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Trajan greatly improved her condition by his wise and liberal administration. Hadrian and the Antonines venerated her for her past achievements, and showed their good-will by the care they extended to her works of art, and their patronage of the schools."
The prosperity, indeed, which Italy had attained in the auspicious age of the Antonines had gradually declined with the decline of the Empire. The fruits of a long peace perished under the rude grasp of the Barbarians; and they themselves were incapable of tasting the more elegant refinements of luxury which had been prepared for the use of the soft and polished Italians.
Gibbon estimates the population at a hundred and twenty millions; many authorities think that figure too high; but Gibbon may well be right, or even under the mark, and it may account for the rapid decline that followed the age of the Antonines.
Be that as it may, however, and waiving any interest which might happen to invest the Antonines as the last princes who kept up the empire to its original level, both of them had enough of merit to challenge a separate notice in their personal characters, and apart from the accidents of their position.
"were you moved to assert an independency of Rome? How many peaceful and prosperous years have rolled on since Trajan and the Antonines, while you and Rome were at harmony; a part of us and yet independent; allies rather than a subject province; using our power for your defence; yet owning no allegiance. Why was this order disturbed? What madness ruled to turn you against the power of Rome?"
When he reluctantly accepted the purple, he was above fourscore years old; a last and valuable remains of the happy age of the Antonines, whose virtues he revived in his own conduct, and celebrated in an elegant poem of thirty books. With the venerable proconsul, his son, who had accompanied him into Africa as his lieutenant, was likewise declared emperor.
Now let it be recollected that this continual and astonishing decline of agriculture, and disappearance of the rural cultivators in the latter stages of the Roman empire, took place in an empire which contained, as Gibbon tells us, 120,000,000 of inhabitants, and 1600 great cities, was 3000 miles long and 2000 miles broad, contained 1,600,000 square miles, chiefly fertile and well cultivated land, which embraced the fairest and most fertile portions of the earth, and which had been governed for eighty yers under the successive sway of Nerva, Adrian, Trajan, and the two Antonines, with consummate wisdon and the most paternal spirit.
He flattered himself that the Romans, dazzled and amused by this apparent liberality, would be less affected by the bloody scenes which were daily exhibited; that they would forget the death of Byrrhus, a senator to whose superior merit the late Emperor had granted one of his daughters; and that they would forgive the execution of Arrius Antoninus, the last representative of the name and virtues of the Antonines.
The mud-ocean of ignorance and fear in which they struggled so manfully was too strong for them; the mud-waves closed over their heads finally, as the age of the Antonines expired; and the last effort of Graeco-Roman thought to explain the universe was Neoplatonism the muddiest of the muddy an attempt to apologise for, and organise into a system, all the nature-dreading superstitions of the Roman world.
He was, indeed, writing in the very period which the historian fixed upon as the happiest and most prosperous that the human race has ever enjoyed those two or three benign generations when, under the Antonines, provincials combined with Romans in celebrating "the increasing splendours of the cities, the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned like an immense garden, and the long festival of peace, which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehension of future danger."
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