The Historians' History of the World 06

But, indeed, if it is permissible to enlarge further upon these anthropogeographical conjectures, the sea was not here able to exercise its animating, but also agitating and therefore strength-consuming effects to the same extent as in Hellas, although it may nevertheless have exercised sufficient influence. The fact that on the soil of Greece there flourished an extraordinary wealth of intellectual growth and an over-refined political civilisation, is just as explicable as that Italy produced such a tardy, intellectual, and at the same time such a powerful and yet carefully planned political, organisation. Italy was, to speak in entirely hypothetical language, narrow and washed by the sea,—but it was also sunny, and yet not too much split up into small sections to allow of its bringing forth political institutions which were not only sound but also really permeated with intellectual thought, and to permit it to produce its art of government and its law. In other words, this peninsula everywhere offered so wide a surface that it was able to produce a state more extensive, stronger, more full of life, and, above all, less threatened by natural separation of interests. But it was not so continental as to permit of the formation of a despotically governed state, stretching over a wide plain as in the vast countries of the East. The sea had been able to exercise its invigorating effects in so far that Italy attained a form of government, strong indeed, but also free. And if no such finely organised intellectual culture was assigned to it, at least its political institutions were intellectually elaborated to a singular degree. For in all essentials they were as much the peculiar product of her otherwise less remarkable intellectual culture as of her political civilisation.

On the other hand Italy shares equally with Greece a life-giving but also life-shortening effect of her geographical position: a mild climate. Perhaps its effects in accelerating her bloom but also her decay have been here somewhat arrested by other territorial conditions, yet perhaps they too finally succeeded in making their influence felt. Else why have Germans and Slavs, that is to say the only civilised peoples of the north alone on the globe maintained themselves so much longer in their strength, and why have they, and perhaps they only, still to-day a prospect of millenniums of an equally robust life of political and intellectual activity?h

FOOTNOTES

[69] [“The charges made by Gibbon … rest on no solid basis of evidence; … except for a vague and feebly supported charge of ‘luxury,’ the moral character of Avitus is without a stain.” Hodgkin.g]

[70] [The manner in which Majorian met his death is in dispute. While Gibbonc gives credence to the report that he died from dysentery, Samuel Dill,i who speaks of Majorian as “that great soldier and far-sighted statesman,” says: “Majorian, the ‘young Marcellus’ of the last years of the Western Empire, with all his old Roman spirit and statesmanlike insight, failed in his mission and was treacherously slain by Ricimer.” J. B. Bury,j

expressing the same view, says “that Majorian returned from Spain to Gaul, and after a sojourn in Arles passed into Italy, without an army. At Tortona the officers of Count Ricimer, who had judged him unworthy of empire, seized him, stripped him of the imperial purple, and beheaded him (7th August, 461).” Niebuhr,k on the other hand, tells us that “when Majorian returned, a conspiracy was formed against him at the instigation of Ricimer; he was compelled to abdicate, and died a few days afterwards.”]

[71] [There is great uncertainty as to these prehistoric migrations.]

Roman Bracelet

(In the British Museum)

APPENDIX A. HISTORY IN OUTLINE OF SOME LESSER NATIONS OF ASIA MINOR

Our studies of Roman history have brought us into incidental contact with several nations of Asia Minor that from time to time have held friendly or hostile relations with the Romans. The two most important of these, the Parthians and the Sassanids, who successfully disputed the mastery of the Orient with the Romans, will be given fuller individual treatment in a later volume. But the lesser kingdoms of Pergamus, Bithynia, Pontus, and Cappadocia, each of which had a somewhat picturesque and interesting history when taken by itself, were hardly of sufficient importance from a world-historical standpoint to be given individual treatment in our text. It will be of interest, however, and will aid the reader in gaining a clear idea of the opponents of Rome, and of the true relations of the Roman Empire to the eastern peoples, if a brief outline of the history of each of these nations is introduced. Such a chronological epitome of their history is given here.

THE KINGDOM OF PERGAMUS (283-133 B.C.)

B.C.