(_αα_) What we were looking for, therefore, is supplied us by the heroic age, for it is here that virtue, _ἀρετὴ_ in the full sense of that Greek word, creates the root-basis of actions. In this connection it would appear that we must distinguish between _ἀρετὴ_ and _virtus_ as understood by the Roman themselves. The Romans had already their State, Fatherland, and legal institutions, and as contrasted with the State, as the controlling object of all, they had surrendered personality. To be simply a citizen of Rome, to have one object for the imagination and for every other personal energy to centre itself upon, namely, the fatherland and its sovereign majesty, therein lies the earnestness and grit of Roman virtue. Heroes, on the contrary, are individuals who undertake and accomplish a complete enterprise in consistent reliance upon their personal resources and initiative, and with whom it is consequently a purely arbitrary act of their own when they execute anything in accordance with the moral principle. This immediate unity, however, of what we may call the substantive import and individuality of inclination, impulse, and will is the characteristic of Greek virtue. According to this view personality is a law to itself without any further subjection to a law, judgment, and tribunal of independent subsistence. The Greek heroes make their appearance in an epoch anterior to legal enactment, or they are themselves the founders of States, so that right and social order, law and ethical custom, emanate from them, and persist as their own creation in an indefeasible relation to them. In this way Hercules was regarded so highly by the ancients themselves, and represents an Ideal of original and heroic virtue. His free and self-reliant virtue, with which he championed the right and battled against the monstrosities of men and Nature is not a prevailing characteristic of the age, but belongs to him as an exclusive and unique possession. And we may add he was not strictly a moral hero, as his reception of the fifty daughters of Thespius in one night[304] clearly shows us; neither would it appear from the tale about the Augaean stables is he pre-eminent for gentility. He is rather the general type of self-reliant strength and resource in its championship of right and justice, to exemplify which he elected summarily and from a free choice to undergo countless toils and labours. It is true that some of his deeds were carried out at the instigation of Eurystheus, but this submission is, after all, rather a formal association than a real one, no connection at least of legal validity or inevitable necessity through which the strength of his self-reliant personality was diverted from its independent course.