of their relations to neighbours, friends and family, may well forget
the larger community in which their private circle is contained. The
Roman provincial had exceptional excuses for remaining indifferent to a
state which claimed his loyalty, not in the name of nationality or
religion, but in that of reason and the common good. Loyalty for him
could only be an intellectual conviction. But, unless he could enter the
privileged ranks of the army or the higher civil service, he had no
opportunities of studying, still less of helping to decide, the
questions of policy and administration with which his welfare was
closely though indirectly linked. Political ideas only came before the
private citizen under the garb of literature. The most admired authors
only taught him to regret republican polities long out of date. The
antiquarian enthusiasms which he acquired by his studies were in no way
corrected by the experience of daily life. If a townsman, he was legally
prohibited from changing his residence and even from travelling about
the Empire, for fear that he might evade the tax-collector. If a rural
landowner, he lived in a community which was economically
self-sufficient, and consequently provincial to the last degree. The
types of character which developed under such conditions were not
wanting in amiable or admirable traits. The well-to-do provincial was
often a scholar, a connoisseur in art and literature, a polished
letter-writer and conversationalist, a shrewd observer of his little
world, an exemplary husband and father, courteous to inferiors,
warm-hearted to his friends. Sometimes he found in religion or
philosophy an antidote to the pettiness of daily life, and was roused
into rebellion against the materialism of his equals, the greed and the
injustice of his rulers. But he despaired of bridging the gulf between
the Empire, as he saw it, and the ideal commonwealth--City of God or
Republic of the Universe--which his teachers held up to him as the goal
of human aspirations. Rather he was inclined, like the just man of