Asianic rhetoric, with its advocacy of adornment, had come to Rome in Cicero’s youth. It is true that its rules engaged his attention. But a man as sensitive to artistic expression as Cicero, and as sure of the spirit of his audiences, had little to learn from Anatolian pedagogues who taught _Graeculi_ how to declaim to four walls. Those teachers would hardly have recognized the _Pro Rabirio_ as a product of their precepts. Similarly, Apollodorus came from Pergamum to teach the doctrines of a Lysianic or Attic style. Youths like Calidius, Calvus, and Pollio favored his method. But Apollodorus would have met with little success if so many Romans had not been practical and if the senate, with its traditions of dignity, had not already lost its prestige before the emerging democracy led by Caesar. Apollodorus may have introduced the new style, but had the times not been ripe for him he would not have been heard; moreover, the part of his doctrine that Rome accepted, Rome had possessed already in the 150 speeches of old Cato. It was Caesar’s sword that antiquated senatorial oratory as it antiquated senatorial pretensions to govern Rome. Foreign schoolteachers did not do it. The Greek observer, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Atticism in the Augustan day, realized that it was not the Greek schoolteachers but the practical statesmen of Rome who in the last analysis required the new prose to take the form it did. “It is my belief,” he says, “that this great revolution [in stylistic matters] was originated by Rome, the mistress of the world, who compelled entire nations to look to her: Rome, I say, and her nobles, men of high character, excellent administrators, highly cultivated, and of high critical intelligence.” Here we have a keen insight into the fact that a powerful state generates a dominant culture which easily drowns the feeble whispers of the cloistered theorist.