When in the second century B.C. the Romans were first brought into closer contact with Greece, they found ample justification for their anti-athletic prejudice in the vicious and corrupt state into which athletics had fallen at that period in Greece. The competitions were in the hands of professional athletes, whose training rendered them useless as soldiers; the gymnasia, instead of producing healthy, useful citizens, had become schools of idleness and immorality; from a physical and military point of view the whole nation had degenerated. The athletic festivals were useful political factors, and as such the Romans knew how to utilize them. Some, like Aemilius Paulus, standing before the Zeus of Pheidias might feel something of the beauty and the grandeur of the Greek ideal, or, like Cato, that odd mixture of conservatism and Hellenism, might train their sons in the athletic exercises of Greece; but the mass of the nation was unaffected; for a long time no gymnasia or palaestrae rose in Rome, no Roman deigned to compete in the games of Greece. The old Roman prejudice died hard. More than a century after the founding of the Empire, in spite of imperial Philhellenism, we find an echo of it in the reign of Nero, in the protests of the old school against the introduction in Rome of a festival on Greek lines. “The youths were degenerating under the influence of foreign tastes, passing their time in athletics, in idling, and low intrigues; what remained for them but to strip themselves naked, put on the caestus, and practise such battles instead of the arms of legitimate warfare?”[235]