ruling desires which animated these men of wealth and influence were
chiefly the product of the new cosmopolitan culture which the victorious
city had begun to absorb in the days when conquest and diplomacy had
first been carried across the seas. To this she fell a willing victim
when the conquered peoples, bending before the rude force which had but
substituted a new suzerainty for an old and had scarcely touched their
inner life, began to display before the eyes of their astonished
conquerors the material comfort and the spiritual charm which, in the
case of the contact of a potent but narrow civilisation with one that is
superbly elastic and strong in the very elegance of its physical
debility, can always turn defeat into victory. But the student who
begins his investigation of the new Roman life with the study of Roman
society as it existed in the latter half of the second century before
our era, cannot venture to gather up the threads of the purely
intellectual and moral influences which were created by the new
Hellenistic civilisation. He feels that he is only at the beginning of a
process, that he lacks material for his picture, that the illustrative
matter which he might employ is to be found mainly in the literary
records of a later age, and that his use of this matter would but
involve him in the historical sins of anticipation and anachronism. Of
some phases of the war between the old spirit and the new we shall find
occasion to speak; but the culminating point attained by the blend of
Greek with Roman elements is the only one which is clearly visible to
modern eyes. This point, however, was reached at the earliest only in
the second half of the next century. It was only then that the fusion of
the seemingly discordant elements gave birth to the new "Romanism,"
which was to be the ruling civilisation of Italy and the Western
provinces and, in virtue of the completeness of the amalgamation and the
novelty of the product, was itself to be contrasted and to live for
centuries in friendly rivalry with the more uncompromising Hellenism of