Excerpt from Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 25
It was a humble, mean house, this home of the conqueror of Pyrrhus; and coarse as plentiful its fare. No Roman ever tired of telling how a Samnite bribe found Manius Curius roasting turnips in the dusk of his chimney comer: Malo in fictilibus meis esse, eis qui aurum habent imperare! The words stuck. When, years afterward, the struggle against Eastern luxury came to its crisis, the moral bias of the ancient episode gave it increased prominence in the minds of old-school Romans, and continued to mould the characters of their descendants through many generations - a homely aroma pervading, as it were, the whole course of Roman ethics, as unmistakable in every writer who catches their true spirit, as it is incapable of confusion with that asceticism which took its place.
"Ancient Rome," said the great historian of morals in Europe, "produced many heroes, but no saint." And he goes on to point out that the type of character which the Romans chiefly held up to admiration, was self-consecrated, not to that abstract of virtue enjoined by religion, but to a concrete purpose - the material prosperity of their Commonwealth. Here as elsewhere, the natural attitude of the practical race was sustained. Whether such devotion lacked much of the spirituality of a quest for the souls salvation, may perhaps with some justice be questioned.
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