GIRL8 PUBLIC DAY fctHCOL COMPANY-LIMITED NOTTINGHAM H1GI for : - ; %s - ;'" -*' *# THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE GIFT OF FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY THE CHIEF PEKIODS OF EUKOPEAN HISTOKY FREEMAN THE CHIEF PERIODS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY SIX LECTUEES READ IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN TRINITY TERM, 1885 WITH AN ESSAY ON GREEK CITIES UNDER ROMAN RULE BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN^ M. A., HON. D.C.L. & LL.D. BEGITTS PBOFESSOB OP MODEBN HISTOET FELLOW Of OBIEt COLLEGE HONOBARY FELLOW OF TEINITT COLLEGE y o n b n MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 188G [All rights reserved] 2> 7 PRINTED BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY PREFACE. THESE are the Lectures referred to in the last paragraph of the Preface to the course on the " Methods of Historical Study," lately published. I have added to them the second of two articles which appeared in the Contemporary Review for 1884. The former of them, "Some Neglected Periods of European History," I have not reprinted, as its substance will be found in the present course. The second, " Greek Cities under Roman Rule," as dealing somewhat more in detail with some points which are barely glanced at in the present course, seemed to make a fitting Appendix to it. I find that the same thought as to the political result of modern scientific inventions which is brought out at pp. 184, 185 of these Lectures is also brought out in the Lecture at Edinburgh, reprinted in my little took "Greater Greece and Greater Britain," published last May. This kind of thing is always likely to happen in lectures given in different places. It seemed to me that the thought came naturally in both lectures, and that either would lose something by its being struck out. As for those who may be so unlucky as to read both, I can only say that a 3 vi PREFACE. a thought which is worth suggesting once is worth sug- gesting twice. At least I have often found it so in the writings of others, specially in those of Mr. Grote. The two courses of Oxford lectures which have now been printed are both introductory. In this present course the division into periods which is attempted is, on the face of it, only one among many which might be made. Another man might divide on some principle altogether different; I might myself divide on some other principle in another course of lectures. My present object was to set forth as strongly as possible, at the beginning of my teaching here, the main outlines of European history, as grouped round its central point, the Roman power. The main periods suggested by such a view of things are those which concern the growth and the dying-out of that power Europe before the growth of Rome Europe with Rome, in one shape or another, as her centre Europe since Rome has practically ceased to be. When this main outline, a somewhat formal one, has once been established, it is easy at once to fill in and to subdivide in an endless number of ways and from an endless number of points of view. Thus I have at present little to do with the political develope- ment of particular nations. Of some branches of that subject I have treated at some length in other shapes ; I may, in the course of my work here, have to treat of others. But they are not my subject now. Nor have I now to deal with the great events and the great institutions of Europe, except so far as they helped to work out the one main outline which I have tried to draw. The power of the Popes may be looked at in a thousand ways ; it con- PREFACE. vii cerns me now only in its strictly Roman aspect, as one, and the greatest, of the survivals of Roman power. The great French Revolution again may be looked on in a thousand ways. It concerns me now as having led to the sweeping away of the last relics of the old Roman tradition, and as having set up for a while the most memorable of conscious imitations of the Roman power. I say all this, that no one may be disappointed if he fails to find in this thin volume even a summary of all European history, much less a philosophical discussion of all European history. My business now is simply to draw an outline, ready either for myself or for others to fill up in various ways. These two introductory courses make up the result of my public work as Professor during my first year of office, 1884-5. Besides these, there was the minute study of Gregory of Tours with a smaller class, followed by the like study of Paul the Deacon. In my second year, 1885-6, I have, besides this study of texts, been engaged, as I said in my former Preface, with public lectures of a much more minute kind, on the history of the Teutonic nations in Gaul. These I do not design to publish as lectures. If I li ve long enough, I trust to make my way through them to an older subject of mine, the Teutonic settlements in Britain. Neither the history of Gaul nor the history of Britain in the fifth century A.D. can be fully understood it follows that the whole later history of the two lands cannot be fully understood without comparing it with the history of the other land. In dealing with Goths, Burgundians, and Franks, the comparison and contrast with Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, if it sometimes passes out of the imme- viii PREFACE. diate sight, must never be allowed to pass out of the mind's eye. The broad light of the history of Gaul is the best comment on the yet more instructive darkness of the history of Britain. This subject brings me at once within the range of con- troversy. I believe that the doctrine for which I have struggled so long, the doctrine, as I have somewhere put it epigramatically, that we, the English people, are our- selves and not somebody else, is now often held to be alto- gether set aside. Only a few old-fashioned people like myself are thought likely to maintain it. Yet, whenever I come across these new lights, I always begin to doubt whether those who kindle them have ever minutely con- trasted the circumstances or the results of the Teutonic settlements in Britain with those of the better known Teutonic settlements in Gaul. Now this is the very root of the matter; in discoursing of the phsenomena of Gaul, I have always had an eye to the phsenomena of Britain, and I trust some day, if I am ever able to work through my materials, to set forth the contrast in full. To this object the lectures which I am now gradually giving will, I hope, serve ; but it will be best to put no essential part of them forth to the world till I can deal with the subject as a whole. Till then I will simply put on record, for the benefit of those who may have heard statements attributed to me which they have certainly not read in my writings, that I have nowhere said, because I never thought, that every one Briton was necessarily killed, even in those parts of Britain which became most thoroughly Teutonic. At the same time, I think, that every one who really reads PREFACE. ix his Gregory and his Baeda, every one who carefully compares the map of Gaul with the map of Britain, every one who stops to think over the history of the French and the English tongues and the history of the Welsh tongue too will not do him any harm may possibly come to the conclusion that the doctrine that Englishmen after all are Englishmen has really some little to be said for it. 1 6, ST. GILES', OXFORD, October 1 8, 1886. on LECTURE I. PAGE EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER .... i LECTURE II. ROME THE HEAD OP EUROPE ..... LECTURE III. ROME AND THE NEW NATIONS ..... * 2 LECTURE IV. THE DIVIDED EMPIRE ..... . t IO4 LECTURE V. SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE . . . . . . l ^ LECTURE VI. THE WORLD ROMELESS . . . . . . !