of our senses.
Sight, though the subtlest of the organs, does not perceive wisdom. Beauty
is more apparent. At the sight of a face lit with its rays, memory
returns, emotions recur, we think love is born in us and it is, yet it is
but born anew."

There is a Persian manuscript which, read one way, is an invocation to
love in verse, and which, read backward, is an essay on mathematics in
prose. Love is both a poem and a treatise. It was in that aspect Plato
regarded it. It had grown since Homer. It had developed since the Song of
Songs. With Plato it attained a height which it never exceeded until Plato
himself revived with the Renaissance. In the interim it wavered and
diminished. There came periods when it passed completely away. Whether
Plato foresaw that evaporation, is conjectural. But his projection of the
drunken Alcibiades into the gravity of the Banquet is significant. The
dissolute, entering suddenly there, routed beauty and was, it may be, but
an unconscious prefigurement of the coming orgy in which love also
disappeared.

VII

ROMA-AMOR

It was the mission of Rome to make conquests, not statues, not to create,
but to quell. Her might reverberated in the roar of her name. Roma means
strength. It is only in reading it backward that Amor appears. Love there
was secondary. Might had precedence. It was Might that made first the
home, then the state, then the senate that ruled the world. That might,
which was so great that to ablate it the earth had to bear new races, was
based on two things, citizenship and the family. The title Romanus sum was
equal to that of rex. The title of matron was superior.

The Romans, primarily but a band of outlaws, carried away the daughters of
their neighbors by force. Their first conquest was woman. The next was the
gods. In the rude beginnings the latter were savage as they. Revealed in
panic and thunder, they were gods of prey and of fright. Rome, whom they
mortified, made no attempt to impose them on other people. With superior
tact she lured their gods from them. She made love to them. With naive
effrontery she seduced them away. The process Macrobius described. At the
walls of any beleaguered city, a consul, his head veiled, pronounced the
consecrated words. "If there be here gods that have under their care this
people and this city, we pray, supplicate, and adjure them to desert the
temples, to abandon the altars, to inspire terror there, to come to Rome
near us