All over this vast Empire with a population and area nearly equal to that of the United States there reigned the blessed _Pax Romana_. Robbers had been cleared from the roads and pirates from the seas. Commerce went to and fro with surprisingly little interference from customs barriers or provincial boundaries. The same coin was current from the cataracts of the Nile to the Caledonian Wall across Britain. A scientific system of law, on the whole administered with remarkable firmness and justice, prevailed between the same wide boundaries. The central government was, indeed, in essence a despotism, but it was a despotism infused with an extreme intelligence, and it left many of the forms of liberty, especially of local liberty, in the municipal matters which touch men nearest home. The Emperor Hadrian, himself, although sometimes guilty of eccentricities and even harshness, was, in the main, a ruler singularly intent upon benefiting his subjects. In all his constant travels he had showered favors upon the communities which he visited. It was as if he (and his great predecessor Trajan) had set out to justify monarchy as an ideal government by showing how much good monarchs could do to the governed. =2. Increasing Glory of the Imperial City.=--All this prosperity had inevitably reacted upon the city of Rome itself. In a most literal sense of the word “all roads led to Rome,” not merely the vast network of government highways and the paths of maritime commerce, but those of intellectual, artistic, and moral influence. Rome was incomparably the best market for the merchant, it provided the largest audiences for the philosopher or rhetorician, the wealthiest patrons for the sculptor. It had, in fact, become the common center and crucible for everything good and bad in the huge, teeming Mediterranean World. Outwardly the city was near the summit of its architectural perfection. In Cicero’s day it could not compare in the elegance of its squares and avenues, and the magnificence of its buildings with Alexandria, Antioch, or several lesser cities which lay at the mercy of the legions; but with the coming of the Empire there has been an incessant process of demolishing, rebuilding, and extending. “I found Rome built of brick; I leave it built of marble,” Augustus had boasted when near his end (14 A.D.). However, even after him, there had been only a gradual transformation until the great fire of Nero in 64 A.D. Terrible as has then been the devastation, the calamity has at least required a general rebuilding of almost half of the city usually upon a much handsomer and more artistic scale. Since then each succeeding Emperor has tried to leave some great architectural memorial behind him. Vespasian and Titus have built the Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum), Trajan a noble Forum, and Hadrian is now completing a magnificent “Temple of Venus and Rome.”