Principles of western civilisation

VII THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE 209

most striking and imposing in ancient history.’ Nevertheless, there must have come to more than one student who has carried his point of view beyond that of the ordinary text-book of Roman law, a time when he has been himself startled by the perception of a fact underlying it all, similar to that in Greek history which so deeply impressed the mind of Freeman. It has been, when the conviction has suddenly come upon him with irresistible force that the whole development here described in Roman history was not a phenomenon of life at all, but a process of death ; that it progressed equally with, and side by side with, the causes which were slowly undermining the ancient State; and that it was in reality, Strange as it may seem, but a phenomenon belonging to the same group of symptoms of the decay and dissolution of the life of the Roman empire with which he had been so familiar elsewhere. It was not with the cosmopolitan principles of the zus gentium, but with the stern institutions of the zus cevtle that the life of ancient Rome was bound up. It was not to the humanitarianism of Epictetus and of Marcus Aurelius, but to the almost Savage exclusiveness of the moral code of Aristotle that the life-principle of the ancient civilisations was ultimately united. Nay more—hard as it may be at first to realise it, we see that if the principles which had found their highest expression in the generous cosmopolitanism of the later Greek philosophy, and in the lofty ideas of Roman Stoicism, had been in the ascendant in the ancient world, there would have been no Greek civilisation, there could have

* Cf. Institutes of Roman Law, by Rudolph Sohm, pp. 40, 41, and 116119. P