How was it formed? This is the great problem that I shall try to solve in the sequence of my work. Naturally, I cannot now resume all the ideas I mean to develop: I confine myself here to some of the simplest considerations, which seem to me surest.
The picture of the Empire, so brilliant from the economic stand-point, is much less so from the intellectual: here we touch its great weakness. Destroying so many governments, especially in the Orient, Rome had at the same time decapitated the intellectual elites of the ancient world; for the courts of the monarchies were the great firesides of mental activity. Rome had therefore, together with states and governments, destroyed scientific and literary institutions, centres of art, traditions of refinement, of taste, of aesthetic elegance. So everywhere, with the Roman domination, the practical spirit won above the philosophical and scientific, commerce over arts and letters, the middle classes over historic aristocracies. Already weakened by the overthrow of the most powerful Asiatic monarchies, these elites received the final blow on the disappearance of their last protection, the dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt.
When Augustus began to govern the Empire,
