Title: The Chief Periods of European History - Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885
Author: Freeman, Edward Augustus
Language: English
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  TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

  * Italics are denoted by underscores as in _italics_.
  * Bold text is denoted by equals as in =bold=.
  * Small caps are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS.
  * Obvious printer errors have been silently corrected.
  * Original spelling was kept, but variant spellings were made
    consistent when a predominant usage was found.
  * The following change was made:
    Pag. 60: “first” replaced by “third” (And now, in the last years
             of the second century and the early years of the third,
             came the question whether Rome could keep what she had
             won).



  THE
  CHIEF PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY

  _FREEMAN_



[Illustration]



  THE
  CHIEF PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY

  SIX LECTURES
  READ IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
  IN TRINITY TERM, 1885

  _WITH AN ESSAY_
  ON
  GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE

  BY
  EDWARD A. FREEMAN, M.A., HON. D.C.L. & LL.D.
  REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY
  FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE
  HONORARY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE

  London
  MACMILLAN AND CO.
  AND NEW YORK
  1886

  [_All rights reserved_]



  Oxford

  PRINTED BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY



PREFACE.


These are the Lectures referred to in the last paragraph of the
Preface to the course on the “Methods of Historical Study,” lately
published. I have added to them the second of two articles which
appeared in the Contemporary Review for 1884. The former of them,
“Some Neglected Periods of European History,” I have not reprinted,
as its substance will be found in the present course. The second,
“Greek Cities under Roman Rule,” as dealing somewhat more in detail
with some points which are barely glanced at in the present course,
seemed to make a fitting Appendix to it.

I find that the same thought as to the political result of modern
scientific inventions which is brought out at pp. 184, 185 of these
Lectures is also brought out in the Lecture at Edinburgh, reprinted
in my little book “Greater Greece and Greater Britain,” published
last May. This kind of thing is always likely to happen in lectures
given in different places. It seemed to me that the thought came
naturally in both lectures, and that either would lose something by
its being struck out. As for those who may be so unlucky as to read
both, I can only say that a thought which is worth suggesting once
is worth suggesting twice. At least I have often found it so in the
writings of others, specially in those of Mr. Grote.

The two courses of Oxford lectures which have now been printed are
both introductory. In this present course the division into periods
which is attempted is, on the face of it, only one among many which
might be made. Another man might divide on some principle altogether
different; I might myself divide on some other principle in another
course of lectures. My present object was to set forth as strongly
as possible, at the beginning of my teaching here, the main outlines
of European history, as grouped round its central point, the Roman
power. The main periods suggested by such a view of things are those
which concern the growth and the dying-out of that power--Europe
before the growth of Rome--Europe with Rome, in one shape or another,
as her centre--Europe since Rome has practically ceased to be. When
this main outline, a somewhat formal one, has once been established,
it is easy at once to fill in and to subdivide in an endless number
of ways and from an endless number of points of view. Thus I have at
present little to do with the political developement of particular
nations. Of some branches of that subject I have treated at some
length in other shapes; I may, in the course of my work here, have
to treat of others. But they are not my subject now. Nor have I now
to deal with the great events and the great institutions of Europe,
except so far as they helped to work out the one main outline which
I have tried to draw. The power of the Popes may be looked at in a
thousand ways; it concerns me now only in its strictly Roman aspect,
as one, and the greatest, of the survivals of Roman power. The
great French Revolution again may be looked on in a thousand ways.
It concerns me now as having led to the sweeping away of the last
relics of the old Roman tradition, and as having set up for a while
the most memorable of conscious imitations of the Roman power. I say
all this, that no one may be disappointed if he fails to find in
this thin volume even a summary of all European history, much less a
philosophical discussion of all European history. My business now is
simply to draw an outline, ready either for myself or for others to
fill up in various ways.

These two introductory courses make up the result of my public work
as Professor during my first year of office, 1884-5. Besides these,
there was the minute study of Gregory of Tours with a smaller class,
followed by the like study of Paul the Deacon. In my second year,
1885-6, I have, besides this study of texts, been engaged, as I said
in my former Preface, with public lectures of a much more minute
kind, on the history of the Teutonic nations in Gaul. These I do not
design to publish as lectures. If I live long enough, I trust to
make my way through them to an older subject of mine, the Teutonic
settlements in Britain. Neither the history of Gaul nor the history
of Britain in the fifth century A.D. can be fully understood--it
follows that the whole later history of the two lands cannot be
fully understood--without comparing it with the history of the other
land. In dealing with Goths, Burgundians, and Franks, the comparison
and contrast with Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, if it sometimes passes
out of the immediate sight, must never be allowed to pass out of
the mind’s eye. The broad light of the history of Gaul is the best
comment on the yet more instructive darkness of the history of
Britain.

This subject brings me at once within the range of controversy. I
believe that the doctrine for which I have struggled so long, the
doctrine, as I have somewhere put it epigramatically, that we, the
English people, are ourselves and not somebody else, is now often
held to be altogether set aside. Only a few old-fashioned people
like myself are thought likely to maintain it. Yet, whenever I come
across these new lights, I always begin to doubt whether those who
kindle them have ever minutely contrasted the circumstances or the
results of the Teutonic settlements in Britain with those of the
better known Teutonic settlements in Gaul. Now this is the very root
of the matter; in discoursing of the phænomena of Gaul, I have always
had an eye to the phænomena of Britain, and I trust some day, if I
am ever able to work through my materials, to set forth the contrast
in full. To this object the lectures which I am now gradually giving
will, I hope, serve; but it will be best to put no essential part of
them forth to the world till I can deal with the subject as a whole.
Till then I will simply put on record, for the benefit of those who
may have heard statements attributed to me which they have certainly
not read in my writings, that I have nowhere said, because I never
thought, that every one Briton was necessarily killed, even in those
parts of Britain which became most thoroughly Teutonic. At the same
time, I think that every one who really reads his Gregory and his
Bæda, every one who carefully compares the map of Gaul with the map
of Britain, every one who stops to think over the history of the
French and the English tongues--and the history of the Welsh tongue
too will not do him any harm--may possibly come to the conclusion
that the doctrine that Englishmen after all are Englishmen has really
some little to be said for it.

  16, ST. GILES’, OXFORD,
  _October 18, 1886_.



CONTENTS.


                                  PAGE
  LECTURE I.
  EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER      1

  LECTURE II.
  ROME THE HEAD OF EUROPE           39

  LECTURE III.
  ROME AND THE NEW NATIONS          72

  LECTURE IV.
  THE DIVIDED EMPIRE               104

  LECTURE V.
  SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE              137

  LECTURE VI.
  THE WORLD ROMELESS               173

  GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE    209

  INDEX                            241



LECTURE I.

EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER.


In my first course of public lectures I did my best to speak in
a general way of the nature of historical study, of its kindred
pursuits, of the difficulties by which it is beset and of the most
hopeful means of overcoming them. I spoke of the nature of the
evidence with which we have to deal in the search after historic
truth, and of the nature of the witnesses by whom that evidence is
handed down to us. In future courses I trust to apply the principles
which I then strove to lay down to the study of some of the most
memorable periods since the point at which, if at any point, the
special business of this chair begins. That we have ruled to be the
point at which the Teutonic and Slavonic nations first began to play
a chief part in the great drama of the history of Western man. In the
present term I ask your attention to a course which will attempt to
fill a place intermediate between these two, and which may naturally
serve as a link between them. Now that we have laid down rules for
the general guidance of our studies, while we are looking forward to
a more minute dealing with the history of some specially memorable
lands and times, we may, as the intermediate stage, do our best to
part off the history of man, such parts of it at least as concern
us, into a few great and strongly-marked periods. In my former
course, while taking a very general view of my whole subject, I did
not feel myself bound to keep within any artificial limits, whether
of my own fixing or of any other man’s. When speaking of evidence
and of authorities, I drew my illustrations as freely from centuries
before our æra as from centuries after it. In my present course I
must make a yet more direct and open raid into the territories of
my ancient brother. The history of the Teuton and the Slave, since
the days when those races came to the forefront of the nations in
the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of our æra, will be
simply unintelligible if we do not attempt at least a general picture
of that elder world into which they made their way, and of the course
of events which gave that world the shape in which they found it.
But my sojourn in the lands which are ruled to belong to another
will not be a long one; before a ξενηλασία or an Alien Act can be
hurled at me, I shall be gone. It will be only for the space of about
a thousand years that I need tarry beyond the frontier which after
all is a frontier of my own choosing. And I shall always welcome my
ancient brother on a return visit of at least the same length. If I
claim to walk lightly at his side through the ages between the first
Olympiad and the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul, I bid him walk more
steadily, more abidingly, at my side through the ages between the
Teutonic invasion of Gaul and the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond. In
my next academic year I shall not need to ask leave to play truant
even for so short a space as I have spoken of. My main subject will
then lie fully within the barrier. We shall cross the Rhine and the
Channel with the Vandal and the Saxon of the fifth century. And
if it may still be sometimes needful to look back to Arminius and
Ariovistus, to remember that men of our own stock fought against
Gaius Julius and Gaius Marius, we can in return again call on our
elder brethren to look forward for a far longer space, to assure them
that we hold them thoroughly at home, not only in the Rome, Western
or Eastern, of any age, but in the Aquæ Grani of Frankish Cæsars and
in the Jerusalem of Lotharingian Kings.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is one truth which in one sense I need not set forth again--it
has been my lot to set it forth so often--but which I must none the
less set forth almost every time that I open my mouth among you,
for it must be the groundwork of my whole teaching, as it is the
groundwork of all sound historic teaching. This is the truth that the
centre of our studies, the goal of our thoughts, the point to which
all paths lead and the point from which all paths start again, is to
be found in Rome and her abiding power. It is, as I said the first
time I came before you, one of the greatest of the evils which spring
from our artificial distinctions where there are no distinctions in
nature, from our formal barriers where there are no barriers in fact,
that this greatest and simplest of historic truths is thereby wholly
overshadowed. He who ends his work in 476 and he who begins his
work in 476 can neither of them ever understand in its fulness the
abiding life of Rome, neither can fully grasp the depth and power of
that truest of proverbial sayings which speaks of Rome as the Eternal
City. And none but those who have thoroughly grasped the place of
Rome in the history of the world can ever fully understand the most
notable historic feature of the age in which we ourselves live. We
live in an age from which Rome has passed away, an age at least in
which Rome has lost her headship. And, by one of the wonderful cycles
of history, the Romeless world from which Rome has passed away is in
not a few points a return to the elder Romeless world on which Rome
had not yet risen. In both alike the European world lacks a centre;
in both alike, each city or nation does what is right in its own
eyes, without even the theory of a controlling power. The fuller
carrying out of this analogy I keep for the last lecture of the
present course. I have now only to divide my subject into three great
and marked periods. We have Europe before the headship of Rome arose.
We have Europe under the headship of Rome, even if that headship was
sometimes disputed and divided. Lastly, we have Europe since the
headship of Rome has altogether passed away. It is the first of these
three periods of which I wish to give such a sketch to-day as may at
least put it in its right relation to the periods which follow it.

But there is one aspect in which all those periods form one whole;
there is one tie which binds all three together; there has been
one abiding duty which has been laid on Aryan Europe in all her
phases, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. One “question”
has, in the cant of the day, been “awaiting its solution,” from the
beginning of recorded history, and from a time long before recorded
history. That is the question on which a shallow sneerer, in the
lucky wisdom of his blindness, bestowed the epithet of “Eternal.”
Happily indeed did he transfer to that abiding strife the epithet
of the city whose sons bore so long and mighty a part in it. It is
the “Eternal Eastern Question,” the undying question between the
civilization of the West and the barbarism of the East, a question
which has here and there taken into its company such side issues
as the strife between freedom and bondage, between Christendom and
Islam, but which is in its essence simply that yet older strife of
whose earlier stages Herodotus so well grasped the meaning. It is a
strife which has, as far as we can look back, put on the familiar
shape of a strife between East and West. And in that abiding strife,
that Eternal Question, the men of the Eternal City, Scipio and Sulla,
Trajan and Julian, played their part well indeed; but it was waged
before them and after them as far back as the days of Agamemnôn and
Achilleus, as near to the present moment as the days of Codrington
and Skobeleff. In all ages, from the earliest to the latest, before
the championship passed to Rome and after it had passed away from
Rome, two great and abiding duties have been laid on Aryan Europe
and on the several powers of Aryan Europe. They have been called on
to develope the common institutions of the great family within its
own borders; and they have been called on to defend those borders and
those institutions against the inroads of the barbarian from without.

When our historic scene first opens, those twofold duties were laid
on a small branch of the European family, and that the branch that
dwelled nearest to the lands of the enemy. It is not without a cause
that those lands of Europe which lie nearest to Asia--we might almost
add, those lands of Asia which are historically part of Europe--are
in their physical construction the most European of European lands.
Europe is the continent of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas; the
lands round the Ægæan, its Asiatic as well as its European shore,
form more thoroughly a world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas
than any other part of Europe or of the world. The Greek land was
made for its people, and the Greek people for their land. I remember
well the saying of one in this place with whom geographical insight
is an instinct, that neither the Greeks in any other land nor any
other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece
actually were. The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers,
the lights, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers. They were
to show what man could be, in a narrow space and in a short space of
time; they were to show every faculty developed to its highest point,
to give models of every form of political constitution, of every
form of intellectual life, to bring to perfection among themselves
and to hand on to all future ages that most perfect form of human
speech, a living knowledge of which is still the one truest test of
the highest culture. Greece was given to be the mistress of the world
in the sense of being the world’s highest intellectual teacher; it
was not hers to be the mistress of the world in the sense in which
that calling fell to another of the great peninsulas of southern
Europe. Deep and abiding as has been the influence of old Greece on
every later age, her influence has been almost wholly indirect; it
has been an influence of example, of precept, of warning; it has not
been an influence of direct cause and effect. In one sense the world
could never have been what it now is if the men of old Hellas had not
lived and fought and thought and sung. But it is in another sense
from that in which we say that the world could not be what it now is
if the men of old Rome had not lived and fought, and--we will not
say thought and sung, but ruled and judged the nations. It is indeed
no small thought, it is one of the most quickening and ennobling of
thoughts, that those men of Hellas were our kinsfolk, men of the same
great family as ourselves, men whose institutions and whose speech
are simply other and older forms of the speech and institutions of
our own folk. The ancient lore alike of Greece and of England puts
on a keener charm when we see in the _Agorê_ before Ilios the same
gathering under well nigh the same forms as we see in the _Marzfeld_
beneath the walls of Rheims and in the _Gemót_ beneath the walls
of London. We seem more at home alike in either age when we see the
ἑταῖροι, the θεράποντες, that fought around Achilleus rise again in
the true _gesiðas_, the faithful _þegnas_, of our own folk, in Lilla
who gave his life for Eadwine and in the men who died, thegn-like,
their lord hard by, around the corpse of Brihtnoth at Maldon. Still
all this is but likeness, example, analogy, derivation from a common
source; we are dealing, not with forefathers but with elder brethren.
The laws of Lykourgos and Solôn have passed away; it is the laws of
Servius and Justinian that still abide. The empire of Mykênê, the
democracy of Athens, the league of Achaia, are all things of the
past. If the Empire of Rome is no longer a thing of the present, if
it has passed away, if it is dead and buried, it is well to remember
that there are still men living who have seen its funeral. I am
myself not old enough to have seen its funeral; but I have before now
seen some look amazed when I told them that I had lived on the earth
for twelve years along with a man who had once been Emperor of the
Romans.

       *       *       *       *       *

The days before the Roman power may be looked on as in some sort the
preface to a volume the last page of which is not written, as the
porch of a building which still stands and which architects to come
may still add to or take from. It is with Rome that the chapters
of the book itself begin; it is Rome that reared the first still
inhabited chambers of the house. Or we may rather say that the tale
of the days before Rome is a summary, short and brilliant, of all
that man has done or can do. The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified
ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what
man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long.
And herein is the highest glory of Greece; herein is the highest
value of the tongue and history of Greece as supplying the truest
and noblest teaching for the mind of man. In no other study are we
so truly seeking knowledge simply to raise and school the mind; in
none do we so sharply draw the still abiding line between those who
have gone through the refining furnace of those immortal studies and
the barbarians--sometimes the self-condemned barbarians--who stand
without. When we study the tongue, the laws, the history, of our
own people, of any people of our immediate kindred, of that people
who, whether conquering or conquered, were still the masters of us
all, we are as it were engaged in our own work, we are busy with the
toil of our own daily life; it is still something of a business,
something of a calling. In our Hellenic studies we stand on a loftier
height, we breathe a purer air, even as the peak of Olympos overtops
the height of Alba. We master the tongue of Latium, because it is
still the tongue of no small part of the business of practical life,
because it meets us at every turn as an essential part of our own
law, our own history, our very daily being. We master the tongue of
Hellas as being in itself the first and noblest form of the common
speech, as the tongue which, in its native and unborrowed strength,
brought forth the greatest master-pieces of every form of lettered
utterance, those master-pieces which none can know save those who
can follow the very words of the poet, the orator, the philosopher
himself, and who are not at the mercy of some blind guide who vainly
strives to reproduce those living words in ruder tongues. After long
years of familiar knowledge, we need hardly sigh for the days when
those deathless works were fresh to us. The tale of Ilios and Ithakê,
the oldest inheritance of the common folk, the oldest picture of the
common household, is ever living, ever fresh. We can but pity the
doom of those who, by their own act or by the act of others, are shut
out from it.

       *       *       *       *       *

The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the
beginnings of the brilliant prologue to unbroken European history,
will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the
islands and peninsulas of the Ægæan sea. I am speaking now of
history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history
of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood,
ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their
works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our
own household. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the
recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional
date, but not forgetting times before the first Olympiad so far as
our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times. I cleave
to the date which I proposed in my Inaugural Lecture. I have to be
sure come across a singular objection from a critic in this place. I
have been told that, by beginning with the first Olympiad, I leave
out all Mahometan history. There are then, one must think, those
who believe that all Mahometan history took place before the first
Olympiad. “Felices errore suo.” I can only heartily wish that it
were so, and that the Ottoman was a thing as dead and gone as the
Hittite. I fear that, beginning with 776 B.C., nay even if we begin
with the mystic year 476 A.D., we shall still have all Mahometan
history in front of us, and that the needs of our tale will drive us
to take not a few glimpses at that side of the world. From the very
beginning we have to do with powers which filled the same place in
the world which the Mahometan powers filled in after ages, the powers
against which our eldest brethren had to wage the earlier stages
of the strife which still is waging. With ingenious speculations
as to the earliest origin, the earliest settlements, the earliest
forms of speech, of the Hellenic folk, I am not, in such a summary
as this, called on to concern myself. I gladly leave them to my
ancient brother. I have to deal with the Greek when he appears on
the stage of the world as the first champion of the great cause and
as waging a strife against worthy rivals. One people alone in the
barbarian world have even the shadow of a right to be placed side
by side, to be dealt with as _ebenbürtig_, with the men of Hellas.
In the men of Canaan the men of Hellas had to acknowledge rivals
who were largely forerunners and in some sort masters. Greece had
ships, colonies, and commerce; but Phœnicia had ships, colonies, and
commerce in days earlier still. How high in all the material arts
the Phœnician stood above the earliest Greek we see in our earliest
picture of Hellenic life. Not to speak of lesser gifts, we all bear
in our minds that it was from the Phœnician that Hellas must first
have learned to carve the abiding records of man’s thought on the
stone, on the brazen or wooden tablet, on the leaves of Egypt and
on the skins of Pergamon. The political life of Greece was her own;
that assuredly was no borrowed gift from Tyre or Sidon; yet Tyre and
Sidon and that mightier Carthage whose institutions Aristotle studied
had a political life of their own which brought them nearer to the
Hellenic level than any other people beyond the Aryan fold. Only, if
we must admit that the men of Canaan were on some points the teachers
of the men of Hellas, yet it was the men of Hellas and not the men of
Canaan to whom destiny had given the call to be the teachers of the
world. It is a strange destiny by which the people who gave Greece
the art of writing should have left to us no writings to hand down
to us the thoughts and deeds of a world of their own that has passed
away. Strange destiny that, while so large a part of the acts of the
Phœnician are recorded by Greek and Roman enemies, while the tongue
of the Phœnician may be said still to live for us in the speech of
the kindred Hebrew, yet the direct memorials of so great a people
should not go beyond a few coins, a few inscriptions, a few ruins of
cities which once held their place among the mightiest of the earth.

Our scene then opens with the picture of the Greek while still
shut up in his own special land of islands and peninsulas. We ask
not for our purposes how and whence he came thither; we ask not
the exact measure of his kindred in blood and speech to the other
nations around him. It is enough for us that the Greek is not wholly
isolated, that he is not merely one of the great Aryan family, but
that he is the foremost among a group of nations who are bound to him
by some closer tie than that which binds together all the branches of
the great Aryan family. The exact degree of kindred between Greeks
and Thracians or Phrygians we may leave to other inquirers; it is
enough for us that there was the common Aryan kindred, and seemingly
something more. But it is one of the leading facts of history that
Greece had to deal on her immediate northern frontier, on the
opposite coasts of Asia, on the opposite coasts of Italy and Sicily,
with nations which, for historical purposes at least, were nearer
still. Those nations had, to say the least, a power of adopting
Greek ways, a power of becoming Greeks by adoption if not by birth.
The boundary line between the Greek and the Epeirot, faint in the
earliest days of Greece, seems for some ages to be drawn sharper and
sharper. Then the tide turns; suddenly the Epeirots, the people of
the oldest Hellas, the guardians of the oldest of Hellenic oracles,
stand forth again in their elder character. Molottian Pyrrhos wages
Western wars as a Hellenic champion and the kingdom of Pyrrhos
settles down at last into a well-ordered Greek confederation.

So it is in Macedonia; so it is in Sicily; so it is in the Greater
Hellas on Italian soil. All these lands, and other lands beside,
become, for a longer or shorter time, part of the immediate Greek
world, no less than Attica or Peloponnêsos. Greek colonization and
Macedonian conquest had, each in its turn, a share in the work, and
both were in many lands not a little helped by real, if unconscious,
kindred on the part of those whom colonists and conquerors found
already in possession. Every colony, every conquest, not only won
new lands for the Greek settlers themselves, but increased the Greek
nation in its wider sense by multitudes who became Greek by adoption,
and in whose case the work of adoption was made more easy by the
existence of earlier ties of which neither side had thought. As time
goes on, as we reach the days when Greek influences were most widely
spread over the Mediterranean lands, we may easily trace out zones
within zones, marking out the different stages by which the Greek
element grows fainter and fainter. First there is the centre of all,
the original Hellas itself. Then there are the genuine colonies
of old Hellas, detached fragments of Hellenic soil translated to
foreign coasts. Then there are the kindred lands whose people were
fully adopted into the Hellenic fold. Beyond them again lie the
kingdoms ruled by Macedonian princes, where a few great cities which
we must call Greek by the law of adoption are planted in lands which
have received at the outside only the faintest varnish of Hellenic
culture. Lastly, beyond these again, there are the barbarian lands
whose princes, like barbarian princes in our own day, made a show
of adopting Greek speech and Greek culture, but where the foreign
tastes of the princes had no real effect on their kingdoms, and which
we cannot look on as forming part of the Greek world in the laxest
sense. Such was Parthia; such was Pontos. Is it too much to add to
the barbarian kingdoms of the East the mighty commonwealth of the
West which had once been in Greek eyes no less barbarian? It is no
small part of our œcumenical story to mark how far Rome became Greek
and how far Rome refused to become Greek. The facts belong to a later
time; yet in some sort they form part of our present survey. The
Rome which brought the Greek lands step by step, first under Roman
influence, then under Roman dominion, was a Rome which had already
come within the magic circle of Hellenic teaching; while keeping the
essential essence of the national life untouched, while remaining
truly Roman in every political institution, in every detail of law
and government, she became Greek for every purpose of refined and
intellectual life. Nay, Rome became, like Macedonia, a disciple that
gathered in fresh disciples. Wherever Rome’s, political life spread,
some measure, greater or less, of Greek intellectual life spread with
it.

The history of Europe before the Roman power is in truth the history
of the stages by which the Greek mind made its way to this general
supremacy over the civilized world, and in some sort beyond the
bounds of the civilized world. Within the range of this supremacy of
the Greek mind comes the narrower range of the political supremacy
of powers which were either Greek from the beginning or which had
become Greek by adoption. The supremacy of the Greek mind has never
ceased, and is still abiding. Greek intellectual dominion has formed
one side of the whole modern world; the advance of Greek political
power has wrought the lesser, but by no means unimportant, work of
forming one of the nations of the modern world. The modern Greek
nation, meaning thereby something more than the inhabitants either of
the existing Greek kingdom or of the continuous Hellas of old times,
is the fruit of old Greek colonization, followed up by Macedonian
conquest. I said years ago that Alexander was the founder of the
modern Greek nation, and I say so still. This saying may seem to shut
out the work of earlier Greek colonization, above all in those lands
of Sicily and southern Italy which we have spoken of as having been
admitted by adoption within the immediate Greek world. The truth
is that Greek colonization has nowhere been fully lasting, it has
nowhere left its abiding traces on the modern world, except where
Macedonian conquest came to strengthen it. This enables us to fix
a boundary for the lands which were permanently admitted within the
immediate Greek world. That boundary is the Hadriatic. West of the
Hadriatic Greek life has died out. The outlying Greek colonies in
Gaul and Spain, deep as was their influence on Gaul, had ceased to
be Greek before the great nations of modern Europe came into being.
Even southern Italy and Sicily, where Greek life was strengthened by
their long connexion with the Greek Rome on the Bosporos, have ceased
to be Greek for some ages. The lands in which a series of invaders
of whom Pyrrhos of Molottis was the last and greatest strove in vain
to set up a Western Greek dominion, have fallen away from the Greek
world. But the work which Alexander of Epeiros failed to do in the
West was largely done by his more famous nephew and namesake in the
East. If a great part of Alexander’s conquests were but for a short
time, another great part of them was abiding. The work of Alexander
and Seleukos fixed a line fluctuating between the Euphrates and the
Tigris, as a long abiding boundary of European dominion. It fixed
Tauros, the boundary of Alexander’s first Asiatic conquests, as a
far more abiding boundary of European life. I have had to point out
in two hemispheres, but I must point out again, how very nearly the
actual range of the modern Greek nation agrees with the range of old
Greek colonization east of Hadria. It has advanced at some points and
it has gone back at others; but its general extent is wonderfully
the same. It is an extent which in both ages has been fixed by
the genius of the people. Nowhere out of the old continuous Hellas
does the Greek people, none the less Greek because largely Greek by
adoption, spread from sea to sea. Throughout a large part of eastern
Europe and western Asia the Greek is the representative of European
and civilized life on the whole sea-coast. The world of peninsulas
and islands is the world of the Greek now, exactly as it was in the
days of the Homeric Catalogue.

It is, as we held in our former course, with that Catalogue, the
first written record of European politics, that our survey of Europe
before the Roman Power must open. With all who can take a general
grasp of history and who understand the nature of evidence, the
Domesday of the Empire of Mykênê, puzzling to the mere porer over
two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, commands full belief. We
ruled it in our former inquiry to be the highest example of a general
rule, “Credo quia impossibile.” In the Catalogue we see the people
of many islands and of all Argos, grouped under the Bretwalda of
Hellas, already engaged in a stage, and not the earliest stage, of
the Eternal Question. Herodotus, who better knew the meaning of the
world’s history than the diplomatists of modern days, could point,
in a mythical shape indeed, to stages earlier still. Whether there
ever was a personal Agamemnôn and a personal Odysseus matters but
little; it matters far more that the keen eye of Ælfred, who knew
the relation of an overlord and his vassal princes, could see the
relation between Ulixes with his two kingdoms and the _Casere_
Agamemnôn of whom he held them. That _Casere_, kingliest among the
kingly, βασιλεύτερος in the throng of βασιλῆες, is already doing the
work of a Trajan or a Frederick; he is fighting for Europe on the
shores of Asia. The work of Greek colonization has begun; Crete, to
be won again ages after from the Saracen, is already won from the
Phœnician; Rhodes is already admitted to Hellenic fellowship, to
see in after days the might of Antigonos and the might of Mahomet
shattered beneath her walls. The southern coast of Asia is still
untouched; Milêtos is a barbarian city; but Achilleus has won Lesbos
as his own prize, and on the mainland the work is doing which was
to make the coasts of the Hellespont and the Propontis a foremost
outpost of Greece and Europe, the land which was to witness the first
exploits of the first crusaders and to behold the Eastern Rome rise
to a fresh life under the firm rule of the Emperors of Nikaia. Deem
we as we will as to minuter details, as we have in the Homeric poems
our first glimpse of Aryan society in peace and war, so we have in
them our first record, if only in a poetic form, of one stage of the
great strife which changed the barbarian peninsula of Asia into that
solid home of Grecian speech and Roman law which for ages held up
against the ceaseless inroads of the Arabian conquerors. To the west,
to the north, our range of sight is narrower. No colonist from Argos
and its islands has made his way to Italy or Sicily; Akarnania is
still part of the vague _Mainland_, the still undefined _Epeiros_;
Korkyra is still a land of fable on which no settler from Corinth
has set foot. But there are signs which already point to the kindred
of the nations on both sides of the Ionian sea. The Sikel dwells
on both coasts; even of the more mysterious Sikan we get a passing
glimpse. The northern coast of the Ægæan is known; but that coast
is not yet Hellenic; it significantly sends its warriors to fight
on the Asiatic side. Further to the north, further to the west, all
is wonder and mystery; we may as well ask whether the poet had any
conception of the site of London as whether he had any conception of
the site of Rome. The eyes of infant Greece are still fixed on the
East; vague tidings had reached her of the wonders of the land by the
river Ægypt; the men of Sidon were her visitors, her traffickers, in
some sort her teachers. But the wary sons of Canaan were too wise to
tell all they knew of Western lands and Western seas. The gold of
Tartêssos was as yet for them only; for them only was the precious
knowledge that the pillars of Hêraklês--if Greece had as yet heard
their name--opened into no stream of Ocean parting the lands of the
living and the dead, but into the boundless waters over which it was
as yet for themselves alone to spread their sails.

Let us take another glance at the Mediterranean world at a later
time, a time when our historic evidence is still meagre and
scattered, but when we have begun to leave mere legend behind us. It
is one of the gains or losses of the wider study of history that it
often teaches us to look at this and that period with different eyes
from those with which we naturally look at them when we are engaged
only in the narrower study of special times and places. I well
remember learning, and I well remember being startled as I learned,
from the teaching of Mr. Finlay, that the age which we commonly
look on as the most glorious in Grecian history, the fifth century
before Christ, was in truth an age of Greek decline. The truth is
that it was the greatest age in the history of Athens, and a crowd
of causes lead us at every moment to mistake the history of Athens
for the history of Greece. What we sometimes fail to see Herodotus
saw clearly. He saw that in the general history of the world the
age of the Persian wars was, for the Greek people as a whole, the
scattered Greek people all over the world, an age of decline. The
fact that there was a Persian war, a Persian war waged in Greece,
is enough to prove the saying. That fact of itself shows that that
process had already begun which is still not ended, the long and
gloomy work of which Finlay steeled himself to write the story, the
History of Greece under Foreign Domination. It is enough to prove
Finlay’s point that Milêtos had learned to groan, as thrice-betrayed
Jôannina groans still, beneath the yoke of the barbarian. The periods
when Greek influences had most sway over the whole world are two,
one earlier, one later, than the more brilliant times of our usual
studies. The earlier is the greater; for it is the time when Hellas
grew and spread and made wide her borders among the nations, by her
own unaided strength, the time when Hellenic colonization carried
everywhere, not only Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts, but the
higher boon of free Hellenic political life. In the later period
Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts are spread more widely than they
had ever been spread before; but Hellenic political life is no longer
carried with them. The external might of Greece is wielded for her
by the kings of the adopted lands; we have passed from Hellenic
colonization to Macedonian conquest. In neither of those periods was
the most vigorous Greek life to be found in old Greece itself; the
most brilliant recorded period of old Greece is the period between
the two, the period of our most usual Greek studies. But it was the
most brilliant because the outer bounds of Hellas had fallen back
before victorious barbarians, and because old Greece rose up in a
renewed strength to avenge the wrongs of her colonies and to ward
off the like bondage from herself. The Greece of the fifth century
before Christ is like the Rome of the fourth century after Christ.
Its warfare is essentially defensive; it seldom gains new ground;
it has much ado to defend old ground. It gains victories; it wins
territories; but the victories are gained over threatening invaders,
the territories that are won are won back from the grasp of those
invaders. The work of Kimôn, the work of Agêsilaos, answers rather
to the work of Galerius and Valentinian than to the work of those
conquerors of realms wholly new who made Sicily a Greek and Gaul a
Roman land.

It is hard to fix on the exact moment when free and independent
Hellas--for remember that wherever Hellênes dwell there is
Hellas--had spread itself most widely over the Mediterranean coasts.
For boundaries fluctuate, and Hellas still advanced at some points
after she had begun to fall back at others. But we cannot be far
wrong in picking out some time not far from the beginning of the
sixth century before Christ as the most brilliant time of the free
Hellênes throughout the world. Then, as Herodotus puts it, all
Greeks were still free; it was in the course of the next century
that some Greeks were brought under the power of barbarian masters.
If some Greek colonies were still to be planted, all the fields of
Greek colonization had already been opened. And in most of them
the Greek cities were at the height of their power and greatness,
positive and relative; they were greater than they were in after
days, greater than the cities of old Greece were at the same time.
It is one of the truths which it is hardest to take in, that there
was a time when Milêtos and Sybaris and Akragas, rather than Athens
or Sparta, were the greatest cities of the Hellenic name. The like
came again at a later time, when the greatest of Greek cities were
Alexandria and Antioch. That the life of Athens and Sparta was the
more abiding proves that the Greek was after all more at home on
the soil on which he grew to be a Greek; but the fact that, at one
time the colonial, at another the Macedonian, cities altogether
outshone the older and truer Hellas is a fact which should be ever
borne in mind. In the great days of the Greek colonies the greater
part of the Mediterranean coasts was divided between settlers from
Greece and settlers from Phœnicia. In the eastern seas the Greek
had the supremacy; the true life and strength of the men of Canaan
had passed away from Sidon and Tyre to the Phœnician cities in the
western Mediterranean, to Panormos in the great central island, to
Gadeira on the Ocean, to Utica on the Libyan coast, to the New City
which outshone her parents and elder sisters, to mighty Carthage,
chief and in course of time mistress of her fellows. From the
Ægæan islands the Phœnician had withdrawn before the Greek; even
in more distant Cyprus the Greek had gained the upper hand. Far to
the south, on the Libyan mainland, the fertile coast between the
Egyptian and the Carthaginian had beheld the growth of Kyrênê and
her sisters of the Greek Pentapolis. The Greek cities of Asia were
among the most flourishing in the world; the gates of the Bosporos
had been thrown open; the Pontos was no longer the Inhospitable but
the Hospitable Sea; if the most abiding seat of Hellenic freedom,
Cherson on her Tauric peninsula, had not already sprung into being,
the path had at least been opened for her. On the western side of her
own peninsula, Greece was creeping up the Hadriatic coast; setting
aside later settlements, setting aside doubtful tales of earlier
settlements, Akarnania was now part of the Greek mainland, Korkyra
was numbered among Greek islands, Ambrakia, perhaps Epidamnos and
Apollônia, had begun their course; Greek culture was spreading among
the kindred nations; if narrower Hellenic feeling forbade to the
Thesprotian and the Molottian any share in the Hellenic name, wider
and more liberal inquirers did not deny their right. But, above all,
this is the age of the greatness of the Greek folk in the lands
west of Hadria, that greatness which so soon dwindled away, and
which adventurous kings from Sparta and Epeiros strove in vain to
restore. The Phœnician, whose settlements once studded the eastern
and southern coasts of Sicily, is now driven into the north-western
corner of the island; the Sicilian cities are among the foremost of
the Greek name; if Syracuse is less great than she was in days to
come, it is because Akragas and Gela have not yet fallen from their
first greatness. In southern Italy, alone in lands out of the old
home, in a peninsular land recalling the old home, Hellas spreads
from sea to sea; the Greater Greece holds the land firmly with her
great cities; Sybaris has reached the greatness from which she is
soon to fall into utter nothingness; Taras, not yet Latin Tarentum,
has begun the long life some traces of which hang about her even in
our own day. As for the Greek cities in the Western Mediterranean,
Massalia and her fellows, their full day of greatness, their day
of widest influence over barbarian neighbours, had as yet hardly
come. But it was coming; the work was begun. In that day Hellenic
life is fully as vigorous and flourishing in the Western as in the
Eastern lands. Continuous Hellas lies between the two, for a moment
less brilliant, of less influence in the world, than the two great
ranges of Greek colonization on either side of it. But when the whole
Mediterranean coast might seem to be divided between the Greek and
the Phœnician, two lands stand marked as having supplied no home for
the settlements of either. There was the land whose day of greatness
had gone by, and the land whose day of greatness was coming. By the
banks of the Nile the site of Alexandria still stood unnoticed by
all the wisdom of a thousand Pharaohs; the Greek was already known
in Egypt as a mercenary; he had not yet come to reign as a Preserver
and a Benefactor. By the banks of the Tiber, Rome, perhaps already
the head of Latium, not yet aspiring to be the head of the world or
the head of Italy, was biding her time; not yet herself conquering or
colonizing, but strong enough, along with her valiant neighbours, to
keep central Italy as an Italian land, in which neither the men of
Hellas nor the men of Canaan should find a dwelling-place.

This then, from the point of view of œcumenical history, is the
time which saw the full height of strictly Hellenic greatness, the
greatness of Hellenic commonwealths, the greatness of states which
were Greek by birth and not only Greek by adoption. Let us pass on to
the next strongly marked period, the days, stretching not very much
beyond a century and a half, which are undoubtedly the most brilliant
days in the life of some of the greatest cities of the elder Hellas,
and which have therefore often been mistaken for the whole history
of the Greek people. Now, as Herodotus says, we can no longer say
that all Greeks are free. In the course of the sixth century B.C.
the work of Mummius and Mahomet begins; Greeks now begin to be the
subjects of foreign rulers. Barbarian powers such as Greeks had never
yet had to deal with have arisen in East and West. Two such powers
above all have come to the front, a mighty empire in the East, a
mighty commonwealth in the West, an empire and a commonwealth which
for some generations were to be names of fear throughout the Hellenic
world. On the one side the old barbarian powers of Asia, powers
which lay beyond the range of European history, have given way to a
new barbarian power which forced itself within the European range,
and which we may almost say had a right to force itself. It was not
against the Hittite or the Assyrian that the strife had to be waged,
but against the kindred Persian. An Aryan people had been misled in
their course of wandering; they had strayed into the land of morning;
they now turned their faces towards the setting sun, but they turned
them only when it was too late, when they had already put on the
guise of the lands of their sojourn and could show themselves among
their European kinsfolk in no light but that of barbarian invaders.
Yet we must pay our tribute to the long abiding national life and
national energy which could so often rise again in full freshness
after ages of bondage. It was no mean people which could twice
spring into fresh being at the preaching of a national religion. It
was in truth no small mission in the world’s history that fell to
the lot of the Aryan of Persia. Once the worthy rival of Greece, he
rose again to be the worthy rival of Rome; like the Greek, he could
lead captive successive conquerors; in the grasp of the Saracen, in
the grasp of the Turk, his old life could still abide, and, if he
bowed to the creed of Arabia, it was only by changing it into a new
shape which made it before all things the creed of Persia. The Lydian
reaped the first-fruits of Greek subjection; the Persian threatened
to turn the whole eastern half of Hellas, continuous and scattered,
into part of a world-wide dominion. The King--βασιλεύς--forestalling
in that simple word the titles and controversies of days to come, was
indeed beaten back from old Hellas; he was beaten back from Europe;
he was for a while forced to withdraw his fleets and armies from
the Hellenic coasts of Asia. But the fact that he had to be driven
back from all of them of itself showed what an enemy it was against
whom Greece had now to strive. For a moment Thebes was the willing
ally, Athens was the defenceless conquest, of the lord of Susa and
Ekbatana. And after all the Persian did cut Hellas short on the side
of Asia; he even declared his will as a master in the councils of
Europe. A century had not passed since the day of Salamis when, by
the peace of Antalkidas, the peace which the King sent down, the
Greek cities of Asia, the Greek cities of Cyprus, were formally
acknowledged to be the King’s.

