The Romans did their job so thoroughly that they erected a structure which under one form or another has survived until our own time, and that in itself is no mean accomplishment. As long as the necessary taxes were paid and a certain outward homage was paid to the few rules of conduct laid down by their Roman masters, the subject-tribes enjoyed a very large degree of liberty. They could believe or disbelieve whatever they pleased. They could worship one God or a dozen Gods or whole temples full of Gods. It made no difference. But whatever religion they chose to profess, these strangely assorted members of a world-encircling empire were forever reminded that the “pax Romana” depended for its success upon a liberal application of the principle of “live and let live.” They must under no condition interfere either with their own neighbors or with the strangers within their gates. And if perchance they thought that their Gods had been insulted, they must not rush to the magistrate for relief. “For,” as the Emperor Tiberius remarked upon one memorable occasion, “if the Gods think that they have just claims for grievance, they can surely take care of themselves.”
And with such scant words of consolation, all similar cases were instantly dismissed and people were requested to keep their private opinions out of the courts.
If a number of Cappadocian traders decided to settle down among the Colossians, they had a right to bring their own Gods with them and erect a temple of their own in the town of Colossae. But if the Colossians should for similar reasons move into the land of the Cappadocians, they must be granted the same privileges and must be given an equal freedom of worship.
It has often been argued that the Romans could permit themselves the luxury of such a superior and tolerant attitude because they felt an equal contempt for both the Colossians and the Cappadocians and all the other savage tribes who dwelled outside of Latium. That may have been true. I don’t know. But the fact remains that for half a thousand years, a form of almost complete religious tolerance was strictly maintained within the greater part of civilized and semi-civilized Europe, Asia and Africa and that the Romans developed a technique of statecraft which produced a maximum of practical results together with a minimum of friction.
To many people it seemed that the millennium had been achieved and that this condition of mutual forbearance would last forever.
But nothing lasts forever. Least of all, an empire built upon force.
Rome had conquered the world, but in the effort she had destroyed herself.
The bones of her young soldiers lay bleaching on a thousand battlefields.
For almost five centuries the brains of her most intelligent citizens had wasted themselves upon the gigantic task of administering a colonial empire that stretched from the Irish Sea to the Caspian.