Hellas owed her successes in foreign wars mainly to the barbarous condition of her neighbours. The Romans and all the peoples of Asia Minor, save her own colonies,[849] were far behind her when, after the fashion of the equestrian races of Northern Asia, she had exchanged the chariot for the charger;[850] and when she borrowed from Egypt the arts of warfare by land and sea, the paraphernalia of the siege, the best of arms and armour, and even the redoubtable phalanx. But she lost pre-eminence, physical and moral, when the rival races rose to be her equals, and even her superiors, in weapons, organisation, and discipline. She began with beating, and she ended with being thoroughly beaten by, the Romans. Greek literature does not abound, like Roman and Hebrew, in perpetual allusions to the Sword: it refers more frequently to the spear and bow. Yet Athenæus ennobles the end of his curious _olla podrida_ (the ‘Deipnosophists’) with some charming lines alluding to the Queen of Weapons. The first passage begins with:— I’ll wreathe my sword in myrtle bough, The sword that laid the tyrant low, When Patriots burning to be free To Athens gave equality.[851] The second is the song of Hybrias the Cretan:— My wealth is here, the sword, the spear, the breast-defending shield, With this I plough, with this I sow, with this I reap the field; With this I rape the luscious grape and drink the blood-red wine, And slaves at hand in order stand, and all are counted mine![852] And here arises a curious question. Do races, as is generally assumed, decline and fall like nations and empires? Does the body politic obey the law of the body corporal? Do peoples grow old and feeble and barren after their most brilliant periods of gestation? Or rather do they not cease to be great, and to bear great men, because their neighbours have grown to be greater, and because genius is repressed by unfavourable media? I cannot see that Time has greatly changed the peasant of the Romagna, the mountaineer of the Peloponnesus, the Persian become a Parsi in Bombay, or the modern soldier of the Nile Valley, who, under Ibrahim Pasha, defeated the Turks in every pitched battle. But the conditions of Italy, Greece, Persia, and Egypt, are now fundamentally altered: they are no longer superior to their surroundings; they are environed by races stronger than themselves. Hence, perhaps, what is popularly called their degeneracy. CHAPTER XII. THE SWORD IN ANCIENT ROME; THE LEGION AND THE GLADIATOR.