Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/65

CHAP. II.
-----walls of the city, that immortal name would have been deprived of some of its noblest ornaments. Virgil was a native of Mantua ; Horace was inclined to doubt whether he should call himself an Apulian or a Lucanian ; it was in Padua that an historian was found worthy to record the majestic series of Roman victories. The patriot family of the Catos emerged from Tusculum; and the little town of Arpinum claimed the double honour of producing Marius and Cicero; the former of whom deserved, after Romulus and Camillus, to be styled the third founder of Rome ; and the latter, after saving his country from the designs of Catiline, enabled her to contend with Athens for the palm of eloquence^[1].

The provinces.The provinces of the empire, (as they have been described in the preceding chapter,) were destitute of any public force, or constitutional freedom. In Etruria, in Greece^[2], and in Gaul^[3], it was the first care of the senate to dissolve those dangerous confederacies which taught mankind, that, as the Roman arms prevailed by division, they might be resisted by union. Those princes, whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had performed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome, were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude. The public authority was everywhere exercised by the ministers of the senate and of the emperors, and that authority was absolute, and without control. But the same salutary maxims of government, which had secured the peace and obedience of Italy, were extended to the most distant con-

1. The first part of the Verona Illustrata of the marquis MafFei, gives the clearest and most comprehensive view of the state of Italy under the Caesars.
2. See Pausanias, 1. vii. The Romans condescended to restore the names of those assemblies when they could no longer be dangerous.
3. They are frequently mentioned by Caesar. The abb6 Dubos attempts, with very little success, to prove that the assemblies of Gaul were continued under the emperors. Histoire de rEtablissement de la Monarchic Fran9oise, 1. i. c. 4.