[The History of Rome, Book IV by Theodor Mommsen]@TWC D-Link book
The History of Rome, Book IV

CHAPTER XII
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Even Greek painters and sculptors were found in his train and completed the aesthetic training of his children.

That the time was past when men could in this field preserve a merely repellent attitude as regarded Hellenism, had been felt even by Cato; the better classes had probably now a presentiment that the noble substance of Roman character was less endangered by Hellenism as a whole, than by Hellenism mutilated and misshapen: the mass of the upper society of Rome and Italy went along with the new mode.
There had been for long no want of Greek schoolmasters in Rome; now they arrived in troops--and as teachers not merely of the language but of literature and culture in general--at the newly-opened lucrative market for the sale of their wisdom.

Greek tutors and teachers of philosophy, who, even if they were not slaves, were as a rule accounted as servants,( 17) were now permanent inmates in the palaces of Rome; people speculated in them, and there is a statement that 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds) were paid for a Greek literary slave of the first rank.

As early as 593 there existed in the capital a number of special establishments for the practice of Greek declamation.

Several distinguished names already occur among these Roman teachers; the philosopher Panaetius has been already mentioned;( 18) the esteemed grammarian Crates of Mallus in Cilicia, the contemporary and equal rival of Aristarchus, found about 585 at Rome an audience for the recitation and illustration, language, and matter of the Homeric poems.


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