side the tombs of the old kings, and the Roman women
mourned him for a year.

Chapter XI

The Commonwealth and Its Economy

External and Internal Bankruptcy of the Roman State

We have traversed a period of ninety years--forty years of profound
peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most
inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps
were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction,(1) and the
Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic
Ocean(2) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the
Danube;(3) but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were
barren. The circle of the "extraneous peoples under the will,
sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,"(4) was not
materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a
better age and to bring the communities, annexed to Rome in laxer
forms of dependence, more and more into full subjection. Behind
the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very
sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization
was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state,
and embodied there in forms of more general validity, the nations
excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond
the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle-
fields of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, of Chaeronea and Orchomenus,
were heard the first peals of that thunderstorm, which the Germanic
tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo-
Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached
almost to our own times. But in internal development also this
epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses
irretrievably. The Roman commonwealth was planned as an urban
community, which through its free burgess-body gave to itself
rulers and laws; which was governed by these well-advised rulers
within these legal limits with kingly freedom; and around which
the Italian confederacy, as an aggregate of free urban communities
essentially homogeneous and cognate with the Roman, and the body
of extra-Italian allies, as an aggregate of Greek free cities and
barbaric peoples and principalities--both more superintended, than
domineered over, by the community of Rome--formed a double circle.
It was the final result of the revolution--and both parties, the
nominally conservative as well as the democrati