The Emperor and his wife by their example meant to recall to all the Roman women the duty of attending with zeal and alacrity to their domestic duties. The ancient family, especially among the upper classes, was also a school. The ancient world had few institutions of public education; and private instruction did not reach a high level of development, except in the closing years of the Empire. Though Rome was the greatest military power in the world, the family took the place of military schools, which were then non-existent. The officers, who all belonged to the nobility, were prepared in the family. The father was the first military instructor of his sons, and on him fell the duty of making good soldiers of them. This, indeed, was one of the reasons why the aristocracy became indispensable to the Roman Empire; because it alone could prepare the officers and generals in the family. In short, the ancient family was a sort of political society. Its members were bound to support and help each other in difficult and dangerous contingencies, to a much greater extent than they are nowadays. In political struggles, for instance, they were all of one colour. It was the most difficult and unheard of thing, if indeed not impossible, for a son or a son-in-law to attach himself to a different political party from that of his father or his father-in-law. If a member of the family was implicated in a lawsuit, or financially embarrassed, the family was bound to help him much more energetically, and at much greater risk, than in our day. We see this phenomenon most clearly in Roman history. After the aristocracy split into two opposing parties,—the conservative and the popular, to borrow modern expressions,—a man’s position in one or the other party was determined, almost always, by his birth. He belonged to one party or the other, according as his own family belonged to one or the other. Take Cæsar, for example. Why was Cæsar always a member of the democratic party, and bound to follow its vicissitudes, to the extent of becoming its leader and occasioning a civil war, overturning the ancient government, and establishing a dictatorship which, reviving as it did the saddest memories of Sulla’s reaction, could not fail to be odious to the majority, and which was the cause of Cæsar’s death? It was not the result of any special inclination or ambition of his own. Several times he tried to cross over to the other party, which had much more power and authority; or at any rate, to reach an understanding with it. But his effort was of no avail. He was the nephew of Marius, the most celebrated among the leaders of the popular party, and the one whom the other party most detested. The first impulse towards the whole of the great dictator’s extraordinary career was given by this relationship; he had in the end to bring about a second revolution, because his uncle had already caused one.