from the open Atlantic, the free high-road of the new world, into the Mediterranean, the confined arena of ancient civilisation. _Livre désordonné et pourtant bien ordonné_ is the verdict of a French critic, André Maurel. How glad I should be if all my readers subscribed to this verdict! In truth, this tragic conflict of the two worlds, of the two civilisations, of man with himself, for licence to dispense with the limits of which he, in fact, has need if he is to enjoy the most exquisite fruits of life, is a picture so vast as to overtax the resources of the painter. But the painter has worked at his canvas with so much ardour and passion that he hopes to find on the other side of the Atlantic, as on this, readers willing to view the defects in his work with the intelligent indulgence of which really cultured men are always so liberal; readers prompt to feel some quickening in response to the few sparks of beauty and of truth which the author may have succeeded in infusing into his work. It is a small thing, no doubt. But do not even the tiny rivulets which flow through the valleys unite to form the mighty rivers in the plain? PART II ANCIENT HISTORY AND THE MODERN WORLD I ANCIENT SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND CONTEMPORARY AMERICA At the end of the year 1906, while sojourning in Paris, where I had been giving at the Collège de France a course of lectures on Roman history, I received an invitation from Emilio Mitré, the son of the famous Argentine general, to undertake a long expedition to South America. This invitation evoked general surprise. What, my friends asked, was I, the historian of the ancient world, going to do in the newest of new worlds, in ultra-modern countries, in countries without a past and caring only for the future, where industry and agriculture fill the place which for the ancients was occupied by war? Why, if I was willing to leave my studies and my books for one moment, did I not repair to Egypt or the East, the scene of so much of the history which I had recounted, where the Romans have left so many traces of the world which has passed away, and where so many important excavations, tending to enrich history with new documentary evidence, are in progress?