Characters and Events of Roman History

Characters and Events of Roman History

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Title: Characters and events of Roman History
Author: Guglielmo Ferrero
Release Date: August 17, 2004 [EBook #13208]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CHARACTERS AND EVENTS OF ROMAN HISTORY
FROM CÆSAR TO NERO
THE LOWELL LECTURES OF 1908
BY
GUGLIELMO FERRERO, LITT.D.
AUTHOR OF
"THE GREATNESS AND DECLINE OF ROME," ETC.
TRANSLATED BY
FRANCES LANCE FERRERO

[Illustration]
The Chautauqua Press
CHAUTAUQUA, NEW YORK
[Copyright deleted]
By G.P. Putnam's Sons
Fifth Printing
The Chautauqua Print Shop
Chautauqua, N.Y.

PREFACE
In the spring of 1906, the Collège de France invited me to deliver, during November of
that year, a course of lectures on Roman history. I accepted, giving a résumé, in eight
lectures, of the history of the government of Augustus from the end of the civil wars to
his death; that is, a résumé of the matter contained in the fourth and fifth volumes of the
English edition of my work, _The Greatness and Decline of Rome_.
Following these lectures came a request from M. Emilio Mitre, Editor of the chief
newspaper of the Argentine Republic, the Nacion, and one from the Academia Brazileira
de Lettras of Rio de Janeiro, to deliver a course of lectures in the Argentine and Brazilian
capitals. I gave to the South American course a more general character than that delivered
in Paris, introducing arguments which would interest a public having a less specialized
knowledge of history than the public I had addressed in Paris.
When President Roosevelt did me the honour to invite me to visit the United States and
Prof. Abbott Lawrence Lowell asked me to deliver a course at the Lowell Institute in
Boston, I selected material from the two previous courses of lectures, moulding it into the
group that was given in Boston in November-December, 1908. These lectures were later
read at Columbia University in New York, and at the University of Chicago in Chicago.
Certain of them were delivered elsewhere--before the American Philosophical Society
and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, at Harvard University in
Cambridge, and at Cornell University in Ithaca.
Such is the record of the book now presented to the public at large. It is a work
necessarily made up of detached studies, which, however, are bound together by a central,
unifying thought; so that the reading of them may prove useful and pleasant even to those
who have already read my Greatness and Decline of Rome.
The first lecture, "The Theory of Corruption in Roman History," sums up the
fundamental idea of my conception of the history of Rome. The essential phenomenon

upon which all the political, social, and moral crises of Rome depend is the
transformation of customs produced by the augmentation of wealth, of expenditure, and
of needs,--a phenomenon, therefore, of psychological order, and one common in
contemporary life. This lecture should show that my work does not belong among those
written after the method of economic materialism, for I hold that the fundamental force in
history is psychologic and not economic.
The three following lectures, "The History and Legend of Antony and Cleopatra," "The
Development of Gaul," and "Nero," seem to concern themselves with very different
subjects. On the contrary, they present three different aspects of the one, identical
problem--the struggle between the Occident and the Orient--a problem that Rome
succeeded in solving as no European civilisation has since been able to do, making the
countries of the Mediterranean Basin share a common life, in peace. How Rome
succeeded in accomplishing this union of Orient and Occident is one of the points of
greatest interest in its history. The first of these three lectures, "Antony and Cleopatra,"
shows how Rome repulsed the last offensive movement of the Orient against the
Occident; the second, "The Development of Gaul," shows the establishing of equilibrium
between the two parts of the Empire; the third, "Nero," shows how the Orient, beaten
upon fields of battle and in diplomatic action, took its revenge in the domain of Roman
ideas, morals, and social life.
The fifth lecture, "Julia and Tiberius," illustrates, by one of the most tragic episodes of
Roman history, the terrible struggle between Roman ideals and habits and those of the
Græco-Asiatic civilisation. The sixth lecture, "The Development of the Empire,"
summarises in a few pages views to be developed