Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/477

 was splendid land about here once. He burned, he massacred, he enslaved, he carried away whatever he could use, as he did everywhere. In the great bazaar of Tunis you will see how he brought marble columns from Carthage and painted them like barbers' poles. But, worst of all, he deforested. Then when hundreds of years had gone by, some soldiers and some gentlemen of my profession came and dug here and uncovered what was left. And at last the new Roman comes in an automobile and is the first person to walk in and think correctly of those poor dead people who were here so long ago and to see that they were human beings like himself. Of course that is because they were like himself, the same kind of people."

"Are you sure?" Ogle asked skeptically. "You don't think him a barbarian or, at the best, Carthaginian?"

"No, no! Roman! That feeling about his own city, it is nothing but Roman. The Carthaginian had something of it, but not the pride or the passion. You will find it in the old Florentine, but nowhere at its height except in the Augustan Roman and in such men as this one who was here. We are too likely to think that Rome was all Virgil and Horace