Roman Public Life

It is not only that classic traditions were forgotten, that, as Gibbon says, “the purity of the Latin language was debased by adopting, in the intercourse of pride and flattery, a profusion of epithets, which Tully would have scarcely understood, and which Augustus would have rejected with indignation,” but that, even where the continuity in public institutions can be traced, it is one of names rather than of ideas. In the Principate we see a perverted Republic; in the monarchy a Res publica only in the narrowest etymological sense of those words. Perhaps the accession of Diocletian does, after all, mark the close of a true “Roman” public life.