the older Roman instruction,
and lastly that of architecture--indispensable to the genteel Roman
of this period, who instead of cultivatingthe ground built
houses and villas.

Greek Instruction
Alexandrinism

In comparison with the previous epoch the Greek as well as
the Latin training improved in extent and in scholastic strictness
quite as much as it declined in purity and in refinement.
The increasing eagerness after Greek lore gave to instruction
of itself an erudite character. To explain Homer or Euripides
was after all no art; teachers and scholars found their account better
in handling the Alexandrian poems, which, besides, were in their spirit
far more congenial to the Roman world of that day than the genuine Greek
national poetry, and which, if they were not quite so venerable
as the Iliad, possessed at any rate an age sufficiently respectable
to pass as classics with schoolmasters. The love-poems of Euphorion,
the "Causes" of Callimachus and his "Ibis," the comically obscure
"Alexandra" of Lycophron contained in rich abundance rare vocables
(-glossae-) suitable for being extracted and interpreted,
sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis,
prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths,
and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts.
Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult; these productions,
in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently
adapted to be lessons for model scholars. Thus the Alexandrian poems
took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction,
especially as trial-themes, and certainly promoted knowledge,
although at the expense of taste and of discretion. The same unhealthy
appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive
their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head. The courses
of the Greek masters in Rome sufficed only for a first start;
every one who wished to be able to converse heard lectures
on Greek philosophy at Athens, and on Greek rhetoric at Rhodes,
and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor,
where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still
to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts
had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion;
whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat
of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men
desirous of culture directed their travels.