on the ethics of clan life had been started in early Rome, it would have possessed nothing to interest and everything to repel the general body of the Roman populace; and such heroes as it exhibited must have summoned up recollections which no plebeian could have felt without shame and indignation. Common sympathies of religion, patriotism, social unity, being impossible, Rome had to borrow her tragedy from the Greeks, and for the service of that Greek spirit which was at once peculiarly attractive for the upper classes and the destroyer of their traditional thought. It was not the first or the last time that possessors of property became the disseminators of ideas fatal to their own ascendency; Athens had seen much of this social suicide, the Paris of the eighteenth century was to see much more of it. But patrician bonds of social duty and clan conceptions of sympathy and obligation were now out of keeping with the widened circle of Roman life, as much as the traditional morality of the Hebrew clans was out of keeping with ideas of personal responsibility in Ezekiel's age, as much as the traditional morality of primitive Athens was out of keeping with the expanded associations of the Periclean age. The discussion of Euripides whether men owe their character to inborn nature (φύσίς) or education, the repudiation of inherited sin by Ezekiel, and a famous line of Terence's Hautontimoroumenos—"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto"—alike mark in their respective social groups the clash between an ethic of narrow sympathies and conditions of social life too wide and too complex to be ruled by the old morality.
The line of Terence just quoted may be treated as the text of a new gospel at Rome, a gospel for which legal relaxations of old patrician exclusiveness had previously opened a way. This gospel of humanitas,
