As may, perhaps, be said of ourselves in this present age, the Romans of the Empire were being encouraged to live too much in the enjoyment of the present, without anxiety for the future. So, too, the cultured classes gradually came to look back at the past, to the great achievements of Rome in war and literature, as all in all to them, and lost the desire to strike out new lines, to make new discoveries, to try new experiments. “Over all, to our eyes, there broods the shadow which haunts the life that is nourished only by memories, and to which the future sends no call and offers no promise.”[16]
CHAPTER X THE EMPIRE UNDER THE ANTONINES—CONCLUSION
The chief work of Rome in the world, as has often been said in this little book, was the defence of Mediterranean civilisation against external enemies. That work was of a double nature. It could not be done simply by marking out and holding lines of frontier; it was also necessary so to organise the Empire within its frontiers that the whole should contribute to the common object, with men, money and public spirit. The last two chapters will have shown that from the time of Julius and Augustus Roman rulers fully recognised this twofold nature of their task. Augustus in particular, while gradually settling the frontiers on a system well thought out, and adapted to his means and experience, also spent much time and pains on internal organisation. He found the Empire a loose collection of subject territories, each governed, well or ill as it might happen, by an officer almost independent of the central authority; he left it, at the end of his long life, in the way of becoming a well-compacted whole, in which every part felt more or less the force of a just central government; a civilised State “standing out in clear relief against the surrounding barbarism.”
In such an empire there must, of course, be differences of race and language—differences, too, of habits, feelings, modes of thought; but under just and wise rule such differences need be no hindrance to the political unity of the whole. There is a book of this period, within the reach of every one, which illustrates better than any other this unity in diversity of the Roman Empire—I mean the Acts of the Apostles. It should be studied carefully, with maps and such other helps as may be available, down to the last chapter, where it leaves St. Paul at Rome, living in his own hired house, in the centre of Mediterranean life and government.