Civilization of the Early Roman Empire 341

But he could take a great Roman galley at Antioch and cross 687. The
°Ver to Alexandria, where a still more ancient world awaited eler in the
""n. In the vast lighthouse (Fig. 95), over four hundred years East: EsyPt
°'d and visible for hours before he reached the harbor, he
recognized the model of the Roman lighthouses he had seen,
^ere our traveler found himself among a group of wealthy
Greek and Roman tourists on the Nile. As they left the
magnificent buildings of Hellenistic Alexandria (§ 466), their
v°yage up the river carried them at once into the midst of an
earlier world — the earliest world of which they knew... All
about them at Memphis and Thebes were buildings which were
thousands of years old before Rome was founded. On these monu-
ments we still find their scribblings at the present day (Fig. 29).

The eastern Mediterranean was regarded by the Romans 688. Ancient
as their ancient world, long possessed of its own ancient civili- ^JhTEast •

*ation, Greek and oriental. There the Roman traveler found later Roman
p in the West

^reek everywhere as far west as Sicily (Fig. 117), and spoke

]t as he traveled. But when he turned away from the East and
entered the western Mediterranean, he found that the language
°f civilized intercourse was Latin, the language of Rome. In
'he western Mediterranean he entered a much more modern
world, with vast regions where civilization was a recent matter,
Wst as it is in America. In this age western Europe had for
the first time been building cities; but it was under the guid-
ance of Roman architects, and their buildings looked like those
at Rome. We can still visit and study massive bridges, spacious
theaters, imposing public monuments, sumptuous villas, and
luxurious public baths — a line of Roman ruins stretching from
Britain through southern France and Germany to the northern
Balkans (Fig. 118). Similarly in North Africa between the
desert and the sea, west of Carthage, the ruins of whole cities
with magnificent public buildings still survive to show us how
Roman civilization reclaimed regions of the western Mediterra-
nean world little better than barbarous before the Roman
conquest.