the murderer Phocas, he warns him also--strange as the words sound to us--that, while the kings of the nations rule over slaves, the Emperors of the Republic rule over freemen. We must indeed beware of bringing in ideas which belong wholly to modern controversy; there is nothing in the word “respublica,” nothing in the word “commonwealth,” nothing in the use of those words down to a very recent date, which shuts out the possibility of a commonwealth having a prince, Emperor or king, as its chief ruler. The point of the employment of the word lies in this, that it marks the unbroken being of the Roman state; in the eyes of the men of the sixth century the power which won back the African province in their own day was the same power which had first won it well nigh seven hundred years before. The consul Belisarius was the true successor of the consul Scipio. Again the Roman power stretches from the Ocean to the Euphrates; the mighty volume of the Roman law is unrolled alike for the Syrian and the Spaniard. The whole Mediterranean coast is again the seaboard of Rome, save where the West-Goth still keeps his hold on Septimania and Northern Spain, save where the Empire has itself yielded the coast from Rhone to the Alps to the Frankish lords of Gaul who have wiped out the power of the Burgundian and cut short the West-Goth on Gaulish soil. The common teaching on these matters is so wretched that I believe we all of us feel--I still feel myself--a certain feeling of strangeness and incongruity at the mere picture of the revived Empire of the sixth century. Or if strangeness and incongruity are words too strong, we at least feel that it is a truth which needs asserting, asserting, it may be, till times seventy times seven, in the ears of the unlearned and unbelieving. To look on it, as the men of the time looked on, as the restoration of a lawful order of things which had been violently interrupted is one of the hardest of historic lessons.