place of one with a few slave-made translations from the Greek, and a few imitations of the decadent Greek comedy of Alexandria;—­also there has been a poet Naevius, whom—­she found altogether too independent to suit her tastes; and a Father Ennius,—­uncouth old bone of her bone, (though he too Greek by race) who is struggling to mold her tough inflexible provincial dialect into Greek meter of sorts,—­and thereby doing a real service for poets to come.  And there is a Cato the Censor, writing prose; Cato, typical of Roman breadth of view; with, for the sum of a truly national political wisdom, yelping at Rome continually that fool’s jingo cry of his:—­your finest market in the western seas, your richest potential commercial asset, must be destroyed.  There you have the high old Roman conception of Weltpolitik; whereby we may understand how little fitted Rome was for Weltpolitik at all; how hoeing cabbages and making summer campaigns,—­as Mr. Stobart says, with a commissariat put up for each soldier in a lunch-bag by his wife,—­were still her metier,—­the Italian soil, whether in actual or only potential possession—­held already, or by the grace of God soon to be stolen—­still her inspiration.  And this Italian soil she was now about to leave forever.

The forces that led her to world-conquest were twofold, inner and outer.  The inner one was the summer campaign habit, formed during several centuries; and the fact that she could form no conception of life that did not include it:  the impulse to material expansion was deep in her soul, and ineradicable.  She might have followed it, perhaps, north and westward; finished with Spain; gone up into Gaul (though in Gaul she might have found, even at that time, possibly, an unmanageable strength); she might even have carried her own ultimite salvation up into Germany.  But we have seen Darius flow victorious eastward towards India, but unsuccessful when he tried the passes of the west; and Alexander follow him in the same path, and not turn westward at all.  So you may say an eastward habit had been formed, and inner-channels were worn for conquest in that direction, but none in the other.  Besides,—­and this was the outer of the two forces,—­the East was crying out to Rome.  There were pirates on the other side of the Adriatic; and for the safety of her own eastern littoral she had been dealing with them, as with Spain, during and before the terrible Hannibalic time.  To sit securely at home she must hold the Illyrian coast:  and, she thought, or events proved it to her, to hold that coast safely, she must go conquering inland.  Then again Egypt had courted her alliance, for regions.  The Ptolemy of the time was a boy; and Philip of Macedon ind Antiochus of Syria had hatched a plan to carve up his juicy realm for their own most delectable feasting.  It was the very year after peace—­to call it that—­had been forced on prostrate Carthage; and you might think an exhausted Rome would have welcomed