Yet it would be unfair to such men as Cicero and his
friends, the wiser and quieter section of the aristocracy, to call
their work altogether unproductive. True, it left little permanent
impress on human modes of thought; it wrought no material change for
the better in Italy or the Empire. We may go so far as to allow
that it initiated that habit of dilettantism which we find already
exaggerated in the age lately illuminated for us by Professor Dill in
his book on _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, and far more
exaggerated in the last age of Roman society, which the same author
has depicted in his earlier work. But it may be doubted whether under
any circumstances the Romans could have produced a great prophet or a
great philosopher; and the most valuable work they did was of
another kind. It lay in the humanisation of society by the rational
development of law, and by the communication of Greek thought and
literature to the western world. This was what occupied the best days
of Cicero and Sulpicius Rufus and many others; and they succeeded at
the same time in creating for its expression one of the most perfect
prose languages that the world has ever known or will know.
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