Others, I well believe, shall mould the bronze to breathe in softer form, from marble shall unveil the living countenance, shall plead with greater eloquence, and heaven’s paths map out with rod in hand and tell the rising of the stars.  Upon the tablets of thy memory, O Roman, it is laid to hold the peoples in thy sway.  These are thy arts and shall be:  To impose the ways of peace; to spare the vanquished and subject the proud.

Now there leaped into life within him a realisation of Rome’s incommunicable greatness.  He perceived at last the nature of the pax romana, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice.  Was it possible that a nation which had given birth to a force like this could also bring forth in due season a love of beauty, a thirst for truth?  Could tameless genius and conquering will, could a passion for ideas and a passion for deeds dwell together until side by side men of one blood should add to the glory of worldly power the glory of spiritual conquest, should superimpose upon the beauty of just laws the beauty of wrought bronze and woven language?

And if this could be, what was the duty of each Roman whose pure desires lay with Poetry and her sisters?  Paulus shuddered as he felt the question tearing its way through the peaceful plans he had been making for his life.  He remembered the story of Menander refusing to leave the intellectual life of Athens for the luxuries of Ptolemy’s court.  Must he, on the contrary, for the sake of an idea, renounce this life, with its cherished poverty and philosophy, its peace and learned leisure, its freedom and candour and regard for beauty, to go back to Rome where, in terrifying coalition, power and pleasure, wealth and display, passion and brutality were forever crowding in upon the city’s honour?  The irresponsibility of the insignificant assailed him.  A Virgil, he supposed, might know that his presence would affect his country for good or evil.  But what could he, Paulus, do?  In Rome, in Athens, he was one of the little men.  Was he not, then, justified in living his own life in the best possible way, atoning for the meagreness of his talent by the honourableness of his quest?

But even as he said this to himself he remembered why Athens had achieved perfection.  In the age of Pericles, geniuses, like flawless jewels cut out of a proper matrix, had been fashioned out of a large body of men, themselves not gifted, but able to understand and safeguard those who were.  He had left Rome because she was no matrix for poets and artists and thinkers.  Ought he now to return to her and live and work and die unknown, serving only as one more citizen ready to welcome the poets to be?