Bible Encyclopedias
Latin Literature

240-80 B.

First among his special services to Latin literature was the fresh impulse which he gave to tragedy. He turned the eyes of his contemporaries from the commonplace social humours of later Greek life to the contemplation of the heroic age. But he did not thereby denationalize the Roman drama. He animated the heroes of early Greece with the martial spirit of Roman soldiers and the ideal magnanimity and sagacity of Roman senators, and imparted weight and dignity to the language and verse in which their sentiments and thoughts were expressed. Although Rome wanted creative force to add a great series of tragic dramas to the literature of the world, yet the spirit of elevation and moral authority breathed into tragedy by Ennius passed into the ethical and didactic writings and the oratory of a later time.

Another work was the Saturae, written in various metres, but chiefly in the trochaic tetrameter. He thus became the inventor of a new form of literature; and, if in his hands the satura was rude and indeterminate in its scope, it became a vehicle by which to address a reading public on matters of the day, or on the materials of his wide reading, in a style not far removed from the language of common life. His greatest work, which made the Romans regard him as the father of their literature, was his epic poem, in eighteen books, the Annales, in which the record of the whole career of Rome was unrolled with idealizing enthusiasm and realistic detail. The idea which inspired Ennius was ultimately realized in both the national epic of Virgil and the national history of Livy. And the metrical vehicle which he conceived as the only one adequate to his great theme was a rude experiment, which was ultimately developed into the stately Virgilian hexameter. Even as a grammarian he performed an important service to the literary language of Rome, by fixing its prosody and arresting the tendency to decay in its final syllables. Although of his writings only fragments remain, these fragments are enough, along with what we know of him from ancient testimony, to justify us in regarding him as the most important among the makers of Latin literature before the age of Cicero.

There is still one other name belonging partly to this, partly to the next generation, to be added to those of the men of original force of mind and character who created Latin litera ture, that of M. Porcius Cato the Censor2 1 (3449), the younger contemporary of Ennius, whom he brought to Rome. More than Naevius and Plautus he represented the pure native element in that literature, the mind and character of Latium, the plebeian pugnacity, which was one of the great forces in the Roman state. His lack of imagination and his narrow patriotism made him the natural leader of the reaction against the new Hellenic culture. He strove to make literature ancillary to politics and to objects of practical utility, and thus started prose literature on the chief lines that it afterwards followed. Through his industry and vigorous understanding he gave a great impulse to the creation of Roman oratory, history and systematic didactic writing. He was one of the first to publish his speeches and thus to bring them into the domain of literature. Cicero, who speaks of 150 of these speeches as extant in his day, praises them for their acuteness, their wit, their conciseness. He speaks with emphasis of the impressiveness of Cato's eulogy and the satiric bitterness of his invective.

Cato was the first historical writer of Rome to use his native tongue. His Origines, the work of his old age, was written with that thoroughly Roman conception of history which regarded actions and events solely as they affected the. continuous and progressive life of a state. Cato felt that the record of Roman glory could not be isolated from the story of the other Italian communities, which, after fighting against Rome for their owil independence, shared with her the task of conquering the world. To the wider national sympathies which stimulated the researches of the old censor into the legendary history of the Italian towns we owe some of the most truly national parts of Virgil's Aeneid. In Naevius, Plautus, Ennius and Cato are represented the contending forces which strove for ascendancy in determining what was to be the character of the new literature. The work, begun by them, was carried on by younger contemporaries and successors; by Statius Caecilius (c.220-168), an Insubrian Gaul, in comedy; in tragedy by M. Pacuvius (c.220-132), the nephew of Ennius, called by Cicero the greatest of Roman tragedians; and, in the following generation, by L. Accius (c.170-86), who was more usually placed in this position. The impulse given to oratory by Cato, Ser. Sulpicius Galba and others, and along with it the development of prose composition, went on with increased momentum till the age of Cicero. But the interval between the death of Ennius (169) and the beginning of Cicero's career, while one of progressive advance in the appreciation of literary form and style, was much less distinguished by original force than the time immediately before and after the end of the second Punic war. The one complete survival of the generation after the death of Ennius, the comedy of P. Terentius Afer or Terence ( c. 185-159), exemplifies the gain in literary accomplishment and the loss in literary freedom. Terence has nothing Roman or Italian except his pure and idiomatic Latinity. His Athenian elegance affords the strongest contrast to the Italian rudeness of Cato's De Re Rustica. By looking at them together we understand how much the comedy of Terence was able to do to refine and humanize the manners of Rome, but at the same time what a solvent it was of the discipline and ideas of the old republic. What makes Terence an important witness of the culture of his time is that he wrote from the centre of the Scipionic circle, in which what was most humane and liberal in Roman statesmanship was combined with the appreciation of what was most vital in the Greek thought and literature of the time. The comedies of Terence may therefore be held to give some indication of the tastes of Scipio, Laelius and their friends in their youth. The influence of Panaetius and Polybius was more adapted to their maturity, when they led the state in war, statesmanship and oratory, and when the humaner teaching of Stoicism began to enlarge the sympathies of Roman jurists. But in the last years during which this circle kept together a new spirit appeared in Roman politics and a new power in Roman literature, the revolutionary spirit evoked by the Gracchi in opposition to the long-continued ascendancy of the senate, and the new power of Roman satire, which was exercised impartially and unsparingly against both the excesses of the revolutionary spirit and the arrogance and incompetence of the extreme party among the nobles. Roman satire, though in form a legitimate development of the indigenous dramatic satura through the written satura of Ennius and Pacuvius, is really a birth of this time, and its author was the youngest of those admitted into the intimacy of the Scipionic circle, C. Lucilius of Suessa Aurunca ( c. 180-103). Among the writers before the age of Cicero he alone deserves to be named with Naevius, Plautus Ennius and Cato as a great originative force in literature. For about thirty years the most important event in Roman literature was the production of the satires of Lucilius, in which the politics, morals, society and letters of the time were criticized with the utmost freedom and pungency, and his own personality was brought immediately and familiarly before his contemporaries. The years that intervened between his death and the beginning of the Ciceronian age are singularly barren in works of original value. But in one direction there was some novelty. The tragic writers had occasionally taken their subjects from Roman life ( fabulae praetextae ), and in comedy we find the corresponding togatae of Lucius Afranius and others, in which comedy, while assuming a Roman dress, did not assume the virtue of a Roman matron.

