The same motive will also be suggested to us if we visit any of the larger Roman works either in this country or on the Continent. Most of us know the look of a Roman road running straight over hill and valley, and meant mainly for military purposes, to enable troops to move rapidly and to survey the country as they marched. In the towns which have been excavated, we usually find that the most spacious and striking buildings must have been the meeting-halls (_basilicæ_), in which business of all kinds was transacted, and especially business connected with law and government. Very often, though not in the comparatively poor province of Britain, this characteristic of utility is combined with another—solidity and imposing size. In this well-watered island the Romans did not need aqueducts to bring a constant supply of water to their towns, but in Italy and the south of France these great works are sometimes unnecessarily huge and imposing. Even when they left the path of strict utility, as in their triumphal arches and gateways, for which we must go to Trier in Germany, or to Orange in the south of France, or to Italy itself, they held strongly to the principles of solidity and imposing size. A writer who knew their art well has said that their notion of the highest of all things, their _summum bonum_, was not the beautiful, but the powerful, and that they thought they had as a people received this notion from heaven. It would, indeed, be wrong to say that there is no beauty in Roman art; but it is quite in accordance with what has just been said, that even in the best of it there is a strong tendency to realism, to matter of fact. In their sculpture they were especially strong in portraiture, and in depicting scenes of human life they never or rarely idealise. A battle scene, or a picture on stone of life in a city, is crowded with figures, just because it really was so, and the work is without that restfulness for the eye which the perfect grouping of a Greek artist so often supplies. So, too, in literature; all their greatest poetry has a strictly practical object, and bears directly on human life. The great philosophical poem of Lucretius was meant to rescue the Romans from religious superstition; the object of the _Æneid_ of Virgil, of which I shall have more to say in another chapter, was to recall the degenerate Roman of that day to the sense of duty in the home and in the State. Their one original invention in literary form was satire, by which they meant comment, friendly or hostile, on the human life around them. Their myths and legends, of which there was no such abundant crop as in Greece, dealt chiefly with the founding of cities, or with the heroic deeds of human beings.[1] On the whole they excelled most in oratory and history; and their prose came to perfection earlier than their poetry.