Nicanor - Teller of Tales | Page 7

Rome once set her seal could never wholly lose the
mark; must remain bound to her by ties, which, stretching across the
centuries, would link the future to the past. In spite of the bitterness of
her defeat and ruin, and because she still was Rome, she was mighty
enough to leave precious gifts to the peoples who should come after her.
To Britain, because Britain had been her own, she left many legacies
great and small: the sonorous richness of her speech, soon corrupted to
make for a new world a new speech as noble; and more than all, she
left the word of her mighty law, proudest monument ever reared by
mortal hands to a nation's glory. Rome's sons builded well for her; and
the labor of their hearts and hands was not for the day alone, but for the

ages. Towns yet to rise upon the ashes of her stately cities would find
their model in her municipal government, and in her laws concerning
the taxation of land and the distribution of personal and real estate. Old
customs she left to be handed down to those who should sit in her sons'
places,--the luctus of widows, who for a full year of widowhood might
not wed again; the names of her deities she gave to the days of the
planetary week. Her superstitions and folk-lore, deep-rooted, survived
and lingered long among many nations: the old sorcery of the waxen
image of an enemy transfixed by bodkins for the torment of that enemy;
the belief in the were-wolf (one of the oldest of Roman traditions); the
association of the yew tree with mourning and the passing of human
souls.
Britain, with all her virgin wealth unmined, furnished Rome with
enormous food supplies; sent many thousand men to serve with Roman
armies on the continent; and received the colonists, called auxiliaries,
brought thither in accordance with Rome's invariable policy of
transplanting to the land of one nation captives from another. Thus the
population of Britain, composed of people from nearly every race or
tribe which has been subdued by Rome, was strangely heterogeneous,
yet as strangely fused. It was Romanized; the national individuality of
its units was lost in that of their conqueror. But as Rome destroyed the
nationality of her captives, so in time she inevitably destroyed her own.
If they were Romanized, she was Gothicized and Gaulicized. But by
this means only was the circulation of her life-currents maintained to
the uttermost branches of the empire. That great empire, age-old,
rotting inwardly almost to decay, was vitalized, as it were galvanically,
against her approaching dissolution by the blood of her colonies. In the
throes of hierarchical government, torn by three irreconcilable
religions,--polytheistic, Julian or Augustan, and Christian,--she had no
strength to spare for these outsiders when her own life was at stake.
The story of Roman Britain is the old story which history repeats down
all the ages: Rome sacrificed one part of Europe that the whole might
not be lost, and offered up the few for the good of the greater number.
For in those dark days from the second century of the Christian era
until near the close of the fifth, when came the last stage of the struggle

and the extinction of the Empire of the West, the world seemed
tottering to its ruin. Kingdoms shook and crumbled to their fall; new
powers strove headlong for their seats; men found themselves harried
on all sides, with no pause for respite, and harried again in turn. They
did not understand; they knew only that fierce unrest possessed all the
earth, manifesting itself in the terrible wandering of the nations, which
was to culminate in a new world and a new order of things. Small
wonder that bewildered folk, swept on and overwhelmed in the
maelstrom of world-wide turbulence, unknowing what must happen
next, predicted and believed that with the year 999 the end of the world
would surely come.
They had good reason for such belief. At Rome the fierce tribes from
Northern Europe could no longer be held back. Goths, Vandals, Huns,
each in their own good time had joined in the attack. Rome the Mighty,
the Eternal, invincible as Fate, whose power no man believed could
have an end, was brought to bay at last, impotent, drained by internal
sores, goaded and tortured by foes without, with a horde of wolfish
barbarians snarling and snapping at her throat. From one distant
province after another her legions were called home. The fated twelve
centuries of her power were ended; the direst tragedy of history had
begun.
Britain, with all her fear and hatred of the heavy Roman hand, had yet
been secure from outer harm while the strength of that hand was with
her. For in