*, 209 241 LECTUKE I. EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. IN my first course of public lectures I did my best to speak in a general way of the nature of historical study, of its kindred pursuits, of the difficulties by which it is beset and of the most hopeful means of overcoming them. I spoke of the nature of the evi- dence with which we have to deal in the search after historic truth, and of the nature of the witnesses by whom that evidence is handed down to us. In future courses I trust to apply the principles which I then strove to lay down to the study of some of the most memorable periods since the point at which, if at any point, the special business of this chair begins. That we have ruled to be the point at which the Teu- tonic and Slavonic nations first began to play a chief part in the great drama of the history of Western man. In the present term I ask your attention to a course which will attempt to fill a place intermediate between these two, and which may naturally serve as a link be- tween them. Now that we have laid down rules for the general guidance of our studies, while we are look- ing forward to a more minute dealing with the history of some specially memorable lands and times, we may, as the intermediate stage, do our best to part off the B 2 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. history of man, such parts of it at least as concern us, into a few great and strongly-marked periods. In my former course, while taking a very general view of my whole subject, I did not feel myself bound to keep within any artificial limits, whether of my own fixing or of any other man's. When speaking of evidence and of authorities, I drew my illustrations as freely from centuries before our aera as from centuries after it. In my present course I must make a yet more direct and open raid into the territories of my ancient brother. The history of the Teuton and the Slave, since the days when those races came to the forefront m of the nations in the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of our aera, will be simply unintelligible if we do not attempt at least a general picture of that elder world into which they made their way, and of the course of events which gave that world the shape in which they found it. But my sojourn in the lands which are ruled to belong to another will not be a long one ; before a ^evrfKaa-la or an Alien Act can be hurled at me, I shall be gone. It will be only for the space of about a thousand years that I need tarry bevond the frontier which after all is a frontier of V my own choosing. And I shall always welcome my ancient brother on a return visit of at least the same length. If I claim to walk lightly at his side through the ages between the first Olympiad and the great Teutonic invasion of Gaul, I bid him walk more steadily, more abidingly, at my side through the ages between the Teutonic invasion of Gaul and the Otto- man conquest of Trebizond. In my next academic ROME THE CENTRE OF HISTORY. 3 year I shall not need to ask leave to play truant even for so short a space as I have spoken of. My main subject will then lie fully within the barrier. We shall cross the Ehine and the Channel with the Vandal and the Saxon of the fifth century. And if it may still be sometimes needful to look back to Anninius and Ariovistus, to remember that men of our own stock fought against Gaius Julius and Gaius Marius, we can in return again call on our elder brethren to look forward for a far longer space, to assure them that we hold them thoroughly at home, not only in the Eome, Western or Eastern, of any age, but in the Aquae Grani of Frankish Caesars and in the Jerusalem of Lotharingian Kings. There is one truth which in one sense I need not set forth again it has been my lot to set it forth so often but which I must none the less set forth almost every time that I open ray mouth among you, for it must be the groundwork of my whole teaching, as it is the groundwork of all sound historic teaching. This is the truth that the centre of our studies, the goal of our thoughts, the point to which all paths lead and the point from which all paths start again, is to be found in Kome and her abiding power. It is, as I said the first time I came before you, one of the greatest of the evils which spring from our arti- ficial distinctions where there are no distinctions in nature, from our formal barriers where there are no barriers in fact, that this greatest and simplest of historic truths is thereby wholly overshadowed. He B 2 4 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. who ends his work in 476 and he who begins his work in 476 can neither of them ever understand in its fulness the abiding life of Rome, neither can fully grasp the depth and power of that truest of proverbial sayings which speaks of Rome as the Eternal City. And none but those who have thoroughly grasped the place of Rome in the history of the world can ever fully understand the most notable historic feature of the age in which we ourselves live. We live in an age from which Rome has passed away, an age at least in which Rome has lost her headship. And, by one of the wonderful cycles of history, the Romeless world from which Rome has passed away is in not a few points a return to the elder Romeless world on which Rome had not yet risen. In both alike the European world lacks a centre ; in both alike, each city or nation does what is right in its own eyes, without even the theory of a controlling power. The fuller carrying out of this analogy I keep for the last lecture of the present course. I have now only to divide my subject into three great and marked periods. We have Europe before the headship of Rome arose. We have Europe under the headship of Rome, even if that headship was sometimes disputed and divided. Lastly, we have Europe since the head- ship of Rome has altogether passed away. It is the first of these three periods of which I wish to give such a sketch to-day as may at least put it in its right relation to the periods which follow it. But there is one aspect in which all those periods form one whole ; there is one tie which binds ail THE "ETERNAL EASTERN QUESTION." 5 three together ; there has been one abiding duty which has been laid on Aryan Europe in all her phases, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. One "question" has, in the cant of the day, been "awaiting its solution," from the beginning of re- corded history, and from a time long before recorded history. That is the question on which a shallow sneerer, in the lucky wisdom of his blindness, be- stowed the epithet of " Eternal." Happily indeed did he transfer to that abiding strife the epithet of the city whose sons bore so long and mighty a part in it. It is the " Eternal Eastern Question," the imdying question between the civilization of the West and the barbarism of the East, a question which has here and there taken into its company such side issues as the strife between freedom and bondage, between Christendom and Islam, but which is in its essence simply that yet older strife of whose earlier stages Herodotus so well grasped the meaning. It is a strife which has, as far as we can look back, put on the familiar shape of a strife between East and West. And in that abiding strife, that Eternal Question, the men of the Eternal City, Scipio and Sulla, Trajan and Julian, played their part well indeed; but it was waged before them and after them as far back as the days of Agamemn6n and Achilleus, as near to the present moment as the days of Codring- ton and Skobeleff. In all ages, from the earliest to the latest, before the championship passed to Rome and after it had passed away from Rome, two great and abiding duties have been laid on Aryan Europe 6 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. and on the several powers of Aryan Europe. They have been called on to develope the common institu- tions of the great family within its own borders ; and they have been called on to defend those borders and those institutions against the inroads of the bar- barian from without. When our historic scene first opens, those twofold duties were laid on a small branch of the European family, and that the branch that dwelled nearest to the lands of the enemy. It is not without a cause that those lands of Europe which lie nearest to Asia we might almost add, those lands of Asia which are historically part of Europe are in their physical construction the most European of Euro- pean lands. Europe is the continent of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas ; the lands round the ./Egaean, its Asiatic as well as its European shore, form more thoroughly a world of islands, peninsulas, and inland seas than any other part of Europe or of the world. The Greek land was made for its people, and the Greek people for their