It was largely through the medium of Greek literature and Greek philosophy, particularly the Platonic and the Stoic, that the ethical Greek spirit, characterized by its humanitarian and cosmopolitan sympathies, exerted its modifying influence upon the Roman moral consciousness and gradually changed it into something very different from what it was at first. This influence can best be traced in Roman literature and the imperial legislation. [Sidenote: Evidences in literature of the softening of the moral feelings] The two great changes in the moral type consisted, as Lecky observes, in the greater prominence accorded the benevolent or amiable virtues, and in the broadening of the moral sympathies.[548] The effect of the action of the humanitarian Greek spirit upon the old Roman ideal of character was to soften its harsher features and to cause the heroic virtues to yield place, in a measure, to the benevolent qualities, that is to say, to those virtues which in the course of three centuries or more, largely under Hebrew-Christian influences, were destined to assume a dominant place in the accepted ideal of moral excellence.[549] Cicero, Vergil, Juvenal, and Seneca may be considered the truest representatives of this new-forming social conscience. Cicero, writing just at the end of the Republic and after Rome for more than three generations had been under the influence of Greek culture and philosophy, exhibits unmistakably the effect upon the Roman character of the comparatively humane and gentle spirit of Hellas. In his treatise _De Officiis_, “concerning duties,” in which he interprets and enlarges for the benefit of his son Marcus the ethical work of the Greek philosopher Panætius, he gives his sanction to moral doctrines which could hardly have been approved by a Roman moralist before Rome had felt the influence of the ethical spirit of Greece. The work is a glorification of the virtues of pity, gentleness, and benevolence. The softening movement finds another representative in Vergil. His great poem is in its ethical spirit more Greek than Roman. In the “transformation of the goddess of lawless self-pleasing love into a goddess of a maternal compassionate love,” Wedgwood would have us see summed up the change in moral feeling of the classical world during the centuries that separated the age of the _Iliad_ from that of the _Æneid_.[550] Juvenal,[551] too, applauds the moral qualities of pity and tenderness. “His moral tone appears to unite the spirit of two different ages.”[552] Seneca denounced the gladiatorial games as inhuman and degrading. He constantly lays emphasis upon those amiable virtues which belong rather to the Greek than to the Roman ideal of moral excellence. [Sidenote: Ethical theory finds embodiment in practice]