Moreover, it is fairly obvious that Greece has not ceased to exist as a geographical expression. The more we study modern Greece, the more we are convinced that the Hellenic race is by no means extinct. Greece was, it is true, conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C. They had been forced partly by the aggression of Pyrrhus and partly by the expansion of their own empire to take some action in the Eastern Mediterranean. There they found themselves physically as men among children, intellectually as children among men. Nothing is more striking than the almost reverent spirit in which the Roman soldiers first moved about among the old cities of Greece. But the Greeks were impossible neighbours, and at last, after infinite forbearance, the Romans were compelled by their masculine sense of order to take the responsibility of controlling Greece. Corinth was destroyed for a warning, Macedonia made a province. But cities like Athens and Sparta were left to govern themselves, though, of course, their foreign policy was subject to Roman control. Athens still continued to talk and write and teach. She became a sort of university town to which noble Romans were sent for their studies. Even when Achaia was added to the list of Roman provinces in the days of Augustus it did not mean that Athens ceased to be a free city. In the days of the Empire the more cultured emperors, like Nero and Hadrian, loved to pass their time in Greece, in the attempt to share in her intellectual prestige. So we have Nero performing in the Olympian Games, and Hadrian rebuilding a large part of Athens. It was Hadrian who attempted to complete the gigantic temple of Olympian Zeus begun by Peisistratus. The Athenian schools of philosophy continued to attract strangers from all parts of the world, until Christianity began to see its bitterest foe in the Stoics, who taught many of its doctrines. Julian the Apostate dreamed for a moment of reviving Greek philosophy, so as to overcome Christianity by borrowing many of its doctrines, but at last a decree of Justinian closed the Athenian schools of philosophy in A.D. 529. Meanwhile clouds of barbarian invaders were continually passing over the land. The Goths ravaged Greece under Alaric. The Slavs conquered and peopled a great part of it without, in the long run, materially altering its nationality. Norman invaders conquered it, and not long before our own conquest Harold Hardrada entered Athens in triumph. Then came the Latin crusaders and Venetians. All through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were Frankish Dukes of Athens. In 1456 the Caliph Omar conquered her, and thenceforth, with a temporary period of Venetian triumph, the Turks ruled Greece with a heavy hand until the glorious War of Independence, in which Lord Byron played a part of prophet and warrior. In 1830 Greece was declared an independent kingdom, and shortly afterwards provided with a youthful European king from Bavaria. The experiment was not a success.