Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/354

330 after the citizenship had been extended to all the Italians, so it now sets out on its course of extension over the whole civilised world. The process was complete in the year 212 A.D. when Caracalla gave the Roman franchise to all free inhabitants of the Empire, so that one uniform legal system was henceforward in use from Syria to Britain. And meanwhile that system was being perfected by the most illustrious series of lawyers that the world has ever seen; men from all parts of the Empire, some of whom brought the acute intelligence of the Greek to the aid of the practical good sense of the Roman legal mind.

Without going further, it will be possible to gain from such studies as these some idea of the nature of the new imperial State which arose out of the scattered ruins of the older one. There are indeed other lines of research in the history of the Empire, in themselves of the deepest interest, which bear less directly on the political aspect of the age, yet reveal to us more of that life and thought of the people which is to the State itself as the circulating blood to the living animal. There is the study of the economical conditions of life in the various parts of the Empire ; of the way in which land was held and cultivated, of the methods of commerce and credit, of the distribution of wealth among the various classes of society, the incidence of taxation, and the prices of the necessaries of life. Again there is the whole range of the