The four essential facts in the moral life of Rome as a republic are: first, the high standard maintained in the early period; second, the gradual widening of the moral sympathies through the influence of conquest and advance in civilization; third, the general decline in morals during the two centuries preceding the establishment of the Empire; and fourth, the modification of the moral type through contact with Greece and the Orient. Through the legendary haze which envelops all the earlier centuries of Rome, the one fact which stands out with comparative clearness is the Spartan-like loyalty of the old Roman to the ideal of character which he had conceived as the noblest and best. The legends of this period, invented or repeated by the men of a later age, celebrate qualities of character which we may believe really marked early Roman life and thought. Among these virtues were patriotic altruism, absolute self-abnegation for the common good, as illustrated by such tales as those of the self-devotion for the Roman people of Curtius and of the Elder and Younger Publius Decius Mus; reverence for law, as shown by the consul Lucius Junius Brutus in the condemnation of his sons to death for taking part in a conspiracy; and incorruptible integrity, as illustrated by the tales of Fabricius. Even though all these stories of the heroic age of Rome be the invention of a later time, they at least show what at this later (though still comparatively early) period were highly esteemed qualities of character, just as the stories celebrating the filial piety of Chinese heroes of the olden time show how high a place this moral trait held in the ideal of the age that invented or repeated these tales with a didactic purpose. [Sidenote: The widening of the moral sympathies]