Page:The municipalites of the Roman empire (IA municipalitesofr00reidrich).pdf/20

2 won, and the process by which the Roman type of civilisation was spread over the western half of Europe, while an immense extension was given in the East to that form of culture which the Greeks had planted there of old. In particular, a study of the town in the ancient world casts some welcome light on two great historical problems which are probably destined never to be completely solved, the problem of Rome's elevation, and the problem of her decay.

For more reasons than one, it has been difficult until recent times to view aright the ancient municipality in its connexion with the Roman ascendency. One of these reasons is almost paradoxical. It is that the ancient historians of Rome treated her story from a municipal rather than an imperial point of view. The ruling city interests a Livy and a Tacitus almost to the exclusion of all else. And until late years, modern historians have generally followed their lead. They have not travelled far beyond the chronicles of the sword and the picturesque lives of the heroic exponents of virtue and villany, and the working of the great central organs of government. In ancient and modern histories alike, non-Roman communities rarely appear excepting when they are in conflict with, or in discontented subjection to, their suzerain. The whole of Latin literature affords but few and dim and transient glimpses of the inner life of even the greatest cities outside Rome, whether in Italy or in the provinces; though in old days as in ours the great main river of history depended for its volume on countless affluents drawn from the minor town and the field. Ancient Roman literary conventions left little room for the delineation of life in a provincial city. Only here and there does a writer who is untroubled by the metropolitan sense of dignity afford us peeps which are precious amid the poverty of our material. Thus Petronius depicts for us with vivid realism the society of a seaport, possibly Puteoli, which in his time, that of Nero, was rapidly becoming the principal maritime town of Italy. And Lucian sketches with satiric genius the humours of the Graeco-Asiatic city of the second century.