[61] Malthus cites Tacitus, De Mor. Germanorum, c. 19; Minucius Felix, c. 30; Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxix, 4.
[62] Cp. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, Treatise ii, pt. iii, § 2 (i, 114). Guizot seems to find the process surprising: "Singulier phénomène! C'est au moment où l'Empire se brise et disparaît, que l'Eglise chrétienne se rallie et se forme définitivement. L'unité politique périt, l'unité religieuse s'élève" (Histoire de la civilisation en France, éd. 1874, i, 339). He does not recognise the case as one of cause and effect. Of course, the fall of the State is not necessary to set up new combinations. It suffices that men should be without political influence or national consciousness—e.g., the secret societies of China in recent times.
[63] An inquiry, or series of inquiries, into the physiological side of social and political development is obviously necessary, and must be made before sociology can on this side attain much scientific precision. I know, however, no general treatise on the subject except an old essay on Changes Produced in the Nervous System by Civilisation, by Dr. Robert Verity (2nd ed., Edinburgh, 1839). This is suggestive, but, of course, tentative. Cp. Ferrero, Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. trans, i, 298–99.
[64] Livy, xxxix, 8–18. See below, pt. iii. ch. iii.
[65] Cp. Salverte, De la Civilisation, p. 52.
[66] The subject is discussed in the author's essay on Mithraism in Pagan Christs.
[67] M. Hochart (Études d'histoire religieuse, 1890, ch. ix) argues that Constantine was never really converted to Christianity; and this is perhaps the best explanation of his long postponement of his baptism.
[68] Compare episodes in the history of the Salvation Army in England (1890), where that body was seen prepared to practise continuous fighting. It had no thought of "Christian" conciliation.
[69] Various causes, the chief being probably Greek piracy, had caused in pre-Roman Etruria a decay of the original seaports. See Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, i, 273.
[70] On this cp. Ihne, Early Rome, p. 6; and Mommsen, ch. iv.
[71] This may have been set up in imitation of the Carthaginian institution of Suffetae, which would be well known to the Etruscans of the monarchic period, who had much traffic with Carthage. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 701. But it may also be explained by the simple fact that the original army was divided into two legions (id. ii, 812).
[72] On this see Montesquieu, Grandeur des Romains, c. 1. No one has elucidated so much of Roman history in so little space as Montesquieu has done in this little book, which Buckle rightly set above the Esprit des Lois. (Cp. the eulogy of Taine, in his Tite-Live.) Its real insight may perhaps best be appreciated by comparing it with the modern work of M. Charles Gouraud, Histoire des Causes de la Grandeur de l'Angleterre (1856), in which it will be hard to find any specification of real causes.
[73] The specification of this detail is one of the items of real explanation in Mr. Warde Fowler's scholarly and sympathetic account of the development of the Roman City-State (work cited, c. viii). He credits the Romans with an "innate genius" for combination and constitutionalism as compared with the Greeks, not noticing the fact that Roman unity was in the main a matter of conquest of non-Romans by Romans; that the conquest was furthered by the Roman institutions; that the institutions were first, so to speak, fortuitously shaped in favour of systematic war and conquest by the revolt against kingship; that war and conquest, again, were taken to almost inevitably as the main road to wealth; and that the accommodations of later times were forced on the upper classes by the career of warfare, to which domestic peace was indispensable. (Cp. Hegel as to the element of coercion and patrician policy in the Roman social system. Philos. der Gesch., Theil iii, Abschnitt i, Kap. i.) See below, § 6, as to the very different conditions of the Greek City-States.
[74] E.S. Shuckburgh, History of Rome, 1894, p. 16.
[75] See below, ch. iii, end; ch. iv, § 2 (c).
[76] Cp. Livy, viii, 3–5.
[77] Cp. Ferrero, Greatness and Decline of Rome, Eng. trans, i, 240.
[78] Cp. Aristotle, Politics, ii, 11; vi, 5.
[79] Already in Montesquieu's Grandeur des Romains it is pointed out that for Hannibal's soldiers, loaded with plunder, anywhere was Capua. Montesquieu rightly observes that the stock phrase on that head is one of the things everybody says because it has once been said. And it is repeated still.
[80] Livy, xxv, 40.
[81] Cicero, In Verrem, iii, 6; iv, 65; v, 21, 22.
[82] Sallust, Bell. Jugurth., c. 36.
[83] Cicero, In Verrem, iii, 20, 38, 81; v, 34; In Pisonem,34–36; Pro Flacco, 12; Pro Fonteio, 5; Pro lege Manilia, 13. See the record in Dureau de la Malle, Econ. polit. des Romains, 1840, vol. ii, liv. iv, ch. 8. Cp. Ferrero, i, 113–14, 183.
[84] Cp. Long, Decline of the Roman Republic, ii. 78–81, and Merivale, General History of Rome, pp. 299–300, as to the plunder and annexation of Cyprus. "Whether the annals of British India contain so foul a crime," writes Long, "I leave those to determine who know more of Indian affairs than I do."
[85] An admission that national "character" is not a connatural or fixed bias, but a simple function of variables.
[86] Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Literature, ed. Schwabe, Eng. trans. i, 122 (§ 91).
[87] See the process traced in W.A. Schmidt's Geschichte der Denk und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums, 1847.