of art and ornament, and much was consumed in daily use, much withdrawn from circulation and eventually lost by the thriftless habit of hoarding. But the supply from the mines of Thrace, Spain, and Germany was probably declining, for it was extracted by forced labor, the most expensive, the most harassing, and the most precarious. The difficulty of maintaining the yield of the precious metals is marked in the severe regulations of the later emperors, and is further attested by the progressive debasement of the currency.

Not more precise is our information respecting the movement of the population, which was also at this period on the verge of decline. To the partial complaints of such a decline in Italy, muttered, as they generally were, by the poets or satirists, I have hitherto paid little heed. In statements of this kind there is generally much false sentiment, some angry misrepresentation. The substitution of slave for free labor in many parts of Italy may have had the appearance of a decline in population, while it actually indicated no more than a movement and transfer. It was more important, however, in the future it foreshadowed than in the present reality. The slave population was not reproductive; it was only kept at its level by fresh drafts from abroad. Whenever the supply should be cut off, the residue would rapidly dwindle. This supply was maintained partly by successful wars, but still more by a regular and organized traffic. The slaves from the North might be exchanged for Italian manufactures and produce; but the venders from many parts, such as Arabia and Ethiopia, Central Africa, and even Cappadocia and other districts of Asia Minor, would take, I suppose, nothing but specie. With the contraction of the currency, the trade would languish, and under this depression a country like Italy, which was almost wholly stocked by importation, would become quickly depopulated. Still more, on the decline of the slave population, there would follow a decline of production, a decline of the means of the proprietors, a decline in the condition of the free classes, and consequently in their numbers also. That such a decline was actually felt under the Flavian emperors appears in the sudden adoption of the policy of alimentation, or public aid to impoverished freemen.

Nor was it in this way only that slavery tended to the decline of population. Slavery in ancient, and doubtless in all times was a hotbed of vice and selfish indulgence, enervating the spirit and vital forces of mankind, discouraging legitimate

marriage, and enticing to promiscuous and barren concubinage. The fruit of such hateful unions, if fruit there were, or could be, engaged little regard from their selfish fathers, and both law and usage continued to sanction the exposure of infants, from which the female sex undoubtedly suffered most. The losses of Italy from this horrid practice were probably the greatest; but the provinces also lost proportionably; the imitation of Roman habits was rife on the remotest frontiers; the conquests of the empire were consolidated by the attractions of Roman indulgence and sensuality; slavery threw discredit on all manual labor, and engendered a false sentiment of honor, which constrained the poorer classes of freemen to dependence and celibacy; vice and idleness went hand in hand, and combined to stunt the moral and physical growth of the Roman citizen, leaving his weak and morbid frame exposed in an unequal contest to the fatal influences of his climate.

If, however, the actual amount of population in Italy and other metropolitan districts had but lately begun sensibly to decline, for some generations it had been recruited mainly from a foreign stock, and was mingled with the refuse of every nation, civilized and barbarian. Slaves, freedmen, clients of the rich and powerful, had glided by adoption into the Roman gentes, the names of which still retained a fallacious air of antiquity, while their members had lost the feelings and principles which originally signalized them. As late as the time of the younger Pliny, we find the gentile names of the republic still common, though many of them have ceased to recur on the roll of the great magistracies, where they have been supplanted by others, hitherto obscure or unknown; but the surnames of Pliny's friends and correspondents, which distinguish the family from the house, are in numerous instances strange to us, and often grotesque and barbarous. The gradual exhaustion of the true Roman blood had been already marked and deplored under Claudius, and there can be no doubt, though materials are wanting for tracing it, that the flux continued to gather force through succeeding generations.

The decay of moral principles which hastened the disintegration of Roman society was compensated by no new discoveries in material cultivation. The idea of civilization common to the Greeks and Romans was the highest development of the bodily faculties, together with the imagination; but in exploring the agencies of the natural world, and turning its forces to

the use of man, the progress soon reached its limits. The Greeks and Romans were almost equally unsteady in tracing the laws of physical phenomena, which they empirically observed, and analyzing the elements of the world around them. Their advance in applied science stopped short with the principles of mechanics, in which they doubtless attained great practical proficiency. Roman engineering, especially, deserves the admiration even of our own times. But the ancients invented no instrument for advancing the science of astronomy; they remained profoundly ignorant of the mysteries of chemistry; their medicine, notwithstanding the careful diagnosis of Hippocrates and Galen, could not free itself from connection with the most trivial superstitions. The Greeks speculated deeply in ethics and politics; the Romans were intelligent students of legal theory and procedure; but neither could discover from these elementary sciences the compound ideas of public economy. Their principles of commerce and finance were to the last rude and unphilosophical. They made little advance, at the height of their prosperity and knowledge, in the economy of labor and production; they made no provision for the support of the increasing numbers to which the human race, under the operation of natural laws, ought to have attained. We read of no improvements in the common processes of agriculture, none even in the familiar mode of grinding corn, none in the extraction and smelting of ores, none in the art of navigation. Even in war, to which they so ardently devoted themselves, we find the helmet and cuirass, the sword, spear, and buckler, identical in character and almost in form, from the siege of Troy to the sack of Rome. Changes in tactics and discipline were slight and casual, compelled rather by some change in circumstances than spontaneous or scientific. The ancient world had, in short, no versatility, no power of adaptation to meet the varying wants of its outward condition. Its ideas were equal to the extension of its material dominion. A little soul was lodged in a vast body.

