The Roman and the Teuton Author:Charles Kingsley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE II. THE DYING EMPIRE. It is not for me to trace the rise, or even the fall of the Roman Empire. That would be the duty rather of a professor of anc... more »ient history, than of modern. All I need do is to sketch as shortly as I can, the state in which the young world found the old, when it came in contact with it. The Roman Empire, toward the latter part of the fourth century, was in much the same condition as the Chinese or the Turkish Empire in our own days. Private morality (as Juvenal and Persius will tell you) had vanished long before. Public morality had, of course, vanished likewise. The only powers really recognised were force and cunning. The only aim was personal enjoyment. The only God was the Divus Caesar, the imperial demigod, whose illimitable brute force gave him illimitable powers of self-enjoyment, and made him thus the paragon and ideal of humanity, whomall envied, flattered, hated, and obeyed. The palace was a sink of corruption, where eunuchs, concubines, spies, informers, freedmen, adventurers, struggled in the basest plots, each for his share of the public plunder. The senate only existed to register the edicts of their tyrant, and if need be, destroy each other, or any one else, by judicial murders, the willing tools of imperial cruelty. The government was administered (at least since the time of Diocletian) by an official bureaucracy, of which Professor Goldwin Smith well says, "the earth swarmed with the consuming hierarchy of extortion, so that it was said that they who received taxes were more than those who paid them." The free middle class had disappeared, or lingered in the cities, too proud to labour, fed on government bounty, and amused by government spectacles. With them, arts and science had died likewise. Such things were left to slaves,...« less