The contemporary history of the years during which the Roman Empire took organic form is written in terms which tend to disguise the real significance of the change; our attention is attracted almost exclusively to the internal politics of the city of Rome; it is withdrawn from the politics of the Empire; the long struggle which ended by giving the whole civilized world one system of Government, which welded together in orderly association Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Africans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and even Britons, is represented to us as being little more than a constitutional revolution inside the city; we see the external pressure, which forced a revised constitution upon the Roman oligarchy, but we only see it dimly; no Roman historian has been at the pains to trace out the process by which the civil administration of the Roman Empire was developed--surely no less wonderful an achievement than the conquests of the Roman generals. We have seen other conquerors, and more brilliant feats of arms than any Roman general achieved, but we have not seen any other nation impress its language and its law upon the populations of so wide an area or so permanently. Alexander did much, but the effects of the conquests of Rome have been more lasting than those of the conquests of Alexander; except in Asia there is not a civilized people in the world which does not somewhere or other bear the impress of Rome, or cannot trace the pedigree of its religion and its law back to the Italian city. This great destiny was concealed from the makers of the Empire, but the immediate possibility, the consolidation of the conquests of Rome, and the permanent establishment of order over the whole area which drains into the Mediterranean was present to their minds; unfortunately the makers of the Empire have been mostly silent, and the only voices which have reached our ears are those of men who could only grasp the great idea intermittently, if at all, or who were annoyed by its insistence. Under Augustus for the first time the Empire became conscious, Virgil and Horace spoke in terms of the larger conception, but the grip of the Roman oligarchy has never relaxed its hold upon the imagination of educated men.