Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/295

IX to Aristotelian language, the of the State was no longer the same as in her youth. She had resisted enemies and conquered them; but she had now to organise and rule them, to develop their resources and to romanise them, and to do this work with justice as well as force. What education, had she now, to fit her to cope with such a task as this?

A new education had indeed come into fashion, and one of a more intellectual type; but it was wholly inadequate to meet the demands which the world was now making on the Roman. The young man now learnt rhetoric, chiefly from Greeks, and from Greeks of a degenerate age; he learnt the art of making black look like white, and of reconciling consciences to what they inwardly feel to be wrong. Rhetoric might be supplemented by philosophy, but even this was not of a character to train the mind and will to just and generous action. The teachers of childhood were for the most part slaves, and the tutors of youth were Greek rhetoricians; from neither was it to be expected that the Roman could be trained in virtue and self-restraint. And as the temptations of the age were manifold, the Roman character utterly gave way; the characteristics of the period of the revolution are want of principle, unbridled selfishness, recklessness, and cruelty, in all classes. We need not be surprised that stasis, when it came, raged with such bitterness and for so long, for the State was left without any safeguard to avert it or to modify it.

I cannot forbear from concluding this chapter