e attempt of the imperial government to incorporate within
the empire vast territories in a comparatively low state of civilization,
and upon the fiscal system whereby it was designed that the expenses
imposed by this policy should be met. In the West the administration
strove to develop a strong class of prosperous peasants as state tenants;
in the East its object was to maintain this class which was already in
existence. But the financial needs of the state caused such a heavy burden
to be laid upon the agricultural population that the ideal of a prosperous
free peasantry proved impossible of realization. The ravages of war and
plague in the second and third centuries also fell heavily upon the
peasants. As a last resource to check the decline of agriculture the
government placed the small farmer at the disposal of the rich landlord
and made him a serf. The results were oppression, poverty, lack of
initiative, a decline in the birth rate, flight and at the end an increase
of uncultivated, unproductive land. The transplanting of conquered
barbarians within the empire swelled the class of the _coloni_ but proved
only a partial palliative to the general shrinkage of the agricultural
elements. But the converse to the development of the colonate was the
creation of a powerful class of landholders who were the owners of large
domains exempt from the control of municipal authorities.

CHAPTER XX

RELIGION AND SOCIETY

I. SOCIETY UNDER THE PRINCIPATE

*Imperial Rome.* Roman society under the Principate exhibits in general
the same characteristics as during the last century of the Republic. Rome
itself was a thoroughly cosmopolitan city, where the concentration of
wealth and political power attracted the ambitious, the adventurous and
the curious from all lands. Whole quarters were occupied by various
nationalities, most prominent among whom were the Greeks, the Syrians, and
the Jews, speaking their own languages and plying their native trades.
With the freeborn foreign population mingled the thousands of slaves and
freedmen of every race and tongue. During the first and second century the
population of Rome must have been in the neighborhood of one million, but
in the third century it began to decline as a result of pestilence and the
general bankruptcy of the empire. Inevitably in such a city there were the
sharpest contrasts betw