Quote

ON the decline of the Roman power, about five centuries after Christ, the countries of Northern Europe were left almost destitute of a national government.

When Edward Gibbon was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, he could argue that transportation hadn't changed since ancient times. An imperial messenger on the Roman roads could get from Rome to London even faster in A.D. 100 than in 1750. But by 1850, and even more obviously today, all of that has changed.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all.

There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions - in a Freudian way - to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century we abandoned tradition, it's at that point that I intend to renew it because the present is built on the past just as the past was built on the times that went before it.

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career.

The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the Netherlands.