From the point of view of the world’s history, then, Augustus appears as a far greater figure than Napoleon III. Antiquity spoke, we speak yet to-day, of the Age of Augustus with reason, and this is an honour that weighs more than the name of Great; a man gives his name to his time only when he has really stamped that time with his image, opening up new roads, not only to his own nation but to the history of his time. Such an honour then implies permanent achievement in the widest sense; no impartial historian, then, will ever speak of the Age of Napoleon III.
The French Empire was shattered while its founder was yet alive, and when it fell, its inner hollowness, its rotten foundations, lay exposed, so that the whole appeared no more than an adventurous episode in the history of France. The work of Augustus, on the other hand, was indispensable to the world’s history; it outlived its founder, and lasted with some modification to the end of antiquity. Succeeding generations saw in Augustus the ideal prince, and hailed each newly chosen emperor with the invocation: “Be thou happier than Augustus, better than Trajan.”
THE ROMAN EMPIRE COMPARED WITH MODERN ENGLAND
Of all the empires of later times Great Britain is the only one that can really be compared with the Roman Empire, for its constitution has been developed in quite a different way from that of continental states, and has preserved a much greater diversity by reason of that conservative spirit which the English share with the Romans. True, in our own century much has changed; for the old aristocratic England has become democratised; many a resemblance of England to the Roman Empire, which even to-day may be detected, appears in a much clearer light if we cast our glance back to the conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This is the case, for instance, with the position of parliament. As the ancient state recognised in theory a diarchia of the emperor and the senate, so, too, the English parliament at the close of the seventeenth century ranged itself, at least for all practical purposes, on the side of the sovereign power; and it was only a jealous watchfulness lest the power of the chief ruler might become too great, that saved the English parliament from the fate of the Roman senate. The critical battle between the two constitutional powers was fought at the end of the seventeenth century, when William of Orange, like Augustus in ancient Rome before him, made an attempt to dovetail a standing army into the frame of the constitution. But the English parliament resisted every attempt in this direction with stubborn obstinacy. Moreover the powerful nobility at home, and the energetic merchants and officials spread all over the world, correspond in the England of to-day to the aristocrats, the merchants and the officials of ancient Rome, just as great wealth on the one side is conditional with great poverty on the other.
The latifundia of ancient Italy may in dimensions have been about equal to the gross landed estates of the English aristocracy, but with slaves to work them in antiquity they had a far more desolating effect, even though we must admit that owing to the villas and parks laid out for the great in England, a portion of the free peasantry are thrust out of their plot of ground and England has had to turn for the means of life, etc., to the foreigner.
Roman Matron
(From a statue in the Capitol)
Also the difference of political rights between the full citizen with full rights and the slave without any rights at all was as marked in England a hundred years ago as it was in Rome. The relations between the Roman and the Latin citizens might then have justly borne comparison with the conflicting elements furnished by Englishmen and Scotchmen, which to-day are ever growing less and less; but even to-day the Irish on the one hand, with their reluctance to obey, and the English colonies on the other, with their successful diffusion of the English language and English national feeling abroad, reflect most faithfully the picture of ancient Rome.