Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/130

 the renitent Dacians, he introduced colonists from all regions of his great Empire. None can deny the imperial measures to increase the numbers of the inhabitants, to add urban elements of a higher culture and calibre, capable of discovering new sources of wealth and working the mines. But long before this official decision and its results, a popular expansion introduced not first here, but particularly in the districts south of the Danube, such components of the population as had the same standard of life as the old indigenous population. As in the South of Gaul, the Romanization of which was possible only by an influx of foreign immigrants, numerous farmers and shepherds (these last finding in the Pindus the same possibilities of transhumance as those of Gaul in the Appenines) abandoned Italy, which had become a country of great cities, of villas and of slavery, nourished with imported food, to seek and find a larger field of activity in this third peninsula of Southern Europe. Diving side by side, tending herds, ploughing diligently the same fertile soil, the two races mingled in a single mass of peasants, scattered in villages leading moral lives in which the traditions of two different, but not too different civilisations were united.

Not the great idea of the Empire, not the decisions of the imperial legates, not the prestige of a higher nature, nor the influence of the Latin-speaking merchants accomplished this so much as the human fellowship engendered by sharing the same daily toil. This active community was also necessary for the meeting of later imported elements : otherwise the searchers for gold, the licensed legionaries, the adventurers, the men of the Caledonian Mountains, the mystical Syrian, the worshipper of the ox Apis could never have been thrown into the same melting-pot to form the resulting exclusively homogeneous community.