In the West meanwhile Hellas had to strive against a rival yet more
worthy of her rivalry, not against a barbarian empire, but against
a barbarian commonwealth. The old Phœnicia on the Syrian shore had
fallen from its glory; its commonwealths, still rich and flourishing,
had sunk into dependencies of the Persian power. The great field of
Phœnician enterprise now lay in the western seas. One Phœnician city,
the youngest of the great Phœnician cities, had risen to a place in
the world and the world’s history such as the cities of the elder
Canaan had never reached. The New City, Carthage, was now the centre
and representative of Phœnician life far more than Sidon or Tyre.
Carthage, in after days the rival of Rome, was now before all things
the rival of Greece. She was to bring Rome nearer to destruction
than was ever done by any other power of the Mediterranean world;
she was to destroy for a season, to weaken for ever, more than one
of the greatest among the western cities of Hellas. At the head
of a mighty following of dependencies of her own race, swollen by
barbarian subjects and mercenaries of every race, the Asiatic city
planted on the shores of Africa came nearer than any other power of
those days to rooting up the elder life of Europe, the life of which
first Greece and then Italy was the centre. We do not rightly take
in the full significance of the struggle which Greece went through
at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. if we do not at every
moment bear in mind how the whole Greek folk was attacked on both
sides at once. It may or may not be true that Xerxes entered into
an actual league with Carthage; it may or may not be true that the
fight of Salamis and the fight of Himera were fought on the same
day. True or false, both beliefs set forth the true position of the
Greek states at that moment, threatened by Persia on one side and
by Carthage on the other. The Persian was beaten back; from the
actual soil of continuous Hellas he was beaten back for ever. The
Carthaginian was beaten back only for a moment; he still kept his
hold on Sicily; he was yet to destroy Selinous and Akragas, to come
within a hair’s-breadth of destroying Syracuse. In earlier days the
scattered Phœnician settlements in eastern Sicily had withdrawn
before the coming of the Greek colonists; but now the Phœnician power
was wielded by a single mighty commonwealth which held some of its
strongest outposts, Panormos at their head, in the north-western
corner of the great island. In Sicily things seem to have turned
round; the European holds the eastern, the Asiatic holds the western
coast. And it is now the masters of the western coast that threaten
the eastern.

But the Persian and the Phœnician were not the only enemies against
whom the scattered Greek nation had to strive. Foes nearer to the
Greek in race than the Phœnician, less widely removed in political
and social institutions than the Persian, were threatening the power
and the being of one great division of the Greek name. The second
of the great peninsulas of southern Europe, the central one of the
three, the peninsula which held Rome and Capua and the cities of the
Etruscan, was beginning to come to the front in the drama of history.
There was as yet no sign that Italy was to be the ruling land of the
world; but there were signs that Italy was no longer to be a land
in which settlers of foreign races might carve themselves homes at
pleasure. The name of Rome was beginning to be heard in Hellenic
ears, but it was as yet hardly a name of fear. It was as yet the
native races of southern Italy that the Greek cities had to dread,
and Rome was for a while the enemy of their enemies. The Persian and
the Carthaginian were strictly enemies from without; the Persian
was in every sense an invader of the soil of the oldest Hellas; the
Carthaginian was at most winning a land in which other branches of
his race had once made settlements; but the Lucanians and the other
nations of southern Italy were, in the strictest sense, winning back
their own land from strangers. When Kymê and Poseidônia ceased to be
cities of Hellas, in one sense the boundaries of the civilized world
fell back; in another we may say that they advanced, as the nations
of Italy began to show that the time was come for the men of the
central peninsula to play their part in the world’s history as well
as the men of the older peninsula to the east of them.

By the middle of the fourth century B.C. the decline of Greece
is, even on the shallowest view, allowed to have begun. But it is
commonly held to have begun merely because the Macedonian kingdom
was beginning to step into that position of primacy among the Greek
powers which had been held at different times by the cities of Argos,
Sparta, Athens, and Thebes. And as regards the political life of
the great Greek cities, above all, as regards the political life of
that Athens which we are so often tempted to mistake for Greece, the
change was great indeed, sad indeed. But we must not forget that the
political decline of the great cities of old Greece was but one part
of the general political decline of the Hellenic people, and also
that a large part of old Greece itself looked on the change in quite
another light from that in which we are used to look at it from the
purely Athenian point of view. With the voice of Dêmosthenês ringing
in our ears, it is hard to listen to the calm comments of Polybios,
when he hands on to us the traditions of Megalopolis and of so many
other cities by whom Philip was looked on as a friend and deliverer,
a pious crusader against the sacrilegious Phokian. But yet more
important it is to remember that, if old Hellas lost much through
the advance of the Macedonian, the younger Hellas beyond Hadria lost
immeasureably more through the advance of the Phœnician and the
native Italian. Cry after cry for help went up from Italy and Sicily
to the motherland in Greece. A series of adventurers, republican and
princely, crossed the sea to bear help to their threatened brethren
or to carve out a dominion for themselves. Some went to free Greek
cities from domestic tyrants, others to free them from the yoke of
the advancing barbarian. That men from the motherland were needed for
either work shows that the great day of the Western Greeks had passed
away, that they could no longer keep either internal freedom or
external independence by their own strength. And, dark as is the tale
of Dionysios and Agathoklês, we cannot wholly put out of sight that
even they had a brighter side as in some sort champions of Hellas
against the barbarian. We must not forget Dionysios as the planter of
Greek colonies on both sides of Hadria, nor Agathoklês as the man who
carried the arms of Europe to the shores of Africa, the forerunner of
Regulus and Scipio, of Roger of Sicily and Charles of Austria. But
the mission of Diôn and of the nobler Timoleôn, the warfare of the
Spartan and the Epeirot, of Archidamos and Alexander and Pyrrhos,
showed that the Greeks of the West could no longer stand, even by the
help of the Greeks of the old Hellenic lands or of the lands which
had become Hellenic by adoption. Their doom was sealed; so before
long was the doom of all lands, the lands of the Macedonian and the
Carthaginian no less than the lands of the Sicilian and the Italian
Greek. But the fall of Macedon and the fall of Carthage were yet far
distant; those lands were reaching their highest pitch of greatness
at the moment when it became plain that all that was left for the
Greeks of the West was to become subjects or dependents of an Italian
power.

Another point to be noticed is the close connexion between the
destiny of the Eastern and of the Western Greeks. The Spartan princes
sought for a career in Italy because, in face of the advance of
Macedonia, there was no career left for them in old Greece. Moreover
the Epeirot kings Alexander and Pyrrhos are themselves part of the
_Hellênismos_; they are among the chiefest signs that the Hellenic
name and culture had spread beyond the genealogical bounds of the
Hellenic nation. Their people might have an ancient kindred with the
Greeks; they themselves might come of the blood of Achilleus; but
they were still, in the wider aspect of the time, Greeks by adoption
only. And the career of the Epeirot kings in the West was directly
suggested by the career of the Macedonian kings in the East. Their
land looked towards Italy and Sicily yet more directly than Macedonia
looked towards Asia; and perhaps Alexander, certainly Pyrrhos, sought
to found beyond the Hadriatic a Western Greek dominion to balance the
Eastern Greek dominion which the Macedonians had founded beyond the
Ægæan. So it was not to be. The decree had gone forth that Greece, in
her new guise, was to leaven the East, for a while to rule over the
East, but that in the West the political power of the Greek race was
to die out, that even its intellectual influence was to be indirect,
an influence which had to accept Roman masters and disciples as its
instruments.

Yet the day was coming when Rome was to rule in the East as well
as in the West; she was step by step to draw all the Greek powers,
those that were Greek by adoption as well as those that we may call
Greek by birth, within the spell of that influence which silently
changed from alliance to subjection. The details of that process, the
picture of the world into which Rome burst as it were in a moment,
the history in short of the third and second centuries, have, in the
common course of so-called classical studies, met with a neglect
which can be measured only by their paramount importance in universal
history. The distinctive aspect of that age I shall have to speak
of again. I wish now to point out how rich in political instruction
of every kind, rich perhaps beyond every other age of so-called
classical times, the age of Polybios really is. The Greek world of
his day was made up of an assemblage of states, of every degree of
power and of every form of political constitution. There was nothing
like it in the earlier days of Greece; there was nothing like it in
the after days when Rome practically became the world. But the Greek
world of those days gives us a lively image of the political state
of modern Europe for some ages past. The political experience of
Polybios was immeasureably wider than that of Thucydides; he had in
truth an experience fully as wide and varied as that of any modern
statesman. Thucydides knew only the independent city, oligarchic or
democratic, and the city which would fain be independent but was
not. In his day kingship and federation--federation worthy to be
so called--were still in the background; they hardly stood forth
on the political stage; kingship was not the constitution of any
acknowledged Greek power; federation was not the constitution of any
Greek power of the first or even of the second rank. But Polybios
could study, within the range of Greek or Greek-speaking powers,
every form of kingship and every form of commonwealth. There was the
national kingship of Macedonia, the king ruling over his own people.
There was the local kingship of Egypt, the rule of Greek kings over
a foreign nation. There was the Seleukid dominion, fallen indeed
from its old greatness, but whose kings still kept up some memory of
the position alike of Cyrus and of Alexander, the position of the
Great King, the King of Kings, ruling over lands and cities, Greek
and barbarian, of every speech, of every form of life, of every kind
of relation to the central power. And the Greek city-commonwealth,
fully free and independent, was still a familiar form of political
life; nor need it shock us that the purest and noblest example of a
Greek democracy was now to be found, not at Athens but at Rhodes.
But the highest political life of Greece, above all of old European
Greece, was now to be found in the federal states, in Polybios’ own
Achaia, in gallant and faithful Akarnania, in the adopted Greek
land of Epeiros, nay too in after days beyond the sea, among worthy
imitators of Hellenic models, in that land of Lykia whose people, in
the latest day as in the earliest, stand forth as the worthiest folk
of Asia, alongside of the men of Achaia, worthiest folk of Europe.
Achaia, Rhodes, Pergamon; it was no mean lesson to be able to study
the federal commonwealth, the single city commonwealth, the kingship
of a house worthy to reign, each standing forth in a model example of
those three several forms of government. In such a system of states
as this, instead of the simpler relations of earlier days, we come
across all the complications of modern international politics. While
the old republican life goes on, we see beside it the working of
dynastic interests, the influence of queens and ministers, exactly
as in the modern world. Diplomacy has its work to do, and a busy and
constant work it is. Nor is the history of these times simply the
history of petty states. Not only Macedonia and Egypt, but Pergamon,
Achaia, Rhodes, were all great powers according to the standard of
any earlier age. They were the leading states of their own world,
the chief members of an established system in which each held its
place exactly like the states of the modern world. Suddenly a foreign
power broke in among them, a power far stronger than any of them, a
power which came from another world beyond their range, and which
in a moment changed the face of the world into which it entered.
The suddenness of this irruption of Rome into the Greek world, the
speed with which she sprang at once to the first place in the East
as well as in the West, are among the most striking parts of the
story. They stand out in marked contrast alike to the slow steps by
which Rome had marched to the headship of the West and to the slow
steps by which her leadership in the East was changed into direct and
universal rule. Next to the delusion that the Empire of Rome came to
an end in 476 A.D. stands the delusion that free Greek states came
to an end in 146 B.C. This last delusion may be easier to get rid of
than the other. The third and second centuries B.C. have at least the
advantage of being left pretty clear from the touch of the crammer.
It is easier to write on white paper than to make parchment ready for
a palimpsest. It may be easier to set forth the true aspect of the
age which ruled that Rome should be the head of the world than it
is to set forth the true aspect of the age which answers to it, the
age which ruled in what shape Rome should still remain the head of
the world, though her political dominion over half her provinces was
broken in pieces.



LECTURE II.

ROME THE HEAD OF EUROPE.


In my last lecture I strove to draw a picture of the Mediterranean
lands at the moment when the Greek world, as the Greek world had been
shaped by Macedonian conquest, a world of kingdoms, federations,
and single cities, a busy and intricate system full of the deepest
political lessons at every step, was suddenly startled by the
invasion of a power from the West. That power had already slowly
risen to the first place in its own Western world; it now sprang
as in a moment to the first place in the East; but, having thus
sprung to the first place, it was content to fall back on its former
slow and piecemeal course. Generations had to pass away before the
paramount influence in the Greek world which Rome won at a single
grasp was fully changed into immediate dominion over every land and
city to which its influence had spread. Very early in the second
century B.C. Rome was already the paramount power in the Greek
world. She had not a single province east of Hadria; but cities,
confederations, kingdoms, all knew that she was practically their
mistress. Late in the first century A.D. Rome had many provinces
east of Hadria; her immediate dominion had become the rule, and even
nominal independence was the exception; but there were still free
Greek cities which Vespasian deemed it prudent to bring under his
immediate dominion, and there were not a few other free Greek cities
which Vespasian left to give Trajan an opportunity of respecting the
faith of treaties. The first step in short was sudden and swift;
every later step was slow; but the first step carried every later
step with it as its necessary consequence. In the interval between
the First and Second Punic Wars, Rome appeared east of the Hadriatic
as the deliverer of Greek cities from the pirates of Illyricum. That
was in truth the first step in that eastward march by which, five
hundred and fifty years later, Rome herself, in her own person,
followed in the wake of her dominion, and transferred her seat from
the seven hills by the Tiber to the seven hills by the Bosporos. Or
shall we say that the first step was taken at a far earlier time?
The position of Rome as an Italian state, ruling over Greek allies
and subjects, but in return deeply affected by Greek influences of
every kind, had begun while Rome still dwelled in her own peninsula.
Before she crossed the Hadriatic, she had begun to put on the
character of that compound power, politically Roman, intellectually
Greek, whose calling it was to leaven the world. The extension which
was marked, in the later half of the third century, by the Roman
alliance with Apollônia, Epidamnos, and Korkyra, was an extension
only geographical. The ally or mistress, whichever name we choose,
of Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse, the undoubted mistress of the
greater half of Sicily, had already begun to put on the character of
a Greek power before she drew sword for or against any city of the
elder Greece. Rome had entered the ranks of the _Hellênismos_ before
Corinth admitted her citizens to strive in the games of the Isthmos,
before Athens honoured them with initiation into the holiest rites of
Dêmêtêr and her Child.

       *       *       *       *       *

In a lecture of my former course I pointed out some of the physical
conditions which made it possible for Rome to rise to the headship
of the world. The course of all history, I then ventured to say, had
been determined by the geological fact that certain hills by the
Tiber were lower and nearer together than the other hills of Latium.
If I were lecturing on Roman history as such, instead of taking a
glance of a moment, a glance of a mere thousand years or so, at Rome
in her œcumenical position, I might carry out this thought into great
detail. For my present purpose it is enough to say that the central
spot of the central peninsula was naturally called to headship. We
might point out that the process which made Lugubalium and Nisibis
bulwarks of Rome began when the Palatine and the Capitoline hills
were girded by a single wall. But it is enough for us to mark the
great steps in the advance of the Roman power, the steps which made
her the head of Latium, the head of Italy, the head of the West, the
head, and in the end the mistress, of the Mediterranean world. In
all these stages we must ever bear in mind that the rule of Rome was
in the fullest sense the rule of a city, a rule of essentially the
same kind as the rule of other ruling cities before and after. It was
distinguished from the rule of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, Bern, and
Venice only by the vastness of the scale to which the rule of the
Roman city extended, and by the process, unparalleled in the history
of any other city, by which the franchise of the ruling commonwealth
was gradually extended to all its allies and subjects. Latium, Italy,
the Mediterranean world, were merged bit by bit, not only in the
Roman dominion but in the Roman city, till every Italian ally, every
Greek confederate, even every barbarian provincial, had become a
citizen of Rome. It is true that the last stage of the process did
not take place till to be a citizen of Rome simply meant to be a
subject of Rome’s master. It has been doubted, with no small show of
reason, whether the edict of Antoninus Caracalla was not an immediate
loss rather than an immediate gain to those whom it admitted to the
full honours of the Roman name. But the eye of universal history
looks at the change in another light. The edict of Antoninus,
whatever its immediate motives, whatever its immediate results, did
in the end create an artificial Roman nation throughout the Roman
dominion, at any rate from the Ocean to Mount Tauros. Every freeman
throughout the Empire had now a right in the name and traditions of
Rome. We see the results of this change in the men of the fifth
and sixth centuries, in those Romans of Gaul and Spain who knew no
national name, no national being, save that of the city to which
their forefathers had bowed. We see its yet more lasting results in
the Romans and the Romania of the East, in the Greek-speaking folk
from whom the Roman name has not yet wholly passed away, in the
Latin-speaking folk to whom in our own day the Roman name has again
become the living badge of their regenerate being.

On Rome then, as head of Europe in a sense in which no other among
the powers of Europe ever reached that headship, the two duties of a
great European power were laid in a fulness in which they were never
laid on any other. Rome was called on, before all others, to be the
teacher of nations of her own European stock, to be the champion of
Europe against the inroads of barbarians from without. In the former
character her teaching had sometimes to be sharp; she had often to
wield the rod of as stern a discipline as that with which Gideon
taught the men of Succoth. It was the mission of Rome to make the
Gaul the partaker of her tongue and culture. It was her mission to
make the Teuton the heir of one half of her political power. She
was to frame out of his stores and her own a third state of things
distinct from either of the elements that went to frame it. Of the
union of Teuton and Roman sprang the world of modern Europe. But
for that union the nations had to bide their time; as in the games
of Hellas, they that rose before the happy moment were scourged
back again. They who came as invaders only had to be dealt with as
invaders and not as disciples. The Gaul who came before his time had
his scourging at Sentinum; the Teuton who came before his time had
his scourging at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. But how well the work was
done with Gauls and Teutons who better knew their time and place, we
see when the Gaul Sidonius paints in his Roman speech the portrait
of one Theodoric, Gothic lord of a Roman realm; we see it when a
greater Theodoric, Gothic lord of a mightier Roman realm, legislates
from his throne at Ravenna for the welfare of Rome’s earliest Gaulish
province. Here was one side of the mission of the head of Europe, the
teacher of the kindred nations. Her other side as European champion,
as foremost representative of the Eternal cause, stands forth in her
long warfare with the Carthaginian, the Persian, the Arab, and the
Turk. And both sides stand forth together when Rome, lady of the
nations, marches forth with her Teutonic _comitatus_ round her to
meet the hosts of Attila. The work was well in doing when Anianus
looked from the walls of Orleans on the banners of deliverance, Roman
and Gothic, flocking side by side, in the strife when Roman, Goth,
and Frank, Catholic, Aryan, and heathen, joined to deal the final
blow for the common European soil on the day of slaughter in the
Catalaunian fields.

How the Latin city of Rome marched to the headship of Latium, how
the head of Latium marched to the headship of Italy, are matters of
Roman rather than of universal history. The œcumenical calling of
Rome comes upon her as soon as she has become the head of Italy,
perhaps more strictly in the very moment of her becoming such. She
is not fully head of Italy till she has beaten back the invader
from Epeiros from the shores of her peninsula. But her war with
Pyrrhos had brought her into the thick of the Greek world and all its
complications. Unless we accept the tales of her earlier dealings
with Massalia, Rome has not yet sought either Greek allies or Greek
enemies beyond the bounds of Italy. But Greece, in the person of her
foremost champion, had come to seek out Rome within those bounds. The
fight of Beneventum ruled that Italy should be Italian; it ruled that
no Greek power should arise in Western Europe to balance the realms
of Ptolemy and Seleukos in the East. It ruled in short that the head
of Italy should be Rome. The wars which Rome had waged against the
Samnite and the Gaul had made her beyond all comparison the first
power in Italy. The war with Pyrrhos, the war that threatened to make
Italy, like Asia or Egypt, part of a Greek dominion, made her the
undoubted head.

The head of Italy now stood forth as one of the great powers of
the world. It marks one of the differences between the political
state of those days and that of our own that Rome had no sooner
undoubtedly risen to this position than she found herself engaged
in a struggle, a struggle well nigh for life and death, with the
other great power of the Western Mediterranean. In the modern world,
whatever jealousies, controversies, wars, may arise between any of
the great powers of Europe, none seeks the utter destruction of any
other, none seeks the abiding weakening of any other, its degradation
from the rank of a great power. But the establishment of Rome as the
undoubted head of Italy, as one of the two greatest powers of the
West, at once condemned her to abiding rivalry with the other power,
a rivalry which might be salved over by this or that interval of
peace, but which meant that, sooner or later, either Rome or Carthage
must perish. We must remember that, while between any other two of
the great wars of Rome there was some slight interval of peace, the
war with Pyrrhos and the Italian allies of Pyrrhos was followed
without any break whatever by the first war with Carthage. That
war was the War for Sicily. On any theory of natural boundaries, a
power that was the head of Italy might reasonably, so far as there
is reason in such matters, expect to spread its dominion over the
lands within the Alps, and over the three great islands which look
like natural appendages to the peninsula of Italy. And a power which
spread itself over the lands within the Alps, a power which from its
own shores could look out on the mountains of Illyricum, could hardly
expect to keep itself wholly unentangled by the affairs of the lands
on the other side of Hadria. Rome then had hardly become the head
of Italy before two fields of action were opened for her without a
breathing-space. She had to strive with the other great power of the
West, and signs were not wanting that before long her destiny would
call her to mingle in the strifes of Eastern Europe also.

The Western call was the earlier and the nearer. Close on the war
with Pyrrhos followed the War for Sicily, the war of more than twenty
years waged mainly on the waters by the fleets of Rome and Carthage.
As a war for Sicily, as one of the greatest of the many wars for
Sicily, it takes its place in the long range of cycles which make up
the history of that illustrious island. Rome now for the first time
buckled on her harness to play her part in dealing with the Eternal
Question. Was the greatest of Mediterranean islands to be a part of
Europe or of Africa, to be a possession of Aryan or of Semitic man,
to be the home of the gods of Alba and Olympos or of the Moloch and
Baalim of the men of Canaan? The Greek had waged the warfare for
ages; the fates had gone against him; the realm of Hierôn was but a
small survival of the days when Sicily had come so near to being a
purely Hellenic island. The calling for which Syracuse was too weak
passed on to the stronger hand of Rome. Panormos, won for Europe for
eleven hundred years, was no mean first-fruits of the strife. After
well nigh a generation of warfare, Rome stood forth victorious,
mistress of Sicily, presently mistress of Sardinia and Corsica,
seized of her first provincial dominion, rich in the faithful
alliance of the first and worthiest of her long line of dependent
kings. The rival power came out of the strife, not crushed, hardly
weakened, but driven to transfer her energies to a new sphere, to
seek in a new land the means of dealing a blow at Rome in the heart
of her own Italy.

The choice of that new sphere of Carthaginian energy, the exploits
of the house of Hamilkar, the line of the sons of Thunder, of itself
opens a new and important, though as yet a secondary, page in the
history of Europe. The time has come for the most western of her
three peninsulas to play its part in the general affairs of the
world. But the peninsula which was not wholly Mediterranean, which
had two of its three sides washed by the outer Ocean, was never to
play such a part as the elder peninsulas which felt only the waters
of the inland sea. A day was to come in ages still far distant when
Spain should be a ruling power in Italy and in Greece. But Spain
never was to be what Italy or what Greece had been, nor what Italy
was to be again. For several centuries her fate was to be a great
and flourishing dependency of Rome, which, when it had once fully
accepted the dependent relation, was to be less disturbed either
by civil wars or by foreign invasion than any other province of
the West. And now her fate was a strange one, but a fate which the
wonderful cycles of history brought back again after more than nine
hundred years. Spain was to be as Sicily. One phase of the Eternal
Question was twice to be whether the most western land of Europe
should be a part of the Western or the Eastern world. Rome had to win
the land from the grasp of the Phœnician; its own sons had in after
ages to win it back from the grasp of the Saracen. For the moment
the third of the great peninsulas was to be in turn the stronghold
of either side, to be the arsenal where Carthage first gathered up
her strength for the attempted overthrow of Rome, and where Rome then
gathered up her strength for the more than attempted overthrow of
Carthage.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Punic Wars form a kind of episode in the history of Europe, just
as the presence of a Punic people in the Western Mediterranean is
of itself an anomaly and in some sort an episode. The existence of
the Carthaginian power hindered what we might have looked on as the
natural course of history for the three great European peninsulas.
When Rome had become the undisputed head of Italy, the next growth of
her power might have been looked for in the direction of the Gaul and
of the Greek. The headship of Italy had been won by driving back a
Greek invasion, an invasion from a Greek land within sight of Italy,
and that headship might be looked on as imperfect till it was further
spread over Sicily at one end and Cisalpine Gaul at the other. Sicily
was at once fought for, and in the end won; but it had to be won from
the intruding Carthaginian. When the first Punic War was over, the
eyes of Rome were again drawn beyond the Po and beyond the Hadriatic.
The conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was begun; the Illyrian wars led to
the first establishment of Rome as an influence, as a power, in the
Eastern peninsula. Protector, mistress in all but name, of Korkyra,
Epidamnos, and Apollônia, Rome has become an element in the affairs
of Greece herself as well as in those of Greek colonies in Italy,
Sicily, Spain, and Gaul. She has won the jealousy of Macedonia, the
good will of the free states of Greece. That is, she has taken the
first steps towards bringing Greek friends and Greek enemies alike,
first under her influence and then under her dominion.

If the first Punic War was in some sort an episode in European
history, a check in the expected march of Rome, still more truly can
this be said of the second. The Hannibalian War stands out in the
history of the world as before all things a strife between a man
and a commonwealth, a strife between the first of men and the first
of commonwealths. Yet if Hannibal overshadows Carthage, if Carthage
seems but an instrument in his hands, we must remember that Hannibal
has no being apart from Carthage, that the work that he does is not
the work of Hannibal but the work of Carthage. Nor must we let the
glory of Hannibal altogether quench the glory of the other members
of his house. Rome had to strive against a line of heroes, against
the whole lion-brood of the house of Barak. One son of Thunder came
after another; what the Grace of Baal began, the Help of Baal came
to strengthen. But in our swift œcumenical survey we must be careful
of tarrying to do homage even to the greatest of individual men.
We have to deal with the results of their actions. The object of
the Hannibalian war was the humiliation, the destruction, of Rome.
Its effect was to raise Rome higher than ever, to make her in one
generation the head of the whole West, before long to be the head of
the East also. It brought, as we have seen, the western peninsula
into the current of European affairs; it brought it into that
current as a stronghold of Roman dominion; it made Rome a power out
of Europe; she came out of the struggle more than ever the head of
Italy, mistress of all Sicily, advancing to be mistress of Spain,
holding a commanding influence in Africa. If she lost Cisalpine Gaul
for a season, it was only for a season; the work could be done again,
and Rome won an influence in Gaul beyond the Alps which was presently
to stand her in good stead. From Eastern Europe her eyes are turned
away for a moment, to be turned thither again in another moment with
far more steadfastness. That which, but for the check given to the
course of things by the great Hannibalian episode, we might have
looked for as the next scene of the drama, now actually comes on the
stage as an episode within the episode. Under cover as it were of
the war with Hannibal, Rome for the first time wages war east of the
Hadriatic as the ally of one of the chief Greek powers and as the
enemy of another. But if that first war between Rome and Macedonia
looks like an episode, if it seems trifling beside the great strife
with Hannibal, that was merely because the Macedonian king failed to
do what in reason he ought to have done, if he went to war at all.
The phalanx and the siege-train of Philip failed to take their place
alongside of the horsemen and the elephants of Hannibal. Still the
first Macedonian war marks a most important stage in the advance of
Rome towards the East. Rome now for the first time measured herself
against the resources of a great kingdom, as in the war with Carthage
she for the first time measured herself against the resources of
a great commonwealth. Rome, Carthage, and Macedonia were now the
three great powers of Europe, and Rome had to strive against both
the other two at once. It was well indeed for Rome that Macedonia
never put forth her full strength while the strength of Carthage was
still unbroken. As it was, Hannibal alone, without allies save the
barbarians whom he gathered to his standard, after the fearful losses
of his Pyrenæan and his Alpine march, was able to win every pitched
battle that he fought, and to bring Rome so near to destruction that
no power but Rome could have come alive out of the trial.

Never in truth was the Eternal Question so near to its solution,
so near to a solution which might have stifled the life of Europe
for ever, as when Hannibal debated in his mind whether he should
march straight from the field of Cannæ to the gates of Rome. It
was a moment like that when it rested on the vote of the polemarch
Kallimachos whether the thousands of Athens should meet the tens of
thousands of Persia on the day of Marathôn. It is not for us to say
whether such a march would have turned the destiny of the world for
ever; it is enough that all that formed the life of Europe, all that
was to form the life of Christendom, seemed at that moment to hang
on the balance. The difficulty is fully to take in that Hannibal and
his kinsfolk, the great house and the greatest of its sons, were in
truth fighting in the same cause as the mere barbarian destroyers
against whom the strife had to be waged at other stages of the long
tale. Yet so it is; when we see Rome, with her citizens, colonists,
and allies, holding up against the mercenaries of Carthage, when we
contrast the votary of Jupiter with the votary of Moloch, we shall
soon see on which side it was the abiding interests of mankind truly
lay. It was after all in the worthiest of causes that the first of
cities was pitted against the first of men. The overthrow of Carthage
enabled Rome to go on to the overthrow of Greece; but if Greece was
to have a conqueror, it was well that she should have a conqueror
who could become a disciple in a way such as the Phœnician never
could be. It is hard to name Hannibal along with Attila or even with
Abd-al-rahman, yet the day of Zama, or rather the long endurance
which made the day of Zama possible, must be set down by the still
abiding world of Europe as a great salvation, a crowning mercy,
alongside of the work of Aetius and Theodoric and the work of the
elder Charles.

How it was that Rome and Europe lived through such a trial, what
were the special causes which gave Rome strength to bear up through
the most fearful of dangers, it is for special historians of Rome to
tell. For us it is enough that Rome came forth out of the struggle
mistress of the West, with Carthage spared to live on for rather
more than fifty years as a Roman dependency. She was then to perish;
her land was to become a Roman province; she was herself, after a
hundred years of desolation, to rise again as a Roman city, the head
of one of the greatest of Roman lands, the seat of a special and
abiding form of Roman life, a life of more than seven hundred years,
till the power of Rome in Africa gave way to Semitic invaders more
terrible than the old Phœnician. The fight of Zama put an end to the
long and wonderful episode of Phœnician power in the Western seas; it
left Rome leisure to go on with her work, as conqueror and teacher in
Western Europe, as conqueror and disciple beyond Hadria. Whether if
Philip had put forth the full power of his kingdom and its allies,
he and Hannibal together could have overthrown Rome, it is a waste
of time to guess. It is enough for us to know and to rejoice that
so it was not; Philip failed to act with Hannibal, and Rome could
overthrow Hannibal and Philip, each in his turn. The first Macedonian
war brought Rome into the thick of Greek affairs. The Greek states
learned all of a sudden what Rome could be either as a friend or
as an enemy. But they were slow to learn how truly the relation of
either friend or enemy of Rome was only a step to the relation,
first of Roman dependent, and then of Roman subject. They were not
likely to learn the lesson; neither princes nor commonwealths are
ever quick in learning such lessons. The Greeks of that day no more
dreamed what Roman interference meant than the Greeks of a hundred
and fifty years before had dreamed what Macedonian interference
meant. No prince or people ever does in such cases fully understand
what is coming. But, seeing Rome had been on the whole the immediate
loser in the first Macedonian war, the Greeks of that day were still
less likely to see how vastly Rome was a gainer by engaging in any
Macedonian war at all. Men who had grown up as leaders in the several
Greek states, who were used to look on Greece and the neighbouring
powers as forming a world of their own, a world in which Roman
interference was as little looked for as interference from another
planet, were not likely to foresee the days that were to come before
their own lives were ended. Philopoimên dreamed not yet of days when
no Greek statesman dared to strike a blow or speak a word without the
good will of the barbarian commonwealth which had become practically
the mistress of them all. That they did not foresee those days was
no special short-sightedness of Greeks or of commonwealths; it was
the common short-sightedness of merely human statesmen, who had not,
like their critics, the means of profitting by the experience of ages
which were still unborn.

At the beginning of the second century B.C. the actual possessions of
Rome were small indeed compared with what they were at its ending.
When the century opened, Rome was the undoubted head of the West;
it was by no means clear that she was ever to become head of the
East as well. To rule that so she was to be was the work of that
all-important and neglected age. At its beginning, Rome was head
of Italy; she was winning back the dominion in Cisalpine Gaul which
the Hannibalian war had cost her; but she had no provinces of her
own separate winning; she had only the lands in Sicily, Sardinia,
and Spain which she had taken over from Carthage, lands which in
Spain at least needed frequent hard fighting to enlarge or even to
keep. In Transalpine Gaul she had as yet no possessions; Massalia was
still an independent and specially cherished ally. In Africa Carthage
was an unwilling dependency; Massinissa of Numidia was a faithful
and zealous vassal king, to be favoured and strengthened as long
as Carthage was allowed to live. In Eastern Europe Rome had indeed
begun her dominion beyond Hadria, a dominion as yet over allies and
not over acknowledged subjects. But it was a dominion which did not
stretch beyond certain points of coast immediately opposite to the
Italian peninsula. Rome had appeared as a destroyer in more than one
island and city in the heart of Greece; but she had done her work of
havoc in fellowship with Greek allies, and, if she had shown herself
at all in Greek warfare, it was only because Philip had chosen to
be the ally of Hannibal, but not to be his ally in such a sort as
to strike at Rome on her own ground. In the further East Pergamon
was already the ally of Rome; Attalos and Eumenês were to be as
Massinissa so long as either Macedonia or the Seleukid power needed
watching on behalf of Rome. The Seleukid power was as yet neither
friend nor enemy; Egypt was bound to Rome by a friendship of some
standing, but friendship had not as yet brought dependence with it.

Let us look only twenty years later. Rome has not increased her
immediate territory on the eastern mainland by a single district
or city. But Kephallênia and Zakynthos have joined the company of
Korkyra and Epidamnos; Aitôlia has entered the formal relation of
Roman dependence; Macedonia has sunk to it as the penalty of warfare
with Rome; she has risen again to at least formal independence as
the reward of good service to the ruling commonwealth. Beyond her
small possessions in Western Greece, Rome has in the Eastern world
no dominion but that of influence; but through that dominion she is
supreme. The vast dominion of Antiochos, the Great King, successor
alike of Cyrus and of Alexander, has been cut short; driven back
beyond Tauros, he has almost withdrawn from the Hellenic world; the
lord of Asia, seeking for a moment to be lord of Europe, has sunk
to be lord only of Syria and of such lands east of Syria as he can
keep back from the grasp of the encroaching Parthian. In his stead,
royal Pergamon, democratic Rhodes, a crowd of smaller powers, ready
to receive the bounty of Rome, have parted out the solid peninsula
of Asia among them. The Roman Senate, which so lately sat to devise
means by which Rome might be saved from the grasp of Hannibal, now
sits as a Court of International Justice for the whole civilized
world, ready to hear the causes of every king or commonwealth that
has any plaint against any other king or commonwealth, ready even to
bend its ear to the voice of every party, of every man, that has any
plaint against any other party or any other man within the smallest
commonwealth. The Roman Fathers judge the causes of powers which
are in theory the equal allies of Rome; they judge by virtue of no
law, of no treaty; they judge because the common instinct of mankind
sees the one universal judge in the one power which has strength to
enforce its judgements. When Rome speaks, all obey; kings fall down
at the threshold of the Senate-house, as entering an assembly of
gods; they keep themselves humbly within the line that the Roman rod
traces round them, even on soil that they have made their own. Rome
in truth rules from the Hadriatic to the Euphrates no less than from
the Ocean to the Hadriatic; but save in the old Roman land which is
her own, save in the few provinces which she has taken over as part
of the spoil of Carthage, her power is still everywhere a power of
influence and nowhere of direct dominion.

The work of the hundred and fifty years which were to pass before
Rome came to obey the rule of a single man was largely to change
this power of influence into a power of direct dominion, in a word
to change allied and dependent states into subject provinces. Let us
look again in the later years of that same second century. Italy has
extended herself, if not in formal language, if not in legal right,
yet in the common speech of men, over all the lands within the Alps.
Gaul is now the land beyond the Alps where Rome, now protector of
Massalia, has won a mighty province, a province binding together
Italy and Spain, and keeping her old ally as it were in ward.
Spain has largely become a Roman land; it has altogether become a
Roman possession, save only those mountain districts which so many
conquerors, each in turn, have found it so hard to conquer. Africa
is a province; Carthage is a wilderness; Numidia and Mauretania are
helpless dependencies. East of the Hadriatic, not a few lands and
cities, Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, Byzantium, the wise confederates of
Lykia, still keep their formal independence. But direct dominion has
widely advanced; if not as yet actually the rule, yet it is the fate
which has overwhelmed the greatest powers; the kingdom of Macedonia
is now the province of Macedonia; the kingdom of Pergamon, so lately
enlarged out of Seleukid spoils, is now the province of Asia; Achaia,
with Corinth lying waste, is, whether formally a province or not,
at least so utterly dependent as to make the question as to its
political state a question merely formal. Syria, Egypt, all the
kingdoms of Asia, must count as vassals of Rome. If absolute freedom
lives on anywhere in the Mediterranean world, it is where freedom
is the shame of Rome rather than her glory; the independence which
Rhodes and Athens keep but in name is kept in all its fulness by the
pirates of Crete and the pirates of Kilikia.

       *       *       *       *       *

So the headship of Rome was won over Italy and the Mediterranean
world. A dominion had grown up of which mankind had never seen
the like. No king of kings had ever come so near to universal rule
as this city of cities. And now, in the last years of the second
century and the early years of the third, came the question whether
Rome could keep what she had won, the question, we might almost
say, whether Rome could keep her own independent being. New powers
arose to dispute her claim to be head of the West, to be head of the
East, to be head of her own Italy. Gaius Marius came down from his
car of triumph over Jugurtha, to march, in a new consulship, in new
consulships crowded one upon another, to save Gaul, to save Italy,
to save Rome herself, from the attacks of Teutonic invaders who had
come before their time. Small are the remains that Aquæ Sextiæ can
show to remind us of that great deliverance; yet we look up to the
Mount of Victory, and feel that it was in the fates that the bones
of our kinsfolk should fence in Massaliot vineyards; the day was not
yet come for Gothia and Romania to be freely yoked together in the
happy bride-ale of Narbonne. The day of Aquæ Sextiæ, the day of the
Raudian fields, confirmed Roman headship in the West for five hundred
years. It needed a longer struggle with Eastern powers strengthened
by the arts of Greece--when Greece and Asia, allies and subjects,
were goaded to revolt by the misdeeds of the ruling city--to secure
Roman headship in the East, not for five hundred years only, but
for thrice that time. And nearer still, on her own soil, at her own
gates, within her own future walls, Rome had again to fight for life
and death against Italian enemies. Another Pontius had come from the
Samnite hills to root up the wood that sheltered the wolves of Italy.
It needed the happy star of Lucius Sulla, it needed the last eager
prayer of the Felix, the Epaphroditos, to the angered gods of Greece,
to keep in being, not merely the lordship over Gaul and Asia, but the
very life of Rome as one Italian city on her own hills.

Yet vain indeed was the struggle of Cimbri and Teutones, of Marsian
and Samnite, of the Pontic king and his allies in Asia and in Europe.
Rome came forth from her threefold trial the undoubted mistress of
all. On no corner of Mediterranean soil was there any power left that
could really dispute her will. The first century before and after our
æra sufficed to gather in the spoil. Enemies and allies, independent
and dependent, were to be changed into subjects; kingdoms were to
sink to provinces; and, if some cities once more than sceptred still
kept the forms of freedom, yet chains did in truth clank over them
when the Senate and People of an independent commonwealth dared
only to pass such decrees as might suit the pleasure of the nearest
proconsul. Of Rome’s two great rival leaders, one was to spread her
dominion to the Euphrates, the other to the Channel and the Northern
Sea. The Syria of Gnæus Pompeius became Rome’s richest province; but
the land of old Damascus and younger Antioch could never become a
Roman land. The Gaul of Gaius Cæsar became a Roman land indeed, the
abiding home of Roman life and Roman culture, the land that had the
praises of its cities sung by Ausonius of Bordeaux and its whole
life painted for us in full by the pencil of Sidonius of Auvergne.
And above all things the possession of Syria and Gaul gave Rome a
new position and laid on her new duties. One aspect of the second
century before our æra is that the barbarian powers of the East are
again threatening. The work of Alexander and Seleukos seems half
undone. Rome had weakened the arms of their successors without taking
their calling on her own shoulders. As it was with the pirates, so
it was with the Parthians; so it was even with the barbarians to the
north of Macedonia. During the time when the Greek commonwealths
and kingdoms had ceased to be really independent, but when they had
not yet formally sunk to the state of Roman provinces, neither of
these frontiers of the civilized world was effectually guarded. The
second century before Christ was therefore a great age of barbarian
advance. Again, as Mommsen puts it, the world had two lords. A power
grew up on the eastern border, before which the Macedonian kings of
Syria gave way, and against which Rome herself could do little more
than hold her own. That Sulla was the first Roman who had direct
dealings with the Parthians marks the course of things. Parthia was
waxing mighty while Rome was weakening the kingdoms which might
have checked the growth of Parthia. The new barbarian power lived
for three hundred years after Sulla’s day to be the equal rival of
Rome, in whose strife with Rome both sides could boast of victories
and momentary conquests, while neither could boast of any lasting
weakening of its rival. And a day came when the Parthians, who had
come within the range of Greek influences, whose kings boasted
themselves as φιλέλληνες, had to give way to more vigorous champions
of the Asiatic side in the Eternal Question. In a long rivalry of
four hundred years, the regenerate Persian, strong in his national
life and national religion, remained Rome’s truest and worthiest
rival. Again each power felt the might of the other on its borders;
what Galerius won Jovian had to give back. At last, when the great
blow was coming on both alike, each sent forth as it were its own
Hannibal to strike at the vitals of the enemy. Chosroes encamped
within sight of Constantinople; Heraclius gave law to the Persian in
the heart of his own realm. One might be curious to know how this
great side of the world’s history looks in the eyes of those who
draw the mystic line at the patriciate of Odowakar. Julian to be
sure comes before the line; but the writings which record the deeds
of Julian are a sealed book--unclassical, I believe, not of the
golden or even of the silver age. As for Belisarius and Heraclius,
they doubtless pass, either in East or West, for Greeks of the Lower
Empire, as cowardly and effete as all their fellows.

