THE words "The Age of the Roman Empire is a period better abused than known," written by Theodor Mommsen half a century ago, no longer contain a truth. To his own illuminative and epoch-making works we owe it, in the first instance, that this period, so long unduly neglected and depreciated, has come into the foreground of research within the last decade or two, and has enchained the interest of the educated world far beyond the narrow circle of professed scholars. Edward Gibbon, the only great historian who had previously turned his attention to this particular field, and whose genius built up the brilliant Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the sure foundation laid ready to his hand by the vast industry of the French scholar Le Nain de Tillemont, chose to confine himself, as the title of his work declares, to giving a description of the period of its decay. By so doing he did much to confirm, though he did not originate, the idea that the whole epoch of the Roman Empire must be regarded as a period of deterioration, and that the utmost to which it can lay claim is an interest of somewhat pathological character, as being the connecting-link between antique and medieval times, and between the pagan and the Christian world. And when we look upon the picture sketched by that incomparable painter of the earlier days of the empire, Tacitus, where scarcely a gleam of light illumines the gloomy scene, we may well feel justified in the opinion that the only office of this period is to set forth to us the death-struggle of classical antiquity, and that no fresh fructifying seeds could spring from this process of corruption.

And, as a matter of fact, it cannot be denied that even the best days of the Empire can hardly with truth be spoken of as the prime of Rome. There is a dearth of great names, such as abound in the history of Greece and the early history of Rome. Julius Cæsar, the last truly imposing figure among the Romans, does not belong to it; he laid the foundations of this new world, but he was not destined to finish his work, and not one of his successors came bup to the standard of this great prototype. Individual character falls into the

background during the empire, even the individuality of the Roman people; its history becomes the history of the antique world, and an account of the period between the reigns of Augustus and Constantine can, in its essence, be nothing other than the history of the world for the first three centuries after Christ.

THE WEALTH OF ROMAN INSCRIPTIONS

It is easy to understand how Niebuhr, whose enthusiastic and lifelong labours were devoted to the history of ancient Rome, should have coldly turned aside from the period of imperial rule and cherished no desire to carry his history beyond the fall of the republic. Certainly it would be unjust to judge of his attitude towards the first-named period from the brief lecture with which he concluded his lectures on Roman history, but we shall nevertheless do no injustice to his undying merits by maintaining that in his heart of hearts he felt no sympathy with it. For it is not possible to conjure up a mental picture of the civilisation and condition of the empire from the scanty and imperfect records of literary tradition, a tradition that is not sufficient even for the first century, and fails us almost completely with regard to the second, and even more with regard to the third. Nothing can make up for this deficiency except an exhaustive study of monuments, and, more especially, of inscriptions, but this Dis Manibus literature, as he was pleased to call it, was a thing which Niebuhr, in spite of his many years of residence in Rome, neither cared for nor understood. For this we can hardly blame him, because, while the subject of coins had received admirable treatment at the hands of Joseph Eckhel, the inscriptions were hardly accessible for scientific purposes till long after Niebuhr's death.

It is difficult for a later generation to realise the condition of epigraphic research before the critical compilation of the Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum had put an end to the frightful state of things that prevailed in this study, discredited as it was by all sorts of forgeries. But when we see the insuperable difficulties with which a scholar of the first rank, like Bartolommeo Borghesi, had to contend in collecting and sifting the boundless abundance of materials for the researches on the subject of the history of the empire, which he planned on so vast a scale and carried through with such admirable acumen; when we see how the chief work of his life came to nought for lack of any firm standing-ground whatsoever, we can easily understand that Niebuhr should have preferred not to venture on such dangerous ground.

From every part of the earth where Roman feet have trod, these direct witnesses to the past arise from the grave in almost disquieting abundance: the inexhaustible soil of Rome and its immediate vicinity has already yielded more than thirty-five thousand stones; we possess more than thirty thousand from other parts of Italy; and the number of those bestowed upon us by Africa, which was not opened up to research until the last century, is hardly smaller. Again, the Illyrian provinces, Dalmatia first and foremost, but Roumania, Bulgaria, and Servia, all in their degree, and even Bosnia, almost unknown ground till a short time ago, have become rich mines of discovery in our own days, thanks to increased facilities of communication and to the civilisation which has made its way into those countries.

