THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

V. The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

Chapter XII - Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art

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Page 14

Germs of State Training-Schools

Thus the previous culture of youth remained substantially unchanged, except that--not so much from its own deterioration as from the general decline of the nation--it was productive of less good and more evil than in the preceding epoch. Caesar initiated a revolution also in this department. While the Roman senate had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture, the government of the new Italo-Greek empire, whose essence in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it after the Greek fashion.

If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire was provided for on the part of the state, and which form the most significant expression of the new state of -humanitas-; and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and had already nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro, as principal librarian, this implied unmistakeably the design of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.

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