ROME AT THE HEIGHT OF
ITS GRANDEUR
The luster of the Roman power and glory of the Roman name were now at their height. The eyes of all the world were now on Italy, the young republic of the West. Into Rome all talents, all riches, flowed. What a grand thing in those days to be a Roman citizen; so that, wherever one walked,—in Spain, in Africa, even in once proud Athens, he was followed, feasted, flattered! What a career was opened to those who wished for wealth or aspired to fame! But in the very sunburst of Rome’s glory, the germs of decay were ripening.
On the Romans themselves the effect of their foreign conquests were both good and bad; but perhaps the evil outweighed the good.
ERA OF GREAT PUBLIC
WORKS
The wealth poured into Rome by the conquest of Carthage, of Greece, and the East, and the considerable revenue derived from the permanent taxation of the provinces, enabled the Romans to carry out a great system of public works. Throughout Italy splendid military roads which remain to this day were built, the provinces were traversed by imperial highways, and fine stone bridges were thrown across the Tiber. In Rome splendid public buildings were erected, the city was sewered, the streets were paved (174 B. C.), two new aqueducts (the Marcian, built in 144 B. C., at a cost of ten million dollars) were constructed; and it may be noted that the Consul P. Scipio Nasica, in 159 B. C., set up in Rome a public clepsydra, or water clock, the citizens having for six centuries gone on without any accurate means of knowing the time by night as well as day.
INFLUENCE OF GREEK CULTURE
ON ROME
The effect on Rome of the conquest of Greece and the Hellenized East was very marked. Greek rhetoricians, scholars, tragedians, musicians and philosophers in large numbers took up their abode in Rome. The city swarmed with Greek schoolmasters. Greek tutors and philosophers, who, even if they were not slaves, were as a rule accounted as servants, were now permanent inmates in the palaces of Rome; people speculated in them, and there is a statement that the sum of two hundred thousand sesterces (ten thousand dollars) was paid for a Greek literary slave of the first class.
RISE OF NATIVE ROMAN
LITERATURE
The stimulus of Greek literary culture led to native production, and in the second century, B. C., we have the beginning of that Latin literature which we still read. Though the great period of Roman letters did not come till a century after this time (age of Augustus), yet there arose a number of writers of no ordinary power. Among these should be mentioned Ennius, the father of Roman poetry; Plautus, his contemporary, a man of rich poetic genius; the elder Cato, the first prose writer of note; and Terence, the most famous of the comic poets.