His panting desires put up one last defence.  Was he not narrowing art within the borders of nationality?  In the service of beauty was there either Greek or Roman?  Alas!  Atticus had beaten that down already.  Art was no fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national life.  Greeks had been artists only when they had been conquerors, soldiers, traders, rulers.  The Romans now held the world.  In them, the eagle’s brood, lay the hope of a new birth of the spirit.  With a certain noble unreason, he dismissed the idea that by living in Athens he might fight the battle for Rome.  If he was to fight at all, it was to be where the enemy was fiercest and the hope of victory least.  Upon any easier choice his ancestors within him laid their iron grasp.  His ears caught the words of one of the actors: 

  “Well, do not then the gods look out for us?” you’ll say. 
  To each of us they have allotted Character
  As garrison commander.

Gathering his forces in obedience to his garrison commander Paulus tried to decide to go back to Rome.  Greece called to him insistently.  Confused and exhausted, he joined perfunctorily in the loud applause that closed the comedy, and in the speeches of gratitude and farewell to the host.

The play had been long, and the autumn night, he found to his surprise, had passed.  Emerging from the house, he breasted the dawn.  With curious suddenness the sense of conflict left him.  The beauty of the Attic plain, born, unlike the beauty of the Roman Campagna, of light rather than of unshed tears, had often seemed to him to quicken the perception of truth.  Certainly the dullest eyes must see at this hour, when, at the behest of the approaching sun, outlines were cleared of all that was shadowy and fanciful, and colours were touched to buoyant life.  Greece called to him, but with what a message!  Imaginings, vain desires, regrets, were swept away from his mind, even as the receding shadows left bare the contours of the mountains.  He saw that his concern was with the battle, not with its issue.  In this enlightening hour he understood that Rome would never become mother of the arts, until, in some unimagined future, through transforming national experiences, she should be made pregnant with ideas beyond the ken of his generation.  Poets might again be born of her, but he and his like would long since have been lying among her forgotten children.  And yet, the life of the future, however distant, would not be unaffected by the obscure work and faith of the present age.  He himself would never see victory, but the struggle was his inalienable heritage.  Revealed in light and joy he knew his purpose.  Down from the crags of Parnes, great wings strong with the morning, swept an eagle—­as if homeward—­toward the western sea.  With it, like an arrow to its goal, alert with the vigour of dawn, aflame with the ardour of life, sped the heart of the young Roman.