WA

GENERAL surprise was expressed when, at the close of 1906, on my return from Paris, where I had been giving a course of lectures on Roman history at the Collège de France, I announced that I had accepted the invitation tendered me by Emilio Mitre to undertake a long journey to South America. What should I, a historian of the ancient world, be doing in that newest of worlds, in that ultra modern continent, in those eminently practical lands, without a past, interested only in the future, where manufactures and agriculture occupy that place in society which in the ancient world was given to war? Were there no other countries which could interest me more? Why, if I were willing to leave my books and my studies, to travel, did I not go to Egypt or to the East, where so much of the history which I had narrated originated; where the Romans had left so many traces of their occupation; where so many important excavations were being made; and thus enrich historiography with new documents?

Whereupon, I made answer that I was no book-worm, interested only in books and archæological remains; that I was interested in life under all its aspects, and therefore, after having studied the peoples of the ancient world, I

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was interested in studying somewhat these most modern of people, the last to make their appearance in the history of our civilization. Because I happened to have written a history of Rome, was I to undertake never again to cast a glance at the modern world?

Yet, even while thus explaining the reason for my journey, I was as firmly persuaded as any of the friends who raised such objections, that my going to America would simply be a parenthesis in my intellectual life; that there could not be the slightest connection between such a journey and my studies of ancient history; that, in a word, I was going to America to seek diversion and intellectual relief, to distract my mind, which for ten years had been over-full of things ancient, by turning it into an entirely different channel. That this diversion would be of use to me I was sure, not because America was to aid me to a better understanding of ancient Rome, but because I have always thought it most helpful, especially for a historian, — who has need of knowing many things, to change, from time to time, the subject-matter of his studies, and to enrich his mind with new ideas. After visiting, however, not only the two largest and most flourishing countries of South America,

but the United States as well, which, better than the other countries of the New World, represents to the eyes of contemporary Europe the most modern element of our civilization, the kingdom of the machine, the empire of business, the realm of money,- I am no longer of this opinion. Now I think that a journey to the New World is, above all, intellectually useful to a historian of the ancient world, and that in order to understand the life and the history of Greek or Roman society, it is quite as useful, if not more so, to visit the countries of America as to visit Asia Minor or North Africa.

On one of the last days of my stay in the United States I said this to a congenial professor of ancient history at Cornell, with whom I was talking over our common work and discussing the most famous schools of the day and the methods used in them.

'Many of you,' I said, 'go to German universities to study ancient history. I think you might better invite some of these German professors to take an advanced course in America: studying, not so much in the libraries as in real life, observing what is going on in American society. No one is in a better position than you to understand ancient society.'

This statement may at first sight seem paradoxical, but nothing during my journeys in the two Americas has impressed me, as a historian of ancient Rome, more profoundly than the discovery in the New World of many of those phenomena of the Old World which, after the lapse of so many centuries of civilization, have disappeared from Europe. What we, at the beginning of the twentieth century, call ancient civilization, was in reality a new and young civilization, flourishing, but with few centuries of historical background, similar to the American civilization of to-day; and for that reason,

we find in it, although in a lesser degree, all those phenomena which seem to characterize American as compared with European society. I shall try, therefore, to throw some light on the most important of those points in which the ancient and the very new world resemble each other.

Those who have read my Greatness and Decline of Rome know that I have tried to show how one of the essential phenomena of Roman history was the struggle between traditional Roman puritanism and the refined, corrupt, artistic civilization of the Hellenized East. For centuries the old Roman aristocracy sought, through legislation and example and especially through religion, to impose upon all classes simple and pure customs, to check the increase of luxury, to keep the family united and strong, to curb dissolute and perverse instincts, to give a character of decency and propriety to all forms of amusement, even at the cost of imposing upon all aspects of Roman life an unadorned simplicity, and of rendering difficult the development of the arts. In ancient Rome the effort to preserve the morality of the past, the old simplicity and the religious spirit of former generations, was so great, and occupied so important a share in social activity, that from it resulted burning political struggles, law-suits, and tragedies, laws severe and terrible. The family of Augustus, for example, was almost wholly destroyed in the struggle between old puritanism and Asiatic civilization.

To understand the motives and fury of this struggle is not impossible in Europe, but it is difficult. For even in its protestant countries, Europe has been too long and too thoroughly under oriental influence to be able easily to imagine a state so strongly dominated by the force of the puritanical ideal. In