one hand a blind dread of Carthage, on the other a still blinder
enthusiasm for Hellenic liberty; so little did the Romans exhibit
during this period the lust of conquest, that they, on the contrary,
displayed a very judicious dread of it. The policy of Rome throughout
was not projected by a single mightly intellect and bequeathed
traditionally from generation to generation; it was the policy of a
very able but somewhat narrow-minded deliberative assembly, which had
far too little power of grand combination, and far too much of a right
instinct for the preservation of its own commonwealth, to devise
projects in the spirit of a Caesar or a Napoleon. The universal
empire of Rome had its ultimate ground in the political development of
antiquity in general. The ancient world knew nothing of a balance of
power among nations; and therefore every nation which had attained
internal unity strove either directly to subdue its neighbors, as did
the Hellenic states, or at any rate to render them innocuous, as Rome
did,--an effort, it is true, which also issued ultimately in
subjugation. Egypt was perhaps the only great power in antiquity
which seriously pursued a system of equilibrium; on the opposite
system Seleucus and Antigonous, Hannibal and Scipio, came into
collision. And, if it seems to us sad that all the other richly-
endowed and highly-developed nations of antiquity had to perish in
order to enrich a single one out of the whole, and that all in the
long run appear to have only arisen to contribute to the greatness
of Italy and to the decay involved in that greatness, yet historical
justice must acknowledge that this result was not produced by the
military superiority of the legion over the phalanx, but was the
necessary development of the international relations of antiquity
generally-so that the issue was not decided by provoking chance,
but was the fulfillment of an unchangeable, and therefore
endurable, destiny.

Notes for Chapter X

1. --Ide gar prasde panth alion ammi dedukein-- (i. 102).

2. II. VII. Last Struggles in Italy

3. The legal dissolution of the Boeotian confederacy, however, took
place not at this time, but only after the destruction of Corinth
(Pausan. vii. 14, 4; xvi. 6).

4. The recently discovered decree of the senate of 9th Oct. 584, which
regulates the legal relations of Thisbae (Ephemeris epigraphica, 1872,
p. 278, fig.; Mitth. d. arch. Inst., in Athen, iv. 235, fig.), gives
a