One of the odes of Horace tells how the name of Rome grew to might:
"Till her superb dominion spread
East, where the sun comes forth in light,
And west to where he lays his head."
—Ode 15, "To Augustus," book 4.
Lucan's lines measured its exceeding greatness from the other points of the compass:
"Though from the frozen pole our empire run,
Far as the journeys of the southern sun."
—"Pharsalia," book 10.
"The empire of the Romans filled the world," says Gibbon. It was "exceeding great," according to the prophecy. In the vision the little horn that grew so great came into the prophet's view as proceeding out of one of the four horns that he had been watching. Rome rose to unquestioned supremacy out of its conquest of Macedonia, one of the four notable kingdoms into which Grecia was divided. It spread forth toward the south, and toward the east, and "toward the pleasant land," Palestine becoming a province of the empire in the century before Christ. And it was a Roman force that destroyed Jerusalem and devastated the pleasant land.
Thus the "sure word of prophecy," with exactness in detail, carries the history through the centuries to the last great universal monarchy, Rome.
But this prophecy does not deal so much with the earlier history of Rome as with the developments of later times. It was the same in the prophetic outline of Daniel 7. After briefly identifying Rome as the last universal monarchy, the vision of the seventh chapter dealt with the rise of papal Rome, described its exaltation of itself against God, and its warfare against the truth and the saints of God. And here again, in the eighth chapter, the same persecuting power is seen developing, exalting itself, and persecuting the saints of God. The prophecy says that "it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practiced, and prospered." Dan. 8:12. The papal history, as given in the study on Daniel 7, need not be repeated here.
