In ancient times, on the contrary, the attempt to establish a balance of power came to naught in the war of Hannibal; and from that time forward there is but one power of any account in the world, that of the Roman government, and for that very reason this moment marks first the stagnation, and then the decline, of culture. The ultimate result which grows out of this state of things in the course of the following centuries is a single vast civilised state in which all differences of nationality are abolished. But this involves the abolition of political rivalry and of the conditions vital to civilisation; the stimulus to advance, to outstrip competitors, is lacking; all that remains to be done is to keep what has already been gained, and, here as everywhere, that implies the decline and death of civilisation.
Rome herself, and with her the whole of Italy, was destined while endeavouring to secure the fruits of victory to experience to the full its disastrous consequences. She was dragged into a world-policy from which there was no escape, however much she might desire it; a return to the old Italian policy, with its circumscribed agrarian tendencies, had become impossible. Thus it comes about that the havoc wrought in Italy by the war of Hannibal has never been made good to this day, that the wounds it inflicted on the life of the nation have never been healed or obliterated. The state of Italy and the embryo Italian nation never came to perfection because the levelling universal empire of Rome sprang up and checked them.
There is no need to tell here how the preponderance of Rome made itself felt in political matters throughout the world immediately after the war with Hannibal, or how within little over thirty years all the states of the civilised world were subject to her sway. It is only necessary to point out that the ultimate result, the world-wide dominion of Rome, ensued inevitably from this preponderance of a single state, and was by no means consciously aimed at by Rome herself. All she desired was to shape the affairs of her neighbours as best consorted with her own interests and to obviate betimes the recurrence of such dangers as had menaced her in the case of Hannibal. Her ambition went no further; above all (though she kept Spain because there was no one to whom she could hand it over) she exhibited an anxious and well-grounded dread of conquests beyond sea. But she did not realise that by reducing all neighbouring states to helplessness and impotence she deprived them of the faculty of exercising the proper functions of a state. Thenceforth they existed only by the good will of Rome; they found themselves constrained to appeal to Roman arbitration in every question, and involved Rome perpetually in fresh complications, while at the same time they felt most bitterly their dependence on the will of an alien and imperious power.