but more sound and solid. The Romans have the airs of grown and grave
men beside the perpetual youth of Greece, (the Greeks were 'always
children') but they are well aware of how much they learned and had to
learn from their predecessors in the task of civilizing the world. So
much is this so that in many departments of civilized life they look
upon themselves as imitating the Greeks and carrying out their ideas. In
this they were less than just to themselves, for even in the world of
art they continued to create; and certainly in literature they produced
works not unworthy to stand beside their chosen models. Especially they
created a prose style, which without ceasing to be artistic served the
sober and serious purposes of political oratory and historic record. But
their peculiar genius showed itself most in the applied arts which
pressed Greek science into the ministry of life in architecture and
engineering. Their roads and bridges and aqueducts still stand to bear
witness of them. It would be a great error to deny to them fertile
advance in the sciences, because their discoveries are so immediately
put to the proof in practice and so little disengage themselves into
express theory from their applications.

But before we proceed to reckon up their contributions to European
civilization it is well to correct a misconception which arises only too
easily from an accident of our education. It is the custom in England to
concentrate attention upon a brief period in the history of Rome,
ignoring on the one hand the early Republican period and on the other
the later Imperial. There is thus lost to our imaginations those figures
and their deeds which seemed for example to Shakespeare most
characteristically Roman and to our more thoughtful consideration those
achievements which most deeply moulded the fabric of Europe. The latter
is the greater loss, and here we must remember that it is the history of
_Imperial_ Rome that is most relevant to our purpose and most