Everything else is foreign, imported, or conquered. The theatre originating in Etruria and in Greece was simply imitated and then forsaken for bear fights which later became processions, magnificent in weapons and ornaments, parades of triumph and war. Monuments of art were pillaged in Greece, and in Cicero’s time were still despised; while in poetry, there was no original fiction, no invention of characters. The only things in which the national genius rivals the imitation of foreign models are oratory,--the arm of the forum,--satire,--versified pleading and instruction in morals,--and history, the record of political facts, which, however, is at Rome only a collection of memoirs or an exercise in oratory; and all these things are concerned with the practical and with government. If Rome possessed poets, it was solely when her particular genius gave way before a new movement. The only entertainments she invented were triumphs and games in the circus, where victory was continued by the humiliation and death of the vanquished, where the spectator was the conqueror and assassin. All scientific writings were translations. There were compilers such as Varro and Pliny, imitators such as Cicero and Lucretius; some small advance was made in agriculture, rhetoric, medicine, and architecture--all applied sciences. In the place of metaphysics, the clumsy physics of Epicurus and of the stoics were copied. The practical side of philosophy was alone studied, moral philosophy, and that with a purely practical object. The only strictly Roman science is jurisprudence, and that is altogether practical and political. It is, moreover, so long as it remains Roman, but a collection of dry formulæ, a mere manual for lawyers and not a branch of science. From the character of Roman genius springs its history. The family and religion being subordinate to the state, art and science being null, or entirely practical, and the state having no other object than to conquer and to organise what it had conquered, Roman history is the history of conquest and its effects.