The Historians' History of the World 06

We might say much more concerning the reforms by which Augustus and his successors transformed the character of the whole empire; of the organisation of the standing army practically created by Cæsar, which in manifold formations compassed about the motley population of the universal empire of Rome with a firm bond; of the imperial coinage which made the denarius and the Roman gold piece legal tender throughout the Roman world and either did away with local coinage or restricted it to private circulation in the place where it was struck (with the sole exception of Egypt, which occupied a peculiar position in this as in other respects); of the institution of an imperial post, which, though it served almost exclusively the purposes of the magistrates and was long a heavy burden on the provincials, is nevertheless a landmark in the history of international communication; of the opening up of remote provinces by the extended network of roads, on the milestones of which nearly all the emperors since Augustus inscribed their names, especially Trajan, Hadrian, Severus, and Caracalla; of the alimentary institutions originated by Nerva (one of the few government institutions for the public welfare in ancient times), which were intended to subserve both the maintenance of the citizen class and the furtherance of agriculture in Italy. We should gladly dwell upon the further development of Roman law by the council of state organised by Hadrian, after Augustus the greatest reformer on the imperial throne, and on the redaction of the edictum perpetuum carried out at his command by Salvius Julianus, whose full name and career we have but recently learned from an inscription found in Africa, which paved the way for a common law for the whole empire and prepared the great age of jurisprudence at the beginning of the third century, when the springs of creative power in art and literature were almost wholly dried up. But within the narrow limits of this brief survey we must refrain from this, as from a description of the prosperity and decline of the highly developed municipal life of the period, and a sketch of the history of the empire at home and abroad, and of its intellectual life. One question, however, cannot be left altogether without answer—the question of the attitude of the imperial government towards alien religions, and, above all, towards Christianity. A detailed examination of the position of Christianity in the Roman Empire by the authority best qualified to speak on the subject[1] will be found in another part of this work, and I can therefore confine myself in this place to a brief notice.

THE EMPIRE AND THE PAGAN CREED

Paganism is essentially tolerant, and the Romans always extended a full measure of this toleration to the religions of the nations they conquered. The early custom of transferring to Rome the tutelary divinity of any conquered city in the vicinity is a practical expression of the view that any addition to the Roman pantheon (which had begun to grow into a Græco-Roman pantheon by the admittance of Apollo and the Sibyls and had actually been such since the war with Hannibal) must be regarded simply as an addition to the divine patrons of Rome. In the main this view was adhered to under the empire, although Augustus formulated more definitely the idea of a Roman state religion and closed the circle of gods to whom worship was due on the part of the state. But we have evidence of the spirit of tolerance and the capacity for assimilation characteristic of the age in the wide dissemination of the Egyptian cults of Isis and Serapis, especially in the upper ranks of society, and still more in the worship—deep rooted among the masses and spread abroad over the greatest part of the earth—of the Persian Mithras, whom Diocletian and his co-regents praised in the great Danubian camp of Caruntum as the patron of their dominion. Even the Phœnician gods of Africa and the Celtic gods of Gaul and the Danube provinces were allowed to survive by identification with Roman divinities of a somewhat similar character, and in the outlandish surnames bestowed upon the latter; although the names of the great Celtic divinities disappear from the monuments—a matter in which the government undoubtedly had a hand. So many barbarians, says Lucian the scoffer, have made their way into Olympus that they have ousted the old gods from their places, and ambrosia and nectar have become scanty by reason of the crowd of topers; and he makes Zeus resolve upon a thorough clearance, in order unrelentingly to thrust forth from Olympus all who could not prove their title to that divine abode, even though they had a great temple on earth and there enjoyed divine honours.