The Historians' History of the World 06

But with all these advantages imperial Rome suffered from grave moral defects. The love of liberty, the common patriotic sentiment, the vigour, and martial virtue of the republican period, were gone; in ease, tranquillity, and enervating pleasure, the arm of the citizen grew feeble, and the self-respect and manly pride of earlier days degenerated into servility and grovelling adulation. The city swarmed with foreign soldiers of fortune and with enriched freedmen. The old seats of culture in the East sent forth not scholars and artists only, but ministers of luxury, gluttony, and voluptuousness. Together with a few wholesome elements, all the evils and defects of human society flowed together here and preyed upon the scanty remnant of the old Roman morality and virtue. Rome became the meeting place of all nations on the face of the earth. Interest in public affairs grew steadily feebler since the offices and dignities had become empty honours void of power. The senators had often to be constrained by penalties to attend the sessions of the senate, although the latter had been reduced to two principal meetings a month; the office of ædile was shunned as a burden until the state took it upon itself to defray the cost of the public entertainments; candidates for the tribunate had often to be put forward by the emperor. The citizens were not ashamed to enrol themselves in the list of paupers and to share in the public distributions of corn and alms; nay, rather than apply themselves to any honest calling, many Romans, especially of the knightly class, preferred to take service for board and wages with the purveyors of gladiatorial combats, and to hazard their lives in a brutal popular amusement which gained ground steadily from that time forward, exercising an effect all the more demoralising on the minds of men, and rousing and stimulating their licentious instincts all the more keenly because the verdict of life or death was given by the humour of the crowd, at whose signal the victor spared or transfixed his prostrate opponent; a right of appeal even more inhuman than the old custom that the duel should end with the death of one of the combatants.

The degeneration of morals and the decay of domestic virtue kept pace with the passion for brutal spectacles. Strenuously as the emperor strove to raise the standard of family life and to curb immoderate expenditure on dress and food and the growing license of women by sumptuary and moral edicts, to enforce legal marriage and the procreation of legitimate offspring as a duty and honour by legal ordinances and curtailment of privileges, to render divorce difficult and to check the rampant vice of adultery, the state of indolent celibacy and the excesses of both sexes in connection with it spread more and more, in the upper classes out of liking for a licentious life and forbidden pleasures, in the lower from poverty and laziness. The corruption of morals, checked but ineffectually by Augustus, made rapid strides after his death; above all, when the rulers themselves tore away the veil which still shrouded shameful living under the first principate. But even Augustus could never disclaim his origin from Venus Aphrodite, the ancestress of the family of Julius.b

AUGUSTUS MAKES EGYPT HIS PRIVATE PROVINCE

[30 B.C.]

The day of Egyptian independence was over as a matter of course. Cæsar needed the country, with its corn and its riches, for his scheme of reorganisation.

The city of Rome capitulated to the grain fleet of the Nile and sold her ancient liberty for a supply of daily bread, and the price at least was paid her. By the Cæsar Egypt had been conquered and under the rule of the Cæsar she remained, like all countries which Cæsar was the first to unite with the Roman Empire.

It is obvious that a conquered province cannot at once be placed on exactly the same footing as older parts of the empire; a transition period is almost always necessary; but Egypt never took quite the same position as other subject countries. Before the partition of the empire into senatorial and imperial provinces was effected, Egypt had come to occupy a unique position with regard to the emperor; and after the partition the ties which bound it to him became even closer. Among the imperial provinces there was none more intimately related to the emperor than this, which surpassed all others in importance. Egypt was of much the same consequence to the Roman Empire as India is to the England of to-day.