenon, even stranger andmore philosophical. I have already said that at the beginning of thefirst century before Christ, although Italy had already planted manyvineyards and gathered generous crops, Italian wines were still littlesought after, while the contrary was true of the Greek. Pliny writes:

 The wines of Italy were for long despised. . . . Foreign wines had great vogue for some time even after the consulate of Opimius [121 B. C. ], and up to the times of our grandfathers, although then Falernian was already discovered. 

In the second half of the last century of the Republic and the firsthalf of the first century B. C. , this condition of things changed;Italian wines rose to great fame and demand, and took from the Greekthe pre-eminence they so long had held. Finally, this pre-eminenceformed one of the spoils of world conquest, and that not one of themeagrest. Pliny, writing in the second half of the first century, says(bk. 14, ch. 11):

 Among the eighty most celebrated qualities of wine made in all the world, Italy makes about two thirds; therefore in this it outdoes other peoples. 

The first wines that came into note seem to have been those ofsouthern Italy, especially Falernian, and Julius Cæsar seems to havedone much to make it known. Pliny tells us (bk. 14, ch. 15) that, inthe great popular banquet offered to celebrate his triumph after hisreturn from Egypt, he gave to every group of banqueters a cask ofChian and an _amphora_ of Falernian, and that in his third consulatehe distributed four kinds of wine to the populace, Lesbian, Chian, Falernian, and Mamertine; two Greek qualities and two Italian. It isevident that he wished officially to recognise national wines as equalto the foreign, in favour of Italian vintners; so that Julius Cæsar, that universal man, has a place not only in the history of the greatItalian conquests, but also in that of Italian viticulture. 

The wines of the valley of the Po were not long in making place forthemselves after those of southern Italy. We know that Augustus drankonly Rhetian wine; that is, of the Valtellina, one of the valleysfamous also to-day for several delicious wines; we know that Liviadrank Istrian wine. 

I have said that Italy exported much wine to Gaul, to the Danuberegions, and to Germany; to this may be added another remark, both curious and interesting. _The Periplus of the Erytrian Sea_, attributed to Arrianus, a kind of practical manual of geography, compiled in the second century A. D. , tells us that in that centuryItalian wine was exported as far as India; so far had its fame spread!There is no doubt that the wealth in the first and second centuryA. D. , which flowed for every section of Italy, came in part from thenourishing vineyards planted upon its hills and plains; and thatthe Italians, who had gone to the Orient for reasons political andfinancial, had fallen upon yet greater fortune in contrabandingBacchus from the superb vineyards of the Ægean islands, andtransporting him to the hills of Italy; a new seat whereon thecapricious god of the vine rested for two centuries, until he tookagain to wandering, and crossed the Alps. 

We may at this juncture ask ourselves if this enologic pre-eminence ofItaly was the result only of a greater skill in cultivating the vineand pressing the grapes. I think not. It does not seem that Italyinvented new methods of wine-making; it appears, instead, that itrestricted itself to imitating what the Greeks had originated. On theother hand, it is certain, at least in northern and central Italy, that, although the vine grows, it does so less spontaneously andprosperously than in the Ægean islands, Greece, and Asia Minor, because the former regions are relatively too cold. 

The great fame of the Italian wines had another cause, a political:the world power and prestige of Rome. This psychological phenomenonis found in every age, among all peoples, and is one of the mostimportant and essential in all history. What is beautiful and what isugly? What is good and what is bad? What is true and what is false?In every period men must so distinguish between things, must adoptor repudiate certain ideas, practise or abandon certain habits, buycertain objects and refuse others; but one should not believe thatall peoples make these discernments spontaneously, according to theirnatural inclination. It always happens that some nations succeed, bywar, or money, or culture, in persuading the lesser peoples about themthat they are superior; and strong in this admiration, they imposeupon their susceptible neighbours, by a kind of continuous suggestion, their own ideas as the truest, their own customs as the noblest, theirown arts as the most perfect. 

For this reason chiefly, wars have often distant and complicatedrepercussions on the habits, the ideas, the commerce of nations. War, to which so many philosophers would attribute a divine spirit, somany others a diabolic, appears to the historian as above all ameans--allow me the phrase, a bit frivolous, but graphic--of noisy_réclame_, advertisement for a people; because, although a morecivilised people may be conquered by one more barbarous, lesscultured, less moral; although, also, the superiority in war maybe relative, and men are not on the earth merely to give each otherblows, but to work, to study, to know, to enjoy; yet the majorityof men are easily convinced that he who has won in a war is ineverything, or at least in many things, superior to him who has lost. So it happened, for example, after the late Franco-Prussian War, thatnot only the armies organised or reorganised after 1870 imitated eventhe German uniform, as they had earlier copied the French, but inpolitics, science, industry, even in art, everything German was moregenerously admired. Even the consumption of beer heavily increasedin the wine countries, and under the protection of the Treaty ofFrankfurt, the god Gambrinus has made some audacious sallies into theterritories sacred to Dionysos. 

The same thing occurred in regard to wine in the ancient world. Athensand Alexander the Great had given to Greek wine the widest reputation, all the peoples of the Mediterranean world being persuaded that thatwas the best of all. Then the centre of power shifted to the west, toward the city built on the banks of the Tiber, and little by littleas the power of Rome grew, the reputation of its wine increased, whilethat of Greece declined; until, finally, with world empire, Italyconquered pre-eminence in the wine market, and held it with theEmpire; for while Italy was lord, Italian wine seemed most excellentand was paid for accordingly. 

This propensity of minor or subject peoples to imitate those dominantor more famous, is the greatest prize that rewards the pre-eminentfor the fatigue necessary to conquer that place of honour; it is thereason why cultured and civilised nations ought naturally to seekto preserve a certain political, economic, and military supremacy, without which their intellectual superiority would weaken or at leastlose a part of its value. The human multitude in the vast world arenot yet so intelligent and refined as to prize that which is beautifuland grand for its own sake; and they are readily induced to admire asexcellent what is but mediocre, if behind it there is a force to befeared or to impose it. Indeed, we may observe in the modern world aphenomenon analogous to that in historic Italy. What, in succeedingcenturies, have been the changes in the enologic superiority conqueredby Rome?

Naturally I cannot recount the whole story, although it would beinteresting; but will only observe that contemporary civilisationconfirms the law by which predominance in the Latin world and thepre-eminence of wine are indissolubly bound together in history. 

