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Updated: June 5, 2025
For that reason in the previous period Cato and those who shared his views never brought such questions before the burgesses, but discussed them solely in the senate. For that reason contemporaries of Gracchus, the men of the Scipionic circle, described the Flaminian agrarian law of 522 the first step in that fatal career as the beginning of the decline of Roman greatness.
Roman talent has made her own all that Greek genius created, and fate has willed that neither race should be complete without the other. The germs of this fine thought are found in the historian Polybius, who dwelt on the grandeur of such a joint influence, and perhaps through his intercourse with the Scipionic circle, gave the idea currency.
Thus Polybius became the first Greek of note, who embraced with serious conviction the comprehensive view of the Scipionic circle, and recognized the superiority of Hellenism in the sphere of intellect and of the Roman character in the sphere of politics as facts, regarding which history had given her final decision, and to which people on both sides were entitled and bound to submit.
Accordingly the Scipionic circle had shown the most bitter hostility to the rhetoricians, and, if Greek declamations before paid masters were tolerated doubtless primarily as exercises in speaking Greek, Greek rhetoric did not thereby find its way either into Latin oratory or into Latin oratorical instruction.
The aspiration of the Scipionic circle after literary correctness, especially in point of language, finds critically its most finished and most clever representative in Lucilius.
That the Italian Hellenism of the lower orders was in reality nothing but a repulsive cosmopolitanism tainted at once with all the extravagances of culture and with a superficially whitewashed barbarism, is self-evident; but even in the case of the better society the fine taste of the Scipionic circle did not remain the permanent standard.
The most respected man in Rome was using the vulgar abuse of the streets to the sovereign people; and the man who used this language was so blinded by prejudice as not to see that the blood which he reviled gave the promise of a new race, that the mob which faced him was not a crowd of Italian peasants, willing victims of the martinet, that the Asiatic and the Greek, with their sordid clothes and doubtful occupations, possessed more intelligence than the Roman members of the Scipionic circle and might one day be the rulers of Rome.
The increased Hellenic culture of the seventh called forth a literary reaction, which destroyed the germs of promise contained in those simple imitative attempts by the winter-frost of reflection, and rooted up the wheat and the tares of the older type of literature together. Scipionic Circle
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.
Yet under the influence partly of Catonian patriotism, partly of the more refined culture of the Scipionic circle, the Latin language gained so decided an ascendency in this field, that of the later historical works not more than one or two occur written in Greek; and not only so, but the older Greek chronicles were translated into Latin and were probably read mainly in these translations.
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