Really Greece was far less changed in itself than in its external position. The government of Athens was truly bad, but even in the time of Athenian greatness it had not been at all exemplary. "There is," says Plutarch, "the same national type, the same disorders, earnest and jest, charm and malice, as among their ancestors." This epoch, too, still exhibits in the life of the Greek people individual features which are worthy of its civilising leadership. The gladiatorial games, which spread from Italy everywhere, especially to Asia Minor and to Syria, found admission to Greece latest of all lands; for a considerable period they were confined to the half-Italian Corinth, and when the Athenians, in order not to be behind that city, introduced them also among themselves without listening to the voice of one of their best men, who asked them whether they would not first set up an altar to the God of compassion, several of the noblest turned indignantly away from the city of their fathers that so dishonoured itself. In no country of the ancient world were slaves treated with such humanity as in Hellas; it was not the law, but custom that forbade the Greek to sell his slaves to a non-Greek master, and so banished from this region the slave-trade proper. Only here in the imperial period do we find the non-free people provided for in the burgess-feasts and in largesses of oil to the burgesses.[174] Only here could one who was not free, like Epictetus under Trajan, in his more than modest outward existence in the Epirot Nicopolis, hold intercourse with respected men of senatorial rank, after the manner of Socrates with Critias and Alcibiades, so that they listened to his oral instructions as disciples to the master, and took notes of, and published, his conversations. The alleviations of slavery by the imperial law are essentially traceable to the influence of Greek views, _e.g._ with the emperor Marcus, who looked up to that Nicopolitan slave as his master and model. [Sidenote: Parallel between Roman and Athenian life.]