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 had already nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro, as principal librarian, this implied unmistakeably the design of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.

Language
The Vulgarism of Asia Minor

The development of the language during this period turned on the distinction between the classical Latin of cultivated society and the vulgar language of common life.  The former itself was a product of the distinctively Italian culture; even in the Scipionic circle “pure Latin” had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken, no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction to the language of the great multitude.  This epoch opens with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation and accordingly also in literature—­a reaction which had inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction of a similar nature in the language of Greece.  Just about this time the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism.  They demanded full recognition for the language of life, without distinction, whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria and Phrygia; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste of learned cliques, but for that of the