l equality that lay at the root
of this indifference.
Now the case was altered. Just as the naive popular faith was
superseded by an enlightened Stoic supernaturalism, so in education
alongside of the simple popular instruction a special training, an
exclusive -humanitas-, developed itself and eradicated the last
remnants of the old social equality. It will not be superfluous
to cast a glance at the aspect assumed by the new instruction of
the young, both the Greek and the higher Latin.
Greek Instruction
It was a singular circumstance that the same man, who in a
political point of view definitively vanquished the Hellenic
nation, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was at the same time the first or
one of the first who fully recognized the Hellenic civilization as--
what it has thenceforth continued to be beyond dispute--the
civilization of the ancient world. He was himself indeed an old
man before it was granted to him, with the Homeric poems in his
mind, to stand before the Zeus of Phidias; but his heart was young
enough to carry home the full sunshine of Hellenic beauty and the
unconquerable longing after the golden apples of the Hesperides
in his soul; poets and artists had found in the foreigner a more
earnest and cordial devotee than was any of the wise men of the
Greece of those days. He made no epigram on Homer or Phidias,
but he had his children introduced into the realms of intellect.
Without neglecting their national education, so far as there
was such, he made provision like the Greeks for the physical
development of his boys, not indeed by gymnastic exercises which
were according to Roman notions inadmissible, but by instruction in
the chase, which was among the Greeks developed almost like an art;
and he elevated their Greek instruction in such a way that the
language was no longer merely learned and practised for the sake
of speaking, but after the Greek fashion the whole subject-matter
of general higher culture was associated with the language and
developed out of it--embracing, first of all, the knowledge of
Greek literature with the mythological and historical information
necessary for understanding it, and then rhetoric and philosophy.
The library of king Perseus was the only portion of the Macedonian
spoil that Paullus took for himself, with the view of presenting it
to his sons. Even Greek painters and sculptors were found in his
train and completed the aesthetic training of his children. That
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