Did we remember that commonplace we should be a little more humble in
our guesswork, especially where it concerns prehistory; and we should
not make so readily certain where the civilization of Europe began, nor
limit its immense antiquity. But though it is a commonplace, and a true
one, that all human work is subject to decay, there seems to be an
inexplicable caprice in the method and choice of decay.
Consider what a body of written matter there must have been to instruct
and maintain the technical excellence of Roman work. What a mass of
books on engineering and on ship-building and on road-making; what
quantities of tables and ready-reckoners, all that civilization must
have produced and depended upon. Time has preserved much verse, and not
only the best by any means, more prose, particularly the theological
prose of the end of the Roman time. The technical stuff, which must, in
the nature of things, have been indefinitely larger in amount, has (save
in one or two instances and allusions) gone.
Consider, again, all that mass of seven hundred years which was called
Carthage. It was not only seven hundred years of immense wealth, of
oligarchic government, of a vast population, and of what so often goes
with commerce and oligarchy--civil and internal peace. A few stones to
prove the magnitude of its municipal work, a few ornaments, a few
graves--all the rest is absolutely gone.
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