The Egyptian civilization, the Hindu, the Chinese, as well as the Greek and Roman, have all had their natural limits, at which their vitality was necessarily arrested. Possibly all civilizations are subject to a similar law, though some may have a wider scope and a more enduring force than others; or possibly there may be a real salt of society in the principle of intelligent freedom, which has first learned to control itself,

that it may deserve to escape from the control of external forces. But Roman society, at least, was animated by no such principle. At no period within the sphere of historic records was the commonwealth of Rome anything but an oligarchy of warriors and slave owners, who indemnified themselves for the restraint imposed on them by their equals in the forum by aggression abroad and tyranny in their households. The causes of its decline seem to have little connection with the form of government established in the first and second centuries. They were in full operation before the fall of the Republic, though their baneful effects were disguised and perhaps retarded by outward successes, by extended conquests, and increasing supplies of tribute or plunder. The general decline of population throughout the ancient world may be dated even from the second century before our era. The last age of the Republic was perhaps the period of the most rapid exhaustion of the human race; but its dissolution was arrested under Augustus, when the population recovered for a time in some quarters of the empire, and remained at least stationary in others. The cause of slavery could not but make itself felt again, and demanded the destined catastrophe. Whatever evil we ascribe to the despotism of the Cæsars, we must remark that it was slavery that rendered political freedom and constitutional government impossible. Slavery fostered in Rome, as previously at Athens, the spirit of selfishness and sensuality, of lawlessness and insolence, which cannot consist with political equality, with political justice, with political moderation. The tyranny of the emperors was, as I have elsewhere observed, only the tyranny of every noble extended and intensified. The empire became no more than an ergastulum or barracoon on a vast scale, commensurate with the dominions of the greatest of Roman slaveholders. It is vain to imagine that a people can be tyrants in private life, and long escape subjection to a common tyrant in public. It was more than they could expect, more, indeed, than they deserved, if they found in Augustus, at least, and Vespasian, in Trajan and Hadrian, in Antoninus and Aurelius, masters who sought spontaneously to divest themselves of the most terrible attributes of their boundless autocracy.

JOSEPHUS ON THE JEWISH WAR.

[FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, Jewish statesman and historian, was the son of a priest by a descendant of the Asmonean princes, and was born at Jerusalem, 37 A.D. He was early a distinguished scholar and a leader of the Pharisees; was sent as delegate to Nero at twenty-six; was governor of Galilee when the last rising against the Roman government took place, and was captured at the siege of Jotapata; made terms for himself with the Romans, and accompanied their army at the siege of Jerusalem. He then lived at Rome till after 97 A.D. He wrote the " History of the Jewish War"; "Jewish Antiquities "; a pamphlet, “Against Apion,” in defense of his countrymen; and his autobiography.]

THE SIEGE OF JOTAPATA.

JOTAPATA is almost all of it a precipice, having on all sides of it but one ravines immensely deep, so that those who try to look down find their sight fail them before it reaches the bottom. It is only to be got at on the north side, where the city is built on the mountain, as it ends obliquely at a plain. Josephus had surrounded this mountain with a wall when he fortified the city, that its summit might not be able to be seized upon by the enemies. The city is covered all round with other mountains, and is invisible till one comes just upon it. Such was the strong situation of Jotapata.

Vespasian, therefore, being put on his mettle by the natural strength of the place, as well as the bold defense of the Jews, resolved to prosecute the siege with vigor. To this end he called the commanders that were under him to a council of war, and consulted with them as to the assault. And when it was resolved to raise a bank against that part of the wall which was accessible, he sent his whole army abroad to collect materials. So when they had cut down all the trees near the city, and had got together a great heap of stones besides the wood they had cut down, some of them spread fascines over their works, to avoid the effects of the darts that were shot from above at them, under cover whereof they kept on forming their bank, and so were hurt little or nothing by the darts that were thrown upon them from the wall, while others pulled the neighboring hillocks to pieces, and perpetually brought them earth; so nobody was idle, as they were busy three sorts of ways. But the Jews cast great stones from the walls and all sorts of darts upon the fascines which protected the men, and their noise, though they did not reach them, was so terrible that it was some impediment to the workmen.

Vespasian then put into position all round the city the en