Peter and the banner to Constantine V. (Muratori, Annali
d'Italia, tom. vi. p. 337.)]

The liberty of Rome, which had been oppressed by the arms and arts of
Augustus, was rescued, after seven hundred and fifty years of servitude,
from the persecution of Leo the Isaurian. By the Caesars, the triumphs
of the consuls had been annihilated: in the decline and fall of the
empire, the god Terminus, the sacred boundary, had insensibly receded
from the ocean, the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates; and Rome was
reduced to her ancient territory from Viterbo to Terracina, and from
Narni to the mouth of the Tyber. [42] When the kings were banished,
the republic reposed on the firm basis which had been founded by their
wisdom and virtue. Their perpetual jurisdiction was divided between
two annual magistrates: the senate continued to exercise the powers
of administration and counsel; and the legislative authority was
distributed in the assemblies of the people, by a well-proportioned
scale of property and service. Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the
primitive Romans had improved the science of government and war: the
will of the community was absolute: the rights of individuals were
sacred: one hundred and thirty thousand citizens were armed for defence
or conquest; and a band of robbers and outlaws was moulded into a nation
deserving of freedom and ambitious of glory. [43] When the sovereignty
of the Greek emperors was extinguished, the ruins of Rome presented
the sad image of depopulation and decay: her slavery was a habit, her
liberty an accident; the effect of superstition, and the object of her
own amazement and terror. The last vestige of the substance, or even the
forms, of the constitution, was obliterated from the practice and memory
of the Romans; and they were devoid of knowledge, or virtue, again to
build the fabric of a commonwealth. Their scanty remnant, the offspring
of slaves and strangers, was despicable in the eyes of the victorious
Barbarians. As often as the Franks or Lombards expressed their most
bitter contempt of a foe, they called him a Roman; "and in this name,"
says the bishop Liutprand, "we include whatever is base, whatever is
cowardly, whatever is perfidious, the extremes of avarice and luxury,
and every vice that can prostitute the dignity of human nature." [44]
[441] By the necessity of their situation, the inhabitants of Rome
were cast into the rough model of a republican government: they were
compe