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