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FOOTNOTES:

[1] One pretended proof of a decline is found in the supposed substitution of slave labour for free Italian labour. This began, it is urged, on the opening of the Nile corn trade. Unfortunately, that is a mere romance. Ovid, describing rural appearances in Italy when as yet the trade was hardly in its infancy, speaks of the rustic labourer as working in fetters. Juvenal, in an age when the trade had been vastly expanded, notices the same phenomenon almost in the same terms.

[2] ‘The best raw material.’ Some people hold that the Romans and Italians were a cowardly nation. We doubt this on the whole. Physically, however, they were inferior to their neighbours. It is certain that the Transalpine Gauls were a conspicuously taller race. Caesar says: ‘Gallis, prae magnitudine corporum quorum, brevitas nostra contemptui est’ (‘Bell. Gall.’ 2, 30 fin.); and the Germans, in a still higher degree, were both larger men and every way more powerful. The kites, says Juvenal, had never feasted on carcases so huge as those of the Cimbri and Teutones. But this physical superiority, though great for special purposes, was not such absolutely. For the more general uses of the legionary soldier, for marching, for castrametation, and the daily labours of the spade or mattock, a lighter build was better. As to single combats, it was one effect from the Roman (as from every good) discipline–that it diminished the openings for such showy but perilous modes of contest.

[3] ‘Any considerable portion of this provincial corn growth,’ i.e., of the provincial culture which was pursued on account of Rome, meaning not the government of Rome, but, in a rigorous sense, on account of Rome the city. For here lies a great oversight of historians and economists. Because Rome, with a view to her own privileged population, i.e., the urban population of Rome, the metropolis, in order that she might support her public distributions of grain, almost of necessity depended on foreign supplies, we are not to suppose that the great mass of Italian towns and municipia did so. Maritime towns, having the benefit of ports or of convenient access, undoubtedly were participators in the Roman advantage. But inland towns would in those days have forfeited the whole difference between foreign and domestic grain by the enormous cost of inland carriage. Of canals there was but one; the rivers were not generally navigable, and ports as well as river shipping were wanting.

[4] ‘Heraclius.‘ The same prosodial fault affects this name as that of Alexandria. In each name the Latin i represents a Greek ei, and in that situation (viz., as a penultimate syllable) should receive the emphasis in pronunciation as well as the sound of a long i (that sound which is heard in Longinus). So again Academia, not Academia. The Greek accentuation may be doubted, but not the Roman.

[5] We have already said that Heraclius, who and whose family filled the throne of Eastern Caesar for exactly one hundred years (611-711), consequently interesting in this way (if in no other), that he, as the reader will see by considering the limits in point of time, must have met and exhausted the first rage of the Mahometan avalanche, merits according to our estimate the title of first and noblest amongst the Oriental Caesars. There are records or traditions of his earliest acts that we could wish otherwise. Which of us would not offend even at this day, if called upon to act under one scale of sympathies, and to be judged under another? In his own day, too painfully we say it, Heraclius could not have followed what we venture to believe the suggestions of his heart, in relation to his predecessor, because a policy had been established which made it dangerous to be merciful, and a state of public feeling which made it effeminate to pardon. First make it safe to permit a man’s life, before you pronounce it ignoble to authorize his death. Strip mercy of ruin to its author, before you affirm upon a judicial punishment of death (as then it was) cruelty in the adviser or ignobility in the approver. Escaping from these painful scenes at the threshold of his public life, we find Heraclius preparing for a war, the most difficult that in any age any hero has confronted. We call him the earliest of Crusaders, because he first and literally fought for the recovery of the Cross. We call him the most prosperous of Crusaders, because he first–he last–succeeded in all that he sought, bringing back to Syria (ultimately to Constantinople) that sublime symbol of victorious Christianity which had been disgracefully lost at Jerusalem. Yet why, when comparing him not with Crusaders, but with Caesars, do we pronounce him the noblest? Reader, which is it that is felt by a thoughtful man–supposing him called upon to select one act by preference before all others–to be the grandest act of our own Wellesley? Is it not the sagacious preparation of the lines at Torres Vedras, the self-mastery which lured the French on to their ruin, the long-suffering policy which reined up his troops till that ruin was accomplished? ‘I bide my time,’ was the dreadful watchword of Wellington through that great drama; in which, let us tell the French critics on Tragedy, they will find the most absolute unity of plot; for the forming of the lines as the fatal noose, the wiling back the enemy, the pursuit when the work of disorganization was perfect, all were parts of one and the same drama. If he (as another Scipio) saw another Zama, in this instance he was not our Scipio or Marcellus, but our Fabius Maximus:

‘Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem.’–‘Ann.’ 8, 27.

Now, such was the Emperor Heraclius. He also had his avenging Zama. But, during a memorable interval of eleven years, he held back; fiercely reined up his wrath; brooded; smiled often balefully; watched in his lair; and then, when the hour had struck, let slip his armies and his thunderbolts as no Caesar had ever done, except that one who founded the name of Caesar.

[6] A brutal outrage on a Captain Jenkins–i.e., cutting off his ears–was the cause of a war with Spain in the reign of George II.–ED.