n them
the first and the second peace with Rome.

The Grecian roads, like the modern European highways, represented the
free genius of the people: they were often sinuous in their course, and,
respecting the boundaries of property, wound around the hills rather than
disturb the ancient landmarks. Up to a certain point the character of
the Grecian Republics was marked rather by rapid progression than by
permanence. Their roads were of a less massive construction than the
Roman, consisting for the most part of oblong blocks, and were not very
artificially constructed, except in the neighbourhood of the great
emporia of traffic, Corinth, and Athens, and Syracuse. Sparta possessed
two principal military highways, one in the direction of Argolis, and
another in that of Mycene; but the roads in the interior of Laconia were
little better than drift-ways for the conveyance of agricultural produce
from the field to the garner, or from the farm-yard to the markets of the
capital and the sea-ports.

The Romans were emphatically the road-makers of the ancient world. An
ingenious but somewhat fanciful writer of the present day has compared
the literature of Rome to its great Viae. One idea, he remarks,
possessed its poets, orators, and historians--the supremacy of the City
on the Seven Hills; and Lucan, Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus, various as were
their idiosyncrasies, still present a formal monotony, which is not found
to the same degree in any other literature. This censure is, perhaps, as
regards the literature of the Roman people, rather overstated; but it
applies literally to their roads, aqueducts, and tunnels. The State was
the be-all and the end-all of social life: the wishes, the prejudices,
the conveniences of private persons never entered into account with the
planners and finishers of the Appian Way, or the Aqueduct of Alcantara.
The vineyard of Naboth would have been taken from him by a single
_senatus consultum_, without the scruples of Ahab and without the crime
of Jezebel. The Roman roads were originally constructed, like our own,
of gravel and beaten stone; the surface was slightly arched, and the
Macadamite principle was well understood by the contractors for the
earliest of the Sabine highways, the Via Salaria {9}. But after the
Romans had borrowed from Carthage the art of intessellation, their roads
were formed of polygonal blocks of immense thickness, having the
interstices at the angles well filled with