fortnight, temples, porticoes; in a month you felt yourself at
home. Rome built with a magic that startled as surely as the glint
of her sword. Time and again the nations whom Caesar encountered
planned to eliminate his camp. When they reached it the camp had
vanished; in its place was a walled, impregnable town.

As the standards lowered before that town, the pomoerium was
traced. Within it the veteran found a home, without it a wife; and
the family established, the legion that had conquered the soil
with the sword, subsisted on it with the plow. Presently there
were priests there, aqueducts, baths, theatres and games, all the
marvel of imperial elegance and vice. When the aborigine wandered
that way, his seduction was swift.

The enemy that submitted became a subject, not a slave. Rome
commanded only the free. If his goods were taxed, his goods
remained his own, his personal liberty untrammelled. His land had
become part of a new province, it is true, but provided he did not
interest himself in such matters as peace and war, not only was he
free to manage his own affairs, but that land, were it at the
uttermost end of the earth, might, in recompense of his fidelity,
come to be regarded as within the Italian territory; as such,
sacred, inviolate, free from taxes, and he a citizen of Rome,
senator even, emperor!

Conquest once solidified, the rest was easy. Tattered furs were
replaced by the tunic and uncouth idioms by the niceties of Latin
speech. In some cases, where the speech had been beaten in with
the hilt of the sword, the accent was apt to be rough, but a
generation, two at most, and there were sweethearts and swains