the heroism of Harmodius, the philosophy of Socrates.
Hellas was held together by no system, but by the Delphic oracle and
the Olympian games. The Greeks depended upon culture, as the Romans
upon law. The national character determined by culture, and that
determined by discipline, eventually broke down: but the ruin in
either case was different. The Greek became servile, indolent, and
slippery; the Roman became arrogant, bloodthirsty, tyrannous, and
brutal. The Greeks in their best days attained to [Greek:
sophrosyne], their regulative virtue, by a kind of instinct; and
even in their worst debasement they never exhibited the extravagance
of lust and cruelty and pompous prodigality displayed by Rome. The
Romans, deficient in the aesthetic instinct, whether applied to
morals or to art, were temperate upon compulsion; and when the
strain of law relaxed, they gave themselves unchecked to profligacy.
The bad taste of the Romans made them aspire to the huge and
monstrous. Nero's whim to cut through the isthmus, Caligula's villa
built upon the sea at Baiae, the acres covered by imperial palaces in
Rome, are as Latin as the small scale of the Parthenon is Greek.
Athens annihilates our notions of mere magnitude by the predominance
of harmony and beauty, to which size is irrelevant. Rome dilates
them to the full: it is the colossal greatness, the mechanical
pride, of her monuments that win our admiration. By comparing the
Dionysian theatre at Athens, during a representation of the
'Antigone,' with the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome, while the
gladiators sang their _Ave Caesar!_ we gain at once a measure for the
differences between Greek and Latin taste. In spiritual matters,
again, Rome, as distinguished from Hellas, was omnivorous. The
cosmopolitan receptivity of Roman sympathies, absorbing Egypt and
the Orient wholesale, is as characteristic as the exclusiveness of
the Greeks, their sensitive anxiety about the [Greek: ethos]. We
feel that it was in a Roman rather than a Greek atmosphere, where no
middle term of art existed like a neutral ground between the moral
law and sin, where no delicate intellectual sensibilities interfered
with the assimilation of new creeds, that Christianity was destined
to strike root and flourish.

These remarks, familiar to students, form a proper prelude to the
criticism of Lucretius: for in Lucretius the Roman character found
its most perfect literary incarnation. He is at all points a true
Roman,