l desolation of the
country, the continued existence and splendour of the great towns is not
so easily explained; but the same thing is now to be witnessed in
Barbary and Turkey, and in the whole Levant. Wherever despotism
oppresses insulated man, he seeks refuge from its outrages in crowds.
The great Roman towns, in the first three centuries of the empire, were
in great part peopled by artisans, and freedmen, and slaves; but they
contained also a number far greater than in our days of men who,
limiting their wants to the mere support of existence, spent their
lives in indolence. All that population was alike unarmed, unpatriotic,
incapable of defence against a foreign enemy; but as it was collected
together, and at hand, it always inspired fear to domestic authority.
Accordingly, to keep it quiet, there was always a regular gratuitous
distribution of corn in the larger towns, and numerous spectacles in the
theatres, the amphitheatres, and the circus, maintained at the public
expense. The carelessness of the future, the love of pleasure and
indolence, which have always characterised the inhabitants of great
towns, characterised the Roman provincials even to the latest days of
the empire, and in the midst of their greatest calamities. Treves, the
capital of the northern prefecture of Gaul, was not the only city of the
empire which was surprised and pillaged by the barbarians, at the moment
when its citizens, their heads crowned with garlands, were applauding
with enthusiasm the victors in the games of the circus."[24]

The frequent custom of recruiting the legions by means of slaves, in the
later period of the empire, which was wholly unknown in the days of the
Republic, reveals, in the clearest manner, the weakness to which, in
respect of military resources, it had arrived, long before the external
symptoms of decay were visible in its fortunes. Even in the time of
Marcus Aurelius, the legions which were to combat the Quadi and
Marcomanni, on the Danube, were recruited from the servile class.
Justinian went so far as to declare, by a public edict, every slave free
who had served in the army.[25] "At last the army came to be composed
entirely," says Finlay, "of the rudest and most ignorant peasants, of
_enfranchised slaves, and naturalised barbarians_. This increased the
repugnance, already sufficiently great, felt by the better class of
citizens to enter the military life. The mercenaries formed the most
valued and bril