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ss to cherish illusions as to the task: its accomplishment has become much more arduous than it was fifty years ago; perhaps because the masses have acquired greater power in every part of the European-American world, and democracy advances more or less rapidly, invading everything--the democracy of the technical man, the merchant, the workman, the well-to-do burgher, all of whom easily hold themselves aloof from a culture in itself aristocratic. The accomplishment will become always more and more arduous; for Roman studies, feeling the new generations becoming estranged from them, have for the last twenty-five years tended to take refuge in the tranquil cloisters of learning, of archaeology, in the discreet concourse of a few wise men, who voluntarily flee the noises of the world, Fatal thought! Ancient Rome ought to live daily in the mind of the new social classes that lead onward; ought to irradiate its immortal light on the new worlds that arise from the deeps of the modern age, on pain of undergoing a new destruction more calamitous than that caused by the hordes of Alaric. The day when the history of Rome and its monuments may be but material for erudition to put into the museums by the side of the bricks of the palace of Khorsabad, the cuneiform inscriptions, and the statues of the kings of Assyria, Latin civilisation will be overwhelmed by a fatal catastrophe. To hinder the extinction of the great light of Rome in the world, to prolong indefinitely this ideal survival, which is the continuation of its material Empire, destroyed centuries ago, there is but one way--to renew historic studies of Rome, and to maintain intact their universal value which forms part of common culture. This is what I have tried to do, seeking to lead back to Roman history the many minds estranged from it, distracted by so many cares and anxieties and present questionings, and to fulfil a solemn duty to my fatherland and the grand traditions of Latin culture. If other histories can grow old, it is indeed the more needful, exactly because it serves to educate new generations, to reanimate Roman history, incorporating in it the new facts constantly discovered by archaeological effort, infusing it with a larger and stronger philosophical spirit, carrying into it the matured experience of the world, which learns not only by studying but also by living. I do not hesitate to say that every half-century there opens among civilised peoples a
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