Their political action reminds us of nothing but the
playing of children; and the best of the leaders of the opposition to
the Imperial _regime_ are new men, most of whose names were never heard
of until the present century. The Imperial family, too, unlike that of
Rome, is a new family. The democratic revolution of Rome, which led
to the fall of the Republic, was enabled to triumph only because the
movement was headed by one of the noblest-born of Romans, a patrician of
the bluest blood, who claimed descent from Venus, and from the last
of the Trojan heroes. No Roman had a loftier lineage than "the mighty
Julius"; and when the place of Augustus passed to Tiberius, the third
Emperor represented the Claudian _gens_, the most arrogant, overbearing,
haughty, and cruel of all those patrician _gentes_ that figure in the
history of the republican times. He belonged, too, to the family of
Nero, which was to the rest of the Claudian _gens_ what that _gens_ was
to other men,--the representative of all that is peculiarly detestable
in an oligarchical fraternity.
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