rmanent force, but consisted theoretically of troops levied before a
war and discharged after victory.

Rome's institutions remained those of a city. It was difficult to apply
them to the vast territory she attempted to govern with their aid. They
were a clumsy {4} apparatus that worked only by sudden starts, a
rudimentary system that could not and did not last.

What do we find three centuries later? A strongly centralized state in
which an absolute ruler, worshiped like a god and surrounded by a large
court, commanded a whole hierarchy of functionaries; cities divested of
their local liberties and ruled by an omnipotent bureaucracy, the old
capital herself the first to be dispossessed of her autonomy and subjected
to prefects. Outside of the cities the monarch, whose private fortune was
identical with the state finances, possessed immense domains managed by
intendants and supporting a population of serf-colonists. The army was
composed largely of foreign mercenaries, professional soldiers whose pay or
bounty consisted of lands on which they settled. All these features and
many others caused the Roman empire to assume the likeness of ancient
Oriental monarchies.

It would be impossible to admit that like causes produce like results, and
then maintain that a similarity is not sufficient proof of an influence in
history. Wherever we can closely follow the successive transformations of a
particular institution, we notice the action of the Orient and especially
of Egypt. When Rome had become a great cosmopolitan metropolis like
Alexandria, Augustus reorganized it in imitation of the capital of the
Ptolemies. The fiscal reforms of the Caesars like the taxes on sales and
inheritances, the register of land surveys and the direct collection of
taxes, were suggested by the very perfect financial system of the
Lagides,[5] and it can be maintained that their government was the first
source from which those of modern Europe were derived, through the medium
{5} of the Romans. The imperial _saltus_, superintended by a procurator and
cultivated by metayers reduced to the state of serfs, was an imitation of
the ones that the Asiatic potentates formerly cultivated through their
agents.[6] It would be easy to increase this list of examples. The absolute
monarchy, theocratic and bureaucratic at the same time, that was the form
of government of Egypt, Syria and even Asia Minor during the Alexandrine
period was the ideal on which the deif