mpire at
strong military posts. We did not suggest to Caracalla to admit all
sorts of people to Roman citizenship, nor dislocate the population by a
wild pursuit of civil offices or the discharge of military duties. We
did not crowd Italy with slaves, nor make those miserable men more
degraded than the beasts of the field, compelling them to labours which
are the business of the brutes. We have taught and practised a very
different doctrine. We did not nightly put into irons the population of
provinces and cities reduced to bondage. We are not responsible for the
inevitable insurrections, poisonings, assassinations, vengeance. We did
not bring on that state of things in which a man having a patrimony
found it his best interest to abandon it without compensation and flee.
We did not demoralize the populace by providing them food, games, races,
theatres; we have been persecuted because we would not set our feet in a
theatre. We did not ruin the senate and aristocracy by sacrificing
everything, even ourselves, for the Julian family. We did not neutralize
the legions by setting them to fight against one another. We were not
the first to degrade Rome. Diocletian, who persecuted us, gave the
example by establishing his residence at Nicomedia. As to the sentiment
of patriotism of which you vaunt, was it not destroyed by your own
emperors? When they had made Roman citizens of Gauls and Egyptians,
Africans and Huns, Spaniards and Syrians, how could they expect that
such a motley crew would remain true to the interests of an Italian
town, and that town their hated oppressor. Patriotism depends on
concentration; it cannot bear diffusion. Something more than such a
worldly tie was wanted to bind the diverse nations together; they have
found it in Christianity. A common language imparts community of thought
and feeling; but what was to be expected when Greek is the language of
one half of the ruling classes, and Latin of the other? we say nothing
of the thousand unintelligible forms of speech in use throughout the
Roman world. The fall of the senate preceded, by a few years, the origin
of Christianity; you surely will not say that we were the inciters of
the usurpations of the Caesars? What have we had to do with the army,
that engine of violence, which, in ninety-two years gave you thirty-two
emperors and twenty-seven pretenders to the throne? We did not suggest
to the Praetorian Guards to put up the empire to auction.

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