THE ROMANIZATION OF THE EMPIRE


Historians seldom praise the Roman Empire. They regard it as a period of
death and despotism, from which political freedom and creative genius
and the energies of the speculative intellect were all alike excluded.
There is, unquestionably, much truth in this judgement. The world of the
Empire was indeed, as Mommsen has called it, an old world. Behind it lay
the dreams and experiments, the self-convicted follies and disillusioned
wisdom of many centuries. Before it lay no untravelled region such as
revealed itself to our forefathers at the Renaissance or to our fathers
fifty years ago. No new continent then rose up beyond the western seas.
No forgotten literature suddenly flashed out its long-lost splendours.
No vast discoveries of science transformed the universe and the
interpretation of it. The inventive freshness and intellectual
confidence that are born of such things were denied to the Empire. Its
temperament was neither artistic, nor literary, nor scientific. It was
merely practical.

Yet if practical, it was not therefore uncreative. In its own sphere of
everyday life, it was an epoch of growth in many directions. Even the
arts moved forward. Sculpture was enriched by a new and noble style of
portraiture. Architecture won new possibilities by the engineering
genius which reared the aqueduct of Segovia and the Basilica of
Maxentius.[1] But these are only practical expansions of arts that are
in themselves unpractical. The greatest work of the imperial age must be
sought in its provincial administration. The significance of this we
have come to understand, as not even Gibbon understood it, through the
researches of Mommsen. By his vast labours our horizon has broadened
beyond the backstairs of the Palace and the benches of the Senate House