Europe and America, the Europe and America of railroads, industries,
monstrous swift-growing cities, might find present in ancient Rome a
part of their own very souls, restless, turbulent, greedy. In the Rome
of the days of 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 for
amusements and distractions; in that Rome where there jostled together
an unnumbered population, uprooted from land, from family, from native
country, and where from the press of so many men there fermented all
the propelling energies of history and all the forces that destroy
morality and life--vice and intellectuality, the imperialistic policy,
deadly epidemics; in that changeable Rome, here splendid, there
squalid; now magnanimous, and now brutal; full of grandeurs, replete
with horrors; in that great city all the huge modern metropolises are
easily refound, Paris and New York, Buenos Ayres and London, Melbourne
and Berlin. Rome created the word that denotes this marvellous and
monstrous phenomenon, of history, the enormous city, the deceitful
source of life and death--_urbs_--_the city_. Whence it is not strange
that the countless _urbes_ which the grand economic progress of the
nineteenth century has caused to rise in every part of Europe and
America look to Rome as their eldest sister and their dean.
Furthermore, into the history of Rome, the historic aristocracy of
Europe may look as into the mirror of their own destiny, as everywhere
they try to retain wealth and power, playing in the stock-exchange,
marrying the daughters of millionaire brewers, giving themselves
to commerce; a nobility that resorts, in the effort to preserve
its prestige over the middle classes, to the expedients of the most
reckless demagogy. Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, Antony, Cæsar,
exemplify in stupendous types the aristocracy that seeks to conserve
riches and power by audaciously employing the forces that menace its
own destruction.
Several critics of my work, particularly the French, have observed
that the policy of expansion made by Rome in the times of Cæsar, as
I have described it, resembles closely the craze for imperialism that
about ten years ago agitated England. It is true, for imperialism in
the time of Cæsar was what has existed for the last half century in
England--a means of which one part of the historic aristocracy availed
itself to keep power and renew decaying prestige, satisfying material
interests and flattering with intoxications of vanity the pride of
the masses. So, too, the contesting parties in France--the socialist,
which represents the labouring classes; the radical, which represents
the middle classes; the progressive and the monarchic, which represent
the wealthy burghers and the aristocracy--may discover some of their
passions, their doings, their invectives, in the political warfare
that troubled the age of Cæsar; in those scandals, those judicial
trials, in that furor of pamphlets and discourses. This is so true,
that in consequence my book met a singular fate in France; that of
being adopted by each party as an argument in its own favour. Drumont
made use of it to demonstrate to France what befalls a country when it
allows its national spirit to be corrupted by foreign influx, seeking
to persuade his fellow-citizens that the Jews in France do the same
work of intellectual and moral dissolution that the Orientals brought
about in Rome. Radical writers, like André Maurel, have sought
arguments in my work to combat the colonial and imperialistic policy.
The imperialists also, like Pinon, have looked for arguments to
support their stand-point. Was I not merely demonstrating that the
policy of expansion is a kind of universal and constant law, which
periodically actualises itself through the working of the same forces,
in the same ways?
It is not to be thought that the age of Cæsar, so disturbed, so
stormy, is our only mirror in the story of Rome. When I write the
account of the imperial society of the first and second centuries, our
own time will be able to recognise even more of itself, to see what
must be the future of Europe and America, if for a century or two they
have no profound political and social upheavals. In that great _pax
Romana_ lasting two centuries, we may study with special facility
a phenomenon to be found in all rich civilisations cultured and
relatively at peace--the phenomenon to me the most important in
contemporary European life, the feminising of all social life; that
is, the victory of the feminine over the masculine spirit. Do not
fancy that the feminists, the problems and the disputes they excite in
modern society, are something quite new and peculiar to us; these are
only special forms of a phenomenon more general, the growing influence
that woman exercises on society, as civilisation, culture, and wealth
steadily increase. Here, too, the history of Rome is luminously clear.
In it we see evolving that vast contest between the feminine spirit
and the masculine, which is one of the essential phenomena in all
human history. We see the masculine spirit--the spirit of domination,
of force, of mastery, of daring--ruling complete, when the small
community had to fight its first hard battles against nature and men.
