t,
and to a certain extent also in that of politics; and, now when the
same task on a wider scale devolved on Rome, she took over Hellenism
along with the rest of the inheritance of Alexander the Great.
Hellenism therefore was no longer a mere stimulus or accessory
influence; it penetrated the Italian nation to the very core. Of
course, the vigorous home life of Italy strove against the foreign
element. It was only after a most vehement struggle that the Italian
farmer abandoned the field to the cosmopolite of the capital; and, as
in Germany the French coat called forth the national Germanic frock,
so the reaction against Hellenism aroused in Rome a tendency which
opposed the influence of Greece on principle, in a fashion altogether
foreign to the earlier centuries, and in doing so fell pretty
frequently into downright follies and absurdities.

Hellenism in Politics

No department of human action or thought remained unaffected by this
struggle between the old fashion and the new. Even political
relations were largely influenced by it The whimsical project of
emancipating the Hellenes, the well deserved failure of which has
already been described, the kindred, likewise Hellenic, idea of a
common interest of republics in opposition to kings, and the desire of
propagating Hellenic polity at the expense of eastern despotism--the
two principles that helped to regulate, for instance, the treatment of
Macedonia--were fixed ideas of the new school, just as dread of the
Carthaginians was the fixed idea of the old; and, if Cato pushed the
latter to a ridiculous excess, Philhellenism now and then indulged in
extravagances at least quite as foolish. For example, the conqueror
of king Antiochus not only had a statue of him self in Greek costume
erected on the Capitol, but also, instead of calling himself in good
Latin -Asiaticus-, assumed the unmeaning and anomalous, but yet
magnificent and almost Greek, surname of --Asiagenus--.(1) A more
important consequence of this attitude of the ruling nation towards
Hellenism was, that the process of Latinizing gained ground everywhere
in Italy except where it encountered the Hellenes. The cities of the
Greeks in Italy, so far as the war had not destroyed them, remained
Greek. Apulia, about which, it is true, the Romans gave themselves
little concern, appears at this very epoch to have been thoroughly
pervaded by Hellenism, and the local civilization there seems to have
attained the