incarnation of that
character which, at great times, made history, but in peace made
trouble. The man who avenged Lucretia, who drove out the Tarquins, and
founded the Republic, is most often remembered as the father who sat
unmoved in judgment on his two traitor sons, and looked on with stony
eyes while they paid the price of their treason in torment and death.
That one deed stands out, and we forget how he himself fell fighting for
Rome's freedom.

But still the evil grew at home, and the hideous law of creditor and
debtor, which only fiercest avarice could have devised, ground the poor,
who were obliged to borrow to pay the tax-gatherer, and made slaves of
them almost to the ruin of the state.

Just then Etruria wakes, shadowy, half Greek, the central power of
Italy, between Rome and Gaul. Porsena, the Lar of Clusium, comes against
the city with a great host in gilded arms. Terror descends like a dark
mist over the young nation. The rich fear for their riches, the poor for
their lives. In haste the fathers gather great supplies of corn against
a siege; credit and debt are forgotten; patrician and plebeian join
hands as Porsena reaches Janiculum, and three heroic figures of romance
stand forth from a host of heroes. Horatius keeps the bridge, first with
two comrades, then, at the last, alone in the glory of single-handed
fight against an army, sure of immortality whether he live or die.
Scaevola, sworn with the three hundred to slay the Lar, stabs the wrong
man, and burns his hand to the wrist to show what tortures he can bear
unmoved. Cloelia, the maiden hostage, rides her young steed at the
yellow torrent, and swims the raging flood back to the Palatine.
Cloelia and Horatius get statues in the Forum; Scaevola is endowed with
great lands, which his race holds for centuries, and leaves a name so
great that two thousand years later, Sforza, greatest leader of the
Middle Age, coveting long ancestry, makes himself descend from the man
who burned off his own hand.

They are great figures, the two men and the noble girl, and real to us,
in a way, because we can stand on the very ground they trod, where
Horatius fought, where Scaevola suffered and where Cloelia took the
river. They are nearer to us than Romulus, nearer even than Lucretia, as
each figure, following the city's quick life, has more of reality about
it, and not less of heroism.

For two hundred years the Romans strove with each other in law making;
the fa