in Persia, Alexander, seventy years later, met
with their chief enemies in Greeks. We may therefore pronounce with
firmness, that unity was one cause of the Roman superiority. What was
the other? Better military institutions. These, if we should go upon the
plan of rehearsing them, are infinite. But let us confine our view to
the separate mode in each people of combining their troops. In Greece,
the _phalanx_ was the ideal tactical arrangement; for Rome, the
_legion_. Everybody knows that Polybius, a Greek, who fled from the
Peloponnesus to Rome a little before the great Carthaginian war,
terminated by Scipio Africanus, has left a most interesting comparison
between the two forms of tactical arrangement: and, waiving the details,
the upshot is this--that the phalanx was a holiday arrangement, a
tournament arrangement, with respect to which you must suppose an excess
of luck if it could be made available, unless by mutual consent, under a
known possibility of transferring the field of battle to some smooth
bowling-green in the neighbourhood. But, on the other hand, the legion
was available everywhere. The _phalanx_ was like the organ, an
instrument almighty indeed where it can be carried; but it cost eight
hundred years to transfer it from Asia Minor to the court of Charlemagne
(_i.e._, Western Europe), so that it travelled at the rate of two miles
_per annum_; but the _legion_ was like the violin, less terrifically
tumultuous, but more infinite than the organ, whilst it is in a perfect
sense portable. Pitch your camp in darkness, on the next morning
everywhere you will find ground for the _legion_, but for the fastidious
_phalanx_ you need as much choice of ground as for the arena of an opera
stage.

And the same influence that had tended to keep the Greeks in division,
without a proper unity, operated also to infect the national character
at last with some lack of what may be called self-sufficiency. They were
in their later phases subtle, but compliant, more ready to adapt
themselves to changes than to assert a position and risk all in the
effort to hold it. Hence it came that even the most honourable and
upright amongst a nation far nobler in a moral sense (nobler, for
instance, on the scale of capacity for doing and suffering) never rose
to a sentiment of respect for the ordinary Grecian. The Romans viewed
him as essentially framed for ministerial offices. Am I sick? Come,
Greek, and cure me. Am I weary? Amuse me. A