paration.
Would ten battles, would a campaign, would ten campaigns lost, furnish
the justifying motive? Certainly it would be a false casuistry that
would say so.

Why did the Romans conquer the Greeks? By _why_ we mean, Upon what
principle did the children of Romulus overthrow the children of Ion,
Dorus, AEolus? Why did not these overthrow those? We, speak _Latino
more_--Vellem ostenderes quare _hi_ non profligaverint _illos_? The
answer is brief: the Romans were _one_, the Greeks were _many_. Whilst
no weighty pressure from without had assaulted Greece, it was of
particular service to that little rascally system that they were split
into sections more than ever we _have_ counted or mean to count. They
throve by mutual repulsion, according to the ballad:

When Captain X. kick'd Miss Roe, Miss Roe kick'd Captain X. again.'

Internally, for pleasant little domestic quarrels, the principle of
division was excellent; because, as often as the balance tended to
degravitation (a word we learned, as Juliet tells her nurse, 'from one
we danc'd withal'), _instanter_ it was redressed and trimmed by some
renegade going over to the suffering side. People talk of Athens being
beaten by the Spartans in the person of Lysander; and the vulgar notion
is, that the Peloponnesian war closed by an eclipse total and central
for our poor friend Athens. Nonsense! she had life left in her to kick
twenty such donkeys to death; and, if you look a very little ahead,
gazettes tell you, that before the peace of Antalcidas, those villains,
the Spartans (whom may heaven confound!) had been licked almost too
cruelly by the Athenians. And there it is that we insist upon closing
that one great intestine[18] war of the Greeks. So of other cases:
absolute defeat, final overthrow, we hold to be impossible for a Grecian
state, as against a Grecian state, under the conditions which existed
from the year 500 B.C. But when a foreign enemy came on, the
possibilities might alter. The foreigner, being one, and for the moment
at least united, would surely have a great advantage over the crowd of
little pestilent villains--right and left--that would be disputing the
policy of the case. There lay the original advantage of the Romans;
_one_ they were, and _one_ they were to the end of Roman time. Did you
ever hear of a Roman, unless it were Sertorius, that fought against
Romans? Whereas, scoundrel Greeks were always fighting against their
countrymen. Xenophon,