The Beginnings of New England | Page 5

to an end. It was in that year that the soldier of fortune, Odovakar, commander of the Herulian mercenaries in Italy, sent the handsome boy Romulus, son of Orestes, better known as "little Augustus," from his imperial throne to the splendid villa of Lucullus near Naples, and gave him a yearly pension of $35,000 [6,000 solidi] to console him for the loss of a world. As 324 years elapsed before another emperor was crowned at Rome, and as the political headship of Europe after that happy restoration remained upon the German soil to which the events of the eighth century had shifted it, nothing could seem more natural than the habit which historians once had, of saying that the mighty career of Rome had ended, as it had begun, with a Romulus. Sometimes the date 476 was even set up as a great landmark dividing modern from ancient history. For those, however, who took such a view, it was impossible to see the events of the Middle Ages in their true relations to what went before and what came after. It was impossible to understand what went on in Italy in the sixth century, or to explain the position of that great Roman power which had its centre on the Bosphorus, which in the code of Justinian left us our grandest monument of Roman law, and which for a thousand years was the staunch bulwark of Europe against the successive aggressions of Persian, Saracen, and Turk. It was equally impossible to understand the rise of the Papal power, the all-important politics of the great Saxon and Swabian emperors, the relations of mediaeval England to the Continental powers, or the marvellously interesting growth of the modern European system of nationalities. [Sidenote: When did the Roman Empire come to an end?]
Since the middle of the nineteenth century the study of history has undergone changes no less sweeping than those which have in the same time affected the study of the physical sciences. Vast groups of facts distributed through various ages and countries have been subjected to comparison and analysis, with the result that they have not only thrown fresh light upon one another, but have in many cases enabled us to recover historic points of view that had long been buried in oblivion. Such an instance was furnished about twenty-five years ago by Dr. Bryce's epoch-making work on the Holy Roman Empire. Since then historians still recognize the importance of the date 476 as that which left the Bishop of Rome the dominant personage in Italy, and marked the shifting of the political centre of gravity from the Palatine to the Lateran. This was one of those subtle changes which escape notice until after some of their effects have attracted attention. The most important effect, in this instance, realized after three centuries, was not the overthrow of Roman power in the West, but its indefinite extension and expansion. The men of 476 not only had no idea that they were entering upon a new era, but least of all did they dream that the Roman Empire had come to an end, or was ever likely to. Its cities might be pillaged, its provinces overrun, but the supreme imperial power itself was something without which the men of those days could not imagine the world as existing. It must have its divinely ordained representative in one place if not in another. If the throne in Italy was vacant, it was no more than had happened before; there was still a throne at Constantinople, and to its occupant Zeno the Roman Senate sent a message, saying that one emperor was enough for both ends of the earth, and begging him to confer upon the gallant Odovakar the title of patrician, and entrust the affairs of Italy to his care. So when Sicambrian Chlodwig set up his Merovingian kingdom in northern Gaul, he was glad to array himself in the robe of a Roman consul, and obtain from the eastern emperor a formal ratification of his rule.
[Transcriber's note: page missing in original.] still survives in political methods and habits of thought that will yet be long in dying out. With great political systems, as with typical forms of organic life, the processes of development and of extinction are exceedingly slow, and it is seldom that the stages can be sharply marked by dates. The processes which have gradually shifted the seat of empire until the prominent part played nineteen centuries ago by Rome and Alexandria, on opposite sides of the Mediterranean, has been at length assumed by London and New York, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, form a most interesting subject of study. But to understand them, one must do much more than merely catalogue the facts of political history; one must acquire a