Take your stand here, at the end of the Punic War, on the brink of the Age of Rome; and you feel at once how fearfully things have gone down since you stood, with Plato, looking back over the Age of Grecce.  There is nothing left now of the high possibilities of artistic creation.  Of the breath of spirituality that still remained in the world then, now you can find hardly a trace.  A Cicero presently, for a Socrates of old; it is enough to tell you how the world has fallen.  Some fall, I suppose, was implied in the cycles; still Rome might have gone to her more material duties with clean heart, mind, and hands; she might have built a structure, as Ts’in Shi Hwangti and Han Wuti did, to endure.  It would not be fair to compare the Age of Han with the Augustan; the morning glory of the East Asian, with the late afternoon of the European manvantara; and yet we cannot but see, if we look at both dispassionately and with a decent amount of knowledge, how beneficently, the Eastern Teachers had affected their peoples, and what a dire thing it was for Europe that the work of the Western Teacher had failed.  Chow China and Republican Rome fell to pieces in much the same way:  in a long orgy of wars and ruin;—­but the rough barbarian who rebuilt China found bricks to his hand far better than he knew he was using,—­ material with a true worth and vitality of its own,—­a race with elements of redemption in its heredity; whereas the great statesman, the really Great Soul who rebuilt Rome, had to do it, if the truth should be told, of materials little better than stubble and rottenness.  Roman life, when Augustus came to work with it for his medium, was fearfully infected with corruption; one would have said that no power human or divine could have saved it.  That he did with it as much as he did, is one of the standing wonders of time.

But now back to the place where we left Rome:  in 200 B.C., at the end of the Carthaginian War.  No more now of Farmer Balbus’s fields; no more of the cows of Ahenobarbus; Dolabella’s rod and line, and his fish-stories, shall not serve us further.  It is the navigable river now; on which we must sail down and out on to the sea.

Already the little Italian city is being courted by fabulously rich Egypt, the doyen of culture since Athens declined; and soon she is to be driven by forces outside her control into conquest of all the old seats of Mediterranean civilization;—­and withal she is utterly unfitted for the task in any spiritual or cultural sense:  she is still little more than the same narrow little provincial half-barbarous Rome she has always been.  No grand conceptions have been nourished in her by a literature of her own with high lights couched in the Grand-Manner; no olden Homer has sung to her, with magnificent roll of hexameters to set the wings of her soul into magnificent motion.  Beyond floating folk ballads she has had no literature at all; though latterly, she is trying to supply the