Spain levied never a pikeman in America, and her colonies were a source of debility in so far as they drained her of her youth. Had Rome been similarly situated, she could hardly have carried the eagles beyond the Bosphorus and the Alps. Perhaps Cæsar’s army was the best an ancient general ever put in the field, and yet it was filled with barbarians. All his legions were raised north of the Po, and most of them, including the tenth, north of the Alps.[380] When pitted against this force native Italians broke in rout, and one of the most striking pages of Plutarch is the story of the gradual awakening of Pompey to a sense of the impotence of Romans. Pompey himself was a commander of high ability, and, until he split upon the rock of the pure martial blood, battle had been with him synonymous with victory. At first he felt such confidence, he laughed at the suggestion of an attack within the Rubicon. With the conviction of the conqueror he said: “Whenever I stamp with my foot in any part of Italy, there will rise up forces enough in an instant, both horse and foot.”[381] A very short experience of the men of the north sufficed to sober him; for, though Cæsar’s command amounted to only twenty-two thousand, and his to twice as many, he not only declined an action, but took what care he could to keep the threats of the Gauls from his men, “who were out of heart and despondent, through terror at the fierceness and hardiness of their enemies, whom they looked upon as a sort of wild beasts.”[382] Pharsalia stunned him. When the tenth legion routed his left wing, he went to his tent and sat speechless until the invasion of the camp; then he walked away “softly afoot, taken up altogether with thoughts such as probably might possess a man that for the space of thirty-four years together had been accustomed to conquest and victory, and was then at last, in his old age, learning for the first time what defeat and flight were.”[383] Thus, in reality, barbarians consolidated the ancient world, and the force which created the Empire, afterward upheld it. With each succeeding century the drafts of centralized society upon the blood of the country beyond the Danube and the Rhine increased, but the supply proved limitless; and, when the Western provinces disintegrated, a new imaginative race poured over Italy and France, creating a new religion, a new art, a new literature, and new institutions. Among modern nations the Russians alone have developed this power of absorbing kindred conquered peoples; and yet, obviously, Napoleon would have fought his campaigns under very different circumstances, and, perhaps, brought them to a different end, had he, like Cæsar, had an exhaustless supply of the best soldiers, altogether independent of the population of France.