But the growth of the Parthian power, continued, as far as universal
history is concerned, in the power of the regenerate Persian, is
after all only one aspect of a chain of events which was then
already ancient and which still abides. It did but put the Eternal
Question under new conditions and give either side new and stronger
champions. Meanwhile in vast regions of the West, in one memorable
corner of the East, conditions arose which were absolutely new.
Pompeius, conqueror of Syria, caused the lands of Rome to march upon
the Parthian; Cæsar, conqueror of Gaul, caused the lands of Rome to
march upon the German. One gave her a neighbour who could be only
an abiding rival; the other gave her a neighbour who would not be a
subject, but who was, in the fulness of his time, to enter on his
twofold calling as conqueror and disciple. And now our own history
begins, the history of the Teutonic race in its three great homes,
in the European mainland, in the great island of the Ocean, in the
vaster mainland beyond the Ocean. I need tell no one here that in
Cæsar’s day, in days ages after Cæsar, the history of ourselves,
as distinguished from the history of our future home, is to be
sought for, not by the Thames and the Severn, but by the Rhine
and the Weser. We have not very long to wait before one line of
Tacitus will reveal the existence of the Angle, before one line of
Ptolemy will reveal the existence of the Saxon. But as yet we stand
undistinguished among the mass of our brethren. Whatever is theirs is
ours also. We have our part in the great deliverance by the wood of
Teutoburg; Arminius, “liberator Germaniæ,” is but the first of a roll
which goes on to Hampden and to Washington. By Rhine and Danube Rome
at last found her Terminus; to extend it to Elbe or Eider was not for
Drusus or Germanicus, but for the first Teuton who wore her crown.

The conquests of Cæsar then, by making the Roman and the German
neighbours, neighbours whose presence could not fail to work the
deepest impress on each other, opened one side of later history. The
world that then was, the world of Roman dominion tempered by Greek
influences, had now nations beside it which were neither subjects
nor as yet rivals, nations whose mingling with that elder world, in
many forms and at many stages, was to call into being the world in
which we live. But the Roman and Teutonic elements out of which the
world of modern Europe and European colonies was to be formed, were
not the Roman and the Teuton in the first state in which history
shows them. Their fusion did not come till both had been brought
under a common influence. And that was an influence whose birthplace
carries us back again from the conquests of Cæsar to the conquests
of Pompeius, from the conquests of Pompeius to an earlier stage of
the Seleukid power. When that power was weakened on the great day of
Magnêsia, its weakness was not merely to open the way for the advance
of Parthia from the East. Native powers, held down under Persian and
Macedonian supremacy, sprang into new life. The greatest of existing
Semitic powers had been humbled; it was soon to be wiped out; but the
abiding life of the Semitic race showed itself in new shapes, in one
shape that was doomed to be more abiding than the power of Sidon and
Carthage. That shape of Semitic influence was to intertwine itself
so closely with the power of Rome that the two could never more be
rent asunder. Arab lords of Damascus gave a foretaste of the days
when mightier Arab lords of Damascus should reign from the Indus to
the Ocean. Hebrew lords of Jerusalem called up the memory of the
days when mightier Hebrew lords of Jerusalem had reigned from the
river to the Great Sea westward. Hannibal might die in banishment;
his city might become heaps like older Nineveh; but men speaking the
tongue of Hannibal, though they worshipped not the gods of Hannibal,
were, from the day when the holy zeal of Mattathias struck down
the renegade, to form one of the great moving powers in all future
history. If the Greek was to enlighten the world, if the Roman was
to rule the world, if the Teuton was to be the common disciple and
missionary of both, it was from the Hebrew that all were to learn
the things that belong to another world. In the highest teaching of
all, Roman and Goth had to become the disciples of the Jew, but of
the Jew speaking only by the mouth of a Greek interpreter. Before
the Aryan world of Europe could truly do its work, it had to take
to itself a Semitic creed. It had to take to itself that Semitic
creed so fully, so exclusively, as to make it by adoption the creed
of Europe, to make it before all things the creed of Rome. For the
last twelve hundred years the Eternal Question has taken the shape of
an abiding strife between two creeds alike of Semitic birth. But of
those two creeds one has become Aryan by adoption; the younger races
accepted the gift which the elder cast aside; as the birthright of
Edom passed to Israel, so the birthright of Israel passed to be the
common heritage of the Greek, the Roman, and the Teuton. Rome is not
Rome in all her fulness, she has not risen to the true height of her
mission in the world, she is not fully mistress and teacher of the
nations, till she has cast aside her old gods and has bowed to the
spiritual mastery of a despised sect from a despised corner of her
dominion. The miracle of miracles, greater than dried-up seas and
cloven rocks, greater than the dead rising again to life, was when
the Augustus on his throne, Pontiff of the gods of Rome, himself a
god to the subjects of Rome, bent himself to become the worshipper
of a crucified provincial of his Empire. The conversion of our own
folk, the conversion of any other barbarian folk of Europe, was no
marvel. Where Rome led, all must follow, Celt, Teuton, Slave, each in
his turn. That Christianity should become the religion of the Roman
Empire is the miracle of history; but that it did so become is the
leading fact of all history from that day onwards. Explain the fact
as we will, Christianity is the religion of the Roman Empire, and
it is hardly more. It has been accepted by every land which either
became part of the Empire or came under its influence; that is, it
has become the creed of Europe and European colonies. Beyond those
limits it has made conquests, but they have seldom been abiding; such
cases as Abyssinia are exceptional, and after all they come of Roman
influence more widely spread than usual. Christianity has never been
the creed of any great power beyond the European world. The great
nations of Asia and Africa have either kept their ancient heathendom
or have become more distinctly antagonistic to the faith of Rome by
embracing the faith of Arabia. On the other hand, no nation within
the Roman pale can be said to have fallen away from Christendom. The
folk of Christian lands have been enslaved or swept away; renegades
have been many; whole tribes, as in Albania, have become apostates,
but whole nations never. It would have sounded strange in the ears
of Nero or of Trajan to be told that a day would come when the rule
of Rome could be spoken of as the joint “rule of Christ and Cæsar;”
to be told that their successors should be admitted to their office
by rites borrowed from the sacred books of the Hebrew, at the hands
of the chief of the sect whose votaries they sent to the lions or to
the coat of fire. It was in a very deep and living sense that the
words were fulfilled which said that the kingdoms of the world had
become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. But their highest
fulfilment of all was when the Empire of the Cæsar came to rejoice
in its Christian style of Holy; when the Emperor, Advocate of the
Universal Church, deemed it a further honour to wear the garb and
to share in the office of Christian priesthood; when Dante gave his
genius to show that the growth of the Roman power was the special
work of God, and that the head of the Roman power was, in all things
earthly, God’s immediate Vicar upon earth. A theory, it may be said,
which no age saw in practice. Truly so, and chiefly because the
power of Rome split asunder, because the inheritance of her Cæsar
was disputed between a prince by the Bosporos and a prince by the
Rhine. Those days are still far from us; we shall reach them in the
course of our story; it is enough here to say that the very cleaving
to Roman titles and traditions on the part of powers from which all
that was truly Roman had passed away was in truth the most speaking
witness to the deep and lasting impress on men’s minds which had been
won for the teaching that it was for Rome, and for Rome alone, to
rule and judge the nations.

       *       *       *       *       *

The change from the commonwealth to the Empire of Rome was in truth
a gradual process by which a single citizen of Rome, charged with a
special commission, allowed to unite offices and powers which were
designed to act as checks on one another, changed, step by step,
first into a practical, and then into an acknowledged, master of Rome
and of all that obeyed Rome. That change, so strikingly analogous to
the gradual process by which Rome herself changed from influence to
dominion, is, in our œcumenical survey, of far less direct moment
than it is in the constitutional history of Rome herself. We have
to deal with the œcumenical headship of Rome, whatever form the
government of Rome herself may take. But the indirect œcumenical
results of the change from commonwealth to Empire were vast indeed.
To the Roman city the change was political death; to the provinces
it was the beginning of a new life. Under the Empire, not only were
many practical grievances lessened in the subject lands, but the
process of fusion between the subject lands and the ruling city went
on with far greater speed than it could go on as long as the Roman
city was engaged in the vain task of striving to unite _libertas_ at
home with _imperium_ in other lands. The _Imperator_ came because
the _imperium_ was there to call for him, because for the subject
lands one master was less grievous than many. It was not without
good reason that the provincials raised their altars to more than
one prince for whom the citizens, also not without good reason,
sharpened their daggers. Under the Empire, families, cities, whole
lands among the provinces, were admitted, one by one, to the full
rights of Romans. At last the decree went forth of which we have
already spoken, the decree which gave to all of them the rights, or
at least the name, of Romans. From that day, most fully in the West,
more fully perhaps than we fancy even in the East, an artificial
nation grew up, a nation with its blood mingled with the blood of
every stock in Europe, but a nation Roman in name, Roman in feeling,
Roman in culture, and, with the exception of the merest survivals,
Roman in speech. Before the days of Teutonic migration began, Rome
had done her work in the West. Gaul and Spain were lands no less
Roman than Italy. If the Roman of Gaul was not always eager to fight
for Cæsar, so neither was the Roman of Italy; but the Roman of Gaul
was as little inclined as the Roman of Italy either to join the
barbarians or to set up for himself. I speak of the lands as wholes;
the special fortunes of Britain and of a corner of Armorica we may
have other occasions to think over. If the world of Europe was to
run its destined course, it was needful that the lands into which the
Teutonic conquerors of the mainland were to make their way should
be thoroughly Roman lands, lands where the invaders would find that
fully developed Roman culture which was needful for the future of
mankind. The work could not have been done if the lands into which
the Goth and the Burgundian entered had been still Iberian and Celtic
instead of Roman. The process of making them Roman was carried on
more swiftly, steadily, and thoroughly under the Empire than it could
ever have been under the commonwealth. In this way, without sharing
the fashionable admiration for successful crime, without joining in
the base and shallow sneers which even great scholars have stooped to
hurl at patriots whose worth soars above their moral level, we can
still see that the overthrow of the freedom of the Roman city was a
needful step in the progress of the Roman world. It was one stage
towards that wedding of Gothia and Romania the offspring of which is
the world in which we live.



LECTURE III.

ROME AND THE NEW NATIONS.


We have seen Rome rise, step by step, to the headship of Latium,
the headship of the West, the headship of the Mediterranean world.
At most stages of her course her progress has been slow; at one
stage only does she rise to a new position as in a moment. That is
when, having been checked on her Eastern course by the Hannibalian
war, the city that had overthrown the Eastern masters of the West
sprang at once to the headship of the Eastern as well as of the
Western world. The power which had trodden under foot the sons
of Thunder was entitled to take its next step with the swiftness
of the thunderbolt. But, once head of the Eastern Mediterranean,
with her Senate once established as judge in all causes from the
Hadriatic to the Euphrates, Rome was in no hurry to exchange her
rule of influence for a rule of acknowledged dominion. Indeed, if
her later hankering after provinces had begun sooner, it may be that
she would have better checked the advance of the lords of Parthia
and Pontos. As it was, it was by slow degrees indeed that cities and
kingdoms which long kept a nominal freedom were formally brought
within the grasp of her universal sovereignty. And as the forms of
her _imperium_ grew up only by slow degrees, so the forms of her
_libertas_ died out only by slow degrees. Slowly and stealthily did
Rome march to the acknowledged sovereignty of her own world; slowly
and stealthily did the citizen whom Rome placed at the head of her
commonwealth march to the acknowledged sovereignty of Rome herself
and her subject lands. It was almost at the same moment that the
power of the _Imperator_ and his army finally supplanted the power
of the Prince, the Senate and the People, and that all the free
inhabitants of the Roman world were admitted to the rank of Romans.
That is, they became equal subjects of the _Imperator_, while each
man among them who could wield his sword with skill and good luck
gained the chance of becoming _Imperator_ himself. The artificial
Roman nation, the _Romani_ of the West, the Ῥωμαῖοι of the East, was
now called into being. By the next step the master of that nation
avowed his mastery. The diadem of Jovius and Herculius, the proud
style of the Lords of All, the bendings of the knee, the whole
ceremonial which surrounded the new Augusti, were a contrast indeed
to the simple pre-eminence of the first of citizens, the highest of
magistrates, to whom that sacred name was first decreed. Chief of
a Roman nation, Roman alike on the Euphrates and on the Ocean, the
Emperor was in no sort bound to the local Rome by the Tiber. Shall we
say that Rome had been swallowed up in Romania, or more truly that
all Romania had become Rome? Emperors were now as much at home at
Nikomêdeia and at Antioch, at Milan and Ravenna, at York and Trier
and Arles and the true Vienna by the Rhone as they had once been in
the modest _regia_ of the elder Rome or in its prouder Septizonium.
No wonder that in after years Emperors were found no less at home at
Ingelheim and Aachen and Gelnhausen, at Nikaia and Thessalonica and
Skoupi, and in the false Vienna by the Danube. But the chosen servant
of Jove on his throne at Nikomêdeia did but open the way for changes
vaster still. A man born in Illyricum, raised to power in Britain,
schooled in Gaul in the arts of empire, won Rome by his right hand,
but only to transplant the very life of Rome to a more abiding seat
of power. Diocletian, first of the avowed lords of the Roman world,
had not slept for many years in his mausoleum at Spalato before a New
Rome had arisen by the Bosporos, before the temples of a new worship
on the hill of the Vatican and in the palace of the Laterani had
begun to threaten the dominion of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on his own
Capitol.

The New Rome, the Rome of Constantine, the city of Constantine, the
city of Emperors, the βασιλεύουσα of the Greek, the _Tzarigrad_
of the Slave,--more proudly still, simply the City, ἡ πόλις, the
name that survives in the _Stamboul_ of her alien lords--was a city
Christian from its birth. The Rome of Romulus remained for a while
more pagan than any city of the Empire, save Athens alone. In its
new seat meanwhile the Empire was Holy from the beginning. The great
question of the divided Empire did not present itself till ages
later. In days to come men disputed which was the true Augustus;
was it he who received his unction among the columns of Saint Peter
in the Old Rome or he who received it beneath the dome of the Divine
Wisdom in the New? As yet the oil of the Old Covenant had not been
poured on any Imperial head; and though two or three Augusti might
reign side by side, the Empire was not held to be thereby divided.
Yet a certain pre-eminence came by a kind of natural selection to
the Emperors who reigned in the Eastern seat of Empire. In the days
of transition, the true middle ages, the days when Roman and Teuton
stood side by side, ready to be fused, but not yet fused, into the
compound being of the modern world, every cause, every accident,
tended in every way to make the Eastern Rome the truest and most
abiding representative, not indeed of Rome’s moral influence, but of
Rome’s abiding power.

       *       *       *       *       *

When did the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begin? The clear
instinct of Gibbon carried on his tale to the fall of its Eastern
branch; the formal fall of its Western branch he lived not to see. In
our point of view the ages of the so-called decline of the Empire are
the ages of its greatest influence; the political decline of Rome,
the moment when her strength directly as a power began to fail, might
perhaps be placed a little earlier than the date chosen by that great
master of us all whose immortal tale none of us can hope to displace.
Under Trajan the Empire reached its greatest territorial extent.
But we may stop and ask whether conquests like his were not in some
sense a sign of coming weakness. The second century of our æra opens
with Trajan’s momentary glories; before that century is ended, the
day of real conquest is past. Marcus keeps his watch by the Danube
with other objects than those with which Drusus had kept his watch
by the Rhine. The work of a Roman prince is now, not to press the
Roman Terminus forward, but to keep him from falling back. The days
of victories and triumphs, the days of conquest in the territorial
sense, are still far from being past; but from Marcus to Stilicho, we
might say from Marcus to Belisarius and Heraclius, to Nikêphoros and
John Tzimiskês, to the Palaiologos who won back Constantinople and
the Palaiologos who won back Peloponnêsos, conquest commonly meant
simply the recovery of a dominion which had once been held and which
had fallen away. We may apply the rule which we applied in our first
lecture. When the Greek had to drive back the Persian from Greek
soil, when the Roman had to drive back the German from Roman soil, it
was a sign that the greatest days of each people, as far as greatness
of territorial dominion is concerned, had passed away.

But, as in the Greek case, so in the Roman, the very decline of
territorial dominion marked the beginning of a newly extended moral
influence. By the days of Marcus the two great elements of the
world that was making already stood face to face. The tables were
now turned; the German was the invader; the Roman stood on his
defence. Again and again was the German driven back from the soil of
Gaul and even from the soil of Italy. Presently days came when he
could no longer be driven back, days when it was oftentimes wiser
to welcome him on Roman soil, as the subject, the ally, the soldier
of the Empire, taught to guard the borders of the Empire against
brethren who came on the same errand as himself. Warlike Emperors
won triumphs at the head of Teutonic armies; unwarlike Emperors sent
forth commanders of Teutonic blood to win triumphs for them. At the
bidding of such commanders Emperors were made and unmade; men of
Teutonic birth became consuls, patricians, guardians of Imperial
sons-in-law; one prize alone was forbidden; the diadem itself was
not as yet to rest on a Teutonic brow. And if the sovereignty of
Rome remained in Roman hands, so it was in one quarter alone, the
quarter in which she had seemed to make the greatest advance, that
the territorial extent of the dominion of Rome was formally cut
short. The Asiatic conquests of Trajan had passed away almost with
Trajan’s self; his European conquest, his vast Dacian province, last
to be won and first to pass away, was given up by a soldier of Rome
hardly less illustrious than himself. Aurelian made the Danube once
more the Roman frontier; beyond it the Goth might dwell till his day
came to march at will through the three great peninsulas and at last
to find himself a throne in the most western. But for a hundred and
fifty years after the surrender of Dacia, fully up to the end of
the fourth century, we can hardly say that the borders of the Empire
ever formally went back. The Empire contained crowds of Teutonic
settlers; we can hardly say that it as yet contained any Teutonic
settlements. Whoever dwelled within the Roman frontier was either, in
name at least, a subject or soldier of Cæsar, or else he was an enemy
marching to and fro in a foreign land. The Franks already dwelled in
their distant corner of Gaul; but they dwelled there as soldiers of
the Empire, charged with the duty, which, if they sometimes betrayed,
they sometimes loyally discharged, of keeping the frontier of Rome
against new comers. The Goth himself, marching hither and thither
through Greek, Italian, and Gaulish lands, holding Rome herself to
ransom, keeping at last his jubilee of plunder within her walls, was
not always the formal foe of her princes; at one moment he accepted
honours and commands from the lawful Augustus; at another he made
himself the friend and soldier of the Empire by setting up an Emperor
of his own. Alaric himself, in all his marches, all his sieges,
never found abiding rest for the sole of his foot; he never became
the acknowledged territorial master of a single inch of Roman soil.
But before he had gone to rest in his grave beneath the waters,
before the Gothic trumpet was heard at the Salarian gate, before
he entered by the same path by which Brennus had entered well nigh
eight hundred years before, the path from which Hannibal had turned
away, the path on which Pontius of Telesia had dealt the last blow
for free and disunited Italy, before that day of fear and wonder in
the annals alike of the waning and of the rising power, another act
in the great drama had begun. Other Teutonic settlers had begun to
establish themselves as abiding dwellers on Roman soil, and the Goth
was presently to follow in their steps.

       *       *       *       *       *

We are now landed in the fifth century of our æra, the century which
beheld the earliest germs of the nations of modern Europe. It is
the age which, more than any other, answers to the third and second
centuries before our æra. They answer to one another, because the
later period, to a great degree, reverses the work of the earlier.
The former period made the Roman Empire; the latter went far to
unmake it. Never, till the days of its gradual dying out, did it come
so near, in the Western lands at least, to being broken in pieces.
We might say in truth that in the West the Empire was broken in
pieces in the fifth century, but that it was largely put together
again in the sixth by a reaction from the East. For the first aspect
of that age is that which has been already pointed out, the fact
that, while the political power of Rome is thus shivered in the
West, in the East it maintains itself, to some extent even enlarges
itself. The Eastern division of the Empire, the lot of the successors
of Arcadius, is that which really kept up the unbroken political
traditions of Rome. It has its wars and its revolutions, its settings
up and puttings down of Emperors; it even sees the marching to and
fro of Teutonic armies. But all seems mild compared with the turmoil
of the West. The war with the Persian, ended at last by an honourable
peace which abides for a hundred years, is another matter from the
endless struggle with the German on every frontier. The occasional
revolts at Constantinople do not begin till the second half of the
century, and they pass for nothing alongside of the series of tyrants
and momentary Emperors which disturbed the West during nearly the
whole time. The Eastern throne was so far the firmer that the West
was over and over again willing to accept an Emperor of his Eastern
colleague’s choosing. Above all, the Eastern provinces were not
parted out among Teutonic rulers. The Eastern movements of Alaric
hardly reach into the fifth century, and the marchings to and fro of
the two Theodorics at a later time were a trifle compared with the
great invasions which parted out the West into Teutonic kingdoms.
It is these which are the real work of the fifth century. At its
beginning, the Empire, with the boundaries of Valentinian hardly
touched, is divided between the sons of Theodosius as Imperial
colleagues. At its end, a single Emperor reigns at Constantinople;
but the whole West, with Rome itself, has fallen away from his
practical dominion, and the greater part has passed from even his
nominal supremacy. The power of Rome lives on only in those Eastern
lands into which she made her way when her power in the West was
assured by the weakening of the power of Carthage. She has lost the
fruits of the fights of Metaurus and of Zama, of the leaguer of New
Carthage and the leaguer of Syracuse; she keeps the fruits of the day
of Kynoskephalai and the day of Pydna, the day of Thermopylai and the
day of Magnêsia. The genius of Rome, banished from his elder seat by
the Tiber, is watching from his newer seat by the Bosporos till the
old home can be won back again.

The two ages which we have thus casually brought together, the age
in which the East was won for Rome and the age in which the West
fell away from Rome, supply, as has been already hinted, some most
instructive points of comparison and contrast. The two ages may be
compared and contrasted from two points of view, one as regards the
breaking up of the Roman power, the other as regards the formation of
the Teutonic powers which so largely took its place. We may compare
the way in which the Roman power was formed and the way in which
it fell in pieces. We may also compare the way in which the Roman
power was formed and the way in which the powers were formed which
took its place. We will begin with the former comparison, with the
analogy, as a political study, between the way in which the power of
Rome came together and the way in which it split asunder. As that
power emphatically was not made but grew, so, no less emphatically,
it was not abolished but died out. That is of course in those lands
where, as in Gaul and in the greater part of Spain, it can be said to
have ever died out. In any land that came under the power of Rome,
that power was established step by step; so in any land that fell
away from the power of Rome, that power vanished away step by step.
The intermediate state between complete independence and complete
subjection, the various stages of alliance and dependence, play a
great part alike in the work of welding together and in the work of
splitting asunder. Rome has again her allied and vassal kings, in
some cases even her allied and vassal commonwealths. They passed from
subjection to complete independence by the same path by which they
had passed from independence to complete subjection. But in such
cases it makes a wide difference in which direction men’s faces are
turned. The formal relation may be the same; the real position is
different. In the elder case alliance is a decent name for subjection
which the time has not yet come to press to the extreme point. In
the later case alliance is a decent name for independence which the
time has not yet come formally to acknowledge. Hierôn, Massinissa,
Eumenês, Prousias, were kings in alliance with Rome; so were Alaric,
Ataulf, Odowakar, perhaps Chlodowig himself. Two things mark the
difference between the ally who is marching towards subjection and
the ally who is marching towards perfect independence. The ally of
old dwells outside the acknowledged Roman dominions; his land is
destined to be one day a part of them, but it is not so as yet. If
he receives titles and honours from Rome, they are the titles of
kingship in his own realm. A consulship of Hierôn, an army of Roman
citizens or Italian allies marching under the command of Massinissa,
would have seemed strange indeed. The ally of the later day dwells
within the Roman dominion; he receives certain Roman lands by the
tenure of defending Roman lands generally against fresh invaders.
Already king of his own people, he adds to the titles of barbarian
kingship the titles of Roman civil or military office; he is consul,
patrician, _magister militum_. Above all, the ally of old, weaker
ally of a stronger power, never draws his sword against his mightier
ally, unless indeed, in some wild moment of hope or of despair, he
seeks to win back the independence which he finds that he has lost,
and thereby only hastens his subjection. The ally of the later day,
in very truth stronger ally of a weaker power, freely draws his sword
against the lord whom he professes to serve, whenever so to do seems
the readiest way to win from him new grants and honours. The contrast
is marked indeed; yet the analogy is clear also. Rome did not win her
provinces by suddenly annexing lands which were wholly independent;
she did not lose her provinces by having them suddenly torn away from
her substance to form at once some wholly separate power. In both
cases the same formally intermediate stage was gone through, the
stage of alliance, dependence, vassalage, whatever name we choose to
give to it. It was step by step that the world became Roman; it was
step by step that it ceased to be so.

And it is a striking thought that, as far as we can see, the two
processes, of absorption in the Roman body and of separation from
the Roman body, were actually going on at the same time. I have
hinted at this already. It is certain, and it is one of the facts in
all history which makes us most pause and think, that the work of
incorporation of Greek states into the Roman body which began beyond
Hadria in the later days of the third century before Christ and which
had begun long before in Italy and Sicily, was by no means over in
the fifth century after Christ. The history of Cherson alone shows
it. That distant and long-lived outpost of Greece and ally of Rome
cannot be looked on as fully passing from alliance into subjection
till the ninth century had run a good part of its course. The work
which began when Korkyra, Apollônia, and Epidamnos became Roman
allies was not ended till the Roman power was divided for ever, and
till a Frank Cæsar reigned in the West. The geographical position of
Cherson secured her a practical freedom; to bring her into bondage
would have needed an exertion of the full power of the Empire.
But the relation which Cherson could really keep was for ages the
formal relation of a crowd of cities whose liberties could be at
any moment trampled under foot by the nearest proconsul. When were
all these free cities, whose rights Trajan respected, each a little
San Marino with the Roman Empire surrounding it, formally annexed
to that Empire? Or were they ever formally annexed at all? Can any
man tell the last day of that Athenian commonwealth which numbered
Hadrian among its archons and Constantine among its generals? What
if the Senate and People of Athens still went on in their old home
after Honorius had striven to gather together at Arles something like
a Senate and People of Southern Gaul? Most likely there is no date
to be fixed in this and in a crowd of other cases. The old forms,
the old feelings, died out so gradually that it would be impossible
to say when the dependent commonwealth finally changed into the
municipal town. When Theodoric was putting out edicts for Goths and
Romans in Italy, Greek Senates and assemblies in Asia may still
have been passing decrees in ancient form. One thing is plain; when
Justinian shut up the University of Athens, the General, successor of
Periklês, who acted as its Chancellor, must have found the more part
of his duties slip away from him.

But if the fifth century was for the Roman power a time of dying
out or of splitting asunder, for the Teutonic settlers in the Roman
lands it was beyond all other ages the time of birth and growth.
And here comes in our other side of comparison and contrast. The
process of Roman conquest in the East, if it has very many points of
unlikeness to the process of Teutonic conquest in the West, has also
some points of likeness. In each case a less cultured people made a
political conquest of a people more advanced than themselves. And in
neither case did the conquest carry with it any great destruction or
displacement of the older inhabitants, or any sweeping away of their
laws, customs, or language. A new people came in and set up some
new laws and customs alongside of the old. Only in the Roman case we
can hardly say that a new people did come in. Many Romans dwelled,
for public or private ends, in Greece and Asia; some doubtless
even settled there; but there was not, even in Roman colonies like
Corinth, any real Roman settlement like the Teutonic settlements
in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. Still in both cases the conquered led
captive the conquerors. The Greek East received a certain Roman
infusion, but it remained Greek. The Roman West received a far
greater Teutonic infusion; but, on two sides at least, those of
religion and language, it remained Roman.

In other words, the Roman conquest of the Greek East, being
unaccompanied by any real settlement in the conquered lands, did not
lead to the growth of a new nation. The Greek nation, in the sense
in which we long ago defined it, the artificial Greek nation which
grew out of Greek colonization and Macedonian conquest, passed,
through the stages of dependence and subjection, to the citizenship
of Rome, such as the citizenship of Rome had then become. From that
day the Greek was entitled to the Roman name, and a time at last came
when Greek and Roman came to mean the same, when the Greek was the
only surviving political representative of the Roman name. But the
name Ῥωμαῖος on the lips of a Greek never expressed the same real
change which was expressed by the name _Romanus_ on the lips of a
Gaul. Its meaning was purely political. The Greek, heir of the most
perfect form of human speech, never cast aside that speech for what
he deemed the barbarous dialect of his conqueror; he did but admit a
crowd of Latin technical terms into his official language, witnesses
each of them that Greek had again supplanted Latin as the official
language of the Roman Empire of the East. The Gaul meanwhile could
not indeed exchange his Celtic forefathers for old patricians or
plebeians of the Roman hills; but in everything short of actual blood
he became as thoroughly Roman as if he had come of the stock of Fabii
or Licinii. He spoke the tongue, he adopted the ways, of Rome; long
after the thought of Roman nationality in any political sense had
passed away, when he had long learned to acquiesce in the dominion of
his Frankish conqueror, when Rome and what clave to her had become to
him a foreign power, the Frankish conqueror was still as much in his
eyes the barbarian and himself the Roman as when Chlodowig went forth
to battle with Syagrius.

We have said that it was the fifth century which beheld the first
germs of the nations of modern Europe. We ruled that, if modern
history must have a definite beginning, the most convenient beginning
for it is the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul in the year 407. Yet
the nations of modern Europe do not spring from the nations which
then crossed the Rhine, or from any intermixture between them and the
Romans into whose land they made their way. The nations which then
crossed the Rhine were the Vandals, Suevians, and Alans. Who were
the Alans, who play a great part in Spain for a moment and a small
part in Gaul for a somewhat longer time? Most likely they were not
Teutonic at all in their origin, but had been more or less Teutonized
by long contact with Teutonic nations. There may be a few drops of
Alan blood in the mixed nationalities of Gaul and Spain; but the Alan
assuredly forms no abiding or visible element in those lands; the
nation passes away from history before the fifth century is over.
Neither did their undoubtedly Teutonic comrades, Vandal and Suevian,
found any abiding settlements in Gaul, or contribute any visible
element to the nationality of France, Aquitaine, or Burgundy. In fact
none of these nations made any real settlements in Gaul; Gaul was to
them simply the high road to Spain. There they did settle, though the
Vandals soon forsook their settlement, and the Alans were soon rooted
out of theirs. The Suevian kept his ground for a far longer time; we
may, if we please, look on him as the Teutonic forefather of Leon,
while we look on the Goth as the Teutonic forefather of Castile.
Here we have touched one of the great national names of history; the
Goth, like the Frank, plays quite another part in Western Europe from
the Alan, the Suevian, and the Vandal. And yet he has not played the
same part as the Frank. Several lands in Europe have at one time or
another borne the name of _Gothia_--I trust none needs the warning
that they are to be looked for in Gaul and Spain, or far away in Crim
Tartary, not in the islands or on the mainland of the Baltic. But no
land has kept that name down to modern times. But two lands, rather
two fragments of one greater land, still keep the name of _Francia_,
and the Frankish name, with the natural changes on modern lips, has
become the name of one of the foremost of modern nations.

Now both Franks and Goths had passed into the Empire long before the
invasion of 407. One branch of the Franks, as we have already hinted,
was actually settled on Roman lands, and, as Roman subjects, they
did their best to withstand the great invasion. What then makes that
invasion so marked an epoch? It may be argued that the nations which
took a part in it are not those which play any great and abiding part
in European history--the Vandals, great for a season, are isolated,
and are great only for a season; the great and abiding part is played
by the nations which were in the Empire before they came. The answer
is that the invasion of 407 not only brought in new elements, but put
the existing elements into new relations to one another. Franks and
Goths put on a new character and begin a new life. The Burgundians
pass into Gaul, not as a road to Spain, but as a land in which to
find many homes. They press down to the south-eastern corner of the
land, while the Frank no longer keeps himself in his north-eastern
corner, while in the south-west the Goth is settled as for a while
the liegeman of Cæsar, and in the north-west a continental Britain
springs into being. Here in truth are some of the chiefest elements
of the modern world, and though none of them are among the nations
that crossed the Rhine in 407, yet the new position taken by all of
them is the direct consequence of that crossing.

In this way, in Gaul and Spain at least, the joint Vandal, Alan, and
Suevian invasion is the beginning of the formation of the modern
nations, though the invading nations themselves form no element in
the later life of Gaul and only a secondary element in the later life
of Spain. The later life of these lands, and that of Italy also, has
sprung of the settlement of Teutonic nations in a Roman land, and of
the mutual influences which Roman and Teuton have had on one another.
Roman and Teuton lived side by side, and out of their living side by
side has gradually sprung up a third thing different from either, a
thing which we cannot call either Roman or Teutonic, or more truly a
thing which we may call Roman and Teutonic and some other things as
well, according to the side of it which we look at. This third thing
is the Romance element in modern Europe, the Romance nations and
their Romance tongues. Their birth, perhaps rather the appearance of
their first germs, comes in the fifth century; we do not see them in
their fulness till ages afterwards; but it is then that the causes
out of which they sprang began to work. Unluckily it is hard to find
a land in which the elements of the fifth century have been allowed
to run their natural course undisturbed to this day. Italy had no
chance. Had not the system of Theodoric been violently broken up,
first by the Imperial reconquest, then by the Lombard invasion, Italy
might have supplied the best of all studies of the way in which a
Romance people with a Romance speech might grow up on the very soil
of Rome herself. Spain supplied a more hopeful field; the position
of the country hindered later Teutonic settlements; but the Saracen
conqueror came before West-Goth and Roman had been thoroughly fused
into one people. Hence came the distinctive character of Spanish
history, the history of a people whose national life was formed by
the need laid upon them of daily working out the Eternal Question
in its sternest shape. Northern Gaul, unlike Spain and Italy, lay
open to continued reinforcements of the Teutonic element within it.
_Francia_ was an unbroken land lying far away on both sides of the
Rhine, and the division into _Austria_ and _Neustria_ forestalls the
later division into _Francia Teutonica_ and _Francia Latina_. The
rise to power of the Austrasian Mayors was almost as much a Teutonic
conquest of a Latin land as had been the first conquest by Chlodowig,
and the settlement of the Normans in the tenth century brought in
another Teutonic element in one part of the land. France then, in
the narrower sense of that name, differs from Spain and Italy in
the presence of these later Teutonic elements; but in Aquitaine and
Provence they had little force; it is there, rather than anywhere
else, that the normal result of the movements of the fifth century
may be best studied. In the modern world of all, where those
South-Gaulish lands have helped to make up the great nation of modern
France, it is undoubtedly in that French nation that we can best
study the threefold elements of a Romance people. The præ-Roman, the
Roman, the Teutonic, elements are all there; the whole, as a whole,
is none of the three, but the result of their fusion; but the whole,
looked at from special sides only, may well be called by any name of
the three. The blood must be mainly Celtic--in the south Iberian and
Ligurian--but with some Roman and some Teutonic infusion. The speech
is Latin, but with a larger Teutonic infusion than would be thought
at first sight. The political history is that of a Teutonic kingdom,
but a kingdom modified by planting its Teutonic kingship among the
Latin-speaking folk of an originally Celtic land. The elements are
fused into a whole; yet they still stand side by side; we cannot say
that the Frank assimilated the Roman or that the Roman assimilated
the Frank. The Frank learned the speech of the Roman; but in
learning it he modified it, and he gave it his own name. The modern
Frenchman is neither Roman nor Frank; he is rather the outcome of the
settlement of the two in a land in which elements earlier than either
have not been without their influence on both.

The mention of the earlier elements in Gaul, elements earlier than
either Roman or Teuton, suggests yet another analogy between the
age in which the Roman power was formed and the age in which it was
broken in pieces. The Roman was so far from displacing the Greek
tongue or Greek life, wherever he found them really established,
that he became in some sort, not only their disciple, but their
missionary. Wherever the Roman went, he carried some measure of
Greek influences with him. The Roman conquest of Asia continued
that work of hellenizing Asia which the Macedonian conquest had
begun. It did much to root up elements older than Greek; it made the
solid Asiatic peninsula, the special Romania of later times, into
a land where in later times the Turk has come in on his errand of
destruction, but where all that he has spared is still Greek. As
the Roman did this work in the East, so the Teuton did a kindred
work in the West; as the Roman everywhere carried Greece with him,
so the Teuton everywhere carried Rome with him; his coming gave
the finishing stroke to the rooting out of all elements older than
the Roman conquest. Here and there old tongues and old beliefs had
lingered till his coming; but for them he had not even those feeble
traces of reverence which may have still lived on in the mind of a
Roman of Gaul. He gladly learned the tongue of the Roman; he never
learned the tongue of the Celt or the Iberian; he gladly bowed to the
God whom Rome had learned to worship; nothing drew him either to the
elder gods of Rome or to the gods elder still who were worshipped
before the Roman came. In two corners only, special circumstances,
taking the shape of a distinct reaction, allowed the elder races
and tongues to put on a new life. The Gascon north of the Pyrenees
and the Briton south of the Channel rose again, when elsewhere all
kindred vestiges were dying out, to form each one a folk which has
lived on to our own day as a survival of days, not only before
Chlodowig and Ataulf, but before Gaius Julius and Gaius Sextius.

So grew up the new nations in the Western lands of Rome, the fruit
in some sort, we may say, of the union of Gothia and Romania.
But there were other nations which did not spring of that union,
nations which kept their untouched Teutonic being, nations which
still dwelled beyond the Empire, which within some small parts of
the Empire settled in another sort from the Goth and the Burgundian
nations. So it was in the island which we won, not from the Roman but
from the Briton; so it was in the lands by Rhine and Danube, where
our kinsfolk conquered almost in the same sort as we did. Yet even
on lands and nations like these the influence of Rome was deep and
abiding. Step by step they embraced the faith of Rome; and, without
casting away their own tongues, they adopted the tongue of Rome
as the tongue of learning and religion. So it was in Germany and
Scandinavia; so it was in all the lands whose religion and culture
came from Germany;--with the Slaves of the North-West who came within
the world of the Western Cæsar and the Western Pontiff, even with
the intruding Magyar whose coming split asunder the great Slavonic
mass, and left the Pole and the Wend to look to the elder Rome,
while the Serb and the Russian looked to the younger. But the great
conquest--only which side was the conqueror?--was nearer home. It
was another partnership between Gothia and Romania, though of quite
another kind from that which was meant to come of the bride-ale of
Narbonne, when Rome and Germany fused together their political being,
and the Western Empire of Rome became the Holy Roman Empire of the
German Nation.

