Pygmalion and Three Other Plays

16

16 (p. 57) “history tells us of only two successful institutions: one the Undershaft firm, and the other the Roman Empire under the Antonines”: Antonines is the collective name of the second-century Roman emperors Antoninus Pius and his sons, who succeeded him. Undershaft has borrowed this opinion about the age of the Antonines from English historian Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788).