Up to the time when Rome began to decline, the school education of her youth was meagre in the extreme, consisting of reading, writing, and a little law. All later education that was more than this was borrowed from the Greeks. It was about the year 200 B.C., at the close of the Second Punic War, that their influence began clearly to show itself. The severe Cato, who so cordially despised rhetoricians and philosophers, learnt Greek in his old age and wrote, for the use of his son, a series of manuals on ethics, rhetoric, medicine, military science, farming, and law. At the same time Scipio Africanus spent his leisure hours in practising gymnastics. From this time on, and just in proportion as Rome lost her national character and became cosmopolitan, she more and more adopted Greek manners, Greek religion (or irreligion), and Greek education. When, finally, in B.C. 146, Greece became a Roman dependency, it was strictly true that "Captive Greece took captive her rude conqueror." Thousands of Greek schoolmasters, rhetoricians, philosophers, etc., flocked to Rome, and, though attempts were made to expel or suppress them, they held their place, for the simple reason that the education they offered was a necessity of the time. Rome, the mistress of the world, had either to become cosmopolitan or perish, and she preferred the former alternative. She now, for the first time, began to have a literature and to cultivate her own language. The studies which she specially affected were (1) grammar, that is, literature, (2) rhetoric, (3) philosophy, which corresponded to school, college, and university education. The last, like music and geometry, was, for the most part, an elegant accomplishment, rather than a serious study. The physical sciences found little favor.