But yet, when we look back, it is hard to say when were the palmy days of Rome.

When did those virtues shine by which her power was founded?
When was that wisdom best exhibited from which came her capacity for ruling?
Not in the time of her early kings, whose mythic virtues, if they existed, were concerned but in small matters; for the Rome of the kings claimed a jurisdiction extending as yet but a few miles from the city.
And from the time of their expulsion, Rome, though she was rising in power, was rising slowly, and through such difficulties that the reader of history, did he not know the future, would think from time to time that the day of her destruction had come upon her.

Not when Brennus was at Rome with his Gauls, a hundred and twenty-five years after the expulsion of the kings, could Rome be said to have been great; nor when, fifty or sixty years afterward, the Roman army--the only army which Rome then possessed--had to lay down its arms in the Caudine Forks and pass under the Samnite yoke.

Then, when the Samnite wars were ended, and Rome was mistress in Italy--mistress, after all, of no more than Southern Italy--the Punic wars began.

It could hardly have been during that long contest with Carthage, which was carried on for nearly fifty years, that the palmy days of Rome were at their best.