Nothing will ever die so long as it knows what to do under the
circumstances, in other words so long as it knows its business. The
Roman Empire must have died of inexperience of some kind, I should think
most likely it was puzzled to death by the Christian religion. But the
question is not so much how the Roman Empire or any other great thing
came to an end—everything must come to an end some time, it is only
scientists who wonder that a state should die—the interesting question is
how did the Romans become so great, under what circumstances were they
born and bred? We should watch childhood and schooldays rather than old
age and death-beds.
As I sit writing on the top of a wild-beast pen of the amphitheatre of
Aosta I may note, for one thing, that the Romans were not squeamish, they
had no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Again, their
ladies did not write in the newspapers. Fancy Miss Cato reviewing
Horace! They had no Frances Power Cobbes, no . . . s, no . . . s; yet
they seem to have got along quite nicely without these powerful moral
engines. The comeliest and most enjoyable races that we know of were the
ancient Greeks, the Italians and the South Sea Islanders, and they have
none of them been purists.