The father commanded then as monarch in his family; the woman was
without right, liberty, personality; had but to obey, to bear
children and rear them. But success, power, wealth, greater security,
imperceptibly loosened the narrow bondage of the first struggles; then
the feminine spirit--the spirit of freedom, of pleasure, of art, of
revolt against tradition--gradually acquired strength, and began bit
by bit to undermine at its bases the stern masculine rule.
The hard conflict of two centuries is sown with tragedies and
catastrophes. Supported by tradition, exasperated by the ever bolder
revolts of woman, the masculine spirit every now and then went mad;
and brutally tore away her costly jewels and tried to deny her soft
raiment and rare perfumes; and when she had already grown accustomed
to appearing in the world and shining there, he willed to drive her
back into the house, and put beside her there on guard the fieriest
threats of law. Sometimes, despairing, he filled Rome with his
laments; protested that the liberty of the woman cost the man too
dear; cried out that the bills of the dressmaker and the jeweller
would send Rome, the Empire, the world, to ruin. In vain, with wealth,
in a civilisation full of Oriental influences, woman grew strong,
rose, and invaded all society, until in the vast Empire of the first
and second centuries, at the climax of her power, with beauty,
love, luxury, culture, prodigality, and mysticism she dominated
and dissolved a society which in the refinements of wealth and
intellectuality had lost the sharp virtues of the pioneer.
It is unnecessary to dilate further on this point; it will be better
rather to dwell a moment on the causes and the effects of this
singular phenomenon. The history of Rome has been and can be so rich,
so manifold, so universal, because in its long record ancient Rome
gathered up into itself, welded, fused, the most diverse elements of
social life, from all peoples and all regions with which it came into
contact. It knew continued war and interrupted peace for centuries.
It held united under its vast sway, states decrepit with the oldest
of civilisations, and peoples hardly out of primitive barbarism.
It exploited with avidity the intelligence, the laboriousness, the
science of the former; the physical force, the war-valour and the
daring of the latter; it absorbed the vices, the habits, the ideas of
the Hellenised Orient, and transfused them in the untamed Occident.
Taking men, ideas, money, everywhere and from every people, it
created first an empire, then a literature, an architecture, an
administration, and a new religion, that were the most tremendous
synthesis of the ancient world. So the Roman world turned out vaster
and more complex than the Greek, although never assuming proportions
exceeding the power of the human mind; and as it grew, it kept that
precious quality, wanting in the Greek, unity; hence, the lucid
clearness of Roman history. There is everything in it, and everything
radiates from one centre, so that comprehension is easy. Without doubt
it would be rash to declare that the history of Rome alone may serve
as the outline of universal history. It is quite likely that there
may be found another history that possesses the same two qualities
for which that of Rome is so notable--universality and unity--but one
thing we may affirm: up to this time the history of Rome alone has
fulfilled this office of universal compendium, which explains how it
has always been studied by the learned and lettered of every part of
the civilised European-American world, and how in modern intellectual
life it is the history universal and cosmopolitan _par excellence_.
This condition of things has a much greater practical importance than
is supposed. Indeed it would be a serious mistake to believe that
cosmopolitan catholicity is an ideal dower purely of Roman history,
for which all the sons of Rome may congratulate themselves as of a
thing doing honour only to their stirp. This universality forms part,
I should say, of the material patrimony of all the Latin stock; we may
number it in the historic inventory of all the good things the sons of
Rome possess and of all their reasonable hopes for the future.
This affirmation may at first appear to you paradoxical, strange, and
obscure, but I think a short exposition will suffice to clear it. The
universality of the history of Rome, the ease of finding in it models
in miniature of all our life will have this effect, that classical
studies remain the educational foundation of the intelligent classes
in all European-American civilisation. These studies may be reformed;
they may be as they ought, restricted to a smaller number of persons;
but if it is not desired--as of course it cannot be--that in the
future all men be purely technical capacities and merely living
machines to create material riches; if, on the contrary, it is desired
that in every nation the chosen few that govern have a philosophical
consciousness of universal life, no means is better suited to instil
this philosophic consciousness than the study of ancient Rome, its
history, its civilisation, its laws, its politics, its art, and its
religions, exactly because Rome is the completest and most lucid
synthesis of universal life.
