; and a powerful army of occupation was kept
on foot, ready to move instantly on any spot where a popular outbreak
might be attempted.

Vast, however, and admirably organized as the fabric of Roman power
appeared on the frontiers and in the provinces, there was rottenness at
the core. In Rome's unceasing hostilities with foreign foes, and still
more in her long series of desolating civil wars, the free middle
classes of Italy had almost wholly disappeared. Above the position which
they had occupied, an oligarchy of wealth had reared itself; beneath
that position a degraded mass of poverty and misery was fermenting.
Slaves; the chance sweepings of every conquered country; shoals of
Africans, Sardinians, Asiatics, Illyrians, and others made up the bulk
of the population of the Italian peninsula.

The foulest profligacy of manners was general in all ranks. In universal
weariness of revolution and civil war, and in consciousness of being too
debased for self-government, the nation had submitted itself to the
absolute authority of Augustus. Adulation was now the chief function of
the senate; and the gifts of genius and accomplishments of art were
devoted to the elaboration of eloquently false panegyrics upon the
prince and his favorite courtiers. With bitter indignation must the
German chieftain have beheld all this and contrasted with it the rough
worth of his own countrymen: their bravery, their fidelity to their
word, their manly independence of spirit, their love of their national
free institutions, and their loathing of every pollution and meanness.
Above all, he must have thought of the domestic virtues that hallowed a
German home; of the respect there shown to the female character, and of
the pure affection by which that respect was repaid. His soul must have
burned within him at the contemplation of such a race yielding to these
debased Italians.

Still, to persuade the Germans to combine, in spite of the frequent
feuds among themselves, in one sudden outbreak against Rome; to keep the
scheme concealed from the Romans until the hour for action arrived; and
then, without possessing a single walled town, without military stores,
without training, to teach his insurgent countrymen to defeat veteran
armies and storm fortifications, seemed so perilous an enterprise that
probably Arminius would have receded from it had not a stronger feeling
even than patriotism urged him on. Among the Germans of high rank who
had most