The Greek States did not remain true to this high ideal. Faced with the temptations of power they descended almost to the level of the oriental monarchies with which they were contrasted. But even had they remained faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they would not have survived. Unable to transcend the limits of their own narrow State-boundaries and to merge their ideals with those of their neighbours, they were helpless in the face of the invader. First Macedonia and then Rome swept over them, and political idealism slumbered for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it greatly needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty. Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the time the end of civilization, it was in reality the beginning of a new life.