pared
the relics of the Byzantine dominion. Their moderate councils delayed
and prevented the election of a new emperor, and they exhorted the
Italians not to separate from the body of the Roman monarchy. The exarch
was permitted to reside within the walls of Ravenna, a captive rather
than a master; and till the Imperial coronation of Charlemagne, the
government of Rome and Italy was exercised in the name of the successors
of Constantine.

The liberty of Rome, which had been oppressed by the arms and arts of
Augustus, was rescued, after seven hundred and fifty years of servitude,
from the persecution of Leo the Isaurian. By the Caesars, the triumphs of
the consuls had been annihilated: in the decline and fall of the empire,
the god Terminus, the sacred boundary, had insensibly receded from the
ocean, the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates; and Rome was reduced to
her ancient territory from Viterbo to Terracina, and from Narni to the
mouth of the Tyber. When the kings were banished, the republic reposed
on the firm basis which had been founded by their wisdom and virtue.
Their perpetual jurisdiction was divided between two annual magistrates:
the senate continued to exercise the powers of administration and
counsel; and the legislative authority was distributed in the assemblies
of the people, by a well-proportioned scale of property and service.
Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had improved the
science of government and war: the will of the community was absolute:
the rights of individuals were sacred: one hundred and thirty thousand
citizens were armed for defence or conquest; and a band of robbers and
outlaws was moulded into a nation deserving of freedom and ambitious of
glory. When the sovereignty of the Greek emperors was extinguished, the
ruins of Rome presented the sad image of depopulation and decay:
her slavery was a habit, her liberty an accident; the effect of
superstition, and the object of her own amazement and terror. The last
vestige of the substance, or even the forms, of the constitution, was
obliterated from the practice and memory of the Romans; and they
were devoid of knowledge, or virtue, again to build the fabric of
a commonwealth. Their scanty remnant, the offspring of slaves and
strangers, was despicable in the eyes of the victorious Barbarians. As
often as the Franks or Lombards expressed their most bitter contempt
of a foe, they called him a Roman; "and in this name," says