Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/69

 THE ROMAN EMPIRE 33 or more stories made up of rows of arches and ornamented with pilasters and columns. Here from eight thousand to fifty thousand persons could look on at the combats of wild beasts and gladiators. Such huge structures can still be seen to-day, not only in cities of Italy, France, and Ger- many, but amid desert surroundings in North Africa. Temples in the rectangular Greek style surrounded by col- onnades, or round in ground plan and covered by a dome; theaters with a stage wall and facade three hundred and thirty-eight feet long and one hundred and twenty-one feet high, one of which still stands to-day in the little town of Orange in southern France; forums full of the bases of pillars and statues long since fallen; town gates, partly fortified and partly ornamental ; and towers, either for for- tifications or for signaling purposes, are other specimens of the more frequent and imposing of Roman public re- mains, not to mention the ruins of once sumptuous private villas. For the economic life of the Roman Empire our records and remains are much scantier than for its military history, its laws, or its architecture. Men of the govern- Economic ing and intellectual classes, the nobles and the conditions writers of Rome, considered money-making a vulgar pur- suit ; and while all of them were ready enough to follow it if they had to or if large profits were in sight, they did not like to write and talk about it. It is also true that their economic life was simple and undeveloped compared with that of our age; that commerce, industry, advertising, and credit were not organized on so vast a scale, and consequently did not exert so great an influence on all other sides of man's exist- ence; while other matters, such as the belief in demons, in supernatural forces, in souls of inanimate objects, in magic powers of animals and plants, in divination and witchcraft, which to-day have much less effect upon human conduct, at that time controlled men potently. But economic forces also affected their fate more than they realized, and hence deserve our attention. The coming into existence of the Roman Empire made