the Roman public of this period applauded
the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator,
and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless
shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection
of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever-
widening circle. But at the same time contemporaries capable
of judging complain that the Hellenic culture in Italy about 690
was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before;
that opportunities of hearing pure and good Latin were but rare,
and these chiefly from the mouth of elderly cultivated ladies;
that the tradition of genuine culture, the good old Latin mother wit,
the Lucilian polish, the cultivated circle of readers
of the Scipionic age were gradually disappearing. The circumstance
that the term -urbanitas-, and the idea of a polished national culture
which it expressed, arose during this period, proves, not that
it was prevalent, but that it was on the wane, and that people
were keenly alive to the absence of this -urbanitas- in the language
and the habits of the Latinized barbarians or barbarized Latins.
Where we still meet with the urbane tone of conversation, as in Varro's
Satires and Cicero's Letters, it is an echo of the old fashion
which was not yet so obsolete in Reate and Arpinum as in Rome.

Germs of State Training-Schools

Thus the previous culture of youth remained substantially unchanged,
except that--not so much from its own deterioration as
from the general decline of the nation--it was productive of less good
and more evil than in the preceding epoch. Caesar initiated
a revolution also in this department. While the Roman senate
had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture,
the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence
in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it
after the Hellenic fashion. If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise
on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians
of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way
in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently
the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire
was provided for on the part of the state, and which form
the most significant expression of the new state of -humanitas-;
and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment
of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and