Paris is the modern Rome, the metropolis of the Latin world. Francecontinues, as far as can be done in modern times, the ancient sway ofRome, irradiating round so much of the globe, by commerce, literature, art, science, industry, dominance of political ideas, the influenceof the Latin world, making tributaries to Latin culture of barbarouspeoples, and nations too young for leadership or grown too old; andFrance has inherited the pre-eminence in wines, although it lies atthe farthest confines of the vine-bearing zone, beyond which the treeof Bacchus refuses to live. Do you realise that in all the wide beltof earth where vineyards flourish, only the dry hills of Champagneripen the delicious effervescent wine that refigures in moderncivilisation--at least for those who are fond of wine--the nectar ofthe gods? And this, while effervescent wines are made in innumerableparts of the world and many are so good that one wonders if it werenot possible for them, manufactured with care, placed in sightlybottles, and sold at as high a price as the most famous FrenchChampagne, to dispute a part of the admiration that the devotees ofBacchus render to the French wine. Ah, they do not scintillate beforethe eyes of the world as symbols of gay intoxication like the others, for through those bottles passes no ray of the glory and prestige ofFrance! An historian fond of paradoxes might affirm, and with greatlikelihood, what does not appear at first glance: that the greatbrands of French Champagne would not be sold so dear if the FrenchRevolution had been suppressed by the European coalition, and ifFrance, overcome in the terrible trial, had been enchained by theabsolute monarchies of Europe like a dangerous beast. It would evenbe possible to declare that the reputation of Champagne is rooted, notonly in the ground where the grapes are cultivated, and preserved inthe vast cellars where the precious crops are stored, but in allthe historic tradition of France, in all that which has given Franceworldly glory and power: the victorious wars, the distant conquests, the colonies, the literature, the art, the science, the money capital, and the spirit--cosmopolitan, expansive, dynamic--of its history. It would be possible to declare that it makes and pours into all theworld its precious wine by that same virtue, intimate, national, and historic, by which it created the encyclopædia and made theRevolution, let Napoleon loose on Europe and founded the Empire, wrote so many famous books and built on the banks of the Seine themarvellous universal city, where all the forces of modern civilisationare gathered together and hold each other in equilibrium: aristocracyand democracy, the cosmopolite spirit and the spirit of nationality, money and science, war and fashion, art and religion. If Francehad not had its great history, Champagne would have remained aneffervescing wine of modest household use that the peasants placeevery year in barrels for their own family consumption or to sell inthe vicinity of the city of Rheims. 

Social Development of the Roman Empire. 

Augustus died the twenty-third of August of the year 14 A. D. , sayingto Livia, as she embraced him: "Adieu, Livia, remember our long life. "Suetonius adds that, before dying, he had asked the friends whohad come to salute him, if he seemed to them "_mimum vitæ commodetransegisse"_--to have acted well his life's comedy. In this famousphrase many historians have seen a confession, an acknowledgment ofthe long rôle of deceit that the unsurpassable actor had played tohis public. What a mistake! If Augustus did pronounce that famoussentence, he meant to say quite another thing. An erudite German hasdemonstrated with the help of many texts that the ancient writers, and especially the stoic philosophers, commonly compared life to atheatrical representation, divided into different acts and with aninevitable epilogue, death, without intending to say that it was athing little serious or not true. They only meant that life is anaction, which has a natural sequence from beginning to end, like atheatrical representation. There is then no need to translate theexpression of Augustus "the play"--that is, the deceit--"is ended, "but rather "the drama"--the work committed by destiny--"is finished. "

The drama was ended, and what a drama! It is difficult to find inhistory a longer and more troubled career than that known by Augustusfor nearly sixty years, from the far-away days when, young, handsome, full of ambition and daring, he had come to Rome, throwing himselfhead first into the frightful turmoil let loose by the murder ofCæsar, to that tranquil death, the death of a great wise man, in themidst of the _pax Romana_, now spread from end to end of the Empire!After so many tragic catastrophies had struck his class and hisfamily, _Euthanasia_--the death of the happy--descended for the firsttime since the passing of Lucullus, to close the eyes of a greatRoman. 

There is no better means of giving an idea of the mission of the RomanEmpire in the world than to summarise the life and work of this famouspersonage. Augustus has been in our century somewhat the victim ofNapoleon I. The extraordinary course of events at the beginning ofthe nineteenth century made so vivid an impression on succeedinggenerations, that for the whole of the century people have been ableto admire only the great agitators, men whose lives are filled withstorm and clamorous action. Compared with that of Napoleon or ofCæsar, the figure of Augustus is simple and colourless. The Romanpeace, in the midst of which he died, was his work only veryindirectly. Augustus had wearied his whole life in reorganisingthe finances and the army, in crushing the revolts of the Europeanprovinces, in defending the boundaries of the Rhine and the Danube, in making effective in Rome, as far as he could, the old aristocraticconstitution. All intent on this service, a serious and difficultone, he never dreamed of regenerating the Empire by a powerfuladministration. Even if he had wished it, he would not have had themeans--men and money. 

For the past century, the vastness and power of the administrationthat governed the Empire has been greatly admired. Without discussingmany things possible on this point, it must be observed that thisjudgment does not apply to the times of Augustus and Tiberius, becausethen this administration did not exist. During the first fifty yearsof the Empire, the provinces were all governed, as under the Republic, by proconsuls or proprætors, each accompanied by a quæstor, a fewsubordinate officials, freedmen, friends, and slaves. A few dozen ofmen governed the provinces, as vast as states. Augustus added to thisrudimentary administration but one organ, the procurator, chosen fromfreedmen or knights, charged with overseeing the collection of tributeand expenses; that is, caring for the interests, not of the provinces, but of Rome. Consequently, the government was weak and inactive in allthe provinces. 

Whoever fancies the government of Rome modelled after the type ofmodern governments, invading, omnipotent, omnipresent, deceiveshimself. There were sent into the provinces nobles belonging to richand noted families, who had therefore no need to rob the subjectstoo much; and these men ruled, making use of the laws, customs, institutions, families of nobles, of each place, exactly as Englandnow does in many parts of its Empire. As in general these governorswere not possessed of any great activity, they did not meddle much inthe internal affairs of the subject peoples. To preserve the unity ofthe Empire and the supremacy of Italy against all enemies, within andwithout; to exploit reasonably this supremacy; for the rest, to letevery people live as best pleased it: such was the policy of Augustusand of Tiberius, the policy of the first century A. D. In short, thiswas but the idea of the old aristocratic party, adapted to the newtimes. 

So the Roman Government gave itself little concern at this time forthe provinces, nor did it build in them any considerable public work. It did not construct roads, nor canals, nor harbours, except whenthey were necessary to the metropolis; for example, Agrippa madethe network of Gallic roads; Augustus opened the first three greathighways that crossed the Alps. It would be a mistake to suppose thatthese important constructions were designed to favour the progressof Gallic commerce; they were strategic highways made to defend theRhine. As gradually Gaul grew rich, Rome had to recognise that theweak garrisons, set apart in the year 27 for the defence of the Rhineand the Danube, were insufficient. It would have been necessary toincrease the army, but the finances were in bad condition. Augustusthen thought to base defence on the principle that the immensefrontiers could not all be assailed at the same time, and therefore heconstructed some great military roads across the Alps and Gaul, to beable to collect the soldiery rapidly from all parts of the Empire atany point menaced, on the Rhine or on the Danube. 

The imperial policy of Augustus and that of Tiberius, who applied thesame principles with still greater vigour, was above all a negativepolicy. Accordingly, it could please only those denying as useful toprogress another kind of men, the great agitators of the masses. Shallwe therefore conclude that Augustus and Tiberius were useless? Sodoing, we should run the risk of misunderstanding all the history ofthe Roman conquest. By merely comprehending the value of the apparentinactivity of Augustus and Tiberius, one can understand the essence ofthe policy of world expansion initiated by the Roman aristocracy afterthe Second Punic War. At the beginning, this policy was pre-eminentlydestructive. Everywhere Rome either destroyed or weakened, notnations or peoples, but republics, monarchies, theocracies, principalities--that is, the political superstructures that framed thedifferent states, great or small; everywhere it put in place of thesesuperstructures the weak authority of its governors, of the Senate, ofits own prestige; everywhere it left intact or gave greater freedom tothe elementary forms of human association, the family, the tribe, thecity. 

