man must
be worthy of his ancestors and of Rome. His own life was short, and
without honour nothing; the life of Rome went on.

Courage, devotion to duty, strength of will, a great power of silence,
a sense of justice rather than any sympathy in his dealings with other
men: these were the characteristic Roman virtues. The Roman was proud:
he had a high idea of what was due from himself. This was the groundwork
out of which his other qualities grew, good and bad. Proud men are not
apt to understand the weakness of other people or to appreciate virtues
different from their own. The defects of the Romans were therefore
hardness, sometimes amounting to cruelty both in action and in
judgement; lack of imagination; a blindness to the things in life that
cannot be seen or measured. They were just rather than generous. They
trampled on the defeated and scorned what they could not understand.
They worshipped success and cared little for human suffering. About
this, however, they were honest. Sentimentalism was not a Roman vice,
nor hypocrisy. When great wealth poured into the city, after the Eastern
conquests of Lucullus and Pompeius, the simplicity of the old Roman life
was destroyed and men began to care for nothing but luxury, show, and
all the visible signs of power. They were quite open about it: they did
not pretend that they really cared for other things, or talk about the
'burden of Empire'.

The heroes of Roman history are men of action. As they pass before us,
so far as we can see their faces, hear their voices, know their natures
from the stories recorded by those who wrote them down at the time or
later, these men stand out in many respects astonishingly like the men
of our own day, good and bad. Centuries of dust lie over them. Their
bones are crumbled to the dust. Yet in a sense they live still and move
among us. Between them and us there lie not only centuries but the great
tide of ruin that swept the ancient world away: destroyed it so that the
men who came after had to build the house of civilization, stone by
stone anew, from the foundation. The Roman world was blotted out by the
barbarians. For hundreds of years the kind of life men had lived in Rome
disappeared altogether and the very records of it seemed to be lost.
Gradually, bit by bit, the story has been pieced together, and the men
of two thousand years ago stand before us: we see them across the gulf.
The faces of those belonging to the earliest story