Certainly the old Roman traditions were destined to be overwhelmed by the invasion of Oriental ideas and habits; but what might not have happened if every one had understood this from the very times of Augustus; if then no one had opposed the invasion of Orientalism; if mysticism and the monarchy of divine right had transformed Italy or the Empire within fifty years instead of three centuries?  I should not at all hesitate to affirm that certain errors are in certain conjunctions much wiser than the corresponding verities.  There is nothing more useful in life than resistance, though apparently futile, against social forces fated to perish, because these, struggling on to the very end, always succeed in imposing a part of themselves on the victorious power, and the result is always better than a complete and unantagonised victory of the opposing force.  To the obstinate resistance with which republican principles combated Asiatic monarchy in Rome, we must even to-day render thanks for the fact that Europe was not condemned, like Asia, to carry the eternal yoke of semidivine absolutism, even in dynastic regimes.  What social force destined to perish would still have power to struggle if it clearly foresaw its inevitable future dissolution; if it did not fortify itself a little with some deluding vision of its own future?

Augustus and Tiberius were deceived.  They wished to reanimate what was doomed; they feared what for the moment was not dangerous.  They are the last representatives of the policy initiated by the Scipios and not the initiators of the policy that created the bureaucratic Empire of Diocletian:  yet this is exactly their glory.  They were right to be wrong; and they rendered to the Empire an immense service, for the very reason that the definite outcome of their efforts was diametrically opposed to the idea that animated them.  But we need not dwell on this point.  Such were the ideas of the two emperors and the results of their work; the true Empire, known to all, the monarchic, Asiaticised, bureaucratic Empire, grew out of this little-governed beginning that Augustus and Tiberius allowed to live in the freedom of the largest autonomy.  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.