seas.
No forgotten literature suddenly flashed out its long-lost splendours.
No vast discoveries of science transformed the universe and the
interpretation of it. The inventive freshness and intellectual
confidence that are born of such things were denied to the Empire. Its
temperament was neither artistic, nor literary, nor scientific. It was
merely practical.

Yet if practical, it was not therefore uncreative. In its own sphere of
everyday life, it was an epoch of growth in many directions. Even the
arts moved forward. Sculpture was enriched by a new and noble style of
portraiture. Architecture won new possibilities by the engineering
genius which reared the aqueduct of Segovia and the Basilica of
Maxentius.[1] But these are only practical expansions of arts that are
in themselves unpractical. The greatest work of the imperial age must be
sought in its provincial administration. The significance of this we
have come to understand, as not even Gibbon understood it, through the
researches of Mommsen. By his vast labours our horizon has broadened
beyond the backstairs of the Palace and the benches of the Senate House
in Rome to the wide lands north and east and south of the Mediterranean,
and we have begun to realize the true achievements of the Empire. The
old theory of an age of despotism and decay has been overthrown, and the
believer in human nature can now feel confident that, whatever their
limitations, the men of the Empire wrought for the betterment and the
happiness of the world.

[Footnote 1: Wickhoff, _Wiener Genesis_, p. 10; Riegl, _Stilfragen_, p.
272.]

Their efforts took two forms, the organization of the frontier defences
which repulsed the barbarian, and the development of the provinces
within those defences. The first of these achievements was but for a
time. In the end the Roman legionary went down before the Gothic
horseman. But before he fell he had done his work. In the lands that he
had sheltered, Roman civilization had taken strong root. The fact has an
importance which we to-day might easily miss. It is not likely that any
modern nation will soon again stand in the place that Rome then held.
Our culture to-day seems firmly planted in three continents and our task
is rather to diffuse it further and to develop its good qualities than
to defend it. But the Roman Empire was the civilized world; the safety
of Rome was the safety of all civilization. Outside was the wild chaos
of barbarism. Rome k