In the spring of 1906, the Coll ge de France invited me to deliver, during November of that year, a course of lectures on Roman history. I accepted, giving a r sum , in eight lectures, of the history of the government of Augustus from the end of the civil wars to his death; that is, a r sum of the matter contained in the fourth and fifth volumes of the English edition of my work, The Greatness and Decline of Rome.