vember-December, 1908. These lectures were later
read at Columbia University in New York, and at the University of
Chicago in Chicago. Certain of them were delivered elsewhere--before
the American Philosophical Society and at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, at Harvard University in Cambridge, and
at 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 reading
of them may prove useful and pleasant even to those who have already
read my _Greatness and Decline of Rome_.

The first lecture, "The Theory of Corruption in Roman History," sums
up the fundamental idea of my conception of the history of Rome. The
essential phenomenon upon which all the political, social, and moral
crises of Rome depend is the transformation of customs produced by the
augmentation of wealth, of expenditure, and of needs,--a phenomenon,
therefore, of psychological order, and one common in contemporary
life. This lecture should show that my work does not belong among
those written after the method of economic materialism, for I hold
that the fundamental force in history is psychologic and not economic.

The three following lectures, "The History and Legend of Antony and
Cleopatra," "The Development of Gaul," and "Nero," seem to concern
themselves with very different subjects. On the contrary, they present
three different aspects of the one, identical problem--the struggle
between the Occident and the Orient--a problem that Rome succeeded in
solving as no European civilisation has since been able to do, making
the countries of the Mediterranean Basin share a common life, in
peace. How Rome succeeded in accomplishing this union of Orient and
Occident is one of the points of greatest interest in its history. The
first of these three lectures, "Antony and Cleopatra," shows how
Rome repulsed the last offensive movement of the Orient against
the Occident; the second, "The Development of Gaul," shows the
establishing of equilibrium between the two parts of the Empire; the
third, "Nero," shows how the Orient, beaten upon fields of battle and
in 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 the
most tragic episodes of Roman history, the terrible struggle