       *       *       *       *       *

In our general survey of the fifth century in the West, we have
passed but lightly over the most striking event of its earlier
years, the taking of the Roman city by the Goth. Before the century
was out, Rome had become used to capture and plunder. Gaiseric and
Ricimer had harried her more fiercely than ever Alaric had done. As
an event, as an incident, none in the whole history of the world
was ever fitted to make a deeper impression on men’s minds than the
first Teutonic capture of Rome. For the purposes of the preacher
and the moralist it was all that the preachers and moralists of the
time painted it. But on the actual course of events it had little
effect. And why? Because the world had so largely become Rome that
the momentary woes of the city which had once alone been Rome were
of comparatively little moment. The invasion of Italy by Alaric
led indirectly to those invasions of Gaul and Spain which laid the
foundations of the modern world; but his actual sack of Rome had no
effect on the busy series of revolutions which followed on those
invasions. So it was with that other event of the later half of the
century in which so many have so strangely seen the end of the Roman
Empire, the boundary line between ancient and modern history. It was
doubtless an impressive fact, we see in the annals of the time that
it was an impressive fact, when Emperors ceased to reign either at
Rome or at Ravenna. But as the news that the Roman Empire had come
to an end would have sounded very strange at Constantinople, so it
would have sounded no less strange at Soissons or at Salona. It
did not greatly touch the Roman realm of Syagrius in northern Gaul
that Italy had acknowledged Zeno as sole Emperor, and that he was
represented in the Italian diocese by the patrician Odowakar. That
those decent formalities veiled a revolution by which the reigning
Emperor had been set aside by a chief of barbarian mercenaries was
nothing new or wonderful. The only difference between the revolution
of 476 and a crowd of earlier revolutions was that Odowakar found
that it suited his purpose to acknowledge the nominal superiority of
an absent sovereign rather than to reign in the name of a present
puppet of his own creation. Presently it was found convenient at
Constantinople to brand the patrician as a tyrant, and to grant a new
commission to another Teutonic leader to displace him and to rule in
his stead. The personal greatness of Theodoric overshadowed Emperor
and Empire; from his palace at Ravenna, by one title or another, by
direct dominion, as guardian, as elder kinsman, as representative of
the Roman power, as head by natural selection of the whole Teutonic
world, he ruled over all the western lands save one; and even to
the conquering Frank he could say, Thus far shalt thou come and no
further. In true majesty such a position was more than Imperial;
moreover there was nothing in the rule of Theodoric which touched
the Roman life of Italy. What might have happened if the East-Gothic
power in Italy had been as lasting as the Frankish power in Gaul, or
even as the West-Gothic power in Spain, it is vain to guess. As far
as we can see, it was the very greatness of Theodoric which kept his
power from being lasting. Like so many other of the very greatest of
men, he set on foot a system which he himself could work, but which
none but himself could work. He sought to set up a kingdom of Goths
and Romans, under which the two nations should live side by side,
distinct but friendly, each keeping its own law and doing its own
work. And for one life-time the thing was done. Theodoric could keep
the whole fabric of Roman life untouched, with the Goth standing
by as an armed protector. He could, as he said, leave to the Roman
consul the honours of government and take for the Gothic king only
the toils. Smaller men neither could nor would do this, and even a
succession of Theodorics could hardly have kept on for generations
the peculiar relations between Goths and Romans which he established.
His rule was the best, as that of the Franks was about the worst,
to be found in Roman and Teutonic Europe in his day. Still fusion
between Roman and Teuton was the very essence of Frankish rule; under
the system of Theodoric no direct step towards fusion could be taken.
It was the necessary result of his position that he gave Italy one
generation of peace and prosperity such as has no fellow for ages on
either side of it, but that, when he was gone, a fabric which had no
foundation but his personal qualities broke down with a crash. Then
came the two events of the sixth century at which we have already
glanced. Italy was wasted by a long and bloody war, which in the end
swept the East-Gothic people from the earth, and for a moment left
the Roman Augustus undisputed master of every corner of the Italian
peninsula. Then, before the land had rested from the long struggle,
came another Teutonic invasion, the invasion of a people far less
touched by Roman teaching than the Goths had been. The Lombards,
establishing their rule and their name in the two ends of Italy,
never won the whole of Italy. They never reigned in Rome; it was
only in the last days of their power that they reigned in Ravenna.
Throughout the land, if there was a bit of Lombardy here, there was
a bit of untouched Romania there, and if the Roman Terminus often
fell back, he also sometimes went forward. Even after the Lombard
had yielded to the Frank, after the Frank had taken on himself the
titles and mission of the Roman, a large part of Southern Italy, the
once Greek land, with the old Greek life which had never wholly died
out kept up and strengthened, acknowledged the lordship, not of the
German-speaking Augustus of the Old Rome, but of the Greek-speaking
Augustus of the New.

Of the Empire itself, its unions, its divisions, the general
position which it kept in the world, I shall speak in another
lecture. My present subject is the influence of Rome on the new
nations which in the course of the fifth century found themselves
homes within her borders. And that practically means her influence
on the Teutonic nations of the Western European mainland. It is true
that the greatest Teutonic migration of all, the long marches of
the Goths, Eastern and Western, began in the East. While Vandals,
Burgundians, Franks, came in by way of Rhine, the Goths came in by
way of Danube. Their course in the Danubian lands forms one of the
most striking pieces of the history of the fourth century and one
of the most confused pieces of the history of the fifth. But that
history of the Goths which really affected the world, the history
both of the West-Goths of Alaric and of the East-Goths of Theodoric,
was wrought in the West. The Western Goths, as their name implies,
came before the Eastern and found homes further to the West. And
after the withdrawal of Theodoric and the East-Goths from the Eastern
provinces, those provinces which still remained under the immediate
rule of the Emperors at the New Rome, all part of the first Teutonic
invaders in the history of the Eastern peninsula may be said to come
to an end. In that peninsula they had been hardly more than invaders;
they had formed no important abiding settlement. For them the Eastern
lands were mainly a road to Italy and Spain and Gaul. The part which
the Teutons played in the West was to be played in the East, so far
as it was to be played at all, by quite another branch of the Aryan
stock.

I have often had to point out the analogy between the position of
the Teutonic settlers in the West and that of the Slavonic settlers
in the East. The East, mainly the South-East, of Europe is the true
field for Slavonic growth. Of the Slaves of the North-West we have
already spoken a word or two, as coming within the range of the
dominion and the creed of the Western Rome. The North-Western Slaves
have been largely exterminated or assimilated by Teutonic conquerors;
even those who escaped this lot have passed, by their union with
the Latin Church, into the general group of the nations of Western
Europe. The historic calling of the Slavonic nations lies in the
East, within the range of the Eastern Empire and the Eastern Church.
There we may make our comparison between their position towards that
side of the Roman world and the position of the Teutons towards its
Western side. The analogy between the two is real and strong; but
it is an analogy which presents almost as many points of contrast
as of likeness. In the phrase that I have so often had to use, the
Slaves were to the Eastern lands of Rome, as the Teutons were to the
Western, at once conquerors and disciples. But they were neither
conquerors nor disciples in exactly the same sense. The difference
largely turned on the different positions of the Old and the New
Rome. In the West, the more deeply Roman influences took root, the
less did the city of Rome show itself as a seat of actual rule,
till the days came when it became the seat of an œcumenical rule of
another kind. From the third century to the nineteenth, Rome never
was the abiding dwelling-place of Emperors; wherever they dwelled,
they were, as far as the local Rome was concerned, non-resident.
The influence of Rome, the use of the Roman language, had nothing
to do with any political boundary; it was only here and there, in
the Exarchate and in the Imperial possessions in Spain, that there
was any distinct geographical frontier between Roman and Teutonic
rule. The possession of the Roman city did not necessarily carry with
it any special dominion in other Roman lands, and a great dominion
in other Roman lands might be won without its possession. With the
Eastern Rome it was far otherwise; there the city was the life and
soul and centre of all. The too discerning eye of its founder had
planted his New Rome at the junction of two worlds, to prolong the
being of successive powers which, save for its possession, might
sooner have passed away. Constantinople was never without an Emperor
dwelling within its walls, and holding a greater or less extent of
territory in fact as well as in name. His boundaries might fluctuate;
the position of this or that land might fluctuate. In the process
of constant warfare along a long and ill-defined boundary, this or
that land or city might sometimes be under the undisputed authority
of the Emperor; it might sometimes be absolutely cut off from the
Empire and form part of a barbarian kingdom; it might sometimes be
in the intermediate state of a dependency over which the Emperor
held an outward superiority which he could enforce or not according
to circumstances. All this has its like in the West; but there is
nothing in the West like the firm abiding of the Imperial power at
Constantinople. Whatever was the extent or the nature of the dominion
of the Eastern Emperor, the Eastern Rome was its local centre, the
spot to which every corner of that dominion looked as its head. No
Slavonic host harried the Eastern Rome as so many Teutonic hosts
harried the Western. No king of a Slavonic people received an
Imperial crown in Saint Sophia, as so many kings of a Teutonic people
received an Imperial crown in Saint Peter’s. The utmost that such a
king could do was to set up a Tzarigrad of his own, to wear a crown
which he loved to call Imperial at Ochrida or at Skoupi. The Slave
became in many things a disciple of the Eastern Rome, but in some
things he was perhaps an imitator rather than a disciple. He always
remained an outsider, in a way in which the Teuton did not remain in
the West. In religious worship, above all, he never adopted either
of the tongues of the Empire; he could become a disciple without
becoming a subject. No new speech, no new nationality, arose in
the East out of a mixture of Slavonic and Roman or Greek elements,
answering to the formation of the Romance tongues and nations of the
West. One cause, as we shall hereafter see, was that the Eastern
Rome spoke with two tongues, while the Western Rome spoke with one
only. There is a Romance nation in the East, but the Slave was not
one of its component elements; the Slavonic invasion in short did
not a little to hinder its growth. On many of these points I may
have to speak again. The main business of the present lecture lies
in the West, in the Western lands of the European mainland. Yet we
must not forget that the birth of our own nation, the settlement of
our forefathers in our second home, came within the bounds of the
same century which saw Burgundian, Gothic, and Frankish kingdoms
arise in Gaul. But we, in our island home, our _alter orbis_, stood
largely aloof from the revolutions of the mainland. Our own tale must
be told separately, and it cannot be told in all its fulness till
the revolutions of the mainland are fully understood. To-day we have
had to deal with the settlements of our kinsfolk in the continental
provinces of the West. At the East we have simply glanced. We shall
have to speak of it more fully when we come to speak of the causes
which split East and West apart for ever.



LECTURE IV.

THE DIVIDED EMPIRE.


The most renowned of my predecessors in this chair, in planning that
History of Rome which unhappily remained a fragment, but which gave
to the world in its last finished volume the very perfection of
historical narrative, designed to carry on his work to the coronation
of Charles the Great. The reading and thought of forty years have
ever more and more convinced me of the wisdom of Arnold’s choice. The
year 800 was not, any more than the year 476, the end of the Roman
Empire; it is not, any more than the year 476, a boundary between
“Ancient” and “Modern” History. But it is one of the most marked
turning-points in the history of the Empire and of the world, a
turning-point of immeasureably greater moment than the consulship of
Basiliscus and Armatus. The election of the first Charles changed the
face of the world far more than the deposition of the last Romulus.
Of a History of Rome such as Arnold planned, it was, as the wise
instinct of Arnold saw, the fitting ending. The election of Charles
did, in outward show, restore the Old Rome to her old position. She
again became, if not the dwelling-place, at least the crowning-place,
of Emperors. In truth the Old Rome had never before beheld the
ancient Hebrew rite which, from the fifth century onwards, had become
familiar in the New. For a thousand years longer the titles of her
Empire went on; for seven hundred years longer they could be won
only before the altar of the Vatican basilica. For full five hundred
years longer the Roman Empire of the West was, as such, a living
thing, a thing that influenced the minds and acts of men, a mighty
fact, a still mightier theory. But in the West the Emperor of the
Romans had less and less to do with the Old Rome. To his Imperial
capital he gradually became a stranger, and his capital became a
city of strangers to him. In short, the Roman power in the West
altogether passed away, not only from the Roman city, but from the
artificial Roman nation. When Rome again asserted her right to choose
her sovereign, she chose, she could not fail to choose, a man who
was not Roman even by adoption. She chose the Frankish king. Pippin
had been Patrician; so had Ricimer; so had Odowakar. But the son of
Pippin bore a loftier style. The long-abiding tradition was broken
through; a barbarian received the diadem; the Roman Pontiff spoke
the words, and the Roman people echoed them--“Karolo Augusto, a Deo
coronato, magno et pacifico Romanorum Imperatori, vita et victoria.”
The German was at last Augustus. No greater witness could there be
to the moral conquest which each race had won over the other. The
Empire now in form received its greatest territorial enlargement.
Gaul was won back and Germany was added. Wherever the Frankish king
had before ruled as king, he now ruled as Emperor. Terminus advanced
to the Elbe and the Eider; he was ready to advance to the Oder and
the Vistula, or, if need should be, to the world’s end. All unreal,
all nominal, some objector will cry; an advance, not of Rome, but of
Germany, an advance, not of the Roman Augustus, but of the Frankish
king. And truly the Empire of Charles, much more the Empire of the
Henries and Fredericks, was unreal in this, that it was assuredly
a very different thing from the Empire of Trajan or of Diocletian.
It was assuredly not Roman in the sense in which the Empire even
of Theodosius was Roman. But here lies the greatest proof of the
influence of Rome, of her magic power over the minds of men, that a
power which had practically ceased to be Roman, should still be Roman
in men’s eyes, and, as Roman, should command a reverence, a devotion,
a bowing down as it were of the whole soul, which could be called
forth by no other name. A name may have lost its first meaning; but,
as long as men will fight and die for the name, the name is a fact
indeed.

The act of 800, it must always be borne in mind, was in one sense
the repetition, in another sense the undoing, of the act of 476; but
it was in no case the revival of the line of Emperors which came to
an end in 476. Charles, Emperor of the Romans, was not the successor
after a long interval either of Romulus Augustulus or of Julius
Nepos; he was the immediate successor of Constantine the Sixth.
The Emperors had lost all practical authority in Rome earlier in
the century; their power had passed to the Frank. Charles Augustus
received no powers which he had not already exercised as Patrician;
only hitherto the titles of sovereignty had been left to the Emperor
beyond the sea. The name now went with the reality; the titles and
badges of Empire were transferred to the new Emperor reigning at
Rome, at least crowned and anointed at Rome. There was no need to
depose any reigning sovereign. Rome had acknowledged Constantine;
she refused to acknowledge Eirênê; the Empire could not be held by a
woman, least of all by a woman who had deposed and blinded her own
son. There was again an interregnum, such as had followed the death
of Romulus and the death of Aurelian; that interregnum was ended by
the election of Charles. In Western theory no doubt, Charles himself,
and each of his successors, was elected to the sovereignty of the
whole Empire; he was to reign, if he could, over the New Rome as
well as over the Old. In Eastern theory no doubt the election and
coronation were null and void; the Emperor anointed in Saint Sophia
had a right which none could take away to reign over the Old Rome as
well as over the New. Each Emperor in short asserted himself to be
the one true Emperor and the other to be an impostor or a tyrant. The
dispute was for some centuries stirred up afresh from time to time at
some moment favourable for its discussion. To men zealous for Eastern
rights the Western claimant was a mere Ἀλαμανῶν ῥήξ; to men zealous
for Western rights the Eastern claimant was nothing loftier than
“Rex Græciæ.” The most curious piece of discussion on the subject
is the memorable controversy, waged by or invented for Basil of the
East and Lewis of the West, while the grounds of the dispute were
still fresh. It was a moment of pride for Charles the Great himself
when Nikêphoros waived his claim to universal rule, when he admitted
the Frankish king as his equal and bade his ambassadors adore him as
_Imperator_ and βασιλεύς. A conflict of claims like this, in which
each of the two greatest princes of Christendom gave himself out to
be the one head of Christendom, might have been expected to lead to
something more than constant disputes and jealousies; it might have
been expected to lead to constant wars. As a matter of fact, formal
wars between the two Empires were not common; there was little to
gain by them on either side. But rivalry and ill-feeling went on
between the princes of the West and of the East, between the men of
the West and of the East, to the great damage of Christendom in more
than one hour of need.

The truest view of the event of 800 is that the existing Empire was
split asunder, and that the western fragment, that which acknowledged
the Frankish king as its Emperor, was in form enlarged by the
addition of the territories of the Frankish king. The Empire was now
really split asunder; it was split asunder between two rivals, each
of whom held himself to be the one lawful representative of their
common predecessors. This state of things must not be confounded with
the state of things in the fifth century. The Empire was now divided
in quite another way from that in which it had been divided between
the sons of Theodosius. The division between the sons of Theodosius
did not differ in form from the division between the sons of
Constantine or the earlier division between Diocletian and Maximian.
The division between Arcadius and Honorius, and the Emperors who
followed them in the fifth century, was a division by consent; the
administration of a single Empire was divided, as it had often been
before, between two Imperial colleagues. But now it was divided
between two rival potentates, each of whom was in theory bound to
deny the rights of the other. Then the West was often willing to
accept the prince named by the Emperor who reigned over the East;
now assuredly no prince named by the lord of Constantinople, the
“rex Græciæ,” would have been admitted to royal and imperial unction
at Aachen, at Milan, and at Rome. But mark further that the Western
division, the Western Empire, was not only parted from the Eastern,
but was enlarged by the addition of new territories, over a great
part of which no Emperor had ever reigned before. If Charles had kept
his Frankish and Lombard kingdoms distinct from his Roman Empire,
the last would have consisted only of Rome and Ravenna and the lands
about those cities. No one so well deserved the somewhat grotesque
title of his later successors, “zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs,”
as the first Emperor who could have understood his own description
in any Teutonic tongue. Charles, as I said earlier in these
lectures, annexed the lands which Drusus and Germanicus had failed
to annex. But to what did he annex them? Assuredly to something very
different from the Empire of the first Augustus, to something very
different from that western half of the Empire of Augustus which
had been reigned over by Maximian and Valentinian. And the effect
of the annexation was widely different from what it would have been
if it had been made either by Drusus or by Valentinian. The main
difference lies in this, that whatever was annexed to the Empire at
either of the earlier times was forthwith added to the artificial
Roman nation that was growing up, while the inclusion of the whole
dominions of Charles within the Empire, though it still carried with
it an extension of Roman influences, in no way carried with it any
extension of an artificial Roman nation. The new subjects of the
Roman Empire, the inhabitants of Gaul and Germany, assuredly did not
feel that they had become Romans. The election of Charles to the
Empire, the annexation of all his dominions to the Empire, did far
more to make the Empire German than it did to make Germany Roman.
The Roman style of the Empire is still very much more than a name;
its Roman traditions are still very much more than mere words; it
is still by its abiding Roman character that it keeps its influence
over the minds of men. But it is now altogether divorced from any
practical connexion with the Roman city and with the Roman nation. It
was nothing new that Emperors should be made elsewhere than in Rome;
that discovery was made before the first century of the Empire ended.
But the Emperors so made were Romans, Roman in speech, Roman at one
stage by real citizenship, at another by artificial nationality. It
was something new that Rome should be the crowning-place, and only
the crowning-place, of Emperors who were Roman in no sense but that
of being Roman Emperors. The Emperor was _Romanorum Imperator_ to the
last; but who were the _Romani_? Were they the inhabitants of the
Empire as a body? The mass of them would assuredly have disclaimed
the Roman name. Or had the name fallen back on its elder and narrower
senses in which it meant only the people of the Roman city? But in
Rome itself the authority of the Roman Emperor passed away more
thoroughly and more formally than elsewhere. The _Imperator_ and
the _Pontifex Maximus_ had long ceased to be the same, and in Rome
the _Pontifex Maximus_ of the new faith had become the true local
sovereign. For ages the _Imperator_ came to Rome only to become
_Imperator_, and then to go away. At last, when the succession begun
by Charles was drawing near its thousandth year, an _Imperator
electus_ came to Rome, and went away without winning the right to
cast aside his qualifying adjective.

The truest description of the Western Empire during the thousand
years from the first Charles to the last Francis is that which
sounds so like a contradiction, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation.” It remained by the strictest continuity a Roman Empire;
once accept the position of the Western Emperors as against the
Eastern, and no flaw can be found in the whole succession. But the
Roman Empire had become a possession of the German nation; German
electors chose a German king, and the German king had a right to
receive his consecration as Roman Emperor without any further
questions being asked.

  “Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum,
  Hostibus expulsis, ad nos justissimus ordo
  Transtulit imperium, Romani gloria regni
  Nos penes est: quemcumque sibi Germania regem
  Præficit, hunc dives submisso vertice Roma
  Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordine Rhenus.”

An older form of the same idea is found in the phrase which spoke
of the translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks.
Translated to the Franks, the Empire, as concerns the West, assuredly
was; and, on the Western theory, it may in a sense be said to be
translated from the Greeks. A line of Emperors whose native speech
was German succeeded, in Western ideas, a line of Emperors whose
native speech was Greek. Yet the phrase will not stand every test.
The words “Greek” and “Frank,” as used in the formula, do not exactly
answer to one another. A man of the East, if he could have brought
himself to allow that the Empire had been translated at all from his
own side of Hadria, would have said that the formula should rather
speak of a translation of the Empire from the Romans to the Franks.
But no one in the West would have thought of saying that the Empire
was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. We have just heard
the Western Empire called, with national pride, a Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation. But no national pride could have been called
up by speaking of the Eastern Empire as a Holy Roman Empire of the
Greek nation. For “German” was a national name in which the men of
the Western Empire gloried; “Greek” was a name which no man of the
Eastern Empire admitted to belong to him. It is perfectly true that
the two Empires did in the end become, the one a German, the other a
Greek state. But they became German and Greek in different senses and
by different processes. We see at once that the Western Empire became
German through the election of a German king to its crown. It seems
ridiculous to speak, even for the sake of pointing the contrast, of
the Eastern Empire becoming Greek by the election of a Greek king
to its crown. Something like that might happen in the nineteenth
century; it could not possibly happen in the ninth. We may here
bring in the analogy and the contrast of which I spoke at the end
of our last lecture. The nearest analogy to be found in the East to
the Empire of Charles the Frank would have been if Bulgarian Simeon
or Servian Stephen had been crowned Emperor of the Romans in Saint
Sophia and had from that moment reigned over Bulgaria or Servia in
his character of Emperor of the Romans. But the nearest approach to
this was when the Tzar Simeon and the Tzar Stephen took an Imperial
style without entering the walls of the Tzarigrad. That such was the
nearest approach in the East to the event of the year 800 is the most
marked point of difference between the positions of the Teuton in
the West and the Slave in the East. One main reason why it was the
nearest approach lies in the different positions held by the Old and
the New Rome in the two Empires. For another main reason we must look
a little further.

I said a few minutes back that a man in the East might perhaps have
said that the Empire was translated to the Franks from the Romans,
but that no man in the West would ever have said that the Empire
was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. I said also in my
last lecture that one great cause of the different position held by
the Teutons in the West and by the Slaves in the East was that the
Eastern Empire spoke with two tongues, while the Western Empire spoke
with one tongue only. The cause of that difference has to be sought
for in far earlier stages of our subject; it is the continuation of
the difference which I pointed out long ago between the position of
Rome in the East and in the West; the difference that, while in both
alike Rome was a ruler, in the West she was also a teacher, while
in the East she was herself a learner. In the West Latin displaced
the native languages. We may say that no Roman ever learned Celtic
or Iberian. If any Roman ever did, it could have been only for some
immediate practical purpose. But in the East Latin never displaced
Greek; it was not likely to displace, there was no wish that it
should displace, a tongue which every educated Roman learned as a
matter of course. The tendency was rather the other way. At one
stage, as I pointed out in another set of lectures, Greek went far
to displace Latin as a literary tongue even in Rome; the later
Latin writers, like Ammianus and Claudian, mark in truth a Latin
reaction against Greek influences. In the Greek East Greek lived
on and flourished; Latin was simply set up by its side for certain
purposes. The Roman Empire of course, whether in East or West, knew
no official tongue but Latin. Latin therefore remained for ages the
tongue of government and warfare in the Roman East, while Greek was
the language of ordinary speech, of literature, and of religion. That
is to say, the position which belonged to Latin alone in the West
was in the East divided between Latin and Greek. It was impossible
therefore that either of those tongues should make the same way
among other nations which Latin, with its undivided supremacy, made
in the West. In those parts of Eastern Europe where Greek had not
already established itself, the phænomena of Western Europe showed
themselves. In inland Thrace and Mœsia, just as in Gaul and Spain, a
Romance speech did spring up, and in the wilder lands of Illyricum,
the Skipetar, the modern Albanian, still kept his own speech, like
the Basque and the Breton of the West. Thus to the invading Teuton,
the culture of the Empire presented itself only in a single shape,
a Latin shape, while the invading Slave, if he wished to adopt
the culture of the Empire, must have been puzzled by the twofold
shape, Greek and Latin, in which it stood before him. It was an
almost necessary consequence that neither element ever had the same
influence on the Slavonic conquerors of the East which the single
Latin element had on the Teutonic conquerors of the West.

I have said that the Roman Empire of the West became by degrees a
German power, and that the Roman Empire of the East became by degrees
a Greek power. But I have said also that they became so in different
ways. We have seen that the Western Empire became German by the
process of choosing German kings to its Emperors, and by extending
the name of Roman Empire over their German dominions. The Eastern
Empire became Greek in quite another way. There was no transfer of
Roman power to Greek princes, no extension of the Roman name over
Greek lands. Either process might have happened with Slavonic princes
and Slavonic lands; neither could happen with Greek princes or
Greek lands, for the simple reason that Greek princes and lands, as
distinguished from Roman, were not in being. In the Romania of the
East, in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, Greek and Roman meant the
same thing. We have spoken of an artificial Greek nation and of an
artificial Roman nation; in the Eastern Romania they were the same
thing. Of the two tongues of the East-Roman world, the tongue which
was native to the soil proved the stronger. Latin gradually died out
even in its own range; it died out, that is, as a separate speech,
though not till it had poured a vast infusion of Latin words into
the official Greek vocabulary. Greek became the one language of the
Roman Empire of the East; as in the West the Romance languages grew
up, while Latin long abode beside them as an official, a literary,
and a religious speech, so in the East men spoke a more modern form
of the Greek tongue, while its older shape went on as the official,
the literary, and the religious speech. But down to the coming of the
Ottoman, nay down to the movement of our own century which in some
lands has thrown off his yoke, the Roman name lived on. What name in
short should supplant it? The name of _Hellên_ had passed away; it
had become synonymous with _pagan_. The Greek name had never been
used in the Hellenic lands; it was the name by which the Hellênes
were known in the West, exactly as the _Deutschen_ and the _Cymry_
are known among other nations by other names than those by which they
call themselves. In truth the people whom the Latins called _Græci_
called themselves at one stage Ἕλληνες and at another Ῥωμαῖοι. The
Roman name lived on, and well it might; there was nothing to change
it. While the Western part of the Empire was first united to the
Eastern and then separated from it, while it was separated from it to
pass to one who was first Patrician of the Romans and then Emperor
of the Romans, but who would hardly have called himself personally a
Roman, the Eastern lands of Rome were ruled in unbroken succession
by princes following one another in the same Imperial seat, any
one of whom would have been amazed indeed if his right to the Roman
name had been disputed. Prince and people alike clave to that name
and knew no other; and Romans they were, not in the same sense as
the first settlers on the Palatine, not even in the same sense as
the Volscian Cicero and the Spaniard Trajan; but in the sense in
which their forefathers had become Romans by the edict of Antoninus.
They were Romans by the same right as Theodosius when he came as a
second Trajan from Spain, as Jovius himself when he came from the
land that should be Tzernagora. It would have been hard to find a
Roman pedigree for Justinian; but neither would it have been easy to
find one for Aurelian. The Greek--not the pure Hellên of old but the
Greek of the artificial nation formed by Macedonian conquest--had the
same right to the Roman name which the Gaul had; so to be sure had
the Syrian and the Egyptian. But then the Syrian and the Egyptian
could hardly be said to accept the gift; under the guise of national
creeds, creeds that were deemed heretical by the orthodoxy of either
Rome, they clave to an elder national being which was neither Greek
nor Roman, and they fell away from their Roman allegiance to become
not wholly unwilling subjects of the Saracen. The very losses of the
Empire, the cutting off of its Eastern provinces, helped, not indeed
to make the Empire more Roman, but to make Roman and Greek more
thoroughly words of the same meaning within its Eastern provinces.
In the course of the seventh century, the Oriental lands of Syria
and Egypt, the Latin lands of Spain and Africa, were finally torn
away from the Empire. Part of Latin Italy had already passed to the
Lombard; the rest now followed it to form the kernel of the new
Roman Empire of the West. The result of all this was that, from
Sicily to Tauros, the subjects left to the Empire, the Romans of the
East, were almost wholly men of Greek speech and of what we have
called artificial Greek nationality. Within the Eastern Empire the
artificial Greek nation and the artificial Roman nation seemed to
have become the same thing. Every Greek was a Roman; it seemed as
if every Roman was a Greek. It was not wholly so; even within the
Eastern peninsula the Albanian and the Rouman nationalities were
still to show themselves. But to all appearance the Roman lands of
the East were as purely Greek-speaking lands as the Roman lands of
the West were Latin-speaking lands. If the Western Empire became
German, it was by choosing a German king and in some sort adopting
his German subjects. If the Eastern Empire became Greek, it was
because the un-Greek parts were lopped off from it. To this process
the finishing stroke was put by the event of 800. Latin Italy then
parted, even in name, from its allegiance to the Eastern Rome. The
prince who reigned at Constantinople was by the truest political
succession Emperor of the Romans; but the Romans who were left for
him to rule over were well nigh wholly Greek.

In this way therefore, and largely by virtue of the same act, the
Eastern Empire became Greek, while the Western Empire became German.
The one became Greek through one of its old elements obtaining an
exclusive predominance; the other became German by bringing in an
element altogether new. But in becoming severally German and Greek,
neither ceased to be Roman. The Roman spirit might die out; but the
Roman succession went on; the Roman tradition was never broken. In
the East the tie to the Roman past was never snapped; if it passed
away, it was because the Romans of the East seemed almost to forget
that there had ever been any Romans but themselves or any Rome but
their own. In the West, on the other hand, the tie to the Roman
past was never formally snapped any more than in the East; but it
passed away because it was overshadowed and stifled by the un-Roman
institutions that grew up by the side of it. The Augustus of the East
was Emperor of the Romans and nothing more; it was strange that the
diadem of Jovius should be conferred by a Christian unction, but what
the Christian unction of the East did confer was the diadem of Jovius
and none other. The Augustus of the West was also King of Germany,
of Italy, and of Burgundy; Aachen, Milan, Arles, had their share in
making him as well as the Eternal City. Take away the German, the
Italian, and the Burgundian realms, and it might be hard to find on
the map the lands over which Cæsar ruled purely in his character of
Cæsar. Again, in the East, wherever the Emperor reigned at all, he
truly reigned. Did the Empire reach once more from Ister to Orontes,
from Ararat to Ætna? Was it shut up within a corner of Thrace and a
fragment of the coast of Asia? In either case, be the Empire great
or small, be its sovereign the mighty Macedonian or the trembling
Palaiologos, wherever he was sovereign at all, he was βασιλεύς and
αὐτοκράτωρ in the fullest sense. In the West, through the growth of a
new set of ideas and institutions, the Emperor, still keeping all his
titles, all his formal dignity, still worshipped with a ceremonial
only less stately than that of his Eastern brother, gradually sank
into a mere chief of unruly feudatories, into a mere President, it
might seem, of a Confederation in which every member was stronger
than the head. An Eastern Emperor might expect to be slain or blinded
to make room for another; but, while he kept his life and his eyes,
his will was undisputed. A Western Emperor was commonly free from
such extreme changes of fortune. A few only died on the battle-field
or by private murder, and those few at least enjoyed the light of
heaven till their last moments. But while they reigned, while men
called them Lords of the World, Vicars of the Almighty, if they loved
the truth of power rather than its show, they might have been tempted
to envy the smallest of their vassals who within a few roods of
ground did without let or hindrance that which was right in his own
eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have been drawn on, almost in spite of myself, to paint somewhat
of a picture of the main features which distinguished the Eastern
and Western Empires after they were finally split asunder by the act
of the year 800. But a lecture on the Divided Empire ought to do
something more. It ought not to shrink from the more prosaic task of
sketching the main facts of the story in their order and of speaking
a word of warning against a few notions and forms of speech which
are likely to mislead. But it may not be useless to run with a swift
step through the revolutions of several centuries, and here and
there to throw in a needful caution. And to understand the Divided
Empire, it is first needful to cast a glance at the Empire before
it was divided. We have to hasten as far as the thirteenth century,
a century almost as full of destiny as the fifth, but to the fifth
we must first again look back. We have seen that at its beginning
the formal boundaries of the Empire had hardly given way; Theodosius
had reigned over at least as wide a dominion as Jovian; and his
dominion had passed to his sons reigning as Imperial colleagues at
Constantinople and at Ravenna. In the course of that century the
Vandal passes through Gaul into Spain; he founds a Spanish realm,
and presently forsakes it for a somewhat more lasting dominion in
Africa. The Alan, marching at his side, founds a yet more momentary
dominion in Spain and presently vanishes from the face of the earth.
The third in that great march, the Suevian, founds his Spanish realm
also and keeps it longer than either. At the end of the century he
still holds his north-west corner; but the rest of the peninsula is
in the hands of the West-Goth, whose mighty kingdom stretches over
Gaulish and Spanish ground from the Loire to the pillars of Hercules.
The Burgundian has spread himself from his old seat on the Rhine to
the mouths of the Rhone and the haven of Massalia. But the Roman name
has but lately died away from central and northern Gaul. Cut off from
either centre of Imperial rule, a Roman land, some say, strange as
the title sounds, a Roman kingdom, has lingered on between Seine and
Loire, to yield at last to the advance of a Teutonic people who have
long played a secondary part in the affairs of Gaul, but who are now,
in the short life-time of a single enterprising king, to spring to
a place in the world alongside of the Roman and the Goth. The Frank
has begun his march, eastward, westward, southward, northward. For
a moment he is the heathen lord of Catholic subjects who preferred
the worshipper of Woden to the follower of Arius; he is presently to
change into the one Catholic power of the whole world, the eldest
son of the Church, looked to through all Gaul as the deliverer of
Catholic lands from heretical rulers. And, what concerns us more than
all, while Gaul, Spain, Africa, have passed away from the Empire,
Italy and Rome itself have, in all but name, passed away with them.
One barbarian patrician has yielded to another; Theodoric watches
over Italy as no Cæsar had watched over it for many a year. A few
years more, and his rule stretches, under one title or another, over
the whole western half of the Mediterranean lands of Europe. Yet the
Roman name, the Roman power, lives on in its Eastern half; the one
Emperor of the Romans still holds his throne in the Eastern Rome,
keeping but the shadow of a barren title over his elder capital, but
biding his time to make that shadow a reality at the first favourable
moment.

So far have we followed the memorable fifth century, the century, I
repeat, in whose first years, if at any time, modern history begins,
the century at whose end the existing nations of Europe are still
not in being, but at whose beginning they have taken, so to speak,
the first feeble steps towards coming into being. Let us now glance
at the hardly less memorable sixth century, memorable in another
way from the fifth. The sixth century is not a creative, but rather
a reactionary age, an age which does much to hinder the growth of
new elements, and much to bring back old elements to a place and a
power which they had lost. Of all ages in history the sixth is the
one in which the doctrine that the Roman Empire came to an end at
some time in the fifth sounds most grotesque. Again the Roman armies
march to victory, to more than victory, to conquest, to conquests
more precious than the conquests of Cæsar or of Trajan, to conquests
which gave back Rome herself to her own Augustus. We may again be
met with the argument that we have ourselves used so often; that the
Empire had to win back its lost provinces does indeed prove that it
had lost them; but no one seeks to prove that the provinces had
not been lost; what the world is loth to understand is that there
was still life enough in the Roman power to win them back again. I
say the Roman power; what if I said the Roman commonwealth? It may
startle some to hear that in the sixth century, nay in the seventh,
the most common name for the Empire of Rome is still “respublica.”
No epithet is needed; there is no need to say that the “respublica”
spoken of is “respublica Romana.” It is the Republic which wins back
Italy, Africa, and Southern Spain from their Teutonic masters. It is
the Republic which beats back from the ransomed lands the new attacks
of the Frank and the Alaman. If Gregory the Great stoops to flatter
the murderer Phocas, he warns him also--strange as the words sound
to us--that, while the kings of the nations rule over slaves, the
Emperors of the Republic rule over freemen. We must indeed beware of
bringing in ideas which belong wholly to modern controversy; there is
nothing in the word “respublica,” nothing in the word “commonwealth,”
nothing in the use of those words down to a very recent date, which
shuts out the possibility of a commonwealth having a prince, Emperor
or king, as its chief ruler. The point of the employment of the word
lies in this, that it marks the unbroken being of the Roman state; in
the eyes of the men of the sixth century the power which won back the
African province in their own day was the same power which had first
won it well nigh seven hundred years before. The consul Belisarius
was the true successor of the consul Scipio. Again the Roman power
stretches from the Ocean to the Euphrates; the mighty volume of the
Roman law is unrolled alike for the Syrian and the Spaniard. The
whole Mediterranean coast is again the seaboard of Rome, save where
the West-Goth still keeps his hold on Septimania and Northern Spain,
save where the Empire has itself yielded the coast from Rhone to
the Alps to the Frankish lords of Gaul who have wiped out the power
of the Burgundian and cut short the West-Goth on Gaulish soil. The
common teaching on these matters is so wretched that I believe we all
of us feel--I still feel myself--a certain feeling of strangeness and
incongruity at the mere picture of the revived Empire of the sixth
century. Or if strangeness and incongruity are words too strong, we
at least feel that it is a truth which needs asserting, asserting, it
may be, till times seventy times seven, in the ears of the unlearned
and unbelieving. To look on it, as the men of the time looked on, as
the restoration of a lawful order of things which had been violently
interrupted is one of the hardest of historic lessons.

But there is no popular delusion which does not contain some measure
of truth, however disguised and distorted. No way of speaking can
be more misleading than that which is still employed, even by some
eminent scholars, of speaking of the Empire of Justinian, of the
armies of Justinian, as Greek. It is not only formally wrong, but it
does not in any way express the facts. Even before the reconquest
of the West, the Greek element was far indeed from being the
exclusive, it was hardly the predominant element in the Empire; and
to apply the name to the enlarged Empire, largely inhabited by a
Latin population, which Justinian passed on to his successors is more
misleading still. And in the army above all, made up from all manner
of warlike tribes within and without the Empire, the proportion of
men who were in any sense of Greek birth, even the proportion of men
to whom Greek was their native speech, must have been small indeed.
Yet we have the memorable fact, showing itself in the narrative of
Procopius and in the very beginnings of English literature, that
both on Gothic and on English lips the subjects of the Emperor who
reigned at Constantinople were spoken of as Greeks. No wonder; the
Goths, marching to and fro in the eastern peninsula, must have
heard more Greek spoken than any other tongue; so must the first of
English travellers, be the travels of the singer of the song real or
imaginary. And the name was given almost by a prophetic instinct, as
if the Goth, unfettered by Roman traditions, saw that an Empire of
which Byzantium was the head, if not Greek already, must some day
become such. What if Justinian had seen that fact and had acted on
it? What if he had grasped his position as before all things lord of
the great eastern peninsula of Europe and the great western peninsula
of Asia, lord that is of lands still partly Latin, but far more
widely Greek? What if he had given his whole mind to the defence of
his northern frontier against Slavonic and Hunnish invaders, and had
left the Teutonic and Latin elements in Italy, Spain, and Africa to
settle themselves as they settled themselves in Gaul? It may well be
that such a course would have been the wiser; looking at the matter
with the light of thirteen later centuries, we are strongly tempted
to say that so it would have been. But we must remember that the
light of those thirteen later centuries could give no help to the
minds of men whose destiny had fixed them in the sixth century. As
Justinian or any man of his age must have looked on the world of the
sixth century, an Emperor of the Romans, reigning in the New Rome
but shut out from the Old, must not only have been tempted by every
feeling of ambition, he must have honestly felt it as the highest of
his Imperial duties, to win back the lost lands of Rome, to win back
Rome herself, for the Roman commonwealth of which he found himself
the head.

