"Thy foot will not stumble, if thou ascribest every thing good and noble to Providence, whether it takes place among the Greeks or ourselves, for God is everywhere the author of all that is good. Some things, indeed, originate immediately with Him, as the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, others again mediately, as philosophy. And even this, he appears to have imparted immediately to the Greeks, until they were called by the Lord; for philosophy led the Greeks to Christ, as the law did the Jews."—Clemens of Alexandria.
"In the history of a war, we speak only of the generals, and those who performed actions of distinction. In like manner the battles of the human mind, if I may use the expression, have been won by a few intellectual heroes. The history of the development of art and its various forms may be therefore exhibited in the characteristic view of a number, by no means considerable, of elevated and creative minds."—Augustus William Schlegel.
"These individual lives, running like so many colored threads, through our record, may impart to it that personal interest and dramatic unity which otherwise it would lack."—Doctor Arnold.
"I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward; so that no beasts might stand before him, neither was there any that could deliver out of his hand; but he did according to his will, and became great."—Daniel, viii. 4.
PART SECOND.
AUGUSTUS.—AGE OF MARTIAL FORCE.
CHAPTER I
LITERATURE.
Civilization in Greece was beautiful, in Rome invincible. As this latter empire spread, it invaded savage races on every hand, and gave birth to a new world, still more vast, the world of commercial progress, stretching along the Mediterranean and Baltic shores into the unbounded ocean of the West. While Providence was concentrating its conservative forces in Alexander, for the execution of gracious designs, the future heiress of Greece was slumbering in her cradle on the Sicilian and Italian coasts, near where the new centre was preparing, which was to draw around it the barbarous nations of earth. That the graceful progeny of Athene should have migrated with facility from the serene clime of their native home to the stormy wilds of Etruscan Rome was not strange, since naturalists assert that birds of Paradise fly best against the wind; it drifts their gorgeous plumage behind them, which only impedes when before the gale.
The most careful consideration of ancient history leads to the belief that many of the nations which flourished in Italy, long before the Roman empire attained its height of power and splendor, were distinguished by a harmony of culture, an exuberance of being, a diversity of manifestation, and originality of genius, which Rome in her best days never exceeded. They each contained an important element of civilization, but only in an incipient degree; they were of co-operative capacity, and when the predominant quality of the new cycle arose with complete development to its culminating point, martial Rome executed the most fulminating and comprehensive of primordial missions. Had not Greece preceded them with the humanizing influences of the beautiful, the great nation would have been nothing but a remorseless slayer of men, furnishing no compensation for the thralldom which was imposed from land to land by her fiery and bloody arms. The former caused Beauty to dwell as a divinity in the midst of men; the latter erected the god of war as the national deity, and compelled all peoples to the ignoble worship.