Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/63

 THE ROMAN EMPIRE 27 rich men gave freely of their wealth and showed much civic pride in adorning their native city with handsome buildings, or undertaking the expense of public works like aqueducts, or endowing charitable foundations, or pro- viding games and amusements. They gave to the city where modern philanthropists give to universities and for- eign missions. While the city-state organization thus lasted into the Roman Empire and continued for some time to display a healthy life, the superimposition of the Roman Superimpo- imperial system and law upon the Mediterranean fmperial world and western Europe was a change of the government greatest consequence. It is true that the Roman emperors borrowed many of their methods of government from the monarchs whom they conquered and whose lands they incorporated into the Empire, and that the Roman law, before it attained to its final perfection, added to the orig- inal "civil law" (i.e., law of the citizens, or of the city) of the Romans themselves the best of the laws of the Mediter- ranean world. But the Romans knew how to combine into a smoothly working system these odds and ends which they had drawn from diverse sources. So they gave to the peo- ples over whom they ruled the advantage of one united government and of a single, harmonious body of law. This meant, on the whole, peace and justice for millions of human beings for hundreds of years. To reach this goal, however, a terrible price had to be paid. Rome had won the supremacy in Italy and had then annexed most of the Mediterranean Basin under the lead of her senate of three hundred members, from whose fam- ilies most of the annual magistrates and generals were elected and into whose ranks these officials usually went at the expiration of their term of office. The Roman people were normally docile and deferential, trained in strict obedi- ence to their fathers and superiors, and accustomed to the military discipline of the army in which they all served. When Rome no longer had to struggle for existence and the world lay open before her to be conquered and despoiled,