The same tendency appears in the treatment of the language or rather of the dialects. While at this time in the other Greek-speaking lands and also in Hellas the so-called common Greek, debased in the main from the Attic dialect, predominated in ordinary intercourse, not merely did the written language of this epoch strive to set aside prevalent faults and innovations, but in many cases dialectic peculiarities were again taken up in opposition to common usage, and here, where it was least of all warranted, the old particularism was in semblance brought back. On the statues which the Thespians set up to the Muses in the grove of Helicon, there were inscribed in good Boeotian the names Orania and Thalea, while the epigrams belonging to them, composed by a poet of Roman name, called them in good Ionic Uranie and Thaleie, and the non-learned Boeotians, if they knew them, like all other Greeks called them Urania and Thaleia. By the Spartans especially incredible things were done in this way, and not seldom more was written for the shade of Lycurgus than for the Aelii and Aurelii living at the time.[179] Moreover, the correct use of the language at this period appears gradually losing ground even in Hellas; archaisms and barbarisms often stand peacefully side by side in the documents of the imperial period. The population of Athens, much mixed with foreigners, has at no time specially distinguished itself in this respect,[180] and, although the civic documents keep themselves comparatively pure, yet from the time of Augustus the gradually increasing corruption of language here also makes itself felt. The strict grammarians of the time filled whole books with the linguistic slips with which the much celebrated rhetorician Herodes Atticus just mentioned and the other famous school-orators of the second century were chargeable,[181] quite apart from the quaint artificiality and the affected point of their discourse. But barbarism proper as regards language and writing set in in Athens and all Greece, just as in Rome, with Septimius Severus.[182] [Sidenote: The public career.] [Sidenote: Great families.] [Sidenote: The career of state-offices.]