Crassus, excited the astonishment even
of the native Greeks, when as governor of Asia he delivered his judicial
decisions, as the case required, sometimes in ordinary Greek, sometimes
in one of the four dialects which had become written languages. And if
the Italian literature and art for long looked steadily towards the east,
Hellenic literature and art now began to look towards the west. Not only
did the Greek cities in Italy continue to maintain an active intellectual
intercourse with Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and confer on the
Greek poets and actors who had acquired celebrity there the like
recognition and the like honours among themselves; in Rome also,
after the example set by the destroyer of Corinth at his triumph
in 608, the gymnastic and aesthetic recreations of the Greeks--
competitions in wrestling as well as in music, acting, reciting,
and declaiming--came into vogue.(7) Greek men of letters even thus
early struck root in the noble society of Rome, especially in the
Scipionic circle, the most prominent Greek members of which--the
historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius--belong rather to
the history of Roman than of Greek development. But even in other
less illustrious circles similar relations occur; we may mention
another contemporary of Scipio, the philosopher Clitomachus,
because his life at the same time presents a vivid view of the
great intermingling of nations at this epoch. A native of
Carthage, then a disciple of Carneades at Athens, and afterwards
his successor in his professorship, Clitomachus held intercourse
from Athens with the most cultivated men of Italy, the historian
Aulus Albinus and the poet Lucilius, and dedicated on the one hand
a scientific work to Lucius Censorinus the Roman consul who opened
the siege of Carthage, and on the other hand a philosophic
consolatory treatise to his fellow-citizens who were conveyed to
Italy as slaves. While Greek literary men of note had hitherto
taken up their abode temporarily in Rome as ambassadors, exiles,
or otherwise, they now began to settle there; for instance, the
already-mentioned Panaetius lived in the house of Scipio, and
the hexameter-maker Archias of Antioch settled at Rome in 652 and
supported himself respectably by the art of improvising and by epic
poems on Roman consulars. Even Gaius Marius, who hardly understood
a line of his -carmen- and was altogether as ill adapted as
possible for a Maecenas, could not avoid pa