DECLINE OF ROME VOL. I. THE EMPIRE BUILDERS BY GUGLIELMO FERRERO TRANSLATED BY ALFRED E. ZIMMERN, M.A. FELLOW AND TUTOR OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS & ift Lib, of Benjamin W. Wheeler 6-19-59 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION THESE two volumes contain a history of the age of Cæsar, from the death of Sulla to the Ides of March. They cover the critical years in which Roman imperialism definitely asserted its sway over the civilised world-when, by the conversion of the Mediterranean into an Italian lake, Italy entered upon her historic task as intermediary between the Hellenised East and barbarous Europe. Prefixed to the work are five introductory chapters giving a somewhat lengthy summary of Roman history down to the moment when the detailed narrative begins. Despite the many defects to which this style of writing is obviously exposed, I would beg my readers to study these chapters with patience and goodwill; for they are a necessary introduction to the full description and understanding of Cæsar's own age. Human history, like all other phenomena of life and motion, is the unconscious product of an infinity of small and unnoticed efforts. Its work is done, spasmodically and in disorder, by single individuals or groups of individuals, acting generally from immediate motives, with results which always transcend the knowledge and intentions of contemporaries, and are but seldom revealed, darkly and for a moment, to succeeding generations. To find a clue to the immediate, accidental, and transitory motives which have pricked on the men of the past to their labours; to describe vividly and whole-heartedly their vicissitudes and anxieties, their struggles and illusions, as they pursued their work; to discover how and why, through this work, the men of one generation have often, not satisfied the passions which spurred them to action, but effected some lasting transformation in the life of their society-this should be, my opinion, the unfailing inspiration of the historian's task. in I hope that my book has enabled me to demonstrate that the Roman world-conquest, one of those amazing spectacles in history which, seen from a distance, seem to defy both comparison and explanation, was in reality the effect, remarkable, indeed, for its special conditions of place and time, of an internal transformation which is continually being re-enacted in the history of societies on a larger or a smaller scale, promoted by the same causes and with the same resultant confusion and suffering the growth of a nationalist and industrial democracy on the ruins of a federation of agricultural aristocracies. My intention is to continue the narrative, in succeeding volumes, down to the break-up of the Empire. We shall watch, in the generation between Augustus and Nero, the appearance of a new aristocracy out of the industrial democracy of Cæsar's age; we shall watch this aristocracy, all-powerful in a peaceful empire, crumble slowly to pieces through its own prosperity, while Christianity and the Oriental worships. undermine its spiritual foundations; and finally we shall watch it as it is engulfed anew, and takes down with it into the deeps all that was most ancient and revered in Græco-Latin civilisation. Thus the book includes in its survey the entire course of one of the most remarkable societies in history, from its birth to its death-from the far-distant morning when a small clan of peasants and shepherds felled the forests on the Palatine to raise altars to its tribal deities, down to the tragic hour in which the sun of Græco-Latin civilisation set over the deserted fields, the abandoned cities, the homeless, ignorant, and brutalised peoples of Latin Europe. TURIN; December 1, 1901. |