that
startled as surely as the glint of her sword. Time and again the
nations whom Caesar encountered planned to eliminate his camp. When
they reached it the camp had vanished; in its place was a walled,
impregnable town.

As the standards lowered before that town, the pomoerium was traced.
Within it the veteran found a home, without it a wife; and the family
established, the legion that had conquered the soil with the sword,
subsisted on it with the plow. Presently there were priests there,
aqueducts, baths, theatres and games, all the marvel of imperial
elegance and vice. When the aborigine wandered that way, his seduction
was swift.

The enemy that submitted became a subject, not a slave. Rome commanded
only the free. If his goods were taxed, his goods remained his own, his
personal liberty untrammelled. His land had become part of a new
province, it is true, but provided he did not interest himself in such
matters as peace and war, not only was he free to manage his own
affairs, but that land, were it at the uttermost end of the earth,
might, in recompense of his fidelity, come to be regarded as within the
Italian territory; as such, sacred, inviolate, free from taxes, and he
a citizen of Rome, senator even, emperor!

Conquest once solidified, the rest was easy. Tattered furs were
replaced by the tunic and uncouth idioms by the niceties of Latin
speech. In some cases, where the speech had been beaten in with the
hilt of the sword, the accent was apt to be rough, but a generation,
two at most, and there were sweethearts and swains quoting Horace in
the moonlight, naively unaware that only the verse of the Greeks could
pleasure the Roman ear.

The principalities and kingdoms that of their own wish [a wish often
suggested, and not always amicably either] became allies of Rome and
mingled their freedom with hers, entered into an alliance whereby in
return for Rome's patronage and protection they agreed to have a proper
regard for the dignity of the Roman people and to have no other friends
or enemies than those that were Rome's--a formula exquisite in the
civility with which it exacted the renunciation of every inherent
right. A king wrote to the senate: "I have obeyed your deputy as I
would have obeyed a god." "And you have done wisely," the senate
answered, a reply which, in its terseness, tells all.

Diplomacy and the plow, such were Rome's methods. As for herself she
fought, she did not till. Italy, devastate