Hecataeus was the first Greek traveler and geographer. The map dates from
about 500 B.C.]

The next great source of our western civilization was the work of Rome.
Like the Greeks, the Romans also occupied a peninsula jutting southward
into the Mediterranean, but in most respects they were far different in
type. Unlike the active, imaginative, artistic, and creative Greeks, the
Romans were a practical, concrete, unimaginative, and executive people.
Energy, personality, and executive power were in greatest demand among
them.

The work of Rome was political, governmental, and legal--not artistic or
intellectual. Rome was strong where Greece was weak, and weak where Greece
was strong. As a result the two peoples supplemented one another well in
laying the foundations for our western civilization. The conquests of
Greece were intellectual; those of Rome legal and governmental. Rome
absorbed and amalgamated the whole ancient world into one Empire, to which
she gave a common language, dress, manners, religion, literature, and
political and legal institutions. Adopting Greek learning and educational
practices as her own, she spread them throughout the then-known world. By
her political organization she so fixed Roman ideas as to law and
government throughout the Empire that Christianity built firmly on the
Roman foundations, and the German barbarians, who later swept over the
Empire, could neither destroy nor obliterate them. The Roman conquest of
the world thus decisively influenced the whole course of western history,
spread and perpetuated Greek ideas, and ultimately saved the world from a
great disaster.

To Rome, then, we are indebted most of all for ideas as to government, and
for the introduction of law and order into an unruly world. In all the