the tomb at the decisive Moment, overcame king Pyrrhus in the senate, and first formally and solemnly proclaimed the complete sovereignty of Rome over Italy.(53) But the gifted man came too early or too late; the gods made him blind on account of his untimely wisdom.  It was not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy—­propagated from generation to generation in the senate—­with the leading maxims of which the sons of the senators became already imbued, when in the company of their fathers they went to the council and there at the door of the hall listened to the wisdom of the men whose seats they were destined at some future time to fill.  Immense successes were thus obtained at an immense price; for Nike too is followed by her Nemesis.  In the Roman commonwealth there was no special dependence on any one man, either on soldier or on general, and under the rigid discipline of its moral police all the idiosyncrasies of human character were extinguished.  Rome reached a greatness such as no other state of antiquity attained; but she dearly purchased her greatness at the sacrifice of the graceful variety, of the easy abandon and of the inward freedom of Hellenic life.

Notes for Book II Chapter VIII

1.  I. XI.  Punishment of Offenses against Order

2.  II.  I. Right of Appeal

3.  II.  III.  The Senate, Its Composition

4.  II.  I. Law and Edict

5.  II.  III.  Censorship, the Magistrates, Partition and Weakening of the Consular Powers

6.  II.  III.  Laws Imposing Taxes

7.  I. VI.  Class of —­Metoeci—­ Subsisting by the Side of the Community

8.  I. V. The Housefather and His Household, note

9.  II.  III.  Praetorship

10.  II.  III.  Praetorship, ii.  V. Revision of the Municipal Constitutions, Police Judges

11.  The view formerly adopted, that these -tres viri- belonged to the earliest period, is erroneous, for colleges of magistrates with odd numbers are foreign to the oldest state-arrangements (Chronol. p. 15, note 12).  Probably the well-accredited account, that they were first nominated in 465 (Liv.  Ep. 11), should simply be retained, and the otherwise suspicious inference of the falsifier Licinius Macer (in Liv. vii. 46), which makes mention of them before 450, should be simply rejected.  At first undoubtedly the -tres viri- were nominated by the superior magistrates, as was the case with most of the later -magistratus minores-; the Papirian -plebiscitum-, which transferred the nomination of them to the community (Festus, -v. sacramentum-, p. 344, Niall.), was at any rate not issued till after the institution of the office of -praetor peregrinus-, or at the earliest towards the middle of the sixth century, for it names the praetor -qui inter jus cives ius dicit-.