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I think better of man than you do, and I cannot but believe that there will yet rise up among us those who shall feel what power, almost of a god, is lodged in the will of a Roman emperor, and will use it like a god to bless, not curse mankind. Why may not Nature repeat the virtuous Antonines! Her power is not spent.
It would realise the want of the age; monarchical, not dynastical, institutions, and it would act independent of the passions and intrigues of the multitude. The principle of adoption was the secret of the strength and endurance of Rome. It gave Rome alike the Scipios and the Antonines." "A court would be rather dull without a woman at its head." "On the contrary," said Mr. Bertie Tremaine.
In the days of the Antonines, to which Gibbon looks back so wistfully, opinion had little influence; the organic forces of society were of a more primitive and a coarser kind. In modern times if a writer could succeed in separating truth from religion, he would shake the pillars of the moral and social as well as the intellectual world.
Not only Augustus and his family, but also the Flavians and the Antonines, never thought that the Empire belonged to them, that they might dispose of it like private property; on the contrary, they regarded it as an eternal and indivisible holding of the Roman people which they, as representatives of the populus, were charged to administer.
But if we gradually descend from the age of the Antonines to that of Theodosius, we shall learn from a chain of contemporary witnesses, that the royal palace and the temple of Serapis no longer contained the four, or the seven, hundred thousand volumes, which had been assembled by the curiosity and magnificence of the Ptolemies.
How did it happen that Italian cultivation receded, as Tacitus and Gibbon tell us it did, from the time of Tiberius; and equally under the wisdom of the Antonines, as the tyranny of Nero, or the civil wars of Vitellius?
M. Cocceius Nerva, Sempronius Proculus, and Juventius Celsus, were of the school of Labeo. Gaius, who flourished in the time of the Antonines, was a great legal authority; and the recent discovery of his Institutes has revealed the least mutilated fragment of Roman jurisprudence which exists, and one of the most valuable, and sheds great light on ancient Roman law.
Apuleius of Madaura in Africa, who lived in the time of the Antonines, appears to have been more remarkable as an author, than for any thing that occurs in the history of his life. St. Augustine and Lactantius however have coupled him with Apollonius of Tyana, as one of those who for their pretended miracles were brought into competition with the author of the Christian religion.
The choice of the authorities that compose the Pandects depended on the judgment of Tribonian: but the power of his sovereign could not absolve him from the sacred obligations of truth and fidelity. As the legislator of the empire, Justinian might repeal the acts of the Antonines, or condemn, as seditious, the free principles, which were maintained by the last of the Roman lawyers.
Persia, better called a kingdom, perhaps, than an empire, commands about forty millions of subjects; as against imperial Rome's who can say? The population there must have gone down by many millions since the days of the Antonines, with all the civil wars, plagues, pestilences, and famines that have harrowed the years between.
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