156 ROMAN HISTORY: 



use in this, inasmuch as the highest grades of virtue and 

 excellence are those which best will bear such definition. 

 But the author who generalises too much in this matter 

 invents a drama rather than writes a history ; and his person- 

 ages become puppets, moved by his own hands, not the real 

 actors on the great stage of the world. Though it be true that 

 every man has a certain mental and moral temperament from 

 his birth, more or less apparent throughout life, yet is human 

 character, in the common sense of the term, made up of too 

 many elements often strangely incongruous in themselves, to 

 be submitted to any standard of unity. Accidents and con- 

 versions interpose in this as in all other human things ; and 

 it would be hardly less an error to attribute all events to a 

 blind fate than to assign them universally to fixities of pur- 

 pose in the agents. The consciousness of every man tells 

 him of such alternations and anomalies in himself. The 

 appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober has a meaning 

 beyond the mere anecdote ; and the noble poetry of Dryden 

 is true to life in picturing, under another influence, the rapid 

 changes of mood and mind in Philip's greater son. We advert 

 to this matter, not as a mere contingency of error, but as an 

 actual fault in historians ; a fault which it is the more 

 needful to guard against at a time when fiction, open or con- 

 cealed, presses so hard in various ways on the true history 

 of mankind. 



Scarcely had the troubled period of Marius and Sylla 

 come to a close, when there sprang up the concurrence of 

 four wars ; that with Mithridates in the East ; the vigorous 

 struggle of Spain under Sertorius in the West ; the devastating 

 war of the pirates in the Mediterranean ; and that of the 

 gladiators in the very centre of Koman power; contests 

 formidable separately ; capable perhaps of subverting the 

 Eepublic, could they have coalesced in action as they coincided 

 in time. These wars, whatever their effect on the fortunes of 