The general results of the last fifty years of the first period (130 to 80) may be thus summed up. In poetry we have the satires of Lucilius, the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman aristocracy, who thus exemplified the affinity of the Roman stage to Roman oratory; various annalistic poems intended to serve as continuations of the great poem of Ennius; minor poems of an epigrammatic and erotic character, unimportant anticipations of the Alexandrian tendency operative in the following period; works of criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the first accompanied the creative movement in Latin literature, and which may be regarded as rude precursors of the didactic epistles that Horace devoted to literary criticism.

The only extant prose work which may be assigned to the end of this period is the treatise on rhetoric known by the title Ad Herennium (c. 84) a work indicative of the attention bestowed on prose style and rhetorical studies during the last century of the republic, and which may be regarded as a precursor of the oratorical treatises of Cicero and of the work of Quintilian. But the great literary product of this period was oratory, developed indeed with the aid of these rhetorical studies, but. itself the immediate outcome of the imperial interests, Oratory. the legal conflicts, and the political passions of that time of agitation. The speakers and writers of a later age looked back on Scipio and Laelius, the Gracchi and their contemporaries, L. Crassus and M. Antonius, as masters of their art.

In history, regarded as a great branch of prose literature, it is not probable that much was accomplished, although, with History. the advance of oratory and grammatical studies, H there must have been not only greater fluency of composition but the beginning of a richer and more ornate style. Yet Cicero denies to Rome the existence, before his own time, of any adequate historical literature. Nevertheless it was by the work of a number of Roman chroniclers during this period that the materials of early Roman history were systematized, and the record of the state, as it was finally given to the world in the artistic work of Livy, was extracted from the early annals, state documents and private memorials, combined into a coherent unity, and supplemented by invention and reflection. Amongst these chroniclers may be mentioned L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi (consul 133, censor 108), C. Sempronius Tuditanus (consul 129), Cn. Gellius, C. Fannius (consul 122), L. Coelius Antipater, who wrote a narrative of the second Punic war about 120, and Sempronius Asellio, who wrote a history of his own times, have a better claim to be considered historians. There were also special works on antiquities and contemporary memoirs, and autobiographies such as those of M. Aemilius Scaurus, the elder, Q. Lutatius Catulus (consul 102 B.C.), and P. Rutilius Rufus, which formed the sources of future historians. (See further Annales; and Rome: History, Ancient, § "Authorities." Although the artistic product of the first period of Latin literature which has reached us in a complete shape is limited to the comedies of Plautus and Terence, the influence may most appropriately be taken as marking the end of one period and the beginning of another.

