armies on Rome in pursuit of their own aggrandizement. It is tempting to suppose that the reality had always
been as venal and as ruthless. Yet it is clear that there had really been a change. When for twenty years Hannibal
led an invincible army about Italy urging Rome's Italian allies to revolt, the great majority of them stood firm; not
much more than a hundred years later their grievances drove them to make war on Rome themselves. Roman
justice and self-restraint, the public spirit which impressed Greeks when they met it in the second century B.C.,
were not a myth.
Archaic and classical Greece, the truly creative period of antiquity, involve a comparatively small area of the
eastern Mediterranean. The conquests of Alexander spread the language, architecture and art of Greece as far to
the East as India; the rise of Rome led eventually to the whole Mediterranean world, and its 'fringe' as far as
Britain, Romania, Iraq, sharing in one recognizable culture with two great languages, Greek and Latin. Anything
like modern nationalism was strikingly ineffective, and the Empire was not held down by force: for most of the
first century A.D., for instance, there was only one legion stationed in north Africa, and none at all in Spain. The
same books were studied by schoolboys all over that huge world, and whether in Provence or in Turkey or in
north Africa cities arose whose lay-out and temples and public buildings shared the same repertory of forms and
decorations. The silver on the table, the mosaics on the floor, the under-floor heating: a uniformity of style
existed which is only now returning to our world.
That style was not, of course, all inclusive. It was the creation of a leisured class, and Berber tribesmen or Illyrian
goatherds doubtless felt little sympathy with it. The Empire must have depended on unfree labour to a much
greater extent than Greece; and the slums of Rome show that many of the free urban poor lived lives of great
poverty. Yet Rome was extraordinary among slave-owning societies in that slaves were constantly freed in great
numbers, and that the moment they were freed they became citizens. More than half of the thousands of epitaphs
extant from imperial Rome are of freedmen and freedwomen. The poor citizen had the great public baths and
public squares and parks and forums, in which he reckoned to spend far more time out of his house than is
normal in the modern north.
Still darker aspects are not to be glossed over: the slave trade, infanticide, the gladiatorial shows, absolute power
which could be in the hands of irresponsible or unbalanced men. Caligula and Nero, the spectacle of bloodshed
and the sinister opulence of the orgy, have haunted the imagination of Europe. One of the ways in which the
Roman Empire is interesting is that it shows certain sides of human. nature developed to their fullest extent:
'Remember', Caligula used to say to people, 'that I can do anything to anybody.' The past is the laboratory in
which human nature can be studied with security, perhaps the only way it can really be studied at all.