It was not until the third century before Christ that the influence of Greek literature, philosophy, and art began to be felt in Rome, introduced through contact with Greek colonies in Italy and Sicily, by Greek slaves, and by Romans who had sojourned in Greece. But the new culture awakened such interest and spread with such rapidity that by the time Greece had become a Roman province, soon after the middle of the succeeding century, it had profoundly modified the scheme of Roman education, except on the side of physical training. The boy’s earliest instruction, received at home or in a private school, still included reading, writing, and reckoning. He was afterwards sent to a secondary school, where the chief subject of study was the writings of favorite Greek and Latin poets, and the practical end sought was accuracy and facility in the use of the two languages. To these a little music and applied geometry might be added. Young men who were looking forward to public life received further preparation in schools of rhetoric. These taught the art of effective speaking, as needed in the law courts, before a popular assembly, or in the senate. The home life of the boy had thus lost its earlier place as chief factor in education, and the old training for domestic, political, and religious duties had been replaced by one essentially grammatical and oratorical. Military service, meanwhile, had ceased to perform its part in national discipline, for during the last century of the Republic it was committed to mercenary troops, and these developed into a standing army under the Empire. While the Greek gymnastics was introduced to some extent among the Romans of the upper class, it never acquired a hold upon the popular mind or entered as an important factor into education in the fosterland. Its pedagogical aim had become obscured, and the great national games which once exhibited its most perfect product had fallen into ill repute. The Roman nature lacked that intense love of competition which was so characteristic of the Greek. The exercises of the palæstra and the gymnasium, an inexhaustible mine of subjects for the painters of red-figured Greek vases in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., were nothing more than idle amusements to a people bent upon world conquest. They were disgusted at the nakedness of the performers, which had been the inspiration of sculptors like Myron, Phidias, Polycletus, Praxiteles, and Lysippus; and the sight of young athletes contending in generous rivalry in such events as made up the pentathlon could have aroused little interest in a generation accustomed to the thrills of the circus and the amphitheater.