Second Period: from 80 to 42 B.C. The last age of the republic coincides with the first half of the Golden age of Roman literature. It is generally known as the Ciceronian age from the name of its greatest literary representative, whose activity as as peaker and writer was unremitting during nearly the whole period. It is the age of purest excellence in prose, and of a new birth of poetry, characterized rather by great original force and artistic promise than by perfect accomplishment. The five chief representatives of this age who still hold their rank among the great classical writers are Cicero, Caesar and Sallust in prose, Lucretius and Catullus in verse. The works of other prose writers, Varro and Cornelius Nepos, have been partially preserved; but these writers have no claim to rank with those already mentioned as creators and masters of literary style. Although literature had not as yet become a trade or profession, an educated reading public already existed, and books and intellectual intercourse filled a large part of the leisure of men actively engaged in affairs. Even oratory was intended quite as much for readers as for the audiences to which it was immediately addressed; and some of the greatest speeches which have come down from that great age of orators were never delivered at all, but were published as manifestoes after the event with the view of influencing educated opinion, and as works of art with the view of giving pleasure to educated taste. Thus the speeches of M.Tullius Cicero (106-43) belong to the domain of literature quite as much as to that of forensic or political oratory. And, although Demosthenes is a Cicero. master of style unrivalled even by Cicero, the literary interest of most of Cicero's speeches is stronger than that of the great mass of Greek oratory. It is urged with justice that the greater part of Cicero's Defence of Archias was irrelevant to the issue and would not have been listened to by a Greek court of justice or a modern jury. But it was fortunate for the interests of literature that a court of educated Romans could be influenced by the considerations there submitted to them. In this way a question of the most temporary interest, concerning an individual of no particular eminence or importance, has produced one of the most impressive vindications of literature ever spoken or written. Oratory at Rome assumed a new type from being cultivated as an art which endeavoured to produce persuasion not so much by intellectual conviction as by appeal to general human sympathies. In oratory, as in every other intellectual province, the Greeks had a truer sense of the limits and conditions of their art. But command over form is only one element in the making of an orator or poet. The largeness and dignity of the matter with which he has to deal are at least as important. The Roman oratory of the law courts had to deal not with petty questions of disputed property, of fraud, or violence, but with great imperial questions, with matters affecting the well-being of large provinces and the honour and safety of the republic; and no man ever lived who, in these respects, was better fitted than Cicero to be the representative of the type of oratory demanded by the condition of the later republic. To his great artistic accomplishment, perfected by practice and elaborate study, to the power of his patriotic, his moral, and personal sympathies, and his passionate emotional nature, must be added his vivid imagination and the rich and copious stream of his language, in which he had no rival among Roman writers or speakers. It has been said that Roman poetry has produced few, if any, great types of character. But the Verres, Catiline, Antony of Cicero are living and permanent types. The story told in the Pro Cluentio may be true or false, but the picture of provincial crime which it presents is vividly dramatic. Had we only known Cicero in his speeches we should have ranked him with Demosthenes as one who had realized the highest literary ideal. We should think of him also as the creator and master of Latin style - and, moreover, not only as a great orator but as a just and appreciative critic of oratory. But to his services to Roman oratory we have to add his services not indeed of the lost literature in determining the spirit, form and style of the eras of more perfect accomplishment which followed is unmistakable. While humour and vivacity characterize the earlier, and urbanity of tone the later development of comedy, the tendency of serious literature had been in the main practical, ethical, commemorative and satirical. The higher poetical imagination had appeared only in Ennius, and had been called forth in him by sympathy with the grandeur of the national life and the great personal qualities of its representative men. Some of the chief motives of the later poetry, e.g. the pleasures and sorrows of private life, had as yet found scarcely any expression in Latin literature. The fittest metrical vehicle for epic, didactic, and satiric poetry had been discovered, but its movement was as yet rude and inharmonious. The idiom of ordinary life and social intercourse and the more fervid and elevated diction of oratorical prose had made great progress, but the language of imagination and poetical feeling was, if vivid and impressive in isolated expressions, still incapable of being wrought into consecutive passages of artistic composition. The influences of Greek literature to which Latin literature owed its birth had not as yet spread beyond Rome and Latium. The Sabellian races of central and eastern Italy and the Italo-Celtic and Venetian races of the north, in whom the poetic susceptibility of Italy was most manifest two generations later, were not, until after the Social war, sufficiently in sympathy with Rome, and were probably not as yet sufficiently educated to induce them to contribute their share to the national literature. Hence the end of the Social war, and of the Civil war, which arose out of it, is most clearly a determining factor in Roman literature, and to. philosophy but to the literature of philosophy. Though not a philosopher he is an admirable interpreter of those branches of philosophy which are fitted for practical application, and he presents us with the results of Greek reflection vivified by his own human sympathies and his large experience of men. In giving a model of the style in which human interest can best be imparted to abstract discussions, he used his great oratorical gift and art to persuade the world to accept the most hopeful opinions on human destiny and the principles of conduct most conducive to elevation and integrity of character.

The Letters of Cicero are thoroughly natural - colloquia absentium amicorum, to use his own phrase. Cicero's letters to Atticus, and to the friends with whom he was completely at his ease, are the most sincere and immediate expression of the thought and feeling of the moment. They let us into the secret of his most serious thoughts and cares, and they give a natural outlet to his vivacity of observation, his wit and humour, his kindliness of nature. It shows how flexible an instrument Latin prose had become in his hand, when it could do justice at once to the ample and vehement volume of his oratory, to the calmer and more rhythmical movement of his philosophical meditation, and to the natural interchange of thought and feeling in the everyday intercourse of life.

Among the many rival orators of the age the most eminent were Quintus Hortensius Ortalus and C. Julius Caesar. The. former was the leading representative of the Asiatic or florid style of oratory, and, like other members of the aristocracy, such as C.Memmius and L. Manlius Torquatus, and like Q. Catulus in the preceding generation, was a kind of dilettante poet and a precursor of the poetry of pleasure, which attained such prominence in the elegiac poets of the Augustan age. Of C. Julius Caesar (102-44) as an orator we can judge only by his reputation and by the testimony of his great rival and adversary Cicero; but we are able to appreciate the special praise of perfect taste in the use of language attributed to him.' In his Commentaries, by laying aside the ornaments of oratory, he created the most admirable style of prose narrative, the style which presents interesting events in their sequence of time and dependence on the will of the actor, rapidly and vividly, with scarcely any colouring of personal or moral feeling, any oratorical passion, any pictorial illustration. While he shows the persuasive art of an orator by presenting the subjugation of Gaul and his own action in the Civil War in the light most favourable to his claim to rule the Roman world, he is entirely free from the Roman fashion of self-laudation or disparagement of an adversary. The character of the man reveals itself especially in a perfect simplicity of style, the result of the clearest intelligence and the strongest sense of personal dignity. He avoids not only every unusual but every superfluous word; and, although no writing can be more free from rhetorical colouring, yet there may from time to time be detected a glow of sympathy, like the glow of generous passion in Thucydides, the more effective from the reserve with which it betrays itself whenever he is called on to record any act of personal heroism or of devotion to military duty.

