opportunities. The Empire arose in the west and in Italy, a land that,
geographically speaking, looks westward. But it was drawn surely, if
slowly, to the east. Throughout the first three centuries of our era, we
can trace an eastward drift--of troops, of officials, of government
machinery--till finally the capital itself is no longer Rome but
Byzantium. All the while, in the undisturbed security of the west,
Romanization proceeded steadily.

The advance of this Romanization followed manifold lines. The Roman
government gave more or less direct encouragement, particularly in two
ways. It increased the Roman or Romanized population of the provinces
during the earlier Empire by establishing time-expired soldiers--men who
spoke Latin and who were citizens of Rome[1]--in provincial
municipalities (_coloniae_). It allured provincials themselves to adopt
Roman civilization by granting the franchise and other privileges to
those who conformed. Neither step need be ascribed to any idealism on
the part of the rulers. _Coloniae_ served as instruments of repression
as well as of culture, at least in the first century of the Empire. When
Cicero[2] describes a _colonia_, founded under the Republic in southern
Gaul, as 'a watch-tower of the Roman people and an outpost planted to
confront the Gaulish tribes', he states an aspect of such a town which
obtained during the earlier Empire no less than in the Republican age.
Civilized men, again, are always more easily ruled than savages.[3] But
the result was in any case the same. The provincials became Romanized.

[Footnote 1: English writers sometimes adduce the provincial origins of
the soldiers as proofs that they were unromanized. The conclusion is
unjustifiable. The legionaries were throughout recruited from places
which were adequately Romanized. The auxiliaries, though recruited from
less civilized districts, and though to some extent tribally organized