There is yet a fourth peninsula in this land-locked sea, known for want of a better name as Asia Minor, which juts out from the Asiatic continent, and forms a meeting-place for Eastern and Western civilisations. This was in the last three centuries B.C. the fighting-ground of the successors of Alexander the Great, kings of Macedon, Pergamum, Syria and Egypt, who wasted the vigour of humanity in wars that to us seem needless. The Romans were soon drawn into a war with the king of Syria, an ally of Philip of Macedon, and won a great victory in this peninsula in the year 190 B.C. But they annexed no territory here until the last king of Pergamum left his kingdom to Rome by will some sixty years later. The Senate preferred to act as arbitrator, to make alliances, to reward friendly states, to use diplomacy rather than force; and on the whole they succeeded. Their policy was often tortuous, sometimes even mean, but in the long run it did more good than harm to humanity that a young and virile people should interfere among these monarchies. Thus, whether we look west or east in the Mediterranean, we find the Roman power predominant everywhere within eighty years from the end of the war with Hannibal. It is not easy to explain in a few words what drove this power onwards. It was not simply the commercial motive, as with Carthage. It was not simply the desire to conquer and annex, for the Senate was slow to undertake new duties of government abroad if their object could be attained in some other way. But what was that object? Undoubtedly it was self-defence to begin with; but self-defence, once successful, only too easily slips into self-assertion. This self-assertion, as we see it in Roman policy, may perhaps be compared with that which governs German foreign policy now—the determination to have a voice in all matters within her “sphere of interest.” No Roman senator had a doubt that his people were the strongest and most competent to control the world, which is exactly what the patriotic German believes now. And the constant assertion of this proud conviction brought many suitors and suppliants to Rome, whose presence flattered Roman pride, and whose diplomacy sometimes involved the government in new wars, giving ambitious consuls their opportunity of increasing the fame and the wealth of themselves and their families. So in due time there arose a dominion of the following military commands or provinces: one in Sicily, one in Sardinia, two in Spain, one in southern Gaul, one in Macedonia with Greece attached to it, one in Asia Minor, and one in Africa, after the destruction of Carthage by her old enemy in 146 B.C. Of the method of governing these provinces I will say something in another chapter. Now let us try to estimate some of the results of these continuous wars in distant parts, taken together with the long struggle with Carthage. We shall find a change in every department of the people’s life, and in almost all a change for the worse.