CIIAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



and successor, Petronius Maximus, invited Gcn- 

 seric, the ' scourge of God,' over from Africa, and 

 exposed Rome to the horrors of pillage for 14 

 days. Ricimer, a Sueve, next figures as a sort of 

 governor of the city, and what relics of empire it 

 still possessed ; for Gaul, llritain, Spain, Western 

 Africa, and the islands in the Mediterranean, had 

 all been wrested from it. While Maj<>rian -the 

 ible emperor lived, Kicimer's position was .1 

 subordinate one, but, thenceforth, the western 

 emperor increlv was an emperor in name a nn 

 faineant while the ml M>\ru-i-nty was exercised 

 by this Suevic Main nit /'<//<?/.*, who was suc- 

 d in his functions by the Burgundian King 

 Kunobald, and the latter, again, by Orestes, in 

 e time the final catastrophe happened, when 

 Odoacer, placing himself at the head of the bar- 

 in mercenaries of the empire, overthrew the 

 ami the most ridiculous, occupant of the 

 throne of the Czcsars (476 A.D.), who, by a curious 

 coincidence, bore the same name as the mythical 

 founder of the city Romulus. 



ROMAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 



The Latin language, ns has been already noticed, 

 is a member of the great family commonly called 

 Indo-European, or Aryan (see LANGUAGE). It 



primarily developed among the people who 

 inhabited that part of Western Italy which lies be- 

 tween the rivers Tiber and Liris ; and though the 

 city of Rome stamped her name on the political 

 ins'titutions of the empire, yet the standard tongue 

 of Italy still continued to be called the Latin lan- 

 guage, not the Roman. As the Roman conquests 

 extended, Latin spread with equal strides over the 

 conquered countries, and was generally used by 

 the educated classes in the greater part of Italy. 

 in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and other 

 Roman provinces. But even in Italy itself, and in 

 Latium, there seem to have been two forms of the 

 language, differing very considerably from each 

 other a polished dialect and a rustic one. It 

 was in the last years of the Republic and the first 

 of the Empire that the polished language reached 

 its highest point of perfection in the writings of 

 Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and others. But by the 

 influx of strangers, by the gradual decline of 

 Roman feelings and Roman spirit, and by the 

 intermixture of the classic forms with the dialects 

 of the provinces, it became corrupted. Thus were 

 formed the modern French, Spanish, Italian, and 

 Portuguese. 



For the first five centuries of their existence as 

 a people, the Romans possessed no literature. A 

 kind of rude poetry was cultivated from the ear- 

 liest times, and was employed in such composi- 

 tions as the Hymn of the Fratres Arvales (dug up 

 at Rome in 1778), in the sacred songs to particular 

 deities, in triumphal poems and ballads, in the 

 Fescennine Carols, and other rude attempts to 

 amuse or dupe an illiterate and vulgar audience. 

 But it was not till they came in contact with the 

 Greeks that the Romans began to develop their 

 faculties in genuine literary compositions ; and 

 then, as was natural, their first productions were 

 translations from, or imitations of, Greek writers. 

 Livius Andronicus and Cneius Nsevius (240 B.C.), 

 the earliest Rpman poets, seem to have been 

 copyists of the Greek ; as were also Fabius Pictor 



112 



and Cincius Alimentus, the first Roman annalists, 

 and who lived during the second Punic War. 

 Between the second Punic War, however (202 

 and the dictatorship of Sulla (81 B.C.), there 

 a number of writers of no ordinary power, 

 in whose hands the Latin language acquired force 

 and flexibility, and whose works illustrate the 

 native character of the Romans. Among these 

 should be mentioned Ennius, the father of Roman 

 poetry ; Plautus, his contemporary, a man of rich 

 comic genius ; the elder Cato, the first prose 

 writer of note ; and Terentius, or Terence, a comic 

 poet of a less rude style than Plautus, and whose 

 first play was acted in the year 165 B.C. 



The period from the dictatorship of Sulla (81 

 RC.) to the death of Augustus (14 A.D.) is the 

 Golden Age of Roman literature. Then flourished 

 Cicero, undoubtedly the greatest as well as the 

 most voluminous of Roman prose authors ; Cajsar, 

 whose brief Commentaries on his own campaigns 

 are among the simplest and most compact of 

 historical writings ; his friend Sallust (born 68 

 I5.C.), who has left us spirited accounts of the 

 Jugurthine War and the conspiracy of Catiline ; 

 the didactic poet, Lucretius ; his contemporary, 

 Catullus, whose lyrical effusions are among the 

 sweetest and most truly poetic things in the 

 Latin language ; and, not to mention a host 

 of others, Virgil and Horace, the two chief classic 

 poets of the Augustan age the former the author 

 of the celebrated epic poem, the ^Eneid, and if 

 not an original, at least a graceful and pathetic 

 writer ; and the latter a sagacious and good- 

 humoured observer of mankind, and the author of 

 many odes, satires, and epistles. Somewhat later 

 were Livy, the great historian of Rome, in 142 

 books, only thirty-five of which, however, have 

 reached us ; and Ovid, who ranks second to none 

 of the Roman poets for ease and elegance. 



Under the emperors, the Latin authors became 

 more and more numerous, springing up in all parts 

 of the Empire, and cultivating all departments. 

 Out of the long list of authors intervening between 

 the reign of Tiberius and that of Commodus, we 

 may mention the poets Lucan and Silius Italicus ; 

 Martial, the writer of epigrams ; Seneca, the Stoic 

 philosopher, put to death by Nero ; Quintilian, the 

 rhetorician ; Pliny, the celebrated natural his- 

 torian, who was killed 79 A.D. by the great erup- 

 tion from Vesuvius which destroyed the city of 

 Herculaneum; Tacitus, the historian of the declin- 

 ing age of Rome ; and Juvenal, whose satires 

 reveal too horribly the immorality of the society 

 in the midst of which he lived. 



The host of petty rhetoricians, poets, &c. both 

 Greek and Roman, who lived in the various cities 

 of the Empire in the second, third, and fourth 

 centuries, may be passed over. During these 

 centuries, Christianity was overspreading the 

 Empire, and drinking up all the intellect and 

 enthusiasm of the various nations ; and nothing 

 more strikingly marks the decrepitude of poly- 

 theism at that time, as compared with the fresh- 

 ness of the new religion, than the contrast between 

 the miserable verse-making, which seemed to be 

 the only literary occupation practised in poly- 

 theistic circles, and the earnest and powerful 

 writings of the Christian Fathers on those great 

 theological topics which concerned the Divine 

 nature and the everlasting destinies of man. 



