But the elegant amusements of the Romans were not suffered to interfere with their sound maxims of policy.

Whilst they acknowledged the charms of the Greek, they asserted the dignity of the Latin tongue, and the exclusive use of the latter was inflexibly maintained in the administration of civil as well as military government.

The two languages exercised at the same time their separate jurisdiction throughout the empire: the former, as the natural idiom of science; the latter, as the legal dialect of public transactions.

Those who united letters with business were equally conversant with both; and it was almost impossible, in any province, to find a Roman subject, of a liberal education, who was at once a stranger to the Greek and to the Latin language.
It was by such institutions that the nations of the empire insensibly melted away into the Roman name and people.

But there still remained, in the centre of every province and of every family, an unhappy condition of men who endured the weight, without sharing the benefits, of society.
In the free states of antiquity, the domestic slaves were exposed to the wanton rigor of despotism.