So for two centuries Rome continued in Orient and Occident to suppressbureaucracies, to dismiss or reduce armies, to close royal palaces, to limit the power of priestly castes or republican oligarchies, substituting for all these complicated organisations a proconsulwith some dozens of vicegerent secretaries and attendants. Thelast enterprise of this policy, which I should be tempted tocall "state-devouring, " was the destruction of the dynasty of thePtolemies, in Egypt. Without doubt, the suppression of so manystates, continued for two centuries, could not be accomplished withoutterrible upheavals. It would be useless to repaint here the grimpicture of the last century of the Republic; sufficient to say, thegrandiosity of this convulsion has hindered most people from seeingthat the state-devouring policy of Rome included in itself, by theside of the forces of dissolution, beneficent, creative forces, ableto bring about a new birth. If this policy had not degenerated intoan unbridled sacking, it could have effectuated everywhere notableeconomies in the expenses of government that were borne by the poorerclasses, suppressing as it did so many armies, courts, bureaucracies, wars. It is clear that Rome would have been able to gather in onall sides, especially in the Orient, considerable tribute, merelyby taking from the various peoples much less than the cost of theirpreceding monarchies and continuous wars. Moreover, Rome establishedwith the conquests throughout the immense Empire what we would calla régime of free exchange; made neighbours of territories formerlyseparated by constant wars, unsafe communication, and internationalanarchy; and rendered possible the opening up of mines and forestshitherto inaccessible. 

The apparent inactivity of Augustus and Tiberius was simply theultimate and most beneficent phase of the state-devouring policy ofRome, that in which, the destructive forces exhausted, the creativeforces began to act. Augustus and Tiberius only prolonged indefinitelyby means of expedients that mediocre order and that partialtranquillity re-established after Actium by the general weariness;but exactly for this reason were they so useful to the world. Inthis peace, in this mediocre order, the policy of expansion of Rome, finally rid of all the destructive forces, matured all the benefitsinherent within it. Finally, after a frightful crisis, the worldwas able to enjoy a liberty and an autonomy such as it had neverpreviously enjoyed and which perhaps it will never again in an equaldegree of civilisation and in so great an extension. 

The Empire then covered Spain, France, Belgium, a part of Germany andAustria, Switzerland and Italy, the Balkanic countries, Greece, AsiaMinor, Syria, Palestine, a part of Arabia, Egypt, and all northernAfrica. I do not believe that the political _personnel_ that made upthe central government of this enormous Empire ever comprised morethan 2000 men. The army charged with defending so many territoriesnumbered about 200, 000 men--fewer than the present army of Italyalone. The effects of this order of things were soon to be seen; inall the Mediterranean basin there began a rapid and universal economicexpansion, which, on a smaller scale, might remind one of what Europeand America have seen in the nineteenth century. New lands werecultivated, new mines opened, new wares manufactured, exports sentinto regions formerly closed or unknown; and every new source ofwealth, creating new riches, made labour and commerce progress. 

Foremost among all nations of the Empire, at the centre, Italy rapidlyconsolidated its fortune and its domination. After the mad plunderingof the times of Cæsar, followed methodical exploiting. Italy attractedto itself by the power of political leadership the precious metals andwares of luxury from every part of the Empire; the largest quantityof these things passed through Rome, before being scattered throughoutthe peninsula in exchange for the agricultural and industrial productsof Italy, consumed in the capital. Consequently the middle classes andmany cities grew rich, especially the cities of the Campania, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Naples, Pozzuoli, through which passed all the tradebetween Italy and Egypt. In addition, Italy found an abundant sourceof income in the exportation of wine and oil. 

In short, having at last emerged from revolution, the peoples of Italyrallied around Rome and the imperial power, united and relativelycontent. At the same time, the provinces began among themselves, aboutItaly, a great interchange of merchandise, men, ideas, customs, across the Mediterranean. Rome and Italy were invaded by a crowdof Orientals, slaves, freedmen, merchants, artisans, _litterati_, artists, acrobats, poets, adventurers; and contemporaneously with Romeand Italy, the agricultural provinces of the West, especially thosealong the Danube. Rome did not conquer the barbarous provinces ofEurope for itself alone; it conquered them also for the East, which, in Mesia, Dalmatia, Pannonia, among those barbarians growing civilisedand eager to live in cities, found customers for their industries inarticles of luxury, for their artists, teachers of literature, andpropagandists of religion. 

We are therefore able to explain to ourselves why, beginning from thetime of Augustus, all the industrial cities of the Orient--Pergamon, Laodicea, Ephesus, Ierapolis, Tyre, Sidon, Alexandria--entered uponan era of new and refulgent prosperity. Finally, we add the singularenriching of two nations, whose names return anew united for the lasttime, Egypt and Gaul. To all the numerous sources of Gallic wealththere is to be added yet another, the importance of which is easierto understand after what I have said on the development of theEmpire. Pliny tells us that all Gaul wove linen sails. The progress ofnavigation, a consequence of the progress of commerce, much increasedthe demand for linen sail-cloth, something that explains the spread offlax cultivation in Gaul and the profit derived from it. 

As to Egypt, it not only found in the pacified empire new outlets forits old industries, but also succeeded in engaging a large part of thenew commerce with the extreme Orient, which was at this time greatlyon the increase. From India and China were imported pearls, diamonds, silk fabrics; for the use of these wares gained largely duringthis century, as it has done in recent times in Europe and America;perfumes were also imported, and rice, which served as a medicamentand to prepare dishes of luxury. 

The unity of the Empire was due far more to this great economicdevelopment that began under Augustus than to the political actionof the early emperors. Little by little, imperial interests becameso numerous and so considerable that Rome saw the effort necessaryto keep up the unity diminish. Everywhere, even in the most distantregions, powerful minorities formed that worked for Rome and againstold separating, anti-uniting forces, against old traditions and localpatriotism alike. The wealthy classes everywhere became in a specialway wholly favourable to Rome. Therefore there is no more seriousmistake than regarding the Roman Empire as the exclusive work of agovernment: it was in truth created by two diverse forces, operatingone after the other--each in its own time, for both were necessary: aforce of destruction--the state-devouring policy of Rome; a force ofreconstruction--the economic unification. The annihilation of states, without which there would have been no economic unification, was thework of the government and the armies. It was the politicians of theSenate that destroyed so many states by wars and diplomatic intrigues;but the economic unification was made chiefly by the infinitelylittle--the peasant, the artisan, the educated man--the nameless many, that lived and worked and passed away, leaving hardly trace or record. These unknown that laboured, each seeking his own personal happiness, contributed to create the Empire as much as did the great statesmenand generals. For this reason I can never regard without a certainemotion the mutilated inscriptions in the museums, chance salvage fromthe great shipwreck of the ancient world, that have preserved the nameof some land-owner, or merchant, or physician, or freedman. Lo!what remains of these generations of obscure workers, who were theindispensable collaborators of the great statesmen and diplomatists ofRome, and without whom the political world of Rome would have been buta gigantic enterprise of military brigandage!

The great historic merit of Augustus and of Tiberius is that theypresided over the passage from the destructive to the reorganisingphase with their wise, prudent, apparently inactive policy. Thetransition, like all transitions, was difficult; the disintegratingforces were not yet exhausted; the upbuilding forces were still veryweak; the world of the time was in unstable equilibrium, violentperturbations certainly yet possible. Without doubt, it is hard to saywhat would have happened if, instead of being governed by the policyof Augustus, the world had fallen into the hands of an adventurousoligarchy like that which gathered around Alexander the Great; but wecan at least affirm that the sagacity and prudence of Augustus, whichtwenty centuries afterward appear as inactivity, did much to avoidsuch disturbances, the consequences of which, in a world so exhausted, would have been grave. 

