When Augustus began to govern the Empire, the classes that represent tradition, culture the elevated and disinterested activities of the spirit, were everywhere extensive in number in wealth, in energy.  It was not long before these ultimate remainders vanished under the alluvial overflow of the middle classes, swollen by the big economic gains of the first century.  In this respect, the first and second centuries of the Christian era resemble our own time.  In the whole Empire, alike in Rome, in Gaul, in Asia, there were old aristocratic families, rich and illustrious, but they were not the class of greatest power.  Under them stood a middle class of merchants, land-owners, orators, jurists, professors, and other intellectual men, and this was so numerous, comfortable, and so potent as to cause all the great social forces, from government to industry, to abandon the old aristocracy and court it like a new mistress.  Art, industry, literature, were vulgarised in those two centuries, as to-day in Europe and America, because they had to work mainly for this middle class which was much more numerous, and yet cruder than the ancient elites.  It was the first era of the cheap, of vulgarisations, I was about to say of the made in Germany, that enters into history.  There was invented the art of silver-plating, to give the bourgeoisie at moderate prices the sweet illusion of possessing objects of silver; great thinkers disappeared; instead were multiplied manuals, treatises, encyclopaedias, professors that summarised and vulgarised.  Philosophy gradually gave out, like all the higher forms of literature, and there began the reign of the declaimers and the sophists; that is, the lecture-givers, the lawyers, the journalists.  In painting and sculpture, original schools were no more to be found, nor great names, but the number of statues and bas-reliefs increased infinitely.  The paintings of Pompeii and many statues and marbles that are now admired in European museums are examples of this industrialised art, inexpensive, creating nothing original, but furnishing to families in comfortable circumstances passable copies of works of art—­once a privilege only of kings.

The imperial bureaucracy that was formed mainly in the second century was another effect of this enlargement of the middle classes.  In the second century there came into vogue many humanitarian ideas, which have a certain resemblance to modern ones.  There increased solicitude for the general well-being, for order, for justice, and this augmented the number of functionaries charged with insuring universal felicity by administrative means.  The movement was supported by intellectual men of the middle classes, especially by jurists, who sought to put their studies to profit, getting from the government employments in which they might make use, well or ill, of their somewhat artificial aptitudes.  If the aristocratic idea, personified by Augustus and Tiberius, delayed, it could not stop,