Principles of western civilisation

208 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

brought into ever-extending political and commercial relations with the wider world they had conquered. We see the haughty czvzs of the third century B.c. wrapt in the rights, the privileges, and the protection of the original local law of the city of Rome, shutting the door of the zus czvzle in the face of the world, and excluding the peoples he had conquered from the coveted privileges of the Roman czvztas. We watch Rome meanwhile gradually becoming the political and commercial capital of the world; and see the growth outside of the zs czvzfe, within which the citizen has entrenched himself, of the zs genteum or the body of laws of the excluded aliens. We follow the gradually transforming influence of the conceptions of the latter upon those of the former; and the slow yielding of the ideals of exclusive citizenship under the pressure of cosmopolitan necessity on the one hand, under the influence of Hellenic culture on the other. We see the principles, the phraseology, and the humanitarian conceptions of Stoicism being gradually incorporated in the system of Roman public law; while pavz fassu there is in progress the gradual extension of the rights of citizenship ; until Caracalla, in the third century, confers the cvvztas on all Roman subjects who are members of some political community; until Justinian at last, in the sixth century, in constituting every free subject of the Roman empire as such a full Roman citizen, sweeps away the entire antithesis between the 22s cevile and the zus gentiwm, and finally annihilates the fundamental principle of exclusiveness upon which Rome was founded and developed.

The spectacle is, in many respects, one of the