Wealth & Money Quote by Goldwin Smith

“Evident” is doing quiet but heavy lifting here. Goldwin Smith isn’t merely describing early Rome; he’s policing the reader’s temptation to romanticize the so-called “primitive” city of the kings. By insisting Rome was already “great and wealthy” when her conquest began, he nudges us away from the comforting origin story in which empires rise from humble virtue and only later curdle into greed. The subtext is blunt: conquest doesn’t arrive as a tragic detour from innocence; it is often the outward expression of prior capacity - money, manpower, organization, surplus.

The phrase “for that time and country” is the historian’s caveat, a calibrated relativism that guards against anachronism. Smith isn’t claiming regal Rome was London or Paris; he’s asserting it was big enough, rich enough, and politically consolidated enough to matter in its own neighborhood. That qualification also signals method: he’s aligning with a 19th-century, evidence-forward historiography that prefers scale and material conditions over legend, especially the moralizing Roman tradition that loved to contrast austere ancestors with decadent descendants.

Context matters. Writing in an age when Britain’s own empire was both self-justifying and self-anxious, Smith’s Rome reads like a mirror held at a safe classical distance. The line implies a structural lesson: imperial trajectories are seeded early in urban wealth and institutional strength, not discovered later through destiny. It’s less a compliment to Rome than a demystification of how empires start - already equipped, already hungry, already plausible.