all these three
together. Those who, like Tiberius and Agrippina, defended the ancient
Roman tradition, were hated, hounded, and defamed with a no less angry
fury than Caligula and Nero, who sought to destroy it. No one of them,
whatever his tendencies or intentions, succeeded in making himself
understood by his times or by posterity; it was their common fate to be
misunderstood, and therefore horribly calumniated. The destiny of the
women was even more tragic than that of the men, for the times demanded
from them, as a compensation for the great honor of belonging to this
privileged family, that they possess all the rarest and most difficult
virtues.

What was the cause of all this? we ask. How were so many catastrophes
possible, and how could tradition have erred so grievously? It is
almost a crime that posterity should virtually always have studied and
pondered this immense tragedy of history on the basis of the crude and
superficial falsification of it which Tacitus has given us. For few
episodes in general history impress so powerfully upon the mind the
fact that the progress of the world is one of the most tragic of its
phenomena. Especially is such knowledge necessary to the favored
generations of prosperous and easy times. He who has not lived in
those years when an old world is disappearing and a new one making its
way cannot realize the tragedy of life, for at such times the old is
still sufficiently strong to resist the assaults of the new, and the
latter, though growing, is not yet strong enough to annihilate that
world on the ruins of which alone it will be able to prosper. Men are
then called upon to solve insoluble problems and to attempt enterprises
which are both necessary and impossible. There is confusion
everywhere, in the mind within and in the world without. Hate often
separates those who ought to aid one another, since they are tending
toward the same goal, and sympathy binds men together who are forced to
do battle with one another. At such times women generally suffer more
than men, for every change which occurs in their situation seems more
dangerous, and it is right that it should be so. For woman is by
nature the vestal of our species, and for that reason she must be more
conservative, more circumspect, and more virtuous than man. There is
no state or civilization which has comprehended the highest things in
life which has not been forced to instil into its women rather than
in