We shall not disparage this noble spirit of a scholar who measured the petty present by the great past, and, as could not fail to be the case, looked at the one with indignant eyes and at the other in the transfigured glory of what had been, if we point out the fact that the good old Hellenic habits were at that time and even long afterwards not merely to be found in Rhodes, but were in many respects still everywhere alive. The inward independence, the well warranted self-esteem of the nation that was still standing at the head of civilisation had not disappeared in the Hellenes even of this age, amidst all the pliancy of subjection and all the humility of parasitism. The Romans borrowed the gods from the old Hellenes and the form of administration from the Alexandrines; they sought to master the Greek language and to Hellenise their own in measure and style. The Hellenes even of the imperial period did not pursue a like course; the national deities of Italy, like Silvanus and the Lares, were not adored in Greece, and it never entered into the mind of any Greek urban community to introduce at home the political organisation which their Polybius celebrates as the best. So far as the knowledge of Latin was a condition for the career of the higher as of the lower magistracies, the Greeks who entered upon this career acquired it; for, though practically it only occurred to the emperor Claudius to withdraw the Roman franchise from the Greeks who did not understand Latin, certainly the real execution of the rights and duties connected with it was possible only for one who was master of the imperial language. But, apart from public life, Latin was never so learned in Greece as Greek in Rome. Plutarch, who, as an author, joined as it were in marriage the two halves of the empire, and whose parallel biographies of famous Greeks and Romans recommended themselves and were effective above all by this juxtaposition, understood not very much more of Latin than Diderot of Russian, and at least, as he himself says, did not master the language; the Greek literati having a real command of Latin were either officials, like Appian and Dio Cassius, or neutrals, like king Juba.