It cannot be questioned that M. Taine’s theory contains a germ of truth. But, in fact, so far as it is true it is a very old story. What is true in his theory is not new, and what is new is questionable. Since history has risen to be something more and something better than a mere roll of warriors and a correct list of kings and queens--which latter class of good people are fast disappearing, never again, we trust, to return--since the historian has been elevated from the rank of a mere annalist to be the interpreter to his own age of not only the acts and sufferings, but the mind and the heart of dead generations, he has become avid of the most trifling details concerning their transitory passage here on earth. He desires to discover and relate how they lived, slept, and ate--how they talked, toiled, and travelled--what they said, what they thought--what, in a word, was their social and psychological life. To obtain the knowledge he seeks, all sources are equally valuable--written manuscripts that speak as well as stone ruins that are dumb.
Such knowledge as this the new school of German historians, having first exhausted all literary material, have sought to gather from the most remote and even repulsive sources; and from philological analysis, from works of art, from monuments, old roads, half-corroded coins, almost obliterated inscriptions, broken pottery, partially effaced frescoes, and from the very fragments of mere kitchen utensils, they have created afresh and revealed to us, in all its details, the daily and familiar life of ancient Rome, and poured a flood of light upon the living man of the that day.
And yet, before the results of their archæological and ethnological labors were given to the world, we thought we knew our Roman well and familiarly. For what literature, unless it be that of Greece, presents so rich and so complete a portrait gallery of all the types of its people as the literature of Rome? From Virgil, who gives us the ploughman and vinedresser, and Cæsar, through whose pages marches the Roman soldier, to Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Horace, we have a score of writers in whose pages all the virtues and vices, the grandeur and the shame, the nobility and the grovelling sensuality, of Rome are spread before us in language so attractive and so grand as to promise to outlast many modern masterpieces.