In the simplicity of his style, the directness of his narrative, the entire absence of any didactic tendency, Caesar presents a sat?ust. marked contrast to another prose writer of that age - the historian C. Sallustrius Crispus or Sallust ( c. 87-36). Like Varro, he survived Cicero by some years, but the tone and spirit in which his works are written assign him to the republican era. He was the first of the purely artistic historians, as distinct from the annalists and the writers of personal memoirs. He imitated the Greek historians in taking particular actions - the Jugurthan War and the Catilinarian Conspiracy - as the subjects of artistic treatment. He wrote also a continuous work, Historiae, treating of the events of the twelve years following the death of Sulla, of which only fragments are preserved. His two extant works are more valuable as artistic studies of the rival parties in the state and of personal character than as trustworthy narratives of facts. His style aims at effectiveness by pregnant expression, sententiousness, archaism. He produces the impression of 1 Latine loqui elegantissime. caring more for the manner of saying a thing than for its truth. Yet he has great value as a painter of historical portraits, some of them those of his contemporaries,and as an author who had been a political partisan and had taken some part in making history before undertaking to write it; and he gives us, from the popular side, the views of a contemporary on the politics of the time. Of the other historians, or rather annalists, who belong to this period, such as Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, Q. Valerius Antias, and C. Licinius Macer, the father of Calvus, we have only fragments remaining.

The period was also remarkable for the production of works which we should class as technical or scientific rather than literary. The activity of one of these writers was so great that he is entitled to a separate mention. This was M. Terentius Varro,the most learned not only of the Romans but of the Greeks, as he has been called. The list of Varro's writings includes over seventy treatises and more than six hundred books dealing with topics of every conceivable kind. His Menippeae Saturae, miscellanies in prose and verse, of which unfortunately only fragments are left, was a work of singular literary interest.

Since the Annals of Ennius no great and original poem had appeared. The powerful poetical force which for half a century continued to be the strongest force in literature, and Lucretius. which created masterpieces of art and genius, first revealed itself in the latter part of the Ciceronian age. The conditions which enabled the poetic genius of Italy to come to maturity in the person of T. Lucretius Carus (96-55) were entire seclusion from public life and absorption in the ideal pleasures of contemplation and artistic production. This isolation from the familiar ways of his contemporaries, while it was, according to tradition and the internal evidence of his poem, destructive to his spirit's health, resulted in a work of genius, unique in character, which still stands forth as the greatest philosophical poem in any language. In the form of his poem he followed a Greek original; and the stuff out of which the texture of his philosophical argument is framed was derived from Greek science; but all that is of deep human and poetical meaning in the poem is his own. While we recognize in the De Rerum Natura some of the most powerful poetry in any language and feel that few poets have penetrated with such passionate sincerity and courage into the secret of nature and some of the deeper truths of human life, we must acknowledge that, as compared with the great didactic poem of Virgil, it is crude and unformed in artistic design, and often rough and unequal in artistic execution. Yet, apart altogether from its independent value, by his speculative power and enthusiasm, by his revelation of the life and spectacle of nature, by the fresh creativeness of his diction and the elevated movement of his rhythm, Lucretius exercised a more powerful influence than any other on the art of his more perfect successors.

While the imaginative and emotional side of Roman poetry was so powerfully represented by Lucretius, attention was directed to its artistic side by a younger genera tion, who moulded themselves in a great degree on Alexandrian models. Such were Valerius Cato also a distinguished literary critic, and C. Licinius Calvus, an eminent orator. Of this small group of poets one only has survived, fortunately the man of most genius among them, the bosomfriend of Calvus, C. Valerius Catullus (84-54). He too was a new force in Roman literature. He was a provincial by birth, although early brought into intimate relations with members of the great Roman families. The subjects of his best art are taken immediately from his own life - his loves, his friendships, his travels, his animosities, personal and political. His most original contribution to the substance of Roman literature was that he first shaped into poetry the experience of his own heart, as it had been shaped by Alcaeus and Sappho in the early days of Greek poetry. No poet has surpassed him in the power of vitally reproducing the pleasure and pain of the passing hour, not recalled by idealizing reflection as in Horace, nor overlaid with mythological ornament as in Propertius, but in all the keenness of immediate impression. He also introduced into Roman literature that personal as distinct from political or social satire which appears later in the Epodes of Horace and the Epigrams of Martial. He anticipated Ovid in recalling the stories of Greek mythology to a second poetical life. His greatest contribution to poetic art consisted in the perfection which he attained in the phalaecian, the pure iambic, and the scazon metres, and in the ease and grace with which he used the language of familiar intercourse, as distinct from that of the creative imagination, of the rostra, and of the schools, to give at once a lifelike and an artistic expression to his feelings. He has the interest of being the last poet of the free republic. In his life and in his art he was the precursor of those poets who used their genius as the interpreter and minister of pleasure; but he rises above them in the spirit of personal independence, in his affection for his friends, in his keen enjoyment of natural and simple pleasures, and in his power of giving vital expression to these feelings.

