From the foregoing brief notice of some of the chief expressions of the moral consciousness of the early Romans we cannot fail to recognize that their ideal of character was in many respects a very admirable one. Its realization in actual flesh and blood gives us those heroic characters which will live forever in Roman legend, and alongside the Greek heroes in the pages of Plutarch. It molded men grave, earnest, and austere, reverent toward superiors, patriotic and self-devoted to the common good. But the ideal had great defects. One of the most conspicuous of these was its aristocratic character. Rome, writes Wedgwood, “accepts consistently and logically the aristocratic theory on which ancient society is based, and carries out the ideal of the Old World in all its naked impressiveness.”[531] Though advancing far during a thousand years of eventful history toward ethical universalism, pagan Rome never actually reached this moral goal. She never recognized in practice the moral equality of all men. There were to the very last in the pagan Empire, classes, such as slaves and gladiators, who were practically outside the moral sphere. Even Roman Stoicism, which was the latest and noblest expression of the moral life of Rome, notwithstanding its cosmopolitan tendencies, was essentially aristocratic. [Sidenote: (_b_) Its omission of the gentler and the intellectual virtues] Another defect of the old Roman type of excellence was its exclusion of the gentler virtues--humility, tenderness, and sympathy with suffering. The type of character fostered by the ideal was hard and severe, even callous and cruel, proud and self-assertive. It was a type somewhat like the Spartan, one which, when the age of reflection came, naturally developed into the Stoic. The old Romans lacked the quality of mercy and compassion for weakness. They seemed almost destitute of the sentiment of pity for misfortune. Their treatment of prisoners of war and of their slaves in the later period was marked by a repellent brutality. The place in their amusements which the gladiatorial combats assumed evidences their callous insensibility to suffering. Still another defect of this ideal was that it gave little or no place to the intellectual virtues. These ethical qualities which were assigned so prominent a place in the Greek type of excellence, and which since the Renaissance the Western world has come to esteem so highly, were never greatly valued by the Romans until they came under the influence of Greek culture, and then only by the few; hence their intellectual life was, in general, lacking in moral impulse. Mental self-culture was not with them, as it was with the Greeks and is coming to be with ourselves, a moral requirement. III. THE MORAL EVOLUTION UNDER THE REPUBLIC [Sidenote: The maintenance of the standard in early times]