land. I remember well the saying of one in this place with whom geographical insight is an instinct, that neither the Greeks in any other land nor any other people in Greece could have been what the Greeks in Greece actually were. The mission of the Greek race was to be the teachers, the lights, the beacons, of mankind, but not their rulers. They were to show what man could be, in a narrow space and in a short space of time ; they were to show every faculty developed to its highest point, to give models of every form of political constitution, of THE GREEKS AND THEIR LAND. 7 every form of intellectual life, to bring to perfection among themselves and to hand on to all future ages that most perfect form of human speech, a living knowledge of which is still the one truest test of the highest culture. Greece was given to be the mistress of the world in the sense of being the world's highest intellectual teacher ; it was not hers to be the mistress of the world in the sense in which that calling fell to another of the great peninsulas of southern Europe. Deep and abiding as has been the influence of old Greece on every later age, her in- fluence has been almost wholly indirect ; it has been an influence of example, of precept, of warning ; it has not been an influence of direct cause and effect. In one sense the world could never have been what it now is if the men of old Hellas had not lived and fought and thought and sung. But it is in another sense from that in which we say that the world could not be what it now is if the men of old Borne had not lived and fought, and we will not say thought and sung, but ruled and judged the nations. It is indeed no small thought, it is one of the most quickening and ennobling of thoughts, that those men of Hellas were our kinsfolk, men of the same great family as ourselves, men whose institutions and whose -Nsneech are simply other and older forms of the speech and institutions of our own folk. The ancient lore alike of Greece and of England puts on a keener charm when we see in the Agore before Ilios the same gathering under well nigh the same forms as we see in the Marzfeld beneath the walls of 8 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. Rheirns and in the Gemot beneath the walls of London. We seem more at home alike in either age when we see the eraipoi, the OepaTrovres, that fought around Achilleus rise again in the true gesffias, the faithful }>egnas, of our own folk, in Lilla who gave his life for Eadwine and in the men who died, thegn-like, their lord hard by, around the corpse of Brihtnoth at Maldon. Still all this is but likeness, example, analogy, derivation from a common source ; we are dealing, not with forefathers but with elder brethren. The laws of Lykourgos and Solon have passed away; it is the laws of Servius and Justinian that still abide. The empire of Myke'ne', the democracy of Athens, the league of Achaia, are all things of the past. If the Empire of Rome is no longer a thing of the present, if it has passed away, if it is dead and buried, it is well to remember that there are still men living who have seen its funeral. I am myself not old enough to have seen its funeral ; but I have before now seen some look amazed when I told them that I had lived on the earth for twelve years along with a man who had once been Emperor of the Romans. The days before the Roman power may be looked on as in some sort the preface to a volume the last page of which is not written, as the porch of a build- ing which still stands and which architects to come may still add to or take from. It is with Rome that the chapters of the book itself begin ; it is Rome that reared the first still inhabited chambers of the house. INFLUENCE OF GREECE. 9 Or we may rather say that the tale of the days before Eome is a summary, short and brilliant, of all that man has done or can do. The tale of Hellas shows us a glorified ideal of human powers, held up to the world for a moment to show what man can be, but to show us also that such he cannot be for long. And herein is the highest glory of Greece ; herein is the highest value of the tongue and history of Greece as supplying the truest and noblest teach- ing for the mind of man. In no other study are we so truly seeking knowledge simply to raise and school the mind ; in none do we so sharply draw the still abiding, line between those who have gone through the refining furnace of those immortal studies and the barbarians sometimes the self-con- demned barbarians -who stand without. When we study the tongue, the laws, the history, of our own people, of any people of our immediate kindred, of that people who, whether conquering or conquered, were still the masters of us all, we are as it were engaged in our own work, we are busy with the toil of our own daily life ; it is still something of a business, something of a calling. In our Hellenic studies we stand on a loftier height, we breathe a purer air, even as the peak of Olympos overtops the height of Alba. We master the tongue of Latium, because it is still the tongue of no small part of the business of practical life, because it meets us at every turn as an essential part of our own law, our own history, our very daily being. We master the tongue of Hellas as being in itself the first and 10 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. noblest form of tLe common speech, as the tongue which, in its native and unborrowed strength, brought forth the greatest master-pieces of every form of lettered utterance, those master-pieces which none can know save those who can follow the very words of the poet, the orator, the philosopher himself, and who are not at the mercy of some blind guide who vainly strives to reproduce those living words in ruder tongues. After long years of familiar knowledge, we need hardly sigh for the days when those deathless works were fresh to us. The tale of Ilios and Ithake 1 , the oldest inheritance of the common folk, the oldest picture of the common household, is ever living, ever fresh. We can but pity the doom of those who, by their own act or by the act of others, are shut out from it. The beginnings then of European history, more strictly perhaps the beginnings of the brilliant pro- logue to unbroken European history, will be found in the borderlands of Europe and Asia, among the islands and peninsulas of the ^Egaean sea. I am speaking now of history in the narrower sense, of the continuous political history of man. With the strangers who lay without the great brotherhood, ancient as may have been their power, mighty as may have been their works, we have to deal only when they come across the men of our own house- hold. We begin in short with the first beginnings of the recorded history of Greece, with the first Olympiad as a conventional date, but not forgetting BEGINNINGS OF GREEK HISTORY. 11 times before the first Olympiad so far as our earliest pictures carry us back to yet older times. I cleave to the date which I proposed in my Inaugural Lecture. I have to be sure come across a singular objection from a critic in this place. I have been told that, by beginning with the first Olympiad, I leave out all Mahometan history. There are then, one must think, those who believe that all Mahometan history took place before the first Olympiad. " Felices errore suo." I can only heartily wish that it were so, and that the Ottoman was a thing as dead and gone as the Hittite. I fear that, beginning with 776 B.C., nay even if we begin with the mystic year 476 A.D., we shall still have all Mahometan history in front of us, and that the needs of our tale will drive us to take not a few glimpses at that side of the world. From the very beginning we have to do with powers which filled the same place in the world which the Mahometan powers filled in after ages, the powers against which our eldest brethren had to wage the earlier stages of the strife which still is waging. With ingenious speculations as to the earliest origin, the earliest settlements, the earliest forms of speech, of the Hellenic folk, I am not, in such a summary as tins, called on to concern myself. I gladly leave them to my ancient brother. I have to deal with the Greek when he appears on the stage of the world as the first champion of the great cause and as waging a strife against worthy rivals. One