Thus education in early Rome was practical, and, to some extent, occupational. It was intended to produce efficiency as fathers, citizens, and soldiers. It consisted in training the youths to be healthy and strong in mind and body, and sedate and simple in their habits; to reverence the gods, their parents, the laws, and institutions; and to be courageous in war, and familiar with the traditional agriculture, or the conduct of some business. It did produce a nation of warriors and loyal citizens, but it inevitably tended to make them calculating, selfish, overbearing, cruel, and rapacious. They never possessed either lofty ideals or enthusiasm. Their training was best adapted to a small state, and became unsatisfactory when they had spread over the entire Italian peninsula. The golden age of valor and stern virtue had then largely departed, and they began unconsciously to seek a more universal culture. While such a people regarded the Greeks as visionary, just as the Greeks looked upon them as barbarians, they felt instinctively that only by absorption of the Hellenic ideals could their cosmopolitan ambitions be carried out. On the other hand, it was through the organization which the Romans were able to furnish, that the great ideals formulated by the Greeks were destined to be rendered effective and to become a matter of value and concern to civilization ever since. [Sidenote: Spread through Alexander and Roman conquests.] [Sidenote: The schools resulting.] =The Absorption of Greek Culture.=--There was a gradual infiltration of Greek culture into Rome from very early days. This received a great impulse through the conquests of Alexander (334-323 B. C.) and the absorption of Macedon by Rome (168 B. C.), but it was not until about half a century after Greece itself had become a Roman province (146 B. C.), that the Greek educational ideals and institutions can be said to have been completely absorbed by Rome. This new type of education was thus well established early in the first century B. C. It may be said to have remained almost unmodified until toward the end of the second century A. D., when political conditions at Rome became most unstable and the period of degeneracy set in. During these three centuries of Hellenized Roman education, three grades of schools resulted from the amalgamation. They were the (1) _ludus_ or school of the _litterator_, as the lowest school was called; (2) the ‘grammar’ school, taught by a _grammaticus_ or _litteratus_; and (3) the schools of rhetoric and oratory, which furnished a somewhat higher education. [Sidenote: Its content and methods.]