barbarian,
the idea was reflected in the Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers,
and that a man's true country is not his own particular city, but the
ecumene. [Footnote: Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the
policy of Alexander and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri
Magni virtute, i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the
most popular of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it had
been implied in the imperial aspiration and polity of Alexander, so it
was implied, still more clearly, in the imperial theory of Rome. The
idea of the Roman Empire, its theoretical justification, might
be described as the realisation of the unity of the world by the
establishment of a common order, the unification of mankind in a single
world-embracing political organism. The term "world," orbis (terrarum),
which imperial poets use freely in speaking of the Empire, is more than
a mere poetical or patriotic exaggeration; it expresses the idea, the
unrealised ideal of the Empire. There is a stone from Halicarnassus in
the British Museum, on which the idea is formally expressed from another
point of view. The inscription is of the time of Augustus, and the
Emperor is designated as "saviour of the community of mankind." There we
have the notion of the human race apprehended as a whole, the ecumenical
idea, imposing upon Rome the task described by Virgil as regere
imperio populos, and more humanely by Pliny as the creation of a single
fatherland for all the peoples of the world. [Footnote: Pliny, Nat.
Hist. iii. 6. 39.]

This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the
form of a universal State and a universal Church, passed afterwards
into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors to
a common pool of civilisation--a principle which, when the idea of
Progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one of the
elements in its growth.

3.

One remarkable man, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, [Footnote: c. A.D.
1210-92. Of Bacon's Opus Majus the best and only complete edition is
that of J. H. Bridges, 2 vols. 1897 (with an excellent Introduction).
The associated works, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium, have been edited by
Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Inedita, 1859.]who stands on an
isolated pinnacle of his own in the Middle Ages, deserves particular
consideration. It has been claimed for him that he announced the idea of
Progress; he has even bee