The other great check against official tyranny was the system of annual tenure. All magistrates, except the censors, who had a lengthy task before them and therefore held office for five years, were annual. While this was some safeguard for liberty, it told heavily against efficiency, especially in the case of military leadership by the consuls. It also meant the gradual creation of a great number of office-holders, past and present. It was not quite so effective as the corresponding Athenian system of balloting for office in checking personal eminence, but it certainly succeeded in putting a great number of nonentities and failures into high office--even the supreme command of the legions. THE EARLY ROMAN It is only very dimly that we can trace the outlines of public history as Rome grew to be a power in Italy. We can scarcely hope to trace the lineaments of the individual Roman even in outline. It is sometimes said that even if the earliest history of the city is admitted to be apocryphal, we can draw valuable deductions as to the Roman character from the sort of actions which were regarded as praiseworthy in the earliest times. There is some truth in that view, though it might be objected that most of these stories took literary shape only in the second and first centuries B.C. It might be added that men often admire qualities just because they feel that they themselves cannot claim them. But, on the whole, I think we can get from this period of legendary history some insight into Roman character. There is a remarkable difference between the Roman hero and the Greek. Greek mythology busies itself very largely with stories of cleverness--how Heracles outwitted his foes, smart _équivoques_ by the oracles, ingenious devices of Themistocles, wise sayings of Thales and Solon. It is mainly the intellectual virtues that Greek history of the borderland admires. But the Roman of the same historical area is not clever. Most of the old Roman stories are in praise of courage--for example, the contempt of pain shown by Scævola, who held his right hand in the flames to demonstrate Roman fortitude; the courage of the maiden Clœlia, who swam the river, or of Horatius, who held the bridge against an army; the devotion to his country of Quintus Curtius, who leapt in full armour into the chasm which had opened in the Forum. Many of them celebrate the true Roman virtue of sternness and austere devotion to law, as when the Roman fathers condemned their sons to death for breaking the law under most excusable circumstances. The love of liberty is extolled in Brutus, the love of equality in Valerius and Cincinnatus, called from the plough-tail to supreme command. Austere chastity in females and the strict demand for it in their proprietors is praised in the stories of Lucretia and Virginia. All these we may well set down as the virtues admired and, we hope, practised in early Rome; they form a consistent and quite distinctive picture.