o bring to light all the documentary evidence that
the earth still conceals; but while all other histories are studied
fitfully, that of Rome is, so to speak, remade every fifty years,
and whoever arrives at the right time to do the making can gain a
reputation broader than that given to most historians.

There is, so to speak, in the history of Rome an eternal youth,
and for the mind in what is commonly called European-American
civilisation, it holds a peculiar attraction. From what deep sources
springs this perennial youth? In what consists this particular force
of attraction and renewal? It seems to me that the chief reason
for the eternal fascination of the history of Rome is this, that it
includes, as in a miniature drawn with simple lines, well defined,
all the essential phenomena of social life; so that every age is
able there to find its own image, its gravest problems, its intensest
passions, its most pressing interests, its keenest struggles;
therefore Roman history is forever modern, because every new age has
only to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its own
self.

In the intellectual history of the nineteenth century this leading
phenomenon of our culture is clearly evident. If any one asked me why,
during the past century, Roman history has proved so interesting, I
should not hesitate to reply, "Because Europeans and Americans
find, there more than elsewhere what has been the greatest political
upheaval of the hundred years that followed the French Revolution--the
struggle between monarchy and republic." From the fervid admiration
for the Roman Republic which animated the men of the French Revolution
to the unmeasured Caesarian apologies of Duruy and of Mommsen, from
the ardent cult of Brutus to the detailed studies on the Roman
administration of the first two centuries, all historians have studied
and regarded Roman history mainly from the point of view of the
struggle between the two principles that yet to-day rend in incurable
discord the mind of old Europe and from which you have emerged
fortunate! You are free, in a new world; you have ended the combat
between the Latin principle of the impersonal state and the Oriental
principle of the dynastic state; between the state conceived as the
thing of all, belonging to every one and therefore of no one, and the
state personified in a family of an origin higher and nobler than
the common in which all authority derives from some hero-founder