ROME MISTRESS OF THE WORLD We have never before seen the world in the condition to which we have brought it now, in the whole course of the story. At first, you will remember, there were the two great empires warring, the Nile Valley empire and the empire of the Euphrates and Tigris. Then came the Persian. He overthrew them both. But then he came up against a wall too strong for him to break down, in the opposition of Greece; and he broke his own head against that wall. After him came Alexander, the Macedonian, going through the world, as it was then known, like a flash of lightning, getting the better of everything that stood in his way as if it was of no account at all. But like a flash of lightning his light went out again, and he left the world he had conquered to be cut up into pieces and quarrelled for by the generals that he had led to the conquest. Then the scene of action shifted westward along the inland sea. Carthage had grown to power at the cost of Phœnicia, her mother-land, and over against Carthage had grown together, in a wonderfully short time, this new Roman power. Carthage and Rome had fought, and Rome had utterly prevailed. Then Rome, looking eastward, and troubled by King Pyrrhus, who had helped the Carthaginians, came in touch with the Macedonians and the Greeks, {191} and after a period of trouble got the better of both, came up against the peoples of Asia Minor, and had them at her mercy whenever she chose to put out her strength. Already Egypt, though independent nominally, had acknowledged Rome as sovereign. [Sidenote: Pax Romana] So you see whither we have come. Hitherto it has always been a struggling world that the story has had to tell of--one or the other master holding power a short while perhaps, but never really having a hold over the whole world and getting all his opponents under. It is quite otherwise now. Rome is mistress; and she is not going to let go her hold for a very long while. When she does lose hold it will be really because her grip has lost power owing to her own maladies, rather than that any other very formidable foe has come against her.