in dynastic regimes. What social force destined to
perish would still have power to struggle if it clearly foresaw its
inevitable future dissolution; if it did not fortify itself a little
with some deluding vision of its own future?

Augustus and Tiberius were deceived. They wished to reanimate what was
doomed; they feared what for the moment was not dangerous. They are
the last representatives of the policy initiated by the Scipios and
not the initiators of the policy that created the bureaucratic Empire
of Diocletian: yet this is exactly their glory. They were right to
be wrong; and they rendered to the Empire an immense service, for
the very reason that the definite outcome of their efforts was
diametrically opposed to the idea that animated them. But we need not
dwell on this point. Such were the ideas of the two emperors and the
results of their work; the true Empire, known to all, the monarchic,
Asiaticised, bureaucratic Empire, grew out of this little-governed
beginning that Augustus and Tiberius allowed to live in the freedom
of the largest autonomy. How was it formed? This is the great problem
that I shall try to solve in the sequence of my work. Naturally, I
cannot now resume all the ideas I mean to develop: I confine myself
here to some of the simplest considerations, which seem to me surest.

The picture of the Empire, so brilliant from the economic stand-point,
is much less so from the intellectual: here we touch its great
weakness. Destroying so many governments, especially in the Orient,
Rome had at the same time decapitated the intellectual _elites_ of
the ancient world; for the courts of the monarchies were the great
firesides of mental activity. Rome had therefore, together with states
and governments, destroyed scientific and literary institutions,
centres of art, traditions of refinement, of taste, of aesthetic
elegance. So everywhere, with the Roman domination, the practical
spirit won above the philosophical and scientific, commerce over arts
and letters, the middle classes over historic aristocracies. Already
weakened by the overthrow of the most powerful Asiatic monarchies,
these _elites_ received the final blow on the disappearance of their
last protection, the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt.

When Augustus began to govern the Empire, the classes that represent
tradition, culture the elevated and disinterested activities of the
spirit, were everywhere extensive in number in wealth, in ener