as much as five
thousand dollars; and there were dirt-cheap Sardinians and
'barbarians' of all sorts to run your estates and farms. All the
work of Italy was done by slave labor; and the city swarmed with
an immense slave population; the country slaves with enough of
manhood left in them to rise and butcher and torture their
masters when they could; the city slaves, one would say, in no
condition to keep the semblance of a soul in them at all,--living
dead. For the most part both were shamefully treated; Cato,--
high old Republican Cato, type of the free and nobly simple
Roman--used to see personally to the scourging of his slaves
daily after dinner, as a help to his digestion.--So the rich
wasted their money and their lives. They bought estates galore,
and built villas on them; Cicero had--was it eighteen?--
country-houses. They bought up Greek art-treasures, of which
they had no appreciation whatever,--and which therefore only helped
to vulgarize them. Such things were costly, and thought highly of
in Greece; so Rome would have them for her money, and have them
_en masse._ Mummius brought over a shipload; and solemnly
warned his sailors that they would have to replace any they might
break or lose. The originals, or such substitutes as the sailors
might supply,--it was all one to him. As to literature,--well, we
have seen how it began with translations made by a Greek slave,
Livius Andronicus, who put certain Hellenistic comedies and the
Odyssey into Latin ballad meters; the kind of verse you would
expect from a slave ordered promiscuously by his master to get
busy and do it. Then came Father Ennius; and here I shall
diverge a little to try to show you what (as I think) really
happened to the soul of Rome.

It was a queer set-out, this job that Ennius attempted,--of
making a real Roman poem, an epic of Roman history. Between old
Latin and Greek there was the same kind of difference as between
French and English: one fundamental in the rhythm of the
languages. I am giving my own explanation of a very puzzling
problem; and needless to say, it may be wrong. The ancient
Roman ballads were in what is called Saturnian meter, which
depends on stress and accent; it is not unlike the meter of the
Scotch and English ballads. That means that old Latin was spoken
like English is, with syllabic accent. But Greek was not. In
that, what counted, what made the meters, was tone and quantity.
Now we have that in Engl