Intellectual
cultivation brings with it rational interests. Knowledge, which looks
before and after, acts as a restraining power, to help conscience when it
flags. The sober and wholesome manners of life among the early Romans had
given them vigorous minds in vigorous bodies. The animal nature had grown
as strongly as the moral nature, and along with it the animal appetites;
and when appetites burst their traditionary restraints, and man in himself
has no other notion of enjoyment beyond bodily pleasure, he may pass by an
easy transition into a mere powerful brute. And thus it happened with the
higher classes at Rome after the destruction of Carthage. Italy had fallen
to them by natural and wholesome expansion; but from being sovereigns of
Italy, they became a race of imperial conquerors. Suddenly, and in
comparatively a few years after the one power was gone which could resist
them, they became the actual or virtual rulers of the entire circuit of
the Mediterranean. The south-east of Spain, the coast of France from the
Pyrenees to Nice, the north of Italy, Illyria and Greece, Sardinia,
Sicily, and the Greek Islands, the southern and western shores of Asia
Minor, were Roman provinces, governed directly under Roman magistrates. On
the African side Mauritania (Morocco) was still free. Numidia (the modern
Algeria) retained its native dynasty, but was a Roman dependency.
Pages:
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43