see evolving that vast contest between the feminine spirit and the masculine, which is one of the essential phenomena in all human history.  We see the masculine spirit—­the spirit of domination, of force, of mastery, of daring—­ruling complete, when the small community had to fight its first hard battles against nature and men.  The father commanded then as monarch in his family; the woman was without right, liberty, personality; had but to obey, to bear children and rear them.  But success, power, wealth, greater security, imperceptibly loosened the narrow bondage of the first struggles; then the feminine spirit—­the spirit of freedom, of pleasure, of art, of revolt against tradition—­gradually acquired strength, and began bit by bit to undermine at its bases the stern masculine rule.

The hard conflict of two centuries is sown with tragedies and catastrophes.  Supported by tradition, exasperated by the ever bolder revolts of woman, the masculine spirit every now and then went mad; and brutally tore away her costly jewels and tried to deny her soft raiment and rare perfumes; and when she had already grown accustomed to appearing in the world and shining there, he willed to drive her back into the house, and put beside her there on guard the fieriest threats of law.  Sometimes, despairing, he filled Rome with his laments; protested that the liberty of the woman cost the man too dear; cried out that the bills of the dressmaker and the jeweller would send Rome, the Empire, the world, to ruin.  In vain, with wealth, in a civilisation full of Oriental influences, woman grew strong, rose, and invaded all society, until in the vast Empire of the first and second centuries, at the climax of her power, with beauty, love, luxury, culture, prodigality, and mysticism she dominated and dissolved a society which in the refinements of wealth and intellectuality had lost the sharp virtues of the pioneer.

It is unnecessary to dilate further on this point; it will be better rather to dwell a moment on the causes and the effects of this singular phenomenon.  The history of Rome has been and can be so rich, so manifold, so universal, because in its long record ancient Rome gathered up into itself, welded, fused, the most diverse elements of social life, from all peoples and all regions with which it came into contact.  It knew continued war and interrupted peace for centuries.  It held united under its vast sway, states decrepit with the oldest of civilisations, and peoples hardly out of primitive barbarism.  It exploited with avidity the intelligence, the laboriousness, the science of the former; the physical force, the war-valour and the daring of the latter; it absorbed the vices, the habits, the ideas of the Hellenised Orient, and transfused them in the untamed Occident.  Taking men, ideas, money, everywhere and from every people, it created first an empire, then a literature, an architecture, an administration, and a new religion, that were the