The art and literature which flourished in this soil during the days of empire are, with insignificant exceptions, as Greek in form and substance as in the preceding centuries. In the great centres of culture in the East, in Antioch and Alexandria, the Roman government and the Roman army have left visible traces, but there is nothing to lead us to suppose that they profoundly affected, far less metamorphosed, the Græco-Oriental character of those cities. Ephesus, the capital of Asia and the seat of the Roman government, was no more Romanised than Ancyra or Pergamus. The only exception is Berytus, “the Latin island in the sea of Oriental Hellenism”; there, in the Colonia Julia Augusta Felix, where the colonists were Roman legionaries, grew up the famous school of jurisprudence, where Ulpian, the great jurist of Syrian descent, may have had his training; a school which ministered abundant material to the editors of the Codex Theodosianus, and whence professors were summoned by Justinian to co-operate with him in the compilation of the code which cast Roman law into its final shape. In general, the Roman Empire received much from the East both of good and evil, but gave it practically no fresh intellectual impulse; its chief contribution to Græco-Oriental civilisation was the establishment of order, the guarantee of personal safety, and the advancement of material prosperity. ROMAN INFLUENCE IN THE WEST The case was very different in the West, where Rome was called upon to accomplish a great civilising mission, and where the ground had been prepared for her in very few places by an indigenous civilisation. In the south of Gaul, indeed, the Greek colony of Massilia had for six centuries been spreading the Greek language and character, Greek coinage and customs, by means of its factories, which extended as far as to Spain, and a home had thus been won for Hellenism on this favoured coast, as in southern Italy. Cæsar, with the far-seeing policy that no sentimental considerations were suffered to confuse, was the first to break the dominion of the Greek city, which had so long been in close alliance with Rome, and so to point the way to the systematic Romanisation of southern Gaul.