at work in it were in the main Greek, and in the system of its construction his two leading ideas of city-life and commercial communications were elaborately carried out. It resembled his transient dominion also in the fact that its centre of gravity was no longer a City-State, but a personality, — the personality of the Cæsar wherever he might be in the Empire. And it had one advantage which Alexander's empire could never have realised. It drew its chief material strength, not from worn-out Greece, or from an effeminate East, but from the youth and vigour of those western peoples, the fruits of whose civilisation have been in modern times the most complete justification of Roman conquest.
It was not indeed a perfect system; there were weak points inherent in it, some of which, already indicated in this chapter, were handed on to it from that wholly inadequate system with which the Roman Republic had sought to govern the world. Yet it was a real State, united together by artificial ties of great power of endurance; and what has proved for us even more valuable, it remained for more than three centuries a loyal trustee of the treasure which the City-State had bequeathed to it. The literature, the art, the philosophy, the law, and in great part even the religion of the πόλις, were valued and preserved under the Roman Empire, which thus became an indestructible bridge uniting ancient and modern civilisation.
It is beyond the scope of this little book to attempt to explain, even in outline, the details of this great structure, or to point out how it
