lay.  The family of Caesar found the opposite situation:  an old military and aristocratic republic, which was changing into an intellectual and monarchical civilisation, based on equality, but opposing formidable resistance to the forces of transformation.  In these situations the two families tried in all ways to reconcile things not to be conciliated, to realise the impossible:  one, the popular monarchy and imperial democracy; the other, the monarchical republic and Orientalised Latinity.  The contradiction was for both families the law of life, the cause of greatness; this explains why neither was ever willing to extricate itself from it, in spite of the advice of philosophers, the malcontent of the masses, the pressure of parties, and the evident dangers.  This contradiction was also the fatality of both families, the cause of their ruin; it explains the shortness of their power, their restless existence, and the continuous catastrophes that opened the way to the final crash.

Waterloo and Sedan, the exile of Julia and the tragic failure of Tiberius’s government, all the misfortunes great and small which struck the two families, were always consequences of the insoluble contradiction they tried to solve.  You have had a perfectly characteristic example of it in the brief story I have been telling you.  Agrippina becomes an object of universal hatred and dies by assassination because she defends tradition; her son disregards tradition and, chiefly for this very reason, is finally forced to kill himself.  Doubtless the fate of the Bonapartes is less tragic, because they, at least, escaped the infamous legend created by contemporary hatred against Caesar’s family, and artfully developed by the historians of successive generations.  I hope to be able to prove in the continuation of my Greatness and Decline of Rome, that the history of Caesar’s family, as it has been told by Tacitus and Suetonius, is a sensational novel, a legend containing not much more truth than the legend of Atrides.  The family of Caesar, placed in the centre of the great struggle going on in Rome between the old Roman militarism, and the intellectual civilisation of the Orient, between nationalism and cosmopolitism, between Asiatic mysticism and traditional religion, between egoism over-excited by culture and wealth, and the supreme interests of the species, had to injure too many interests, to offend too many susceptibilities.  The injured interests, the offended susceptibilities, revenged themselves through defaming legends.

The case of Nero is particularly instructive.  He was half insane and a veritable criminal:  it would be absurd to attempt in his favour the historical rehabilitation to which other members of the family, Tiberius for instance, have a right.  And yet it has not been enough for succeeding generations that he atoned for his follies and crimes by death and infamy.  They have fallen upon his memory:  they have overlooked that extenuating circumstance of considerable importance, his age when elected; they have gone so far as to make him into a unique monster, no longer human and even the Antichrist!