Britain, and Illyricum, supplied the legions with excellent soldiers, and constituted the real strength of the monarchy. Their personal valour remained; but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army. The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life.

The love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement, was fashionable among the subjects of Hadrian and the Antonines, who were themselves men of learning and curiosity. It was diffused over the whole extent of their empire; the most northern tribes of Britons had acquired a taste for rhetoric; Homer as well as Virgil were transcribed and studied on the banks of the Rhine and Danube; and the most liberal rewards sought out the faintest glimmerings of literary merit.* The sciences of physic and astronomy were successfully cultivated by the Greeks; the observations of Ptolemy, and the writings of Galen, are studied by those who have improved their discoveries, and corrected their

* Herodes Atticus gave the sophist Polemo about 8000l. for three declamations. See Philostrat. 1. 1, p. 538. The Antonines founded a school at Athens, in which professors of grammar, rhetoric, politics, and the four great sects of philosophy, were maintained at the public expense, for the instruction of youth. The salary of a philosopher was ten thousand drachmæ, between 300l. and 400l. a year. Similar establishments were formed in the other great cities of the empire. See Lucian in Eunuch. tom. 2, p. 352, edit. Reitz. Philostrat. 1. 2, p. 566. Hist. August. p. 21. Dion Cassius, 1. 71, p. 1195. Juvenal himself, in a morose satire, which in every line betrays his own disappointment and envy, is obliged, however, to say,

-O Juvenes, circumspicit et stimulat vos,

Materiamque sibi Ducis indulgentia quærit.-Satir. 7, 20. [Vespasian first established salaried professorships. Each chair of eloquence, whether Greek or Roman, was endowed by him with a yearly income of centena sestertia, equal, according to Arbuthnot, to about 4850 crowns. He also rewarded artists and poets. (Sueton. in Vesp. 1. 18.) Hadrian and the Antonines were less generous; still they were liberal. See Reimarius on Dion Cassius and Xiphilin, lib. 100; but he has overlooked the earlier example of Vespasian.-WENCK.]

of

errors: but if we except the inimitable Lucian, this age indolence passed away without having produced a single writer of original genius, or who excelled in the arts of elegant composition. The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind. The beauties of the poets and orators, instead of kindling a fire like their own, inspired only cold and servile imitations; or if any ventured to deviate from those models, they deviated at the same time from good sense and propriety. On the revival of letters, the youthful vigour ot the imagination, after a long repose, national emulation, a new religion, new languages, and a new world, called forth the genius of Europe. But the provincials of Rome, trained by a uniform artificial foreign education, were engaged in a very unequal competition with those bold ancients, who, by expressing their genuine feelings in their native tongue, had already occupied every place of honour. The name of poet was almost forgotten; that of orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning; and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.*

* In addition to the writers on medicine, the astronomers and grammarians, among whom we may find distinguished names, there lived also in Hadrian's time, Suetonius, Florus, and Plutarch; and in that of the Antonines, Arrian, Pausanias, Appian, Marcus Aurelius himself, Sextus Empiricus, &c., writers, indeed, of unequal ability, but not destitute of genius. Jurisprudence, too, owed much to the labours of Salvius Julianus, Julius Celsus, Sextus Pomponius, Caius and others. Gibbon's verdict is, therefore, too stern, indiscriminate, and hasty. At least it ought to have been restricted to the Latins, who, it must be owned, were very deficient in good taste, after the time of Trajan. But there is not so perceptible a change among the Greeks, when compared with those who flourished under preceding emperors. -WENCK.] The decay of talent began earlier in Greece than in Italy. The Greek writers of the first century were so few and of such inferior note, that those of the second gain little honour by surpassing them. Nor did M. Wenck consider how much even the few who distinguished themselves during that period, had been indebted to their training by education or early residence at Rome. To his general list he might have added such names as Apuleius, Maximus Tyrius, and Polyænus. Still his galaxy would have shone faintly beside the constellations of preceding ages, with which Gibbon placed them in contrast. Yet

The sublime Longinus, who, in somewhat a later period, and in the court of a Syrian queen, preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments this degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents. "In the same manner," he says, as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined; thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients, who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted."* This diminu

Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines gave to learning a patronage more conspicuously honourable and more profitably remunerative than that which it received from Augustus. Literary merit was not only invited to their courts, but rewarded by high office. Plutarch was appointed præfect of Illyricum, and Arrian of Cappadocia. Suetonius, Lucian, Arrian, Maximus Tyrius, and others, were raised to eminent distinction. The example and the munificence of successive emperors were vainly exerted to revive the drooping spirit of heathen literature. They could not check the torpor which was ever creeping stealthily onward, and by which the Roman world was so enfeebled, that, reversing the law of social progress, it had not sufficient energy left to civilize barbarian conquerors.-ED.] * Longin. de Sublim. c. 44, p. 229, edit. Toll. Here, too, we may say of Longinus,-"His own example strengthens all his laws." Instead of proposing his sentiments with a manly boldness, he insinuates them with the most guarded caution, puts them into the mouth of a friend, and, as far as we can collect from a corrupted text, makes a show of refuting them himself. ["The spirit of ancient Athens," for which Gibbon gives Longinus credit, must be seen only in his style of writing, if we would make this praise consistent with the subsequent censure, which the note conveys. In the latter, a line of Pope's Essay on Criticism, (v. 680,) which makes the lofty language of the Treatise "On the Sublime," an example of its laws, is acutely applied to the description given by Longinus of the degeneracy of his age, and to his mode of manifesting his own sentiments. I doubt whether that application be as true as it is skilful. Pearce and some other interpreters of Longinus have understood the passage as Gibbon did, but, as it appears to me, without any sufficient ground. Longinus says that he had heard a philosopher assign their altered form of government as the true cause of the debasement of literature, since democracy alone can nurture strong minds, &c. Gibbon's extract is taken from the speech or argument of this philosopher, which is rather the extravagant effusion of a violent king-hater than a faithful historical delineation. Longinus then replies. He cannot perceive that the form of government had such mighty influence, or that it is so impossible to nurse high thoughts under monarchial sway. Human nature is always dissatisfied with its actual position. I am rather of opinion, he said,

tive stature of mankind, if we pursue the metaphor, was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pigmies; when the fierce giants of the north broke in, and mended the puny breed. They restored a manly spirit of freedom; and after the revolution of ten centuries, freedom became the happy parent of taste and science.

CHAPTER III.-OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, IN THE

AGE OF THE ANTONINES.

THE obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a State, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is intrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connexion between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance

*

that energy and spirit have been depressed by the universal misery, which incessant wars have produced, and the abject sentiments which everywhere prevail. The thoughts of all are engrossed by gain and indulgence of appetite. A boundless luxury, with its attendant vices, pervades society. These unfit men for noble thoughts, quench aspirations after immortal things, and degrade our souls to the dust. This slavery is more certain, and in its consequences worse, than any publicly recognized servitude. What use could those make of freedom who are unable to bear it? &c. In this there is no political hypocrisy. The whole history of Longinus, the bold designs with which he inspired the great queen, Zenobia, his influence over her, and the undaunted fearlessness with which he met his fate, these all absolve him from any suspicion of timidity or temporizing meanness. The life of an author is the best commentary on such passages.WENCK.]

* [In superstitious ages, often enough, not to serve the people or the State, but to promote the interests of the church itself, to which all others were subordinate. Still the power of the popes was sometimes useful, in restraining the violence of rulers or softening the manners of a people.-WENCK.]

capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprises of an aspiring prince.

Every barrier of the Roman constitution had been levelled by the vast ambition of the dictator; every fence had been extirpated by the cruel hand of the triumvir. After the victory of Actium, the fate of the Roman world depended on the will of Octavianus, surnamed Cæsar, by his uncle's adoption, and afterwards Augustus, by the flattery of the senate. The conqueror was at the head of forty-four veteran legions,* conscious of their own strength, and of the weakness of the constitution, habituated, during twenty years' civil war, to every act of blood and violence, and passionately devoted to the house of Cæsar, from whence alone they had received, and expected, the most lavish rewards. The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows, and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquillity, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom. With its power, the senate had lost its dignity; many of the most noble families were extinct. The republicans of spirit and ability had perished in the field of battle, or in the proscription. The door of the assembly had been designedly left open for a mixed multitude of more than a thousand persons, who reflected disgrace upon their rank, instead of deriving honour from it.‡

The reformation of the senate was one of the first steps in which Augustus laid aside the tyrant, and professed himself the father of his country. He was elected censor; and, in

* Orosius, 6, 18. [The authority of Orosius, to which Gibbon here refers, is of little value, when better can be obtained. Dion Cassius (lib. 55, c. 20) says, that Augustus had only twenty-five legions. According to Appian, the triumvirs had no more than forty-three, after they had united all their forces.-WENCK.]

The pleasing picture, here presented, has been thus far copied from Tacitus. Annal. lib. 1, c. 2.-WENCK.] Julius Cæsar introduced soldiers, strangers, and half-barbarians, into the senate. (Sueton. in Cæsar, c. 77,80.) The abuse became still more scandalous after his death.