ared
at Rome, on a political mission. During an interval of official business
he delivered two public orations, to give the unlettered conquerors of
his country a taste of the disputations that flourished in the Attic
schools. On the first day he discoursed of natural justice. On the next
he denied its existence, arguing that all our notions of good and evil
are derived from positive enactment. From the time of that memorable
display, the genius of the vanquished held its conquerors in thrall. The
most eminent of the public men of Rome, such as Scipio and Cicero,
formed their minds on Grecian models, and her jurists underwent the
rigorous discipline of Zeno and Chrysippus.

If, drawing the limit in the second century, when the influence of
Christianity becomes perceptible, we should form our judgment of the
politics of antiquity by its actual legislation, our estimate would be
low. The prevailing notions of freedom were imperfect, and the
endeavours to realise them were wide of the mark. The ancients
understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of
liberty. They concentrated so many prerogatives in the State as to leave
no footing from which a man could deny its jurisdiction or assign bounds
to its activity. If I may employ an expressive anachronism, the vice of
the classic State was that it was both Church and State in one. Morality
was undistinguished from religion and politics from morals; and in
religion, morality, and politics there was only one legislator and one
authority. The State, while it did deplorably little for education, for
practical science, for the indigent and helpless, or for the spiritual
needs of man, nevertheless claimed the use of all his faculties and the
determination of all his duties. Individuals and families, associations
and dependencies were so much material that the sovereign power consumed
for its own purposes. What the slave was in the hands of his master, the
citizen was in the hands of the community. The most sacred obligations
vanished before the public advantage. The passengers existed for the
sake of the ship. By their disregard for private interests, and for the
moral welfare and improvement of the people, both Greece and Rome
destroyed the vital elements on which the prosperity of nations rests,
and perished by the decay of families and the depopulation of the
country. They survive not in their institutions, but in their ideas, and
by their ideas, especially on th