Corinth admitted her citizens to strive in the games of the Isthmos, before Athens honoured them with initiation into the holiest rites of Dêmêtêr and her Child. * * * * * In a lecture of my former course I pointed out some of the physical conditions which made it possible for Rome to rise to the headship of the world. The course of all history, I then ventured to say, had been determined by the geological fact that certain hills by the Tiber were lower and nearer together than the other hills of Latium. If I were lecturing on Roman history as such, instead of taking a glance of a moment, a glance of a mere thousand years or so, at Rome in her œcumenical position, I might carry out this thought into great detail. For my present purpose it is enough to say that the central spot of the central peninsula was naturally called to headship. We might point out that the process which made Lugubalium and Nisibis bulwarks of Rome began when the Palatine and the Capitoline hills were girded by a single wall. But it is enough for us to mark the great steps in the advance of the Roman power, the steps which made her the head of Latium, the head of Italy, the head of the West, the head, and in the end the mistress, of the Mediterranean world. In all these stages we must ever bear in mind that the rule of Rome was in the fullest sense the rule of a city, a rule of essentially the same kind as the rule of other ruling cities before and after. It was distinguished from the rule of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, Bern, and Venice only by the vastness of the scale to which the rule of the Roman city extended, and by the process, unparalleled in the history of any other city, by which the franchise of the ruling commonwealth was gradually extended to all its allies and subjects. Latium, Italy, the Mediterranean world, were merged bit by bit, not only in the Roman dominion but in the Roman city, till every Italian ally, every Greek confederate, even every barbarian provincial, had become a citizen of Rome. It is true that the last stage of the process did not take place till to be a citizen of Rome simply meant to be a subject of Rome’s master. It has been doubted, with no small show of reason, whether the edict of Antoninus Caracalla was not an immediate loss rather than an immediate gain to those whom it admitted to the full honours of the Roman name. But the eye of universal history looks at the change in another light. The edict of Antoninus, whatever its immediate motives, whatever its immediate results, did in the end create an artificial Roman nation throughout the Roman dominion, at any rate from the Ocean to Mount Tauros. Every freeman throughout the Empire had now a right in the name and traditions of Rome. We see the results of this change in the men of the fifth and sixth centuries, in those Romans of Gaul and Spain who knew no national name, no national being, save that of the city to which their forefathers had bowed.