Nor could the strong emperors from the Danubian provinces check the process of decay. Poverty fell upon the cities of Italy and the provinces, whose material prosperity and patriotic devotion had been the most pleasing pictures offered by the good days of the Roman Empire; seats in the town council and municipal offices, once passionately striven after as the goal of civic ambition, as the election placards at Pompeii testify, now found no candidates because upon their occupants rested the responsibility of raising taxes it was impossible to pay; the way was paved for the compulsory hereditary tenure of posts and trades indispensable to the government. Agriculture was ruined, and documents dating from the third century and the end of the second, which have been recently brought to light in parts of the empire remote from one another, describe with affecting laments the want and hardships endured by colonists and small landholders in the vast imperial demesnes. The currency was debased, silver coins had depreciated to mere tokens, salaries had to be paid for the most part in kind, public credit was destroyed. The desolation of the land, no longer tilled in consequence of the uncertainty of possession amidst disorders within and without; a steady decrease of the population of Italy and the provinces from the end of the second century onwards; famine, and a prodigious rise in the cost of all the necessaries of life, which it was a hopeless undertaking to check by any imperial regulation of prices, are the sign-manual of the time. The army, from which Italians had long since disappeared, liberally interspersed with barbarian elements and no longer held together by any interest in the empire and in an emperor who was never the same for long together, was no longer capable of coping with the Goths and Alamanni who ravaged the Roman provinces in all directions; the right bank of the Rhine and the Limes Germanicus and Limes Ræticus, laboriously erected and fortified with ramparts and castellae, fell a prey to the Germans in the middle of the third century. A Roman emperor meets a shameful death in captivity among the Parthians; Dacia, Trajan’s hard-won conquest, has to be abandoned and its inhabitants, who were spared by the enemy, transplanted to the southern bank of the Danube. Towards the end of the third century the cities in Gaul were surrounded with substantial walls, Rome itself had to be fortified against the attacks of the barbarians, and was once more provided with a circumvallation, as in the days of hoary antiquity, by one of the most vigorous of her rulers. Diocletian ceased to make the Eternal City his capital, and realised in practice the idea of division into an Oriental and Occidental world which had stirred the minds of men three centuries before. His successor put a final end to the Roman Empire; but all he had to do was to bury the dead. FOOTNOTES [1] [See Professor Harnack’s article on Church and State on page 629.]