wealth and splendour.[243] Again, the Romans were a rough, turbulent people, full of physical rather than intellectual energy, loving antagonism, courting peril, setting no value on human life or suffering. Their very virtues were stern and severe. The unrelenting justice of a Brutus, representing as it did the victory of principle over feeling, was to them the height of virtue. They were ready to undergo the extreme of physical torture with Regulus, and to devote themselves to death, like Curtius and the Decii. Hard and pitiless to themselves, they were, as might be expected, the same towards others. They were, in fact, strangers to both the passions, which it was the object of tragedy to excite and to purify, Pity and Terror.[244] They were too stern to pity, too unimaginative to be moved by the tales of wonder and deeds of horror which affected the tender and marvel-loving imagination of the Greeks. Being an active, and not a sentimental people, they did not appreciate moral suffering and the struggles of a sensitive spirit. They were moved only by scenes of physical suffering and agony. The public games of Greece at Olympia, or the Isthmus, were bloodless and peaceful, and the refinements of poetry mingled with those which were calculated to invigorate the physical powers and develop manly beauty. Those of Rome were exhibitions, not of moral, but of physical courage and endurance: they were sanguinary and brutalizing,—the amusements of a nation to whom war was not a necessary evil or a struggle for national existence, for hearths and altars, but a pleasure and a pastime—the means of gratifying an aggressive ambition. The tragic feeling of Greece is represented by the sculptured grief of Niobe, that of Rome by the death-struggles which distort the features and muscles of the Laocoon. It was, if the expression is allowable, _amphitheatrical_, not _theatrical_.