Now there was a far greater disparity of civilization between Rome and this Hellenistic Orient and half-orientalized Greece, than appeared afterwards between the Romans and Spaniards and Gauls.  Spain, very soon after Augustus completed its conquest, was producing most of the brightest minds in Latin literature:  the influx of important egos had hardly passed from Italy before it began to appear in Spain.  Had not Rome become the world metropolis, capable of attracting to herself all elements of greatness from every part of the Mediterranean world, we should think of the first century A.D., as a great Spanish Age.  Gaul, too, within a couple of generations of Ceasar’s devastating exploits there, had become another Egypt for wealth and industries.  The grandson’s of the Vercingetorixes and Dumnorixes were living more splendidly, and as culturedly, in larger and better villas than the patricians of Italy; as Ferrero shows.  We may judge, too, that there was a like quick rise of manvantaric conditions in Britain after the Claudian conquest:  we have news of Agricola’s speaking of the “labored studies of the Gauls,” as if that people were then famed for learning,—­to which, he said, he preferred the “quick wits and natural genius of the Britons.”  And here I may mention that, even before the conquest of Gaul, Caesar’s own tutor was a man of that nation, a master of Greek and Latin learning;—­but try to imagine a Roman tutoring Epaminondas or Pelopidas!  So we may gather that a touch from Italy—­by that time highly cultured,—­was enough to light up those Celtic countries at once; and infer from that that no such long pralayic conditions had obtained in them as had obtained in Italy during the centuries preceding the Punic Wars.  Spain at thirteen decades before Scipio, Gaul at as much before Caesar, Britain at as much before Caesar or Claudius, may well have been strong and cultured countries:  because you wake quickly after the thirteen decade period of rest, but slowly after the long pralayas.

Roman Italy woke very slowly at the touch of Greece; and woke, not like Spain and Gaul afterwards at Rome’s touch, to culture; not to learning or artistic fertility.  What happened was what always does happen when a really inferior civilization comes in contact with a really superior one.  Rome did not become civilized in any decent sense:  she simply forwent Roman virtues and replaced them with Greek vices; and made of these, not the vices of a degenerate culture, but the piggishness of cultureless boors.—­Behold her Gadarene stations, after Flamininus’s return:—­

Millions of money, in indemnities, loot, and what not,—­in bribes before very long,—­are flowing in to her.  Where not so long since she was doing all her business with stamped lumps of bronze or copper, a pound or so in weight, in lieu of coinage, nor feeling the need of anything more handy,—­now she is receiving yearly, monthly, amounts to be reckoned in millions sterling; and has no more good notion