dates and facts of the reigns of the emperors, but have never realised, not to say visualised, the contemporary Roman as a human being.  There exist denunciations of the morals of the Roman world of this date which would lead one to believe that every man was a Nero and every woman a Messalina:  denunciations so lurid that, if they were a third part true, the continuance of the Roman Empire, or even of the Roman race, for a single century would be simply incomprehensible.  On the other hand there have been accounts of the material glory of Rome which have conjured up visions of splendour worthy only of the Arabian Nights; and sometimes the comment is added that it was all won from the blood and sweat heartlessly wrung from a world of miserable slaves.  It is not too much to say that none of these descriptions could come from a writer or speaker who knew the period at first hand.

The most dangerous form of falsehood is that which contains some portion of truth.  The life of many a Roman was deplorably dissolute; the splendour of Rome was beyond doubt astonishing; of oppression there were too many scattered instances; but we do not judge the civilisation of the British Empire by the choicest scandals of London, nor the good sense of the United States by the freak follies of New York.  We do not take it that the modern satirist who vents his spleen on an individual or a class is describing each and all of his contemporaries, nor even that what he says is necessarily true of such individual or class.  Nor is the professional moralist himself immune from jaundice or from the disease of exaggeration.

The endeavour here will be to realise more veraciously what life in the Roman world was like.  For those who are familiar with the political history and the escapades of Nero there may be some filling in of gaps and adjusting of perspective.  For those who are familiar with the journeyings and experiences of St. Paul there may be some correction of errors and misconceptions.  For those who have any thought of visiting the ruins of Rome and Pompeii, it may prove helpful to have secured some comprehension of this period.  Pompeii was destroyed only fifteen years after our date, and all those houses, large and small, were occupied in the year 64 by their unsuspecting inhabitants.  Meanwhile mansions, temples, and halls stood in splendour above those platforms and foundations over which we tread amid the broken columns in the Roman Forum or on the Palatine Hill.

CHAPTER I

EXTENT AND SECURITY OF THE EMPIRE

The best means of realising the extent of the Roman Empire in or about the year 64 is to glance at the map.  It will be found to reach from the Atlantic Ocean to the Euphrates, from the middle of England—­approximately the river Trent—­to the south of Egypt, from the Rhine and the Danube to the Desert of Sahara.  The Mediterranean Sea is a Roman lake, and there is not a spot upon its shores which is not under Roman rule.  In round numbers the empire is three thousand miles in length and two thousand in breadth.  Its population, which, at least in the western parts, was much thinner then than it is over the same area at present, cannot be calculated with any accuracy, but an estimate of one hundred millions would perhaps be not very far from the mark.