Neither citizens nor city were changed even in name. They had put out for security a few miles to sea, but the sandbanks on which they landed were still Venetia. The fugitive patricians were neither more nor less citizens of the imperial province because they had fled from Padua or Altinum to Malamocco or Torcello. Their political allegiance was still due to the Empire. Their social organization remained unaffected by the flight. So far were they from being severed from Rome, so far from entertaining any dreams of starting afresh in the "new democracy" which exists in the imagination of Daru and his followers, that the one boast of their annalists is that they are more Roman than the Romans themselves. Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the line of Roman Emperors. Venice--as she proudly styled herself in after time--was "the legitimate daughter of Rome." The strip of sea-board from the Brenta to the Isonzo was the one spot in the Empire from the Caspian to the Atlantic where foot of barbarian never trod. And as it rose, so it set. From that older world of which it was a part the history of Venice stretched on to the French Revolution untouched by Teutonic influences. The old Roman life which became strange even to the Capitol lingered unaltered, unimpaired, beside the palace of the duke. The strange ducal cap, the red ducal slippers, the fan of bright feathers borne before the ducal chair, all came unchanged from ages when they were the distinctions of every great officer of the Imperial State. It is startling to think that almost within the memory of living men Venice brought Rome--the Rome of Ambrose and Theodosius--to the very doors of the Western world; that the living and unchanged tradition of the Empire passed away only with the last of the Doges. Only on the tomb of Manin could men write truthfully, "Hic jacet ultimus Romanorum."