In order to understand this extraordinary phenomenon of Roman history, we must hark back to the generations that lived quietly and in a relatively happy state in the flowery times of Rome’s real power and greatness. After two centuries of war, at the beginning of the Christian era, peace was finally established in the great Empire which Rome had conquered. In the days of peace, the barbarian West learned from the Romans how to cultivate the earth, to cut the forests, to excavate the minerals, to navigate the rivers, to speak and to write Latin. It became civilised, and bought the manufactures of the ancient industrial cities of the East. Every fresh market of the West, as it was opened up, gave a stimulus to the ancient industries of the East, which found in such market a new clientèle. Contact with the barbarism of the West rapidly gave fresh youth to the old civilisation of the East,—Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor,—which had decayed somewhat in the great crisis of the last century of the republic. Everywhere fresh lands were brought under cultivation, methods of agriculture were perfected, minerals were searched for, new industries and new branches of commerce were opened up. Prosperity and luxury preceding in every nation, even the most barbarous, and in every class, even the poorest, which acquired a taste for the luxuries of civilisation. An epoch of rapid increase of wealth, of lucky enterprises, of frequent, close, and varied commercial and intellectual intercourse between the most distant peoples, began. In every part of the Empire, in Gaul as well as in Asia Minor, in Spain as well as in Africa, these new trades, these new industries and agricultural enterprises gave rise to a prosperous middle class and to provincial aristocracies,—_nouveaux riches_ families,—which gradually came to form the governing class of the Empire, migrated to the cities, strode to enlarge them, to embellish them, and to make them more comfortable, reproducing in every part of the Empire the splendours of the urban civilisation after the Greco-Asiatic model as perfected by the practical Roman spirit of organisation. In every province, the example of the Emperor in Rome found imitators. In the first and second centuries, every rich family spent part of its possessions on the embellishment of the cities, and made provision for the common people of profits, comforts, and pleasures: they built palaces, villas, theatres, temples, baths, and aqueducts. They distributed grain, oil, amusements, and money. They endowed public services and assumed the rôle of pious founders.