With the complete Latinizing of Italy the growth of Hellenizing went hand in hand.

In the higher circles of Italian society Greek training became an integral element of their native culture.

The consul of 623, the -pontifex maximus- Publius Crassus, excited the astonishment even of the native Greeks, when as governor of Asia he delivered his judicial decisions, as the case required, sometimes in ordinary Greek, sometimes in one of the four dialects which had become written languages.

And if the Italian literature and art for long looked steadily towards the east, Hellenic literature and art now began to look towards the west.

Not only did the Greek cities in Italy continue to maintain an active intellectual intercourse with Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and confer on the Greek poets and actors who had acquired celebrity there the like recognition and the like honours among themselves; in Rome also, after the example set by the destroyer of Corinth at his triumph in 608, the gymnastic and aesthetic recreations of the Greeks-- competitions in wrestling as well as in music, acting, reciting, and declaiming--came into vogue.( 7) Greek men of letters even thus early struck root in the noble society of Rome, especially in the Scipionic circle, the most prominent Greek members of which--the historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius--belong rather to the history of Roman than of Greek development.