Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/513

 CHAP. II. THE ROMAN CONQUEST. 507 for the benefit of the subject a multitude of turns and artifices of language. Indeed, the Roman genius, if its municipal traditions prevented it from making laws for the conquered, could not suffer society to fall into dis- solution. In principle the provincials were placed out- side the laws, while in fact they lived as if they had them; but with the exception of this, and the tolerance of the conquerors, all the institutions of the vanquished and all their laws were allowed to disappear. The Roman empire presented, for several generations, this singular spectacle : A single city remained intact, pre- serving its institutions and its laws, while all the rest — that is to say, more than a hundred millions of souls — either had no kind of laws, or had such as were not recognized by the ruling city. The world then was not precisely in a state of chaos, but force, arbitrary rule, and convention, in default of laws and principles, alone sustained society. Such was the effect of the Roman conquest on the nations that successively became its prey. Of the city everything went to ruin ; religion first, then the gov- ernment, and finally private law. All the municipal institutions, already for a long time shaken, were finally overthrown and destroyed ; but no regular society, no system of government, replaced at once what had dis- appeared. There was a period of stagnation between the moment when men saw the municipal governments dissolve and that in which another form of society ap- peared. The nation did not at once succeed the city, for the Roman empire in no wise resembled a nation. It was a confused multitude, where there was real order only in one central point, and where all the rest en- joyed only a factitious and transitory order, and ob- tained this only at the price of obedience. The con-