The great revival of the Empire in the sixth century was but the
first of a long series of revivals which marked the history of the
power whose head was at Constantinople down to its latest stages.
In its long annals, the successors of Cæsar and Trajan, the men
who extend the borders of the Empire over new lands, are far from
wholly lacking; the successors of Valentinian and Belisarius, the
men who win back the lost lands, are never lacking down to the last
generation of the Palaiologoi. But the first and greatest burst
of this power of springing to new life was that which came while
the Empire still was one, when Belisarius, deliverer of Africa and
Sicily, sent the keys of ransomed Rome to her own Emperor. True,
as we have seen, a large part of Italy was lost again before the
century was out; the Spanish province passed away early in the next
century; but the successors of Justinian still ruled at Carthage till
the last years of the seventh century; they still ruled, in name at
least, at Rome till the last year of the eighth. No confusion can be
greater or more misleading than that which looks on the Empire of
Tiberius, Maurice, and Heraclius as something strange and anomalous,
something to be labelled as Eastern, Byzantine, perhaps Greek, to be
called anything in short but its true name of Roman. Never, I would
say to all of you, use the words “Eastern” or “Byzantine,” till
there is something Western to oppose to them. You may distinguish
Nikêphoros as the Eastern Emperor as opposed to the Western Emperor
Charles; but never speak of Maurice or Heraclius as anything but the
sole Roman Emperor that he was. Still in the days of Heraclius the
process begins which was to leave the Empire of Nikêphoros, if not
a Greek power, at least a power fast hastening to become Greek. The
mightiest of Imperial warriors, he who overleaped the fame of Trajan
to renew the fame of Alexander, the deliverer of Rome, the conqueror
of Persia, the man who brought back the holiest of Christian relics
from its heathen bondage, lived to be the man who saw Syria and
Egypt lopped away from his Empire, who saw the Holy City that he had
redeemed pass away into the hands of misbelievers yet more terrible
than those whom he had overthrown. It may be that the Empire gained
even by these fearful losses; it is plain that after its Oriental
and its Latin provinces are lost, it begins to put on somewhat of the
strength of a national power, even though that power had no thought
of its own nationality. It may even be that the great Isaurian
Emperors of the eighth century let the remnant of Latin Italy slip
from their hands almost without an effort, because they saw that a
dominion which was becoming foreign to the great mass of the Empire
was no true source of strength. To reign from Hæmus to Tauros, to
be lord at Trebizond and at Syracuse, to beat back the Bulgarian in
Europe and the Saracen in Asia--it was no mean task, no easy task,
which fell to the lot of the “effete” “Greek of the Lower Empire;”
he might well deem that he had work enough to do in the lands which
naturally looked up to the New Rome, and that he might leave the Old
to set up again for itself, if such was its own good pleasure.

Set up for itself it did, as we have already seen; but it set up
for itself mainly to deck a German king and a German kingdom with
its own Roman memories. Charles, like Theodoric, had called into
being a system which it needed himself to work. He could be at once
German King and Roman Cæsar in deed as well as in name. His immediate
successors found it hard to be either. By the end of the ninth
century the great Frankish dominion was broken in pieces; the crown
of the Western Rome passed, now to a prince of Italy, now to a prince
of Germany, now to a prince of Gaul. Under the second Lewis Italy
came nearer to forming an united and separate realm than she did
at any other moment between Theodoric and Victor Emmanuel. For that
moment there seemed a chance--that is, we, a thousand years after the
time, see that there was a chance--that there might be, not a German,
but an Italian Empire of the Western Rome, to match the Greek Empire
of the Eastern Rome. But it was fated that the traditions of the
Western Rome should neither abide in Italy with Lewis and Berengar
nor pass into Gaul with Charles the Bald. The German King, the Saxon
King, the first of the Ottos, came down to receive the crown of Rome
as a deliverer, to pass it on to a grandson who seemed for a moment
to have the mission, not only of reviving the Roman power, but of
making the elder Rome herself once more the local seat of Imperial
dominion.

  Vivo Ottone tertio,
  Salus fuit populo.

But the “mirabilia mundi” passed to an early grave; the true work of
his house was, not to restore the local power of Rome, but to fix
that the Western Empire of Rome, the now Holy Roman Empire, should
be, down to the moment of its last shadowy being, a Roman Empire of
the German nation. It is that Empire, the Empire of the Ottos, the
Henries, and the Fredericks, the Empire to whose worthiest chief men
could pay their tribute of renewed Saturnian song;

  Princeps terræ principum, Cæsar noster, ave,
  Cujus jugum omnibus bonis est suave;

the Empire whose true power and glory was buried in the grave of
“Fridericus stupor mundi,” but whose shadow lived on to inspire the
heart of Dante, whose traditions lived on to win for the Imperial
name one flash of seeming might in the days of Henry of Luxemburg,
one flash more dazzling still in the days of that Charles who was
the last to take its crown, though not in the old crowning-place
of the first--it is this great fact of all European history, the
fact whose greatness has been so well proclaimed by a scholar and
statesman of whom this University is proud, which has now to divide
our thoughts with that other side of the divided Roman power whose
annals, for some ages at least as glorious, were wound up by a far
more glorious end. As the warrior’s death of the last Constantine
is another tale from the self-abasement of the last Francis, so in
the brighter days of either power we may claim for the Empire of the
Macedonians at least an equal place in the world alongside of the
Empire of the Old-Saxons. While the third Otto was dreaming of the
coming glories of the Old Rome, the second Basil was filling the New
with the trophies of all lands from the Danube to the Orontes, from
the Pharos of Messana to the roots of Caucasus. And let us pause for
a moment to think once more what might have been. What if the Slayer
of the Bulgarians had failed in his sternest struggle, when he and
his Empire strove, year after year, locked tight in the death-grapple
with rivals worthy of them? What if Samuel of Ochrida, and not
Baldwin of Bruges or Mahomet of Brusa, had made his way within the
walls of Constantinople, on an errand matching the errand of the
first Otto in the West, to make the Imperial city abide for ever a
seat of Christian rule, as the head of a Roman Empire of the Slavonic
Nation?

       *       *       *       *       *

One question now comes which might well have come sooner. In the
days of the Divided Empire, when Europe and Christendom had two
rival heads, how did either bear itself towards the greatest work
of all, the special calling of Europe and of Christendom? How did
the Cæsars of East and West bear themselves in the Eternal Question
of the world’s history? The Persian victories of Heraclius were
the last work, the last glories, we might almost say the greatest
and noblest glories, of the undivided Empire. The next moment the
Eternal Question put on that more fearful and more abiding shape
which it still bears in our own day. The two Semitic creeds, the
most antagonistic of all creeds simply because they have so much in
common, the creed of Rome and the West, the creed of Arabia and the
East, stood forth as new badges for each side, badges under which
each side drew new life for the eternal struggle. Syria and Egypt,
which had little to lose by falling away, fell away, as we have
seen, in a moment; Latin Africa, which had much to lose, fought on
for sixty years; the Roman strove more manfully for Carthage than
the Goth strove for Spain and Septimania. But Africa was lost for
ever; the unconquerable lands of northern Spain, the Tzernagora of
the West, bred up a line of heroes to win back their own land from
the intruder. The Frank, Hammer in hand, crashed the enemy before
he crossed the border stream of Loire; and the first king of the
new line won a higher glory than that of Frankish king and Roman
patrician by ending the short rule of the Mussulman around the temple
and the arena of Nîmes and on the tower-crowned hill of Carcassonne.
Nor did the New Rome fail in the work; vainly did the last companions
of the Prophet strive to win the fulfilment of his promise that
the sins of the first believing army that entered the city of the
Cæsars should be forgiven. As the Persian had been beaten back in
the days of Heraclius, so was the Arab beaten back in the days of
his descendants. Again he came; but the strong arm of the Isaurian
Leo again saved the New Rome and the whole world of Christendom. The
strife of the old days came again in Sicily; again Europe and Africa,
again Aryan and Semitic man--Aryan men who spoke the tongue of Greece
and Semitic men who ruled where Carthage had twice been--strove, in
the cycle of the ages, for the island that was called on to be the
meeting-place, the battle-field, of creeds and tongues and nations.
Sicily was lost, yet Tauromenion on its height, looking down on the
Ebbsfleet of Hellenic Sicily, held out for almost a hundred years;
short indeed were the two intervals when the Infidel could boast
himself master of the whole of that memorable island. If Tauromenion
and Rametta fell at last, the sword of George Maniakês was soon to be
sharpening; if Syracuse was won and lost again, the sword of Norman
Roger was already sharpening for a deliverance more abiding.

Long and stern indeed was the strife which the Romans of the East had
to wage to guard Tauros against the Saracen, while they had to wage
a strife no less abiding to guard Hæmus against the Bulgarian. But
as long as the Saracen alone had to be striven against, the work was
done. Then came the day of reconquest, the days of Nikêphoros Phokas,
of John Tzimiskês, of the awful Basil himself. The eleventh century
begins as the greatest century of Byzantine history; before its end
a new enemy has come; the Asiatic side of the Eternal Question has
passed to a new champion; what the Arab failed to do, the Turk has
begun to do indeed. The Romania of Asia has ceased to be a Christian
land of the Empire; but a Roman land it seems hardly to cease to be,
while Nikaia, birthplace of Christian orthodoxy, destined in after
times to be the seat of the most vigorous of Eastern survivals of the
Roman power, holds the throne of a Mussulman, the throne of a Turk,
but a Mussulman and a Turk whose style is Sultan of Rome.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hurried indeed is the glance that is all that we can take of the
Empire thus split asunder between two rivals. The true power and
greatness of both come to an end in the great age of creation and
destruction, the thirteenth century of our æra. In the West, the
Roman Empire and the German kingdom do not indeed come to a formal
end, but they lose their ancient place beside the grave of Frederick
the Second. In the East, the Empire, as a local power, gains a new
lease of national strength, but it loses its œcumenical position when
the Latin reigns at Constantinople, when the Ῥωμαῖος, however we
translate his name, reigns beyond the Bosporos at Nikaia. Thus far
we have had still to deal with the true and ancient substance of the
Empire, even if parted asunder into two bodies. We shall have next to
speak of powers which kept on its name and its traditions, but which
in sober truth we can hardly look on as more than its shadows and
survivals.



LECTURE V.

SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE.


I drew a distinction in my last lecture between two stages in
the dying out of the Roman power and its traditions. There were
times when the two Empires of East and West, however changed their
character from what it had been in earlier times, however far they
had gone, the one to become Greek, the other to become German, might
still be held to keep the essence of their old Roman being. And there
were later times when the names and traditions of Rome still lingered
on, but when they could not be looked on as more than shadows and
survivals. I wish it of course to be understood that this division
between these times is an arbitrary line of my own drawing. In the
West at least it does not answer to any such marked epoch as the
event of 800, the event of 1453, the event of 1806. I drew the line
at the death of Frederick the Second. We shall, I think, all allow
that, if Frederick the Second represents a state of things which had
become very unlike the state of things under Trajan or even under
Constantine, Francis the Second represents a state of things at
least as unlike the state of things under Frederick. But it does not
follow that, if a line is to be drawn, every one would draw it at the
death of Frederick. It might be said that the Empire had become a
mere German state before his day, that the position of Frederick was
exceptional, that his importance in Italian affairs really belonged
to the King of Sicily and not to the Emperor of the Romans, that the
career even of his grandfather showed that in his time the Roman
claims of the German kings had become thoroughly unreal, and rested
wholly on the strength of their German armies. Another might draw the
line much later; he might say that the true Empire passed away when
an Emperor, a third Frederick most unlike the First and Second, took
his crown for the last time before the altar of old Saint Peter’s.
He might draw it when that Frederick’s son took an Imperial style,
though to be sure with a qualifying adjective, without any show of
Imperial crowning. Or he might draw it when the last _Imperator_,
successor of the first _Imperator electus_, took the crown of the
Empire, not before the altar of Saint Peter at Rome, but before
the altar of Saint Petronius at Bologna. The last is indeed an
epoch-making moment; Charles the Fifth does seem to wind up with
some fitting dignity that Imperial line which began with Charles the
Great. And as the last Emperor, as distinguished from Emperors-elect,
he does truly wind it up. The gap between Charles and Ferdinand is
in truth a wide one. But surely there is a still wider gap between
Frederick the Wonder of the World and princes like William of
Holland, Richard of Cornwall, and even, when looked on from the
Imperial side, as Rudolf of Habsburg. Rudolf is indeed different
from William and Richard; he is great and famous as German King; but
the line of Emperors knows him not. The fact that the man whom we may
call the restorer of the German kingdom never sought the Imperial
crown seems of itself to point to the reign of the last Emperor
before him, even if that Emperor had not been Frederick the Second,
as the time when the Empire, as a power in itself, and not simply as
a lofty title, a mighty memory, came to an end. Under Charles the
Fifth the Empire seems to spring again to the fulness of its ancient
power; but his abdication and death revealed a truth. When his titles
of Empire passed to Ferdinand and his European position passed to
Philip, it became clear that, however the titles of Empire might make
the position of Charles more brilliant, his might had not really
been the might of the Empire, but the might of Burgundy and Castile.
The line, wherever we draw it, is an arbitrary one, unmarked either
by formal changes or by events of the first greatness. I think we
shall all agree that the Peace of Constanz and the Peace of Westfalia
are the acts of a power which in the earlier time still kept much
of a really Roman position, while in the later time all truly Roman
character had passed from it. The change between the two states of
things is gradual; at what point between the two we choose to draw
the line is largely matter of opinion, one might say rather matter of
taste or of feeling.

In the East our case is much clearer. The event of 1204 is one that
stands out with far greater distinctness than the event of 1250.
No years in the Byzantine annals are more honourable than those in
which they for a while cease to be Byzantine. It is when the Ῥωμαῖοι
again become Byzantine that they again degenerate. If the name of
Roman is to be held as an epithet of honour, at no time did prince
and people better deserve that name than when they were banished from
the New Rome. Adversity brought out vigorous qualities indeed in the
Emperors of Nikaia and their subjects. Yet the fact that they were
Emperors of Nikaia and not of Constantinople puts a wide barrier
between them and their predecessors. The life of the Eastern Empire
had been so thoroughly bound up in the possession of the Eastern Rome
that no change could seem so great as that which gave the Eastern
Rome to a Latin stranger. The Empire of Nikaia proved in the end the
most vigorous and abiding among its fellows; but it had fellows. It
was only one of a crowd of states, Greek and Latin, into which the
Roman Empire of the East was broken in pieces. That the old Empire
was utterly broken in pieces, that its old position had wholly passed
away, is shown by unavoidable changes in language. It is now indeed
hard to avoid using the word _Greek_. To be sure no Orthodox speaker
of the Greek tongue--that is now the definition of the artificial
Greek nation--dreamed of calling himself Ἕλλην; the Greeks, the
Griffons, of Western speakers were still everywhere Ῥωμαῖοι in their
own eyes. Strange indeed is the opposition of names in these days.
When we find Ῥωμαῖοι and Λατῖνοι opposed, we seem to be carried back
to the consulship of Manlius and Decius; when somewhat earlier we
find a strife between Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί, we seem to be carried
back from the pages of Anna to the pages of Dionysios, from the
reign of Alexios to the reign of Tullus. But now that Emperors,
Kings, Despots, Dukes, Grand-Sires, outlying possessions of Italian
commonwealths and Italian families, have become thick on the ground
and still thicker on the waters, we can hardly use any other name
than _Greek_ to distinguish a prince or a people speaking the later
shape of the tongue of Hellas from princes and people speaking the
later shapes of the tongue of Latium. When we step within the range
of theological controversy, our difficulties become greater still. If
we keep to our elder language, the special badge of the Roman will be
that he denies the authority of the Roman Church. The Roman name, as
the formal name of a power, ceased only in 1453, or rather in 1461.
The Roman name, as the name of a people, can hardly be said to have
even now passed away. But from 800 onwards we may fairly use such
distinguishing forms as “Eastern” and “Byzantine”; from 1204 onwards
we can hardly help adopting the Western language of the time, and
speaking of those scattered fragments of the Eastern Empire which
were still held by its own people as “Greek.”

The Empire of Nikaia may seem to have well proved its right to be
looked on as the true successor of the old Empire by the great
exploit of winning back the Imperial city. For eight hundred years we
have had to deal with powers that win back oftener than with powers
that can be strictly said to advance; but to win back Constantinople
in the thirteenth century was to gain a richer prize than even to
win back Rome in the sixth. Without Constantinople an East-Roman
or Greek Empire might seem to have no position in the face of the
world. In possession of Constantinople, it might seem to be brought
back to something like its old place among powers and nations. Still
the Empire of the Palaiologoi was but a feeble representative, a
mere shadow and survival, not only of the Empire of the Macedonians,
but of the Empire of the Komnênoi. For a while it was an advancing
power in Europe; even when its northern frontiers had fallen back
before the Bulgarian, the Servian, the Ottoman himself, it could
still advance in the old Greek lands. It showed the Byzantine
power of revival in its last and strangest form, when the whole of
Peloponnêsos, bating the points held by Venice, was again united
under a Greek prince. In those days it was something for the Roman
Empire to outlive the principality of Achaia, days when the Isle
of Pelops formed the main body of an Empire of which the city of
Constantine was the distant head. If the last Emperor of the West
took his crown at Bologna, the last Emperor of the East took his on
the spot which had been Sparta. But “Emperor of the East” I should
not say. That is one of the many conventional ways of describing the
princes of the Eastern Rome, the use of which may sometimes help to
turn a sentence. But no prince reigning at Constantinople ever called
himself Emperor of the East, and there was another prince who did. In
those days Empires arose and fell with speed in the Eastern world.
Even before 1204, a stranger born on English soil, a Count of Poitou
whom a strange chance made also King of England, had the privilege
of overthrowing an Emperor of the Romans whose Empire was bounded by
the isle of Cyprus. Master of that island, that old battle-field of
Aryan and Semitic man, he had the wisdom to get rid of an useless
possession, and to bestow it as a kingdom on a vassal of his own
who had lately been King of Jerusalem. So, after the great crash of
the Latin conquest, momentary Emperors had reigned in Epeiros and
at Thessalonikê. But there was yet another Imperial claimant whose
power, like that of him of Nikaia, was more than momentary. It should
never be forgotten that the last fragment of Greek-speaking Roman
power that the world saw lingered on, not in Megarian Byzantium
but at Arkadian Trebizond. As the northern shore of the Euxine saw
the last Greek commonwealth, so its southern shore saw the last
Greek Empire. For Greek we must call it. The Komnênos at Trebizond,
admitting the superiority of the Palaiologos at Constantinople, cast
aside his Roman style, and called himself among other titles Emperor
of the East. The West had long before heard of an Emperor of Britain
and of an Emperor of the Spains; but now for the first time in the
East a man was found calling himself βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ, but
βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ of something else and not Ῥωμαίων. But an
Emperor of the East, an Emperor of all the East, πάσης τῆς ἀνατολῆς,
still keeps about him something of the sublimity of vagueness; his
Imperial style has a better sound than the Imperial style of a German
duchy or a negro island; an Emperor of the East does not seem to
be cabined, cribbed, confined, within quite such a paltry space as
an Emperor of Hayti or an Emperor of Austria. Still a prince who
called himself Emperor, but did not dare to call himself Emperor of
the Romans, proclaimed himself by his very style to be, to use the
most civil words, a shadow and a survival. Indeed there is a curious
analogy between the survival at Trebizond and the survival at Vienna.
The Komnênos and the Lotharingian each cast aside his Roman style, to
carry on the business, as our own expounder of things Imperial puts
it, under another name.

But, if we cannot allow the so-called Empires of Cyprus, Epeiros, and
Trebizond, or even the restored Byzantine Empire of the Palaiologoi,
to be more than shadows and survivals of the old Roman Empire of the
East, they did at least continue it in the sense in which any whole
may be said to be continued in its fragments. We can hardly say that
that Empire was in the same sort continued either in the Turkish
Sultanate of _Roum_ or in the Latin Empire of _Romania_. Truly
they are shadows and survivals of the old Empire; but shadows and
survivals of a different kind from those at Epeiros and Trebizond.
That the Seljuk lords of Nikaia should have been called Sultans
of _Roum_, that the Ottoman lord of Constantinople and his people
should bear the same Roman name among the nations of the further
East, that, before the Ottoman was lord of Constantinople, Bajazet
should have been addressed by Timour as the _Keiser of Roum_, all
these things are strange and startling tributes to the abiding life
of the Roman name, but of little more than the name. The Latin Empire
of Romania is more remarkable. Two or three centuries earlier, if
a band of Western warriors had made their way into Constantinople,
their most obvious legal pretext, if they had sought for a legal
pretext, would have been the establishment of the authority of the
Emperor crowned at Rome over the Eastern as well as the Western
portion of the Empire. To German crusaders such a thought might
possibly have presented itself even in the thirteenth century;
Constantinople might have been claimed for the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation with more show of reason than Prussia or Livonia.
But the thought was not likely to come into the minds of Frenchmen,
of Flemings, of Venetians so lately themselves vassals of the Eastern
Emperor, of Italians other than the most zealous Ghibelins. Earlier
crusaders had consented to become liegemen of Alexios Komnênos, and
if some refused or delayed, it was certainly not out of loyalty to
Henry of Franconia. The men of Pisa, firm stay of Cæsar in the
West, did not scruple to fight for his Eastern rival against the
Latin invaders. That the chief of the conquerors took the title of
Emperor was in itself a confession that Constantinople was a lawful
seat of Empire; but difficulties on either side might hinder the
authors of the new Imperial style from literally translating Ῥωμαίων
βασιλεύς as the description of a Latin potentate. The style became
territorial; Baldwin and Henry shrank, not unreasonably, from calling
themselves Emperors of the Roman people, but they did not shrink from
proclaiming themselves Emperors of a Roman land. A strange position
it was that the Latin Emperors of Romania held during the two
generations of their rule in Constantinople. Almost more strange is
the long cleaving of Western opinion to their supposed rights after
the Greek princes and people again held their old home.

We may then, I think, fix, with some confidence, the year 1204 as
the time when the true Roman Empire of the East came to an end.
The various Greek powers continue it, but they continue it only
as fragments; none of them can claim to be the very thing itself,
however cut short. But they are genuine fragments; if not the very
thing itself, they are pieces of it. In the East Ῥωμαῖοι had become
the name of a nation, distinct and easily recognized, if artificial,
and Trebizond and Epeiros, no less than Constantinople, sheltered
fragments of that divided nation. The Western Empire in its later,
its purely German, shape, does not in the same way continue the
national existence of any people that could be called even artificial
Romans. It continues Roman titles and memories; as so doing, it is
a true survival of the Roman power, but it has passed away from all
Roman national life to become no small element in the national life
of another people. It became the Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation, and the German nation felt itself lifted up by having the
Holy Roman Empire in its keeping. After 1250 we begin to feel that
there is something incongruous even in the Imperial coronation. The
personal dignity of Henry of Luxemburg veils the fact that even he
was not like the Franks and the Swabians; Lewis of Bavaria is rather
the great subject of Imperial theories than a doer of any Imperial
deeds. We come to Charles the Fourth and Frederick the Third; the
crowning of Charles at Rome may be bracketted with his crowning at
Arles, and Frederick will call forth a smile on the most Ghibelin of
lips, as we see him in cope and crown, Augustus and _Pater Patriæ_
and something like _Pontifex_ as well, in that strange gathering
of men of all ages which keeps watch over his penniless son at
Innsbrück. On the other hand, if the Eastern survivals, unlike the
Western, kept on a national being which might in some sort be called
Roman, the Western, the German, shadow of Empire had the advantage
of unity. It was one survival and not many. There is no formal break
between 800 and 1806. The difference is the difference between a
thing which is utterly broken in pieces, but of which each fragment
keeps, so far as a fragment can, the character of the whole, and a
thing which lives on, which never loses its personality, which is
never broken in pieces, but which so changes its character that to
speak of it as the same thing, though technically accurate, strikes
us as no longer expressing the real facts. In many points there is
a wider difference between the Empire of the first Cæsars and the
Empire of the Hohenstaufen than there is between the Empire of the
Hohenstaufen and the Empire of the Austrians and Lorrainers. But the
Hohenstaufen Emperors still felt as Emperors and acted as Emperors;
whether their objects were wise or foolish, possible or impossible,
they were still Imperial objects, objects that reached far beyond
the bounds of Swabia or of Germany. Among the other princes of the
West they held something more than a mere precedency. The kings of
France, of Britain, of Spain, might deny their supremacy, but they
denied it as a thing which needed to be denied; they might refuse
to acknowledge the Emperor as their lord, but they still felt that
the one Emperor was a being of another class from the kings around
him who might or might not be his men. Their whole position was not
German but European; if not the sovereigns, they were at least the
chiefs, of all Western Christendom. But the Austrian Emperors sank
to be Kings of Germany keeping the titles of Empire, and Kings of
Germany who had much less authority in their own kingdom than other
kings. For in truth the German kingdom had given way beneath the
weight of the Roman Empire. The Imperial tradition had first split
the kingdom in pieces, and had then kept the pieces from altogether
falling apart. The Emperor was set too high in formal dignity to
exercise the ordinary authority of lesser kings. We cannot speak of
the Austrian Emperors as chiefs of Western Christendom, though, in
a character which was not Imperial, they might sometimes become its
champions. The Swabian Emperors were, if not above, at least before,
all other princes; the Austrians can barely maintain their right to
be the first among them. They keep at most a barren precedency, and
even that is not always undisputed. Their policy is not European; it
is hardly German; it seeks only the advancement of their own house
in Germany and out of it. At last they seem altogether to forget
who and what they are. When an Emperor-elect of the Romans, King of
Germany and Jerusalem, could cast aside his Roman and German style,
his Roman and German speech, and could describe himself as “Empereur
d’Allemagne et d’Autriche” in a treaty with one who called himself
“Empereur des Français,” it was time that the ancient titles should
yet be used in one document more, in that which should announce to
the world that, as the titles had now ceased to have a meaning, the
thing which they described had ceased to be.

Of the two men who, under those strange and novel descriptions,
signed the Treaty of Pressburg, if one had forgotten who and what he
was, the other knew perfectly well who and what he was. The first
Buonaparte did not, like writers and orators now-a-days, use the
words “Emperor” and “Empire” simply to sound fine. When he called
himself “Emperor of the French,” he knew perfectly well what he meant
by the name. What he meant involved to be sure a few historical
misrepresentations, but they were misrepresentations which were very
convenient for his purpose. Once grant that Austrasian Charles and
Corsican Buonaparte were alike Frenchmen, and the theory does not
hang badly together. The lordship of the world, at the lowest the
supremacy of Western Europe, was translated from Rome and Germany
to France. The ruler of France held the position in the world which
the rulers of Rome and Germany once had held. So it was in fact; the
style of 1804 did but put that fact into very emphatic words. There
was again an Emperor, a βασιλεύς with ῥῆγες around him; only that
βασιλεύς was no longer Roman, Greek, or German, but, by conquest at
least, French. It might even add a malicious sweetness to the new
Imperial position to reckon Rome and Germany among the subject lands
of France. The first French Empire was not a mere survival of the
Roman Empire in any of its stages; nor was it a mere analogy, as when
we apply the Imperial name to barbarian princes who hold an Imperial
position in their own world. The Empire of the Moguls in many things
repeated the Empire of the Cæsars; but it repeated it unconsciously.
But about the French Empire everything was conscious; every detail of
imposture had a meaning. It was not in any sense a survival, neither
was it a true revival; it was in some sort a mockery, in some sort
an imitation, a spurious branch of the same stock, a parody of the
old Empire set up in a kind of strange rivalry on the ground of the
old Empire. But the old Empire was not made but grew; it took a long
time even to crumble in pieces. The new Empire, made by one man, grew
mightily for a few years, and then broke asunder in a moment. Still
the new Civilis, the man who made the Empire of the Gauls, must be
allowed the doubtful pre-eminence of being, if κακοπράγμων, at least
μεγαλοπράγμων also. Of the grotesque imitation of his work to which
some bowed down not twenty years back, it is needless to speak.

I spoke just now of a document, the treaty of Pressburg, which was
signed by two personages described as the “Emperor of the French” and
the “Emperor of Germany and Austria.” It must never be forgotten that
the title of “Emperor of Austria” dates, not from 1806 but from 1804.
The King of Germany, Emperor-elect of the Romans, while he still held
the highest place on earth, thought good to call himself “Hereditary
Emperor of Austria”--_Erbkaiser von Oesterreich_. What the two titles
meant side by side, no man can tell; but when the Roman and German
titles were dropped, the so-called “Empire of Austria” went on as a
distinct survival of the old Empire, and a very memorable survival
too. For it is the most successful imposture on record. This use
of an Imperial style has caused a power which is in its own nature
modern, upstart, and revolutionary, to be looked on as ancient,
venerable, and conservative. A power of yesterday, which has lived
only by trampling on every historic right and every national memory,
has somehow come to be looked on as the very embodiment of dignified
and conservative antiquity. But the particular way in which the
imposture has succeeded is the most wonderful thing of all. In the
last century among ourselves Smithson thought good to call himself
Percy, and the world believes that he is Percy. But the world
believes that Smithson is Percy; it does not believe that the old
Percies were Smithsons. This last is what is believed in the Austrian
case. Nobody believes that the present King of Hungary and Archduke
of Austria is Emperor of the Romans and King of Germany. But many
believe that real Emperors of the Romans and Kings of Germany were,
what he calls himself, Emperors of Austria. I have seen Frederick
Barbarossa called “Emperor of Austria;” half the world believes
that the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles the Sixth settled an Empire
of Austria on Maria Theresa; I have seen a book of the eighteenth
century in which Joseph the Second was of course spoken of simply
as “the Emperor,” but in which the editor in the nineteenth century
thought it needful to explain that the “Emperor” spoken of was
“Emperor of Austria.” I have found natives of Switzerland on their
ground who believed that the Imperial eagle carved on this or that
ancient building was the badge of Austria and not of Rome. Yes;
never was imposture more successful; never was the truth of history
more thoroughly turned round. It would be somewhat hard to bear if
Francis of Lorraine were thought to be something like Frederick of
Hohenstaufen; but the dead may turn in their graves when Frederick of
Hohenstaufen is thought to be something like Francis of Lorraine.

The truth is that the strange neglect into which the Imperial history
has fallen, the general incapacity or unwillingness to grasp the
leading fact in the whole history of Europe, is largely owing to
the existence and the success of the great Austrian imposture. But
there are two other European powers which also take to themselves the
Imperial style, and each of which is in a certain sense a revival
of the old Empire. Neither the Russian nor the German Empire can be
allowed to be more than a survival of the true Empire; but neither
of them is a sheer imposture like the so-called Empire of Austria.
The German Empire called yesterday into being is a real new birth
of the old German kingdom. Its head, with no claim to represent the
Imperial position of Charles and Otto, is a real representative of
Henry of Saxony and Rudolf of Habsburg. But so many Kings of Germany
had been Emperors that it might have seemed strange to make a King of
Germany and not to call him Emperor. And it would have been hard to
find any lower title for the head of a Confederation which numbers
other kings among its members. Such an one in truth has in some sort
an Imperial position; he too, like Agamemnôn or Æthelstan, is a
βασιλεύς with his ῥῆγες round him. The elder Empire of Russia stands
on quite another ground. So far as it is an Imperial survival, it
is a survival of the Empire of the East. The Tzar of Moscow belongs
to the same class as the Tzars of Bulgaria and Servia. We have seen
how the Slavonic powers which, while assaulting the Empire, bowed
down before the greatness of the Empire, took to themselves its
Imperial titles, and bore outside the Tzarigrad the lofty style
which they would have been better pleased to bear within its walls.
And since the fall of Constantinople, the Russian princes, to say
nothing of some supposed kindred with the last Imperial house, have,
as the most powerful princes of the Eastern Church, stepped into
something like the general position in the world which had belonged
to the Eastern Emperors. With less of geographical connexion, they
certainly represent the Eastern Empire with far more of truth than
any modern Western power can claim to represent the Western Empire.
Only the title of “Emperor of all the Russias” can hardly be accepted
as a truth, as long as two Russian lands, the lands of Halicz and
Vladimir, are tied on to the Austrian duchy on the strength of having
been in far distant ages conquered by a Hungarian king.

In all these powers then which bear or have borne the Imperial
style, Russia, Germany, Austria, France under the first Buonaparte,
we can see a distinct connexion with the Roman power. The thought
of the Roman power in some of its forms and stages was present to
the minds of those by whom the Imperial style was taken. But the
application of that style to so many powers has gone far to take
from it any distinct meaning. I will not say that the words “Empire”
and “Imperial” were always in my younger days used with a conscious
reference to Rome and her memories; but I will say that they were
not used quite as they are now, simply to sound fine. A poet or an
orator might use them in some impassioned strain; men did not in
every day speech talk about “the Empire” as familiarly as they talk
about “the parish.” A little time back, in opposition to this new
insular whim, “Empire” always meant something specially French. Even
the cant phrase of “the Second Empire” to mean the dominion of the
last Buonaparte has, I suspect, done something to overshadow the
great truths of history; we all know that a man who has written many
volumes on a great historical subject took for granted that a “Prince
of the Empire,” above all a Prince of Orange, must mean something in
France. To those whose studies lead them to look on _Imperator_ and
βασιλεύς as words which translate each other, it does seem a pity if
the style of Emperor should come simply to be the English equivalent
for τύραννος.

       *       *       *       *       *

But leaving smaller questions like these aside, there is indeed one
survival of the ancient Empire before whose mighty history all minds
must bend in awe, a survival well nigh greater and more memorable
than that of which it is the survival. When Gratian, the Christian
_Imperator_, laid aside the badges of the pagan _Pontifex Maximus_,
truly he did not foresee the day when a Christian _Pontifex Maximus_
should claim to place the crown of the _Imperator_ on his brow, and
should even claim the right to take away what he might in some sort
seem to have given. Christian Cæsars might indeed repeat what a pagan
Cæsar had said in unconscious prophecy, that he could better bear
the proclamation of a rival Emperor than the election of a Christian
Bishop in the Imperial city. A day was to come when, if men deemed
that two great lights were set in the Christian firmament, yet it
was Cæsar’s moon that shone with a feebler and reflected light,
a light that might suffice to rule the night of earthly things,
while the sun of the Pontiff shone with a light that came straight
from the Creator’s hand, a greater light to rule the day of man’s
spiritual being. It might still be held that God had two earthly
Vicars, that two swords were placed by His grant, each in the hand
chosen to wield it; but the sword that was wielded by the successor
of Augustus was held to be of baser metal and duller edge than the
sword that was wielded by the successor of Peter. Great and mighty
were those claims, and great and mighty were once the men who put
them forth. Even Ghibelins in heart, historic liegemen of Cæsar,
must stand by and wonder, if they cannot approve, when Cæsar stands
uncrowned, unclad, unheeded, at the Pontiff’s gate, cast down from
the throne of the world by a word sent forth from Rome in Rome’s
new character. At one moment the lord of fifty legions is left,
at the bidding of an unarmed man, without a single sword ready to
leave its scabbard at his call. At another moment he whose word has
wrought such wonders, himself in turn driven from his church and
throne, leaves the world with the protest that it is because he has
loved righteousness and hated iniquity that he dies in exile, and is
comforted in his dying hour by the answer that in exile he cannot
die, seeing God hath given him the nations for his inheritance and
the utmost parts of the earth for his possession. Rome again rules
the world, and again rules it by a moral power; she rules the world
so surely that she can again as it were turn her back upon herself;
the voice of her Pontiff can speak from Avignon as the voice of her
Augustus had once spoken from Ravenna. But we must bear in mind that
it was simply because her Emperors had come to speak from Ravenna
and from a crowd of other spots other than Rome, that a voice that
would have seemed as strange to Constantine as to Trajan had learned
to come forth, it might be from Rome, it might be from Clermont or
from Lyons. Let us look at the case with the calm gaze of history.
History knows nothing of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears
as the centre of spiritual unity, the divinely commissioned head of
the Universal Church. History knows just as little of theories in
which the Roman Bishop appears as Antichrist and the Man of Sin. It
may indeed be the business of history to trace the steps by which
either theory arose in men’s minds; but it is not by the light of
such theories as these that she will look at the facts of her own
science. In the eyes of history the power of the Roman Church grew up
simply because it was the Roman Church and the Church of no meaner
city. The church founded in the mother and head of all cities could
not fail to rank as the mother and head of all churches. Rome, the
local Rome, still had life in her to rule, and if her Emperor forsook
his calling in the local seat of rule, her Bishop was there to take
his place. When the sword of Valentinian was powerless against
the Hun, the voice of Leo was ready to charm with all its wisdom.
Claudius and Vespasian had brought the elder folk of Britain beneath
the earthly yoke of Rome; when their work of a moment had passed
away, it was for Gregory to bring another folk of Britain as more
abiding dwellers within her ghostly fold. Cæsar after Cæsar had given
and taken away the crowns of vassal kings; when Cæsar’s name had
become but a shadow in Western lands, it was for the Roman Pontiff
to bid shear the locks of the last degenerate Merwing, to pour for
the first time the kingly unction on a Frankish head. In all these
cases, in a hundred others, Rome still speaks as the head and teacher
of the nations; she is driven to speak through the voice of her
Bishop simply because her Emperor has forsaken her. How truly, how
wholly, it was the constant absence, the frequent weakness, of the
Emperor out of which the power of the Pontiff grew will be seen by
comparing the story of the Old Rome with the story of the New. At
Constantinople the Emperor was ever present, ever reigning; where he
dwelled and reigned there was no room for any other power to take to
itself the slightest fragment of Imperial rule. Never was any line
of princes more deeply impressed with a religious character than the
Eastern Cæsars; none more constantly made the Faith, the advancement
of the Faith, the humiliation of its enemies, the abiding objects
of their policy; their style was the “Faithful Emperor;” their cry
of battle was “Victory to the Cross.” Nowhere were Church and State
more truly one; but nowhere was the temporal ruler more distinctly
in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme. In
the West the present Patriarch had well nigh taken the place of the
absent Emperor; in the East the present Emperor had well nigh taken
on himself the functions of a Patriarch who in his presence was
but his creature. Like his pagan predecessors, it was he, and not
the priest whom he appointed and deposed, who was truly _Pontifex
Maximus_ as well as _Pater Patriæ_. A Dante of the tenth or eleventh
century might have found the highest Ghibelin ideal, the Augustus
crowned by God, ruling in God’s name as God’s Vicar but knowing no
father or lord on earth, in the mighty Emperors of that day, in the
men who turned from the toils of the camp and the splendours of the
court to tame their own bodies with the hardness of a hermit in his
cave, in Nikêphoros seeking rest on his bearskin on the earth for
the stalwart limbs that had smitten down the Saracen, in Basil with
his girdle of iron on his loins, marching forth to trample under foot
all that stood forth as either the foe of Christ or the foe of Rome.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mighty and wonderful indeed are those the most brilliant days in the
long annals of the Eastern Empire. Crete, Cyprus, Kilikia, won back
from the misbelievers--the Roman eagle again spreading her wings
over the Euphrates and the Tigris--the cross again planted in what
might seem to be its special home at Antioch and Edessa--all show the
part which the Eastern Rome in her proudest days could play in that
Eternal Question which is in truth the very substance of her whole
history. Seated at the junction of two worlds, called into being by
her founder as the special guardian of Europe and of those lands of
Asia which Europe had made her own, as soon as the strife of West and
East had changed into a strife of Christendom and Islam, the Eastern
Rome was bound to be the foremost in the strife, or she was untrue to
the cause of her own being. The Roman of the East, like the Spaniard
of the West, was of necessity a crusader before crusades were
preached; with both of them religion and patriotism were in truth
the same; men could not deal a blow on behalf of their country which
was not also a blow dealt on behalf of their faith. We have already
glanced at this greatest of all the many instances of Byzantine power
of revival, the great days of the Macedonian Emperors. I call back
your thoughts to them again in order to carry out more fully the
contrast between the East fighting for its very being against the
unbelieving foe, fighting under the leadership of its still present
Imperial head, and the West where the Imperial head fell away from
the common work of all, and left the leadership of the Empire and of
the kingdoms of the West to the spiritual power which stood ready to
do the highest of his duties for him. When the West first marched for
the deliverance of the East, it was not at the bidding of the Cæsar,
but at the bidding of the Pontiff. In earlier days, when the danger
was at their own gates, when new Attilas came, year after year, on
the old errand of havoc, Germany was indeed ready with men to do once
more the work of Aetius and the first Theodoric. The Saxon kings,
father and son, knew how to smite the Magyar with blows more crushing
than the Hun had tholed on the Catalaunian fields. So, ages after,
men were not lacking to smite the Mongol at Lignitz as the Hun and
the Magyar had been smitten before him. But in these wars men were
fighting for their homes and for their lives, for their faith only
as part of their homes and of their lives. When the great cry of
all came up, when to fight for the faith was not to fight for men’s
own homes and lives but for the homes and lives of others, then the
voice that spoke was the voice, not of Rome’s Emperor but of her
Bishop. Some months back I strove to draw for you a picture of the
great day on which that voice was raised, as part of the tale of the
memorable land and city that listened to it. By the Bright Mount of
the Arvernian land, in the home of Sidonius and Gregory, the word
was spoken, at whose bidding men of every calling short of kingship
marched forth to do battle for the sepulchre of Christ. The man to
speak the word should have been God’s Vicar in earthly things; he
who bade men draw the sword should have been he who could bid them
follow him as their loftiest leader; the call to the Holy War should
have been in the West, as in the East it ever was, a decree that went
forth from Cæsar Augustus. But the two swords had clashed in anger,
the two lights shone with hostile brilliancy; the days were passed
when the third Otto and the fifth Gregory might have stood side by
side at such a gathering; he who now drew the sword at the bidding
of Rome’s Emperor could do it only at the risk of the ban of Rome’s
oft-times banished Bishop. Alexios Komnênos, vigorous founder of a
vigorous dynasty, was still not a Heraclius or a Basil; but in the
East the Emperor was still ready in his own place to do his own work;
he had not vanished into some land beyond Mount Hæmus, and left a
Patriarch who acknowledged him not to do the foremost duty of Empire
in his stead.

