This may be called a barbarous custom, and a nation of artistic feelings would certainly not have tolerated the continuance of this odd resurrection of the dead down to an epoch of fully-developed civilization; but even Greeks who were very dispassionate and but little disposed to reverence, such as Polybius, were greatly impressed by the naive pomp of this funeral ceremony.  It was a conception essentially in keeping with the grave solemnity, the uniform movement, and the proud dignity of Roman life, that departed generations should continue to walk, as it were, corporeally among the living, and that, when a burgess weary of labours and of honours was gathered to his fathers, these fathers themselves should appear in the Forum to receive him among their number.

The New Hellenism

But the Romans had now reached a crisis of transition.  Now that the power of Rome was no longer confined to Italy but had spread far and wide to the east and to the west, the days of the old home life of Italy were over, and a Hellenizing civilization came in its room.  It is true that Italy had been subject to the influence of Greece, ever since it had a history at all.  We have formerly shown how the youthful Greece and the youthful Italy—­both of them with a certain measure of simplicity and originality—­gave and received intellectual impulses; and how at a later period Rome endeavoured after a more external manner to appropriate to practical use the language and inventions of the Greeks.  But the Hellenism of the Romans of the present period was, in its causes as well as its consequences, something essentially new.  The Romans began to feel the need of a richer intellectual life, and to be startled as it were at their own utter want of mental culture; and, if even nations of artistic gifts, such as the English and Germans, have not disdained in the pauses of their own productiveness to avail themselves of the miserable French culture for filling up the gap, it need excite no surprise that the Italian nation now flung itself with fervid zeal on the glorious treasures as well as on the dissolute filth of the intellectual development of Hellas.  But it was an impulse still more profound and deep-rooted, which carried the Romans irresistibly into the Hellenic vortex.  Hellenic civilization still doubtless called itself by that name, but it was Hellenic no longer; it was, in fact, humanistic and cosmopolitan.  It had solved the problem of moulding a mass of different nations into one whole completely in the field of intellect, 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.