Nevertheless, while aiming at entire lucidity, the following chapters will aim even more scrupulously at telling the truth. There are doubtless a number of matters--though generally of relatively small moment--about which we are, and probably always shall be, uncertain. The best way to deal with these, in a work which is descriptive rather than argumentative, is to omit them. For the rest it must be expected of any one whose professional concern it has been to saturate himself for many years in the literature of the times, and to study carefully their monumental remains, that he should occasionally make some statement, drop some passing remark or judgment, which may appear to be in conflict with assertions made in other quarters. If a few examples are met with in the present book, they may be taken as made with all deference, but with deliberation. It is perhaps well to say this with some emphasis, in view of the blunders often innocently committed by those who happen to be speaking of this period. There are those who know it almost only through the medium of the _Acts of the Apostles_, and who entertain the most erroneous notions concerning Gallio or Festus, concerning Roman justice, Roman taxation, or Roman moral and religious attitudes. There are those, again, who know it almost only through the manuals of history; that is to say, they know the dates and facts of the reigns of the emperors, but have never realised, not to say visualised, the contemporary Roman as a human being. There exist denunciations of the morals of the Roman world of this date which would lead one to believe that every man was a Nero and every woman a Messalina: denunciations so lurid that, if they were a third part true, the continuance of the Roman Empire, or even of the Roman race, for a single century would be simply incomprehensible. On the other hand there have been accounts of the material glory of Rome which have conjured up visions of splendour worthy only of the _Arabian Nights_; and sometimes the comment is added that it was all won from the blood and sweat heartlessly wrung from a world of miserable slaves. It is not too much to say that none of these descriptions could come from a writer or speaker who knew the period at first hand. The most dangerous form of falsehood is that which contains some portion of truth. The life of many a Roman was deplorably dissolute; the splendour of Rome was beyond doubt astonishing; of oppression there were too many scattered instances; but we do not judge the civilisation of the British Empire by the choicest scandals of London, nor the good sense of the United States by the freak follies of New York. We do not take it that the modern satirist who vents his spleen on an individual or a class is describing each and all of his contemporaries, nor even that what he says is necessarily true of such individual or class. Nor is the professional moralist himself immune from jaundice or from the disease of exaggeration.