as the most precious spoil of victory to be her own, had pursued the same policy through seven hundred years of increasing power. Thus all Italy had gradually acquired the right of Roman citizenship. For she, for the first time in history, had created a citizenship independent of material walls and limits. Her rule was not the exclusion of the stranger and the isolation of the city; but to attract, to associate, and to extend. How did she effect this? Let us take an instance. Augustus found the Alpine valleys descending on Italy still in possession of the native tribes. Having conquered the warlike Salesi in the largest and fairest of these, he terminated a series of rebellions by selling for slaves their male population; but in the midst of the valley he planted a colonia. A legion of veteran soldiers, with standards displayed, with their tribunes, centuries, and cohorts, marched to the chosen spot. At their head the augur, the pontiff, the notary, and the land-surveyor took their place. The ground was solemnly marked out according to the sacerdotal laws of Etruria; the omens taken; the lines drawn; officer and private received his portion according to his rank. In the midst of the ground so allotted the sacred plough traced the enclosure without which there could be no legal city, the pomarium imaging that of Rome. The parallelogram so formed was intersected by two lines, terminating at the four cardinal points, which marked the site of four

Out of the armed

gates, sacred and inviolable as those of Rome, while at the point of intersection was the forum, the likeness of that whose name had become famous over all the earth. force, which had thus become citizen, the new republic chose duumviri, which were its consuls; and decemvirs, which formed its senate. Three hundred families answered to the three hundred original Roman gentes; thirty decemvirs to the three hundred senators; there was priest for priest, and sacrifice for sacrifice. There was Rome herself in her fourfold aspect of camp, city, temple, and field.* It was henceforth Roman soil, dwelt in by Roman citizens with all civil and political rights.

Forthwith the new republic became in its district a sentinel, a citadel, a capital of Roman power: the centre of all existing civilisation, and besides the market-place, tribunal, emporium to all the neighbourhood. Every occupation and business of life drew the natives around to it. There only on market-days could they exchange their goods and make their purchases; there, if strife arose between neighbours, the law would determine the right. There they saw an image of life, wealth, comfort, and civil peace far superior to any thing which they had imagined. Insensibly it drew them to its bosom, and the aim of their life became to share the privileges which they saw "Campus, urbs, templum, ager Romanus."

securely possessed by its inhabitants. Rome had planted herself, with all her attributes of power, order, wealth, and peace, before their eyes and within their grasp. How could they fail to stretch forth their arms to the embrace of such a mother?*

After nearly two thousand years you may still gaze down from the overlooking mountain on that colonia. Its enclosure remains. Its walls in large part continue as they were then built. Its central square was the ancient forum; its chief streets the intersecting lines drawn by the augur; and before its gate stands the very triumphal arch bearing the name of Augustus, its founder, twenty-seven years before the Christian era.† Even in her stones Rome seems everlasting.

Now what Rome did here in the fairest and most important of Alpine valleys, the great road by which Julius passed to conquer Gaul, and Napoleon from Gaul descended on Italy, that she had been doing for hundreds of years in her own peninsula, wherein during that time she had planted 161 coloniæ and 72 municipia; that she was doing over the broad plains of Gaul, and by the great rivers and thoroughfares of Western Europe, the Rhine, the Rhone, the Tagus, and the Ebro. She

Champagny, Les Césars: to whom I am indebted for this view of the importance of the colonia in the Roman system of rule. "Coloniæ nostræ omnes in literis antiquis urbeis quod item conditæ ut Roma." Varro, De L. Lat. v. 40. "Coloniæ, quasi effigies parvæ simulacraque populi Romani." Aul. Gell. xvi. 13, quoted by him. †The city of Aosta, seen from the Becca di Nona.

propagated herself in France by such cities as Lyons, Narbonne, Toulouse, and Arles; in Spain, by such as Cordova, Tarragona, Merida; in Africa, by Carthage, Utica, Adrametum; on the Rhine, by Cologne and Bâle; on the Moselle, by Treves; in England, by Colchester and London. These are but specimens of her assimilating power, by which she, who had conquered in arms, won and moulded by civilisation, educated by governing, united and exalted by imparting rights. Athens, Antioch, Alexandria did not this, and so lived solitarily, and at length died ignominiously; whereas Rome sowed the whole West with the imperishable seed of her own liberty, law, and self-government, so that her municipal autonomy passed on as a principle of freedom to our living Europe; and throughout her provinces all that were distinguished by wealth, industry, energy, rank of any sort, strove for her citizenship and obtained it, and henceforth had two countries—one that town or district which bore them, the other and the greater, Rome, that queenmother of ten thousand cities, from whose womb they had been bred, by whose milk they had been nurtured, whose heart's blood-the possession of her original civil and political rights-ran in their veins.

Was the Greek orator* wrong when he called the coloniæ and municipia of Rome her true ramparts, ramparts not to the city only, but to the whole empire? "The walls of Babylon were but

Aristides, De Urbe Roma.

child's play," he cried, "in comparison with these. Darius once netted a single city on an island within a circle of living men, but Rome has netted the world." And thus she is like the common mother earth, supporting all; or like the ocean, receiving all streams into her bosom without overflowing; where every one has his deserts; and no geographical division prevents merit from being known and honoured. And thus the word 'Roman' is become the name not of a city merely, but of a general race, and her guards are her own citizens, the best and most powerful citizens in every city of the world.

Great, then, as in itself was the military power of Rome, it pressed very lightly on so vast an empire, being thrown entirely on the frontiers, while the whole interior was guarded and maintained in tranquillity without soldiers by that sole majesty of her name. Indisputable, all-controlling as was her sovereignty, at the same time it did not efface the variety of subject races, for it left them in general in possession of their own laws, liberty, property, and customs, reserving to itself the right of peace and war, and requiring only that they should have the same enemies and the same friends with herself. It was a patronage, says Cicero, rather than an

*

"Regum, populorum, nationum portus erat et refugium senatus. Nostri autem magistratus imperatoresque ex hac una re maximam laudem capere studebant, si provincias, si socios æquitate et fide defendissent. Itaque illud patrocinium orbis terræ verius quam imperium poterat nominari." De Offic. ii. 8. This state of things,