Nor is it correct to believe that this policy was easy. Moderationand passivity, even when good for the governed, rust and waste awaygovernments, which must always be doing something, even if it be onlymaking mistakes. In fact, while supreme power usually brings returnand much return to him who exercises it, especially in monarchies, itcost instead, and unjustly, to Augustus and Tiberius. Augustus had tooffer to the monster, as Tiberius called the Empire, almost all hisfamily, beginning with the beloved Julia, and had to spend for thestate almost all his fortune. We know that although in the last twentyyears of his life he received by many bequests a sum amounting to abillion and four hundred million sesterces, he left his heirs only onehundred and fifty million sesterces, all the rest having been spent byhim for the Republic: this was the singular civil list of this curiousmonarch, who, instead of fleecing his subjects, spent for them almostall he had. It is vain to speak of Tiberius: the Empire cost him theonly thing that perhaps he held dear, his fame. A philosophic historywould be wrong in not recognising the grandeur of these sacrifices, which are the last glory of the Roman nobility. The old politicalspirit of the Roman nobility gave to Augustus and Tiberius thestrength to make these sacrifices, and they probably saved ancientcivilisation from a most difficult crisis. 

It may be observed that Augustus and Tiberius worked for the Empireand the future without realising it. Far from understanding that theeconomic progress of their time would unify the Empire better thancould their laws and their legions, they feared it; they believedthat it would everywhere diffuse "corruption, " even in the armies, and therefore weaken the imperial power of resistance against thebarbarians on the Rhine and the Danube. The German peril--the futurehad luminously to demonstrate it--was much less than Augustus andTiberius believed. In other words, the first two emperors thought thatthe unity of the Empire would be maintained by a vigorous, solid army, while the economic progress, which spread "corruption, " appeared tothem to put it to risk. 

Exactly the opposite happened; the army continued to decay, notwithstanding the desperate efforts of Tiberius, while the innerforce of economic interests held the countries well bound together. It is impossible to oppose this course of reasoning, in itself mostaccurate; but what conclusion is to be drawn from it? In the chaoticconflict of passions and interests that make up the world, the deedsof a man or a party are not useful in proportion to the objectivetruth of the ideas acted out, or to the success attained. Theirusefulness depends upon the direction of the effort, on the ends itproposes, on the results it obtains. There are men and parties of whomone might say, they were right to be wrong, when chimerical ideasand mistakes have sustained their courage to carry out an effectiveeffort; there are others, instead, of whom it might be said that theywere wrong to be right, when their clear vision of present and pastkept them from accomplishing some painful but necessary duty. 

Certainly the old Roman traditions were destined to be overwhelmedby the invasion of Oriental ideas and habits; but what might nothave happened if every one had understood this from the very times ofAugustus; if then no one had opposed the invasion of Orientalism; ifmysticism and the monarchy of divine right had transformed Italy orthe Empire within fifty years instead of three centuries? I shouldnot at all hesitate to affirm that certain errors are in certainconjunctions much wiser than the corresponding verities. There isnothing more useful in life than resistance, though apparently futile, against social forces fated to perish, because these, struggling on tothe very end, always succeed in imposing a part of themselves on thevictorious power, and the result is always better than a completeand unantagonised victory of the opposing force. To the obstinateresistance with which republican principles combated Asiatic monarchyin Rome, we must even to-day render thanks for the fact that Europewas not condemned, like Asia, to carry the eternal yoke of semidivineabsolutism, even in dynastic regimes. What social force destined toperish would still have power to struggle if it clearly foresaw itsinevitable future dissolution; if it did not fortify itself a littlewith some deluding vision of its own future?

Augustus and Tiberius were deceived. They wished to reanimate what wasdoomed; they feared what for the moment was not dangerous. They arethe last representatives of the policy initiated by the Scipios andnot the initiators of the policy that created the bureaucratic Empireof Diocletian: yet this is exactly their glory. They were right tobe wrong; and they rendered to the Empire an immense service, forthe very reason that the definite outcome of their efforts wasdiametrically opposed to the idea that animated them. But we need notdwell on this point. Such were the ideas of the two emperors and theresults of their work; the true Empire, known to all, the monarchic, Asiaticised, bureaucratic Empire, grew out of this little-governedbeginning that Augustus and Tiberius allowed to live in the freedomof the largest autonomy. How was it formed? This is the great problemthat I shall try to solve in the sequence of my work. Naturally, Icannot now résumé all the ideas I mean to develop: I confine myselfhere to some of the simplest considerations, which seem to me surest. 

The picture of the Empire, so brilliant from the economic stand-point, is much less so from the intellectual: here we touch its greatweakness. Destroying so many governments, especially in the Orient, Rome had at the same time decapitated the intellectual _élites_ ofthe ancient world; for the courts of the monarchies were the greatfiresides of mental activity. Rome had therefore, together with statesand governments, destroyed scientific and literary institutions, centres of art, traditions of refinement, of taste, of æstheticelegance. So everywhere, with the Roman domination, the practicalspirit won above the philosophical and scientific, commerce over artsand letters, the middle classes over historic aristocracies. Alreadyweakened by the overthrow of the most powerful Asiatic monarchies, these _élites_ received the final blow on the disappearance of theirlast protection, the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt. 

When Augustus began to govern the Empire, the classes that representtradition, culture the elevated and disinterested activities of thespirit, were everywhere extensive in number in wealth, in energy. It was not long before these ultimate remainders vanished under thealluvial overflow of the middle classes, swollen by the big economicgains of the first century. In this respect, the first and secondcenturies of the Christian era resemble our own time. In the wholeEmpire, alike in Rome, in Gaul, in Asia, there were old aristocraticfamilies, rich and illustrious, but they were not the class ofgreatest power. Under them stood a middle class of merchants, land-owners, orators, jurists, professors, and other intellectual men, and this was so numerous, comfortable, and so potent as to cause allthe great social forces, from government to industry, to abandonthe old aristocracy and court it like a new mistress. Art, industry, literature, were vulgarised in those two centuries, as to-day inEurope and America, because they had to work mainly for this middleclass which was much more numerous, and yet cruder than the ancient_élites_. It was the first era of the _cheap_, of vulgarisations, Iwas about to say of the _made in Germany_, that enters intohistory. There was invented the art of silver-plating, to give the_bourgeoisie_ at moderate prices the sweet illusion of possessingobjects of silver; great thinkers disappeared; instead were multipliedmanuals, treatises, encyclopaedias, professors that summarised andvulgarised. Philosophy gradually gave out, like all the higher formsof literature, and there began the reign of the declaimers and thesophists; that is, the lecture-givers, the lawyers, the journalists. In painting and sculpture, original schools were no more to be found, nor great names, but the number of statues and bas-reliefs increasedinfinitely. The paintings of Pompeii and many statues and marblesthat are now admired in European museums are examples of thisindustrialised art, inexpensive, creating nothing original, butfurnishing to families in comfortable circumstances passable copies ofworks of art--once a privilege only of kings. 

The imperial bureaucracy that was formed mainly in the second centurywas another effect of this enlargement of the middle classes. In thesecond century there came into vogue many humanitarian ideas, whichhave a certain resemblance to modern ones. There increased solicitudefor the general well-being, for order, for justice, and this augmentedthe number of functionaries charged with insuring universal felicityby administrative means. The movement was supported by intellectualmen of the middle classes, especially by jurists, who sought to puttheir studies to profit, getting from the government employments inwhich they might make use, well or ill, of their somewhat artificialaptitudes. If the aristocratic idea, personified by Augustusand Tiberius, delayed, it could not stop, the invasion of thesebureaucratic locusts; the government showed itself constantly weakerwith the intellectual classes. Little by little the whole Empirewas bureaucratised; founded by an aristocracy exclusively Roman instatesmen and soldiers, it was finally governed by a cosmopolitanbureaucracy of men of brains: orators, _litterati_, lawyers. Therefore, to my thinking, they are wrong who believe that theimperial bureaucracy created the unity of the Empire; whereas, theformation of the imperial bureaucracy was one of the consequences ofthat natural unification, the chief reason for which should be soughtin the great economic movement. The economic unification was firstand was entire; then came the political unity, made by the imperialbureaucracy, which was less complete than the unifying of materialinterests. 

