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degenerate princes. But in the end the cruelty of Tiberius is not greater 

 than that of Sylla, and the intrigues of the courts of the Seleucids 

 and Ptolemies are useful in making one understand the plotting of the 

 Palatine Imperial Palaces. And without having recourse to the easy 

 but unhealthy remedy of fixed formulas taken from premature 

 treatises on the historical development of all societies, it is clear that 

 in the study of the ancient Germanic races or of the oriental mon- 

 archies one will often find material adapted to clear up problems 

 of the ancient classic world. Such study, for instance, can be useful 

 to the solution of the controverted problem of the Scriptores Historiae 

 Augustae, much more than the infinite series of proceedings which will 

 be expounded by the philologist, and more than an analytic diction- 

 ary of those texts. 



At any rate, the history of the Empire contains problems which 

 can be referred also in great part to posterior history. The modern 

 historian lives in an epoch when war is generally considered as an 

 evil to be avoided ; the scholar who is not accustomed to arms spends 

 his time between the documents of the archives and the ruins of the 

 excavations. He does not feel the necessity of connecting military 

 events which he is not in a condition to understand. If necessary 

 he turns to the opinion of some military person more or less used to 

 interpret and to understand military texts. Anyhow modern age is 

 tending to solve problems of social character, and critics, generally, 

 if only for the love of novelty, ascertain and follow the tastes of their 

 contemporaries. And more than to the problem of moral conscience, 

 which determines the function of the highest human energies, they 

 try to transport, in the ancient world, those facts which are torment- 

 ing modern societies, without sufficiently taking into consideration 

 different conditions in culture and faith, in density of population and 

 in social organisms. 



An historian of the first order, Polybius, in finding fault with his- 

 torians given only to the study of books, praised Ephorus for his being 

 in condition to describe a land battle or a naval operation, just as 

 Gibbon's contemporaries appreciated his military knowledge. Poly- 

 bius himself, quite an expert in arms as in political management, 

 was not wrong. To narrate the destinies of the world, determined by 

 the result of military events, without being in a condition to interpret 

 them, is like writing a history of literature and sciences, giving only 

 the names of the authors and the titles of the works, without examin- 

 ing the contents. To speak of Alexander and Hannibal without con- 

 sidering the merits of their strategy and tactical movements, means 

 to give up a good part of their work, and not to understand the nature 

 of the military states in which those same events happened, and for 

 which they were written. And this fact holds more for the Roman 

 world \vhich lived always in arms than for the Greek civilization. 