people alone in the barbarian world have even the shadow of a right to be placed side by side, to be dealt with 12 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. as ebenbiirtig, with the men of Hellas. In the men of Canaan the men of Hellas had to acknowledge rivals who were largely forerunners and in some sort masters. Greece had ships, colonies, and commerce ; but Phoenicia had ships, colonies, and commerce in days earlier still. How high in all the material arts the Phoenician stood above the earliest Greek we see in our earliest picture of Hellenic life. Not to speak of lesser gifts, we all bear in our minds that it was from the Phoenician that Hellas must first have learned to carve the abiding records of man's thought on the stone, on the brazen or wooden tablet, on the leaves of Egypt and on the skins of Pergamon. The political life of Greece was her own ; that assuredly was no borrowed gift from Tyre or Sidon ; yet Tyre and Sidon and that mightier Carthage whose institu- tions Aristotle studied had a political life of their own which brought them nearer to the Hellenic level than any other people beyond the Aryan fold. Only, if we must admit that the men of Canaan were on some points the teachers of the men of Hellas, yet it was the men of Hellas and not the men of Canaan to whom destiny had given the call to be the teachers of the world. It is a strange destiny by which the people who gave Greece the art of writing should have left to us no writings to hand down to us the thoughts and deeds of a world of their own that has passed away. Strange destiny that, while so large a part of the acts of the Phoenician are recorded by Greek and Roman enemies, while the tongue of the Phoenician may be said still to live for us in the THE GREEKS AND THEIR NEIGHBOURS. 13 speech of the kindred Hebrew, yet the direct memorials of so great a people should not go beyond a few coins, a few inscriptions, a few ruins of cities which once held their place among the mightiest of the earth. Our scene then opens with the picture of the Greek while still shut up in his own special land of islands and peninsulas. We ask not for our purposes how and whence he came thither ; we ask not the exact measure of his kindred in blood and speech to the other nations around him. It is enough for us that the Greek is not wholly isolated, that he is not merely one pf the great Aryan family, but that he is the foremost among a group of nations who are bound to him by some closer tie than that which binds together all the branches of the great Aryan family. The exact degree of kindred between Greeks and Thracians or Phrygians we may leave to other inquirers ; it is enough for us that there was the common Aryan kindred, and seemingly something more. But it is one of the leading facts of history that Greece had to deal on her immediate northern frontier, on the opposite coasts of Asia, on the opposite coasts of Italy and Sicily, with nations which, for historical purposes at least, were nearer still. Those nations had, to say the least, a power of adopting Greek ways, a power of becoming Greeks by adoption if not by birth. The boundary line between the Greek and the Epeirot, faint in the earliest days of Greece, seems for some ages to be drawn sharper and sharper. Then the tide turns ; 14 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. suddenly the Epeirots, the people of the oldest Hellas, the guardians of the oldest of Hellenic oracles, stand forth again in their elder character. Molottian Pyrrhos wages Western wars as a Hellenic champion and the kingdom of Pyrrhos settles down at last into a well-ordered Greek confederation. So it is in Macedonia ; so it is in Sicily; so it is in the Greater Hellas on Italian soil. All these lands, and other lands beside, become, for a longer or shorter time, part of the immediate Greek world, no less than Attica or Peloponnesos. Greek colonization and Macedonian conquest had, each in its turn, a share in the work, and both were in many lands not a little helped by real, if unconscious, kindred on the part of those whom colonists and conquerors found already in possession. Every colony, every conquest, not only won new lands for the Greek settlers them- selves, but increased the Greek nation in its wider sense by multitudes who became Greek by adoption, and in whose case the work of adoption was made more easy by the existence of earlier ties of which neither side had thought. As time goes on, as we reach the days when Greek influences were most widely spread over the Mediterranean lands, we may easily trace out zones within zones, marking out the different stages by which the Greek element grows fainter and fainter. First there is the centre of all, the original Hellas itself. Then there are the genuine colonies of old Hellas, detached fragments of Hellenic soil translated to foreign coasts. Then there are the kindred lands whose people were fully FORMS OF GREEK INFLUENCE. 15 adopted into the Hellenic fold. Beyond them again lie the kingdoms ruled by Macedonian princes, where a few great cities which we must call Greek by the law of adoption are planted in lands which have received at the outside only the faintest varnish of Hellenic culture. Lastly, beyond these again, there are the barbarian lands whose princes, like barbarian princes in our own day, made a show of adopting Greek speech and Greek culture, but where the foreign tastes of the princes had no real effect on their kingdoms, and which we cannot look on as forming part of the Greek world in the laxest sense. Such was Parthia ; such was Pontos. Is it too much to add to the barbarian kingdoms of the East the mighty commonwealth of the West which had once been' in Greek eyes no less barbarian ? It is no small part of our oecumenical story to mark how far Home became Greek and how far Rome refused to become Greek. The facts belong to a later time ; yet in some sort they form .part of our present survey. The Rome which brought the Greek lands step by step, first under Roman influence, then under Roman dominion, was a Rome which had already come within the magic circle of Hellenic teaching ; while keeping the essential essence of the national life untouched, while remaining truly Roman in every political institution, in every detail of law and government, she became Greek for every purpose of refined and intellectual life. Nay, Rome became, like Macedonia, a disciple that gathered in fresh disciples. Wherever Rome's political life spread, 16 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. some measure, greater or less, of Greek intellectual life spread with it. The history of Europe before the Roman power is in truth the history of the stages by which the Greek mind made its way to this general supremacy over the civilized world, and in some sort beyond the bounds of the civilized world. Within the range of this supremacy of the Greek mind comes the narrower range of the political supremacy of powers which were either Greek from the beginning or which had become Greek by adoption. The supremacy of the Greek mind has never ceased, and is still abiding. Greek intell ectual dominion has formed one side of the whole modern world ; the advance of Greek political power has wrought the lesser, but by no means unim- portant, work of forming one of the nations of the modern world. The modern Greek nation, meaning thereby something more than the inhabitants either of the existing Greek kingdom or of the continuous Hellas of old times, is the fruit of old Greek colonization, followed up by Macedonian conquest. I said years ago that Alexander was the founder of the modern Greek nation, and I say so still. This saying may seem to shut out the work of earlier Greek coloniza- tion, above all in those lands of Sicily and southern Italy which we have spoken of as having been admitted by adoption within the immediate Greek world. The truth is that Greek colonization has nowhere been fully lasting, it has nowhere left its abiding traces on the modern world, except where Macedonian conquest came to strengthen it. This BOUNDARIES OF GREEK INFLUENCE. 