Rome_, that
the history of Caesar's family, as it has been told by Tacitus and
Suetonius, is a sensational novel, a legend containing not much more
truth than the legend of Atrides. The family of Caesar, placed in the
centre of the great struggle going on in Rome between the old Roman
militarism, and the intellectual civilisation of the Orient,
between nationalism and cosmopolitism, between Asiatic mysticism
and traditional religion, between egoism over-excited by culture and
wealth, and the supreme interests of the species, had to injure too
many interests, to offend too many susceptibilities. The injured
interests, the offended susceptibilities, revenged themselves through
defaming legends.

The case of Nero is particularly instructive. He was half insane and
a veritable criminal: it would be absurd to attempt in his favour
the historical rehabilitation to which other members of the family,
Tiberius for instance, have a right. And yet it has not been enough
for succeeding generations that he atoned for his follies and crimes
by death and infamy. They have fallen upon his memory: they have
overlooked that extenuating circumstance of considerable importance,
his age when elected; they have gone so far as to make him into a
unique monster, no longer human and even the Antichrist!

Surely he first shed Christian blood; but if we consider the tendency
he represented in Roman history, we can hardly classify him among the
great enemies of Christianity. Unwittingly, Augustus and Tiberius were
two great enemies of the Christian teachings, because they sought
by all means to reinforce Roman tradition, and struggled
against everything that would one day form the essence of
Christianity--cosmopolitism, mysticism, the domination of intellectual
people, the influence of the philosophical and metaphysical spirit
on life. Nero, on the contrary, with his repeated efforts to
spread Orientalism in Rome, and chiefly with his taste for art, was
unconsciously a powerful collaborator of future Christian propaganda.
We must not forget this: the masses in the Empire became Christian
only because they had first been imbued with the Oriental spirit.

Nero and St. Paul, the man that wished to enjoy all, and the man
that suffered all, are in their time two extreme antitheses: with
the passing of centuries, they become two collaborators. While one
suffered hunger and persecution to preach the doctrine of redemption,
the other called to Italy