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Excerpt from Essays in Ancient History and Antiquities, Vol. 7 [The following are brief general notes with wtiich Mr. De Quincey introduced "The Cæsars," and Plato's "Republic" when revising the latest edition of his works.] "The Cæsars," it may be right to mention, was written in a situation which denied me the use of books; so that with the exception of a few penciled extracts in a pocket-book from the Augustan history, I was obliged to depend upon ray memory for materials, in so far as respected facts. These materials for the Western Empire are not more scanty than meagre; and in that proportion so much the greater is the temptation which they offer to free and skeptical speculation. To this temptation I have yielded intermittingly; but from a fear (perhaps a cowardly fear) of being classed as a dealer in licentious paradox, I checked myself exactly where the largest license might have been properly allowed to a bold spirit of incredulity. In particular, I cannot bring myself to believe, nor ought therefore to have assumed the tone of a believer, in the inhuman atrocities charged upon the earlier Cæsars. Guided by my own instincts of truth and probability, I should, for instance, have summarily exploded the most revolting among the crimes imputed to Nero. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

First published in 1974, this book is a collection of nine essays written by Victor Ehrenberg between 1925 and 1967, five of which had not been published before. They deal with a number of aspects of Greek and Roman history, and with the nature of ancient history in the East and West. The first essay is a broad survey of interactions between opposing forces and ideas in the world as seen from the most ancient Near Eastern civilizations to the beginning of the western Middle Ages and the era of Byzantium; this is followed by discussions of topics from Classical and Hellenistic Greece and Republican and Imperial Rome, with the accent on the history of ideas and institutions –freedom, the Greek city-state, and Roman concepts of state and empire. The final chapter consists of personal reflections on the meaning of history from the writer’s own characteristic viewpoint, and is, as he admits, more in the way of a confession than pure scholarship.