Third Period: Augustan Age, 42 B.C. to A.D. 17. The poetic impulse and culture communicated to Roman literature in the last years of the republic passed on without any break of continuity into the literature of the of imperial succeeding age. One or two of the circle of Catullus survived into that age; but an entirely new spirit came over the literature of the new period, and it is by new men, educated indeed under the same literary influences, but living in an altered world and belonging originally to a different order in the state, that the new spirit was expressed. The literature of the later republic reflects the sympathies and prejudices of an aristocratic class, sharing in the conduct of national affairs and living on terms of equality with one another; that of the Augustan age, first in its early serious enthusiasm, and then in the licence and levity of its later development, represents the hopes and aspirations with which the new monarchy was ushered into the world, and the pursuit of pleasure and amusement, which becomes the chief interest of a class cut off from the higher energies of practical life, and moving in the refining and enervating atmosphere of an imperial court. The great inspiring influence of the new literature was the enthusiasm produced first by the hope and afterwards by the fulfilment of the restoration of peace, order, national glory, under the rule of Augustus. All that the age longed for seemed to be embodied in a man who had both in his own person and by inheritance the natural spell which sways the imagination of the world. The sentiment of hero-worship was at all times strong in the Romans, and no one was ever the object of more sincere as well as simulated hero-worship than Augustus. It was not, however, by his equals in station that the first feeling was likely to be entertained. The earliest to give expression to it was Virgil; but the spell was soon acknowledged by the colder and more worldly-wise Horace. The disgust aroused by the anti-national policy of Antony, and the danger to the empire which was averted by the result of the battle of Actium, combined with the confidence inspired by the new ruler to reconcile the great families as well as the great body of the people to the new order of things.

While the establishment of the empire produced a revival of national and imperial feeling, it suppressed all independent political thought and action. Hence the two great forms of prose literature which drew their nourishment from the struggles of political life, oratory and contemporary history, were arrested in their development. The main course of literature was thus for a time diverted into poetry. That poetry in its most elevated form aimed at being the organ of the new empire and of realizing the national ideals of life and character under its auspices; and in carrying out this aim it sought to recall the great memories of the past. It became also the organ of the pleasures and interests of private life, the chief motives of which were the love of nature and the passion of love. It sought also to make the art and poetry of Greece live a new artistic life. Satire, debarred from comment on political action, turned to social and individual life, and combined with the newly-developed taste for ethical analysis and reflection introduced by Cicero. One great work had still to be done in prose - a retrospect of the past history of the state from an idealizing and romanticizing point of view. For that work the Augustan age, as the end of one great cycle of events and the beginning of another, was eminently suited, and a writer who, by his gifts of imagination and sympathy, was perhaps better fitted than any other man of antiquity for the task, and who through the whole of this period lived a life of literary leisure, was found to do justice to the subject.

Although the age did not afford free scope and stimulus to individual energy and enterprise, it furnished more material and social advantages for the peaceful cultivation of letters. The new influence of patronage, which in other times has chilled the genial current of literature, become, in the person of Maecenas, the medium through which literature and the imperial policy were brought into union. Poetry thus acquired the tone of the world, kept in close connexion with the chief source of national life, while it was cultivated to the highest pitch of artistic perfection under the most favourable conditions of leisure and freedom from the distractions and anxieties of life.

The earliest in the order of time of the poets who adorn this age - P. Vergilius Maro or Virgil (70-19) - is also the greatest in genius, the most richly cultivated, and the most perfect in art. He is the idealizing poet of the hopes and aspirations and of the purer and happier life of which the age seemed to contain the promise. He elevates the present by associating it with the past and future of the world, and sanctifies it by seeing in it the fulfilment of a divine purpose. Virgil is the true representative poet of Rome and Italy, of national glory and of the beauty of nature, the artist in whom all the efforts of the past were made perfect, and the unapproachable standard of excellence to future times. While more richly endowed with sensibility to all native influences, he was more deeply imbued than any of his contemporaries with the poetry, the thought and the learning of Greece. The earliest efforts of his art (the Eclogues ) reproduce the cadences, the diction and the pastoral fancies of Theocritus; but even in these imitative poems of his youth Virgil shows a perfect mastery of his materials. The Latin hexameter, which in Ennius and Lucretius was the organ of the more dignified and majestic emotions, became in his hands the most perfect measure in which the softer and more luxurious sentiment of nature has been expressed. The sentiment of Italian scenery and the love which the Italian peasant has for the familiar sights and sounds of his home found a voice which never can pass away.

In the Georgics we are struck by the great advance in the originality and self-dependence of the artist, in the mature perfection of his workmanship, in the deepening and strengthening of all his sympathies and convictions. His genius still works under forms prescribed by Greek art, and under the disadvantage of having a p ractical and utilitarian aim imposed on it. But he has ever in form so far surpassed his originals that he alone has gained for the pure didactic poem a place among the highest forms of serious poetry, while he has so transmuted his material that, without violation of truth, he has made the whole poem alive with poetic feeling. The homeliest details of the farmer's work are transfigured through the poet's love of nature; through his religious feeling and his pious sympathy with the sanctities of human affection; through his patriotic sympathy with the national greatness; and through the rich allusiveness of his art to everything in poetry and legend which can illustrate and glorify his theme.