In later stages of the crusading strife Kings and Emperors of the
Romans did indeed take their share; and the greatest success won by
any crusaders since the first fell to the lot of the Emperor who more
than any other drew down on his head the curses of the spiritual
Rome. Conrad went and came back; the elder Frederick died on his
march; but the second Frederick, alone of Emperors, alone of European
kings, made his way within the long-fought-for walls, and wore a
royal crown in the city of Godfrey and of David. Cursed first for
not going on the crusade, then cursed again for going, cursed most
of all for actually winning the prize of so many struggles, the King
of Salem had to fall back on traditions older than Godfrey, older
than David; he had to fall back on the kingdom of Melchizedek, to
place on his own head the crown which no priestly hand would set
there. That the Bishop of the Western Rome should strive to hinder
the Emperor of the Western Rome from winning the noblest prize that
any Emperor since Heraclius had won, shows more than any other tale
in history what a power had sprung up in the bosom of the Empire
to supplant the Empire itself. A King of France, a King’s son of
England, might go on the now hopeless errand; no Emperor, no German
king, was likely to go and seek the misbelievers in the Eastern lands
with the memory of Frederick before his eyes. A day was to come when
the misbelievers were to come and threaten Emperors and German kings
in their own realm. But before that day came, one Emperor, fighting
for the last fragment of Rome’s Eastern power, was to win by his fall
such glory as no Emperor had for ages won by his triumphs. And, even
in the moment of that glorious fall, he was doomed to show that the
Bishops of the Western Rome could be as deadly in their friendship
to the Cæsars of the East as they could be in their enmity to their
own sovereigns, whether on the throne of Charles or on the throne of
David.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have already spoken of the event of the year 1204, the taking of
Constantinople by the Latins, as the point at which we must place
the end of the old and unbroken Empire of Rome in the East. High
indeed among the crimes and follies of recorded history must we rank
that exploit of princely freebooters in crusading garb which broke
in pieces the ancient bulwark of Christendom, and left only feeble
fragments which could not fail to be swallowed up one by one by the
advancing Infidel. Men with the cross on their shoulders, with their
swords hallowed to the service of the faith, turned aside from their
calling to carve out realms for themselves at the cost of their
fellow-Christians, and thereby to do the work of the misbeliever
more thoroughly than he could ever have done it for himself. At the
beginning of the thirteenth century the paths of the Eastern and
Western Emperors had parted so far asunder that the rival claims of
the Greek and the German representatives of Rome might well have died
out in oblivion. But the Western Rome had now another representative
whose claims could not die out. If her Emperor no longer cared to
assert his right to the dominion of the world, her Bishop was ever
ready to make the claim. The men of the West were taught to look on
the Christian East as a schismatic land to be won back to the true
obedience; they were taught that it was a worthy work to drive the
pastors of the Eastern Churches from their thrones and to instal in
their place dependents of the encroaching Bishop of the West. Vassals
of Rome in her new character, a spiritual Prusias, a spiritual Herod,
were to teach once more the lesson of bondage to Greece and Asia,
to bid all lands look once more to the elder Rome as the judge that
alone gave forth judgements which none might gainsay. It is indeed
due to the memory of the great Innocent to remember that it was not
at his bidding, but in direct disobedience to his straitest command,
that Frank and Venetian turned their swords against Constantinople
instead of wielding them for Jerusalem. It was not at his word or
with his approval that men whose calling it was to rescue the Temple
of the Lord from misbelieving masters, defiled the church of the
Divine Wisdom as no unbelieving master has ever defiled it. But
Innocent did not scruple to take advantage of the crimes which he had
forbidden, and to enlarge his spiritual dominion by the help of the
plunderers whom he had failed to call off from their work of plunder.
And so the disunited East, a Christendom in which Christians had
ceased to be brethren, stood a ready prey for the Infidel, strong in
his unity, strong in the guidance of the mightiest line of princes to
whom the championship of the Asiatic, now the Mussulman, side of the
Eternal Question had ever fallen.

For we have reached the days of the Ottoman. Europe and Christendom
had now to strive with a foe more terrible than Carthage or than
Persia, more terrible than the Saracen of the East or of the West,
more terrible than the Hun, the Avar, the Magyar, or the earlier
tribes of his own Turkish stock. The Arab had cut the Empire short;
but in cutting the Empire short, he had relieved it of provinces
which were no source of true strength, and thereby he had given it
for the first time somewhat of the life and vigour of a nation. The
Seljuk Turk had conquered the lands which the Arab had ravaged but
could never conquer; but he had conquered them only by making them a
wilderness. He had fixed his throne at Nikaia, but he had fixed it
there only to fall back again. If the Sultan of Rome ever dreamed
that the Eastern Rome itself was to be his, his dream was of the
kind which comes from the gate of ivory. But the vision of Othman
was the vision of a seer to whom the future was laid open. He and
his house were not to be beaten back till they had reared a dominion
on Christian, on European, soil, which far more than outweighed
the winning back of the most western land of Europe from Eastern
masters. The Ottoman was to become, what no other of the many earlier
invaders of his stock had ever become, not the mere passing scourge,
but the indwelling and abiding oppressor of Christian and European
lands. The Hun and the Avar had been driven back or swept away from
the earth. The Bulgarian had bowed himself to Christian teaching;
he had cast aside his barbarian speech, and had merged his national
being in the national being of an European people. The Magyar had
kept his name and his tongue; but he had made his way into the
fellowship of Christendom and of Europe; only, to the abiding loss
of the nations of South-Eastern Europe, his Christian teaching had
come from the Western Rome. The Mongol had fixed himself on a far
off march of Europe and Asia, to hold from thence an overlordship
over the most distant and least known of European powers. The Ottoman
was to do more than these. He was to do what the Arab and the Seljuk
had striven in vain to do; he was to fix his seat in the New Rome
itself. And more, he was to win the New Rome in the character of an
European power, and to storm its walls by the hands of soldiers of
European birth. When Mahomet pitched his camp before Constantinople,
it was not, like the Saracen who came before him, in the character of
a lord of Asia invading Europe; he came as one whose vast dominion
on European soil had long hemmed in the Roman world in that corner
of Thrace which he had kept as well nigh the last morsel to devour.
The conqueror of Constantinople came as one who already ruled on the
Danube, but who did not as yet rule on the Nile or the Euphrates. And
he came as one who knew how to press into his service the choicest
wits and the strongest arms of all the lands from the Danube to the
Propontis as well as of the lands from the Propontis to the Halys.
The institution of the Janissaries, that cruelest offshoot of the
wisdom of the serpent, had turned the strength of every conquered
people against itself, and had changed those who should have been the
deliverers from oppression into the most trustworthy instruments
of the oppressor. The ramparts of Constantinople were stormed by
warriors of Greek, of Slavonic, and of Albanian blood; the dominions
of the masters of Constantinople were administered by statesmen of
European stock, once of Christian faith; whether the human prey
kidnapped in childhood or the baser brood who, then as now, sold
their souls for barbarian hire. In all the endless phases of the
Eternal Question, never had the powers of evil yet devised such a
weapon as this, the holding down of nations in bondage by the hands
of the choicest of their own flesh and blood.

I would fain ask how many there are among those around me who bear
in memory that this day on which we have come together[1] is the
anniversary of the darkest day in the history of Christendom. The
twenty-ninth of May, the day so long and so strangely honoured among
us as the day of the birth and return of Charles the Second, bears
about it in other lands the memory of events of greater moment in
the history of the world. It is the day of the fall of the Eastern
Rome, the martyr’s birthday of her last Emperor. It was on this day
that the barbarian first seated himself on the throne of the Cæsars,
that the infidel first planted the badge of Antichrist on the most
glorious of Christian temples. From this day onwards the Christian
East has been in mourning, mourning for the home of its Empire, for
the holy place of its faith. On such a day as this there should go
up no anthem of rejoicing, but the sad strain of the Hebrew gleeman
who had seen a day of no less blackness; “O God, the heathen have
come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and
made Jerusalem an heap of stones.” But for the Hebrew seventy years
only of sorrow were appointed; our captivity--for the captivity of
the Eastern Rome is the captivity of all Christendom--has gone on
now for four hundred and two and forty years as it is this day. Now,
as then, barbarians sit encamped as a wasting horde in the fairest
regions of the earth; now, as then, the profession of the Christian
faith entails an abiding martyrdom on nations in their own land.
And heavier still is the thought that not a few in Christian lands
love to have it so. We daily hear the strange lesson that “British
interests,” “imperial interests”--the interest perhaps of the usurer
wrung from the life-blood of his victim--demand that we should do
all that we can to prolong the rule of the oppressor, to prolong the
bondage of the oppressed. We have seen the strange sight of English
statesmen rejoicing, as at some worthy exploit of their hands, that
they had given back to the rule of the Sultan, that is to the bondage
of the unbelieving stranger in their own land, the men, the women,
the children, for whom the swords of better men than they had wrought
deliverance. With shame like this done in our own day, we can hardly
turn round and throw stones even at the men of the Fourth Crusade.
They at least sinned for the human motive of their own pelf; it is
something for which no human motive can be found when men rejoice in
the sorrows of the helpless lands which, after a glimpse of the light
of freedom, were again thrust down into the night of bondage which
that short glimpse of light has made more black.

  [1] May 29, 1885.

Let us remember then, as our story brings the tale of the Eastern
Rome to its end, that it was as it were in the night that has just
passed that the last Christian worship was paid beneath the dome of
Saint Sophia, that it was as it were by the morning light of this
very day that the last Constantine took his post by the gate of
Saint Rômanos, to die, when to die was all that he could do, for his
Empire and for his faith. And yet there is one thought which casts a
shadow over the end of the hero and of his power. The last Christian
worship beneath the dome of Saint Sophia was a worship paid according
to foreign rites, a worship from which the men of the Christian East
shrank as from a defilement. So far had the ghostly power of the
Western Rome spread its shadow over all lands, that the temporal help
of the West could be won only, or rather could be promised only and
never won, by treason to the old religious traditions of the East. It
was a brighter moment in the memory of our fathers, a moment which
has no fellow in our own memory, when three of the great powers of
East and West, representing three of the great races of Europe, three
of the great divisions of Christendom, Orthodox Russia, Catholic
France, Protestant England, fought side by side to break the power of
the barbarian on the great day of Navarino.

From the last European survival of the Eastern Rome--for ever
remember that a more abiding survival still lingered for a while in
Asia--let us turn to another power which we can now look upon as no
more than a survival, the last direct survival of the Western Rome.
From Constantinople let us turn to Vienna, from the Palaiologos to
the Habsburg, from the last Constantine to the first Leopold. For two
hundred and thirty years the flood of Ottoman conquest had swept on;
it was at last to be stemmed. The Turk appeared, as he had appeared
already, before what we must now perchance call the Imperial city
of the West. But he fared in another sort from that in which he had
fared before the Imperial city of the East. He had made his way into
Constantinople; he could not make his way into Vienna. He made his
way into Constantinople over the corpse of a slaughtered Emperor;
from Vienna he was beaten back, but it was not by the arm of an
Emperor that he was beaten back. No king of another land came to the
help of Constantine; a king of another land did come to the help of
Leopold. Constantine fell by the sword of a foe that was too strong
for him; Leopold found a helper who was stronger than his foe, and
devoted the full turnings and searchings of an Imperial mind to find
out with how little sacrifice of Imperial dignity he could pay some
feeble thanks to the man who had saved his throne and life. Vienna
was saved for Christendom; it never shared the fate of Belgrade and
Buda. But it was the sword of the Slave, the sword of the Pole, that
saved it. Look on a hundred years, and the debt is paid in full.
Poland is wiped out from the list of nations, and the house that the
Pole had saved takes its share of the spoils of its deliverer.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have ended my tale of Rome, my tale of Rome in her many shapes
and stages, in the last feeble survivals of her power, in the more
strange survivals of her mere style. Once more I have to meet you
before the year, as years in this place are reckoned, comes to its
end. As I began by speaking of a world on which Rome had not yet
risen, I must end by speaking of a world from which Rome has passed
away.



LECTURE VI.

THE WORLD ROMELESS.


I said in the opening lecture of this series that one of the most
wonderful features of the age in which we live, an age which will
assuredly take its place in the Universal History of times to come
as one of the most memorable of ages, is that the world is Romeless.
I said too that this feature of the most modern times is, by one of
the great cycles of history, a feature which takes us back to the
earliest days of European life. The world from which Rome has passed
away has something in common with the world in which Rome had never
shown herself. It has something in common with it which it has not
in common with those later ages during which Rome, in one shape or
another, under one form of influence or another, was the acknowledged
centre of all European and Christian lands. But this is one of those
many truths which can be grasped only by those who look at European
history as a whole, and who are not led away by the delusive voices
which would teach them that this or that fragment of the unbroken
tale can be mastered by itself apart from the other acts of the one
drama. He who shuts up his books and he who opens his books at any
arbitrary point in Rome’s long story are alike shut out from any
true conception of the place of Rome in the world’s history; they are
shut out from understanding the difference between an age in which
Rome is and an age in which Rome is not. To their eyes the fact that
the world is Romeless will not seem anything wonderful, anything
distinctive, because they have never looked with any searching gaze
at the ages in which the world was otherwise. Such an one will never
see that the great feature of the most modern times, a feature which
has reached its height in the times in which we ourselves live, is
the absence of any such centre as the world so long gathered itself
around. And if he will not see that the world is Romeless, still
less will he see that even the Romeless world is not as though Rome
had never been. Rome is still eternal in her influence; the world in
truth has been for ages so steeped in Roman influences that those
influences have ceased to be Roman. But Rome, as a visible and
acknowledged centre, has passed away. No longer does an undivided
world look to a single Rome as its one undoubted head. No longer does
a divided world look to an Eastern and a Western Rome as each the
undoubted head of half the world of civilized man. Rome œcumenical in
either of her seats has become a thing that is no longer. The younger
Rome has passed from us to be the spoil of the barbarian. The elder,
by a fate at once more and less hopeful, has sunk to be the local
capital of a single European kingdom. The younger, in her present
distress, has the loftier hopes for the future. Her very oppressors
have in some sort kept on her traditions; they have kept her in her
old place as the head of something more than a mere local realm. We
are far more likely to see Christian Constantinople again step into
her old heritage as the head of Eastern Christendom than to see the
lands of the West again accept the headship of the elder Rome by the
Tiber. The line of her Cæsars is broken, broken, we may be sure, for
ever. Her Pontiffs have not wisdom enough to see how their œcumenical
position has been raised by deliverance from the shackles of local
sovereignty. But to him who begins at the middle or at the end, to
him who leaves off at the middle--to him who, under the influence of
either error, has not given his mind to grasp the whole tale from the
kingship on the Palatine to the kingship on the Quirinal--the things
which make our own age so wonderful are things which lack a meaning.
He who vainly dreams that he will better understand his own times
by beginning his historic work with the times immediately before
them--he who listens to false charmers who bid him seek, perhaps
historic honours but assuredly not historic knowledge, by preferring
the flashy glitter of some sixth or seventh period to the solid
work of his Gregory or his Einhard--he will find out--no, he will
never learn enough to find out--that there is no royal road to the
knowledge even of his own times. His penalty will be to walk in an
age as strange and memorable as any that went before it, and not to
know in how strange and memorable an age it is in which he is walking.

We live then in a Romeless age, and to those who have eyes to see
it is one of the chief wonders of our age that it is Romeless. But
our age is Romeless because we live in a world from which Rome has
passed away; those far-gone ages were Romeless because Rome had
not yet made her way to the place which the world’s destiny had
marked for her. The position of those ages in the general tale of
European history was the subject of the first lecture of this course
six weeks back. In that lecture and in the one which followed it
I strove to point out how Rome, having by slow steps risen to the
first place in the West, burst suddenly into the midst of another
political system, a system of kingdoms and commonwealths which was
in many points a forestalling of the political system of the world
in which we now live. And we may go yet further back, to days when
Rome was so far from being the head of the world that her name could
hardly have been known in the world. By one of the strange cycles of
history, we who dwell in the wide world of modern times, the world of
continents and oceans--nothing better shows its vastness than that
we are driven to form a plural for this last primæval name--have
in some points come back to the state of those who dwelled in the
narrow world of the earliest times, the little world of islands,
peninsulas, and inland seas. We have come back to the state of things
that was, not only before Rome stood forth to rule the nations, but
before Macedonian kingdoms and Greek confederations had cut short
the right of every single town on its hill or in its island to act
as a sovereign state in the affairs of the world. Each nation now,
like each city then, does what is right in its own eyes. A nation
now, like a city then, may be kept back from the exercise of its
inherent powers by dread of the physical strength of some mightier
neighbour. But the nations now, like the cities then, acknowledge no
common centre of lawful rule, no power which can speak to all with
an authority higher than that of physical strength. From our age the
great vision of Dante’s Monarchy has passed away, and we have so
far gone back to the condition of the ages before whose eyes that
wondrous vision had never shown itself. The best witness to this
fact is to be found in the acknowledged importance and the confessed
difficulty of the doctrine of International Law. At no time has it
ever been more needful than it is now to have a system of rules by
which a number of independent powers shall acknowledge themselves to
be bound. At no time has it been found harder to enforce that system
of rules by any practical sanction. The simplest way perhaps is that
the weak state shall be held bound to the strictest observance of
every international rule in its dealings with the stronger, but that
the stronger shall be held to be absolved from the like pedantic
minuteness in its dealings with the weaker. A fancied insult, for
instance, at the hands of Greece is held to demand a humiliating
atonement which would certainly not be asked for in the like case
at the hands of Germany. But the most subtle International lawyer
has failed to devise any means, save the last argument of all,
for bringing a great power to reason which, to put it delicately,
puts its own construction on international rules, and is so fully
convinced of the truth of that construction that it declines to
submit their interpretation to the decision of any arbiter. So it was
in the days when the civilized world was bounded by the independent
commonwealths of Greece. In theory certain rules or customs were
held to bind every Greek state in its dealings with every other
Greek state. Certain acts which were deemed lawful if done towards
barbarians were deemed unlawful if done towards fellow-Greeks. Such
rules differed in no essential respect from the International Law
of modern times. There is simply a verbal difficulty in applying
the name to the old Greek world, a difficulty arising out of the
fact that, in our present state of things, nations have taken the
place of cities. But among Greek cities there was just the same
difficulty in finding a sanction for the wholesome rules laid down
by Greek tradition or religion which there is in finding the like
sanction now. There was no common temporal authority; we can hardly
say that there was a common spiritual authority. The Amphiktyonic
Council had but feeble claims even to the last position; its decrees
went practically for nothing, unless some powerful state undertook
to carry them out for its own purposes, and claimed in return to
determine what they should be. In the days of the great Peloponnesian
war we do not hear of the Amphiktyons at all. Then and later,
Athens, Sparta, Thebes, could trifle at pleasure with the rights
of a weaker city, subject only to the chance that some other among
the stronger cities might find it suit its interests to assert the
rights of the weaker. Every Greek city had in theory an equal right
to independence; but Messênê, Skiônê, and Plataia felt how hard it
sometimes was to assert that right. A treaty graven on a stone went
for little, an Amphiktyonic decree went for less, when a powerful
and ambitious city had other purposes to carry out. Such a treaty,
such a decree, went for about as much as the agreement of a modern
European congress when it binds itself to secure the freedom of
Epeiros and the good government of Armenia. The voice of some one
overbearing city, say Sparta backed by the will of the Great King,
counted for far more. The rise of the Macedonian power under two
renowned princes gave the Greek world for a short space a centre and
a head. International law or its substitutes went for little when
Alexander, flushed with Asiatic conquest, wrote to all the cities
of Greece to restore their exiles. But when the Macedonian kingdom
again became only one power among many, the old state of things
came back again with the needful changes. The world of Greece was
no longer a world of cities only; it was a world in which cities,
kingdoms, and confederations all played their part, a world in
which diplomacy had its full run, in which the eastern seas of
Europe were ever covered by embassies crossing one another in their
endless voyages to the court of this or that prince, to the assembly
of this or that confederation. It was into this busy world of
complicated International dealings that the power of Rome burst like
a thunderbolt. All was at once changed. Under the Roman Peace, indeed
in days long before the Roman Peace was formally established, as soon
as Rome became by common consent the arbiter of the Mediterranean
world, International Law had small opportunities left of showing
its strength or its weakness. For a while the independent powers of
the civilized world received as law whatever decrees the mightiest
among them, the Roman Senate, thought good to put forth in each
particular case. As kingdoms sank into provinces, as independent
cities sank into municipalities, the law of the one commonwealth into
whose substance they were in a manner merged became the immediate
law of the whole civilized world, with the might of Cæsar Augustus
as its sanction. There might still be a _jus gentium_ between Rome
and Parthia; to settle such questions as might arise at Antioch, at
Gades, or at Eboracum, there was only the law of the Roman city of
which all other cities had become suburbs.

As long as any shadow of Roman power lasted, the theory that there
lived on at Rome a central judgement-seat for the world was never
wholly forgotten. As East and West became, not only separate but
hostile, as the Western Pontiff stepped for many purposes into the
place of the Western Emperor, it was the ecclesiastical rather than
the Imperial Rome to which the nations sought as their common judge.
Still in either case it was Rome that spoke; the world at least of
Western Europe still acknowledged a centre by the Tiber, though
that centre might have shifted from the Regia and the Septizonium
to the Lateran and the Vatican. The world of which the Lateran and
the Vatican were centres was presently cut short by a spiritual
revolt. And that spiritual revolt was largely measured by national
distinctions. As Eastern Europe, Greek and Slavonic Europe, had
never admitted the spiritual dominion of the Western Rome, so now
Teutonic Europe cast that dominion aside. Nations which had, in the
teeth of Emperors, asserted their independence in the affairs of
the world, now asserted their independence no less in the range of
man’s spiritual being. The Church of Rome remained, like the Empire
of Rome, a power mighty and venerable, but a power confined, if not
within the bounds of a single nation, at least within the bounds of
a group of nations closely connected in history and speech. As there
was a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, so there was now a
Holy Roman Church of the Latin-speaking folk. In one important point
indeed we may say that the range of the new Roman power was narrowed
yet further. There was a time when the bishopric of Rome, with all
that the bishopric of Rome carried with it, was, in practice as
well as in theory, open to men of all nations that admitted the
spiritual power of Rome. Now, though no law forbids the election of
a Pope of any nation, in practice the choice of the electors has
long been confined to men of Italian birth. This privilege indeed
might be looked on as in some sort a survival or revival of local
Roman supremacy; more truly it is a falling back on days before the
spiritual supremacy of Rome began. It is a falling back on times when
the Roman church, still a local church though the first of local
churches, naturally sought for its chiefs among its own members.
But so far as it is a falling back in either sense, it is a falling
back in a shape better fitted for later times; here again the nation
takes the place of the city; Italy takes the place of Rome. In short
the Roman Church, still in theory coextensive with the world, once
really coextensive with Western Europe, has shrunk up into a body
mainly Latin with a head exclusively Italian. It is indeed only in a
broad and general sense that we can take such propositions as that
the Latin nations clave to Rome while the Teutonic nations fell
away. That there are many exceptions needs no proof. It is plain
that the Roman Church can still boast herself of not a few Teutonic
and Slavonic subjects. It is no less plain that there are here and
there, though in smaller numbers, men of Latin speech, both in East
and West, who are not her subjects. Still the general proposition
is none the less true in its general sense. It marks, to say the
least, general tendencies which run a certain course wherever there
is no special cause to hinder them. If we look narrowly into each
case of exception, we shall often see some special cause, commonly
some political cause, which accounts for the anomaly. We may note
further that, as the Empire became more purely German and the Papacy
became more purely Latin, the old feuds between Empire and Papacy
died out. The Austrian Emperors, Catholic chiefs of an Empire mainly
Protestant, had no such warfare to wage with the Roman see as had
been waged by the Franconians and the Swabians. But as Empire and
Papacy alike came to be thus shut up within narrowed and definite
limits, neither could any longer act as a common centre, even for
the Western lands. For better or for worse, the world has fallen
back on an older state of things. Instead of a single Rome as the
acknowledged head of all, instead of two rival Romes, each claiming
the headship of its own half of the civilized world, it is now open
to every nation, as in the earlier day it was open to every city,
to do, as far as it finds to do it, that which is right in its own
eyes. Every nation now, as every city then, may play the part of Rome
for the years or for the moments through which it may keep enough of
physical strength to play that part.

The latest times then are in truth a return to the earliest times,
with this difference, that nations have taken the place of cities.
Two of the masters of history in later times have pointed out the
close analogy between the mutual relations of the cities of old
Greece and those of the nations of modern Europe. The lesson has
been taught us in its fulness alike by Arnold and by Grote. It hardly
fell within the scope of either master to point out how truly the
likeness is a cycle, how the later state of things is a return to
the earlier, after the existence for many ages of a state of things
wholly unlike either. They were hardly called on to dwell upon the
causes which have brought about this return to an earlier state of
things, or on the causes which made that return, as every return
to an earlier state of things must be, a return only partial, a
return largely modified by the events which have taken place in the
meanwhile. It was enough for them to point the analogy. And the
analogy is answer enough to those shallowest of the shallow who go
about winning cheers from half-taught audiences by declaiming on
the uselessness of studying the institutions of “petty states” and
by asking what can be gained by knowing about battles fought two
thousand years ago. The substitution of the nation for the city is,
from one side, part of the process which we may, for our purposes,
call the physical growth of the world. The world in which we live
is in physical extent vastly bigger than the first civilized world
of old Greece, vastly bigger than the far wider Mediterranean
world of Rome. What the Ægæan and its borderlands once were, what
the Mediterranean and its borderlands once were, Ocean and his
borderlands, his borderlands spread over so many continents and
islands, are now. No one ought to be more ready than students of
political history to welcome every modern scientific invention. The
discoveries which have gone so far to annihilate distance ought to
call up our deepest thankfulness. But we are perhaps thankful for
them on other grounds than those for which they are prized by their
own inventors; we are certainly thankful for them on other grounds
from those for which they are prized by those who go about bragging
about the worthlessness even of the knowledge of times when those
inventions were unknown. The steamer, the railway, the telegraph,
are wholesome and necessary institutions; they are wholesome and
necessary in order to hinder man’s intellectual and political life
from being crushed by mere physical extension. They allow the England
of our day to come nearer to the Athens of Periklês than the England
of a hundred years back, of fifty years back. They allow the United
States of America, spread over a world wider than any age of Roman
empire, to abide as a Confederation free and united, the true fellow
of the old Achaia shut up within the bounds of Peloponnêsos. They are
needful in an age when nations have taken the place of cities, that
they may make the nations really the political equals of the cities.
You may again, some of you, chance to hear some smatterer sneering at
petty states ignorant of the great discoveries of natural science.
Tell him that the highest use of the discoveries of natural science
has been to raise large states to the political level of small ones.

       *       *       *       *       *

The causes which have led to the substitution of nations for cities
in the modern world are many, many more than I can attempt to deal
with in this lecture; but not a few of them are nearly connected
with the main subject of this course, the condition of Europe in its
three great stages, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. I long
ago defined modern history, if the formula has any meaning at all,
to mean the history of the times in which the Teutonic and Slavonic
nations have held the foremost place. Now among both these races the
tendency to look to the city as the natural centre of social and
political life has always been far less developed than it was among
the southern nations. We may say southern nations in general; for
if the highest developement of the city belongs to Greece, yet it
is also very strong in Italy--let Rome and Capua bear witness; and
if the growth of the city life was much less perfect among Gauls
and Iberians than it was among Greeks and Italians, yet Gauls and
Iberians had certainly made a nearer approach to it than Slaves or
Teutons. The causes of this difference, the detailed shapes in which
this difference shows itself, if I ever speak of them at all, I must
speak of some other time, and after all they perhaps rather belong
to the province of the Reader in Anthropology than to mine. For the
present purpose we may simply accept the fact. Take the highest type
of each class. Greek political society starts from the city; separate
cities may be grouped into confederations. Teutonic political society
starts from the tribe; separate tribes may be fused into nations.
I use the word _group_ in one case, the word _fuse_ in the other,
because in the Teutonic case the union has both happened far more
universally and has been far more perfect than in the Greek case. We
must take one more glance at the old free Hellas, before the growth
of Rome, before the growth of Macedonia. Its ideal is the perfectly
independent city; it is only the experience of a later age which
leads cities to join into confederations. The process is in some
sort an unwilling one; we may be sure that Sikyôn and Corinth would
never have given up one jot of their perfect separate independence
through any smaller motive than the need of union among cities that
had to escape or to throw off Macedonian domination. The Teutonic
political unit, the tribe, or whatever we call the body of settlers
who occupy a _shire_ or _gá_, holds another position. Neighbouring
and kindred tribes join into a nation--at first most likely they join
into some group greater than the tribe and less than the nation--with
far greater ease than Greek cities join into confederations. Some of
the reasons are obvious. A city has in the nature of things a more
distinct and abiding political being than a mere district, a mere
space on the map. Two shires may be physically rolled into one, and
the rolling into one does not carry with it any necessary political
subjection of one part of the new whole to the other. Two cities can
seldom be physically rolled into one; the political union of two
cities is necessarily more imperfect than that of two districts,
and it is hard to unite them at all without giving some degree of
superiority to one over the other. Again, the tendency of a tribe,
whether wandering or settled in its district, is to the headship of
a personal chief, whether hereditary or elective; if the assembly is
the body of the tribe, the duke, judge, ealdorman, is the head. The
tendency of a city, whether aristocratic or democratic, is to mere
temporary magistrates, who are not in the same sense heads either of
the city or of its assembly. Two or more dukes or ealdormen can give
way to a single king, or they can go on exercising their office under
a common king, with very little shock to the constitution and habits
of the land and its folk. The assembly of the enlarged district
is simply an enlargement of the separate assemblies of the two
districts. It is by no means so easy to fuse the assemblies and the
magistracies of two separate cities into one. The attempt is recorded
to have been once made in historic Greece; Corinth for a while, no
very long while, merged her separate being in that of Argos; but
before long Argos and Corinth were again separate and independent
cities. In our own country the process by which the great kingdoms of
the Angles and Saxons were joined into the one kingdom of England is
perfectly well known; we know nothing of the details of the process
by which those seven or eight great kingdoms, those three specially
great kingdoms, were gradually formed by the union of earlier and
smaller settlements. In most cases we can see that such an union did
take place; we can even see that the process of union took different
shapes in one kingdom and in another; but the details are hidden from
us. One reason of our ignorance among many may well be that the
process was gradual and easy, carrying with it no great immediate
change. We need not suppose that the union of Wessex or of Mercia was
wrought by a series of treacherous murders like those which united
the whole Frankish nation under Chlodowig. But the ease with which
Chlodowig could root out all the other Frankish kings, the seeming
good will with which he was received as king by each division of the
nation, shows that the process was an easy one. Even when it was done
by force, it would carry with it no special wrong beyond the force by
which it was done. The Ripuarians really lost nothing by accepting
the Salian king.

At a later time the opposite process has taken place in many lands.
Gaul and Germany after a very near approach to union, Italy after an
approach far more distant, split up again into a crowd of states,
practically if not formally independent. The still abiding theory of
the Empire forbade either the free city or the duchy or county to put
on that avowed independence which had belonged to every free Greek
city, to every barbarian kingdom, in the days before the Empire was.
But practically cities and principalities took to themselves all the
powers of independent states, even to that of making war on their
overlord. In Gaul indeed, besides the splitting up of the land among
the dukes and counts, there was the splitting off of the land itself
from the body of the Empire. As the German poet sings;

  “Et simul a nostro secessit Gallia regno,
  Nos priscum regni morem servamus, at illa
  Jure suo gaudet, nostræ jam nescia legis.”

In that part of Gaul which became France in the later sense, we
might even say that a nation was forming and splitting in pieces at
the same moment. It is hard to distinguish the process by which the
house of Robert the Strong became Dukes of the French from that by
which they became Kings of the French. In either case we see that the
word _Franci_ now means, at least west of the Maes and the Saone,
something very unlike what it had meant in the days of Chlodowig. The
new nation, the nation formed out of three elements, the _Mischvolk
der Franzosen_, the nation which still kept in Latin the name of the
old Teutonic Franks, is fast forming. Its language is forming; there
is a _lingua Romana_ of Northern Gaul, which is felt to have become
distinct from the _lingua Latina_ of books, which is felt before long
to be distinct from the other forms of the _lingua Romana_ in Italy,
Spain, and Southern Gaul. There is a French people, speaking a French
tongue. But the nation, while forming, is splitting asunder. At the
very moment when the duchy of France is changing into the kingdom
of France, a crowd of smaller duchies and counties are falling off
from it. By the strangest chance of all, the duchy is dismembered on
behalf of Scandinavian settlers. Their coming might have been almost
expected to call into fresh life the waning Teutonic element in Gaul.
In truth the new comers from the North, while keeping all their
native energy, became disciples of French speech and French culture;
and it was in truth their help which enabled the French kingdom to
come into being. The typical Romance nation was thus formed, itself
a nation in the strictest sense, though it has since done much to
absorb and assimilate parts of the other nations on its borders.
Yet we may perhaps see in the growth of the French nation, at least
as compared with England and Scandinavia, some influences from the
city-life of more southern lands. The nation grows round a city in
a way in which no Teutonic nation has done; Paris is the centre,
nay the cradle, of France in a way in which no chief city of any
Teutonic land can be said to be. The other cities, the ancient heads
of tribes, kept a headship over the districts which shared their
names such as never belonged to the towns of England. When we pass
out of France into Southern Gaul, we find another state of things, a
state of things approaching to that which is to be seen in Italy, a
state of things far more nearly recalling the elder state of Southern
Europe. In both lands the cities, though not forming, as in old
Greece, the whole political life of the country, are a conspicuous
element; in Italy they are the predominant element. As the power
of the Emperors gradually died out in their kingdoms of Italy and
Burgundy, the land split up into a crowd of practically independent
states, among which free commonwealths again played their part
alongside of principalities. On the greatness of the Italian cities
I need not now dwell; but it is important to remember, first, that,
though the history of the cities is the most brilliant and the most
attractive part of mediæval Italian history, yet the cities never
spread over the whole land, as they did in old Greece; secondly,
that the political phænomena of Italy appear, though with less
brilliancy and for a shorter time, in the neighbouring lands of Gaul.
Provence, the land once so deeply touched by Greek influences, had
for a moment her commonwealths no less than Lombardy. Massalia, which
had braved the might of Cæsar, again braved the might of Charles
of Anjou, and found the Frenchman a far harsher conqueror than the
Roman. Aquitaine too, the other land of the tongue of _oc_, if not
so distinctly republican as Provence, yet stands distinguished from
France as emphatically a land of civic growth and civic privilege.
The importance and independence of the cities grow as we go on a
south-eastward journey through England, France, Aquitaine, Provence,
and Italy.

We have been opposing cities to nations; but it is easier to define
a city than to define a nation. I think we may say, at least for our
purpose, that the ideal nation is found when all the speakers of
the same tongue on a continuous territory are united into a single
political whole, which includes no speakers of other tongues. The
nation in short should have unity of speech and unity of government.
It would be hard to find a nation which exactly answers this
definition, but the nearer a political body answers to it, the nearer
surely does it come to the highest type of a nation. I think that,
when we find anything else, when we find men of several tongues
under the same government or men of the same tongue under several
governments, we instinctively ask the reason. The reason may be a
good one or it may not; but we cannot help asking the reason; the
thing is, at the first look of it, an anomaly. Now free cities, with
all their merits, are the greatest of all legitimate hindrances to
national unity. I say of legitimate hindrances, of hindrances which
come of themselves and which have something to be said for them, as
distinguished from hindrances caused by external and unrighteous
force. Italian unity was impossible as long as Milan and Venice were
kept apart from the Italian body by the brute force of the House
of Austria; but Italian unity was no less impossible in the days
when Milan and Venice--Milan for a moment, Venice for ages--played
a part in the affairs of the world as independent commonwealths.
Italy, the land of free cities, has, largely because it had been
the land of free cities, been of all the lands of Europe that which
most thoroughly split asunder, that which most thoroughly became, in
the well-known words of her enemy, a mere geographical expression.
Germany, in her most divided days, was still far from being so
utterly divided as Italy. Save during the few years of French
ascendency, her princes and cities always kept up some kind of mutual
relations towards one another. Germany always had a national Diet;
Italy had none.

The Italian nation has been at last united in our own days, and we
all rejoiced in its union. Yet we may be allowed to doubt whether
the union was not a little too speedy and a little too thorough.
It is surely carrying unity too far to wipe out all traces of the
independent being, for most purposes to wipe out the very name, of
such a land as Sicily. It jars on our feelings to find that, while
Ireland at least forms part of the royal style of its sovereign,
Sicily is no longer even a geographical expression. The island
realm of Roger has sunk to be seven provinces of the kingdom on the
mainland. And there is another result of Italian unity, a result in
which we may rejoice without drawbacks, but which still has somewhat
of sadness about it as finally ending that great phase of the history
of Europe with which we have throughout been dealing. Never were ties
with the past so fully snapped as when the army of Italy entered
liberated Rome. Of all novelties in European history the greatest was
when Rome became the centre of a dominion with acknowledged metes
and bounds, the head in short of a local Italian kingdom. “Rome
the capital of Italy” was a formula which might well gladden our
hearts; but it was a formula which formally swept away the œcumenical
position, the œcumenical traditions, of Rome. Till that day some
shadow of her œcumenical position had lived on. Under the temporal
dominion of her Bishops, she was indeed the temporal capital, not
of all Italy but of a part. But the temporal headship of the part
did not wipe out the œcumenical position as is done by the temporal
headship of the whole. Rome was not the mere head of the Papal
States; the Papal States was something which her Bishops held as a
temporal appendage to their position as Bishops of the œcumenical
city. But the kingdom of Italy is not an appendage to Rome; Rome is
the head of the kingdom. The whole is greater than its part; Rome,
by her own free will and by the free will of Italy, has become less
than Italy. By becoming the willing head of an Italian kingdom she
has formally cast aside her Imperial traditions as they were not cast
aside when brute force made her the head of a French department. The
deliverance of 1870 was the formal record of the fact that, in the
sense in which I used the words in the opening of this lecture, the
world is Romeless.

While Italy then, the special land of free cities, was slow in rising
to national unity, the neighbouring land in which free cities showed
themselves only for a moment has never reached national unity at
all. Bondage to the modern map, the familiar use of geographical
names only in their most modern sense, hinders men from seeing that
the lands of Southern Gaul, the lands of the tongue of _oc_, that is
Aquitaine and the Imperial Burgundy, had in them all the elements
of national life just as truly as Italy or Spain, or as that very
France in which their national being has been merged. We are apt to
talk as if, because those lands are French now, therefore they have
been French from all eternity, or at least as if it had been in the
eternal fitness of things that they should become French some day.
Aquitaine indeed owed a formal and nominal homage to the French
crown; but Provence and the other Burgundian lands were as fully
independent of the Kings of Paris as any land of Spain or Italy. The
Karolingian dominion, that Frankish kingdom which had grown into a
Western Empire of Rome, broke up, as our own Chronicler has told us
better than any other record, into the four kingdoms of Germany,
Burgundy, Italy, and the Western realm that was to become France.
In the course of ages the Western kingdom has annexed the Middle
kingdom; it might have been the order of things that the Middle
kingdom should annex the Western. The course of the world’s history
might have been that, instead of Arles, Vienne, or Lyons bowing to
Paris, Paris should bow to Arles, Vienne, or Lyons. In a land whose
geography was so largely ruled by ecclesiastical divisions, it might
not have seemed wonderful if the seat of the Primate of Primates or
of the Primate of all the Gauls had won even temporal precedence over
the simple bishopric of Saint Denys and Saint German. The reason why
no South-Gaulish nationality was able to maintain itself is most
likely to be found in the specially divided political relations of
those lands. Aquitaine and the Imperial Burgundy have so much in
common, so much that is utterly unlike anything in France, that, had
they had the faintest chance of political union, they might have
formed a true nation. But there was no moment, under Romans, under
Goths, under Franks, when the two lands formed a political whole
apart from any other land. Aquitaine and Burgundy were ever parted,
each by itself was split in pieces, while Neustria and Austria ever
kept some measure of union, enough to enable them to grow into the
great realms of France and Germany. And so the Kings of Paris could
bit by bit swallow up the divided land. They could not only annex the
lands west of Rhone which owed them a formal homage, but they could
spread their power, slowly and surely, over the fairer lands, the
more royal cities, which knew no king but Cæsar.

