CONTENTS CHAP. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION THE IMMEDIATE EFFECTS OF THE ROMAN CONQUEST UPON HELLENISM POLYBIUS and the thoughtful Greeks who talked with him after the fall of Carthage and of Corinth must have felt that they had lived to see one of the great turning-points in the world's history. There was now no longer any doubt that all the civilised nations hitherto at variance, in opposition, distracted by reason of contrasts in population, in government, in language, in traditions, would now be directed by the will of one people, by the influence of one system of law, by the predominance of a common language. It was not the first time that this grand prospect had been held forth to the world. When Alexander was yet a young man, returning from his conquests in the far East, men must have anticipated, as very near, an empire not unlike that of Rome; for the conquest of the West would have been no difficult matter to Alexander, with all the resources of Asia under his hand. The successes of Pyrrhus, with his small army, against the adult Rome of the third century, B fresh from her Samnite conquests, show what would have been the successes of Alexander, with his giant genius and armaments, against the younger and feebler Republic. And if the realisation of the conqueror's dreams was hindered by his early death, most of the early Diadochi had each for many hard-fought years aspired to be his sole successor, completing his work and regenerating the distracted world by the potent influence of Hellenistic culture. A world-empire, including all the lands and nations about the Mediterranean Sea, reaching to the frozen North and the torrid South as its natural limits, exchanging the virgin ores of Spain for the long-sought spices of Araby the blest, was therefore no real novelty in imagination. But while those who had conceived it and striven for it consciously had failed, who could have imagined that it should drop almost suddenly, unexpectedly, by the force, not of genius, but of circumstances, into the hands of a people who attained it not by the direction of an Alexander or a Napoleon, or even by the successes of a Clive, but by those national qualities which had gained for Sparta precedence and respect, coupled with those aggressive wars under the guise of securing ever-widening frontiers which mark the rapid strides of Macedonia ? Any political thinker who witnessed this mighty outcome of half a century might indeed feel uneasy at the result, if he were not, like most of the Stoics, a religious fatalist. There was no doubt the manifest gain of a great peace throughout the world, of the real settlement of disputes by the arbitration of an umpire with power to enforce his will, of the consequent development of wide commerce over the world, with its diffusion not only of wealth but of enlightenment. These material gains were indisputable, even though |