ia that touched Greece to awakenment; and there is that
problematical Indian period (if it existed), thirteen decades
after the fall of the Mauryas, and following close upon the
waning of the first glory of the Hans. So we should look for the
Greek Age to kindle something westward again, sooner or later;--
which of course it did. 478 to 348; 348 to 218; 218 to
88 B.C.; 88 B.C. to 42 A. D.: we shall see presently the
significance of those latter dates in Roman history. Meanwhile
to note this: whereas Persia woke Greece at a touch, thirteen
decades elapsed before Greece began to awake Italy. It waited to
do so fully until the Crest-Wave had sunk a little at the eastern
end of the world; for you may note that the year 63 B.C., in
which Han Chaoti died, was the year in which Augustus was born.

With him in the same decade came most of the luminaries that made
his age splendid: Virgil in 70; Horace in 65; Vipsanius
Agrippa in 63; Cilnius Maecenas in what precise year we do not
know. The fact is that the influx of vigorous light-bearing
egos, as it decreased in China, went augmenting in Italy: which
no doubt, if we could trace it, we should find to be the kind of
thing that happens always. For about four generations the
foremost souls due to incarnate crowd into one race or quarter of
the globe; then, having exhausted the workable heredity to be
found there,--_used up_ that racial stream,--they must go
elsewhere. There you have the _raison d'etre,_ probably, of
the thirteen-decade period. It takes as a rule about four
generations of such high life to deplete the racial heredity for
the time being,--which must then be left to lie fallow. So now,
America not being discovered, and there being no further eastward
to go, we must jump westward the width of two continents
(nearly), and (that last lecture being parenthetical as it were)
come from Han Chaoti's death to Augustus' birth, from China
to Rome.

But before dealing with Augustus and the Roman prime, we must get
some general picture of the background out of which he and it
emerged: this week and next we must give to early and to
Republican Rome. And here let me say that these two lectures
will be, for the most part, a very bare-faced plagiarism;
summarizing facts and conclusions taken from a book called _The
Grandeur that was Rome,_ by Mr. J. C. Stobart, of the English
Cambridge. One greatest trouble about historical study is, that
it allows you to see no