But a fragment has escaped. Cities there still are of the old
Burgundian realm, cities both of Romance and of Teutonic speech,
from which the kingship of Cæsar has passed away, and which have
not bowed the neck to any meaner lord. The Middle kingdom still
has its representative in Europe; but that representative is no
longer a kingdom but a free confederation. Massalia the twice
free--Aquæ Sextiæ with her memories of Roman victory and Provençal
countship--Arelate where kings took their crown in life and Vienna
that sheltered them in death--Lugdunum whose name once spread to the
Ocean and the British sea--all these have passed away; but Lausanne
and Geneva still sit unchained beside their lake--modern freedom
has not wiped out the memory of ancient kingship at Neufchâtel and
Payerne--Basel, Basilia, in her very name brings up the thoughts
of Empire, fit thoughts in a city where men so long defied the
claims of Rome in her newer garb--and high above them all, younger
and mightier, still stands the city by the Aar, the home of old
patricians, the city looking forth upon her subject mountains, the
Bern of Berchthold, yet nobler than the Bern of Theodoric, the
city which, in days when the Middle kingdom might seem to have been
forgotten, a poet of her own could greet in a twofold garb,

  “Als Krone im Burgundenreich,
    Als freier Städte Krone.”

There is thus still a free and abiding fragment of the old realm of
that King Boso who, when men questioned his kingship, could tell them
that he was “Dei gratia id quod sum.” But of a Burgundian nationality
Europe now knows no trace. The fragment of free Burgundy that is
left has joined with two other brands snatched from the burning,
a fragment of Germany, a fragment of Italy, to form a political
nation, none the less truly a political nation because it does not
coincide with any nation defined by blood or speech. A fragment of
the English folk, a fragment of the British, a fragment of the Irish,
joined together to make for us that people of the Northern England
which, among its other merits, has kept alive, under another name,
the purest form of the English tongue. If we could not spare Scotland
in our island world, our _alter orbis_, still less could we spare
Switzerland in the wider world of the European mainland. A fragment
of the German, the Burgundian, and the Italian folk, have come
together to show us, in this age from which the power of Rome has
vanished, one lively image of the age when the œcumenical power of
Rome had not yet risen. Athens, like Rome, has sunk to be a seat of
local kingship; Achaia still lives, if not on her own Mediterranean
shore, yet in the lands which reproduce her political life. She
lives in a figure in the mountain land, the home of all that is
oldest and newest in Western tradition and Western thought. And
she lives too in a figure in the vaster federal and vaster English
land beyond the Ocean. We indeed feel the Unity of History to be a
living thing when we see the work of Markos of Keryneia and Aratos of
Sikyôn reproduced on two such widely different scales in the younger
hemisphere and in the elder.

Thus in the Latin-speaking lands and on the central march of
the Teutonic and Latin-speaking lands nations have grown up of
themselves, they have failed to grow up, or they have been formed
by an artificial union. But the city, as an independent political
unit, has vanished. Even in Switzerland the city is subordinate
to the artificial nation; and we can hardly say that any Swiss
canton is now a city commonwealth in the older sense. The people of
the surrounding district, once commonly a subject district, have
everywhere won for themselves equal rights with the people of the
town. If _Baselstadt_ is a purely town-community, it is because
_Baselland_ has won for itself, not only equality but separation.
In other lands the cities are simply members of the kingdom or
commonwealth, though we have seen that, where cities once were great,
nations have found it harder to grow into nations than elsewhere.
In other parts of Europe, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, nations have
grown up without reference to cities at all. The Teutonic and the
Slavonic political units are both something very unlike a city; the
Celtic political unit is something yet more unlike. In none of
these parts of Europe did the native political developement take
the course which it took in Greece or Italy or even in Gaul, and
the Roman influence was naturally immeasureably less than it was in
Southern Europe. In all these lands the city is everywhere a direct
importation from the South. It may be a real Roman colony; it maybe
a Teutonic or Slavonic community shaping itself after the pattern
of a Roman colony. Nowhere was the city a thing of purely native
growth, nowhere was the independent city the ruling political idea
around which all political life gathered. In one land indeed, in the
central land, the land which took specially to itself the Teutonic
name, cities did indeed become great and famous; but they became
great and famous only under the conditions which I have just laid
down. It was fitting that the German nation which sheltered its own
Holy Roman Empire should conform to Roman traditions more nearly than
England, Scandinavia, or the Slavonic lands. Cities therefore became
an important element in the German kingdom. The oldest Germans looked
on a walled town as a prison; yet in after days cities and city-life
found the German land no unkindly soil. The Roman cities by the
Rhine lived on, and became models for cities of more purely Teutonic
birth. The Colony of Agrippina had its capitol no less than the
Tolosa of Quintus Cæpio, and it seemed only in the nature of things
that patricians should gather round it. Saxon kings, Saxon dukes,
made younger cities arise after their model in the heart of the
German land or on the shore of the Northern Mediterranean. Nor must
we forget that other cities at which we have glanced already--will
any one grasp my meaning and all that it suggests if I speak of one
of them as “Verona in montibus?”--were simply cities of the German
realm, to which circumstances gave in the end a fuller freedom than
their neighbours. Zürich herself, “nobile Torregium,” “die uralte,
löbliche, eidgenössische Stadt,” reckons among her titles of honour
that the judgement-seat of Cæsar was so often held within her walls.
In course of time that special home of Imperial power passed away,
together with her fellows, from all dealings with Cæsar and his
Empire. Others clave to their old allegiance till a new _Francia_
reaching to the Baltic and the Hadriatic supplanted the ancient realm
which was at once _Francia_ and _Romania_. Those free cities of the
Empire which lingered on till our own century came, like the cities
of the Alpine land, of divers forms of growth. Augsburg--Augusta
Vindelicorum--proclaimed herself to all time as of Roman and Imperial
birth; round Nürnberg none but Teutonic memories can gather. And by
the Northern and the Eastern sea, by the banks of Weser, Elbe, and
Trave, cities arose which were called to a still higher and a more
abiding destiny. Merchants, missionaries, self-styled crusaders,
joined their efforts to plant German cities on the conquered shores
of the Wend and of the older folk beyond him, folk beside whom
modern Europe and her nations feel as intruders on foreign soil.
The League of the Saxon Hansa, a power for which, as a League, we
can hardly find a geographical place on land, became mighty indeed
and memorable upon the seas. London and Novgorod formed parts of
one union of trade and enterprise; the merchant cities could give
law to the kingdoms of the North and could place whom they would
on thrones which in Cnut’s day had looked to Winchester and which
were now taught to look to Lübeck. But here too, as in more southern
lands, the greatness of cities was not abiding. The League drooped;
its members fell away; three only lived through the last storm to
claim a revived freedom in the first new birth of Germany seventy
years back. Three-and-twenty years ago I saw those cities still
sovereign and independent; in theory more sovereign and independent
than they were in the days of their might. On the coins of Lübeck
was still graven, if not the image, yet the superscription of Cæsar;
the Hanseatic city seemed to have put forth no marks or shillings
since the days of the first Francis from Lorraine. But Cæsar lived
only in his superscription; Lübeck knew no lord on earth; she was
bound by no ties save those which bound her to her two Hanseatic
sisters and to the lax Confederation which still numbered a single
inland city among its members. The next year after my visit the
tale of free cities was shortened, the freedom of those that still
lived on was shortened also. Frankfurt has sunk from the rank of a
commonwealth to become a city of a local kingdom; Lübeck, Bremen,
Hamburg, are still commonwealths, but commonwealths which are again
members of an Empire. They are survivals, but survivals which
modern Europe, Romeless Europe, the Europe of huge kingdoms and of
countless armies--happy when kingdoms mean nations and when armies
do not simply keep down unwilling subjects--cannot spare from the
midst of her. The age of free cities is past; in some lands the mere
high-handed robbery of the stranger has wiped them out, as where
the fetters of the meanest of oppressors still clank over enslaved
Ragusa. In other lands the loss of local freedom has perhaps been
outweighed by admission into a wider national unity. In two lands
again the commonwealths still abide, tempered only by the obligations
of a federal tie. But a federal tie is one thing when it binds
together a group of lands and cities none of which could now stand
alone; it is another thing when the federation has an Imperial head,
when three surviving cities are grouped with duchies and kingdoms
which could at any moment overwhelm them, and when duchies and
kingdoms are again grouped in fellowship with another kingdom greater
than cities, duchies, and kingdoms joined in one. Yet to this day the
free city, even if shorn of its old greatness, its old independence,
is still an element in our modern Europe. Those three surviving
cities of the great Hansa are precious fragments indeed, fragments in
one sense of a world when the Roman power had put on its German garb,
reminders in another sense of a world on which the Roman power had
not yet risen. As we trust never to see the day when the bull of Uri
and the bear of Bern shall cease to be badges of a freedom more than
municipal, so we trust never to see the day when Imperial Germany
shall cease, among the ensigns of its free confederate members, to
reckon ensigns more worthy of honour than the banners of dukes and
kings, the towers of Hamburg, the key of Bremen, and the eagle-shield
of Lübeck.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have done my desultory picture of our Romeless world, desultory
and imperfect as must be every picture attempted in lectures such
as these, the object of which is not the communication of minute
knowledge on any point. I am still at the threshold of my work. Some
solid work I think I have done in inner chambers with the small
and faithful band who follow me, who sometimes guide me, through
book after book of the historian of the Franks. But what I have as
yet preached, so to speak, on the house-tops has been in its own
nature general and desultory. I have not, strictly speaking, been
teaching; I have been purposely talking in a way which might call
up memories in some and might stir up to inquiry in others. But
through the general we make our way to the particular. Next term I
trust to make even these more public lectures of a more solid kind.
I have run with a swift pace through a general view of the Methods
of Historical Study, through a general view of the chief periods of
European history. This last series fills up for this year the tale of
forty-two lectures which the iron rule of our masters demands from
me. With such necessity laid upon me, I should think it savoured
of arrogancy and impiety if I ventured on such a voluntary work of
supererogation as a forty-third lecture. What the Commissioners deem
enough you doubtless deem enough; so to-day I bring my desultory
story to an end. In October I hope to begin a more regular course,
and to make a path, through a true understanding of the early history
of Gaul, to a true understanding of the early history of Britain. And
I have one word more to say. Since I came here I have learned several
things, I have learned one in particular. I have hitherto always
shrunk from crying my own wares, from advertising my own writings.
Whenever I have quoted myself or referred to myself, it has been with
a feeling of doing something that one should be ashamed of. But I
have learned in this place where I now stand, from a colleague who is
now no longer a colleague, how very silly such modesty is, and how
much better it is to quote oneself and talk of oneself as freely as
one quotes and talks about anybody else. I will tell you then that a
few years back I gave two courses of lectures on the other side of
the Ocean which, I venture to think, contain matter worth reading. I
think they contain matter specially worth reading by those who think
of following my roundabout course in company, first with the Vandal
who crosses the Rhine and afterwards with the Saxon who crosses the
sea. They were printed in America; some copies have, I know, found
their way into Britain. I must put a bold face on the matter, and
say that those who have followed me thus far and who purpose to
follow me again in October might spend their Long Vacation worse than
in giving some part of it to reading my two courses of Lectures to
American audiences, bound up in one not very big volume. You will
find in them some things that I have said elsewhere, and, though
some seem to think that impossible, some things that I have not
said elsewhere. And so I bid you farewell for a few months, finding
fault with you in nothing, except that, like most other Professors,
I wish there were more of you. But one therefore feels all the more
kindly to the elect, the faithful, the little band that watched with
Ælfred, the stout hearts that lapped with Gideon, even though they be
far from reaching the full tale of three hundred. And so I will end
the work of my first academic year, with a wish to see you all and
more also on the same benches in October; I part from you with the
blessing of the modern Greek, εἰς καλὴν ἀντάμωσιν.



GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE.



GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE.


I have in various forms tried to point out the special importance
which, in the history of the world, belongs to the period which
saw the establishment of the dominion of the Roman People over
the civilized world of its time, especially over the Hellenic and
hellenized lands round the eastern Mediterranean. It is of the first
importance for the right understanding of general history to take in
the real character of the state of things which was brought about
by this gradual establishment of the Roman dominion. It is curious
to see how constantly that state of things is misunderstood, from
looking at the matter with modern eyes. And it is the more curious
when we come to think how very modern the eyes must be which are
unable to see the matter correctly. For we have hardly to go out of
our own century to find lively images of the state of things which
Roman conquest brought about. Yet we are constantly tempted to fancy
that the rule of the early Roman Emperors, perhaps that of the
Roman Commonwealth before them, was a centralized administration,
in which all authority issued from a central power. We are used
to the great kingdoms and commonwealths of modern Europe, in
which local bodies may enjoy a greater or less degree of local
independence, but in which they hold that independence in inherent
subordination to the central authority, by virtue of laws passed
by the central legislature. The land is divided into counties,
departments, provinces, administered according to such rules as the
central legislature may think good to lay down. It is true that in
our own country the shire is, both in idea and in part of the land
in historical fact, older than the kingdom. But in a large part of
England the shire is as truly a division of the kingdom as a French
department, and where it is not so historically it has become so
practically. An English shire, an English borough, has no rights or
powers but such as it has derived, in some shape or another, from the
central power of the land, by act of Parliament or by royal charter.
That central power has the same rights and powers in every corner of
the kingdom. I speak of course only of the United Kingdom; as soon
as we get beyond its limits, as soon as we enter the Scandinavian
kingdom and the Norman duchy which lie so near to it but which form
no part of it, so soon we still find ourselves in a state of things
which has much in common with the Roman dominion. And if all this
is true of the United Kingdom, it is yet more true of states like
France and Italy, whose geographical divisions and administrative
system have been drawn up as something wholly new in quite modern
times. Yet down at least to the end of the last century, in many
parts of Germany, of Italy, of Switzerland, of all the lands to which
the power of Venice reached, the endless varieties of alliance and
subjection between different towns and lands presented the closest
analogies to the relations of which I have now to speak. Survivals
went on even to our own time. In 1865 a small district was still held
in _condominium_ by the two free cities of Lübeck and Hamburg. I
passed through it with a feeling as if I had been carried back into
some distant age. I presume that since 1866 things are different
there.

It is of course perfectly true that, at a later age of the Roman
dominion, when the Empire began to change into an acknowledged
monarchy--though monarchy is not the proper word for a power which
was often held by two or more colleagues--that Empire did come
much nearer to the character of a modern centralized state. It was
mapped out into administrative divisions, and those divisions were
administered according to a general law. But the dominion of Rome,
Commonwealth and Empire, had been in being for several ages before
this change took place. The elder Roman rule was not the rule,
despotic or constitutional, of a man over an united territory; it
was the rule of a city over other cities and lands, cities and
lands standing to the ruling city in every possible relation, from
nominally equal alliance to a subjection hardly better than bondage.
That so it should be was the natural result of the way in which the
Roman dominion was formed. With the political ideas of the third
and second centuries before Christ no other state of things was
possible. The way in which the dominion of Rome was formed, the
process by which the cities and lands of so large a part of the world
passed under the supremacy of one ruling city, has much in common
with the further process which the growth of that dominion made
inevitable, the submission of Rome herself to the dominion of one
or more of her own citizens. In both cases the change was gradual.
People often talk of the change from the Republic to the Empire,
very much as they talk of the English Reformation, as if it were a
definite act which took place in some particular year. Yet all that
was characteristic in the Imperial power arose out of its gradual
growth, its growth through an union of magistracies and extraordinary
commissions which virtually bestowed supreme authority on their
holder. Above all, out of the original character of the Empire as an
extraordinary commission granted by a vote of the Senate came the
fact that the Empire remained for ages without any law of succession.
A law prescribing a mode of election and a law prescribing a rule of
hereditary succession both assume an ordinary office which must be
filled by some one; the Empire was in its origin an extraordinary
office which might not be filled at all. A vote, or several votes, of
the Senate entrusted a single citizen--or more than one citizen--with
powers which practically amounted to sovereignty, and which in the
end grew into acknowledged sovereignty. But that growth was slow.
For a long time after the Empire began, the republican constitution,
the republican magistracies, the republican assemblies, still lived
on untouched in their outward framework. They had simply lost all
living energy through the growth of a power greater than all, a power
which sometimes directed their course of action, sometimes itself
acted in their stead. If we could conceive, as once or twice did
happen for a short time, the controlling power removed, that is, if
the extraordinary commissions which made up the Imperial power were
not granted to any one, the old elements of the commonwealth were
there, able again to act for themselves as of old. The Senate, after
ages of utter nullity, actually did act again as an independent body
when the Goth was at the gates of Rome and the Emperor was far away
at Ravenna. For Rome once more to act without her master there was no
need to create any new power, but simply to take the fetters off an
old one. In the earlier ages of the Empire, when the old traditions
were more lively, when the forms of the old constitution were still
observed, such a change would doubtless have been far more easy. A
modern kingdom cannot be changed into a republic without an active
change in its constitution. The executive authority must be vested
in some new power to be created and defined for the purpose. The
Roman Empire might have been turned back into a republic by a purely
negative change. All that was needed was not to appoint an Emperor.
The various powers of the State which had left off acting or had come
to act only as the Emperor bade them, would doubtless, from lack of
practice, from change in all surrounding circumstances, have found
it practically impossible to act as they had done in the days of
the old commonwealth. But there would have been no formal hindrance
to their so doing; there would have been no need to clothe Senate
or magistrates with any powers beyond those which they still held,
though in a dormant state.

The power of Rome over her allies and dependencies during the
Commonwealth and the early Empire was very much of the same kind as
the power of the Emperors over Rome herself. It was something which
overshadowed a crowd of old powers and liberties, which brought them
down to practical nullity, but which in no way formally abolished
them. The republican institutions of Rome under the early Empire,
the constitutions of the allied states, of the dependencies, even
of the direct subjects of Rome, under both the early Empire and the
Commonwealth, were much in the same state as a man or a beast that
is fettered or bridled. His inherent physical powers of action are
not lessened; only they cannot be exercised, or can be exercised only
according to the will of a master. So it was with Rome herself under
the Emperors; so it was yet more strikingly with the dependencies of
Rome under Rome republican or imperial. As Rome herself submitted
only gradually to the rule of her Emperors, so the dependencies of
Rome submitted only gradually to the rule of Rome. There could
hardly have been one Roman province in which, as in an English
county or a French department, every inch of soil stood in the same
relation to the central power. Within the geographical bounds of most
provinces, above all within the bounds of the Greek and hellenized
provinces, there were cities and districts standing to Rome in
all those endless relations which were the natural result of the
different times and the different circumstances under which their
connexion with Rome began. Here was a free and equal ally of Rome, a
city which Rome had been glad to receive as a free and equal ally at
a time when her alliance was really valuable. Nothing had happened
to give any excuse for dragging down the old ally to any inferior
position. In theory she was still as free as ever, keeping every
power of a sovereign state within and without. No Roman magistrate
had any authority within her territory; if she sent offerings to Rome
or to Rome’s master, if she supplied a contingent to a Roman army,
all was the gift of pure friendship from one equal ally to another.
A neighbouring town might be in the strictly provincial relation;
over her soil the Roman people had become, not only sovereign, but
landlord; she might keep her old municipal constitution, but it was
purely by the grant or sufferance of the ruling city. Such a city
yielded obedience to Rome, because Rome was an acknowledged mistress;
if its free neighbour practically yielded obedience to Rome no less,
it was simply because, in an alliance between the weak and the
strong, the strong will always give law to the weak. And between
these two extremes there were endless intermediate shades. Besides
the absolutely independent ally, there were allies who also had
treaties with Rome, but whose treaties were less favourable, treaties
which bound both sides alike, but which formally placed one of the
contracting parties in a higher and the other in a lower position.
Again, there were towns of the province itself on which Rome had
bestowed, not by treaty but by her own grant, higher rights than the
rest of the province. One city was free, keeping its own law, exempt
from the ordinary jurisdiction of the Roman governor, paying no tax
or tribute to Rome, but holding all these privileges by grant from
the Roman state. Another was equally free within its own walls, but
bought its privileges by the payment of tribute to Rome. And as there
were within every Greek-speaking province spots which remained spots
of free Hellas abiding in their old freedom, so there might be other
spots which were transplanted fragments of the soil of Latium or of
Rome itself, keeping in the foreign land the rights of Latium or of
Rome. That is, there might be within the bounds of the province Latin
or Roman colonies, or towns to which, without being in their origin
Latin or Roman colonies, Rome had thought good to grant, sometimes
her own full citizenship, sometimes only the half-citizenship of
Latium. Of these, the free and allied city, the Roman and the
Latin colony, were geographically within the province, but they
were not legally part of it. To the Roman and the Latin colony we
have nothing exactly answering in modern Europe; but Andorra and
San Marino are still lively illustrations of the position of a
small state which has powerful neighbours. San Marino, a perfectly
independent state, but which, as wholly surrounded by its great
neighbour, is practically cut off from exercising any of the external
powers of an independent state, is in exactly the position of a free
and equal ally of Rome. Such an ally might keep perfect internal
freedom, but it was in the nature of things cut off from any foreign
policy. Andorra, a dependent and tributary state, though keeping full
internal freedom, would, if it had only one protecting lord, also
have its parallels among the dependent allies of Rome. But, in the
complication of mediæval relations, Andorra has two protecting lords,
two receivers of tribute. That was a state of things which could not
be in the days of the Roman Peace.

There is only one San Marino within the geographical bounds of
Italy, and San Marino is not one of the great cities of Italy. It
is therefore a harmless political curiosity, with whose rights the
Italian kingdom has no temptation to meddle. It might be otherwise
if the kingdom had many such independent towns and districts within
its borders, and if any of the great cities of Italy were reckoned
among them. Now one of the ugliest features of Roman history, one
which comes out in every page of the history of the second century
B.C., is the ungenerous way in which Rome treated her independent
allies the moment they ceased to be useful to her. As long as they
served as checks on some other power, so long they were made not a
little of; as soon as the dangerous power was overthrown or humbled,
the ally which had helped to overthrow it became an object of Roman
jealousy. The friendly power whose day of usefulness was over was
exposed to endless attempts on the part of Rome to weaken and break
it in pieces. Such is the tale of the kingdom of Pergamon, of the
city-commonwealth of Rhodes, of the confederation of Achaia. No part
of Roman history is more disgraceful than the dealings of Rome with
those three states, the model governments of their several classes.
No learning, no eloquence, can avail to whitewash the faithless and
brutal dealings of the Roman Senate towards powers whose only fault
was to be weaker than Rome and to have done good service to Rome.
This feeling of jealousy towards the allies lingered on long after
all ground for jealousy had passed away, when the free city was free
only within its own walls, and could not lift hand or foot against
the mighty ally by whose dominion it was hemmed in. But the wrongs
of these cities under Roman rule were far more largely due to more
immediate causes, to the overbearing love of power, to the baser
love of gain, which formed the dark side of the Roman character.
The liberties of these weak states were often encroached on, not
only by the Roman state itself, but by particular Roman magistrates,
and even by powerful men who were not at the moment magistrates.
The establishment of the Empire undoubtedly did something to check
the oppressions of the Roman governors, on whom there was very
little check under the commonwealth. But if the Empire led to less
oppression on the part of the representatives of the central power,
it led to more meddling on the part of the central power itself. A
man placed at the head of the world stands in a different position
from a city placed at the head of the world. To the ruling city the
dependent states are simply dependent states; it gets what it can out
of them, but it has no temptation to meddle for the sake of meddling.
The ruling man has temptations to meddle, and it may even be that,
the better disposed he is, his temptations to meddle become greater.
The natural tendency of the Empire was to unity and centralization
everywhere and in every way. Under imperial rule, the endless variety
of relations among the allies, dependents, and subjects of Rome
gradually changed into the one character of direct members of the
Roman Empire. But the change was slow. Sovereign commonwealths sank
into municipalities, and municipalities sank into something less
than municipalities, by mere force of circumstances, without any
formal act. It is often very hard to say when this or that free city
finally lost its distinct being through absolute incorporation in
the Roman Empire. It is certain that the memory of past freedom, as
something that still was not wholly past, lived on for ages. Under
the early Empire the commonwealths of Greece and Asia, whatever was
their formal relation, were in practice, not only subject to the
Roman Empire, but very much at the mercy of the governors of the
provinces within which they geographically lay. But they still were
commonwealths, though dependent or even subject commonwealths. Their
senates, assemblies, or other ruling bodies, had practically sunk to
the functions of town-councils, and they were open, in a way in which
an English town-council is not, to the caprice of an external power.
But they were town-councils which had been sovereign parliaments.
Some of them were in theory sovereign parliaments still. And even
those which were furthest from that character, the councils of those
towns which were neither free and allied states, nor Roman colonies,
nor in any way privileged above the general provincial relation,
had not wholly lost their original character. Deep into the time of
the Empire, the old character of the Roman dominion, that of a city
ruling over other cities, still left its traces. In such a state of
things the authority of the councils or assemblies of the subject
states might practically be smaller than that of the town-council of
an English borough. That is, the assembly might be afraid of acting
in any matter of importance without the leave of the central power
or its representative. It might practically confine its action to
matters of routine and ceremony, at most to votes of honours and
setting up of statues, because any bolder action would awaken Roman
jealousy. That is to say, the free and allied state could in theory
do everything, even the provincial town could in theory do many
things, according to its own free will. But generations of submission
to an irresistible neighbour had taught it not to exercise that
free will except according to the higher will of the power which
was supreme over all. If the rights of the subordinate state became
formal or even null, it was because they were wide and indefinite;
they were the powers of a community which still kept a distinct
being, but which was placed under the irresistible influence,
sometimes under the direct dominion, of a stronger community. This is
a position altogether different from that of a town or district in a
modern kingdom or commonwealth where every part of the land has equal
rights. In such a kingdom or commonwealth, whatever powers, great
or small, this or that board or council has, are held according to
the law of the land. As long as those powers are exercised according
to the law of the land, no administrative interference is to be
feared; if the law is broken, if the local authority steps beyond
its legal powers, the wrong will be made good, not by an arbitrary
will, but by a legal process. It was wholly different with the cities
of which we speak, whether free, dependent, or subject; they were
still separate commonwealths with inherent rights, even if those
rights could no longer be exercised; their assemblies had once been
parliaments, and to both the forms and the feelings of parliaments
they still clave. And one city at least among the allies of Rome kept
its substantial freedom down to an age when many fancy that the Roman
power itself had altogether vanished from the earth. The freedom of
Cherson was overthrown, not by Mummius in the second century on one
side, not by Vespasian in the first century on the other, but by
the Amorian Theophilos in the ninth. Till that day the last of the
Greek commonwealths lived on its ancient life, and for the simplest
of reasons. Not only the Emperor himself, but the proconsul of
Achaia, of Macedonia, or of Asia, could at any moment encroach on,
the Emperor could at any moment destroy, the freedom of any Greek
city that lay geographically within those provinces. He had always
the physical power to encroach or to destroy; not uncommonly he had
the will. But the commonwealth which lay far away in the Tauric
Chersonêsos stood in another case. The faithful ally could not be
changed into the helpless subject, except by the same kind of effort
which was needed for a Gothic or a Persian war.

The long abiding independence of Cherson is a fact to which I have
often had occasion to call attention from other points of view. So
is the independence of the Lykian League, though the less favourable
geographical position of that power allowed its freedom to come to an
end eight hundred years sooner than the freedom of Cherson. I have
elsewhere spoken of that League as perhaps the most skilfully planned
example of a federal constitution that the elder day could show;[2]
it concerns me now as an example of the degree of independence which
a considerable territory could keep under the general supremacy
of Rome, from the fall of Perseus to the reign of Claudius. For
the story of its origin we have to go to the narrative, unhappily
fragmentary, which Polybios gives of the events which led to the
deliverance of Lykia from Rhodian rule;[3] for a full account of its
constitution we have only to turn to the description of Strabo.[4] It
is specially instructive when the geographer tells us that the League
still kept the right of war and peace, though, he adds, in his day
that right could not be exercised at all, or could be exercised only
as Rome thought fit.[5] After reading this, it is certainly curious
to read the comment of a recent scholar who thinks that the powers of
the League and the measure of its independence were something like
those of the city of London.[6] A nearer analogy might surely be
found in the relations in which many of the smaller powers of Europe
stood not very long back; it is not very unlike that in which some
of them stand at this moment. The position of Lykia towards Rome
is very like that in which various Italian and German states stood
towards Austria forty years back. It is very like that in which
Servia at this moment stands to Austria and Montenegro to Russia.
It is in short the position of a “protected” state, whether the
protection be avowed or only practical. But there is this important
difference. A protected state now has at least some voice in choosing
its protector; it can exercise the old Teutonic right of seeking a
lord. And a small state may even keep perfect independence without
any protector at all, simply through the jealousies of the greater
powers. A small state may sometimes live on in perfect freedom
surrounded by powers stronger than itself. Any one of them could at
any moment put an end to its freedom; but none of them is likely to
make the attempt, because the others, for their own ends, will not
allow it. But Rome stood alone in the world; there was no choice of
protectors; whatever independence was left was held only by Roman
sufferance. Whenever it suited Roman policy or caprice to extinguish
the independence of any state, the thing was done.

  [2] History of Federal Government, i. 208.

  [3] Polybios, xxx. 519; xxxi. 7, 16, 17.

  [4] Strabo, xiv. 3, vol. iii. p. 219, Tauchnitz.

  [5] Καὶ περὶ πολέμου δὲ καὶ εἰρήνης καὶ συμμαχίας ἐβουλεύοντο
  πρότερον, νῦν δ' οὐκ εἰκὸς, ἀλλ' ἐπὶ τοῖς Ῥωμαίοις ταῦτ' ἀνάγκη
  κεῖσθαι, πλὴν εἰ ἐκείνων ἐπιτρεψάντων ἢ ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν εἴη χρήσιμον.
  That is to say, the right had never been formally taken away;
  only it practically could not be exercised.

  [6] In writing this article I have had several times in my
  thoughts a controversy on “Home Rule under the Roman Empire,”
  which will be found in two numbers of _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for
  November 1882 and March 1883. This controversy is instructive in
  many ways, specially as showing how utterly, and how contentedly,
  large parts of Roman history and Roman literature may be passed
  by, even by a scholar who enjoys a high repute in other branches
  of those subjects. The comparison between the Lykian League and
  the city of London comes from the second of the two articles. Its
  author could hardly have read the description of the League in
  Strabo.

The Lykian League, as embracing a considerable territory, has,
from its geographical side, more in common with the kingdoms and
principalities which lived on under Roman vassalage, than with the
single city-commonwealths which supply the examples which most
naturally occur to us. It must have been beyond the power of any
single proconsul in a peaceful time seriously to interfere with the
liberties of Lykia. It is true that the federal states of Greece
still lived on for Pausanias to see them at work; and two generations
earlier the sacred convocation of the Amphiktyons had drawn a new
life from the measure of redistribution ordained by the Emperor
Augustus.[7] But we may be sure that no confederation of old Greece
kept anything like such a measure of political life as that which
Strabo saw at work in Lykia. What little life there still was in the
Greek world abode in the single cities, and there was doubtless more
life among the Greek cities of Asia than in those of old Greece. Of
Lykia in Strabo’s day we have only Strabo’s general description;
we have no detailed illustrations of the working of the political
system; least of all have we any speeches, any letters, any political
treatises, either from Lykian orators or philosophers or from Roman
magistrates who had dealings with the Lykian League or its cities.
Let us leap on to the age of Trajan, and we shall find that that
age is rich in materials for the political life of the Achaian and
Bithynian provinces and of the free cities which lay within their
geographical boundaries. We have four highly instructive contemporary
writers, two Greek and two Latin, one of the latter being the
renowned Emperor himself. We have from Plutarch a treatise on the
duties of a Greek statesman of his day. We have from Diôn Chrysostom
several speeches actually delivered in the assemblies of Greek cities
in the reign of Trajan. We have the correspondence of Trajan himself
with the younger Pliny when Pliny was proconsul of Bithynia. We thus
get two sides of the picture. We see how things looked in the eyes
of two literary Greeks, one of whom to be sure was bound to make the
best of things and to make his rhetoric as acceptable as he could to
his Greek hearers. We see also how things looked in the eyes of two
official Romans, an Emperor and a proconsul who were among the best
of their several classes, but whose very virtues laid them open to
one special temptation. Both Trajan and Pliny loathed oppression and
wrong of every kind, and they sincerely sought the welfare of all for
whose welfare they were responsible. But for that very reason they
were more likely to be led to constant meddling with the affairs of
their subjects than rulers who might now and then be guilty of some
gross piece of tyranny, but who for the most part left people alone
in the time between one act of oppression and another. The colouring
on the Greek and on the Roman side is very different; but the main
outlines are the same in both pictures. In both cases we see cities
which keep much--which in some cases keep everything--of the outward
show of free commonwealths, but which do not dare to exercise their
powers, even in very small matters, without the knowledge and good
will of the Roman prince or his local representative.

  [7] See History of Federal Government, i. 136.

The political treatise of the wise and kindly Plutarch[8] is one
which cannot be read without sadness. To a Greek, a Bœotian,
living in a land which had once been so great and which was so
utterly fallen, the contrast between what had been and what was came
more keenly home than it could come to his Asiatic contemporary.
The cities of Diôn’s native Bithynia had never been so great in
the past, and they were far more prosperous in the present, than
the cities for whose would-be statesmen and orators the sage of
Chairôneia had to give rules. But in both writers we find things
looked at from the same general point of view. Local independence
is assumed as the state of things which exists at least in theory.
We read page after page of both Plutarch and Diôn without any hint
that the commonwealths of which they were speaking had any superior
beyond their own walls. Both write in a way in which no one would
write for the instruction of a newly-chosen town-councillor in a
modern state. It is for parliaments, not for town-councils, that the
whole language is fitted. But ever and anon we come to some passage
which shows us that the parliaments with which we are dealing are
parliaments working in fetters, parliaments which can practically
do nothing without the approval of a foreign superior. In our own
land we find the nearest parallel in ecclesiastical bodies, and
the likeness is increased by the fact that the range within which
the Greek assemblies of that day were most active was that which
concerned religious worship and that large class of subjects which
in Greek ideas were connected with religious worship. A Convocation
organized like a Parliament, carrying on its debates as freely
as a Parliament, but whose acts go for nothing unless they have
the licence of the Crown beforehand and the consent of the Crown
afterwards, a Convocation which, without ever being suppressed,
without ever having its formal meetings interrupted, could be
practically suspended for a hundred and fifty years, has far more
likeness to one of these Greek assemblies than can be found in a
local body whose powers are narrowly defined, but which can freely
exercise such powers as it has. We have another parallel in the
Chapter electing its Bishop, electing him freely according to all
outward look, but whose choice not only needs the approval of the
Crown, but is actually dictated beforehand by the Crown, under
heavy penalties if that dictation is not obeyed.[9] We read several
chapters of Plutarch which might have been written for any Greek
commonwealth in days before either the later or the former Philip.
Presently the mention of certain demagogues who corrupted the
people by shows of gladiators is a sign that the Roman has entered
into the Greek world.[10] But, for anything in that or in several
following chapters, the commonwealths so corrupted might have been as
independent as when earlier demagogues were said to have corrupted
their countrymen by allurements of other kinds. We go on further,
and the full truth comes out. The Greek commonwealths of Plutarch’s
day had no longer anything to do with wars, with alliances, with
putting down of tyrants, and some might think that in such a state
of things there was no room for statesmanship left. Plutarch thought
otherwise; there were still public trials at home; there were
embassies to be sent to the Emperor; there were dealings with Roman
governors, possibly with bad governors. These things needed some
qualifications; energy, daring, discretion, were all needed by those
who had to plead for the weak before the powerful.[11] The chosen
magistrate was not to despise his office because he had not so free
a field as the magistrates of old times; but he was never to forget
the difference between him and them. Periklês might say that he was
called to rule among freemen, among Greeks, among Athenians. The
magistrate of Plutarch’s day was to remember that he ruled with a
ruler over him; that his city was in subjection to the proconsuls of
Rome, to the procurators of Cæsar.[12] War was impossible; of freedom
they had as much as their masters left to them, as much perhaps as
was good for them[13] when Greece was so weak, when there was no
power left in her which the slightest bidding of a proconsul could
not upset.[14] In such times public men must be careful to give no
offence, no occasion, to dangerous neighbours; they must above all
avoid such occasion as was given by disputes at home or with other
cities. At the same time, while fully understanding their dependent
position, they must avoid base cringing and flattery; they must not
make the governor yet more of a master than he is disposed to be by
calling him in on all occasions;[15] and it will be wise to make
some powerful Roman their friend.[16] They will do well to study the
records of old Greece, but only for examples suited to the actual
state of things; tall talk about Marathôn and Plataia and Eurymedôn
should be left to the rhetoric of the schools; but peaceful examples
from earlier times, examples of courtesy, humanity, and good faith,
were as instructive then as they ever had been.[17]

  [8] His Πολιτικὰ Παραγγέλματα, commonly quoted as _Reipublicæ
  Gerendæ Præcepta_.

  [9] A still closer parallel might have been found up to the
  present reign, as long as the Deans of the churches of the Old
  Foundation were chosen by the Chapters. By long-standing custom a
  nominee of the Crown was always chosen, though there was not, as
  in the case of the election of Bishops, any legal obligation so
  to do.

  [10] C. 5. ἢ τοῦ βαλανείου διδόντες ἢ πυῤῥίχας τινας ἢ μονομάχων
  θεάματα παρασκευάζοντες ἀεὶ δημαγωγοῦσι, μᾶλλον δὲ δημοκοποῦσι.

  [11] C. 10.

  [12] C. 17. ἀρχόμενος ἄρχεις, ὑποτεταγμένης πόλεως ἀνθυπάτοις,
  ἐπιτρόποις Καίσαρος.

  [13] C. 32. ἐλευθερίας δὲ ὅσον οἱ κρατοῦντες νέμουσι τοῖς δήμοις
  μέτεστι, καὶ τὸ πλέον ἴσως οὐκ ἄμεινον.

  [14] C. 32. ποία δύναμις ἣν μικρὸν ἀνθυπάτου διάταγμα κατέλυσεν ἣ
  μετέστησεν εἰς ἄλλο.

  [15] C. 19. οἱ πάντι δόγματι καὶ συνεδρίῳ καὶ χάριτι καὶ
  διοικήσει προσάγοντες ἡγεμονικὴν κρίσιν ἀναγκάζουσι ἑαυτῶν μᾶλλον
  ἢ βούλονται δεσπότας εἶναι τοὺς ἡγουμένους.

  [16] C. 18.

  [17] C. 17.

The precepts of Plutarch are perfectly general. He draws no
distinction between the different classes of cities, according
to the greater or less degree of independence which they still
formally kept. For in truth they were all practically in the same
case; all had, in his own phrase, the shoe of the Roman over their
heads.[18] The provincial town could act freely in many things, if
the governor did not choose to meddle; the independent ally could
not act freely in any thing, if the governor did choose to meddle. We
find things on the whole the same when we turn from the philosopher
giving wise precepts in his study to the orator actually haranguing
the assemblies whose duties Plutarch so carefully lays down. Diôn
Chrysostom is a rhetorician by profession, and he has the faults of
his profession; but there is much that is attractive about the man
and his writings, and he gives us several instructive pictures of
Greek life in his own day. His orations on subjects of theoretical
politics, on kingship, aristocracy, democracy, and the like, sound
a little unpractical under the universal rule of Rome; but we must
remember that it mattered a good deal whether the reigning prince was
Domitian or Trajan. We gain real additions to our knowledge from the
picture of the Euboian hunter, possessed of the civic franchise but
who had never been in the city, and we learn better what an Euboian
city was like in Diôn’s day.[19] More interesting still is his
picture of the Greek city of Olbia or Borysthenês, still clinging to
its Greek speech and manners amid the constant attacks of dangerous
barbarian neighbours.[20] Of more importance for our purpose is his
oration to the Rhodians, an oration of good advice, but of course
largely mingled with panegyric on his hearers and their city. This is
a document of deep interest, if read by the light of the history of
that illustrious island in the second century before Christ. Rhodes
is throughout addressed as a free commonwealth, as a democracy;[21]
it is the one Greek state besides Athens which keeps its freedom;[22]
it is the only one which still cherishes the glory of the Hellenic
name.[23] The relations of the state to Rome are nowhere dwelled upon
after the manner of Plutarch; Emperors are several times casually
mentioned, but not as masters;[24] the point of connexion between
Rhodes and Rome of which the orator is most inclined to speak is the
part played by the Rhodians in the Roman civil war.[25] He knows of
no break between the mighty Rhodes of an earlier day and the still
flourishing democracy which he harangues. Some of his sayings could
hardly have been approved by Plutarch; they are too much in the
Marathôn and Eurymedôn style; but they could not, even as flourishes,
have been addressed to a people who were not free, at least in
theory, however precarious might be the tenure by which their freedom
was held.