After the material unity, after the political, there should have beenformed the moral and intellectual; but at this point, the forces ofRome gave way. Rome had gathered under its sceptre too many races, too many kinds of culture, religions too diverse; its spirit was tooexclusively political, administrative, and judicial; it could nottherefore conciliate the ideas, assimilate the customs, weld thesentiments, unify the religions, by its laws and decrees. To thisend was necessary the power of ideas, of doctrines, of beliefs thatofficials of administration could neither create nor propagate. Thework was to be accomplished outside of, and in part against, thegovernment. It is the work of Christianity. 

Many have asked me how I shall consider Christianity in the sequenceof my work. In brief, I may say that I shall follow a different methodfrom that which its historians have taken up to this time: they havestudied especially how there was formed that part of Christianitywhich yet lives and is the soul of it, namely, the religious doctrine. On this account, they generally separate its history from the historyof the Empire, making of it the principal argument, considering thehistory of Roman society as subordinate to it and therefore only anappendix. I propose to reverse the study, taking Christianity as achapter, important but separate, in the history of the Empire. Iffor three centuries Christianity has been gradually returning to itsorigin, that is, becoming purely a religion and a moral teaching, for some centuries in the ancient world it was a thing much morecomplicated; a government and an administration that willed not onlyto regulate the relations between man and God, but to govern theintellectual, social, moral, political, and economic life of thepeople! The historian ought to explain how this new Empire--for it wasindeed a new Empire--was formed in Rome and upon its ruins: this is aproblem much more intricate than at first appears. 

It has been said and often repeated that the Church was in the MiddleAges in Europe the continuation of the Roman Empire, that the Pope isyet the real successor of the Emperor in Rome. In fact he carries oneof the Emperor's titles, _Pontifex maximus_. The observation is just, but it should not make us forget that the Christian Empire, so to callit, and the Roman Empire, were between themselves as radicallyopposed as two forces that created the one and the other; politics andintellectuality. The diplomatists, the generals, the legislators ofRome created by political means, by wars, treaties, laws, a grandeconomic and political unity, which they consolidated, quite givingup the formation of a large intellectual and moral unity. Theintellectual men, who formed the most powerful nucleus of the Churchafter the fourth century, took up again the Roman idea of unity and ofempire; but they transferred it from matter to mind, from the concreteworld of economic and political interests, to the world of ideasand beliefs. They tried to re-do, by pen and word, the work of theScipios, of Lucullus, and of Cæsar, to conquer the world, not indeedinvading it with armies, but spreading a new faith, creating a newmorality, a new metaphysics which must gather up within themselvesthe intellectual activities of Græco-Latin culture, from history toscience, from law to philosophy. 

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

I shall make an effort, above all, to explain the origin, thedevelopment, and the consequences of this contradiction, because Ibelieve that explaining this clears one of the weightiest and mostimportant 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 mentallyand morally he is, instead, much nearer, because for the last fourcenturies Europe has been returning to Rome--that is, striving toremake a great political and economic unity at the expense of theintellectual and moral. In this fact particularly, lies the immensehistoric importance of what is called the classic renaissance. Itindicates the beginning of an historic reversion that correspondsin the opposite direction to what occurred in the third and fourthcenturies of the Christian era. The classic renaissance freed anewthe scientific spirit of the ancients from mediæval metaphysics andtherefore created the sciences; rediscovered some basic politicaland juridical ideas of the ancient world, among them that of theindivisibility of the State, which destroyed the foundations offeudalism and of all the political orders of the Middle Ages; and gavea great impetus to the struggle against the political domination ofthe Church and toward the formation of the great states. France andEngland have been in the lead, and for two centuries Europe hasbeen wearying itself imitating them. After the movement of politicalunification followed the economic. Look about you: what do you see?A world that looks more like the Roman Empire than it does the MiddleAges; it is a world of great states whose dominating classes havealmost all the essential ideas of Græco-Latin civilisation; each, seeking to better its own conditions, is forced to establish betweenitself and the others the strictest economic relations and to bindinto the system of common interests also barbarous countries and thoseof differing civilisation. But how? By scrupulously respecting all theintellectual and moral diversities of men. What matters it if a peoplebe Roman Catholic or Protestant, Mohammedan or Buddhist, monarchic orrepublican, provided it buys, sells, takes part in the economic unityof the modern world? This is the policy of contemporary states and wasthe policy of the Roman Empire. It has often been observed that in themodern world, so well administered, there is an intellectual and moraldiversity greater than that during the fearful anarchy of the MiddleAges, when all the lettered classes had a single language, the Latin, and the lower classes held, on certain fundamental questions, the sameideas--those taught by the Church. A correct observation, this, butone from which there is no need to draw too many conclusions; since inour history the material unity and the ideal are naturally exclusive. 

We are returning, in a vaster world, to the condition of the RomanEmpire at its beginning; to an immense economic unity, which, notwithstanding the aberrations of protectionism, is grander andfirmer than all its predecessors; to a political unity not so great, yet considerable, because even if peace be not eternal, it is at leastthe normal condition of the European states; to an indifference forevery effort put forth to establish moral and ideal uniformityamong the nations, great and small, that share in this political andeconomic unity. This is why we understand Augustus and his times muchmore readily than we do the times of Charlemagne, even though from thelatter we possess a greater number of documents; this is why we canwrite a history of Augustus and rectify so many mistakes made abouthim by preceding generations. It has often happened to me to find, _àpropos_ of the volumes written on Augustus, that my contradiction oftradition creates a kind of instinctive diffidence. Many say: "Yes, this book is interesting; but is it possible that for twenty centurieseverybody has been mistaken?--that it was necessary to wait till 1908to understand what occurred in the year 8?" But those twenty centuriesreduce themselves, as far as regards the possibility of understandingAugustus, to little more than a hundred years. Since Augustus was thelast representative of a world that was disappearing, his figure soonbecame obscure and enigmatic. Tacitus and Suetonius saw him alreadyenveloped in the mist of that new spirit which for so many centurieswas to conceal from human eyes the wonderful spectacle of the paganworld. Then the mist became a fog and grew denser, until Augustusdisappeared, or was but a formless shadow. Centuries passed by; thefog began to withdraw before the returning sun of the ancient culture;his figure reappeared. Fifty years ago, the obscurity cleared quiteaway; the figure stands in plain view with outlines well defined. Ibelieve that the history I have written is more like the truth thanthose preceding it, but I do not consider myself on that accounta wonder-worker. I know I have been able to correct many precedingerrors, because I was the first to look attentively when the moment tosee and understand arrived. 

Roman History in Modern Education. 

When I announced my intention to write a new history of Rome, manypeople manifested a sense of astonishment similar to what they wouldhave felt had I said that I meant to retire to a monastery. Was it tobe believed that the hurrying modern age, which bends all its energiestoward the future, would find time to look back, even for a moment, atthat past so far away? That my attempt was rash was the commonopinion not only of friends and critics, but also of publishers, whoeverywhere at first showed themselves skeptical and hesitating. Theyall said that the public was quite out of touch with Roman affairs. Onthe contrary, facts have demonstrated that also in this age, in aspectso eager for things modern, people of culture are willing to giveattention to the events and personages of ancient Rome. 

