Among these cities was one on the Tiber, about sixteen miles up from the mouth.  It had had a great past under kings of its own, before the Etruscan conquest; very likely had wielded wide empire in its day.  A tradition of high destiny hung about it, and was ingrained in the consciousness of its citizens; and I believe that this is always what remains of ancient greatness when time, cataclysms, and disasters have wiped all actual memories thereof away.  But now, say in 500 B.C., we are to think of it as a little peasant community in an age and land where there was no such wide distinction between peasant and bandit.  It had for its totem, crest, symbol, what you will, very appropriately, a she-wolf....

Art or culture, I said, there was none;—­and yet, too, we might pride ourselves on certain great possessions to be called (stretching it a little), in that line; which had been left to us by our erstwhile Etruscan lords, or executed for us by Etruscan artists with their tongues in their cheeks and sides quietly shaking.—­Ha, you men of Praeneste! you men of Tibur! sing small, will you? We have our grand Jupiter on the Capitoline, resplendent in vermilion paint; what say you to that?  Paid for him, too, (a surmise, this!) with cattle raided from your fields, my friends!

Everything handsome about us, you see; but not for this must you accuse us of the levity of culture.  We might patronize; we did not dabble.—­One seems to hear from those early ages, echoes of tones familiar now.  Ours is the good old roast beef and common sense of—­I mean, the grand old gravitas of Rome.  What! you must have a Jupiter to worship, mustn’t you?  No sound as by Parliament-Established-Religion of Numa Pompilius, Sir, and the world would go to the dogs!  And, of course, vermilion paint.  It wears well, and is a good bloody color with no levity about it; besides, can be seen a long way off—­whereby it serves to keep you rascals stirred up with jealousy, or should.  So:  we have our vermilion Jupiter and think of ourselves very highly indeed.

Yes; but there is a basis for our boasting, too;—­which boasting, after all, is mainly a mental state; we aim to be taciturn in our speech, and to proclaim our superiority with sound thumps, rather than like wretched Greeks with poetry and philosophy and such.  We do possess, and love,—­at the very least we aim at,—­the thing we call gravitas; and—­there are points to admire in it.  The legends are full of revelation; and what they reveal are the ideals of Rome.  Stern discipline; a rigid sense of duty to the state; unlimited sacrifice of the individual to it; stoic endurance in the men; strictest chastity in the women:—­there were many and great qualities.  Something had come down from of old, or had been acquired in adversity:  a saving health for this nation.  War was the regular annual business; all the male population of military age took part in it; and military age did