  [18] _Ibid._ ὁρῶτα τοὺς καλτίους ἐπάνω τῆς κεφαλῆς.

  [19] Oration vii. Εὐβοϊκὸς ἢ Κυνηγός.

  [20] Oration xxxvi. Βορυσθενικός.

  [21] Oration xxxi. vol. i. p. 364, Dindorf. ταῦτα ἐν δημοκρατίᾳ
  καὶ παρ' ὑμῖν, οἱ μέγιστον φρονεῖτε ἐπὶ τῷ νομίμως καὶ δικαίως
  διοικεῖν τὰ παρ' ἑαυτοῖς.

  [22] _Ibid._ p. 380. τοῖς μὲν γὰρ [Ῥοδίοις] μόνον ὑπάρχειν τὴν
  ἐλευθερίαν δίχα Ἀθηναίων.

  [23] _Ibid._ p. 350. τῆς λοιπῆς Ἑλλάδος τρόπον τίνὰ ἐσβεσμένης
  μόνους ἐφ' αὑτοῖς διαφυλάξαι τὸ κοινὸν ἀξίωμα τῶν Ἑλλήνων εἰς τὸν
  νῦν παρόντα χρόνον. So p. 398; μόνοι καταλείπεσθε τῶν Ἑλλήνων οἷς
  ἂν καὶ παραινέσαι τις καὶ περὶ ᾧ ἔστιν ἔτι λυπηθῆναι δοκούντων
  ἁμαρτάνειν.

  [24] _Ibid._ pp. 359, 380, 381, 387, 393.

  [25] _Ibid._ pp. 367, 383.

Less interesting in themselves than any of these, but perhaps in a
certain way more instructive, are the speeches which Diôn makes in
his own city of Prusa and in other towns of his native province. He
had to preach peace and concord both to rival cities and to rival
parties in the same city, and also to plead his own cause against
his own enemies.[26] The assemblies which he addresses are always
assumed to be self-acting bodies; references to the existence
of Rome come in only casually, and Diôn does not often copy the
plain-speaking of Plutarch.[27] But the speeches of the Greek orator
put on a tenfold interest when we come to compare them with the
memorable correspondence which is luckily preserved to us between
a Roman Emperor and a proconsul of Bithynia in Diôn’s own day. The
letters which passed between Trajan and Pliny seem at first sight to
describe a wholly different state of things from that which appears
in the speeches of Diôn. If we compare the two, we shall see that
they set before us two opposite sides of the same state of things.
From the two together we shall get a clear notion of the state of
the various cities of Bithynia, and of the different relations in
which, like those of any other province, they stood to the ruling
power. Speeches and letters together illustrate the show of freedom
which existed in perhaps every case, the reality of freedom which
existed in some cases, and at the same time the precarious tenure
by which both the shadow and the reality were held. We see the
ordinary provincial town, still keeping the style of “res publica,”
passing “psephismata,” sending “legati” to the Emperor and the
neighbouring governors, playing in short at being a commonwealth, but
not venturing to do any local act of the least importance without
consulting the Emperor’s representative. Diôn brings out one side,
Trajan and Pliny bring out the other side; that is all. Diôn makes
a speech to the people of Nikomêdeia, exhorting them to peace and
harmony with the people of Nikaia. Many passages would have been
in place in the mouth of a mediator between Athens and Sparta five
hundred years earlier. There is no direct mention of any superior
authority as bearing rule over both; the orator indeed tells his
hearers that after all they cannot make war on their enemies,[28]
and warns them lest by their dissensions they make the Greek name
ridiculous among the Romans.[29] We are for the moment amazed when
we turn from this picture of two seemingly independent commonwealths
to the letters which show how the Emperor and his representative
had to be consulted by Nikomêdeia, Nikaia, and every other city,
about the smallest municipal regulations, about every kind of local
improvement.[30] It is an odd comment on the dissensions between
city and city of which Diôn speaks, when Trajan, remembering how
Nikomêdeia and other cities had been torn by seditions, will not
allow the creation of a company of firemen, lest it be turned to some
dangerous political purpose.[31] We again feel sure that Pliny, in
his zeal, meddled in many matters which a worse proconsul would have
left alone, and that, in his desire to do right, he referred many
things to the Emperor which such a proconsul would have settled for
himself in a high-handed way. Reading speeches and letters together,
we better understand both. We are dealing with commonwealths,
but with commonwealths acting in fetters. They do everything for
themselves by votes of their own assemblies. But those votes need a
licence beforehand, a confirmation afterwards, or both the one and
the other, from the overruling power that stands without.[32]

  [26] See the forty-third and forty-fourth orations.

  [27] Once perhaps in the home orations, xliv. (vol. ii. p. 117);
  εὖ γὰρ ἴστε ὅτι τὴν μὲν λεγομένην ἐλευθερίαν, καὶ τὸ ὄνομα τοῦθ',
  ὃ παρὰ τῶν κρατούντων καὶ δυναμένων γίγνεται ἐνιότε οὐ δυνατὸν
  κτήσασθαι.

  [28] Oration xxxviii. Πρὸς Νικομηδεῖς περὶ ὁμονοίας τῆς πρὸς
  Νικαιεῖς. vol. ii. pp. 74, 75, 76.

  [29] _Ibid._ p. 80.

  [30] Epp. Plini et Trajani, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 40, 41, 48, 49,
  70, 71, 74, 81, 90.

  [31] Ep. 34. “Tibi quidem secundum exempla complurium in mentem
  venit posse collegium fabrorum apud Nicomedenses constitui. Sed
  meminerimus provinciam istam et præcipue eas civitates ejusmodi
  factionibus esse vexatas. Quodcumque nomen ex quacumque causa
  dederimus iis qui in idem contracti fuerint ... hetæriæque fient.”

  [32] In Ep. 81 there are references to Diôn himself. He was a
  Roman citizen.

Both Nikomêdeia and Nikaia, and Diôn’s own city of Prusa, were only
ordinary provincial towns with no special privilege. But there
were spots in Bithynia which were more highly favoured. Here, as
elsewhere, the Roman colony, the free and allied city, were locally
in the province, but not of it. It is plain that even cities of
this rank were used to a good deal of meddling on the part of the
Roman officers; but they resented such treatment and appealed to
their privileges. Apameia was no provincial town, but a Roman colony.
Diôn, who claimed to be one of its citizens, made a speech before
its senate, in which he sets forth the dignity of its colonial
character.[33] Pliny, more busy than other proconsuls, claimed to
look over the accounts of the colony. The colonists told him that he
was welcome to do so, that it was their common wish that he should do
so. But he should remember that it was a thing which no proconsul had
ever asked before; their ancient privileges gave them the right of
managing their own commonwealth as they thought good. Pliny asks for
and receives a statement of their case in writing. He thinks much of
the paper irrelevant; but he sends it to the Emperor to be guided by
his judgement. In all this correspondence one somehow thinks of the
correspondence of Augustine and Gregory; the superior is so clearly
the wiser man of the two. Trajan writes back that the straightforward
dealing of the men of Apameia is to be respected; the proconsul is
to tell them that it is by the Emperor’s special request that he
asks to look at their accounts; he is to do so without any prejudice
to their privileges for the future.[34] We here see plainly enough
the difference inherent in the position of a Roman colony as
distinguished from that of an ordinary town of the province. Still an
Emperor and a proconsul less scrupulous than Trajan and Pliny might
have made short work of the liberties of Apameia. Under the men with
whom the colonists had actually to deal, those liberties, when once
established by sufficient evidence, were safe.

  [33] Oration xli. vol. ii. pp. 103, 105.

  [34] Plin. et Traj. Epist. 47, 48 (56, 57). The claim of the
  colony is “habuisse privilegium et vetustissimum morem arbitrio
  suo rem publicam administrare.” The Emperor’s answer is,
  “Remuneranda est igitur probitas eorum, et jam nunc sciant quod
  inspecturus es ex mea voluntate salvis, quæ habent privilegiis
  esse facturum.”

But within the geographical limits of Bithynia there was something
yet higher than a Roman colony. Amisos was an independent state
surrounded by Roman territory. The city had in past times seen
many settlers and many masters; it was at last delivered from its
oppressors by Augustus Cæsar, and it became a free ally of Rome,
bound to Rome only by the terms of its treaty.[35] We know not what
those terms were; they may, like treaties with Gades and Aitôlia,
have formally bound Amisos to respect the majesty of Rome, or they
may not. That difference mattered little to a commonwealth whose
geographical position compelled it in any case practically to respect
that majesty. But it mattered greatly that, within its own walls,
Amisos was by right perfectly free, governed by its own laws, which
might or might not agree with the laws of Rome. Still it is plain
that its treaty rights could not always secure the commonwealth from
the meddling of Roman proconsuls. And it again marks the difference
between the servant and the master that Pliny speaks of the liberties
of Amisos as existing by the indulgence of Trajan, while Trajan
himself grounds them directly on the faith of treaties. The proconsul
asks if an _eranos_, a benefit club, is to be allowed in Amisos. Such
a question marks the way in which the rights even of a perfectly free
city were liable to be interfered with. Trajan, as we have seen in
the case of the Nikomêdeian firemen, had a great dislike to unions
and societies of any kind which might possibly be turned to political
ends. No _eranos_ is to be allowed in any city that is subject to
the laws of Rome. But at Amisos, a city ruled by its own laws, Pliny
is not to interfere with the establishment of such a body. The way
in which the great Emperor speaks is remarkable. The might of Cæsar
stands disarmed before the majesty of treaties. Trajan carries out a
certain policy wherever he has the legal right to do so; where he has
no such right, he forbears. Yet his words seem to imply that even he,
the just Emperor, might have interfered with the rights of the free
commonwealth, had he seen really good cause for doing so.[36] What
other Emperors and other proconsuls did, with or without cause, it is
easy to guess.

  [35] See its own citizen Strabo, xii. 3 (iii. 24 Tauchnitz). The
  Dictator Cæsar delivered it from Pharnakês; Antonius παρέδωκε
  βασιλεῦσι, εἶτ' ἠλευθερώθη πάλιν μετὰ τὰ Ἀκτιακὰ ὑπὸ Καίσαρος
  τοῦ Σεβάστου καὶ νῦν εὖ συνέστηκεν. Pliny (92 or 93) says,
  “Amisenorum civitas libera et fœderata beneficio indulgentiæ
  tuæ legibus suis utitur.” Trajan answers, “Si legibus istorum
  quibus de officio fœderis utuntur concessum est eranon habere,”
  &c. “In cæteris civitatibus, quæ nostro jure obstrictæ sunt, res
  hujusmodi prohibenda est.” There is another mention of Amisos in
  Letter 110, which reads rather like sharp practice on the part of
  the free and allied city, its _boule_ and _ecclesia_.

  [36] “Possumus quo minus habeant non impedire, eo facilius si
  tali conlatione non ad turbas et ad inlicitos cœtus, sed ad
  sustinendam tenuiorum inopam utuntur.”

It is not at all wonderful if most of the business done by the
assemblies of these commonwealths had to do with religious and social
matters, and again with formal and trifling matters, with votes of
honours, statues, and the like. As Diôn several times tells them
implicitly, as Plutarch tells them more directly, the decision of
greater matters had passed into other hands. The point is that these
cities still kept the form of commonwealths, commonwealths that must
have passed most of their lives in fear and trembling, but still
commonwealths, even if in fetters, not mere municipalities, such as
we are used to in our own day. In Eastern Europe and Western Asia
this state of things is the direct and necessary consequence of the
events of the Polybian age. The history of the Roman power in Western
Europe is a wholly distinct subject. There Rome did not enslave or
destroy, but created. The towns of the West looked forward, while the
Greek commonwealths looked backward. The gradual extinction of these
last was the necessary consequence of later changes, of changes which
followed on the centralizing and despotic tendencies of the later
Empire. Much of local independence had vanished between Strabo’s day
and Pliny’s; the Lykian League itself was a thing of the past when
Trajan respected the privileges of Amisos. How late any traces of
freedom lingered we need not here inquire. My present object is to
show the long abiding effects of the peculiar process by which the
Roman dominion was definitely formed in that great determining period
of the world’s history which is marked by the second century before
Christ.



INDEX.


  A.

  _Abyssinia_, Christianity of, 67.

  _Achaia_, dealings of Rome with, 218.

  _Ælfred_, his view of early Greek history, 18.

  _Africa_, Saracen conquest of, 133.

  _Agamemnôn_, his imperial position, 18, 19.

  _Agathoklês_, two sides of, 33.

  _Akarnania_, its position in Homeric times, 19;
    becomes Greek, 24.

  _Akragas_, its time of greatness, 25.

  Ἀλαμανῶν ῥήξ, title of, 107.

  _Alans_, their history and settlement, 87, 88; 122.

  _Alaric_, his career, 78.

  _Albanians_, their origin, 119.

  Ἀλβανοί, opposed to Ῥωμαῖοι, 141.

  _Alexander_, founder of the modern Greek nation, 16;
    his work in the East, 17;
    his dealings with the Greek cities, 179.

  _Alexander of Epeiros_, 17;
    his designs, 34.

  _Alexandria_, its relation to older Greek cities, 23.

  _Alexios Komnênos_, compared with Henry the Fourth, 162.

  _Allies_, Roman, their relations to Rome, 82, 83; 218-220;
    their slow incorporation, 84, 85; 219-221.

  _Ambrakia_, its beginnings, 24.

  _Amisos_, dealings of Trajan and Pliny with, 237, 238.

  _Amphiktyonic Council_, nullity of, 178, 179;
    its reform by Augustus, 225.

  _Andorra_, relations of, 217.

  _Angles_, first mentioned, 64.

  _Antalkidas_, Peace of, 28.

  _Antioch_, its relation to older Greek cities, 23.

  _Antoninus Caracalla_, effects of his edict, 42.

  _Apameia_, dealings of Trajan and Pliny with, 236, 237.

  _Aquæ Sextiæ_, battle of, 44; 60.

  _Aquitaine_, position of cities in, 192;
    its relations to France, 195;
    its separation from Burgundy, 196.

  _Arles_, capital of Southern Gaul, 85.

  _Arminius_, his historic position, 64.

  _Arnold_, Thomas, point chosen by for the ending of his History, 104.

  _Asia Minor_, its historic position, 19.

  _Athens_, her history mistaken for that of Greece, 21;
    remains specially pagan, 74;
    her relations to Rome, 84, 85;
    her position under Trajan, 232.

  _Aurelian_, his dealings with the Goths, 77.

  _Austria_, the Frankish, effect of the rise of its Mayors, 91.

  _Austrian Emperors_, their relations to the Popes, 183.

  _Austrian Empire_, 151-152.

  _Avignon_, Popes at, 157.


  B.

  _Bajazet_, Keiser of Roum, 145.

  _Barbarians_, conversion of, 67.

  _Basil the Macedonian_, his controversy with Lewis the Second, 108.

  _Basil the Second_, Emperor, 132, 133.

  Βασιλεύς, title of, 108.

  _Basques_, Iberian elements preserved by, 93.

  _Belisarius_, Roman consul, 125.

  _Beneventum_, battle of, 45.

  _Bithynia_, different position of its cities under Trajan, 233-238.

  _Britain_, Roman influence in, 94;
    Continental, its origin, 89;
    Celtic elements preserved in, 93.

  _Buonaparte_, Napoleon, his position and objects, 149-151.

  _Burgundians_, their settlement in Gaul, 89; 123.

  _Burgundy_, position of cities in, 191, 192;
    its separation from Aquitaine, 196;
    represented by Switzerland, 197, 198.

  _Byzantine_, use of the name, 129.


  C.

  _Cæsar_, his work in Gaul, 61, 65.

  _Capitular elections_, their analogy with Greek cities, 228.

  _Carthage_, her beginnings, 24;
    the rival of Greece, 29;
    her wars in Sicily, 30;
    her rivalry and first war with Rome, 46, 47;
    strife of with Rome for Spain, 48, 49;
    her fall and new birth, 54.

  _Catalaunian Fields_, battle of, 44.

  _Catalogue_, the Homeric, its historic value, 18-20.

  _Charles Martel_, his defeat of the Saracens, 134.

  _Charles the Great_, effect of his coronation, 104;
    nature of his Empire, 106, 107;
    successor of Constantine the Sixth, 106;
    his position towards the East, 107, 108;
    his successors, 130.

  _Charles the Fourth_, Emperor, his coronations, 147.

  _Charles the Fifth_, last _Imperator_, 138;
    his coronation at Bologna, ib.;
    real source of his power, 139.

  _Charles the Sixth_, Emperor, 152.

  _Cherson_, its beginnings, 24;
    its relations to Rome, 84;
    Roman annexation of, 221-222.

  _Chlodowig_, unites the Frankish kingdoms, 189.

  _Christianity_, its relation to the Roman power, 67-69;
    its special rivalry with Mahometanism, 133.

  _Cities_, answer to nations, 177, 178; 183;
    contrasted with nations, 186-188;
    their chief developement among Southern nations, 186;
    difficulty of uniting, 187;
    their position in Northern and Southern Gaul, 191, 192;
    their history and position in modern Europe, 199-205;
    their history in Germany, 200-205;
    suppression of, 201-202.

  _Civilis_, compared with Buonaparte, 151.

  _Clermont_, Council of, 162.

  _Colonies_, Greek, 14;
    their relation to Macedonian conquests, 16;
    their beginnings, 19;
    their time of greatness, 23-26;
    their extent, 24-26.

  Condominium, survival of, 211.

  _Conquest_, Roman and Teutonic compared, 85.

  _Constance_, Peace of, compared with that of Westfalia, 139.

  _Constantine the Great_, his changes at Rome, 74;
    his foundation of Constantinople, ib.

  _Constantine Palaiologos_, his death, 170;
    compared with Leopold the First, 171.

  _Constantinople_, its various names, 74;
    Christian from the beginning, ib.;
    its position compared with that of old Rome, 100-103;
    never without a resident Emperor, 101;
    its loss in 1204, 139;
    its recovery, 142;
    Latin Empire at, 145;
    its position, 160;
    taking of, May 29, 1453, 168-170;
    Latin rites in Saint Sophia, 170.

  _Convocation_, English, its analogy with Greek cities, 227, 228.

  _Crete_, mention of in Homer, 19.

  _Crusade_, _First_, 161, 162.

  _Crusade_, _Fourth_, 164, 165.

  _Cyprus_, rivalry of Greek and Phœnician in, 24;
    Empire of, 143;
    conquered by Richard, ib.


  D.

  _Dacia_, its conquest and cession, 77.

  _Dante_, his doctrine of the Empire, 68;
    his theory carried out in the East, 159.

  _Departments_, French, their position, 210.

  _Diocletian_, his changes, 73, 74; 86.

  _Diôn Chrysostom_, his account of contemporary Greek commonwealths, 225-234;
    value of his Orations, 231;
    his speech to the Rhodians, 232;
    his speech at Prusa, 233;
    at Nikomêdeia, 234.

  _Dionysios_, two sides of, 33.

  _Diplomacy_, in the third century B.C., 37.


  E.

  _East_, growth of native powers in, in the first and second centuries B.C., 65.

  _Eastern Emperors_, their religious character, 159.

  _Eastern Empire_, in what sense Greek, 112-120;
    in what sense Roman, 117-119;
    its power of revival, 128;
    use of the name, 129;
    its calling, 130;
    its wars with the Saracens, 135;
    with the Turks, ib.;
    practically ends in 1204, 136; 139-144;
    its survival and fragments, 145;
    its greatest days, 160;
    its crusades, ib., 161.

  _Eastern Question_, eternal, 5.

  _Egypt_, early Greek knowledge of, 20;
    its relations to Greece, 26;
    Saracen conquest of, 133.

  _Eleventh Century A.D._, its history, 135.

  Ἕλλην, use of the name, 112; 140.

  Empereur d’Allemagne et d’Autriche, title of, 149.

  Empereur des Français, title of, 149.

  _Emperor_, various uses of the name, 144.

  _Emperor of the East_, title of, 143, 144.

  _Emperors_, joint reign of several, 75;
    pre-eminence of those in the East, ib.;
    rival claims of in East and West, 107, 108;
    contrast of in East and West, 120, 121;
    origin of their power, 212-214.

  _Empire_, vague uses of the word, 155.

  _Empire_, Eastern, _see_ Eastern Empire.

  _Empire_, Roman, _see_ Roman Empire.

  _Empire_, Western, _see_ Western Empire.

  _Empires_, various Greek, in the fourteenth century, 143, 144.

  _England_, its steps towards union, 188.

  _Epeiros_, its relations to Greece, 13, 14; 25;
    plans of her kings in the West, 34;
    suggested by the Macedonian conquests, ib.;
    Empire of, 143.

  Erbkaiser von Oesterreich, title of, 151.

  _Euboia_, account of by Diôn Chrysostom, 231.

  _Europe_, three marked periods in its history, 4;
    its geographical character, 6;
    its analogies in the earliest and latest times, 176.


  F.

  _Federal States_, examples of in the third century B.C., 36.

  _Federations_, their long survivals in Greece, 225.

  _Fifth Century A.D._, its character and relation to earlier times, 79;
    compared with the third century B.C., 81;
    sketch of its history, 122-124.

  _Fifth Century B.C._, a time of Greek decline, 21;
    its effect on the Teutonic nations, 85-95.

  _Finlay_, George, his view of the fifth century B.C., 21.

  _France_, formation of, 91, 92;
    its growth, 190-192;
    position of cities in, 191.

  _France_, Duchy of, its dismemberment, 190.

  Francia, name of, 89;
    divisions of, 91.

  _Frankfurt_, its commonwealth suppressed, 202.

  _Franks_, their appearance in Gaul, 78;
    translation of the Empire to, 112;
    their advance in Gaul, 123;
    union of their kingdoms, 189;
    fourfold division of, 196.

  _Frederick the Second_, Emperor, his crusade, 163;
    effects of his treatment by the Popes, ib.

  _Frederick the Third_, Emperor, 138; 147.

  _Free Cities_, hindrances to national growth, 193.

  _French Empire_, 149-151.

  _French language_, its formation, 190.

  _French nation_, its origin, 91, 92;
    its formation, 190-192.


  G.

  _Gascons_, _see_ Basques.

  _Gaul_, Cisalpine, Roman conquest of, 49;
    its Roman life, 61, 62;
    Teutonic settlements in, 87;
    how affected by the Teutonic invasions, 90, 91;
    Southern, Romance growth in, 91;
    its disunion, 189;
    national elements in, 195-197.

  _Gauls_, their relation to Rome, 86;
    their adoption of the Roman name, 87.

  _Gela_, its time of greatness, 25.

  _George Maniakês_, his recovery of Syracuse, 135.

  _German_, use of the name, 113.

  _German Empire_, 153.

  _Germans_, their invasions, 77;
    their relation to the Empire, ib.

  _Germany_, its connexion with the Western Empire, 147;
    its disunion, 189;
    less divided than Italy, 193;
    position of cities in, 200-205.

  _Ghibelline theory_, carried out in the East, 159.

  _Gibbon_, Edward, extent of his history, 75.

  Gothia, name of, 88.

  _Goths_, their dealings with the Empire, 77-79;
    their settlement in Gaul, 89;
    their taking of Rome, 95;
    their position in East and West, 99;
    their settlement in Gaul and Spain, 123.

  Græci, use of the name, 112.

  _Gratian_, refuses the Pagan pontificate, 155.

  _Greece_, its geographical character, 6;
    its historic calling, 7;
    its connexion with other Aryan lands, 7, 8;
    its influence compared with that of Rome, 8-10;
    its position towards the East, 11, 12;
    its relations to Rome, 15;
    various forms of its influence, 16;
    its geographical boundary, 17;
    two main periods of its influence, 21, 22;
    its decline in the fourth century B.C., 32;
    its influence in East and West, 34;
    relations of Rome to, after the first Macedonian war, 54, 55;
    its influence extended by Rome, 92, 93;
    international law in its oldest times, 178;
    in Macedonian times, 179;
    highest developement of cities in, 186;
    survival of Federal systems in, 225;
    its position under Trajan, 229.

  _Greece_, Greater, 14;
    falls away from Greek life, 17;
    its most brilliant time, 25.

  _Greek_, use of the name, 113;
    in the sixth century, 126, 127;
    in the thirteenth, 140, 141.

  _Greek cities_, their position under the Roman Empire, 239;
    gradual extinction of their freedom, 239, 240.

  _Greek language_, its history in the Eastern Empire, 115-117.

  _Greek nation_, modern, its origin, 16.

  _Greek studies_, their value, 9, 10.

  _Greeks_, their relations to other nations, 13;
    their geographical position, 17, 18;
    their relation to Rome, 86;
    their adoption of the Roman name, ib.

  _Gregory the Great_, his letter to Phocas, 125; 158.

  _Gregory the Seventh_, his career and death, 156, 157.


  H.

  _Hadriatic Sea_, Western boundary of permanent Greek life, 17.

  _Hamilkar_, his exploits and those of his House, 48.

  _Hannibal_, his character and historic position, 50-53.

  _Hannibalian war_, its character, 50-52.

  _Hansa_, its growth, 201;
    its decline, 202;
    its modern survival, 202-204.

  _Henry the Fourth_, Emperor, his position at the time of the First Crusade, 162.

  _Henry the Seventh_, Emperor, 132; 147.

  _Heraclius_, his exploits, 129; 133.

  _Herodotus_, his clear view of history, 18; 21.

  _Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation_, 95; 111; 112.

  _Homer_, his historic witness, 18-20.


  I.

  Imperator _and_ Imperator electus, 111.

  _Imperial power_, its original nature, 69;
    its slow growth, 73, 74.

  _Innocent the Third_, his relation to the Fourth Crusade, 165.

  _International law_, times of its importance, 177-180;
    its difficulty, 177;
    ceases under the Roman power, 180.

  _Italy_, relations of its nations to the Greek cities, 31;
    help for its cities sought in Greece, 32-34;
    how affected by the Teutonic invasions, 90, 91;
    its position under Theodoric, 97, 98;
    reconquered by the Empire, 98;
    divided between the Empire and the Lombards, ib.;
    southern part remains Greek, ib.;
    developement of cities in, 186;
    its disunion, 189; 193;
    position of cities in, 191;
    its reunion, 193-195;
    its drawbacks, 194.


  J.

  _Janissaries_, 167.

  _Jerusalem_, recovered by Frederick the Second, 163.

  _Jews_, revival of their power under the Maccabees, 66;
    their mission in the world, ib.

  _John Sobieski_, Vienna delivered by, 171.

  _Joseph the Second_, Emperor, 152.

  _Justinian_, closes the University of Athens, 85;
    his historic position, 126-128.


  K.

  _Kingship_, various forms of in the Polybian age, 36.

  _Korkyra_, its position in Homeric times, 20;
    becomes Greek, 24.

  _Kyrênê_, colonization of, 24.


  L.

  _Latin language_, its history in the Eastern Empire, 114-117.

  Λατῖνοι, opposed to Ῥωμαῖοι, 141.

  _Lectures_, scheme of, 204-206;
    given in America, 205.

  _Leo the Isaurian_, beats back the Saracens, 134.

  _Leopold the First_, Emperor, compared with Constantine Palaiologos, 171.

  _Lesbos_, mention of in Homer, 19.

  _Lewis the Second_, Emperor, his controversy with Basil the Macedonian, 108;
    his position in Italy, 130, 131.

  _Lignitz_, defeat of the Mongols at, 161.

  _Lübeck_, its coinage, 202.

  _Lykia_, League of, 37;
    its history and constitution, 222, 223.


  M.

  _Macedonia_, its relations to Greece, 14.

  _Macedonian Conquests_, effects of, 14, 15.

  _Macedonian Emperors_, their work, 132, 133.

  _Macedonian Wars_, character of the First, 51, 52.

  _Magyars_, effects of their settlement and conversion, 94.

  _Mahomet the Second_, his European position, 167.

  _Mahometan history_, its date, 11.

  _Mahometanism_, its special rivalry with Christianity, 133.

  _Marcus_, his reign, 76.

  _Maria Theresa_, 152.

  _Marius_, Gaius, his work, 60.

  _Massalia_, its time of greatness, 25;
    its two republican periods, 192.

  _Maximilian_, Imperator electus, 138;
    his tomb, 147.

  _Merwings_, end of, 158.

  _Milêtos_, mention of in Homer, 19.

  _Mogul Empire_, 150.

  _Mykênê_, Empire of, 18.


  N.

  _Nations_, answer to cities, 177, 178; 183;
    definition of, 192, 193.

  _Nikaia_, Sultans of, 135, 144, 145;
    Emperors of, 140;
    their recovery of Constantinople, 142;
    its position under Trajan, 234, 235.

  _Nikêphoros_, Emperor, acknowledges the claim of Charles the Great, 108.

  _Nikomêdeia_, its position under Trajan, 234, 235.

  _Normandy_, settlement of, 190.


  O.

  _Odowakar_, his position and history, 96.

  _Odysseus_, his relation to his overlord, 18.

  _Olbia_, Diôn Chrysostom’s account of, 231.

  _Olympiad_, First, a starting-point, 10, 11.

  _Otto the Great_, Emperor, 131.

  _Otto the Third_, Emperor, 131.

  _Ottoman Turks_, their advance in Asia and Europe, 165-168.


  P.

  _Palaiologoi_, their Empire a survival of the old Empire, 142;
    their recovery of Peloponnêsos, ib.

  _Panormos_, Phoenician colony, 24.

  _Paris_, the centre of France, 191.

  _Parthia_, Greek influence on, 15;
    its relations to Rome, 62.

  _Patricians_, Teutonic, 105.

  _Peloponnêsos_, recovered by the Palaiologoi, 142.

  _Pergamon_, the model kingdom, 37;
    its relations to Rome, 56;
    dealings of Rome with, 218.

  _Persia_, its historic position, 27-29;
    its alliance with Carthage, 30;
    its new birth and rivalry with Rome, 63.

  _Persian Wars_, their nature, 21.

  _Philip_, how looked on at Megalopolis, 32.

  _Philip the Fifth_, his failure to help Hannibal, 51, 54.

  _Phœnicia_, its history and relation to Greece, 12; 20;
    extent of its colonization, 24; 26;
    its older and newer cities, 29.

  _Physical inventions_, their political effect, 183-185.

  _Pippin_, Patrician, 105;
    recovers Septimania from the Saracens, 134;
    his unction, 158.

  _Pliny_, his correspondence with Trajan, 225, 226; 233-239;
    his dealings with Apameia, 236;
    with Amisos, 237.

  _Plutarch_, his account of contemporary Greek commonwealths, 225-230;
    his political precepts, 227-230.

  _Poland_, Vienna delivered by, 171;
    share of the House of Austria in its partition, 172.

  _Polybios_, preserves the non-Athenian tradition of Philip, 32;
    character of his age, 35;
    his experience compared with that of Thucydides, 35, 36.

  _Pompeius Gnæus_, his work in the East, 61.

  _Pontius Telesinus_, 61.

  _Pontos_, Greek influence on, 15.

  _Popes_, a survival of the Empire, 155;
    origin and growth of their power, 156-158;
    their encroachments in the East, 165; 170;
    chosen from Italians only, 182;
    their relations to the Austrian Emperors, 183.

  _Pragmatic Sanction_, 152.

  _Pressburg_, Treaty of, 149.

  _Protected states_, their position, 224.

  _Provence_, its commonwealth, 192.

  _Provinces_, slow annexation of, 72, 73;
    position of different towns in, 215-216.

  _Prusa_, speech of Diôn Chrysostom at, 232.

  _Punic Wars_, an episode in European history, 49, 50.

  _Pyrrhos_, his Hellenic position, 14; 17;
    his designs, 34;
    effects of his war with Rome, 45.


  R.

  _Ragusa_, its commonwealth suppressed, 203.

  _Ravenna_, Emperors at, 157.

  Respublica, use of the word, 125.

  Rex Græciæ, Eastern Emperor so called, 108, 109.

  _Rhodes_, mention of in Homer, 19;
    democracy of, 36;
    dealings of Rome with, 218;
    speech of Diôn Chrysostom at, 231, 232.

  _Roger_, Count, his recovery of Sicily, 135.

  _Roman_, use of the name, 43.

  _Roman Church_, its boundaries, 181, 182.

  _Roman Empire_, when did its decline begin? 75;
    its extension, 76;
    effect of the fifth century on, 79;
    its traditions kept on in the East, 79, 80;
    relations of its Eastern and Western divisions, 79-81;
    its enlargement under Charles, 105; 109, 110;
    its nature under Charles, 106, 107;
    its final division in 800, 108, 109;
    parted from the Roman nation, 110, 111;
    translation of, 112-114;
    its extent in the fifth century, 122;
    its reconquest in the sixth century, 124-126;
    advance of centralization in, 211;
    change from republic to empire, 212-214.

  _Roman kingdom_, in Gaul, 123.

  _Roman nation_, created by the Edict of Antoninus, 42;
    its growth, 70, 71; 73.

  _Roman Senate_, acts as an international court, 57, 58.

  _Romance languages_, their origin, 90.

  _Romance nations_, their origin, 90-92;
    their relation to the Roman Church, 182.

  Romani, use of the name, 73, 111.

  _Romania_, Latin Empire of, 145;
    its style, 146.

  _Rome_, her historic position, 3, 4;
    her epithet of “Eternal,” 4;
    her part in the Eastern Question, 5;
    her relation to Greece, 15;
    her early position, 26;
    her first dealings with Greeks, 31;
    her sudden entrance in the East, 35; 37;
    slowness of her second advance, 39-41;
    her first relations with Greece, 40, 41;
    importance of her geographical position, 41;
    her rule, the rule of a city, 42;
    her historic calling, 43;
    her relations to Gauls and Teutons, 43, 44;
    her growth in Italy, 44, 45;
    effects of her war with Pyrrhos, 45;
    her rivalry and first war with Carthage, 46, 47;
    strife of with Carthage for Spain, 48, 49;
    her establishment beyond the Hadriatic, 49, 50;
    how affected by the Hannibalian war, 50-53;
    her position in the East after the first Macedonian war, 54-55;
    her advance in the second century B.C., 55-59;
    her time of trial, 60, 61;
    her relations with Syria and Gaul, 61, 62;
    her calling in the East, 62, 63;
    her special rivalry with Persia, 63;
    her first dealings with Germany, 64;
    Christianity needful for its mission, 67;
    change from commonwealth to Empire, 69;
    its effect on the city and the province, 69, 70;
    lessening of her local importance, 73, 74;
    remains specially Pagan, 74;
    falls away from the Empire, 80;
    her relation to her allies, 82-85;
    their slow incorporation, 84, 85;
    extension of Greek influence by, 93;
    her influence extended by the Teutonic settlements, ib.;
    her influence beyond the Empire, 94;
    taken by the Goths, 95;
    never occupied by the Lombards, 98;
    her position compared with that of Constantinople, 100-102;
    absence of the Emperors from, 101;
    her relations to Mahometanism, 133;
    represented by the Popes, 164, 165; 181, 182;
    the world without Rome, 173-176;
    the world before and after Rome, 176;
    effect of her reunion with Italy, 194, 195;
    her position under the Popes, 194;
    gradual establishment of her power, 209;
    modern analogies to, ib.;
    nature of her power over her allies, 214-217;
    analogies with its internal constitution, 214;
    her treatment of her allies, 217, 218;
    comparison of her power in East and West, 239.

  _Rome_, ROUM, Sultans of, 135; 144, 145.

  _Rouman language_, its origin, 115.

  _Roumans_, their relation to the Slavs, 103;
    growth of, 119.

  _Rudolf of Habsburg_, King, not Emperor, 139.

  _Russian Empire_, 153, 154.

  Ῥωμαῖοι, use of the name, 73; 86; 117; 141; 146.


  S.

  _Samuel_, Bulgarian Tzar, 133.

  _San Marino_, relations of, 217.

  _Saxon Emperors_, their work, 130, 131;
    their wars with the Magyars, 161.

  _Saxons_, first mentioned, 64.

  _Scandinavia_, Roman influence in, 94.

  _Scotland_, compared with Switzerland, 198.

  _Second Century B.C._, advance of Rome in, 55-59;
    time of Barbarian revival, 62.

  _Seleukid Kings_, their position, 36;
    their relations to Rome, 56, 57.

  _Seljuk Turks_, their conquest, 166.

  _Sentinum_, battle of, 44.

  _Shires_, English, their position, 210.

  _Sicily_, its relations to Greece, 14;
    falls away from Greek life, 17;
    Phœnician and Greek settlements in, 25;
    their warfare, 30;
    help for sought in Greece, 32-34;
    war of Rome and Carthage for, 47;
    its conquest by the Saracens, and recovery, 134-135;
    incorporated with Italy, 194.

  _Sidonius Apollinaris_, 44.

  _Sikans_, mention of in Homer, 20.

  _Sikels_, mention of in Homer, 20.

  _Simeon_, Bulgarian Tzar, 113.

  _Sixth Century A.D._, its historical character, 124-126.

  _Sixth Century B.C._, greatest time of free Hellas, 23.

  _Slaves_, their relation to Rome, East and West, 94;
    their position compared with that of the Teutons, 100;
    their northern and southern divisions, ib.;
    their relations to the Eastern Empire, 102; 116;
    to the Roumans, 103;
    to the Western Church, 182.

  _Spain_, her historic position, 48;
    strife of Rome and Carthage for, 49;
    Teutonic settlements in, 88;
    how affected by the Teutonic invasions, 91;
    character of its history, ib.;
    its conquest and recovery, 134.

  _Stephen Dushan_, Servian Tzar, 113.

  _Strabo_, his description of the Lykian League, 223.

  _Suevians_, their settlement in Spain, 122.

  _Sulla_, Lucius, his work, 61.

  _Swabian Emperors_, their position, 148, 149;
    compared with the Austrian, ib.

  _Switzerland_, represents Burgundy, 197, 198;
    compared with Scotland, 198;
    reproduces Achaia, 199;
    position of cities in, ib.;
    its German origin, 201;
    its Confederation contrasted with that of Germany, 203.

  _Sybaris_, its time of greatness, 25.

  _Syracuse_, its time of greatness, 25.

  _Syria_, its position under Rome, 61;
    Saracen conquest of, 133.


  T.

  _Taras_, _Tarentum_, its time of greatness, 25.

  _Tauromenion_, its long resistance, 134, 135.

  _Teutonic nations_, their relation to the Roman Church, 181, 182.

  _Teutonic race_, beginning of its threefold history, 64.

  _Teutons_, Roman influence extended by their settlements, 93.

  _Theodoric_, the East-Goth, 44;
    his earlier history, 80; 99;
    his position, 96, 97; 123, 124;
    his system dependent on himself alone, 97.

  _Theodoric_, the West-Goth, 44.

  _Theophilos_, Emperor, annexes Cherson, 222.

  _Thessalonikê_, Empire of, 143.

  _Third Century B.C._, 36, 37;
    compared with the fifth century A.D., 81.

  _Thucydides_, his experience compared with that of Polybios, 35, 36.

  _Trajan_, his reign, 75, 76;
    loss of his conquests, 77;
    his correspondence with Pliny, 225, 226; 233-239;
    his dealings with the provinces and allies, 226;
    with Nikomêdeia, 235;
    with Apameia, 236;
    with Amisos, 237;
    his respect for treaties, ib.

  _Trebizond_, Empire of, 143.

  _Tribes_, united into nations, 187;
    in England, 188;
    in Gaul, 189.


  U.

  _Unction_, practice of, 75;
    first use of at Rome, 105.

  _United States_, its Federal system, 199.


  V.

  _Vandals_, their settlements, 88, 89; 122.

  _Vercellæ_, battle of, 44.

  _Vienna_, siege of in 1683, 171.


  W.

  _Western Emperors_, their Eastern wars, 161.

  _Western Empire_, in what sense German, 112-116;
    becomes German, 130-132;
    practically ends with Frederick the Second, 136-138;
    its later character, 147-149.

  _Westfalia_, Peace of, compared with that of Constance, 139.


  Y.

  _Year 407 A.D._, Teutonic invasion of Gaul in, 87;
    best beginning of modern history, 161, 162.


  Z.

  _Zama_, battle of, its effect, 53, 54.

  _Zones of Greek Influence_, 14, 15.

  Zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs, title of, 109.


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