us
not what they felt, but how the feelings which ever belong to all men
more particularly affected the actors at one time or another during the
action of the world's long play. Little things sometimes tell the
longest stories.

[Illustration: THE COLOSSEUM]

Pliny, suffering from sore eyes, going about in a closed carriage, or
lying in the darkened basement portico of his house, obliged to dictate
his letters, and unable to read, sends his thanks--by dictation--to his
friend and colleague, Cornutus, for a fowl sent him, and says that
although he is half blind, his eyes are sharp enough to see that it is a
very fat one. The touch of human nature makes the whole picture live.
Horace, journeying to Brindisi, and trying to sleep a little on a canal
boat, is kept awake by mosquitoes and croaking frogs, and by the
long-drawn-out, tipsy singing of a drunken sailor, who at last turns off
the towing mule to graze, and goes to sleep till daylight. It is easier
to see all this than to call up one instant of a chariot race in the
great circus, or one of the ten thousand fights in the Colosseum,
wherein gladiators fought and died, and left no word of themselves.

Yet, without the setting, the play is imperfect, and we must have some
of the one to understand the other. For human art is, in the first
place, a progressive commentary on human nature, and again, in quick
reaction, stimulates it with a suggestive force. Little as we really
know of the imperial times, we cannot conceive of Rome without the
Romans, nor of the Romans without Rome. They belonged together; when the
seat of Empire became cosmopolitan, the great dominion began to be
weakened; and when a homogeneous power dwelt in the city again, a new
domination had its beginning, and was built up on the ruins of the old.

Napoleon is believed to have said that the object of art is to create
and foster agreeable illusions. Admitting the general truth of the
definition, it appears perfectly natural that since the Romans had
little or no art of their own, they should have begun to import Greek
art just when they did, after the successful issue of the Second Punic
War. Up to that time the great struggle had lasted. When it was over,
the rest was almost a foregone conclusion. Rome and Carthage had made a
great part of the known world their fighting ground in the duel that
lasted a hundred and eighteen years; and the known world was the portion
of the victor. Spoil first, for s