Principles of western civilisation

vu THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 207

he first realised, through the teaching of Finlay, ‘that the age which we commonly look on as the most glorious in Grecian history, the fifth century before Christ, was in truth an age of Greek decline.”* The Greek mind was yet to produce much of its highest work ;—the wider outlook in thought, and that more humanitarian tendency in philosophy which was afterwards to reach its loftiest expression in Roman Stoicism and in the later developments of Roman jurisprudence, were almost entirely the products of a subsequent period. And yet—to use Freeman’s words of the period—‘‘ the Greece of the fifth century before Christ is like the Rome of the fourth century after Christ.” What we sometimes fail to see of it Herodotus saw clearly .. . for the Greek people as a whole all over the world it was an age of decline.” *

It may seem to many to be curious that the perception of a fact which often makes so little mark on the mind, even when it is fully recognised, should have so deeply impressed Freeman. We have to turn elsewhere to perceive the direction in which the larger meaning which is behind it carries us.

It must be within the experience of more than one student of the history of Roman law, that there has happened in the development of his view of Roman jurisprudence a crisis which will at once suggest a remarkable relation to the experience of Freeman in Greek history here related. ‘There is hardly any more striking spectacle in Roman history than the gradual growth and expansion of legal conception within the empire, as the Romans were

1 Chief Periods of European History, by E. A. Freeman, p. 21. 2 Tbid. p. 22. 3 Jord. p. 21.