as deplorably dissolute;
the splendour of Rome was beyond doubt astonishing; of oppression
there were too many scattered instances; but we do not judge the
civilisation of the British Empire by the choicest scandals of London,
nor the good sense of the United States by the freak follies of New
York. We do not take it that the modern satirist who vents his spleen
on an individual or a class is describing each and all of his
contemporaries, nor even that what he says is necessarily true of such
individual or class. Nor is the professional moralist himself immune
from jaundice or from the disease of exaggeration.

The endeavour here will be to realise more veraciously what life in
the Roman world was like. For those who are familiar with the
political history and the escapades of Nero there may be some filling
in of gaps and adjusting of perspective. For those who are familiar
with the journeyings and experiences of St. Paul there may be some
correction of errors and misconceptions. For those who have any
thought of visiting the ruins of Rome and Pompeii, it may prove
helpful to have secured some comprehension of this period. Pompeii was
destroyed only fifteen years after our date, and all those houses,
large and small, were occupied in the year 64 by their unsuspecting
inhabitants. Meanwhile mansions, temples, and halls stood in splendour
above those platforms and foundations over which we tread amid the
broken columns in the Roman Forum or on the Palatine Hill.

CHAPTER I

EXTENT AND SECURITY OF THE EMPIRE

The best means of realising the extent of the Roman Empire in or about
the year 64 is to glance at the map. It will be found to reach from
the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates, from the middle of
England--approximately the river Trent--to the south of Egypt, from
the Rhine and the Danube to the Desert of Sahara. The Mediterranean
Sea is a Roman lake, and there is not a spot upon its shores which is
not under Roman rule. In round numbers the empire is three thousand
miles in length and two thousand in breadth. Its population, which, at
least in the western parts, was much thinner then than it is over the
same area at present, cannot be calculated with any accuracy, but an
estimate of one hundred millions would perhaps be not very far from
the mark.

Beyond its borders--sometimes too dangerously near to them and apt to
overstep them--lay various peoples concerning whom Roman knowledge was
for the most part