out of its tomb; the Pre-Raphaelites join with the Dutch Primitives; and Religion, though no longer believed in by these new followers of Plato, is held up to admiration as the mother of myth and tragedy, in her sacred rites, her hymns and processions, her narratives of the Divine. From a second point of view the school in which D'Annunzio takes a foremost place may seem Romantic or even German. He is not ashamed to own himself a disciple of Wagner; his philosophy utters a thousand echoes of Schopenhauer's Pessimism, of Nietzsche's Titanism, hard as these will ever be to reconcile. Again, he is Decadent like Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the Goncourts; so that we might imagine him all 'reflection and reverberation,' if we did not perceive, in the wide and barren lights which he scatters upon his Calabrian Apennines, in the purple-grey clouds of his Rome, in his lonely palaces on the Brenta, and, above all in his evocation of Venice from her waters to meet the descending Ideal, that he is the Latin genius, magnificent and direct, as smooth as adamant to the touch, and not less unyielding. He possesses a rhetoric which may kindle into love or scorn, but which is never sentimental, which knows nothing of our domestic or picturesque, which appeals by its form to the senses, and which seldom touches the heart, though it excites our highest admiration as a feat of intellect. D'Annunzio is, at last, neither Romantic nor Decadent; he is one born out of due time, meant to be the companion of princes in the age of Leo X, a hero of the Renaissance who must employ his pen where the sword or the pencil would be more to his liking. One gift he calls his own-the 'inviolate style' which frames all his thoughts 'lucid or terrible' in words of immortal comeliness. It has brought him European fame; it may herald the dawn of a new Italian literature.

ART. VII.-ROME AND BYZANTIUM.

1. Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire. By Samuel Dill, M.A. Second edition. London: Macmillan, 1899.

2. Byzantine Constantinople; the Walls of the City and adjoining Historical Sites. By Alexander van Millingen. London: John Murray, 1899.

3. Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt. By Otto Seeck. Bd. I. Berlin: Siemenroth and Worms, 1895.

4. O tainoi Istorii Prokopiya (On the Secret History of Procopius). By B. Panchenko. St. Petersburg: Press of Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1897.

5. The Roman Empresses. [Translated from the French of Jacques Roergas de Serviez.] Two vols. London: The Walpole Press, 1899.

6. Byzantine History in the Early Middle Ages. The Rede Lecture, by Frederic Harrison. London: Macmillan, 1900.

NSTEAD of enquiring why the Roman Empire was

subsisted so long.' This was Gibbon's conclusion when he had accomplished the laborious narrative' of the decline of the Roman Empire down to its fall in the West in the fifth century of our era. It seemed to him that this narrative itself had sufficiently exhibited the causes of that series of events which culminated in the subjection of Italy to the barbarian Odovacar, and that no further analysis was needed. Yet we suspect that the more thoughtful of his readers will hesitate to agree with the historian. His brilliant narrative will have impressed them rather with a sense of the strength than of the weakness of the Empire of Rome, and they will be disposed to wonder that it ever fell. This was the view of Finlay, a most acute enquirer, who observes that 'few events, in the whole course of history, seem more extraordinary than the success of the uncivilised Goths against the well disciplined legions of imperial Rome'; and, although he applied this remark especially to the inroads of the Goths in the third century, it expresses the attitude of his intelligence to the whole phenomenon of the conquest of Rome and her provinces by the barbarians. Those who regard the facts as Finlay regarded them will find the General Observations on the Fall of the

Roman Empire in the West,' with which Gibbon wound up the first half of his work, unsatisfactory and disappointing.

In these Observations' Gibbon seems to lay most stress on the excessive power of the army in the early Empire, and the partial dissolution of its strength at the beginning of the fourth century by the policy of Constantine. He touches upon the want of national vigour in the provinces, and he remarks acutely that the Romans were unable fully to grasp the extent of their danger. He ascribes a share in the decline to the Christian religion, pointing to 'the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity' which were inculcated by the clergy, to the attractions of the cloister which withdrew men from public life and military science, to the demands of charity and devotion which diverted wealth from secular purposes, and to the discords of Christian sects. At the same time he points out that if the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors.'

