columns still lingered in the Heræum of Olympia. The real organ of history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of one’s personal past and of a national and a world-historical past[131] as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super- personal becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in this vague background;[132] and the great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance—witness Cæsar’s slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Cæsar’s reform of the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Cæsar also imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State into an empire which was to be dynastic—marked with the badge of duration—and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the _Polis_ and the _Urbs Roma_. Even then Classical mankind was still living every hour and every day for itself; and this is equally true whether we take the individual Greek or Roman, or the city, or the nation, or the whole Culture. The hot-blooded pageantry, palace-orgies, circus-battles of Nero or Caligula—Tacitus is a true Roman in describing only these and ignoring the smooth progress of life in the distant provinces—are final and flamboyant expressions of the Euclidean world-feeling that deified the body and the present.