the senate. They met with no resistance. It was naturally of no avail, that the majority of the senate, with the view of protesting in some way against the mockery and censure of their decree in the matter of Catilina, publicly put on mourning, and that Cicero himself, now when it was too late, fell on his knees and besought mercy from Pompeius; he had to banish himself even before the passing of the law which debarred him from his native land (April 696). Cato likewise did not venture to provoke sharper measures by declining the commission which he had received, but accepted itand embarked for the east.(12) What was most immediately necessary was done; Caesar too might leave Italy to devote himself to more serious tasks.
CHAPTER VII The Subjugation of the West
The Romanizing of the West
When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness, which fought its battles in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch of Rome should be called Gnaeus, Gaius, or Marcus, we may well be allowed--on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world--to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be apprehended in their bearing on the general history of the world.
By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage-- by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much a law of nature as the law of gravity--the Italian nation (the only one in antiquity which was able to