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 patronizing 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.