ro himself, now when it was too late,
fell on his knees and besought mercy from Pompeius; he had to banish
himself even before the passing of the law which debarred him
from his native land (April 696). Cato likewise did not venture
to provoke sharper measures by declining the commission
which he had received, but accepted itand embarked for the east.(12)
What was most immediately necessary was done; Caesar too
might leave Italy to devote himself to more serious tasks.

Chapter VII

The Subjugation of the West

The Romanizing of the West

When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony
of the political selfishness, which fought its battles
in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters
of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch
of Rome should be called Gnaeus, Gaius, or Marcus, we may well
be allowed--on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still
at the present day influence the destinies of the world--to look round us
for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest
of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact
with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be
apprehended in their bearing on the general history of the world.

By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state
absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized
people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage--
by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much
a law of nature as the law of gravity--the Italian nation (the only
one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political
development and a superior civilization, though it presented
the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled
to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the east which were ripe
for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades
of culture in the west--Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans--by means
of its settlers; just as England with equal right has in Asia reduced
to subjection a civilization of rival standing but politically
impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled,
and still continues to mark and ennoble, extensive barbarian
countries with the impress of its nationality. The Roman aristocracy
had accomplished the preliminary condition required for this task--
the union of Italy; the task itself it never solved, but always
rega