We may ask, but we can have no certain answer. The answer that we are obliged to make is that it is scarcely to be believed that these Romans would have done as well, or nearly as well, as they did, if the Greeks had not set them such a good example.
Then we may look at the poets. The Æneid of Virgil is certainly modelled on the Iliad of Homer, and, fine though it is, it is far less admirable than the work of the far older Greek poet. Horace stands more by himself, but he uses metres which we know that he borrowed from the Greek, and it is quite possible that he stands rather alone because Greek originals on which he may have modelled his own verse have been lost.
Of writers for the theatre, there is no Roman to put "in the same street," as we say, with Æschylus, Sophocles, or Aristophanes. In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.
And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?
Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered and possessed it by her thought. Already, before the Roman conquest of the world, she had achieved this conquest to the east of Italy. By means of the Roman machinery of government, and those straight roads of the Romans, Greek thought was distributed all through the Western world too.
So get that picture clear in your minds, of the Roman Empire as a means of sending out the Greek culture everywhere.
There is something else that you have to see coming in on top of the Greek thought, distributed along with that thought, through all the world. That something else is Christianity.
You have seen this—if you will remember—that in the course of our story we found that the Greeks, the Greeks at the time when the Persian conquerors from the east came up against them and could make their way no farther west, were the first people whom we met in the whole course of the story to whom religion did not mean a great deal in their lives. To the ancient Egyptians it had meant very much. To the ancient Babylonians it was the same. The Persians came with the wonderful religion of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, which influenced their lives enormously. The Greeks were the first of the peoples to whom religion meant very little. There were a few ceremonies, annually performed, and so on; but nothing that affected their character.
With the Romans it was the same. The early Roman had reverence for the "mos majorum"—the custom of their fathers. They had high ideas of justice and of such virtues as courage and of their duties as citizens. But no religion affected their lives or their thoughts.
Influence of the Jews