Classical studies are one of the most powerful means of intellectual
and moral influence on the Anglo-Saxon and German civilisations that
the Latins possess, representing under modern conditions, for the
Latin nations, a kind of intellectual entail inherited from their
ancestors. The young Germans and Englishmen who study Greek and Latin,
who translate Cicero or construe Horace, assimilate the Latin spirit,
are brought ideally and morally nearer to us, are prepared without
knowing it to receive our intellectual and social influence in other
fields, are made in greater or less degree to resemble us. Indeed,
it can be said, that, material interests apart, Rome is still in the
mental field the strongest bond that holds together the most diverse
peoples of Europe; that it unites the French, the English, the
Germans, in an ideal identity which overcomes in part the diversity in
speech, in traditions, in geographical situation, and in history. If
common classical studies did not make kindred spirits of the upper
classes in England, France, and Germany, the Rhine and the Channel
would divide three nations mentally so different as to be impenetrable
each to another.
Therefore the cosmopolitan universality of Roman history is a kind
of common good which the Latin races ought to defend with all
their might, having care that no other history usurp its place in
contemporary culture; that it remain the typical outline, the ideal
model of universal history in the education of coming generations. The
Latin civilised world has need that every now and then an historian
arise to reanimate the history of Rome, in order to maintain its
continued supremacy in the education of the intelligent; to prevent
other histories from usurping this pre-eminence.
It is useless to cherish illusions as to the task: its accomplishment
has become much more arduous than it was fifty years ago; perhaps
because the masses have acquired greater power in every part of the
European-American world, and democracy advances more or less rapidly,
invading everything--the democracy of the technical man, the
merchant, the workman, the well-to-do burgher, all of whom easily
hold themselves aloof from a culture in itself aristocratic. The
accomplishment will become always more and more arduous; for Roman
studies, feeling the new generations becoming estranged from them,
have for the last twenty-five years tended to take refuge in the
tranquil cloisters of learning, of archaeology, in the discreet
concourse of a few wise men, who voluntarily flee the noises of the
world, Fatal thought! Ancient Rome ought to live daily in the mind
of the new social classes that lead onward; ought to irradiate its
immortal light on the new worlds that arise from the deeps of the
modern age, on pain of undergoing a new destruction more calamitous
than that caused by the hordes of Alaric. The day when the history of
Rome and its monuments may be but material for erudition to put into
the museums by the side of the bricks of the palace of Khorsabad, the
cuneiform inscriptions, and the statues of the kings of Assyria, Latin
civilisation will be overwhelmed by a fatal catastrophe.
To hinder the extinction of the great light of Rome in the world, to
prolong indefinitely this ideal survival, which is the continuation of
its material Empire, destroyed centuries ago, there is but one way--to
renew historic studies of Rome, and to maintain intact their universal
value which forms part of common culture. This is what I have tried
to do, seeking to lead back to Roman history the many minds estranged
from it, distracted by so many cares and anxieties and present
questionings, and to fulfil a solemn duty to my fatherland and the
grand traditions of Latin culture. If other histories can grow old, it
is indeed the more needful, exactly because it serves to educate new
generations, to reanimate Roman history, incorporating in it the new
facts constantly discovered by archæological effort, infusing it
with a larger and stronger philosophical spirit, carrying into it the
matured experience of the world, which learns not only by studying but
also by living.
I do not hesitate to say that every half-century there opens among
civilised peoples a contest to find the new conception of Roman
history, which, suited to the changed needs, may revivify classical
studies; a competition followed by no despicable prize, the
intellectual influence that a people may exercise on other peoples by
means of these studies. To win in this contest we must never forget,
as too many of us have done in the past thirty years, that a man can
rule and refashion the world from the depths of a library, but only
on condition that he does not immure himself there; that, while the
physical sciences propose to understand matter in order to transform
it, historico-philosophical discipline has for its end action upon the
mind and the will; that philosophical ideas and historic teachings
are but seeds shut up to themselves unless they enter the soil of the
universal intellectual life.
