Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/487

 CHAP. 11. THE ROMAN CONQUEST. 481 Tlnis were these religious notions transformed, littlo by little ; the municipal religion, the basis of the city, disappeared, and the municipal governments, such as the ancients had conceived them, were forced to fall M'itli it. Insensibly men departed from those rigorous rules, and fiom those narrow forms of government. Higher ideas prompted men to form more extensive societies. They were attracted towards unity; this was the general aspiration for two centuries preceding our era. The fruits which these revolutions of knowl- edge bore were, it is true, very slow to mature; but we shall see, in studying the Roman conquest, that events moved in the same direction with these ideas, that, like them, they tended to the ruin of the old municipal system, and that they prepared new modes of govern- ment. CPIAPTER II. The Roman Conquest. At first it apj^ears very surprising that among the thousand cities of Greece and Italy one was found ca- pable of subduing all the others. Yet this great event is due to the ordinary causes that determine the course of human affairs. The wisdom of Rome consisted, like all wisdom, in profiting by the favorable circumstance that fell in its way. We can distinguish two periods in the work of the Roman conquest. One corresponds to the time when the old municipal spirit was still strong; it was then that Rome had the greatest number of obstacles to surmount. The second belonged to the time when the municipal 31