The Historians' History of the World 06

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

There is, no doubt, much chaff that has attained to an unmerited longevity in these stone archives, much that we would willingly let go by the board. But one thing is certain: that only out of these materials—which of late have been singularly supplemented by the masses of papyri discovered in Egypt—can a history of the Roman Empire be constructed; and that any one who addresses himself to the solution of a problem of this kind without exact knowledge of them, though he were as great a man as Leopold von Ranke, must fall far short of the goal within reach. What can be done with such materials has been shown by Mommsen in the masterly description of the provinces from the time of Cæsar to the reign of Diocletian, given in the fifth volume of his History of Rome, a volume which not only forms a worthy sequel to those which preceded it, but in many respects marks an advance upon them, and makes us all the more painfully aware of the gap which we dare scarcely hope to see filled by his master hand.

THE MEANING OF IMPERIAL ROMAN HISTORY

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

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

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

In the East, permeated with Greek culture, though by no means denationalised, the Romans scarcely made an attempt to enter into competition with this superior civilising agency, and, except as the medium of expression of the Roman magistrates, the Roman language played a very subordinate part there.