Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/337

XI We saw that from the beginning she was not a wholly isolated community, but the member of a Latin league, of which she made herself successively the leader and the mistress. We have noticed the strength of her early realisation of the meaning of magisterial power and the ready faculty she displayed in the conception, and later in the extended application, of legal ideas. We have seen in passing how the habits and temperament of her people fitted them for war and conquest, and how as early as the age of kingship her military resources were fully organised. And we traced in outline the steady development of her institutions in the direction of popular sovereignty, and the course of the counter-current that brought her under the rule of an oligarchy of wonderful aptitude for the detailed business of government. It remains to explain how Rome, herself a City-State, ceased at last to be one; how in the vast reach of her endeavour to deprive all others of their autonomous life, she too lost the genius of the. And we must take also a glance, however rapid and superficial, at the system of universal empire which Romans, rather than Rome, succeeded at last in creating out of the old materials.

Almost before her history can be truly said to begin, the Roman territory had already exceeded the limits which Aristotle regarded as sufficient for the perfect City-State. When Alexander died at Babylon in 323 B.C. she had reduced her own kindred, the Latins, together with other peoples in her vicinity, and was engaged in a deadly struggle