laws the beauty of wrought bronze and woven language?

And if this could be, what was the duty of each Roman whose pure
desires lay with Poetry and her sisters? Paulus shuddered as he felt
the question tearing its way through the peaceful plans he had been
making for his life. He remembered the story of Menander refusing
to leave the intellectual life of Athens for the luxuries of
Ptolemy's court. Must he, on the contrary, for the sake of an idea,
renounce this life, with its cherished poverty and philosophy, its
peace and learned leisure, its freedom and candour and regard for
beauty, to go back to Rome where, in terrifying coalition, power and
pleasure, wealth and display, passion and brutality were forever
crowding in upon the city's honour? The irresponsibility of the
insignificant assailed him. A Virgil, he supposed, might know that
his presence would affect his country for good or evil. But what could
he, Paulus, do? In Rome, in Athens, he was one of the little men.
Was he not, then, justified in living his own life in the best
possible way, atoning for the meagreness of his talent by the
honourableness of his quest?

But even as he said this to himself he remembered why Athens had
achieved perfection. In the age of Pericles, geniuses, like flawless
jewels cut out of a proper matrix, had been fashioned out of a large
body of men, themselves not gifted, but able to understand and
safeguard those who were. He had left Rome because she was no matrix
for poets and artists and thinkers. Ought he now to return to her
and live and work and die unknown, serving only as one more citizen
ready to welcome the poets to be?

His panting desires put up one last defence. Was he not narrowing
art within the borders of nationality? In the service of beauty was
there either Greek or Roman? Alas! Atticus had beaten that down
already. Art was no fungus, growing on a rotten stump of national
life. Greeks had been artists only when they had been conquerors,
soldiers, traders, rulers. The Romans now held the world. In them,
the eagle's brood, lay the hope of a new birth of the spirit. With
a certain noble unreason, he dismissed the idea that by living in
Athens he might fight the battle for Rome. If he was to fight at all,
it was to be where the enemy was fiercest and the hope of victory
least. Upon any easier choice his ancestors within him laid their
iron grasp. His ears caught the words of one of the actors:

"Well, do not t