Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/28

4 themselves, and as incapable of deserting them except as a consequence of their own shortcomings.

In regard to character, it was just the very unlikeness of the two peoples that served to attract them to each other. What the Roman lacked the Greek could supply, — poetry and the plastic arts, and the mythological fancy in which these were so deeply rooted; the power of thinking, too, and the precious gift of curiosity which spurs men to ask questions and to seek for answers to them. Thus the Romans borrowed the finer elements in their civilisation from the Greeks; but they were not without something to give in exchange. They possessed what Matthew Arnold called "the power of conduct" in a far higher degree than the Greeks — the self-restraint, the discipline, the "courage never to submit or yield," which at last placed the dominion of the world in their hands. These qualities were regarded almost with awe by the Greek thinkers who came to know the Romans as conquerors. These, too, and the rare power of governing which the Romans developed out of them, made it possible for Greek culture to survive long after the Greeks had lost their freedom. The Roman dominion became a legal framework on which Greek intelligence could be fitted. And though Greek and Roman never became wholly amalgamated, and East and West always remained in many ways distinct, yet the two great currents poured into a single channel, and ran side by side, like Rhône and Saône after their junction,