The _rôle_ played by pagan Rome on the stage of history was twofold—that of conqueror and that of regulator. In obeying man’s acquisitive instinct she was compelled to perfect her executive instrument, the fighter. To her we owe the words ‘arms’ and ‘army,’ ‘armour’ and ‘armoury.’[853] As _pugna_ derives from _pugnus_, the fist, so _arma_ and its congeners derive from _armus_, the arm: ‘antiqui humeros cum brachiis armos vocabant,’ says Festus. Well knowing that the ‘God of Battles’ favours superiority of weapons as much as, and in select cases more than, ‘big battalions,’ she ever chose the implements and instruments she found the best; and, following her own proverb, she never disdained to take a lesson in arms even from the conquered. But Rome soon learnt that to make good soldiers she must begin by making good citizens. She insisted upon the civilising maxim ‘Cedant arma togæ,’ without, however, the invidious precedence which Sallust calls ‘those most offensive words of Cicero’ ——Concedat laurea linguæ. She subordinated the Captain to the Magistrate, and she proclaimed to both the absolute Reign of Law. The idea presented itself to the Greek mind in the shape of Fate, Anagké, Nemesis: Rome brought it down from the vague to the realistic, from the abstract to the concrete, from heaven to earth. Thus, while Greece taught mankind the novel lessons of ordered liberty, free thought, intellectual culture, and patriotic citizenship, Rome, by her reverence for Law, in whose sight all men were equal, preached the brotherhood of mankind. Hence Christendom ever has been, and is still, governed by a heathen code, by that Roman jurisprudence which flowed from the Twelve Tables, like the laws of Jewry from the Ten Commandments. Indeed the ‘Fecial College’ which pronounced upon the obligations of international war and peace, is an institution which might profitably be revived in the modern world.[854] Rome was single-minded in her objective, conquest; and unlike the Greeks, from whom she borrowed, she was not diverted by art or literature. All her poets for a thousand years fit into one volume. All her art, indeed, can hardly be said to exist; history is silent concerning any save a few exceptional Roman architects. Varro laughs at the puppets and effigies of the gods. The triumph of Metellus (B.C. 146) introduced Art, but the Helleno-Roman artist contented himself with copies and with portrait-statues of the great. In the days of their highest luxury and refinement, the toga’d people were connoisseurs and purchasers who diffused instead of adding to knowledge. Others, as Virgil said, might give movement to marble and breath to bronze: the Art of the Roman was to rule the nations, to spare the subjected, and to debase the proud. ‘Fortia agere Romanum est.’