omans was more due to
Valour or to Fortune_.

Many authors, and among others that most grave historian Plutarch, have
thought that in acquiring their empire the Romans were more beholden to
their good fortune than to their valour; and besides other reasons which
they give for this opinion, they affirm it to be proved by the admission
of the Romans themselves, since their having erected more temples to
Fortune than to any other deity, shows that it was to her that they
ascribed their success. It would seem, too, that Titus Livius was of
the same mind, since he very seldom puts a speech into the mouth of any
Roman in which he discourses of valour, wherein he does not also make
mention of Fortune. This, however, is an opinion with which I can in
no way concur, and which, I take it, cannot be made good. For if no
commonwealth has ever been found to grow like the Roman, it is because
none was ever found so well fitted by its institutions to make that
growth. For by the valour of her armies she spread her empire, while by
her conduct of affairs, and by other methods peculiar to herself and
devised by her first founder, she was able to keep what she acquired, as
shall be fully shown in many of the following Discourses.

The writers to whom I have referred assert that it was owing to their
good fortune and not to their prudence that the Romans never had two
great wars on their hands at once; as, for instance, that they waged no
wars with the Latins until they had not merely overcome the Samnites,
but undertook in their defence the war on which they then entered; nor
ever fought with the Etruscans until they had subjugated the Latins, and
had almost worn out the Samnites by frequent defeats; whereas, had any
two of these powers, while yet fresh and unexhausted, united together,
it may easily be believed that the ruin of the Roman Republic must have
followed. But to whatsoever cause we ascribe it, it never so chanced
that the Romans engaged in two great wars at the same time. On the
contrary, it always seemed as though on the breaking out of one war,
another was extinguished; or that on the termination of one, another
broke out. And this we may plainly see from the order in which their
wars succeeded one another.

For, omitting those waged by them before their city was taken by the
Gauls, we find that during their struggle with the Equians and the
Volscians, and while these two nations continued strong, no others rose
against