17 enables us to fix a boundary for the lands which were permanently admitted within the immediate Greek world. That boundary is the Hadriatic. West of the Hadriatic Greek life has died out. The outlying Greek colonies in Gaul and Spain, deep as was their influence on Gaul, had ceased to be Greek before the great nations of modern Europe came into being. Even southern Italy and Sicily, where Greek life was strengthened by their long connexion with the Greek Rome on the Bosporos, have ceased to be Greek for some ages. The lands in which a series of invaders of whom Pyrrhos of Molottis was the last and greatest strove in vain to set up a Western Greek dominion, have fallen away from the Greek world. But the work which Alexander of Epeiros failed to do in the West was largely done by his more famous nephew and name- sake in the East. If a great part of Alexander's conquests were but for a short time, another great part of them was abiding. The work of Alex- ander and Seleukos fixed a line fluctuating between the Euphrates and the Tigris, as a long abiding boundary of European dominion. It fixed Tauros, the boundary of Alexander's first Asiatic conquests, as a far more abiding boundary of European life. I have had to point out in two hemispheres, but I must point out again, how very nearly the actual range of the modern Greek nation agrees with the range of old Greek colonization east of Hadria. It has advanced at some points and it has gone back at others ; but its general extent is wonderfully the same. It is 18 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. an extent which in both ages has been fixed by the genius of the people. Nowhere out of the old con- tinuous Hellas does the Greek people, none the less Greek because largely Greek by adoption, spread from sea to sea. Throughout a large part of eastern Europe and western Asia the Greek is the represen- tative of European and civilized life on the whole sea-coast. The world of peninsulas and islands is the world of the Greek now, exactly as it was in the days of the Homeric Catalogue. It is, as we held in our former course, with that Catalogue, the first written record of European politics, that our survey of Europe before the Koman Power must open. With all who can take a general grasp of history and who understand the nature of evidence, the Domesday of the Empire of Myk^nd, puzzling to the mere porer over two or three arbitrarily chosen centuries, commands full belief. We ruled it in our former inquiry to be the highest example of a general rule, " Credo quia impossibile." In the Catalogue we see the people of many islands and of all Argos, grouped under the Bretwalda of Hellas, already engaged in a stage, and not the earliest stage, of the Eternal Question. Herodotus, who better knew the meaning of the world's history than the diplo- matists of modern days, could point, in a mythical shape indeed, to stages earlier still. Whether there ever was a personal Agamemnon and a personal Odys- seus matters but little ; it matters far more that the keen eye of ./Elfred, who knew the relation of an over- lord and his vassal princes, could see the relation FIRST GLIMPSES OF GREECE. 19 between Ulixes with his two kingdoms and the Casere Agamemnon of whom he held them. That Casere, kingliest among the kingly, (3aari\evrepos in the throng of (3ao-i\tjes, is already doing the work of a Trajan or a Frederick ; he is fighting for Europe on the shores of Asia. The work of Greek colonization has begun ; Crete, to be won again ages after from the Saracen, is already won from the Phoenician; Ehodes is already admitted to Hellenic fellowship, to see in after days the might of Antigonos and the might of Mahomet shattered beneath her walls. The southern coast of Asia is still untouched ; Miltos is a barbarian city; but Achilleus has won Lesbos as his own prize, and on the mainland the work is doing which was to make the coasts of the Hellespont and the Propontis a foremost outpost of Greece and Europe, the land which was to witness the first exploits of the first crusaders and to behold the Eastern Eome rise to a fresh life under the firm rule of the Emperors of Nikaia. Deem we as we will as to minuter details, as we have in the Homeric poems our first glimpse of Aryan society in peace and war, so we have in them our first record, if only in a poetic form, of one stage of the great strife which changed the barbarian peninsula of Asia into that solid home of Grecian speech and Eoman law which for ages held up against the ceaseless inroads of the Arabian con- querors. To the west, to the north, our range of sight is narrower. No colonist from Argos and its islands has made his way to Italy or Sicily ; Akar- nania is still part of the vague Mainland, the still C 2 20 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. undefined Epeiros ; Korkjra is still a land of fable on which no settler from Corinth has set foot. But there are signs which already point to the kindred of the nations on both sides of the Ionian sea. The Sikel dwells on both coasts ; even of the more mysterious Sikan we get a passing glimpse. The northern coast of the ^Egsean is known ; but that coast is not yet Hellenic ; it significantly sends its warriors to fight on the Asiatic side. Further to the north, further to the west, all is wonder and mystery ; we may as well ask whether the poet had any conception of the site of London as whether he had any conception of the site of Rome. The eyes of infant Greece are still fixed on the East ; vague tidings had reached her of the wonders of the land by the river JEgypt ; the men of Sidon were her visitors, her traffickers, in some sort her teachers. But the wary sons of Canaan were too wise to tell all they knew of Western lands and Western seas. The gold of Tartessos was as yet for them only; for them only was the precious know- ledge that the pillars of Heraklds if Greece had as yet heard their name opened into no stream of Ocean parting the lands of the living and the dead, but into the boundless waters over which it was as yet for themselves alone to spread their sails. Let us take another glance at the Mediterranean world at a later time, a time when our historic evidence is still meagre and scattered, but when we have begun to leave mere legend behind us. It is one of the gams or losses of the wider study of history that it often teaches us to look at this and THE FIFTH CENTURY B.C. 21 that period with different eyes from those with which we naturally look at them when we are engaged only in the narrower study of special times and places. I well remember learning, and I well remember being startled as I learned, from the teaching of Mr. Finlay, that the age which we commonly look on as the most glorious in Grecian history, the fifth century before Christ, was in truth an age of Greek decline. The truth is that it was the greatest age in the history of Athens, and a crowd of causes lead us at every moment to mistake the history of Athens for the history of Greece. What we sometimes fail to gee Herodotus saw clearly. He saw that in the general history of the world the age of the Persian wars was, for the Greek people as a whole, the scattered Greek people all over the world, an age of decline. The fact that there was a Persian war, a Persian war waged in Greece, is enough to prove the saying. That fact of itself shows that that pro- cess had already begun which is still not ended, the long and gloomy work of which Finlay steeled him- self to write the story, the History of Greece under Foreign Domination. It is enough to prove Finlay's point that Mile'tos had learned to groan, as thrice- betrayed Joannina groans still, beneath the yoke of the barbarian. The periods when Greek influences had most sway over the whole world are two, one earlier, one later, than the more brilliant times of our usual studies. The earlier is the greater ; for it is the time when Hellas grew and spread and made wide her borders among the nations, by her own 22 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. unaided strength, the time when Hellenic coloniza- tion carried everywhere, not only Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts, but the higher boon of free Hellenic political life. In the later period Hellenic speech and Hellenic arts are spread more widely than they had ever been spread before ; but Hellenic political life is no longer carried with them. The external might of Greece is wielded for her by the kings of the adopted lands ; we have passed from Hellenic colonization to Macedonian conquest. In neither of those periods was the most vigorous Greek life to be found in old Greece itself; the most brilliant re- corded period of old Greece is the period between the two, the period of our most usual Greek studies. But it was the most brilliant because the outer bounds of Hellas had fallen back before victorious barbarians, and because old Greece rose up in a re- newed strength to avenge the wrongs of her colonies and to ward off the like bondage from herself. The Greece of the fifth century before Christ is like the Borne of the fourth century after Christ. Its war- fare is essentially defensive ; it seldom gains new ground ; it has much ado to defend old ground. It gains victories ; it wins territories ; but the victories are gained over threatening invaders, the territories that are won are won back from the grasp of those invaders. The work of Kimon, the work of Agesilaos, answers rather to the work of Galerius and Valen- tinian than to the work of those conquerors of realms wholly new who made Sicily a Greek and Gaul a Roman land. WIDEST EXTENT OF HELLAS. 