d the Antonines,
never thought that the Empire belonged to them, that they might
dispose of it like private property; on the contrary, they regarded it
as 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 never
before, the history of Rome was looked upon as a great war between the
monarchy and the republic. Indeed, the problem of the republic and
the monarchy, always present to the minds of writers of the nineteenth
century, has been perhaps the chief reason for the gravest mistakes
committed by Roman historiography during this period--mistakes I have
sought to correct. For example, the republicans have pinned their
faith to all the absurd tales told by Suetonius and Tacitus about the
family of the Caesars, through preconceived hate for the monarchy; and
the monarchists have exaggerated out of measure the felicity of the
first two centuries of the Empire, to prove that the provinces lived
happy under the monarchic administration as never before or after.
Mommsen has fashioned an impossible Caesar, almost making of that great
demagogue a literary anticipation of Bismarck.

Little by little, however, as the contest between republic and
monarchy gradually spent itself in Europe, in the last twenty-five
years of the nineteenth century, the interest for histories of Rome
conceived and written in this spirit, declined. The real reason why
Mommsen and Duruy are to-day so little read, why at the beginning of
the twentieth century Roman history no longer stirs enthusiasm through
their books is, above all, this: that readers no longer find in those
pages what corresponds directly to living reality. Therefore it was to
be believed that Roman history had grown old and out of date; whereas,
merely one of its perishing and deciduous forms had grown old, not the
soul of it, which is eternally living and young. So true is this, that
a writer had only to consider the old story from new points of view,
for Caesar and Antony, Lucullus and Pompey, Augustus and the laws of
the year 18 B.C., to become subjects of fashionable conversation in
Parisian drawing-rooms, in the most refined intellectual centre of the
world.

It has never been difficult for me to realise that contemporary
Europe and America, the Europe and America of railroads, industries,
monstrous swift-growing cities, might find present in