[298] E. B. (quoted from Tröltsch).
[299] See Haverfield. The Romanization of Roman Britain.—E. B.
[300] No literature! I demur entirely. Apuleius, Ammianus, St. Augustine, the Vulgate, Claudian, Sidonius Apollinaris, Ausonius—I mention but a few names—are not these literature?—E. B.
I forgot the Golden Ass and St. Augustine as coming into the Imperial period, but do these two names save the situation? E. B. ekes out with one second-rate historian, a translation, three court poets. Yet we are dealing here with the literature of a “world” empire.—H. G. W.
[301] A very interesting and suggestive book bearing on this question of disease in relation to political history is Malaria: a Neglected Factor in the History of Greece and Rome, by W. H. S. Jones.
[302] Baring Gould’s Lives of the Saints.
[303] On Benedictinism, see Dom. Berlière’s L’Ordre Monastique.—E. B.
[304] See Holmes’ Justinian and Theodora.—E. B.
[305] Great importance is attached to this task by historians, including one of the editors of this history. We are told that the essential contribution of Rome to the inheritance of mankind is the idea of society founded on law, and that this exploit of Justinian was the crown of the gift. The writer is ill-equipped to estimate the peculiar value of Roman legalism to mankind. Existing law seems to him to be based upon a confused foundation of conventions, arbitrary assumptions, and working fictions about human relationship, and to be a very impracticable and antiquated system indeed; he is persuaded that a time will come when the whole theory and practice of law will be recast in the light of a well-developed science of social psychology in accordance with a scientific conception of human society as one developing organization and in definite relationship to a system of moral and intellectual education. He contemplates the law and lawyers of to-day with a temperamental lack of appreciation. This may have made him negligent of Justinian and unjust to Rome as a whole.
[306] The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxiii.