But we have hurried on to the Empire and left out the Republic. What were the beginnings and early occupations of this astonishing race, of whose national hero we are reminded when we use the word _brute_? In the previous chapter reference was made to certain words and phrases which are now used for the purposes of everyday life, but which were originally technical metaphors drawn from the phenomena of electricity. If we examine such words as _calamity_, _delirious_, _emolument_, _pecuniary_, _prevaricate_, _tribulation_, we shall find that they possess a similar history. Although the Romans of classical times used the Latin words from which they are derived in much the same way as the English words are used now, yet if we trace them a little farther back, we learn that ‘delirare’ had at one time no other meaning than to ‘go out of the furrow,’ when ploughing; ‘praevaricari’ was to ‘plough in crooked lines’; ‘tribulare’ to thrash with a ‘tribulum’, and so forth. In _interval_, on the other hand (from ‘intervallum’, the space between two palisades), _excel_, _premium_, _salary_, and many other words we have examples of metaphors taken from the military life. The English-sounding word, _spoil_, comes to us from a Latin term which once had no other meaning than to ‘strip a conquered foe of his arms’. By entering with our imaginations into the biography of such a word, as it lives in time, we catch glimpses of civilization in primitive Rome. Agriculture and war, we feel, were the primary businesses of life, and it was to these that the Roman mind instinctively flew when it was casting about for some means of expressing a new abstract idea—of realizing the unknown in terms of the known. Not often could the warlike city afford to beat her swords into ploughshares, but she was constantly melting both implements into ideas.