ment defines the modern sense of time and makes it unnecessary to raise the question that haunted our predecessors: how should nations conduct themselves under sentence of death?

The biblical conception of history, after all, had more in common (though not in the way that Nisbet imagines) with the classical conception, as reformulated during the Renaissance, than with the modern gospel of progress. What they had in common was an awareness of the "doom of threatened societies"—an understanding, that is, that the contingent, provisional, and finite quality of temporal things finds its most vivid demonstration not just in the death of individuals but in the rise and fall of nations. There is a good deal to be said for J. H. Plumb's thesis that the fall of Rome sharpened the historical imagination in the West, posing both for Christians in the fourth century and for neopagans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a question that could be answered only through speculation about the course of past events. Why had that splendid empire collapsed? For the Romans themselves, it was the desertion of the pagan gods, after the introduction of Christianity, that led to the barbarian conquest. Augustine wrote The City of God in order to refute this belief but also in order to put the fall of Rome in the cosmic perspective of God's plan for salvation. "As far as I can see, the distinction between victors and vanquished has not the slightest importance for security, for moral standards, or even for human dignity.... As far as this mortal life is concerned, which ends after a few days' course, what does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts?" For Machiavelli and his readers—for whom ancient Rome, on the other hand, supplied the "standard by which modern times ... were measured and found wanting," in Hanna Pitkin's words—it was just this indifference to civic affairs, encouraged by Christianity, that fatally weakened Rome. No matter how it was explained, however, the fall of Rome served as a reminder of glory's fleeting career as well as an incentive to rescue something of permanence from the realm of change. "The world of particular events was ill under

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