“Others will mould their bronzes to breathe with a tenderer grace, Draw, I doubt not, from marble a vivid life to the face, Plead at the bar more deftly, with sapient wands of the wise, Trace heaven’s courses and changes, predict us stars to arise. Thine, O Roman, remember, to reign over every race! These be thine arts, thy glories, the ways of peace to proclaim, Mercy to show to the fallen, the proud with battle to tame!” _Æneid_, vi. 847-853 (Bowen’s translation). It was this power of ruling, which itself implies a habit of discipline, that marked out Rome as the natural successor of Greece in European civilisation; and it grew naturally out of the purely practical bent of the early Romans, who were unhampered in their constant activity by fancy, reflection, or culture. Without it, we may doubt if the work of the Greeks would have been saved for us when the storms from the north, invasions of barbarian peoples, fell at last upon the sunny lands filled with the spirit of Greek thought and the divine works of Greek artists. To Roman discipline, law, and government, we owe not only much that even now is every day of practical benefit to us, but the preservation of what we still possess of the treasures of Hellenic genius. For this reason I assume that this book will be taken up by most readers after they have made some acquaintance with the history and thought of the Greeks. It is true that the history of the two peoples is best looked at as one great whole; there is a general likeness in their institutions; the form of the State, and the ideas of government, with which each grew to maturity, were in the main the same. But Roman mental development was much slower than Greek; and Greece was already beginning to lose her vitality when Rome was still illiterate and unable to record her own history adequately. Thus Greek influence was the first to tell upon the world; the basin of the Mediterranean was already permeated by the Greek spirit when Roman influence began to work upon it; and there can be no doubt that he who begins with Roman history and then goes on to Greek is reversing the natural order of things.