’Twas for the good of my country that I should be abroad.—Anything for the good of one’s country—I’m a Roman for that.

The speaker wraps a self-serving absence (“abroad”) in the language of patriotic duty, then doubles down with a grand classical pose: “I’m a Roman for that.” The line plays on the Restoration/early‑eighteenth‑century stage’s fondness for witty self-justification and for invoking “Roman” virtue as a shorthand for austere public spirit. Farquhar’s comedy often exposes how easily fashionable talk of honor and public good can be recruited to excuse private motives. The humor lies in the mismatch between the elevated rhetoric of civic sacrifice and the likely reality that the character’s travels are prompted by convenience, pleasure, or scandal rather than genuine service.