They finally reached the absurd extreme of enacting a law, by the terms
of which a popular assembly was obliged to disperse, if it should occur
to a higher magistrate merely to look into the heavens for signs of the
approach of such a storm. The power of the priests under such a law was
immeasurable. (See pages 236 and 247). ] Cato was very much shocked by
the preaching of three Greek philosophers: Diogenes, a stoic;
Critolaus, a peripatetic; and Carneades, an academic, who visited Rome
on a political mission, B.C. 155; because it seemed to him that they,
especially the last, preached a doctrine that confounded justice and
injustice, a system of expediency, and he urged successfully that they
should have a polite permission to depart with all speed. The
philosophers were dismissed, but it was impossible to restrain the
Roman youth who had listened to the addresses of the strangers with an
avidity all the greater because their utterances had been found
scandalous, and they went to Athens, or Rhodes, to hear more of the
same doctrine.
Thus in time the simplicity of the people was completely undermined,
and while they became more cosmopolitan they also grew more lax. They
used the Greek language, and employed Greek writers, as we have seen,
to make their books for them, which, though bearing Greek titles, were
composed in Latin.
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