Chapter VII: Part 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE.

GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE.

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

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

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