The slightness and superficiality of these remarks is hardly excused by the author's statement that he regarded an enquiry as superfluous. They are far from explaining why the Roman Empire fell, and we turn to later historians who have had a clearer perception of the problem and have attempted to find a solution. At the close of the second volume of his work on Italy and her Invaders,' Mr. Hodgkin has set out under six heads what appear to him to be the efficient causes of the fall of the Western Empire, namely: the foundation of Constantinople; Christianity; slavery; the free distributions of corn, which pauperised the Roman proletariat; the destruction of the middle class; and barbarous finance. To these he adds, but as symptoms rather than causes, the depopulation of the Empire and the demoralisation of the army; yet he would doubtless admit that, though themselves derived from deeper causes, both these evils promoted effectively the decline of the Empire. The prefatory disquisition on the final cause of that decline, which Mr. Hodgkin offers us, throws no light on the subject, but his treatment of the efficient causes is more satisfactory than Gibbon's. He appreciates certain economic facts to which Gibbon did not give due weight, and he apprehends the importance of the decay of the middle class. We must demur, however, to the cause which he places as the head and front of his enumeration-the founding of Constantinople. On this point he might, with advantage, have consulted Gibbon, who justly observes that the rise of the younger Rome more

essentially contributed to the preservation of the East than to the ruin of the West.'

One of the chief defects in Mr. Hodgkin's discussion is his inadequate treatment of the depopulation of the Roman world. This question takes us back to three suggestive lectures on Roman Imperialism which the late Professor Seeley delivered in 1869.* In the second of these lectures he announced and dealt with the problem, 'What was the cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire?' By the Fall of the Roman Empire' he meant, according to his own statement, more than Gibbon and Mr. Hodgkin mean by the Fall of the Western Empire,' for he included not only the occupation of the West by the Goths and their fellow-Germans, the conquest of Italy by Odovacar and Theodoric, but the later mutilation of the Eastern Empire by the Saracens. This difference in the statement of the problem has, however, made no difference to his solution; he deals with causes which operated before the fifth century.

Seeley pointed out that the Roman Empire did not succumb to either of those causes of weakness which have usually brought about the collapse of great empires-the antipathy of conquered nationalities, and the difficulty of controlling a realm of vast geographical extent. The Romans were strangely successful in extirpating national feeling in the conquered provinces; there were only two grave rebellions of subject nationalities under the Empire-that of Civilis and that of the Jews-and neither was fatal. This danger, which was averted by the policy of Rome at an early period, must be carefully distinguished from a natural tendency to fall asunder, in empires of unwieldy size and composed of heterogeneous parts. In the latter case the impelling motive of rebellion is not the aspiration of a nationality, but the ambition of a viceroy. Both dangers may operate together, as in the revolts which threatened the existence of the old Persian Empire in the middle of the fourth century B.C. But they are essentially distinct, and the second did not make itself seriously felt in the Roman Empire until the third century of our era, although the revolt of Avidius Cassius against Marcus Aurelius indicated the rocks that were ahead. The Empire would have gone to pieces on those rocks, had it not been rescued by the reorganisation which was initiated by Diocletian and completed by Constantine. These Emperors-Professor Seeley, it may be observed, did not give due credit to Diocletian-averted for

They were published in Macmillan's Magazine' in July, August, and October of the same year, and were subsequently included in the volume of Essays.'

a time the danger of over-powerful viceroys by splitting up the large governments into small provinces, and separating the military from the civil administration.

Having thus shown that Rome succeeded in avoiding the Scylla and Charybdis which beset great empires, Professor Seeley puts the question anew, Why, then, did her empire collapse? This question may now be cast in a more precise form, Why did the Roman prove inferior in strength to the barbaric world? The cause must lie either in an increase of the power of the barbarians or in the decay of the power of the Romans, or in both these processes combined. Professor Seeley observes that through their prolonged contact with the Roman Empire the barbarians were growing in civilisation, in intelligence, and military skill. He also thinks that they were learning the habit of co-operation, which effectively increased their power. But if the barbarian world was thus progressing, the progress of Rome, as a civilised State, ought to have been greater still, if we may judge from the analogy of modern States. Analogy may indeed be deceptive, and it is impossible to compare an ancient and a modern civilisation without many reserves. The industrial force, which plays the chief part in progressive countries in modern times, was almost wholly absent in the Roman Empire. But, allowing for this, there must have been some deep cause, according to Professor Seeley, to account for the retrogression of Rome, as compared with the progress of her barbarian foes. The solution which Seeley presented with such force, is clear and concise. The ailment which afflicted Rome was want of men; her children were barren; her power was undermined, not by moral but by physical decay. In depopulation, which Mr. Hodgkin regards only or mainly as a symptom, Seeley sees the cause of the fall.

This carefully argued and enlightening study has brought out vividly two indisputable facts. Firstly, the events of the fourth and fifth centuries cannot be explained by the mere might of the barbarians who invaded and conquered large provinces of the Empire. The successes of the Germans, who were never able to cope on equal terms with a Roman army, must be imputed, not to their own resources, but to internal diseases which made the Roman world their prey.* We may illustrate this point further by observing that in early times there was no strong national feeling among the German tribes. This fact strikes every reader of Tacitus. We find, for

* Compare Seeck, in the work named at the head of this article, pp. 197 et seq.