The empire was, on the whole, in a prosperous condition. Certain it is that during the eighty years after the battle of Actium, in a time of profound peace, and of great vitality, which only required that there should not be any devastations and destructions,—men felt very comfortable and happy, and recovered their strength. Caligula’s exactions, it is true, were very hard to bear; yet they did not so very much check this development: the population after the wars was certainly more than doubled, the towns became filled with inhabitants, and the wastes were peopled. Unhappy Greece alone remained a wilderness, even to the reign of Trajan. Such countries as had fallen into the hands of the farmers-general,—who, using them as pastures, would not rebuild the towns, nor allow of any tillage,—lay waste; yet they were gardens indeed in comparison with what they were at the time of the battle of Actium. It was just the same in Italy; there the fields were cultivated by bondmen, and the population was indeed restored by slaves who were imported, though it increased in quite a different ratio from what it did in the provinces, where it was recruited by _ingenui_. It is not mere declamation in Lucan, when he says with regard to the state of Italy, _Rarus et antiquis habitator in urbibus errat._ Marriage, although it was so easy to dissolve, was distasteful to most persons, so that they lived in concubinage; the many freedmen whose names are found on the inscriptions of that period, are the children whom the masters had by their female slaves. This gave rise to those celebrated laws, the _Lex Julia_ and the _Lex Papia Poppæa_. The degeneracy and profligacy of the freeborn female citizens was so awful, that many a man who was no profligate, may have found a much more faithful and estimable partner in a slave than in a Roman lady of high birth; and thus it was looked upon as a point of conscience not to marry. Hence there were now many more born slaves and _libertini_ than there were freeborn citizens; besides which, in the great houses, innumerable hosts of bought slaves were kept. In the provinces, where the _parsimonia provincialis_ was still reigning, there was no such disproportion: these had a population of _ingenui_; in some it was also restored and recruited by the military colonies;—such a soldier, though he may formerly have been a brigand, might after all have turned out quite a respectable man, after having once got a home of his own. These men made the use of the Latin language more general. Nor could this be helped: for what was spoken in those countries was but a jargon, from which the people did their best to wean themselves; and they were none the worse for it. The main object of the provincials could not have been, and indeed was not, anything else but to become Romans. In the midst, therefore, of the most detestable tyranny, the vital energies of the countries bordering upon the Mediterranean revived. The tyranny of