But it is essential to note that this hard and practical turn of the Roman mind was in some ways curiously limited. It cannot be said that they excelled either in industrial or commercial pursuits. Agriculture was their original occupation, and trade-gilds existed at Rome very early in her history; but the story of their agriculture is rather a sad one, and Rome has never become a great industrial city. Their first book about husbandry was translated from the Carthaginian, and their methods of commerce they learnt chiefly from the Greeks. It was in another direction that their genius for practical work drew them: to the arts and methods of discipline, law, government.
We can see this peculiar gift showing itself at all stages of their development: in the agricultural family which was the germ of all their later growth, in the city-state which grew from that germ, and in the Empire, founded by the leaders of the city-state, and organised by Augustus and his successors. It is seen, too, in their military system, which won them their empire; they did not fight merely for spoil or glory, but for clearly realised practical purposes. As Tacitus says of a single German tribe which possessed something of this gift, the Romans did not so much go out to battle as to war. True, they constantly made blunders and suffered defeat; they often “muddled through” difficulties as we do ourselves; but they refused to recognise defeat, and profited by adverse fortune. Listen once more to a few words of old Cato; in his _Origins of Rome_, written for his son, he wrote: “Adversity tames us, and teaches us our true line of conduct, while good fortune is apt to warp us from the way of prudence.” Thus they went on from defeat to victory, conquest, and government. It is worth while not only to lay to heart, but to learn by heart, the famous lines in which Virgil sums up the Roman’s conception of his own work in the world—
“Others will mould their bronzes to breathe with a tenderer grace, Draw, I doubt not, from marble a vivid life to the face, Plead at the bar more deftly, with sapient wands of the wise, Trace heaven’s courses and changes, predict us stars to arise. Thine, O Roman, remember, to reign over every race! These be thine arts, thy glories, the ways of peace to proclaim, Mercy to show to the fallen, the proud with battle to tame!” _Æneid_, vi. 847-853 (Bowen’s translation).
