Ancient history divides itself into the history anterior to the rule
of Rome, which has many centres, and into the history of Roman rule,
wherein there is but one centre, Rome, the action of which extends
on all sides. Other nations, like the Egyptians, have acted by their
intellectual power upon the foreigner, but were deficient in mind;
others, as the barbarian nations of the Celts and other races, became
important merely by the mightiness of their conquests; Greece, by
her mind; but Rome combines every thing, the greatest political
perfection, might, and mind. Here is an influence which has become
still more lasting and ineffaceable than that of Greece: it continues
to the latest centuries, even to this very day. The Roman history has
to exhibit the greatest characters, achievements, and events; it is
the development of the whole life of a people, the like of which is
unknown in all the rest of history. Of the history of the East, as far
as regards the stages of its progress, we know nothing whatever. The
Egyptians we find already in castes, consequently in fixed forms, in
which they abide throughout every century; they exist unalterable, of
which their mummies are the emblem, and all the changes which we remark
in them are a mere dying away. The Romans we see almost growing under
our eyes; indeed, they also are early moulded into fixed forms, but
their origin is no riddle to us. The other nations are as buds still
folded up in their petals; they grow, but before they expand, they die
away or only open imperfectly, as it also ever occurs with individuals,
that among many thousands few only are not checked in their
development. In modern history the English alone have had a career like
that of the Romans. In a cosmopolitical point of view therefore, these
two histories must ever remain the most important ones.
Here now the whole history of the twelve ages, which in the legend of
Romulus have also been foretold as the duration of Rome, is to be set
forth;--in the beginning the history of the nation and the town, then
that of the empire and the aggregate of people who bore the name of
Romans.
But first of all, let us make ourselves acquainted with the sources.