23 It is hard to fix on the exact moment when free and independent Hellas for remember that where- ever Hellenes dwell there is Hellas had spread itself most widely over the Mediterranean coasts. For boundaries fluctuate, and Hellas still advanced at some points after she had begun to fall back at others. But we cannot be far wrong in picking out some time not far from the beginning of the sixth century before Christ as the most brilliant time of the free Hellenes throughout the world. Then, as Herodotus puts it, all Greeks were still free ; it was in the course of the next century that some Greeks were brought under the power of barbarian masters. If some Greek colonies were still to be planted, all the fields of Greek colonization had already been opened. And in most of them the Greek cities were at the height of their power and greatness, positive and relative; they were greater than they were in after days, greater than the cities of old Greece were at the same time. It is one of the truths which it is hardest to take in, that there was a time when Miletos and Sybaris and Akragas, rather than Athens or Sparta, were the greatest cities of the Hellenic name. The like came again at a later time, when the greatest of Greek cities were Alexandria and Antioch. That the life of Athens and Sparta was the more abiding proves that the Greek was after all more at home on the soil on which he grew to be a Greek ; but the fact that, at one time the colonial, at another the Macedonian, cities altogether out- shone the older and truer Hellas is a fact which 24 EUROPE BEFORE TEE ROMAN POWER. should be ever borne in mind. In the great days of the Greek colonies the greater part of the Mediterranean coasts was divided between settlers from Greece and settlers from Phoenicia. In the eastern seas the Greek had the supremacy; the true life and strength of the men of Canaan had passed away from Sidon and Tyre to the Phoenician cities in the western Mediterranean, to Panormos in the great central island, to Gadeira on the Ocean, to Utica on the Libyan coast, to the New City which outshone her parents and elder sisters, to mighty Carthage, chief and in course of time mistress of her fellows. From the ^Egaean islands the Phoenician had withdrawn before the Greek ; even in more dis- tant Cyprus the Greek had gained the upper hand. Far to the south, on the Libyan mainland, the fertile coast between the Egyptian and the Carthaginian had beheld the growth of Kyr^ne and her sisters of the Greek Pentapolis. The Greek cities of Asia were among the most flourishing in the world ; the gates of the Bosporos had been thrown open ; the Pontos was no longer the Inhospitable but the Hospitable Sea ; if the most abiding seat of Hellenic freedom, Cherson on her Tauric peninsula, had not already sprung into being, the path had at least been opened for her. On the western side of her own peninsula, Greece was creeping up the Hadriatic coast; set- ting aside later settlements, setting aside doubtful tales of earlier settlements, Akarnania was now part of the Greek mainland, Korkyra was numbered among Greek islands, Ambrakia, perhaps Epidamnos THE GREEK COLONIES. 25 and Apollonia, had begun their course ; Greek cul- ture was spreading among the kindred nations; if narrower Hellenic feeling forbade to the Thesprotian and the Molottian any share in the Hellenic name, wider and more liberal inquirers did not deny their right. But, above all, this is the age of the greatness of the Greek folk in the lands west of Hadria, that greatness which so soon dwindled away, and which adventurous kings from Sparta and Epeiros strove in vain to restore. The Phoenician, whose settle- ments once studded the eastern and southern coasts of Sicily, is now driven into the north-western corner of the island; the Sicilian cities are among the foremost of the Greek name ; if Syracuse is less great than she was in days to come, it is because Akragas and Gela have not yet fallen from their first greatness. In southern Italy, alone in lands out of the old home, in a peninsular land recalling the old home, Hellas spreads from sea to sea; the Greater Greece holds the land firmly with her great cities ; Sybaris has reached the greatness from which she is soon to fall into utter nothingness ; Taras, not yet Latin Tarentum, has begun the long life some traces of which hang about her even in our own day. As for the Greek cities in the Western Mediterranean, Massalia and her feUows, their full day of greatness, their day of widest influence over barbarian neighbours, had as yet hardly come. But it was coming ; the work was begun. In that day Hellenic life is fully as vigorous and flourishing in the Western as in the Eastern lands. Continuous 26 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. Hellas lies between the two, for a moment less brilliant, of less influence in the world, than the two great ranges of Greek colonization on either side of it. But when the whole Mediterranean coast might seem to be divided between the Greek and the Phcenician, two lands stand marked as having supplied no home for the settlements of either. There was the land whose day of great- ness had gone by, and the land whose day of greatness was coming. By the banks of the Nile the site of Alexandria still stood unnoticed by all the wisdom of a thousand Pharaohs ; the Greek was already known in Egypt as a mercenary; he had not yet come to reign as a Preserver and a Benefactor. By the banks of the Tiber, Kome, perhaps already the head of Latium, not yet aspiring to be the head of the world or the head of Italy, was biding her time ; not yet herself conquering or colonizing, but strong enough, along with her valiant neighbours, to keep central Italy as an Italian land, in which neither the men of Hellas nor the men of Canaan should find a dwelling-place. This then, from the point of view of oecumenical history, is the time which saw the full height of strictly Hellenic greatness, the greatness of Hellenic commonwealths, the greatness of states which were Greek by birth and not only Greek by adoption. Let us pass on to the next strongly marked period, the days, stretching not very much beyond a century and a half, which are undoubtedly the most brilliant days in the life of some of the greatest cities of the WARFARE WITH PERSIA. 