friends at once; for to name
each one separately, I should need, as a Latin poet says, "a hundred
mouths and a hundred tongues."

GUGLIELMO FERRERO.

TURIN, February 22, 1909.

CONTENTS

"CORRUPTION" IN ANCIENT ROME, AND ITS
COUNTERPART IN MODERN HISTORY ......... 1
THE HISTORY AND LEGEND OF ANTONY AND
CLEOPATRA ............................. 37
THE DEVELOPMENT OF GAUL ................. 69
NERO .................................... 101
JULIA AND TIBERIUS ...................... 143
WINE IN ROMAN HISTORY ................... 179
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE .. 207
ROMAN HISTORY IN MODERN EDUCATION ....... 239
INDEX ................................... 265

"Corruption" in Ancient Rome And Its Counterpart in Modern History

Two years ago in Paris, while giving a course of lectures on Augustus
at the College de France, I happened to say to an illustrious
historian, a member of the French Academy, who was complimenting me:
"But I have not remade Roman history, as many admirers think. On
the contrary, it might be said, in a certain sense, that I have only
returned to the old way. I have retaken the point of view of Livy;
like Livy, gathering the events of the story of Rome around that
phenomenon which the ancients called the 'corruption' of customs--a
novelty twenty centuries old!"

Spoken with a smile and in jest, these words nevertheless were more
serious than the tone in which they were uttered. All those who know
Latin history and literature, even superficially, remember with
what insistence and with how many diverse modulations of tone are
reiterated the laments on the corruption of customs, on the luxury,
the ambition, the avarice, that invaded Rome after the Second Punic
War. Sallust, Cicero, Livy, Horace, Virgil, are full of affliction
because Rome is destined to dissipate itself in an incurable
corruption; whence we see, then in Rome, as to-day in France, wealth,
power, culture, glory, draw in their train--grim but inseparable
comrade!--a pessimism that times poorer, cruder, more troubled, had
not known. In the very moment in which the empire was ordering itself,
civil wars ended; in that solemn _Pax Romana_ which was to have
endured so many ages, in the very moment in which the heart should
have opened itself to hope and to joy, Horace describes, in three
fine, terrible verses, four successive generations, each corrupting
Rome, which grew ever the worse,