There is, no doubt, much chaff that has attained to an unmerited longevity in these stone archives, much that we would willingly let go by the board. But one thing is certain: that only out of these materials — which

of late have been singularly supplemented by the masses of papyri discovered in Egypt—can a history of the Roman Empire be constructed; and that any one who addresses himself to the solution of a problem of this kind without exact knowledge of them, though he were as great a man as Leopold von Ranke, must fall far short of the goal within reach. What can be done with such materials has been shown by Mommsen in the masterly description of the provinces from the time of Cæsar to the reign of Diocletian, given in the fifth volume of his History of Rome, a volume which not only forms a worthy sequel to those which preceded it, but in many respects marks an advance upon them, and makes us all the more painfully aware of the gap which we dare scarcely hope to see filled by his master hand.

THE MEANING OF IMPERIAL ROMAN HISTORY

What is the secret of the vivid interest which the Roman Empire awakens even in the minds of those who feel little drawn towards the study of antiquity? It is, in the first place, undoubtedly because this period is in many respects more modern in character than any other of ancient times; far more so than the Byzantine Empire or the Middle Ages. It is a period of transition, in which vast revolutions came about in politics and religion and the seed of a new civilisation was sown. Its true significance is not to be found in the creation of a world-wide empire. Republican Rome had already subdued the East in her inexorable advance; Macedonia and Greece, Syria, Asia, Africa, and, finally, Egypt, had fallen into her hands before the setting up of the imperial throne.

In the West, again, Spain and the south of Gaul had long been Roman when Julius Cæsar started on the campaign which decided the future of Europe, and pushed the Roman frontier forward from the Rhone to the Rhine. The sway of Rome already extended over all the coasts of the Mediterranean, and the accessions made to her dominions during the period of imperial rule were comparatively insignificant. The Danubian and Alpine provinces were won for the Roman Empire by Augustus, Britain was conquered by Claudius, Dacia and Arabia by Trajan, beside the conquests which his successor immediately relinquished. Germania and the kingdom of Parthia permanently withstood the Roman onset, and the construction of the Upper Germanic and Rætian Limes by Domitian was an official recognition of the invincibility of the Germanic barbarians. The counsel of resignation, given by Augustus to his successors out of the fulness of his own bitter experience, warning them to keep the empire within its natural frontiers, i.e., the Rhine, Danube, and Euphrates, was practically followed by them, and Hadrian did unquestionably right in breaking altogether with his predecessor's policy of expansion and refusing to expose the waning might of the empire to a continuous struggle to which it was no longer equal.

The great work of the empire, therefore, was not to conquer a world but to weld one into an organic whole, to foster civilisation where it existed and to be the instrument of Græco-Roman civilisation amongst the almost absolutely uncivilised nations admitted into the Orbis Romanus and up to a certain point it actually accomplished this pacific mission, which proceeded with hardly a pause even under the worst of tyrants. Its task, however, varied greatly in various parts of its world-wide field.

In the East, permeated with Greek culture, though by no means denationalised, the Romans scarcely made an attempt to enter into competition

with this superior civilising agency, and, except as the medium of expression of the Roman magistrates, the Roman language played a very subordinate part there.

The art and literature which flourished in this soil during the days of empire are, with insignificant exceptions, as Greek in form and substance as in the preceding centuries. In the great centres of culture in the East, in Antioch and Alexandria, the Roman government and the Roman army have left visible traces, but there is nothing to lead us to suppose that they profoundly affected, far less metamorphosed, the Græco-Oriental character of those cities. Ephesus, the capital of Asia and the seat of the Roman government, was no more Romanised than Ancyra or Pergamus. The only exception is Berytus, "the Latin island in the sea of Oriental Hellenism"; there, in the Colonia Julia Augusta Felix, where the colonists were Roman legionaries, grew up the famous school of jurisprudence, where Ulpian, the great jurist of Syrian descent, may have had his training; a school which ministered abundant material to the editors of the Codex Theodosianus, and whence professors were summoned by Justinian to co-operate with him in the compilation of the code which cast Roman law into its final shape. In general, the Roman Empire received much from the East both of good and evil, but gave it practically no fresh intellectual impulse; its chief contribution to Græco-Oriental civilisation was the establishment of order, the guarantee of personal safety, and the advancement of material prosperity.

