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The Roman and the Teuton (pt. 121); A Series of Lectures Delivered Before the University of Cambridge
The Roman and the Teuton A Series of Lectures Delivered Before the University of Cambridge - pt. 121 Author:Charles Kingsley Volume: pt. 121 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1891 Original Publisher: Macmillan and Co. Subjects: Germanic peoples Middle Ages Rome Drama / General History / Ancient / Rome History / Medieval Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may ... more »be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 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 ancient 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, whom all 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 consumi...« less