This heap of marble, under pagan gods, had given it grand, if only partial, expression.

There was no symbol of war in the long procession of its upper frieze, and its lower was like a sculptured song of peace wrought in fruits and bees and birds and blossoms.

Here was a mighty plant flowering twice a year and giving its seed to the four winds.

Every July and January its erection was celebrated in the imperial republic.
Vergilius stood beside the emperor that day when, at the Ars Pacis Augustas, he addressed the people.
"I have been reading," he said, "the words of a certain dreamer of Judea, who, in the olden time, wrote of a day when swords should be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks, and when peace should reign among the nations of the earth.

Well, give me an army for a hundred years, good people, and then I may voice the will of the gods that iron be used no more to plough its way in living flesh, but only to turn the furrow and to prune the tree.