ROMAN INFLUENCE IN THE WEST

The case was very different in the West, where Rome was called upon to accomplish a great civilising mission, and where the ground had been prepared for her in very few places by an indigenous civilisation. In the south of Gaul, indeed, the Greek colony of Massilia had for six centuries been spreading the Greek language and character, Greek coinage and customs, by means of its factories, which extended as far as to Spain, and a home had thus been won for Hellenism on this favoured coast, as in southern Italy. Cæsar, with the far-seeing policy that no sentimental considerations were suffered to confuse, was the first to break the dominion of the Greek city, which had so long been in close alliance with Rome, and so to point the way to the systematic Romanisation of southern Gaul.

The Phoenician and Iberian civilisation of Africa and Spain was even less capable of withstanding the irresistible advance of Rome. The names of cities and individuals have indeed survived there as witnesses to the past, and the Phoenician language held its ground in private life for centuries, but the Roman language and Roman customs made a conquest of both Africa and Spain in the course of the period of imperial rule. The same holds good, and in the same degree, of Dalmatia and Noricum, less decidedly of Rætia and the Alpine provinces. In Mosia, where a vigorous Greek civilisation had made itself at home in the trading stations on the Black Sea, the process of Romanisation was not completely successful, and in the northeastern parts of Pannonia it was never seriously taken in hand. But even Dacia, though occupied at so late a date, and though the colonists settled there after the extermination or expulsion of its previous inhabitants were not Italians, but settlers from the most diverse parts of the Roman Empire, was permeated with Roman civilisation to an extent which is positively astonishing under the circumstances.

In Britain alone the Romanising process proved altogether futile, in spite of the exertions of Agricola, and the country remained permanently a great military camp, in which the development of town life never advanced beyond the rudimentary stage. Even in Gaul, which had been conquered by Cæsar, it proceeded with varying success in the various parts of the country, making most headway in Aquitaine, though not till late, and less even in middle Gaul, where the Roman colony of Lugdunum, the metropolis of the three Gallic provinces, alone reflected the image of Rome in the north. But even at Augustodunum (Autun), which was a centre of learning in the early days of the empire no less than at the point of transition from the third century to the fourth, Roman civilisation reached the lower ranks of the population as little as in other parts of Gaul. Moreover, in the Gallic provinces, which were conquered by Cæsar but not organised by his far-seeing political genius, the old civitates and pagi were not superseded, as in the Narbonensis, by the Italian municipal system, and the Celtic language did not wholly die out in middle Gaul till the time of the Franks.

The civilisation of western Belgica was even more meagre; while in the eastern portions of the country, in the fertile valleys of the Moselle and Saar, thickly studded with villas, we come upon a curious mixed GallicoRoman civilisation of which the graceful descriptions of Ausonius and the lifelike sculptures of the Igel column, and the Neumagen bas-relief afford us a lively picture.

Treves, above all, bears witness to the vigour of Roman civilisation in these parts, though it did not attain its full development until the fourth century. The Romanising of Gaul would no doubt have proceeded far more energetically had not the country been emptied of Roman troops from the time it was conquered. The immense efficacy of the Roman legions as agents of civilisation has been demonstrated-even more clearly than on the Danube-on the banks of the Rhine, where the Roman civilisation which centred about the great camp-cities struck deep root, although it had not strength to survive the fierce storms of the wandering nations which have since raged over that region.

The value of the Roman work of civilisation was most profoundly realised by those who witnessed it in their own country, and no writer has given more eloquent expression to this feeling than a late Gallic poet in the verses in which he extols the blessings of Roman rule:

"Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam:
Profuit invitis, te dominante, capi;

Cumque offers victis propria consortia juris,
Urbem fecisti, quod prius Orbis erat."

But what Rome did for these countries was repaid her a hundred-fold. No country took so prominent a part in the literature of the empire as Spain. She gave birth to the two Senecas, to Lucan, Martial, and Quintilian (not to speak of lesser men): that is to say to the originator of modern prose and the champion of Ciceronian classicism. From Africa come the versatile Apuleius and the pedantic Fronto, as well as the eloquent apologists of Christianity, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine. Gaul early exercised a strong influence on the development of rhetoric, and in the latter days of the empire became a seat of Roman poetic art and study. Even more striking is the fact that Spain and Africa gave birth to Trajan, Hadrian, and Septimius Severus, men who, widely as they differed in character and purpose, were the principal factors in the evolution of the empire.