w York, Buenos Ayres and London, Melbourne and Berlin. Rome created the word that denotes this marvellous and monstrous phenomenon, of history, the enormous city, the deceitful source of life and death--urbs--the city. Whence it is not strange that the countless urbes which the grand economic progress of the nineteenth century has caused to rise in every part of Europe and America look to Rome as their eldest sister and their dean.
Furthermore, into the history of Rome, the historic aristocracy of Europe may look as into the mirror of their own destiny, as everywhere they try to retain wealth and power, playing in the stock-exchange, marrying the daughters of millionaire brewers, giving themselves to commerce; a nobility that resorts, in the effort to preserve its prestige over the middle classes, to the expedients of the most reckless demagogy. Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, Antony, Caesar, exemplify in stupendous types the aristocracy that seeks to conserve riches and power by audaciously employing the forces that menace its own destruction.
Several critics of my work, particularly the French, have observed that the policy of expansion made by Rome in the times of Caesar, as
