At first, you will remember, there were the two great empires warring, the Nile Valley empire and the empire of the Euphrates and Tigris. Then came the Persian. He overthrew them both. But then he came up against a wall too strong for him to break down, in the opposition of Greece; and he broke his own head against that wall. After him came Alexander, the Macedonian, going through the world, as it was then known, like a flash of lightning, getting the better of everything that stood in his way as if it was of no account at all. But like a flash of lightning his light went out again, and he left the world he had conquered to be cut up into pieces and quarrelled for by the generals that he had led to the conquest.
Then the scene of action shifted westward along the inland sea. Carthage had grown to power at the cost of Phœnicia, her mother-land, and over against Carthage had grown together, in a wonderfully short time, this new Roman power. Carthage and Rome had fought, and Rome had utterly prevailed.
Then Rome, looking eastward, and troubled by King Pyrrhus, who had helped the Carthaginians, came in touch with the Macedonians and the Greeks, and after a period of trouble got the better of both, came up against the peoples of Asia Minor, and had them at her mercy whenever she chose to put out her strength. Already Egypt, though independent nominally, had acknowledged Rome as sovereign.
Pax Romana
So you see whither we have come. Hitherto it has always been a struggling world that the story has had to tell of—one or the other master holding power a short while perhaps, but never really having a hold over the whole world and getting all his opponents under. It is quite otherwise now. Rome is mistress; and she is not going to let go her hold for a very long while. When she does lose hold it will be really because her grip has lost power owing to her own maladies, rather than that any other very formidable foe has come against her.
You will understand, of course, what I mean when I talk of "the whole world" at this point of the story, and what that Greek historian, Polybius, of whom I told you in the last chapter, meant by it. He knew, no doubt, that there was a great deal of the world, in the sense of land inhabited by human beings, beyond the wide lands over which the Roman power really did extend. But neither he nor any one else in the Greek or Roman world of that day thought that these lands and their inhabitants counted for anything. They did not matter. These peoples were called barbarians. They were considered rather as we consider the North American Indians or the negroes. They were far more formidable to the Romans than either of these are to us, because the people away to the east and north-east of Syria, to the north of Asia Minor and Thrace and of Italy itself, all these had limitless lands behind them, on the sides farthest from the central power of Rome, to retreat into when she came with any power against them. For the most part they were peoples who led a wandering life. It was no trouble to them to strike their tents and go back into the wilds. But it was terrible trouble for the legions to follow them very far into those wilds; and the legions could not easily force them to a decided battle if they did follow them.
Therefore the Romans doubtless knew that however far they might push out their power in the east and north there would always be peoples on the edge of the lands which they could really make their own who would be apt to give trouble and would require small campaigns to be waged against them from time to time. Probably they made up their minds to that. But inside that wide barbarian fringe, and with the Atlantic Ocean on the west and the nearly uninhabited deserts of Africa on the south—within the wide expanse of which these form the boundary, the Roman power was such that if Rome said a thing had to be done, there was no man who questioned it. Done that thing had to be. That is what is meant by a phrase that you have most likely heard, the "Pax Romana," the Roman peace. It meant the peace which Rome could, and did, enforce within these regions under her power—a peace that could not be broken because every man knew that whatever she said was to be done, must be done. There was no help for it.
Of course the peace was not perfect, it was not untroubled. No peace ever is. But it was peace of a kind that the world had never known before. The whole world—the whole world that mattered—was for the first time under one single authority. It was also for the last time; for it is a condition that the world has never been in again since the break-up of the Roman power. So I think I was justified in asking you to stop a moment in the course of the story in order to consider the position of affairs to which it has brought us. It is interesting, is it not?
* * * * *
Mithridates