The thing appears strange and bizarre, as is natural, to those who hadnot considered it possible; consequently, few have seen how simpleand clear is its explanation. To those who showed surprise that thehistory of Rome could become fashionable in Paris salons, I havealways replied: My history has had its fortune because it was thehistory of Rome. Written with the same method and in the same style, a history of Venice, or Florence, or England, would not have had thesame lot. One must not forget that the story of Rome occupies in theintellectual world a privileged place. Not only is it studied in allthe schools of the civilised world; not only do nearly all statesspend money to bring to light all the documentary evidence thatthe earth still conceals; but while all other histories are studiedfitfully, that of Rome is, so to speak, remade every fifty years, and whoever arrives at the right time to do the making can gain areputation 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-Americancivilisation, it holds a peculiar attraction. From what deep sourcessprings this perennial youth? In what consists this particular forceof attraction and renewal? It seems to me that the chief reasonfor the eternal fascination of the history of Rome is this, that itincludes, as in a miniature drawn with simple lines, well defined, all the essential phenomena of social life; so that every age isable there to find its own image, its gravest problems, its intensestpassions, its most pressing interests, its keenest struggles;therefore Roman history is forever modern, because every new age hasonly to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its ownself. 

In the intellectual history of the nineteenth century this leadingphenomenon of our culture is clearly evident. If any one asked me why, during the past century, Roman history has proved so interesting, Ishould not hesitate to reply, "Because Europeans and Americansfind, there more than elsewhere what has been the greatest politicalupheaval of the hundred years that followed the French Revolution--thestruggle between monarchy and republic. " From the fervid admirationfor the Roman Republic which animated the men of the French Revolutionto the unmeasured Cæsarian apologies of Duruy and of Mommsen, fromthe ardent cult of Brutus to the detailed studies on the Romanadministration of the first two centuries, all historians have studiedand regarded Roman history mainly from the point of view of thestruggle between the two principles that yet to-day rend in incurablediscord the mind of old Europe and from which you have emergedfortunate! You are free, in a new world; you have ended the combatbetween the Latin principle of the impersonal state and the Orientalprinciple of the dynastic state; between the state conceived as thething of all, belonging to every one and therefore of no one, and thestate personified in a family of an origin higher and nobler thanthe common in which all authority derives from some hero-founder bya mysterious virtue unaccountable to reason and human philosophy; youhave done with the conflict between the human state, simple, withoutpomp, without dramatic symbols--the republic as we men of thetwentieth century understand it, and as you Americans conceive andpractise it--and the monarchy of divine right, vainglorious, full ofceremonies and etiquette, despotic in internal constitution, whichstill exists in Europe under more or less spurious forms. Now it iseasy to explain how, in an age in which the contest between these twoconceptions and these two forms of the State was so warm, the historyof Rome should so stir the mind. 

In no other history do these two political forms meet each other in amore irreconcilable opposition of characters in extreme. The Republic, as Rome had founded it, was so impersonal that, in contrast withmodern more democratic republics, it had not even a fixedbureaucracy, and all the public functions were exercised byelective magistrates--even the executive--from public works to thepolice-system. In the ancient monarchy which the Orient had created, the dynastic principle was so strong that the State was consideredby inherent right the personal property of the sovereign, who mightexpand it, contract it, divide it among his sons and relatives, bequeathing his kingdom and his subjects as a land-owner disposes ofhis estate and his cattle. Furthermore, although to-day the sovereignsof 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 thestruggle between the two principles so antagonistic, from the timewhen in the Empire, immeasurable and complicated, the institutions ofthe Republic proved inadequate to govern so many diverse peoples andterritories so vast. The Romans kept on, as at first, rebelling atthe idea of placing a man-god at the head of the State, themselves tobecome, when finally masters of the world, the slaves of a dynasty. The conflict between the two principles lasted a century, from Cæsarto Nero, filled the story of Rome with hideous tragedies, but endedwith the truce of a glorious compromise; for Rome succeeded in puttinginto the monarchic constitution of empire some essentially republicanideas, among others, the idea of the indivisibility of the State. Notonly Augustus and his family, but also the Flavians and the Antonines, never thought that the Empire belonged to them, that they mightdispose of it like private property; on the contrary, they regarded itas 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 neverbefore, the history of Rome was looked upon as a great war between themonarchy and the republic. Indeed, the problem of the republic andthe monarchy, always present to the minds of writers of the nineteenthcentury, has been perhaps the chief reason for the gravest mistakescommitted by Roman historiography during this period--mistakes I havesought to correct. For example, the republicans have pinned theirfaith to all the absurd tales told by Suetonius and Tacitus about thefamily of the Cæsars, through preconceived hate for the monarchy; andthe monarchists have exaggerated out of measure the felicity of thefirst two centuries of the Empire, to prove that the provinces livedhappy under the monarchic administration as never before or after. Mommsen has fashioned an impossible Cæsar, almost making of that greatdemagogue a literary anticipation of Bismarck. 

Little by little, however, as the contest between republic andmonarchy gradually spent itself in Europe, in the last twenty-fiveyears of the nineteenth century, the interest for histories of Romeconceived and written in this spirit, declined. The real reason whyMommsen and Duruy are to-day so little read, why at the beginning ofthe twentieth century Roman history no longer stirs enthusiasm throughtheir books is, above all, this: that readers no longer find in thosepages what corresponds directly to living reality. Therefore it was tobe believed that Roman history had grown old and out of date; whereas, merely one of its perishing and deciduous forms had grown old, not thesoul of it, which is eternally living and young. So true is this, thata writer had only to consider the old story from new points of view, for Cæsar and Antony, Lucullus and Pompey, Augustus and the laws ofthe year 18 B. C. , to become subjects of fashionable conversation inParisian drawing-rooms, in the most refined intellectual centre of theworld. 

It has never been difficult for me to realise that contemporaryEurope and America, the Europe and America of railroads, industries, monstrous swift-growing cities, might find present in ancient Rome apart of their own very souls, restless, turbulent, greedy. In the Romeof the days of Cæsar, 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 foramusements and distractions; in that Rome where there jostled togetheran unnumbered population, uprooted from land, from family, from nativecountry, and where from the press of so many men there fermented allthe propelling energies of history and all the forces that destroymorality and life--vice and intellectuality, the imperialistic policy, deadly epidemics; in that changeable Rome, here splendid, theresqualid; now magnanimous, and now brutal; full of grandeurs, repletewith horrors; in that great city all the huge modern metropolises areeasily refound, Paris and New York, Buenos Ayres and London, Melbourneand Berlin. Rome created the word that denotes this marvellous andmonstrous phenomenon, of history, the enormous city, the deceitfulsource of life and death--_urbs_--_the city_. Whence it is not strangethat the countless _urbes_ which the grand economic progress of thenineteenth century has caused to rise in every part of Europe andAmerica look to Rome as their eldest sister and their dean. 

Furthermore, into the history of Rome, the historic aristocracy ofEurope may look as into the mirror of their own destiny, as everywherethey try to retain wealth and power, playing in the stock-exchange, marrying the daughters of millionaire brewers, giving themselvesto commerce; a nobility that resorts, in the effort to preserveits prestige over the middle classes, to the expedients of the mostreckless demagogy. Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, Antony, Cæsar, exemplify in stupendous types the aristocracy that seeks to conserveriches and power by audaciously employing the forces that menace itsown destruction. 

