was using,--
material with a true worth and vitality of its own,--a race with
elements of redemption in its heredity; whereas the great
statesman, the really Great Soul who rebuilt Rome, had to do it,
if the truth should be told, of materials little better than
stubble and rottenness. Roman life, when Augustus came to work
with it for his medium, was fearfully infected with corruption;
one would have said that no power human or divine could have
saved it. That he did with it as much as he did, is one of the
standing wonders of time.

But now back to the place where we left Rome: in 200 B.C., at the
end of the Carthaginian War. No more now of Farmer Balbus's
fields; no more of the cows of Ahenobarbus; Dolabella's rod and
line, and his fish-stories, shall not serve us further. It is
the navigable river now; on which we must sail down and out on
to the sea.

Already the little Italian city is being courted by fabulously
rich Egypt, the doyen of culture since Athens declined; and soon
she is to be driven by forces outside her control into conquest
of all the old seats of Mediterranean civilization;--and withal
she is utterly unfitted for the task in any spiritual or cultural
sense: she is still little more than the same narrow little
provincial half-barbarous Rome she has always been. No grand
conceptions have been nourished in her by a literature of her own
with high lights couched in the Grand-Manner; no olden Homer has
sung to her, with magnificent roll of hexameters to set the wings
of her soul into magnificent motion. Beyond floating folk
ballads she has had no literature at all; though latterly, she
is trying to supply the place of one with a few slave-made
translations from the Greek, and a few imitations of the decadent
Greek comedy of Alexandria;--also there has been a poet Naevius,
whom--she found altogether too independent to suit her tastes;
and a Father Ennius,--uncouth old bone of her bone, (though he
too Greek by race) who is struggling to mold her tough inflexible
provincial dialect into Greek meter of sorts,--and thereby doing
a real service for poets to come. And there is a Cato the
Censor, writing prose; Cato, typical of Roman breadth of view;
with, for the sum of a truly national political wisdom, yelping
at Rome continually that fool's jingo cry of his:--your finest
market in the western seas, your richest potential commercial
asset, must be destroyed. There you have the high old Roman
c