Streams of History: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) by Ellwood W. Kemp

other religion could; and, second, the government all around the Mediterranean Sea with fine roads leading to every part of the empire made traveling so easy that people could readily pass from place to place and carry the new doctrine.
    Finally, about 325 A.D., a Roman emperor named Constantine adopted the Christian religion and proclaimed it the religion of the whole empire. From that time on all the Roman empire rapidly became Christian.
    During the first three centuries after Christ was born, Rome was able to keep back the strong German tribes who wandered through the woods of the North; but as Rome turned more to pleasure and vice, the Roman army was filled largely with German soldiers, who, living for a time in Rome, saw some of the new life there and often took it back to their German homes. Trade gradually sprang up between the Germans and Romans, and whole tribes of rude warriors were hired by Rome to protect her borders; but finally in 476 A.D., a German barbarian chief, Odoacer, captured the Eternal City, compelled the boy-Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, to give up the Crown, made himself king, and, with the force and ignorance of a barbarian, began to rule in the seat which had been occupied by Roman Kings, Consuls and Emperors for more than a thousand years. But what the Germans, or Teutons, as they are often called, found at Rome, and how the Romans finally educated the Germans, just as the Greeks educated the Romans, we shall see in the next volume of this series.
    Now let us look back over the great stream of Roman history and briefly review what we have seen.
    First we saw infant Rome, nourished, as it were, on wolf-milk, grow to be as strong and brave as a wolf itself. We saw Rome creep slowly out from her seven hills till she had conquered the people near by on the plains, then up to the mountains and conquer the rough, half-civilized, mountaineers. All these people she bound tightly to herself by building permanent roads through their territory, settling colonies among them, and teaching them the laws, manners and customs of Rome.
    All of this time there was going on at Rome the fierce struggle between the rich patrician and the poor plebeian. After two hundred years of struggle, the ple beians became equal to the patricians. Rome then felt strong, and with a senate, composed of brave, virtuous, unselfish men, began the fierce struggle with Carthage and her great general, Hannibal. With Carthage conquered, we saw Rome, like a mighty fisherman firmly draw her net of law around the Mediterranean and catch and hold securely in its meshes all the peoples studied earlier,—Egypt, Judea, Mesopotamia, Phœnicia and Greece. All these she finally bound into one immense government, having one ruler, one law, one mighty system of roads reaching to every corner of the immense empire. Then we saw Greek literature and Greek philosophy spread throughout the west. Finally, as Rome was growing old and losing her power to rule, we saw the rise of the King whose kingdom was not to be of this world, and whose law was to be the law of love. As men came to understand this law, slowly, quietly and almost unnoticed, Christianity took root and, amid much opposition, continued to grow till it burst the bounds of the old empire and spread throughout Europe. Rome had lived for more than a thousand years and had taught the world as no other nation had been able to do the great lesson of how to build a mighty nation with a single center from which to rule. In doing so, she had become the great western reservoir which gathered into this center the streams of wealth, culture, art, law, philosophy, literature, religion and learning which had been slowly flowing westward from Memphis, Babylon, Tyre, Jerusalem, Athens and Alexandria through the thousands of years which had gone before.
    When Rome died as a government she did not die in the hearts and minds of men, for, as already said, a mightier power than she arose to carry all this thought