27 elder Hellas, and which have therefore often been mistaken for the whole history of the Greek people. Now, as Herodotus says, we can no longer say that all Greeks are free. In the course of the sixth century B.C. the work of Mummius and Mahomet begins ; Greeks now begin to be the subjects of foreign rulers. Barbarian powers such as Greeks had never yet had to deal with have arisen in East and West. Two such powers above all have come to the front, a mighty empire in the East, a mighty commonwealth in the West, an empire arid a com- monwealth which for some generations were to be names of fear throughout the Hellenic world. On the one side the old barbarian powers of Asia, powers which lay beyond the range of European history, have given way to a new barbarian power which forced itself within the European range, and which we may almost say had a right to force itself. It was not against the Hittite or the Assyrian that the strife had to be waged, but against the kindred Persian. An Aryan people had been misled in their course of wandering ; they had strayed into the land of morning ; they now turned their faces towards the setting sun, but they turned them only when it was too late, when they had already put on the guise of the lands of their sojourn and could show themselves among their European kinsfolk in no light but that of barbarian invaders. Yet we must pay our tribute to the long abiding national life and national energy which could so often rise again in full freshness after ages of bondage. It 28 EUROPE BEFORE THE ROMAN POWER. was no mean people which could twice spring into fresh being at the preaching of a national religion. It was in truth no small mission in the world's history that fell to the lot of the Aryan of Persia. Once the worthy rival of Greece, he rose again to be the worthy rival of Borne ; like the Greek, he could lead captive successive conquerors ; in the grasp of the Saracen, in the grasp of the Turk, his old life could still abide, and, if he bowed to the creed of Arabia, it was only by changing it into a new shape which made it before all things the creed of Persia. The Lydian reaped the first-fruits of Greek sub- jection ; the Persian threatened to turn the whole eastern half of Hellas, continuous and scattered, into part of a world-wide dominion. The King (3ajv ; the Greeks, the Griffons, of Western speakers were still everywhere 'Pw/matoi in their own eyes. Strange indeed is the opposition of names in these days. THE EMPERORS OF NIKAIA. 141 When we find 'Pwnaioi and Karlvot opposed, we seem to be carried back to the consulship of Manlius and Decius; when somewhat earlier we find a strife between f Pto/xa?ot and 'AA/3ai/o/, we seem to be car- ried back from the pages of Anna to the pages of Dionysios, from the reign of Alexios to the reign of Tullus. But now that Emperors, Kings, Despots, Dukes, Grand-Sires, outlying possessions of Italian commonwealths and Italian families, have become thick on the ground and still thicker on the waters, we can hardly use any other name than Greek to distinguish a prince or a people speaking the later shape of the tongue of Hellas from princes and people speaking the later shapes of the tongue of Latium. When we step within the range of theo- logical controversy, our difficulties become greater still. If we keep to our elder language, the special badge of the Roman will be that he denies the authority of the Koman Church. The Roman name, as the formal name of a power, ceased only in 1453, or rather in 1461. The Koman name, as the name of a people, can hardly be said to have even now passed away. But from 800 onwards we may fairly use such distinguishing forms as "Eastern" and "Byzantine" : from 1204 onwards we can hardly help adopting the Western language of the time, and speaking of those scattered fragments of the Eastern Empire which were still held by its own people as " Greek." The Empire of Nikaia may seem to have well proved its right to be looked on as the true successor 142 SUE VIVALS OF EMPIRE. of the old Empire by the great exploit of winning back the Imperial city. For eight hundred years we have had to deal with powers that win back oftener than with powers that can be strictly said to advance; but to win back Constantinople in the thirteenth century was to gain a richer prize than even to win back Eome in the sixth. Without Constantinople an East- Roman or Greek Empire might seem to have no position in the face of the world. In possession of Constantinople, it might seem to be brought back to something like its old place among powers and nations. Still the Empire of the Palaiologoi was but a feeble representative, a mere shadow and survival, not only of the Empire of the Macedonians, but of the Empire of the Kom- nnoi. For a while it was an advancing power in Europe ; even when its northern frontiers had fallen back before the Bulgarian, the Servian, the Ottoman himself, it could still advance in the old Greek lands. It showed the Byzantine power of revival in its last and strangest form, when the whole of Peloponne"sos, bating the points held by Venice, was again united under a Greek prince. In those days it was something for the Roman Empire to outlive the principality of Achaia, days when the Isle of Pelops formed the main body of an Empire of which the city of Constantine was the distant head. If the last Emperor of the West took his crown at Bologna, the last Emperor of the East took his on the spot which had been Sparta. But "Emperor of the East" I should not say. That is one of the many VARIOUS GREEK EMPIRES. 143 conventional ways of describing the princes of the Eastern Rome, the use of which may sometimes help to turn a sentence. But no prince reigning at Con- stantinople ever called himself Emperor of the East, and there was another prince who did. In those days Empires arose and fell with speed in the Eastern world. Even before 1204, a stranger born on English soil, a Count of Poitou whom a strange chance made also King of England, had the privilege of overthrowing an Emperor of the Romans whose Empire was bounded by the isle of Cyprus. Master of that island, that old battle-field of Aryan and Semitic man, he had the wisdom to get rid of an useless possession, and to bestow it as a kingdom on a vassal of his own who had lately been King of Jerusalem. So, after the great crash of the Latin conquest, momentary Emperors had reigned in Epeiros and at Thessalonikd. But there was yet another Imperial claimant whose power, like that of him of Mkaia, was more than momentary. It should never be forgotten that the last fragment of Greek-speak- ing Roman power that the world saw lingered on, not in Megarian Byzantium but at Arkadian Trebi- / zond. As the northern shore of the Euxine saw the last Greek commonwealth, so its southern shore saw the last Greek Empire. For Greek we must call it. The Komndnos at Trebizond, admitting the superiority of the Palaiologos at Constantinople, cast aside his Roman style, and called himself among other titles Emperor of the East. The West had long before heard of an Emperor of Britain and of 144 SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE. an Emperor of the Spains ; but now for the first time in the East a man was found calling himself {3aa-i\us and avroKpartop, but (3aan\v$ and avTOKpartop of something else and not 'PcoAtmW. But an Em- peror of the East, an Emperor of all the East, irda-w r^y avaToXijs, still keeps about him something of the sublimity of vagueness ; his Imperial style has a better sound than the Imperial style of a German duchy or a negro island; an Emperor of the East does not seem to be cabined, cribbed, confined, within quite such a paltry space as an Emperor of Hayti or an Emperor of Austria. Still a prince who called himself Emperor, but did not dare to call himself Emperor of the Komans, proclaimed himself by his very style to be, to use the most civil words, a shadow and a survival. Indeed there is a curious analogy between the survival at Trebizond and the survival at Vienna. The Komnenos and the Lothar- ingian each cast aside his Eoman style, to carry on the business, as our own expounder of things Im- perial puts it, under another name. But, if we cannot allow the so-called Empires of Cyprus, Epeiros, and Trebizond, or even the restored Byzantine Empire of the Palaiologoi, to be more than shadows and survivals of the old Roman Empire of the East, they did at least continue it in the sense in which any whole may be said to be continued in its fragments. We can hardly say that that Empire was in the same sort continued either in the Turkish Sultanate of Bourn or in the Latin Empire of Romania. Truly they are shadows and survivals of the old THE LATIN EMPIRE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 145 Empire ; but shadows and survivals of a different kind from those at Epeiros and Trebizond. That the Seljuk lords of Nikaia should have been called Sultans of Eoum, that the Ottoman lord of Constan- tinople and his people should bear the same Roman name among the nations of the further East, that, before the Ottoman was lord of Constantinople, Bajazet should have been addressed by Timour as the Reiser of Eoum, all these things are strange and startling