. So: we have our
vermilion Jupiter and think of ourselves very highly indeed.

Yes; but there is a basis for our boasting, too;--which
boasting, after all, is mainly a mental state; we aim to be
taciturn in our speech, and to proclaim our superiority with
sound thumps, rather than like wretched Greeks with poetry and
philosophy and such. We do possess, and love,--at the very least
we aim at,--the thing we call _gravitas;_ and--there are points
to admire in it. The legends are full of revelation; and what
they reveal are the ideals of Rome. Stern discipline; a rigid
sense of duty to the state; unlimited sacrifice of the
individual to it; stoic endurance in the men; strictest
chastity in the women:--there were many and great qualities.
Something had come down from of old, or had been acquired in
adversity: a saving health for this nation. War was the regular
annual business; all the male population of military age took
part in it; and military age did not end too early. It was an
order that tended to leave no room in the world but for the
fittest, physically and morally, if not mentally. There was
discipline, and again and always discipline: _paterfamilias_
king in his household, with power of life and death over his
children. It was a regime that gave little chance for loose
living. A sterile and ugly regime, Nevertheless; and, later,
they fell victims to its shortcomings. Vice, that wrecks every
civilization in its turn, depend upon it had wrecked one here:
that one of which we get faint reminiscences in the stories of
the Roman kings. Then these barren and severe conditions ensued,
and vice was (comparatively speaking) cleaned out.

What were the inner sources of this people's strength? What
light from the Spirit shone among them? Of the Sacred Mysteries,
what could subsist in such a community?--Well; the Mysteries
had, by this time, as we have seen, very far declined. Pythagoras
had made his effort in this very Italy; he died in the first
year of the fifth century soon after the expulsion of the
kings, according to the received chronology;--in reality,
long before there is dependable history of Rome at all. There
had been an Italian Golden Age, when Saturn reigned and the
Mysteries ruled human life. There were reminiscences of a long
past splendor; and an atmosphere about them, I think, more
mellow and peace-lipped than anything in Hesiod or Homer. I
suppose that from some calmer, firmer, and