IX
DECAY OF THE CITY-STATE
273
was now ceasing to be a true City-State, and to have an ἧθος of her own in which she could train up her sons; and Cato was hardly in his grave when the new education began to gain ground, a mixture of Roman and Greek culture, less valid for public and private morality, but more in harmony with the life of a State which had absorbed all other States into one far-reaching dominion. We might almost say that Cato's life and precepts are the last, and not the meanest, fruit ever produced by the ancient form of polity.
