The Chief Periods of European History, by Edward A. Freeman

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[Pg vi] 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 con[Pg vii]cerns 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 imme[Pg viii]diate 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[Pg ix] 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.

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[Pg 2] 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[Pg 3] 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[Pg 4] 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[Pg 5] 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[Pg 6] 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[Pg 7] 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[Pg 8] 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.[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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[Pg 11] 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[Pg 12] 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[Pg 13] 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;[Pg 14] 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[Pg 15] 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,[Pg 16] 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[Pg 17] 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[Pg 18] 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[Pg 19] 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[Pg 20] 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[Pg 21] 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[Pg 22] 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[Pg 24] 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[Pg 25] 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[Pg 26] 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[Pg 27] 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[Pg 28] 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[Pg 29] 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[Pg 30] 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,[Pg 31] 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,[Pg 33] 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[Pg 34] 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.[Pg 36] 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[Pg 37] 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[Pg 38] 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.

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[Pg 40] 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,[Pg 41] 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,[Pg 42] 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[Pg 43] 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[Pg 44] 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[Pg 45] 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, what[Pg 46]ever 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[Pg 47] 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[Pg 48] 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[Pg 49] 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[Pg 50] 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[Pg 51] 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[Pg 52] 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[Pg 53] 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[Pg 54] 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[Pg 55] 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[Pg 56] 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[Pg 57] 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[Pg 58] 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[Pg 59] 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[Pg 60] 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 first, 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[Pg 61] 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[Pg 62] 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 con[Pg 63]quests, 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[Pg 64] 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[Pg 66] 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[Pg 67] 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[Pg 68] 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[Pg 69] 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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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.

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[Pg 73] 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[Pg 74] 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[Pg 75] 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.[Pg 76] 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[Pg 77] 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[Pg 78] 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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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[Pg 81] 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[Pg 82] 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[Pg 83] 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[Pg 85] 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[Pg 86] 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[Pg 87] 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[Pg 88] 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[Pg 89] 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[Pg 90] 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[Pg 91] 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[Pg 92] 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[Pg 93] 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[Pg 94] 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[Pg 95] 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[Pg 96] 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[Pg 97] 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[Pg 98] 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[Pg 99] 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[Pg 100] 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[Pg 101] 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[Pg 102] 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,[Pg 103] 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.

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.[Pg 105] 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[Pg 106] 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[Pg 107] 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[Pg 108] “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[Pg 109] 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[Pg 110] 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[Pg 111] 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[Pg 112] 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.

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[Pg 113] 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[Pg 114] 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[Pg 115] 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[Pg 116] 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[Pg 117] 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[Pg 118] 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 pro[Pg 119]vinces. 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[Pg 121] 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[Pg 122] 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[Pg 123] 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 Medi[Pg 124]terranean 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[Pg 125] 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[Pg 126] 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[Pg 127] 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[Pg 128] 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.[Pg 129] 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[Pg 130] 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[Pg 131] 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.

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;

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?[Pg 133] 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[Pg 134] 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[Pg 135] 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[Pg 136] 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.

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.[Pg 138] 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.[Pg 139] 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 dis[Pg 140]tinctness 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.[Pg 141] 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[Pg 142] 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[Pg 143] 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[Pg 144] 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[Pg 145] 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[Pg 146] 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[Pg 147] 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[Pg 148] 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 Im[Pg 149]perial 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[Pg 150]-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;[Pg 151] 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[Pg 152] 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[Pg 153] 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[Pg 154] 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[Pg 155] 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[Pg 156] 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[Pg 157] 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[Pg 158] 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[Pg 159] 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[Pg 160] 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[Pg 161] 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[Pg 162] 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[Pg 163] 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[Pg 164] 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[Pg 165] 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[Pg 166] 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[Pg 167] 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[Pg 168] 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[Pg 169] 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[Pg 170] 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.

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[Pg 172] 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.

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[Pg 174] 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,[Pg 175] 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[Pg 176] 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[Pg 177] 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[Pg 178] 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[Pg 179] 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[Pg 180] 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[Pg 181] 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,[Pg 182] 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[Pg 183] 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.[Pg 184] 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[Pg 185] 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,[Pg 186] 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[Pg 187] 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[Pg 188] 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[Pg 189] 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;

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[Pg 191] 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[Pg 192] 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[Pg 193] 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[Pg 194] 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[Pg 195] 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[Pg 196] 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[Pg 197] 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,[Pg 198] 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,

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 repro[Pg 199]duce 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[Pg 200] 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[Pg 201] 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[Pg 202] 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[Pg 203] 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[Pg 204] 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[Pg 205] 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[Pg 206] 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.

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[Pg 210] 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[Pg 211] 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.[Pg 212] 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[Pg 213] 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.[Pg 214] 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[Pg 215] 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[Pg 216] 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[Pg 217] 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[Pg 218] 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[Pg 219] 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[Pg 220] 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[Pg 221] 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[Pg 222] 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[Pg 223] 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[Pg 224] 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.

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[Pg 225] 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 corre[Pg 226]spondence 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.

The political treatise of the wise and kindly Plutarch [8] is one which cannot be read without sadness.[Pg 227] 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[Pg 228] 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[Pg 229] 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[Pg 230] 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]

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[Pg 231] 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[Pg 232] 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.

Less interesting in themselves than any of these,[Pg 233] 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[Pg 234] 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 dis[Pg 235]sensions 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]

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.[Pg 236] 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[Pg 237] 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.

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[Pg 238] 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[Pg 239] 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.

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[Pg 240] 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.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] May 29, 1885.

[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.

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

[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.

[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 νόμισμως 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 τινὰ 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.

[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.

[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.”

[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.”

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

THE
CHIEF PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY

PREFACE.

CONTENTS.

LECTURE I.
EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER.

LECTURE II.
ROME THE HEAD OF EUROPE.

LECTURE III.
ROME AND THE NEW NATIONS.

LECTURE IV.
THE DIVIDED EMPIRE.

LECTURE V.
SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE.

LECTURE VI.
THE WORLD ROMELESS.

GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE.

INDEX.

THECHIEF PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY

PREFACE.

CONTENTS.

LECTURE I. EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER.

LECTURE II. ROME THE HEAD OF EUROPE.

LECTURE III. ROME AND THE NEW NATIONS.

LECTURE IV. THE DIVIDED EMPIRE.

LECTURE V. SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE.

LECTURE VI. THE WORLD ROMELESS.