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For some centuries this Roman Empire did not fall into the grooves of
precedent that had so speedily swallowed up Persian and Greek, and all that
time it developed. The rulers of the Medes and Persians became entirely
Babylonized in a generation or so; they took over the tiara of the king of
kings and the temples and priesthoods of his gods; Alexander and his
successors followed in the same easy path of assimilation; the Seleucid
monarchs had much the same court and administrative methods as Nebuchadnezzar;
the Ptolemies became Pharaohs and altogether Egyptian. They were assimilated
just as before them the Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians had been
assimilated. But the Romans ruled in their own city, and for some centuries
kept to the laws of their own nature. The only people who exercised any great
mental influence upon them before the second or third century A.D. were the
kindred and similar Greeks. So that the Roman Empire was essentially a first
attempt to rule a great dominion upon mainly Aryan lines. It was so far a new
pattern in history, it was an expanded Aryan republic. The old pattern of a
personal conqueror ruling over a capital city that had grown up round the
temple of a harvest god did not apply to it. The Romans had gods and temples,
but like the gods of the Greeks their gods were quasi-human immortals, divine
patricians. The Romans also had blood sacrifices and even made human ones in
times of stress, things they may have learnt to do from their dusky Etruscan
teachers; but until Rome was long past its zenith neither priest nor temple
played a large part in Roman history.
The Roman Empire was a growth, an unplanned novel growth; the Roman people
found themselves engaged almost unawares in a vast administrative experiment.
It cannot be called a successful experiment. In the end their empire collapsed
altogether. And it changed enormously in form and method from century to
century. It changed more in a hundred years than Bengal or Mesopotamia or
Egypt changed in a thousand. It was always changing. It never attained to any
fixity.
In a sense the experiment failed. In a sense the experiment remains
unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are still working out the riddles of
world-wide statescraft first confronted by the Roman people.
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It is well for the student of history to bear in mind the very great changes
not only in political but in social and moral matters that went on throughout
the period of Roman dominion. There is much too strong a tendency in people's
minds to think of the Roman rule as something finished and stable, firm,
rounded, noble and decisive. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, S.P.Q.R. the
elder Cato, the Scipios, Julius Caesar, Diocletian, Constantine the Great,
triumphs, orations, gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrs are all mixed
up together in a picture of something high and cruel and dignified. The items
of that picture have to be disentangled. They are collected at different
points from a process of change profounder than that which separates the
London of William the Conqueror from the London of to-day.
We may very conveniently divide the expansion of Rome into four stages. The
first stage began after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 390 B.C. and went on
until the end of the First Punic War (240 B.C.). We may call this stage the
stage of the Assimilative Republic. It was perhaps the finest, most
characteristic stage in Roman history. The age-long dissensions of patrician
and plebeian were drawing to a close, the Etruscan threat had come to an end,
no one was very rich yet nor very poor, and most men were public-spirited. It
was a republic like the republic of the South African Boers before 1900 or
like the northern states of the American Union between 1800 and 1850; a
free-farmers republic. At the outset of this stage Rome was a little state
scarcely twenty miles square. She fought the sturdy but kindred states about
her, and sought not their destruction but coalescence. Her centuries of civil
dissension had trained her people in compromise and concessions. Some of the
defeated cities became altogether Roman with a voting share in the government,
some became self-governing with the right to trade and marry in Rome;
garrisons full of citizens were set up at strategic points and colonies of
varied privileges founded among the freshly conquered people. Great roads were
made. The rapid Latinization of all Italy was the inevitable consequence of
such a policy. In 89 B.C. all the free inhabitants of Italy became citizens of
the city of Rome Formally the whole Roman Empire became at last an extended
city. In 212 A.D. every free man in the entire extent of the empire was given
citizenship; the right, if he could get there, to vote in the town meeting in
Rome.
This extension of citizenship to tractable cities and to whole countries was
the distinctive device of Roman expansion. It reversed the old process of
conquest and assimilation altogether. By the Roman method the conquerors
assimilated the conquered.
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