In two respects, however, the geographical circumstances of Rome appear specially to have prepared her for the exercise of universal empire. In the first place, her position was such as to bring her into contact from the outset with a great variety of races. The cradle of her dominion was a sort of ethnological microcosm. Latins, Etruscans, Greeks, Campanians, with all the mountain races and the Gauls, make up a school of the most diversified experience, which could not fail to open the minds of the future masters of the world. How different was this education from that of a people which is either isolated, like the Egyptians, or comes into contact perhaps in the way of continual border hostility with a single race! What the exact relations of Rome with Etruria were in the earliest times we do not know, but evidently they were close; while between the Roman and the Etruscan character the difference appears to have been as wide as possible. The Roman was pre-eminently practical and business- like, sober-minded, moral, unmystical, unsacerdotal, much concerned with present duties and interests, very little concerned about a future state of existence, peculiarly averse from human sacrifices and from all wild and dark superstitions. The Etruscan, as he has portrayed himself to us in his tombs, seems to have been, in his later development at least, a mixture of Sybaritism with a gloomy and almost Mexican religion, which brooded over the terrors of the next world, and sought in the constant practice of human sacrifice a relief from its superstitious fear. If the Roman could tolerate the Etruscans, be merciful to them, and manage them well, he was qualified to deal in a statesmanlike way with the peculiarities of almost any race, except those whose fierce nationality repelled all management whatever. In borrowing from the Etruscans some of their theological lore and their system of divination, small as the value of the things borrowed was, the Roman, perhaps, gave an earnest of the receptiveness which led him afterwards, in his hour of conquest, to bow to the intellectual ascendency of the conquered Greek, and to become a propagator of Greek culture, though partly in a Latinized form, more effectual than Alexander and his Orientalized successors.