Battles were indeed fought, and troops
were marched upon Rome, but this was merely to decide who was to be the
nominal head of the vast system of the Empire, and what had once been
independent cities, countries, and nations submitted unhesitatingly to
whoever represented that irresistible power. It might be imagined that a
political system which destroyed all national individuality, and
rendered patriotism in its highest sense scarcely possible, would have
reacted unfavourably on the literary character of the age. Yet nothing
of the kind can be urged against the times which produced Epictetus, Dio
Chrysostom and Arrian; while at Rome, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus,
Martial, and Juvenal were reviving the memories of the Augustan age.
From several passages in Plutarch's writings we gather that he studied
under a master named Ammonius, at Athens. For instance, at the end of
his Life of Themistokles, he mentions a descendant of that great man who
was his fellow-student at the house of Ammonius the philosopher. Again,
he tells us that once Ammonius, observing at his afternoon lecture that
some of his class had indulged too freely in the pleasures of the table,
ordered his own son to be flogged, "because," he said, "the young
gentleman cannot eat his dinner without pickles," casting his eye at the
same time upon the other offenders so as to make them sensible that the
reproof applied to them also.
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