In the Eclogues and Georgics Virgil is the idealizing poet of the old simple and hardy life of Italy, as the imagination could conceive of it in an altered world. In the Aeneid he is the idealizing poet of national glory, as manifested in the person of Augustus. The epic of national life, vividly conceived but rudely executed by Ennius, was perfected in the years that followed the decisive victory at Actium. To do justice to his idea Virgil enters into rivalry with a greater poet than those whom he had equalled or surpassed in his previous works. And, though he cannot unroll before us the page of heroic action with the power and majesty of Homer, yet by the sympathy with which he realizes the idea of Rome, and by the power with which he has used the details of tradition, of local scenes, of religious usage, to embody it, he has built up in the form of an epic poem the most enduring and the most artistically constructed monument of national grandeur.

The second great poet of the time - Q. Horatius Flaccus or Horace (68-8) is both the realist and the idealist of his age. If. we want to know the actual lives, manners and ways of thinking of the Romans of the generation succeeding the overthrow of the republic it is in the Satires and partially in the Epistles of Horace that we shall find them. If we ask what that time provided to stir the fancy and move the mood of imaginative reflection, it is in the lyrical poems of Horace that we shall find the most varied and trustworthy answer. His literary activity extends over about thirty years and naturally divides itself into three periods, each marked by a distinct character. The first - extending from about 40 to 29 - is that of the Epodes and Satires. In the former he imitates the Greek poet Archilochus, but takes his subjects from the men, women and incidents of the day. Personality is the essence of his Epodes; in the Satires it is used merely as illustrative of general tendencies. In the Satires we find realistic pictures of social life, and the conduct and opinions of the world submitted to the standard of good feeling and common sense. The style of the Epodes is pointed and epigrammatic, that of the Satires natural and familiar. The hexameter no longer, as in Lucilius, moves awkwardly as if in fetters, but, like the language of Terence, of Catullus in his lighter pieces, of Cicero in his letters to Atticus, adapts itself to the everyday intercourse of life. The next period is the meridian of his genius, the time of his greatest lyrical inspiration, which he himself associates with the peace and leisure secured to him by his Sabine farm. The life of pleasure which he had lived in his youth comes back to him, not as it was in its actual distractions and disappointments, but in the idealizing light of meditative retrospect. He had not only become reconciled to the new order of things, but was moved by his intimate friendship with Maecenas to aid in raising the world to sympathy with the imperial rule through the medium of his lyrical inspiration, as Virgil had through the glory of his epic art. With the completion of the three books of Odes he cast aside for a time the office of the vates, and resumed that of the critical spectator of human life, but in the spirit of a moralist rather than a satirist. He feels the increasing languor of the time as well as the languor of advancing years, and seeks to encourage younger men to take up the role of lyrical poetry, while he devotes himself to the contemplation of the true art of living. Self-culture rather than the fulfilment of public or social duty, as in the moral teaching of Cicero, is the aim of his teaching; and in this we recognize the influence of the empire in throwing the individual back on himself. As Cicero tones down his oratory in his moral treatises, so Horace tones down the fervour of his lyrical utterances in his Epistles, and thus produces a style combining the ease of the best epistolary style with the grace and concentration of poetry - the style, as it has been called, of "idealized common sense," that of the urbanus and cultivated man of the world who is also in his hours of inspiration a genuine poet. In the last ten years of his life Horace resumed his lyrical function for a time, under pressure of the imperial command, and produced some of the most exquisite and mature products of his art. But his chief activity is devoted to criticism. He first vindicates the claims of his own age to literary pre-eminence, and then seeks to stimulate the younger writers of the day to what he regarded as the manlier forms of poetry, and especially to the tragic drama, which seemed for a short time to give promise of an artistic revival.

But the poetry of the latter half of the Augustan age destined to survive did not follow the lines either of lyrical or of dramatic art marked out by Horace. The latest form of poetry adopted from Greece and destined to gain and permanently to hold the ear of the world was the elegy. From the time of Mimnermus this form seems to have presented itself as the most natural vehicle for the poetry of pleasure in an age of luxury, refinement and incipient decay. Its facile flow and rhythm seem to adapt it to the expression and illustration of personal feeling. It goes to the mind of the reader through a medium of sentiment rather than of continuous thought or imaginative illustration. The greatest masters of this kind of poetry are the elegiac poets of the Augustan age - Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid.

Of the ill-fated C. Cornelius Gallus, their predecessor, we have but a single pentameter remaining. Of the three Tibullus ( c. 541 9) is the most refined and tender. As the poet of love he gives utterance to the pensive melancholy rather than to the pleasures associated with it. In his sympathy with the life and beliefs of the country people he shows an affinity both to the idyllic spirit and to the piety of Virgil. There is something, too, in his fastidious refinement and in his shrinking from the rough contact of life that reminds us of the English poet Gray.

A poet of more strength and more powerful imagination. but of less refinement in his life and less exquisite taste in his art, is Sextus Propertius (c. 50 - c. 15). His youth was a more stormy one than that of Tibullus, and was passed, not like his, among the "healthy woods" of his country estate, but amid all the licence of the capital. His passion for Cynthia, the theme of his most finished poetry, is second only in interest to that of Catullus for Lesbia; and Cynthia in her fascination and caprices seems a more real and intelligible personage than the idealized object first of the idolatry and afterwards of the malediction of Catullus. Propertius is a less accomplished artist and a less equably pleasing writer than either Tibullus or Ovid, but he shows more power of dealing gravely with a great or tragic situation than either of them, and his diction and rhythm give frequent proof of a concentrated force of conception and a corresponding movement of imaginative feeling which remind us of Lucretius.

