serving of the house, especially the more delicate departments—the cooking of state dinners, the attendance upon guests, the care of the great man's intimate comforts—could only be done fashionably by Greek slaves. … But of course these lower sides of Hellenism had no more potent effect in civilising Rome than the employing of French cooks and valets and the purchase of French ornaments and furniture had in improving our grandfathers. Much more serious was the acknowledged supremacy of the Greeks in literature of all kinds, and still more their insistence that this superiority depended mainly upon a careful system of intellectual education. … This is the point where Polybius, after his seventeen years' experience of Roman life, finds the capital flaw in the conduct of public affairs. In every Hellenistic state, he says, nothing engrosses the attention of legislators more than the question of education, whereas at Rome a most moral and serious government leaves the training of the young to the mistakes and hazards of private enterprise. That this was a grave blunder as regards the lower classes is probably true. … But when Rome grew from a city controlling Italy to an empire directing the world, such men as Æmilius Paullus saw plainly that they must do something more to fit their children for the splendid position they had themselves attained, and so they were obliged to keep foreign teachers of literature and art in their houses as private tutors. The highest class of these private tutors was that of the philosophers, whom we have considered, and while the State set itself against their public establishments, great men in the State openly encouraged them and kept them in their houses. … As regards literature, however, in the close of the second century B. C. a change was visible, which announced the new and marvellous results of the first. … Even in letters Roman culture began to take its place beside Greek, and the whole civilised world was divided into those who knew Greek letters and those who knew Roman only. There was no antagonism in spirit between them, for the Romans never ceased to venerate Greek letters or to prize a knowledge of that language. But of course there were great domains in the West beyond the influence of the most western Greeks, even of Massilia, where the first higher civilisation introduced was with the Roman legions and traders, and where culture assumed permanently a Latin form. In the East, though the Romans asserted themselves as conquerors, they always condescended to use Greek, and there were prætors proud to give their decisions at Roman assize courts in that language." _J. P. Mahaffy, The Greek World under Roman Sway, chapter 5._ HELLENION, The. See NAUKRATIS. HELLESPONT, The.