Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/342

318 provinces. Neither Romans nor Greeks could think of civilised life apart from the city as a centre of business, government, and pleasure; and the Roman oligarchy, true to its practical instincts, saw also in the city a most convenient machinery for raising the taxes they imposed.

It need hardly be said that it was the city, rather than the City-State, which they thus turned to account. Here is exactly the point at which we can best see how the older form of State slowly passed into an imperial one, forming, as it were, out of its old and well-worn material a fresh cellular tissue for a new political system. It will be by this time sufficiently obvious that the real life of the was now everywhere already extinct, or rapidly passing away. The bodily appearance was there, but the spirit had departed. Yet the material which remained could be turned to new purposes; the cities could become, by an easy transition, the municipal towns of an empire. Some few indeed were still nominally the allies of Rome, had their freedom guaranteed by treaty, and paid no taxes to the Roman Government; but all the rest were now to be treated as convenient centres of administration, and to pass under the control, more or less direct in various degrees, of the magistrates of the mistress of the world. And this mistress, though