Yet neither the language of Tacitus nor the testimony from other sources justify the belief in any sudden moral revolution. The Antonine age was undoubtedly an age of conscientious and humane government in the interest of the subject; it was even more an age of religious revival. But whether these were accompanied by a corresponding elevation of conduct and moral tone among the masses may well be doubted. On the other hand the pessimism of satirist and historian who had lived through the darkness of the Terror has probably exaggerated the corruption of the evil days. If society at large had been half as corrupt as it is represented by Juvenal, it would have speedily perished from mere rottenness. The Inscriptions, the Letters of the younger Pliny, even the pages of Tacitus himself, reveal to us another world from that of the satirist. On countless tombs we have the record or the ideal of a family life of sober, honest industry, and pure affection. In the calm of rural retreats in Lombardy or Tuscany, while the capital was frenzied with vicious indulgence, or seething with conspiracy and desolated by massacre, there were many families living in almost puritan quietude, where the moral standard was in many respects as high as among ourselves. The worst period of the Roman Empire was the most glorious age of practical Stoicism. The men of that circle were ready, at the cost of liberty or life, to brave an immoral tyranny; their wives were eager to follow them into exile, or to die by their side.(3) And even in the palace of Nero there was a spotless Octavia, and slave-girls who were ready to defend her honour at the cost of torture and death.(4) In the darkest days, the violence of the bad princes spent itself on their nobles, on those whom they feared, or whom they wished to plunder. The provinces, even under a Tiberius, a Nero, or a Domitian, enjoyed a freedom from oppression which they seldom enjoyed under the Republic.(5) Just and upright governors were the rule and not the exception, and even an Otho or a Vitellius, tainted with every private vice, returned from their provincial governments with a reputation for integrity.(6) Municipal freedom and self-government were probably at their height at the very time when life and liberty in the capital were in hourly peril. The great Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood and equality of men, as members of a world-wide commonwealth, which was destined to inspire legislation in the Antonine age, was openly preached in the reigns of Caligula and Nero. A softer tone—a modern note of pity for the miserable and succour for the helpless—makes itself heard in the literature of the first century.(7) The moral and mental equality of the sexes was being more and more recognised in theory, as the capacity of women for heroic action and self-sacrifice was displayed so often in the age of the tyranny and of the Stoic martyrs. The old cruelty and contempt for the slave will not give way for many a