The staggering achievements of the Roman empire were evident through much of Europe and its literature. Book 6. 851–53, of Virgil's Aeneid offers a paradigm of the imperial mission that Dryden's polite version enhances with a typically English flourish alien to the original – freeing slaves. Anchises in the underworld tells Aeneas of Rome's great Augustan future:

The primacy of Roman governance was thus communicated to school-boys, some of whom as literate adults would adapt it for their own purposes. Indeed, numerous Romanized speechifiers inflicted such high virtue upon Restoration and eighteenth-century auditors and readers. Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus (1681) sees the future, when the city is purged of its grosser elements, and can fulfill the Virgilian imperative.

We recall that Juba, the civilized Numidian prince in Addison's Cato (1713), speaks comparable words, and praises Roman “Wisdom, Discipline, and lib'ral Arts” which embellish, reform and “break our fierce Barbarians into Men.”