tronizing the artist
in verse. While intellectual and literary life thus brought the
more genteel, if not the purer, elements of the two nations into
connection with each other, on the other hand the arrival of troops
of slaves from Asia Minor and Syria and the mercantile immigration
from the Greek and half-Greek east brought the coarsest strata of
Hellenism--largely alloyed with Oriental and generally barbaric
ingredients--into contact with the Italian proletariate, and gave
to that also a Hellenic colouring. The remark of Cicero, that new
phrases and new fashions first make their appearance in maritime
towns, probably had a primary reference to the semi-Hellenic
character of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium, where with foreign
wares foreign manners also first found admission and became thence
more widely diffused.

Mixture of Peoples

The immediate result of this complete revolution in the relations
of nationality was certainly far from pleasing. Italy swarmed with
Greeks, Syrians, Phoenicians, Jews, Egyptians, while the provinces
swarmed with Romans; sharply defined national peculiarities
everywhere came into mutual contact, and were visibly worn off; it
seemed as if nothing was to be left behind but the general impress
of utilitarianism. What the Latin character gained in diffusion
it lost in freshness; especially in Rome itself, where the middle
class disappeared the soonest and most entirely, and nothing was
left but the grandees and the beggars, both in like measure
cosmopolitan. Cicero assures us that about 660 the general culture
in the Latin towns stood higher than in Rome; and this is confirmed
by the literature of this period, whose most pleasing, healthiest,
and most characteristic products, such as the national comedy and
the Lucilian satire, are with greater justice described as Latin,
than as Roman. That the Italian Hellenism of the lower orders was
in reality nothing but a repulsive cosmopolitanism tainted at once
with all the extravagances of culture and with a superficially
whitewashed barbarism, is self-evident; but even in the case of
the better society the fine taste of the Scipionic circle did not
remain the permanent standard. The more the mass of society began
to take interest in Greek life, the more decidedly it resorted not
to the classical literature, but to the most modern and frivolous
productions of the Greek mind; instead of moulding the Roman
character in the Hellenic spirit, th