ancient Rome a
part of their own very souls, restless, turbulent, greedy. In the Rome
of the days of Caesar, huge, agitated, seething with freedmen, slaves,
artisans come from everywhere, crowded with enormous tenement-houses,
run through from morning till night by a mad throng, eager for
amusements and distractions; in that Rome where there jostled together
an unnumbered population, uprooted from land, from family, from native
country, and where from the press of so many men there fermented all
the propelling energies of history and all the forces that destroy
morality and life--vice and intellectuality, the imperialistic policy,
deadly epidemics; in that changeable Rome, here splendid, there
squalid; now magnanimous, and now brutal; full of grandeurs, replete
with horrors; in that great city all the huge modern metropolises are
easily refound, Paris and New York, Buenos Ayres and London, Melbourne
and Berlin. Rome created the word that denotes this marvellous and
monstrous phenomenon, of history, the enormous city, the deceitful
source of life and death--_urbs_--_the city_. Whence it is not strange
that the countless _urbes_ which the grand economic progress of the
nineteenth century has caused to rise in every part of Europe and
America look to Rome as their eldest sister and their dean.

Furthermore, into the history of Rome, the historic aristocracy of
Europe may look as into the mirror of their own destiny, as everywhere
they try to retain wealth and power, playing in the stock-exchange,
marrying the daughters of millionaire brewers, giving themselves
to commerce; a nobility that resorts, in the effort to preserve
its prestige over the middle classes, to the expedients of the most
reckless demagogy. Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, Antony, Caesar,
exemplify in stupendous types the aristocracy that seeks to conserve
riches and power by audaciously employing the forces that menace its
own destruction.

Several critics of my work, particularly the French, have observed
that the policy of expansion made by Rome in the times of Caesar, as
I have described it, resembles closely the craze for imperialism that
about ten years ago agitated England. It is true, for imperialism in
the time of Caesar was what has existed for the last half century in
England--a means of which one part of the historic aristocracy availed
itself to keep power and renew decaying prestige, satisfying material
interests and flattering with into