The most facile and brilliant of the elegiac poets and the least serious in tone and spirit is P. Ovidius Naso or Ovid (43 B.C. - A.D. 18). As an amatory poet he is the poet of pleasure and intrigue rather than of tender sentiment or absorbing passion. Though he treated his subject in relation to himself with more levity and irony than real feeling, yet by his sparkling wit and fancy he created a literature of sentiment and adventure adapted to amuse the idle and luxurious society of which the elder Julia was the centre. His power of continuous narrative is best seen in the Metamorphoses, written in hexameters to which he has imparted a rapidity and precision of movement more suited to romantic and picturesque narrative than the weighty self-restrained verse of Virgil. In his Fasti he treats a subject of national interest; it is not, however, through the strength of Roman sentiment but through the power of vividly conceiving and narrating stories of strong human interest that the poem lives. In his latest works - the Tristia and Ex Ponto - he imparts the interest of personal confessions to the record of a unique experience. Latin poetry is more rich in the expression of personal feeling than of dramatic realism. In Ovid we have both. We know him in the intense liveliness of his feeling and the human weakness of his nature more intimately than any other writer of antiquity, except perhaps Cicero. As Virgil marks the point of maturest excellence in poetic diction and rhythm, Ovid marks that of the greatest facility.

The Augustan age was one of those great eras in the world like the era succeeding the Persian War in Greece, the Elizabethan age in England, and the beginning of the 19th Lk y. century in Europe, in which what seems a new spring of national and individual life calls out an idealizing retrospect of the past. As the present seems full of new life, the past seems rich in glory and the future in hope. The past of Rome had always a peculiar fascination for Roman writers. Virgil in a supreme degree, and Horace, Propertius and Ovid in a less degree, had expressed in their poetry the romance of the past. But it was in the great historical work of T. Livius or Livy (59 B.C. - A.D. 17) that the record of the national life received its Tibullus. Ovid. most systematic exposition. Its execution was the work of a life prolonged through the languor and dissolution following so soon upon the promise of the new era, during which time the past became glorified by contrast with the disheartening aspect of the present. The value of the work consists not in any power of critical investigation or weighing of historical evidence but in the intense sympathy of the writer with the national ideal, and the vivid imagination with which under the influence of this sympathy he gives life to the events and personages, the wars and political struggles, of times remote from his own. He makes us feel more than any one the majesty of the Roman state, of its great magistracies, and of the august council by which its policy was guided. And, while he makes the words senatus populusque Romanus full of significance for all times, no one realizes with more enthusiasm all that is implied in the words imperium Romanum, and the great military qualities of head and heart by which that empire was acquired and maintained. The vast scale on which the work was conceived and the thoroughness of artistic execution with which the details are finished are characteristically Roman. The prose style of Rome, as a vehicle for the continuous narration of events coloured by a rich and picturesque imagination and instinct with dignified emotion, attained its perfection in Livy.

Fourth Period: The Silver Age, from A.D. 17 to about 130. For more than a century after the death of Augustus Roman literature continues to flow in the old channels. Though drawing from the provinces, Rome remains the centre of the literary movement. The characteristics of the great writers are essentially national, not provincial nor cosmopolitan. In prose the old forms - oratory, history, the epistle, treatises or dialogues on ethical and literary questions - continue to be cultivated. Scientific and practical subjects, such as natural history, architecture, medicine, agriculture, are treated in more elaborate literary style. The old Roman satura is developed into something like the modern prose novel. In the various provinces of poetry, while there is little novelty or inspiration, there is abundance of industry and ambitious effort. The national love of works of large compass shows itself in the production of long epic poems, both of the historic and of the imitative Alexandrian type. The imitative and rhetorical tastes of Rome showed themselves in the composition of exotic tragedies, as remote in spirit and character from Greek as from Roman life, of which the only extant specimens are those attributed to the younger Seneca. The composition of didactic, lyrical and elegiac poetry also was the accomplishment and pastime of an educated dilettante class, the only extant specimens of any interest being some of the Silvae of Statius. The only voice with which the poet of this age can express himself with force and sincerity is that of satire and satiric epigram. We find now only imitative echoes of the old music created by Virgil and others, as in Statius, or powerful declamation, as in Lucan and Juvenal. There is a deterioration in the diction as well as in the music of poetry. The elaborate literary culture of the Augustan age has done something to impair the native force of the Latin idiom. The language of literature, in the most elaborate kind of prose as well as poetry, loses all ring of popular speech. The old oratorical tastes and aptitudes find their outlet in public recitations and the practice of declamation. Forced and distorted expression, exaggerated emphasis, point and antithesis, an affected prettiness, are studied with the view of gaining the applause of audiences who thronged the lecture and recitation rooms in search of temporary excitement. Education is more widely diffused, but is less thorough, less leisurely in its method, derived less than before from the purer sources of culture. The precocious immaturity of Lucan's career affords a marked contrast to the long preparation of Virgil and Horace for their high office. Although there are some works of this so-called Silver Age of considerable and one at least of supreme interest, from the insight they afford into the experience of a century of organized despotism and its effect on the spiritual life of the ancient world, it cannot be doubted that the steady literary decline which characterized the last centuries of paganism was beginning before the death of Ovid and Livy. The influences which had inspired republican and Augustan literature were the artistic impulse derived from a familiarity with the great works of Greek genius, becoming more intimate with every new generation, the spell of Rome over the imagination of the kindred Italian races, the charm of Italy, and the vivid sensibility of the Italian temperament. These influences were certainly much less operative in the first century of the empire. The imitative impulse, which had much of the character of a creative impulse, and had resulted in the appropriation of the forms of poetry suited to the Roman and Italian character and of the metres suited to the genius of the Latin language, no longer stimulated to artistic effort. The great sources of Greek poetry were no longer regarded, as they were by Lucretius and Virgil, as sacred, untasted springs, to be approached in a spirit of enthusiasm tempered with reverence. We have the testimony of two men of shrewd common sense and masculine understanding - Martial and Juvenal - to the stale and lifeless character of the art of the Silver Age, which sought to reproduce in the form of epics, tragedies and elegies the bright fancies of the Greek mythology.

