They knew how to keep their heads.  There were those two races among them,—­races or orders;—­and a mort of politics between the two.  Greek cities, in like manner but generally less radically divided, knew no method but for one side to be perpetually banishing the other, turn and turn about, and wholesale; but these spare, tough Romans effect compromise after compromise, till Patricians and Plebs are molten down into one common type.  They are not very brilliant, even at their native game of war:  given a good general, their enemies are pretty sure to trounce them.  Pyrrhus, a fine tactician but no great strategist, does so several times;—­and then they reply to his offers of peace, that they make no peace with enemies still camped on Italian soil.—­ Comes next a real master-strategist, Hannibal; and senate and people, time after time, are forced (like Balbus in the poem)

     “With a frankness that I’m sure will charm ye
     To own it is all over with the army.”

He wipes them out in a most satisfactory and workmanlike manner.  Their leading citizens, ipso facto their generals (amateur soldiers always cabbage-hoers at heart) afford him a good deal of amusement; as if you should send out the mayor of Jonesville, Arkansaw, against a Foch or a Hindenburg.  One of them, a fool of a fellow, blunders into a booby-trap and loses the army which is almost the sole hope of Rome; and comes home, utterly defeated, —­to be gravely thanked by the Senate for not committing suicide after his defeat:  “for not despairing of the Republic.”  Ah, there is real Great Stuff in that; they are admirable peasant bandits after all!  Most people would have straight court martialed and beheaded the man; as England hanged poor Admiral Byng pour encourager les autres. And all the while they have been having the sublime impudence to keep an army in Spain conquering there.  How to account for this unsubduability?  Well; there is Numa’s teaching; and what you might call a latent habit of Caput-Mundi-ship: imperial seeds in the soil.

There is that indestructible god-side to everything; especially, behind and above this city on the seven hills, there is divine eternal ROME.  So, after the Gaulish conquest, they rejected proffered and more desirable Etruscan sites, and came back and provided Dea Roma with a new out-ward being; the imperial seeds, molds of empire, were on the Seven Hills, not at Veii.  So, when this still greater peril of Hannibal so nearly submerged them, they took final victory for granted,—­could conceive of no other possibility,—­and placidly went forward while being whipped in Italy with the adventure in Spain.  There was one thing they could not imagine:  ultimate defeat.  It was a kind of stupidity with them.  They were a stupid people.  You might thrash them; you might give them their full deserts (which were bad), and fairly batter them to bits; all the world might think them dead; dozens