The street, however, is crowding with life, even if not a horse is in sight. The most conspicuous are literally dozens of men, each with a heavy toga wrapped carelessly around him, hurrying frantically in every direction. In other cities and other ages they might be “making a train.” Here they are in fact “clients,” duty bound to be at the doors of their patrons early every morning to pay their respects and seek their bounty (see p. 149)--but almost every other type of humanity is represented. Great numbers of boys and girls are trudging reluctantly along to their schools, the poorer bearing their own packages of writing tablets, the better dressed each followed by a sedate male attendant, a pedagogue, bearing the weapons of learning. In and out there also go youths in humble attire, often running at breakneck speed, thrusting and jostling to make their way; they are the slave messengers from the great houses flying on early errands for their masters. One of them elbows aside a tall and venerable man with a prodigiously long beard and wrapped in a trailing but none too spotless mantle--he is a Greek philosopher on his way to some mansion where he will perhaps expound the theories of Epicurus to a pleasure-loving nobleman. A few steps further and there is seen a fair-haired German clad in his outlandish costume of undressed wolf skins; hardly behind him is a red-headed Gaul in a short tartan cloak; one can speedily recognize also a hawk-eyed, white-robed Arab from the edge of the deserts and presently appears a grinning negro, black as ebony and in a splendid gilt and scarlet livery--the foot-boy probably of some rich lady. =16. Frequent Use of Greek in Rome.=--The bulk of the crowd, to be sure, is Italian, with keen, olive faces, dark hair, and rather short stature, graceful and incessantly gesturing. But the Latin chattered on every hand is full of uncouth idioms, the _sermo plebis_ calculated to make Cicero turn in his grave, and there is a great co-mingling of foreign words; above all, about one person out of every four seems to be _speaking Greek_, now abominably corrupt, now in the purest Attic, and upon penetrating the great houses one would discover Greek to be even more truly a familiar language. All educated Romans write and speak Greek as Englishmen and Americans will never learn to use French. Learned books are being written by the Tiber in the incomparable tongue of Hellas, and only the most ignorant Romans fail to understand simple Greek sentences. In short Rome seems close to becoming a bi-lingual city. The reigning emperor is so enthusiastic for things Hellenic that his foes brand Hadrian as “the Graecule.” Athens and Corinth seem almost to have conquered their conquerors.