t mission of Caesar's family. I believe this to be a great
mistake. The lot of the family would have been simple and easy, if it
had been able to found a monarchy. The family of Caesar had to solve
another problem, much more difficult,--in fact insoluble; a problem
that may be compared, from a certain point of view, to that which
confronted the Bonapartes in the nineteenth century. The Bonapartes
found old monarchical, legitimistic, theocratic Europe agitated by
forces which, although making it impossible for the ancient regime
to continue, were not yet able to establish a new society, entirely
democratic, republican, and lay. The family of Caesar found the
opposite situation: an old military and aristocratic republic, which
was changing into an intellectual and monarchical civilisation, based
on equality, but opposing formidable resistance to the forces of
transformation. In these situations the two families tried in all ways
to reconcile things not to be conciliated, to realise the impossible:
one, the popular monarchy and imperial democracy; the other, the
monarchical republic and Orientalised Latinity. The contradiction
was for both families the law of life, the cause of greatness; this
explains why neither was ever willing to extricate itself from it, in
spite of the advice of philosophers, the malcontent of the masses, the
pressure of parties, and the evident dangers. This contradiction
was also the fatality of both families, the cause of their ruin; it
explains the shortness of their power, their restless existence, and
the continuous catastrophes that opened the way to the final crash.

Waterloo and Sedan, the exile of Julia and the tragic failure of
Tiberius's government, all the misfortunes great and small which
struck the two families, were always consequences of the insoluble
contradiction they tried to solve. You have had a perfectly
characteristic example of it in the brief story I have been telling
you. Agrippina becomes an object of universal hatred and dies by
assassination because she defends tradition; her son disregards
tradition and, chiefly for this very reason, is finally forced to kill
himself. Doubtless the fate of the Bonapartes is less tragic, because
they, at least, escaped the infamous legend created by contemporary
hatred against Caesar's family, and artfully developed by the
historians of successive generations. I hope to be able to prove
in the continuation of my _Greatness and Decline of