had at all times
depended on other distinctions,(100) continued certainly
even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction
and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts
under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls
and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according
to martial law had for long been practically coincident,
and the different titles of the magistrates signified little
after the one Imperator was over all.

In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances--
which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution,
to Caesar--a definite system is apparent. Italy was converted
from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother
of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province
completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise
and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as
in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized
district might expect to be placed on an equal footing
by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself.
On the threshold of full national and political equalization
with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily
and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized.
In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces
of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo
had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities--Emporiae, Gades,
Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria--
now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres
of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental
pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire.
The rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores
of the Mediterranean was at an end; in its stead came the new
Mediterranean state, and its first act was to atone for the two
greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated
on civilization. While the destruction of the two greatest marts
of commerce in the Roman dominions marked the turning-point at which
the protectorate of the Roman community degenerated into political
tyrannizing over, and financial exaction from, the subject lands,
the prompt and brilliant restoration of Carthage and Corinth marked
the foundation of the new great commonwealth which was to train up
all the regions on the Mediterranean to national and political
equality,