comparison with others; as they are despised, in
that ratio rises the clannish self-estimation. Whereas the nobler pride
of a Roman patriotism is [Greek: autarkes] and independent of external
relations. Nothing is more essentially opposed, though often confounded
under the common name of patriotism, than the love of country in a Roman
or English sense, and the spirit of clannish jealousy.

[29] This it was (a circumstance overlooked by many who have written on
the Roman literature), this destiny announced and protected by early
auguries, which made the idea of Rome a great and imaginative idea. The
patriotism of the Grecian was, as indicated in an earlier note, a mean,
clannish feeling, always courting support to itself, and needing support
from imaginary 'barbarism' in its enemies, and raising itself into
greatness by means of _their_ littleness. But with the nobler Roman
patriotism was a very different thing. The august destiny of his own
eternal city [observe--'_eternal_,' not in virtue of history, but of
prophecy, not upon the retrospect and the analogies of any possible
experience, but by the necessity of an aboriginal doom], a city that was
to be the centre of an empire whose circumference is everywhere, did not
depend for any part of its majesty upon the meanness of its enemies; on
the contrary, in the very grandeur of those enemies lay, by a rebound of
the feelings inevitable to a Roman mind, the paramount grandeur of that
awful Republic which had swallowed them all up.

[30] I do not mean to deny the casual intercourse between Rome and
particular cities of Greece, which sometimes flash upon us for a moment
in the earliest parts of the Roman annals: what I am insisting upon, is
the absence of all national or effectual intercourse.

[31] Even an attorney, however [according to an old story, which I much
fear is a Joe Miller, but which ought to be fact], is not so rigorous as
to allow of no latitude, for, having occasion to send a challenge with
the stipulation of fighting at twelve paces, upon 'engrossing' this
challenge the attorney directed his clerk to add--'Twelve paces, be the
same more or less.' And so I say of the Olympiad--'777 years, be the
same more or less.'

[32] And finally, were it necessary to add one word by way of
reconciling the student to the substitution of 777 for 776, it might be
sufficient to remind him that, even in the rigour of the minutest
calculus, when the 776 years are fully accom