Italy was leading a struggling existence in the middle of powerful tribes. Sometimes she was victorious, sometimes she bought off the enemy, once or twice she was almost destroyed. In the end, after continuous warfare, she gained a precarious supremacy in South and Central Italy, and turned her eyes across the seas. Two hundred years more of fighting were added to her wars in Italy, and she emerged practically the mistress of the world, with a stronger organisation and sounder statecraft than had yet been known.

In these early struggles a character was formed that never lost traces of its origin. It is betrayed in the favourite adjectives: fortis, strenuus, constans, diligens, firmus, verecundus, castus, prudens, gravis, assiduus, sedulus (the last two reminding us of the saying, Sedendo vincit Romanus). Hard necessity taught the Roman to prize these qualities. He became brave, stubborn, honest because otherwise he would have been destroyed. He learnt the art of statesmanship and compromise, because he had either to avoid civil war or perish. He avoided vice, because there was no leisure to be vicious. He was not luxurious, because he had no means of making money. All this became a second nature to him. That is why Cicero makes his claim in

the Tusculans. That is why Quintilian says,
rather unjustly to Greece: Graeci praeceptis valent,
Romani exemplis. "The Greeks tell us, the Romans
shew us, how to live." That is why in poet after
poet of Rome lines of a certain quality reappear.
There is nothing in the sentiment or diction or
style which shews them to be the work of any
particular writer. They bear a common stamp,
and might have come from one mint. They bear
the stamp of the Latin genius.

Vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu (Lucretius).
Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem (Ennius).
Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa (Horace).
Non fuit exuviis tantis Cornelia damnum ;

Quin et erat magnae pars imitanda domus (Propertius).
Bene non poterat sine puro pectore vivi (Lucretius).
Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta (Persius).
Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque (Ennius).
Propter vitam vivendi perdere causas (Juvenal).1

1"Life is given to all to use, to none to have and hold.” "He did not set what men said, before the safety of the state." "To have no guilty secrets, no sin at which we turn pale." "Cornelia was no hurt to these high achievements; nay, she was a pattern in the great house of which she was a child." "Men could not live well without a pure heart.” “Let them see virtue and pine that they have deserted her." "The state of Rome stands by its ancient manners and its men." sake of life to lose what makes life worth living."

"For the

These lines are taken from authors so diverse in time and character as Horace, Lucretius, Ennius, Persius, Juvenal, Propertius; yet except for some peculiarities of diction and metre they might be by a single writer. The common characteristic is a deep sense of something which perhaps we can best express by the word 'character,' a deep sense, not of the brilliance and glory of life, but of its tremendous possibilities for achievement and failure. They are distinctively Roman. There would be no difficulty in multiplying such lines indefinitely, or in finding sentences in prose which breathe identically the same spirit. Non votis neque suppliciis muliebribus auxilia deorum parantur; vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo prospera omnia cedunt; ubi socordiae te atque ignaviae tradideris, nequicquam deos implores. No one could mistake the spirit of any of these quotations for Greek; they are somehow of a different cast. Greece has indeed done more for morals than any force except Christianity, but she has done it by appealing to

1 Sallust, Cat. c. 52. "The help of heaven is not won by vows and womanish prayers; all success is the reward of watchfulness, vigour, wise counsel; if you abandon yourself to indifference and indolence, you will ask the help of God in vain."

the reason, by making men think. Her yvumu are generally thoughts on life rather than direct moral precepts. But the Roman maxims are direct injunctions, as peremptory and practical as the Ten Commandments, the orders of a commander-inchief on the battlefield of life.

There we have one of the reasons why Latin is so valuable in education. Glance again at the quotations on the preceding page, and think whether this is not the temper which we should wish to create in the youth of a nation, on whom a task not unlike Rome's is laid. Can we find · more vivid, more trenchant, more memorable expressions of a heroic and imperial spirit? And can anyone fail to profit by knowing a literature which is full of such sayings and becoming a familiar friend of the men who made them and the nation whose character they express. Greek takes us into the world of thought; in Latin we live with a heroic race,

The commonwealth of kings, the men of Rome.

(Hero is not a word, somehow, we should use of the great Greeks, though no Roman lived and died more nobly than, for instance, Socrates.) Like Aeneas in the lower world we move among

illustres animae, splendid souls; Cincinnatus fetched, like a Boer farmer, from the plough to be chief magistrate of Rome; Valerius, who, dying as consul, did not leave enough money to pay for his funeral; Regulus, refusing to be exchanged for Carthaginian prisoners, and himself opposing it in the Senate, because "they are young and valuable generals, while I am an old and broken man," 1 and going back to Carthage to torture and death; Brutus, grimly handing his two sons over to execution because they had conspired against the state; Aelius Tubero, "who was a marvellous honest man, and did more nobly maintain himself in his poverty than any other Roman; for they were sixteen persons all of the house of Aelii, very near akin one to the other, who all had but one little house in the city, and a small farm in the country, wherewith they entertained themselves, and lived all together in one house, with their wives and many little children." Consider how the Senate greeted the consul, who, chosen by the

1 Cicero, De Off. 3. 26.

• Plutarch, V. Aem. Paulli, c. 5. (The translations from Plutarch are taken with a few correotions from North, who is delightful, if not verbally accurate; his translation of the Lives is published in the Temple Classics.)