. They scarcely knew what was meant by civic life,
with its material luxuries and graces, its art and literature. They
were commonly small peoples without unity, brave fighters, but, in all
those matters commonly classed as civilisation, distinctly behind the
times. The superiority of the Roman in these parts was not merely one
of organised strength, military skill, and political method, it was a
superiority also of intellectual life and culture. In Spain, Gaul,
Britain, Switzerland, the Tyrol and southern Austria, and also in
North-West Africa, the Roman proceeded to organise after his own
heart, to settle his colonies, to impose his language, and to
inculcate his ideals. He was dealing with inferiors; this he fully
recognised, and so for the most part did they.

Meanwhile to the eastward also Rome spread her conquests. Here,
however, she was dealing with peoples who had already passed under
influences in many respects superior to those brought by the
conqueror, influences which were in a sense only beginning to educate
the conqueror himself. Let us here, for the sake of clearness, make a
brief digression into previous history.

Throughout the eastern half of the Mediterranean countries, conquering
Rome had been face to face with an older, a more polished, a more
keenly intellectual, and more artistic culture than her own. This was
the civilisation of Greece. We need not dwell upon the character of
Hellenic culture. Anyone who has made acquaintance with the richness
of Greek literature, the clear sureness of Greek art, the keen insight
of Greek science and philosophy, and the bold experiments of Greek
society--especially as represented by Athens--will understand at once
what is meant. When the Romans, more than two hundred years before our
date, conquered Greece, in so far as they were a people of letters or
of effort in abstract thought, in so far as they possessed the arts of
sculpture, architecture, painting, and music, they were almost wholly
indebted to Greece. Their own strength lay in solidity and gravity of
character, in a strong sense of national and personal discipline, in
the gift of law-making and law-obeying. In culture they stood to the
Greeks of that time very much as the Germans of two centuries ago
stood to the French. After their conquest by the Romans the Greeks
perforce submitted to the rule of might, but the typical Greek never
looked upon the Roman as socially or intellectually his equal. He
bec