Nationalism and Internationalism in the Ancient World

Extract

We read and hear so much about our debt to Greece and Rome in the worlds of literature, law, and language that we are apt to forget that included in the legacy of the Ancient World to us is, to mention only one instance, the problem of the Franco-German frontier. Ought we to be glad the Romans stopped at the Rhine? Would things be better if they had gone farther? It was the defeat of Varus at the Teutoberger Wood that settled the frontier for the Romans; and Augustus with his plaintive cry of ‘Varus, Varus, give me back my legions’ determined once and for all to stop at the Rhine, and so left the Romanized Gauls and Germans in France and the free Germans across the Rhine as a thorny problem for all future time. Where the future is unknown, the present so uncertain, it is to the past we must turn for some definite foundation on which to build.