Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/340

 282 Outlines of European History needs of a great empi^-e. They laid the foundations of a vast imperial code of law, a great work of Roman genius. Its pur- pose was that as there was one government, so there should be one law for all the civilized world. The same principles of reason, justice, and humanity were believed to hold whether the Roman citizen lived upon the Euphrates or the Thames. The law of the Roman Empire is its chief legacy to posterity. Its provisions are still in force in many of the states of Europe to-day, and it is one of the subjects of study in our American universities. Wives and children were protected from the cruelty of the head of the house, who, in earlier centuries, had been privileged to treat the members of his family as slaves. The law held that it was better that a guilty person should escape than that an innocent person should be condemned. It conceived^ mankind_jiot ^ as a gro up of nations a nd j-rihesj pprh wii-h its own. la ws, but as one people in cludedja-jme great empire and sub- ject to a single system of lawjbased upon fairness and reason. Section 46. Civilization after Augustus and ITS Decline The Medi- terranean world ; the same culture throughout the Roman Empire Such organization created a vast Mediterranean world, in the midst of which men of all nations lost their nationality. In spite of the efforts of Augustus, even the men of Italy soon felt themselves to be citizens of the great Roman world — a world everywhere more and more inwrought with Greek civilization. The government encouraged education by supporting at least three teachers in every town of any considerable importance (Fig. 115). They taught rhetoric and oratory and explained the works of the great Greek and Latin writers. A reading public for the first time fringed the entire Mediterranean, and an educated man was sure to find, even in the outlying parts of the great Empire, other educated men with much the same interests and ideas as his own. Travel was so common that wide acquaintance with the world was not unusual.