No: the time-stained marbles of Rome must not end beside
cuneiform-inscribed bricks or Egyptian mummies, in the vast dead
sections of archæological halls; they must serve to pave for our feet
the way that leads to the future. Therefore nothing could have been
pleasanter or more grateful to me, after receiving the invitation
tendered me by the _Collège de France_, and that from South America,
than to accept the invitation of the First Citizen of the United
States to visit this world which is being formed. In Paris, that
wonderful metropolis of the Latin world, I had the joy, the highest
reward for my long, hard labour, to show to the incredulous how much
alive the supposedly dead history of Rome still is, when on those
unforgettable days so cosmopolite a public gathered from every part of
the city in the small plain hall of the old and august edifice. Coming
into your midst, I feel that the history of Rome lives not only in the
interest with which you have followed these lectures, but also, even
if in part without clear cognisance, in things here, in the life you
lead, in what you accomplish. The heritage of Rome is, for the peoples
of America still more than for those of Europe, an heredity not purely
artistic and literary, but political and social, which exercises the
most beneficent influence on your history. In a certain sense it might
be said that America is to-day politically, more than Europe, the true
heir of Rome; that the new world is nearer--by apparent paradox--to
ancient Rome than is Europe. Among the most important facts, however
little noticed, in the history of the nineteenth century, I should
number this: that the Republic, the human state considered as the
common property of all--the great political creation of ancient
Rome--is reborn here in America, after having died out in Europe. The
Latin seed, lying buried for so many centuries beneath the ruins of
the ancient world, like the grains of wheat buried in Egyptian tombs,
transported from the other side of the ocean, has sprung up in the
land that Columbus discovered. If there had been no Rome; if Rome
had wholly perished in the great barbarian catastrophe; if in the
Renaissance there had not been found among the ruins of the ancient
world, together with beautiful Greek statues and manuscripts, this
great political idea, there would to-day be no Republic in North
America. With the word would probably have perished also the idea and
the thing; and there is no assurance that men would have been able so
easily and so well to rediscover it by their own effort.
I am a student and not a flatterer. I therefore confess to you
frankly, ending these lectures, that I do not belong to that number
of Europeans who most enthusiastically admire things American. I think
that Americans in general, in North America as in South, so readily
recognise in themselves a sufficient number of virtues, that we
Europeans hardly need help them in the belief, easy and agreeable
to all, that they stand first in the world. Having come from an
old society, which has a long historical experience, the most vivid
impression made upon me in the two Americas has been just that
of entering into a society provided with but meagre historical
experience, which therefore easily deludes itself, mistaking for signs
of heroic energy and proofs of a finished superiority, the passing
advantages of an order chiefly economic, which come from the singular
economic condition of the world. In a word, I do not believe that
you are superior to Europe in as many things as you think; but a
superiority I do recognise, great and, for me at least, indisputable,
in the political institutions with which you govern yourselves. The
Republic, which you have made to live again, here in this new land, is
the true political form worthy of a civilised people, because the
only one that is rational and plastic; while the monarchy, the form
of government yet ruling so many parts of Europe, is a mixture of
mysticism and barbarity, which European interests seek in vain to
justify with sophistries unworthy the high grade of culture to which
the Continent has attained. To search out the reasons why the old
Oriental monarchy holds on so tenaciously in Europe, still threatening
the future, would be useless here; certain it is that, when you
meet any European other than a Frenchman or a Swiss, you can feel
yourselves as superior to him in political institutions as the Roman
_civis_ in the times of the Republic felt himself above the Asiatic
slave of absolute monarchy. This superiority--never forget it!--you
owe to Rome; for its possession, be grateful to the city that has
encircled you with such glory, by infusing so tenacious a life into
the "_Respublica_."
INDEX
Acrobats, the great number of, 218
Acte, the beautiful, 114
Actium,
the mistakes of Antony at, 60;
the peace after, 216
_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