But riches surprised them; and we see ostentatious depravity quickly taking the place of a pure, though meagre, life. To quote again from Polybius, who himself was carried from Macedon to Rome as a prisoner of war: "Most of the Romans live in strange dissipation. The young allow themselves to be carried away by the most shameful excesses. They are given to shows, to feasts, to luxury and disorder of every kind, which it is too evident they have learned from the Greeks during the war with Perseus." Cato calls attention to the new manners with that bitter scorn which was so strong in the old Roman. "See this Roman," he says; "he descends from his chariot, he pirouettes, he recites buffooneries and jokes and vile stories, then sings or declaims Greek verses, and then resumes his pirouettes." Imitation of the Greeks was zealously adopted in the education of the young. Scipio Æmilianus says: "When I entered one of the schools to which the nobles send their sons, great gods! I found there more than five hundred young girls and lads who were receiving among actors and infamous persons lessons on the lyre, in singing, in posturing; and I saw a child of twelve, the son of a candidate for office, executing a dance worthy of the most licentious slave." The school here referred to must not be understood as the regular institution for the imparting of knowledge to Roman children; the purpose of that described seems to have been the cultivation of what the Romans had come to regard as genteel accomplishments. There were other schools for instruction in reading, writing, and the usual branches of knowledge. These schools also were as free of access to girls as to boys, and were always conducted as private enterprises rather than by the State.
The remarkable revolution in thought and manners which Hellenism introduced into Rome could not fail profoundly to affect the existence of woman. That she was not far behind man in "running to every excess of riot" is abundantly shown by the historians and other writers of the time. In that city which was once remarkable for the purity of its morals, houses of ill repute became plentiful. These were occupied principally by women who had been slaves, but had gained their liberty by the sacrifice of their honor. Houses of this character are the scenes of nearly all the comedies of Plautus and Terence, who found all their material in Rome, though they located the brothels of which they write at Athens and used Greek names for their characters. Prostitution, however, was not confined to the freedwomen; women of all classes were necessarily drawn into the vortex of degeneracy. Notwithstanding the fact that in B.C. 141 the Senate made a serious effort to resist the increasing looseness of morals, going so far as to build a temple to Venus Verticordia, the Venus who was supposed to convert women's hearts to virtue, the character of the times devoted the whole sex too zealously to Aphrodite for anything noteworthy to result from the appeal to her nobler namesake.