The Roman state from its origin, and according to its first constitution, was nothing else than a well organized school of war, a permanent establishment for conquest. Among other nations, as among the Persians and Greeks, the desire of military glory and the lust of conquest was only a temporary enthusiasm, called forth by some special cause, or some mighty motive--a sudden sally--the thought of a moment. Among the Romans it is precisely the systematically slow and progressive march of their first conquests, their inflexible perseverance, their unremitting activity, the vigilant use of every advantageous opportunity, which strike the observer, and explain the cause of their mighty success in after-times. That unshaken constancy under misfortune, which ever characterised the Romans, they displayed even at this early period during the conquest of their city by the Gauls; though this misfortune, like that people itself, was but a transient calamity. In general, the Romans never evinced greater energy than when they were overcome, or when they met with an unexpected resistance. Sometimes in a moment of extreme urgency, their generals, like the Consul Decius Mus, taking a chosen body of troops, invoked the national Gods, devoted themselves to death, and rushed on the superior forces of the enemy, whereby though they fell the victims of their zeal, they saved the army from the menaced ignominy of defeat, and achieved a signal victory. With such a character, such unshaken fortitude and perseverance under misfortune, we can well conceive that in a state so constituted like theirs, the Romans, by their indefatigable activity in war, should in no very great space of time have conquered and subdued all the surrounding nations and states of Italy. It was thus they successively overcame the kindred and confederated tribes of Latium, and the rude Sabines; that, after a long and obstinate siege of the Tuscan city of Veii, they became masters of the Etrurian League, lords of the beautiful Campania, and vanquished the warlike Samnites on the Apennine range, and on the coast of the Adriatic. They now cast their eyes on the rich provinces of Magna Græcia. In the war against Tarentum, which was in alliance with Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, they came for the first time in contact with the great extra-Italic Greek powers, and had to encounter, in the ranks of the enemy, the unwonted spectacle of war-elephants, which were there employed according to the Asiatic custom. After the loss of the first battles, they were victorious; and they now added Apulia and Calabria to their conquests. Each step in the career at victory drew after it new embarrassments, new occasions, and new matter for future wars. The inhabitants of Syracuse, who had been for some time governed by tyrants, formed on the retreat of Pyrrhus, an alliance with the Carthaginians, then masters of half of Sicily, and sought their protection against the