tributes to the abiding life of the Koman name, but of little more than the name. The Latin Empire of Romania is more remarkable. Two or three centuries earlier, if a band of Western warriors had made their way into Constantinople, their most obvious legal pretext, if they had sought for a legal pretext, would have been the establishment of the authority of the Emperor crowned at Kome over the Eastern as well as the Western portion of the Empire. To German crusaders such a thought might possibly have presented itself even in the thirteenth century; Constantinople might have been claimed for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with more show of reason than Prussia or Livonia. But the thought was not likely to come into the minds of Frenchmen, of Flemings, of Venetians so lately themselves vassals of the Eastern Emperor, of Italians other than the most zealous Ghibelins. Earlier crusaders had consented to become liegemen of Alexios Komn6nos, and if some refused or de- layed, it was certainly not out of loyalty to Henry of Franconia. The men of Pisa, firm stay of Caesar L 146 SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE. in the West, did Dot scruple to fight for his Eastern rival against the Latin invaders. That the chief of the conquerors took the title of Emperor was in itself a confession that Constantinople was a lawful seat of Empire ; but difficulties on either side might hinder the authors of the new Imperial style from literally translating 'Pw/ua/coj/ /Sao-tXeJ? as the description of a Latin potentate. The style became territorial ; Baldwin and Henry shrank, not un- reasonably, from calling themselves Emperors of the Eoman people, but they did not shrink from pro- claiming themselves Emperors of a Eoman land. A strange position it was that the Latin Emperors of Eomania held during the two generations of their rule in Constantinople. Almost more strange is the long cleaving of Western opinion to their supposed rights after the Greek princes and people again held their old home. We may then, I think, fix, with some confidence, the year 1 204 as the time when the true Eoman Em- pire of the East came to an end. The various Greek powers continue it, but they continue it only as frag- ments ; none of them can claim to be the very thing itself, however cut short. But they are genuine fragments ; if not the very thing itself, they are pieces of it. In the East 'Poyxcuot had become the name of a nation, distinct and easily recognized, if artificial, and Trebizond and Epeiros, no less than Constantinople, sheltered fragments of that divided nation. The Western Empire in its later, its purely German, shape, does not in the same way continue THE LATER GERMAN EMPERORS. 147 the national existence of any people that could be called even artificial Eomans. It continues Eoman titles and memories ; as so doing, it is a true survival of the Koman power, but it has passed away from all Eoman national life to become no small element in the national life of another people. It became the Holy Koman Empire of the German Nation, and the German nation felt itself lifted up by having the Holy Roman Empire in its keeping. After 1250 we begin to feel that there is something incongruous even in the Imperial coronation. The personal dig- nity of Henry of Luxemburg veils the fact that even he was not like the Franks and the Swabians ; Lewis of Bavaria is rather the great subject of Imperial theories than a doer of any Imperial deeds. We come to Charles the Fourth and Frederick the Third ; the crowning of Charles at Eome may be bracketted with his crowning at Aries, and Frederick will call forth a smile on the most Ghibelin of lips, as we see him in cope and crown, Augustus and Pater Patriss and something like Pontifex as well, in that strange gathering of men of all ages which keeps watch over his penniless son at Innsbruck. On the other hand, if the Eastern survivals, unlike the Western, kept on a national being which might in some sort be called Eoman, the Western, the German, shadow of Empire had the advantage of unity. It was one survival and not many. There is no formal break between 800 and 1806. The difference is the differ- ence between a thing which is utterly broken in pieces, but of which each fragment keeps, so far as L 2 148 SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE. a fragment can, the character of the whole, and a thing which lives on, which never loses its person- ality, which is never broken in pieces, but which so changes its character that to speak of it as the same thing, though technically accurate, strikes us as no longer expressing the real facts. In many points there is a wider difference between the Empire of the first Caesars and the Empire of the Hohenstaufen than there is between the Empire of the Hohenstaufen and the Empire of the Austrians and Lorrainers. But the Hohenstaufen Emperors still felt as Emperors and acted as Emperors ; whether their objects were wise or foolish, possible or impossible, they were still Im- perial objects, objects that reached far beyond the bounds of Swabia or of Germany. Among the other princes of the West they held something more than a mere precedency. The kings of France, of Britain, of Spain, might deny their supremacy, but they denied it as a thing which needed to be denied ; they might refuse to acknowledge the Emperor as their lord, but they still felt that the one Emperor was a being of another class from the kings around him who might or might not be his men. Their whole position was not German but European ; if not the sovereigns, they were at least the chiefs, of all Western Christendom. But the Austrian Emperors sank to be Kings of Germany keeping the titles of Empire, and Kings of Germany who had much less authority in their own kingdom than other kings. For in truth the German kingdom had given way beneath the weight of the Eoman Empire. The Im- THE AUSTRIAN EMPERORS. 149 perial tradition Lad first split the kingdom in pieces, and had then kept the pieces from altogether falling apart. The Emperor was set too high in formal dig- nity to exercise the ordinary authority of lesser kings. We cannot speak of the Austrian Emperors as chiefs of Western Christendom, though, in a character which was not Imperial, they might sometimes become its champions. The Swabian Emperors were, if not above, at least before, all other princes ; the Austrians can barely maintain their right to be the first among them. They keep at most a barren precedency, and even that is not always undisputed. Their policy is not European ; it is hardly German ; it seeks only the advancement of their own house in Germany and out of it. At last they seem altogether to forget who and what they are. When an Emperor-elect of the Eomans, King of Germany and Jerusalem, could cast aside his Eoman and German style, his Eoman and German speech, and could describe himself as " Em- pereur d'Allemagne et d' Autriche " in a treaty with one who called himself " Empereur des Francais," it was time that the ancient titles should yet be used in one document more, in that which should announce to the world that, as the titles had now ceased to have a meaning, the thing which they described had ceased to be. Of the two men who, under those strange and novel descriptions, signed the Treaty of Pressburg, if one had forgotten who and what he was, the other knew perfectly well who and what he was. The first Buonaparte did not, like writers and orators now-a- 150 SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE. days, use the words " Emperor " and " Empire " sim- ply to sound fine. When he called himself " Em- peror of the French," he knew perfectly well what he meant by the name. What he meant involved to be sure a few historical misrepresentations, but they were misrepresentations which were very convenient for his purpose. Once grant that Austrasian Charles and Corsican Buonaparte were alike Frenchmen, and the theory does not hang badly together. The lord- ship of the world, at the lowest the supremacy of Western Europe, was translated from Kome and Germany to France. The ruler of France held the position in the world which the rulers of Kome and Germany once had held. So it was in fact ; the style of 1804 did but put that fact into very em- phatic words. There was again an Emperor, a (3a