retirement at Smyrna, where Cato would have been miserable, and offensive to the provincials. Everything we hear of Rutilius shows not only his high principle, but his perfect temper and his large culture. It is, indeed, to be regretted that his Memoirs are not preserved. We know him through the many allusions of Cicero, Seneca, and others.1 It was in this way that Hellenistic philosophy made itself a home in Italy, and acquired pupils who in the next generation became masters in their way, and showed in Cicero and Lucretius no mean rivals of the contemporary Greek.

Lucretius is so essentially a Roman figure, and his poem so Roman a poem, that I will not turn aside to criticise it at any length. But as the author himself tells us, his philosophical masters were Democritus and Epicurus, his poetical masters Empedocles and Ennius, so that he only claims originality for having been the first to treat this Greek system of philosophy in Latin—perhaps in Latin poetry. Even here his claim is made doubtful by what Cicero says of Amafinius, and the vulgar herd who reproduced Epicurus in Latin prose. Yet, still, there is far more originality in Lucretius than he claims for himself. In the first place he recasts the ostentatiously slipshod writing of Epicurus into a noble poem, and for his model he selects not the fashionable Alexandrian poets, as his contemporary Catullus did, but a famous old master, of real Hellenic purity.2 And to reproduce the effect of this old Epic speech, he goes back to the archaic Ennius, and resuscitates forms which were antiquated and forgotten by the fashionable literati of his day. This bold attempt, executed with undoubted genius, was perhaps too original to meet with general favour

1 Cf. Zeller, op. cit. p. 536.

2 Cf. on Empedocles my Class. Greek Lit. i. 124 sq.

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from the advocates of the new school, though it influenced the best of them, Catullus and Virgil, very considerably. But however little he may have been appreciated by his compeers, posterity has recognised the first great success in reproducing Greek thought and Greek artistic style in a Roman dress. The poem of Lucretius stands beside the prose of Epicurus as superior in literary form as the poetry of Virgil beside that of Apollonius Rhodius, or the English Bible beside the Greek. The Romans were indeed imitators and pupils; but what pupils!1

1 The attempt of Pub. Nigidius Figulus, whom Mommsen rates so extraordinarily (R. G. iii. 573), chiefly on the authority, too, of that Cicero whom he derides and despises, I shall consider in connection with the new Pythagoreanism of Alexandria and the East at this period-the most curious of all the philosophic developments of the century before Augustus.

CHAPTER V

THE GENERAL REACTION OF HELLENISM UPON ROME

I HAVE chosen for our first and most serious consideration the settlement of Greek philosophy at Rome, because there was no purer or more distinctly Greek product, and one which kept its individual character and language so long. Till the poem of Lucretius and the works of Cicero, we may say nothing in Latin worth reading existed on the subject. Whoever wanted to study philosophy, therefore, down to that time (60 B.C.) studied it in Greek. Nearly the same thing may be said of the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture. There were indeed distinctly Roman features in architecture, but they were mere matters of building, and whatever was done in the way of design, in the way of adding beauty to strength, was done wholly under the advice and direction of Greeks.

The subservience to Hellenism in the way of internal household ornament was even more complete. No painting or sculpture from native artists would now be tolerated at Rome. Extravagant prices were paid for statues and pictures from Greece, also for silver plate and for Greek marbles, though there were precious quarries lying idle in Italy. The prices then paid for old silver-twenty to thirty

CHAP. V

GREEK FASHIONS AT ROME

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times the price of the metal-rival those lavished in our own day on 'Queen Anne' plate. And with the ornaments of the house, the proper serving of the house, especially the more delicate departments-the cooking of state dinners, the attendance upon guests, the care of the great man's intimate comforts-could only be done fashionably by Greek slaves. The outburst of Hellenistic fashions of this sort at Rome must have far exceeded the outburst of French fashions in England after the peace of 1815, when England with all her great wealth and European prestige had been practically excluded from the progress of material civilisation in France for a whole generation, and suddenly awoke to the fact that in many respects she was still rude and barbarous.

But of course these lower sides of Hellenism had no more potent effect in civilising Rome than the employing of French cooks and valets and the purchase of French ornaments and furniture had in improving our grandfathers. Much more serious was the acknowledged supremacy of the Greeks in literature of all kinds, and still more their insistence that this superiority depended mainly upon a careful system of intellectual education. A self-taught man-autodidaktos—or even the man who learned late—opsimathes—was in the Greek world always considered a man of imperfect breeding, and wanting in real refinement. This is the point where Polybius, after his seventeen years' experience of Roman life, finds the capital flaw in the conduct of public affairs. In every Hellenistic state, he says, nothing engrosses the attention of legislators more than the question of education, whereas at Rome a most moral and serious government leaves the training of the young to the mistakes and hazards of private enterprise.

That this was a grave blunder as regards the lower classes is probably true. The Roman mob during the next few

G

generations showed all the vices and violences of an ignorant populace entrusted with the affairs of a mighty empire. If, therefore, the almost universal assumption be really true, that the mob of any nation can be educated out of passion and folly into a reasonable crowd, then the Senate is liable to a crime of omission which brought upon the government terrible punishment. But as regards the upper classes, whose education the Senate did no doubt carefully consider, the Roman theory held that home education was the only education worth having, and that the unpaid interest taken in the young by parents and parents' friends was the proper influence to be brought upon the rising generation. So long as the requirements of the day were small, and consisted chiefly of practical good sense in the management of household affairs or civic duties, this theory did not show its weakness. But when Rome grew from a city controlling Italy to an empire directing the world, such men as Æmilius Paullus saw plainly that they must do something more to fit their children for the splendid position they had themselves attained, and so they were obliged to keep foreign teachers of literature and art in their houses as private tutors.

. The highest class of these private tutors was that of the philosophers, whom we have considered, and while the State set itself against their public establishments, great men in the State openly encouraged them and kept them in their houses. Cicero says that he treated his literary slave Dionysius better than Scipio treated Panatius; and the jibe of Lucilius, that his horse and groom were worth more to him than his philosopher, seems to corroborate this.1 But still, so far as philosophy was concerned, the Romans could hardly say anything reasonable to depreciate the Greeks. No Roman of that day could produce anything beyond the

1 Cf. Mommsen, R. G. ii. 425.