Several critics of my work, particularly the French, have observedthat the policy of expansion made by Rome in the times of Cæsar, asI have described it, resembles closely the craze for imperialism thatabout ten years ago agitated England. It is true, for imperialism inthe time of Cæsar was what has existed for the last half century inEngland--a means of which one part of the historic aristocracy availeditself to keep power and renew decaying prestige, satisfying materialinterests and flattering with intoxications of vanity the pride ofthe masses. So, too, the contesting parties in France--the socialist, which represents the labouring classes; the radical, which representsthe middle classes; the progressive and the monarchic, which representthe wealthy burghers and the aristocracy--may discover some of theirpassions, their doings, their invectives, in the political warfarethat troubled the age of Cæsar; in those scandals, those judicialtrials, in that furor of pamphlets and discourses. This is so true, that in consequence my book met a singular fate in France; that ofbeing adopted by each party as an argument in its own favour. Drumontmade use of it to demonstrate to France what befalls a country when itallows its national spirit to be corrupted by foreign influx, seekingto persuade his fellow-citizens that the Jews in France do the samework of intellectual and moral dissolution that the Orientals broughtabout in Rome. Radical writers, like André Maurel, have soughtarguments in my work to combat the colonial and imperialistic policy. The imperialists also, like Pinon, have looked for arguments tosupport their stand-point. Was I not merely demonstrating that thepolicy of expansion is a kind of universal and constant law, whichperiodically actualises itself through the working of the same forces, in the same ways?

It is not to be thought that the age of Cæsar, so disturbed, sostormy, is our only mirror in the story of Rome. When I write theaccount of the imperial society of the first and second centuries, ourown time will be able to recognise even more of itself, to see whatmust be the future of Europe and America, if for a century or two theyhave no profound political and social upheavals. In that great _paxRomana_ lasting two centuries, we may study with special facilitya phenomenon to be found in all rich civilisations cultured andrelatively at peace--the phenomenon to me the most important incontemporary European life, the feminising of all social life; thatis, the victory of the feminine over the masculine spirit. Do notfancy that the feminists, the problems and the disputes they excite inmodern society, are something quite new and peculiar to us; these areonly special forms of a phenomenon more general, the growing influencethat woman exercises on society, as civilisation, culture, and wealthsteadily increase. Here, too, the history of Rome is luminously clear. In it we see evolving that vast contest between the feminine spiritand the masculine, which is one of the essential phenomena in allhuman history. We see the masculine spirit--the spirit of domination, of force, of mastery, of daring--ruling complete, when the smallcommunity had to fight its first hard battles against nature and men. The father commanded then as monarch in his family; the woman waswithout right, liberty, personality; had but to obey, to bearchildren and rear them. But success, power, wealth, greater security, imperceptibly loosened the narrow bondage of the first struggles; thenthe feminine spirit--the spirit of freedom, of pleasure, of art, ofrevolt against tradition--gradually acquired strength, and began bitby bit to undermine at its bases the stern masculine rule. 

The hard conflict of two centuries is sown with tragedies andcatastrophes. Supported by tradition, exasperated by the ever bolderrevolts of woman, the masculine spirit every now and then went mad;and brutally tore away her costly jewels and tried to deny her softraiment and rare perfumes; and when she had already grown accustomedto appearing in the world and shining there, he willed to drive herback into the house, and put beside her there on guard the fieriestthreats of law. Sometimes, despairing, he filled Rome with hislaments; protested that the liberty of the woman cost the man toodear; cried out that the bills of the dressmaker and the jewellerwould 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 firstand second centuries, at the climax of her power, with beauty, love, luxury, culture, prodigality, and mysticism she dominatedand dissolved a society which in the refinements of wealth andintellectuality had lost the sharp virtues of the pioneer. 

It is unnecessary to dilate further on this point; it will be betterrather to dwell a moment on the causes and the effects of thissingular phenomenon. The history of Rome has been and can be so rich, so manifold, so universal, because in its long record ancient Romegathered up into itself, welded, fused, the most diverse elements ofsocial life, from all peoples and all regions with which it came intocontact. It knew continued war and interrupted peace for centuries. It held united under its vast sway, states decrepit with the oldestof civilisations, and peoples hardly out of primitive barbarism. It exploited with avidity the intelligence, the laboriousness, thescience of the former; the physical force, the war-valour and thedaring of the latter; it absorbed the vices, the habits, the ideas ofthe Hellenised Orient, and transfused them in the untamed Occident. Taking men, ideas, money, everywhere and from every people, itcreated first an empire, then a literature, an architecture, anadministration, and a new religion, that were the most tremendoussynthesis of the ancient world. So the Roman world turned out vasterand more complex than the Greek, although never assuming proportionsexceeding the power of the human mind; and as it grew, it kept thatprecious quality, wanting in the Greek, unity; hence, the lucidclearness of Roman history. There is everything in it, and everythingradiates from one centre, so that comprehension is easy. Without doubtit would be rash to declare that the history of Rome alone may serveas the outline of universal history. It is quite likely that theremay be found another history that possesses the same two qualitiesfor which that of Rome is so notable--universality and unity--but onething we may affirm: up to this time the history of Rome alone hasfulfilled this office of universal compendium, which explains how ithas always been studied by the learned and lettered of every part ofthe civilised European-American world, and how in modern intellectuallife it is the history universal and cosmopolitan _par excellence_. This condition of things has a much greater practical importance thanis supposed. Indeed it would be a serious mistake to believe thatcosmopolitan catholicity is an ideal dower purely of Roman history, for which all the sons of Rome may congratulate themselves as of athing doing honour only to their stirp. This universality forms part, I should say, of the material patrimony of all the Latin stock; we maynumber it in the historic inventory of all the good things the sons ofRome possess and of all their reasonable hopes for the future. 

This affirmation may at first appear to you paradoxical, strange, andobscure, but I think a short exposition will suffice to clear it. Theuniversality of the history of Rome, the ease of finding in it modelsin miniature of all our life will have this effect, that classicalstudies remain the educational foundation of the intelligent classesin 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 thefuture all men be purely technical capacities and merely livingmachines to create material riches; if, on the contrary, it is desiredthat in every nation the chosen few that govern have a philosophicalconsciousness of universal life, no means is better suited to instilthis philosophic consciousness than the study of ancient Rome, itshistory, its civilisation, its laws, its politics, its art, and itsreligions, exactly because Rome is the completest and most lucidsynthesis of universal life. 

Classical studies are one of the most powerful means of intellectualand moral influence on the Anglo-Saxon and German civilisations thatthe Latins possess, representing under modern conditions, for theLatin nations, a kind of intellectual entail inherited from theirancestors. 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 withoutknowing it to receive our intellectual and social influence in otherfields, are made in greater or less degree to resemble us. Indeed, it can be said, that, material interests apart, Rome is still in themental field the strongest bond that holds together the most diversepeoples of Europe; that it unites the French, the English, theGermans, in an ideal identity which overcomes in part the diversity inspeech, in traditions, in geographical situation, and in history. Ifcommon classical studies did not make kindred spirits of the upperclasses in England, France, and Germany, the Rhine and the Channelwould divide three nations mentally so different as to be impenetrableeach to another. 

Therefore the cosmopolitan universality of Roman history is a kindof common good which the Latin races ought to defend with alltheir might, having care that no other history usurp its place incontemporary culture; that it remain the typical outline, the idealmodel of universal history in the education of coming generations. TheLatin civilised world has need that every now and then an historianarise to reanimate the history of Rome, in order to maintain itscontinued supremacy in the education of the intelligent; to preventother histories from usurping this pre-eminence. 

