. The grandeur that was Rome; a survey of Roman culture and civilisation:. to sacrifice. Or fancy thecrowd in the Great Amphitheatre, which held more than eightythousand spectators, with the purple and gold awnings spreadto protect them from the blazing sunshine, the auditorium per-fumed with scents and cooled by fountains, and the arena attheir feet flooded with water to present a naval combat. It isa city wrapped in profound peace, still dreaming amid that it is the mistress of the world. And these signs of magnificent material riches were notconfined to Rome. Alexandria would
. The grandeur that was Rome; a survey of Roman culture and civilisation:. to sacrifice. Or fancy thecrowd in the Great Amphitheatre, which held more than eightythousand spectators, with the purple and gold awnings spreadto protect them from the blazing sunshine, the auditorium per-fumed with scents and cooled by fountains, and the arena attheir feet flooded with water to present a naval combat. It isa city wrapped in profound peace, still dreaming amid that it is the mistress of the world. And these signs of magnificent material riches were notconfined to Rome. Alexandria would almost rival towns like Ephesus and Antioch presented a similarappearance of luxury and opulence. In the north Lugudunumand even Londinium had a splendour of their own. In GadesSpain had a handsome and highly civilised capital. The Romanremains at Trier utterly dwarf the comfortable erections of aprosperous modern town. Out in the desert at Palmyra * andBaalbek \ there were rising into existence those huge buildings * Plate 59. t Ilates 60, 61, 62, 63. 282. THE GROWTH OF THE EMPIRE which testify to the industry fostered by the provincial govern-ment of the emperors. Along the sea-coast of Campania therewere sea-fronts of continuous villas whose marble fragments arestill washed up in the Bay of Naples. It tasks the imaginationof genius to conjure up that glowing world of the past out ofthe ruined foundations which remain. Turners famous pictureof Baiae represents a successful attempt to do so. Pompeii,wonderful as it is, was only a very small and obscure countrytown. Yet it was lavishly provided with temples, baths,theatre, and amphitheatre. On the coast of North Africa, where nothing but manslabour organised under a good government is required to makethe desert blossom as a rose, there was a teeming populationwhich prospered on agriculture. Timgad (Thamugadi) wasfounded in the year loo as a colony by Trajan, and it was thehead-quarters of the Third Legion. Here, in
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