ON THE LITERARY EDUCATION 



.people of having acted hostilely towards them ; and a thousand of them 

 were sent as deputies, or rather as hostages, to plead their cause, and ob- 

 tain the best terms they could for their country before the senate of this 

 aspiring republic. Contrary, however, to the engagement stipulated with 

 them, they were not allowed to enter upon their defence ; were scattered 

 over different parts of the republic ; forbidden to appear before the 

 senate ; and detained, in a state of captivity, for not less than seventeen 

 years. For the most part these Achasans were men of taste and elegant 

 accomplishments^ and many of them were scholars of profound and di- 

 versified erudition. Such, more especially, was Polybius, who was soon 

 introduced into public favour under the patronage of Scipio ^Emilianus, 

 and whose elegant Greek writings were now read and studied by every 

 one. The whole repubhc became enamoured of the various acquisitions 

 of its new, but mistreated visitants ; and in matters of pohte literature 

 the conquerors soon yielded to the conquered. Hence schockls 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 Mes- 

 sala, in the year of the city 592, in consequence of the ascendancy they 

 had acquired over the public mind. 



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

 literature had been caught, and the classical contagion had spread univer- 

 sally. Polybius was still studied, and the consul Kutihus Rufus had pub- 

 lished, in elegant Greek, a liistory of his own country. The Greek scho- 

 lars, indeed, were still farther avenged a few years afterwards, by the ge- 

 neral 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 by wisdom ; and 

 who substituted the mere tinsel of verbiage for the sterhng gold of per- 

 spicuous argument and fair induction. With this foppery of learning, the 

 Roman government soon became far more disgusted than with the se- 

 ductive talents of the Greek teachers ; and hence, in the year of the city 

 661, during the censorship of Crassus, the Latin declaimers 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, 

 Laslius, and Scipio were orators of no inconsiderable powers,- and emi- 

 nently, as well as deservedly, esteemed in their day. In poetry, however, 

 the republic had already a right to boast of its productions ; for Andro- 

 nicua, Nagvius, and Enniushad long delighted their countrymen with their 

 dramatic as well as their epic labours : Paeuvius, and Accius, Plautus, 

 GsBciUus, and Afranius 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 



* See the author's life of Lucretius prefixed to his translation of the poem Pe Reruia 

 Natura. 