It is useless to cherish illusions as to the task: its accomplishmenthas become much more arduous than it was fifty years ago; perhapsbecause the masses have acquired greater power in every part of theEuropean-American world, and democracy advances more or less rapidly, invading everything--the democracy of the technical man, themerchant, the workman, the well-to-do burgher, all of whom easilyhold themselves aloof from a culture in itself aristocratic. Theaccomplishment will become always more and more arduous; for Romanstudies, feeling the new generations becoming estranged from them, have for the last twenty-five years tended to take refuge in thetranquil cloisters of learning, of archaeology, in the discreetconcourse of a few wise men, who voluntarily flee the noises of theworld, Fatal thought! Ancient Rome ought to live daily in the mindof the new social classes that lead onward; ought to irradiate itsimmortal light on the new worlds that arise from the deeps of themodern age, on pain of undergoing a new destruction more calamitousthan that caused by the hordes of Alaric. The day when the history ofRome and its monuments may be but material for erudition to put intothe museums by the side of the bricks of the palace of Khorsabad, thecuneiform inscriptions, and the statues of the kings of Assyria, Latincivilisation will be overwhelmed by a fatal catastrophe. 

To hinder the extinction of the great light of Rome in the world, toprolong indefinitely this ideal survival, which is the continuation ofits material Empire, destroyed centuries ago, there is but one way--torenew historic studies of Rome, and to maintain intact their universalvalue which forms part of common culture. This is what I have triedto do, seeking to lead back to Roman history the many minds estrangedfrom it, distracted by so many cares and anxieties and presentquestionings, and to fulfil a solemn duty to my fatherland and thegrand traditions of Latin culture. If other histories can grow old, itis indeed the more needful, exactly because it serves to educate newgenerations, to reanimate Roman history, incorporating in it the newfacts constantly discovered by archæological effort, infusing itwith a larger and stronger philosophical spirit, carrying into it thematured experience of the world, which learns not only by studying butalso by living. 

I do not hesitate to say that every half-century there opens amongcivilised peoples a contest to find the new conception of Romanhistory, which, suited to the changed needs, may revivify classicalstudies; a competition followed by no despicable prize, theintellectual influence that a people may exercise on other peoples bymeans 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 canrule and refashion the world from the depths of a library, but onlyon condition that he does not immure himself there; that, while thephysical sciences propose to understand matter in order to transformit, historico-philosophical discipline has for its end action upon themind and the will; that philosophical ideas and historic teachingsare but seeds shut up to themselves unless they enter the soil of theuniversal intellectual life. 

No: the time-stained marbles of Rome must not end besidecuneiform-inscribed bricks or Egyptian mummies, in the vast deadsections of archæological halls; they must serve to pave for our feetthe way that leads to the future. Therefore nothing could have beenpleasanter or more grateful to me, after receiving the invitationtendered me by the _Collège de France_, and that from South America, than to accept the invitation of the First Citizen of the UnitedStates to visit this world which is being formed. In Paris, thatwonderful metropolis of the Latin world, I had the joy, the highestreward for my long, hard labour, to show to the incredulous how muchalive the supposedly dead history of Rome still is, when on thoseunforgettable days so cosmopolite a public gathered from every part ofthe city in the small plain hall of the old and august edifice. Cominginto your midst, I feel that the history of Rome lives not only in theinterest with which you have followed these lectures, but also, evenif in part without clear cognisance, in things here, in the life youlead, in what you accomplish. The heritage of Rome is, for the peoplesof America still more than for those of Europe, an heredity not purelyartistic and literary, but political and social, which exercises themost beneficent influence on your history. In a certain sense it mightbe said that America is to-day politically, more than Europe, the trueheir of Rome; that the new world is nearer--by apparent paradox--toancient Rome than is Europe. Among the most important facts, howeverlittle noticed, in the history of the nineteenth century, I shouldnumber this: that the Republic, the human state considered as thecommon property of all--the great political creation of ancientRome--is reborn here in America, after having died out in Europe. TheLatin seed, lying buried for so many centuries beneath the ruins ofthe ancient world, like the grains of wheat buried in Egyptian tombs, transported from the other side of the ocean, has sprung up in theland that Columbus discovered. If there had been no Rome; if Romehad wholly perished in the great barbarian catastrophe; if in theRenaissance there had not been found among the ruins of the ancientworld, together with beautiful Greek statues and manuscripts, thisgreat political idea, there would to-day be no Republic in NorthAmerica. With the word would probably have perished also the idea andthe thing; and there is no assurance that men would have been able soeasily and so well to rediscover it by their own effort. 

I am a student and not a flatterer. I therefore confess to youfrankly, ending these lectures, that I do not belong to that numberof Europeans who most enthusiastically admire things American. I thinkthat Americans in general, in North America as in South, so readilyrecognise in themselves a sufficient number of virtues, that weEuropeans hardly need help them in the belief, easy and agreeableto all, that they stand first in the world. Having come from anold society, which has a long historical experience, the most vividimpression made upon me in the two Americas has been just thatof entering into a society provided with but meagre historicalexperience, which therefore easily deludes itself, mistaking for signsof heroic energy and proofs of a finished superiority, the passingadvantages of an order chiefly economic, which come from the singulareconomic condition of the world. In a word, I do not believe thatyou are superior to Europe in as many things as you think; but asuperiority I do recognise, great and, for me at least, indisputable, in the political institutions with which you govern yourselves. TheRepublic, which you have made to live again, here in this new land, isthe true political form worthy of a civilised people, because theonly one that is rational and plastic; while the monarchy, the formof government yet ruling so many parts of Europe, is a mixture ofmysticism and barbarity, which European interests seek in vain tojustify with sophistries unworthy the high grade of culture to whichthe Continent has attained. To search out the reasons why the oldOriental monarchy holds on so tenaciously in Europe, still threateningthe future, would be useless here; certain it is that, when youmeet any European other than a Frenchman or a Swiss, you can feelyourselves as superior to him in political institutions as the Roman_civis_ in the times of the Republic felt himself above the Asiaticslave of absolute monarchy. This superiority--never forget it!--youowe to Rome; for its possession, be grateful to the city that hasencircled you with such glory, by infusing so tenacious a life intothe "_Respublica_. "

INDEX

 Acrobats, the great number of, 218 Acte, the beautiful, 114 Actium, the mistakes of Antony at, 60; the peace after, 216 _Ægean_ 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 Archæological discoveries, the effect of, 259 Archæologists, 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 Cæsar, 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 Bætica, civilisation in, 72 Baiæ, the Court at, 119 Banquets, the, of ancient Rome, 7 Barbarian, the struggle against the, 34 Barbarism, the primitive, 254 Belgæ, 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 Cæsar, 247 Biturigi, the, a tribe of Gaul, 86 Black Sea, the country around, 182 Borebiste, a Gætic 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 Cæsar, Caius, adopted by Augustus, 158; the political position of, 160 Cæsar, Julius, the wisdom of, 72; mistakes of, 75 Cæsar, Lucius, adopted by Augustus, 158, the popularity of, 164 Cæsars, 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 Collège de France, the, 3, 260 Columbus, mentioned, 71 _Comitia_, the election of the, 58 _Commentaries_, the, of Cæsar, 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 Bergères_, 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

 Gætic warrior, the rule of a, 191 Gæto-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 Græco-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 dorée_, 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, André, 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 Poppæa Sabina, the skill of, 116; death of, 137 _Populus_, the representatives of the, 246 Pozzuoli, the city of, 218 Prætor, the office of the, 157 Precious metals, the distribution of, 218 Prætorian guards, the, 117 Prætorians, 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

 Quæstor, 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