ABSTRACT
From the middle of the IIIrd century to about the last third of the Ist century before our era, we have sought in Roman ideas and works for the general characteristic which might establish the connexion between them and could be interpreted as the expression of the special spirit of the people. We have not found it; or rather, the dominant faculty which gives its special character to this period of rather confused richness seems to be chiefly, as in the preceding period, a marvellous power of assimilation. We find it both in Cato and in Scipio, both in Naevius and Ennius and in Catullus, both in the people which is infected by the religious unrest of the whole of Italy and in the Senate and Pontifices who admit the Greek gods into Rome, and even the Great Phrygian Mother of Pessinus. We find it in art, which becomes Sicilian, then Pergamene, and then Neo-Attic and Alexandrian, and also in common life, which, from the time of Sylla, completely amalgamates Greek manners with those of Italy, just as it usually combines the Hellenistic peristyle house with the old Roman atrium. Rome, during these two centuries, absorbed the civilization of the conquered Mediterranean world just as, in the preceding centuries, she had assimilated that of Italy. The wealth of this civilization stifled, at least for a time, the native tradition.