The idea of Rome, owing to the antagonism between the policy of the government and the sympathies of the class by which literature was favoured and cultivated, could no longer be an inspiring motive, as it had been in the literature of the republic and of the Augustan age. The spirit of Rome appears only as animating the protest of Lucan, the satire of Persius and Juvenal, the sombre picture which Tacitus paints of the annals of the empire. Oratory is no longer an independent voice appealing to sentiments of Roman dignity, but the weapon of the "informers" (delatores ), wielded for their own advancement and the destruction of that class which, even in their degeneracy, retained most sympathy with the national traditions. Roman history was no longer a record of national glory, stimulating the patriotism and flattering the pride of all Roman citizens, but a personal eulogy or a personal invective, according as servility to a present or hatred of a recent ruler was the motive which animated it.

The charm of Italian scenes still remained the same, but the fresh and inspiring feeling of nature gave place to the mere sensuous gratification derived from the luxurious and artificial beauty of the country villa. The idealizing poetry of passion, which found a genuine voice in Catullus and the elegiac poets, could not prolong itself through the exhausting licence of successive generations. The vigorous vitality which gives interest to the personality of Catullus, Propertius and Ovid no longer characterizes their successors. The pathos of natural affection is occasionally recognized in Statius and more rarely in Martial,' but it has not the depth of tenderness found in Lucretius and Virgil. The wealth and luxury of successive generations, the monotonous routine of life, the separation of the educated class from the higher work of the world, have produced their enervating and paralysing effect on the mainsprings of poetic and imaginative feeling.

New elements, however, appear in the literature of this period. As the result of the severance from the active interests of life, a new interest is awakened in the inner life of the individual. The immorality of Roman society not lvew literary only affords abundant material to the satirist, but deepens the consciousness of moral evil in purer and more thoughtful minds. To these causes we attribute the pathological observation of Seneca and Tacitus, the new sense of purity in Persius called out by contrast with the impurity around him, the glowing if somewhat sensational exaggeration of Juvenal, the vivid characterization of Martial. The literature of no time presents so powerfully the contrast between moral good and evil. In this respect it is truly representative of the life of the age. Another new element is the influence of a new race. In the two preceding periods the rapid diffusion of literary culture following the Social War and the first Civil War was seen to awaken into new life the elements of original genius in Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. In the first century of the empire a similar result was produced by the diffusion of that culture in the Latinized districts of Spain. The fervid temperament of a fresh and vigorous race, which received the Latin discipline just as Latium had tw9 or three centuries previously received the Greek discipline, revealed itself in the writings of the Senecas, Lucan, Quintilian, Martial and others, who in their own time added literary distinction to the Spanish towns from which they came. The new extraneous element introduced into Roman literature draws into greater prominence the characteristics of the last great representatives of the genuine Roman and Italian spirit - the historian Tacitus and the satirist Juvenal.

On the whole this century shows, in form, language and substance, the signs of literary decay. But it is still capable of producing men of original force; it still maintains the traditions of a happier time; it is still alive to the value of literary culture, and endeavours by minute attention to style to produce new effects. Though it was not one of the great eras in the annals of literature, yet the century which produced Martial, Juvenal and Tacitus cannot be pronounced barren in literary originality, nor that which produced Seneca and Quintilian devoid of culture and literary taste.

This fourth period is itself subdivided into three divisions: (I) from the accession of Tiberius to the death of Nero, 68 - the most important part of it being the Neronian age, 54 to 68; (2) the Flavian era, from the death of Nero to the death of Domitian, 96; (3) the reigns of Nerva and Trajan and part of the reign of Hadrian.

i. For a generation after the death of Augustus no new original literary force appeared. The later poetry of the Augus tan age had ended in trifling dilettantism, for the continuance of which the atmosphere of the court was no longer favourable. The class by which litera- 'lo' Nero. ture was encouraged had become both enervated and terrorized. The most remarkable poetical product of the time is the long-neglected astrological poem of Manilius which was written at the beginning of Tiberius's reign. Its vigour and originality have had scanty justice done to them owing to the difficulty of the subject-matter and the style, and the corruptions which still disfigure its text. Very different has been the fate of the Fables of Phaedrus. This slight work of a Macedonian freedma

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