having an original Greek author constantly before him.  At places like Baiae serious work was of course impossible, and would have been ridiculed.  There was no original thinker in this age.  Caesar himself was probably more suited by nature to reason on facts immediately before him than to speculate on abstract principles.  Varro, the rough sensible scholar of Sabine descent, was a diligent collector of facts and traditions, but no more able to grapple hard with problems of philosophy or theology than any other Roman of his time.  The life of the average wealthy man was too comfortable, too changeable, to suggest the desirability of real mental exertion.

Nor has this life any direct relation to material usefulness and the productive investment of capital.  Cicero and his correspondents never mention farming, never betray any interest in the new movement, if such there was, for the scientific cultivation of the vine and olive.[406] For such things we must go to Varro’s treatise, written, some years after Cicero’s death, in his extreme old age.  In the third book of that invaluable work we shall find all we want to know about the real villa rustica of the time,—­the working farm-house with its wine-vats and olive-mills, like that recently excavated at Boscoreale near Pompeii.  Yet it would be unfair to such men as Cicero and his friends, the wiser and quieter section of the aristocracy, to call their work altogether unproductive.  True, it left little permanent impress on human modes of thought; it wrought no material change for the better in Italy or the Empire.  We may go so far as to allow that it initiated that habit of dilettantism which we find already exaggerated in the age lately illuminated for us by Professor Dill in his book on Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, and far more exaggerated in the last age of Roman society, which the same author has depicted in his earlier work.  But it may be doubted whether under any circumstances the Romans could have produced a great prophet or a great philosopher; and the most valuable work they did was of another kind.  It lay in the humanisation of society by the rational development of law, and by the communication of Greek thought and literature to the western world.  This was what occupied the best days of Cicero and Sulpicius Rufus and many others; and they succeeded at the same time in creating for its expression one of the most perfect prose languages that the world has ever known or will know.  They did it too, helping each other by kindly and cheering intercourse,—­the humanitas of daily life.  It is exactly this humanitas that the northern mind of Mommsen, in spite of its vein of passionate romance, could not understand; all the softer side of that pleasant existence among the villas and statues and libraries was to him simply contemptible.  Let us hope that he has done no permanent damage to the credit of Cicero, and of the many lesser men who lived the same honourable and elegant life.