[Footnote 53: Surely the author should have added the Belgian army (fixed by the laws of 1853 at 100,000), and that part of the Prussian, etc., which is raised west of the Rhine, in comparing the military force of ancient Gaul with that of the same district in our day.]
It might have been added, that, as a general rule, the army which guarded each portion was composed of the natives of the country in which they were stationed. Roman citizens they were, no doubt, but citizens of provincial extraction, and posted to guard on behalf of Rome the very country which their fathers, sometimes but a very few generations back, had defended against her. [Footnote 54] This is a policy the generosity of which France dares not at this day imitate, even in her oldest provinces. To say nothing of the British army in Ireland, the Breton conscripts are still sent to serve at Lyons and Paris.
[Footnote 54: Champagny, Rome, and Judea.]
The extracts we have given will doubtless lead every reader to study for himself Mr. Allies's descriptions of Rome, and the life of the Thermae, and of the colonies, everywhere reproducing the life of Rome. Every page breathes with the matured thought of a mind of remarkable natural acuteness, and stored with refined scholarship. There is nothing of beauty or majesty in that magnificent old world which he does not seem to have witnessed and mused over.
It is hardly possible to realize all this greatness without being tempted to repine in the remembrance whither it was all hastening—that the peace of the Roman world was but "the torrent's smoothness ere it dash below;" its magnificence only the feast of Baltassar in that last night of the splendor of Babylon, when the Medes and Persians were already under her walls, and the river had been turned away from its course through her quays, and a way left open for the rush of the destroyer into her streets and palaces. Already the mysterious impulse had been given which, during so many centuries, drove down horde after horde of barbarians from the wild north-east, to overflow the favored lands that surrounded the Mediterranean. In the early days of Roman history the Gauls had rushed on, sweeping away those earlier races whose remains we are now exploring in the shallows of the Swiss lakes, and whose descendants are probably to be found in the Basques, and in some of those degraded castes which, in spite of the welding power of the Church, left proscribed remnants in France and elsewhere until the great revolution. That mighty wave burst upon the rock of the Capitol, threatened for a moment utterly to overwhelmed it, and then fell broken at its feet. But it is not by repelling one wave, however formidable, that a rising tide is turned back. In the day of Rome's [{369}] utmost power her very foundations were shaken by the torrent of the Cimbri and Teutones. They, too, were broken against the steel-clad legions of Marius, and fell off like spray on the earth. But the tide was still advancing. What need to trace its successive inroads? Every reader of Gibbon remembers how the time came at last when the very site where Rome had stood had been so often swept by it, that of all its greatness there remained nothing more than the sea leaves of some castle of shingles and sand, after a few waves have passed over it.
"Quench'd is the golden statue's ray;
The breath of heaven hath swept away
What toiling earth hath piled;
Scattering wise heart and crafty hand,
As breezes strew on ocean's strand
The fabrics of a child!"
There even came a time when for many weeks the very ruins of ancient Rome were absolutely deserted, and trodden neither by man nor beast. No wonder that the world stood by afar off weeping and mourning over the utter destruction of all that the earth had ever known of greatness and glory. So the sentence had been passed, in the day of her greatest glory, by the prophetic voice of the angel, who cried with a strong voice:
"Fallen—fallen, is Babylon the great, and is become the habitation of devils and the hold of every unclean spirit, and of every unclean and hateful bird. And the kings of the earth shall weep and bewail themselves over her, when they shall see the smoke of the burning; standing afar off for fear of her torments, saying, Alas! alas! that great city Babylon, that mighty city; for in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her, and shall stand afar off from her for fear of her torments, weeping and mourning, and saying, Alas! alas! that great city which was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and was gilt with gold and precious stones and pearls. For in one hour are so great riches come to nought." (Apocalypse, chap, xviii.)
It was not the ruin of one city, however glorious, but the sweeping away of all the accumulated glories of the civilization of the whole civilized world, during more than a thousand years. All had been embodied in imperial Rome. In the words of our author—
"The empire of Augustus inherited the whole civilization of the ancient world. Whatever political or social knowledge, whatever moral or intellectual truth, whatever useful or elegant arts, 'the enterprising race of Japhet' had acquired, preserved, and accumulated in the long course of centuries since the beginning of history had descended without a break to Rome, with the dominion of all the countries washed by the Mediterranean. For her the wisdom of Egypt and of all the East had been stored up. For her Pythagoras and Thales, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and all the schools beside of Grecian philosophy suggested by these names, had thought. For her Zoreaster, as well as Solon and Lycurgus, legislated. For her Alexander conquered, the races which he subdued forming but a portion of her empire. Every city, in the ears of whose youth the poems of Homer were familiar as household words, owned her sway. The magistrates, from the Northern sea to the confines of Arabia, issued their decrees in the language of empire—the Latin tongue; while, as men of letters, they spoke and wrote in Greek. For her Carthage had risen, founded colonies, discovered distant coasts, set up a world-wide trade, and then fallen, leaving her the empire of Africa and the west, with the lessons of a long experience. Not only so, but likewise Spain, Gaul, and all the frontier provinces, from the Alps to the mouth of the Danube, spent in her service their strength and skill; supplied her armies with their bravest youths; gave to her senate and her knights their choicest minds. The vigor of [{370}] new and the culture of long-polished races were alike employed in the vast fabric of her power. Every science and art, all human experience and discovery, had poured their treasure in one stream into the bosom of that society, which, after forty-four years of undisputed rule, Augustus had consolidated into a new system of government, and bequeathed to the charge of Tiberius" (p. 41).