dominion, although ready at the first touch to fall to pieces. All of Asia of which the Greeks had any knowledge, from the shores of the Ægæan to the Indus and the Araxes, from the Erythræan Sea southwards to the Caspian, and the chain of Caucasus, obeyed, to speak generally, the great king. In Africa however it was otherwise: Egypt had been for some years in revolt, was again governed by a dynasty of its native princes, and had defied the efforts of the Persian kings to reconquer it. And this example, together with the long war carried on against the Persians by Evagoras, the tyrant of the little state of Salamis, in Cyprus, and the belt of Greek cities encircling the whole coast of Asia Minor, from Trapezus on the Euxine to Cnidus by the Triopian Cape, was tending gradually to dissolve the Persian power. The great king's hold on Caria and Cilicia was loosened, and when Isocrates wrote his Panegyrical Oration, in the beginning of the hundredth Olympiad 10, Tyre was in the possession of the king's enemies, and its naval force strengthened for a time the arms of Evagoras. CHAP. Such was the state of the civilized world, when the Conclusion. Kelts or Gauls broke through the thin screen which had hitherto concealed them from sight, and began for the first time to take their part in the great drama of the nations. For nearly two hundred years they continued to fill Europe and Asia with the terror of their name: but it was a passing tempest, and if useful at all, it was useful only to destroy. The Gauls could communicate no essential points of human character in which other races might be deficient; they could neither improve the intellectual state of mankind, nor its social and political relations. When, 40 Isocrates, Panegyric. § 188, p. 74. XXII. CHAP. therefore, they had done their appointed work of havoc, they were doomed to be themselves extirpated, or to be lost amidst nations of greater creative and constructive power; nor is there any race which has left fewer traces of itself in the character and institutions of modern civilization. CHAPTER XXIII. MISCELLANEOUS--PHYSICAL HISTORY. "Postrema vero partitio historiæ civilis ea sit, ut dividatur in meram aut mixtam. Mixturæ celebres duæ: altera ex scientiâ civili; altera præcipue ex naturali.”—BACON, De Augmentis Scientiar. II. 10. XXIII. Imper the materials history. A GREAT work might be written on the connexion be- CHAP. tween the revolutions of nature and those of mankind: how they act each upon the other; how man is affected fection of by climate, and how climate is again altered by the for physical labours of man: how diseases are generated; how different states of society are exposed to different disorders, and require different sorts of diet: how, as all earthly things are exhaustible, the increased command over external nature given by increased knowledge seems to have a tendency to shorten the period of the existing creation, by calling at once into action those resources of the earth which else might have supplied the wants of centuries to come: how, in short, nature, no less than human society, contains tokens that it had a beginning, and will as surely have its end. But unfortunately, the physical history of ancient times is even more imperfect than the political history; and in the place of those exact and uninterrupted records of natural phenomena, from which alone any safe conclusions can be drawn, we have only a few scattered notices; nor can we be sure that even these have recorded what was most worthy of our knowledge. Still XXIII. CHAP these scanty memorials, such as they are, must not be neglected: and as we gain a wider experience, even these may hereafter be found instructive. The climate of Italy was anciently colder in it is now. The first question with regard to the physical state of ancient Rome is, whether the climate was such as it winter than is at present. Now here it is impossible not to consider the somewhat analogous condition of America at this day. Boston is in the same latitude with Rome; but the severity of its winter far exceeds not that of Rome only, but of Paris and London. Allowing that the peninsular form of Italy must at all times have had its effect in softening the climate, still the woods and marshes of Cisalpine Gaul, and the perpetual snows of the Alps, far more extensive than at present, owing to the uncultivated and uncleared state of Switzerland and Germany, could not but have been felt even in the neighbourhood of Rome. Besides, even on the Apennines, and in Etruria and in Latium, the forests occupied a far greater space than in modern times; this would increase the quantity of rain, and consequently the volume of water in the rivers; the floods would be greater and more numerous, and before man's dominion had completely subdued the whole country, there would be large accumulations of water in the low grounds, which would still further increase the coldness of the atmosphere. The language of ancient writers, on It is by no means easy to know what weight is to be given to the language of the poets; nor how far particular descriptions or expressions may have been occasioned by peculiar local circumstances. Pliny's statement, Epistol. II. 17, that the bay tree would rarely live through the winter without shelter, either at Rome, or at his own villa at Laurentum, if taken absolutely, would prove too much; for although the bay is less hardy than some other evergreens, yet how can it be conceived that a climate in which the olive would flourish, could be too severe for the bay? There must either have been some local peculiarity of winds or soil, which the tree did not like, or else the fact, as is sometimes the case, must have been too hastily assumed: and men were afraid from long custom to leave the bay unprotected in the winter, although in fact they might have done it with safety. Yet the elder Pliny, XVII. 2, speaks of long snows being useful to the corn, which shows that he is not speaking of the mountains; and a long snow XXIII. the whole, favours the same conclusion, that the Ro- CHAP. man winter, in their days, was more severe than it is at present. It agrees with this, that the olive, which cannot bear a continuance of severe cold, was not introduced into Italy till long after the vine: Fenestella 2 asserted that its cultivation was unknown as late as the reign of Tarquinius Priscus; and such was the notion entertained of the cold of all inland countries, even in the latitude of Greece, that Theophrastus 3 held it impossible to cultivate the olive at the distance of more than four hundred stadia from the sea. But the cold of the winter is perfectly consistent with great heat in the summer. The vine is cultivated with success on the Rhine, in the latitude of Devonshire and Cornwall, although the winter at Coblentz and Bonn is far more severe than it is in Westmorland; and evergreens will flourish through the winter in the Westmorland valleys far better than on the Rhine or in the heart of France. The summer heat of Italy was lying in the valleys of central or southern Italy would surely be a very unheard-of phenomenon now. Again, the freezing of the rivers, as spoken of by Virgil and Horace, is an image of winter, which could not I think naturally suggest itself to Italian poets of the present day, at any point to the south of the Apennines. Other arguments to the same effect may be seen in a paper by Daines Barrington, in the 58th volume of the Philosophical Transactions. Gibbon also, after stating the arguments on both sides of the question, comes to the same conclusion. Miscellan. Works, Vol. III. p. 246. He quotes, however, the Abbé de Louguerue, as saying that the Tiber was frozen in the bitter winter of 1709. 2 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XV. 1. 3 Pliny, Hist. Natur. XV. 1. It is a common notion that climate follows latitude, and that a northern country will be cold, and VOL. I. 4 a southern one warm, as compared Ee Wall |