OF FORMER TIMES. 



293 



tions of its new, but mistreated visitants : and in matters of polite literature 

 the conquerors soon yielded to the conquered. Hence schools for the study 

 and exercise of rhetoric and eloquence, superintended by native Greeks, 

 became in a short time so frequent, that scarcely a Roman youth was to be 

 found who would engage in any other avocation ; and the whole body of Greek 

 philosophers and rhetoricians, that remained after the return of the Achaean 

 deputies, were expelled by a decree of the senate during the consulship of 

 Caius Fannius Strabo and Valerius Messala, in the year of the city 592, in 

 consequence of the ascendency they had acquired over the public mind. 



This expulsion, however, was too late ; a general taste for Grecian litera- 

 ture had been caught, and the classical contagion had spread universally. 

 Polybius was still studied, and the consul Rutilius Rufus had pubhshed, in 

 elegant Greek, a history of his own country. The Greek scholars, indeed, 

 were still farther avenged a few years afterward, by the general comparison 

 which was drawn between their own genuine taste and that of the tribe of 

 Latin sophists and declaimers, who, in consequence of their banishment, had 

 sprung up and occupied their place : men who were bloated with conceit, 

 instead of being inspired b}^ wisdom ; and who substituted the mere tinsel 

 of verbiage for the sterling gold of perspicuous argument and fair induction. 

 With this foppery of learning the Roman government soon became far more 

 disgusted than with the seductive talents of the Greek teachers ; and hence, 

 in the year of the city 661, during the censorship of Crassus, the Latin de- 

 claimers shared the fate of their predecessors, and were formally banished 

 from Rome. 



In their own language, therefore, we meet with but few successful spe- 

 cimens of prosaic eloquence down to this period : yet Cato the censor, Lselius, 

 and Scipio were orators of no inconsiderable powers, and eminently, as well 

 as deservedly, esteemed in their day. In poetry, however, the republic had 

 already a right to boast of its productions ; for Andronicus, Naivius, and 

 Ennius had long delighted their countrymen with their dramatic as well as 

 their epic labours : Pacuvius and Accius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Afranus 

 had improved upon the models thus offered them in the former department, 

 and Terence had just carried it to its highest pitch of perfection.* 



Public museums, also libraries, and collections of valuable curiosities of 

 all kinds, from Greece, Syracuse, Spain, and other parts of the world, were, 

 at this period, becoming frequent and fashionable. Italy was never more 

 emptied of its elegancies and ornaments by Buonaparte, than Syracuse was 

 by Marcellus, when stratagem and treachery at length gave him. an admis- 

 sion into the city. In the forcible words of Livy, " he left nothing to the 

 wretched inhabitants, but their walls and houses." Spain and Africa were in 

 the same manner ransacked by the elder Scipio ; Macedon and Lacedaemon 

 by Flaminius ; Carthage by Scipio Africanus ; and Corinth, in the very same 

 year, by Mummius. Nothing, however, can afford a stronger proof of the 

 general want of taste for the fine arts among the Romans, even at this period, 

 than the threat given by Mummius to the masters of the transports to whom 

 he committed his invaluable pillage of the best pictures and statues of Achaia, 

 that if they lost or injured any of them he would oblige them to find others 

 at their own cost. In addition to which I may also observe, that Polybius, 

 who was at this time with the Roman army, found a party of Roman legion- 

 aries, shortly after the capture of Corinth, playing at dice on the Bacchus of 

 Aristides ; a picture so exquisitely finished as to be accounted one of the 

 wonders of the world. Not knowing the value of it they were readily per- 

 suaded to part with it for a more convenient table ; and when the spoils of 

 Corinth were afterward put up to sale, Attalus, king of Pergamus, a much 

 better judge of painting than the Roman soldiers, offered for it six hundred 

 thousand sesterces, or about five thousand pounds sterling. Mummius, the 

 Roman consul and general, disbelieving that a picture of any kind could be 

 SO valuable of itself, thought it must contain some magical virtue in it ; and 



* See the author's Life of Lucretius, prefixed to his translation of the poem De Rerum Natur4 



