"Italy had been subject to the influence of Greece, ever since it had a history at all. … But the Hellenism of the Romans of the present period [second century B. C.] was, in its causes as well as its consequences, something essentially new. The Romans began to feel the lack of a richer intellectual life, and to be startled as it were at their own utter want of mental culture; and, if even nations of artistic gifts, such as the English and Germans, have not disdained in the pauses of their own productiveness to avail themselves of the paltry French culture for filling up the gap, it need excite no surprise that the Italian nation now flung itself with eager zeal on the glorious treasures as well as on the vile refuse of the intellectual development of Hellas. But it was an impulse still more profound and deep-rooted which carried the Romans irresistibly into the Hellenic vortex. Hellenic civilization still assumed that name, but it was Hellenic no longer; it was, it fact, humanistic and cosmopolitan. It had solved the problem of moulding a mass of different nations into one whole completely in the field of intellect, and to a certain degree in that of politics, and, now when the same task on a wider scale devolved on Rome, she entered on the possession of Hellenism along with the rest of the inheritance of Alexander the Great. Hellenism therefore was no longer a mere stimulus, or subordinate influence; it penetrated the Italian nation to the very core. Of course, the vigorous home life of Italy strove against the foreign element. It was only after a most vehement struggle that the Italian farmer abandoned the field to the cosmopolite of the capital; and, as in Germany the French coat called forth the national Germanic frock, so the reaction against Hellenism aroused in Rome a tendency, which opposed the influence of Greece on principle in a style to which earlier centuries were altogether unaccustomed, and in doing so fell not unfrequently into downright follies and absurdities. No department of human action or thought remained unaffected by this struggle between the new fashion and the old. Even political relations were largely influenced by it. The whimsical project of emancipating the Hellenes, … the kindred, likewise Hellenic, idea of combining republics in a common opposition to kings, and the desire of propagating Hellenic polity at the expense of eastern despotism—which were the two principles that regulated, for instance, the treatment of Macedonia—were fixed ideas of the new school, just as dread of the Carthaginians was the fixed idea of the old; and, if Cato pushed the latter to a ridiculous excess, Philhellenism now and then indulged in extravagances at least as foolish. … {1640} But the real struggle between Hellenism and its national