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The Chautauqua Press
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In the spring of 1906, the Collège de France invited me to deliver,during November of that year, a course of lectures on Roman history.I accepted, giving a résumé, in eight lectures, of the history of thegovernment of Augustus from the end of the civil wars to his death;that is, a résumé of the matter contained in the fourth and fifthvolumes of the English edition of my work, The Greatness and Declineof Rome.
Following these lectures came a request from M. Emilio Mitre, Editorof the chief newspaper of the Argentine Republic, the Nacion, andone from the Academia Brazileira de Lettras of Rio de Janeiro, todeliver a course of lectures in the Argentine and Brazilian capitals.I gave to the South American course a more general character thanthat delivered in Paris, introducing arguments which would interest apublic having a less specialized knowledge of history than the publicI had addressed in Paris.
When President Roosevelt did me the honour to invite me to visit theUnited States and Prof. Abbott Lawrence Lowell asked me to deliver acourse at the Lowell Institute in Boston, I selected material from thetwo previous courses of lectures, moulding it into the group that wasgiven in Boston in November-December, 1908. These lectures were laterread at Columbia University in New York, and at the University ofChicago in Chicago. Certain of them were delivered elsewhere—beforethe American Philosophical Society and at the University ofPennsylvania in Philadelphia, at Harvard University in Cambridge, andat Cornell University in Ithaca.
Such is the record of the book now presented to the public at large.It is a work necessarily made up of detached studies, which, however,are bound together by a central, unifying thought; so that the readingof them may prove useful and pleasant even to those who have alreadyread my Greatness and Decline of Rome.
The first lecture, "The Theory of Corruption in Roman History," sumsup the fundamental idea of my conception of the history of Rome. Theessential phenomenon upon which all the political, social, and moralcrises of Rome depend is the transformation of customs produced by theaugmentation of wealth, of expenditure, and of needs,—a phenomenon,therefore, of psychological order, and one common in contemporarylife. This lecture should show that my work does not belong amongthose written after the method of economic materialism, for I holdthat the fundamental force in history is psychologic and not economic.
The three following lectures, "The History and Legend of Antony andCleopatra," "The Development of Gaul,"