un by the great innovator Appius Claudius, when he
caused bronze shields with images and eulogies of his ancestors to be
suspended in the new temple of Bellona (442); the distribution of
branches of palms to the competitors, introduced at the Roman national
festival in 461; above all, the Greek manners and habits at table.
The custom not of sitting as formerly on benches, but of reclining
on sofas, at table; the postponement of the chief meal from noon to
between two and three o'clock in the afternoon according to our mode
of reckoning; the institution of masters of the revels at banquets,
who were appointed from among the guests present, generally by
throwing the dice, and who then prescribed to the company what, how,
and when they should drink; the table-chants sung in succession by the
guests, which, however, in Rome were not -scolia-, but lays in praise
of ancestors--all these were not primitive customs in Rome, but were
borrowed from the Greeks at a very early period, for in Cato's time
these usages were already common and had in fact partly fallen into
disuse again. We must therefore place their introduction in this
period at the latest. A characteristic feature also was the erection
of statues to "the wisest and the bravest Greek" in the Roman Forum,
which took place by command of the Pythian Apollo during the Samnite
wars. The selection fell--evidently under Sicilian or Campanian
influence--on Pythagoras and Alcibiades, the saviour and the Hannibal
of the western Hellenes. The extent to which an acquaintance with
Greek was already diffused in the fifth century among Romans of
quality is shown by the embassies of the Romans to Tarentum--when
their mouthpiece spoke, if not in the purest Greek, at any rate
without an interpreter--and of Cineas to Rome. It scarcely admits
of a doubt that from the fifth century the young Romans who devoted
themselves to state affairs universally acquired a knowledge of what
was then the general language of the world and of diplomacy.

Thus in the intellectual sphere Hellenism made advances quite as
incessant as the efforts of the Romans to subject the earth to their
sway; and the secondary nationalities, such as the Samnite, Celt, and
Etruscan, hard pressed on both sides, were ever losing their inward
vigour as well as narrowing their outward bounds.

Rome and the Romans of This Epoch

When the two great nations, both arrived at the height of their
development, began to mingl