So there was this machine, which had all the material power and was wonderful for purposes of government--for organisation, as we say. But, then, look at the world, the cities, the civilisations in which it was operating. Their thought, their art, their literature, {221} was not Roman; it was Greek. Of all the Eastern part of the world, of Greece itself and all to the east of Greece, right away to the Euphrates and south of Egypt, we may say that it had learned to think in the Greek way before it had ever heard of the Romans at all. Indeed, we may talk, if we please, of Roman art, Roman literature and so on; but if we do we have to remember all the time that there is very little in it that was original. It was nearly all copied from the Greek. The Romans had great men. They had their great orator, Cicero; but he was less great than his Greek predecessor, Demosthenes. They had Livy and Tacitus, the historians. Tacitus had a style of his own. Perhaps he is the most original writer in prose that Rome produced. But Livy compares more with Thucydides, and the comparison is hardly to the advantage of the Roman historian. Besides, we may ask, "How would Livy have written if he had not had Thucydides and other Greeks to be his guides?" We may ask, but we can have no certain answer. The answer that we are obliged to make is that it is scarcely to be believed that these Romans would have done as well, or nearly as well, as they did, if the Greeks had not set them such a good example. Then we may look at the poets. The _Æneid_ of Virgil is certainly modelled on the _Iliad_ of Homer, and, fine though it is, it is far less admirable than the work of the far older Greek poet. Horace stands more by himself, but he uses metres which we know that he borrowed from the Greek, and it is quite possible that he stands rather alone because Greek originals on which he may have modelled his own verse have been lost. Of writers for the theatre, there is no Roman to {222} put "in the same street," as we say, with Æschylus, Sophocles, or Aristophanes. In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato. And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles? Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered and possessed it by her thought. Already, before the Roman conquest of the world, she had achieved this conquest to the east of Italy. By means of the Roman machinery of government, and those straight roads of the Romans, Greek thought was distributed all through the Western world too.