ept it back from end to end of Europe and across a
thousand miles of western Asia. Through all the storms of barbarian
onset, through the carnage of uncounted wars, through plagues which
struck whole multitudes down to a disastrous death, through civil
discord and sedition and domestic treachery, the work went on. It was
not always marked by special insight or intelligence. The men who
carried it out were not for the most part first-rate statesmen or
first-rate generals. Their successes were those of character, not of
genius. But their phlegmatic courage saved the civilized life of Europe
till that life had grown strong and tenacious, and till even its
assailants had recognized its worth.

It was this growth of internal civilization which formed the second and
most lasting of the achievements of the Empire. Its long and peaceable
government--the longest and most orderly that has yet been granted to
any large portion of the world--gave time for the expansion of Roman
speech and manners, for the extension of the political franchise, the
establishment of city life, the assimilation of the provincial
populations in an orderly and coherent civilization. As the importance
of the city of Rome declined, as the world became Romeless, a large part
of the world grew to be Roman. It has been said that Greece taught men
to be human and Rome made mankind civilized. That was the work of the
Empire; the form it took was Romanization.

This Romanization has its limits and its characteristics. First, in
respect of place. Not only in the further east, where (as in Egypt)
mankind was non-European, but even in the nearer east, where an ancient
Greek civilization reigned, the effect of Romanization was inevitably
small. Closely as Greek civilization resembled Roman, easy as the
transition might seem from the one to the other, Rome met here that most
serious of all obstacles to union, a race whose thoughts and affections
and traditions had crystallized into definite coherent form. That has in
all ages checked Imperial assimilation; it was the decisive hindrance to
the Romanization of the Greek east. A few Italian oases were created by
the establishment of _coloniae_ here and there in Asia Minor and in
Syria. But all of them perished like exotic plants.[1] The Romanization
of these lands was political. Their inhabitants ultimately learnt to
call and to consider themselves Romans. But they did not adopt the Roman
language or the Roman civiliza