ROME (ROMAN LITERATURE). 



15 



and their origin; the least pleasing are, perhaps, 

 his Heroides, or heroic epistles, of which he is the 

 inventor. They are too monotonous, and too 

 much filled with amorous complaints, to have 

 either dignity or truth; they are rather to be 

 considered as rhetorical exercises. Of the other 

 poets belonging to this age there is little to be 

 said. Some esteemed elegiac writers, such as 

 Pedo Albinovanus and Cornelius Gallus, are al- 

 most entirely lost to us. A poem upon jEtna, 

 attributed to Cornelius Severus, who is praised 

 by Quinctilian, has little inventive power; and 

 the didactic poem of Gratius Faliscus upon the 

 chase (Cynegeticon), and that of Manlius upon 

 astronomy, some passages excepted, are more 

 valued for their materials than their manner, which, 

 though inferior, resembles the productions of the 

 Alexandrian school of Greek poetry. 



The third age, after the death of Augustus, 

 begins with Phaedrus, an imitator of JEsop, who 

 has more merit, in regard to style, than invention 

 and manner. The degeneracy of Roman poetry 

 is displayed in the harsh and obscure Persius. 

 He and the later Juvenal expressed their indigna- 

 tion at the corruption of the age with unrestrained 

 severity, but have more moral than poetical value. 

 In the principal writers of the later poetry Lu- 

 can, who returned to the historical epic in his 

 versification of the civil war between Caesar and 

 Pompey, and the bombastic Statius, who wrote 

 the Thebaid and the beginning of the Achilleis, 

 in verse, to say nothing of the minor poets we 

 find a universal barrenness of in'vention, and a 

 coldness, which vainly endeavours to kindle itself 

 and its hearers by the fire of rhetoric. These 

 poets had long since lost all poetic feeling, and 

 even the love of republican freedom. With such 

 a corrupt taste as that of the Romans, poets like 

 the pompous Statius, or the wanton epigrammatist 

 Martial, to whom we cannot deny wit and fertility 

 of invention, could alone be successful. Lucan, 

 however, with all his defects of plan and unworthy 

 adulation, sometimes exhibits great elevation of 

 sentiment, vigour of expression, and a happy de- 

 lineation of character. Valerius Flaccus, who 

 described the Argonautic expedition in verse, in 

 imitation of Apollonius Rhodius, endeavoured to 

 shine by his learning, rather than by his originality 

 and freshness of colouring, and Silius Italicus, a 

 great admirer of Virgil, who selected the second 

 Punic war, as the subject of a heroic poem, is 

 merely 'a historic poet. In the fourth period, 

 Roman literature sunk to a still lower state. The 

 twenty-four fables of Arvienus, or Arvianus, are 

 in a stiff and forced style ; on the other hand, the 

 poem of Nemesianus, on the pleasures of the chase, 

 and the seven eclogues of Calpurnins, have some 

 pretensions to purity and ease of style. Ausonius, 

 in his epigrams and idyls (so called), and parti- 

 cularly in his poems on the Moselle, forms as it 

 were the line of division between the ancient and 

 the modern world; Claudian appears almost a mir- 

 acle in this brazen age. Although not free from 

 rhetorical and epigrammatical excrescences, and 

 from the desire of displaying his learning, he is still 

 fur above his age, and often approaches to a grace- 

 ful style. We conclude this part of the subject 

 with Rutilius Numantianus, whose voyage to Gaul, 

 in elegiac measure, is not without merit, and with 

 two Christian poets, Prudentius and Sedulius, in 

 whose writings we find hardly any thing but modern 

 features and the first germs of the church songs. 



In the Roman prose literature, which is, on thr 

 whole, of a higher character than the poetical, elo- 

 quence, history, philosophy and jurisprudence are 

 the principal departments. After the Romans had 

 entered Greece as conquerors, and began to pay 

 more attention to learning, and particularly after 

 they became sensible of the political importance of 

 eloquence, the Greeks were necessary to their con- 

 querors, as teachers of rhetoric, and of the Greek 

 language and literature, although in this period 

 they were twice banished from Rome. (See Illie- 

 toricians, and Grammarians.} Theoretical instruc- 

 tion was connected with the practice of declama- 

 tions, as a preparation for public speaking, as forensic 

 eloquence was always the object of ambition during 

 the republic. Of their orators we know many 

 merely by name and by the reputation which they 

 enjoyed. To this class belong Cornelius Cethegus, 

 Tiberius Gracchus, Cotta, Sulpicius, but particu- 

 larly Licinius Crassus, Antonius, Hortensius, and 

 even Caesar himself. Cicero not only acquired the 

 most splendid fame in eloquence, the finest models 

 of which we possess in the fifty-nine orations of his 

 yet extant, but also appears as a teacher in his rhe- 

 torical works, and in general had a most important 

 part in founding Roman prose literature. In the 

 age of Augustus, after the death of the last cham- 

 pion of Roman liberty, free eloquence necessarily 

 became silent; yet the works of this, and even of 

 later periods, were more or less imbued with the 

 old spirit. The panegyric of Pliny the younger 

 upon Trajan may be considered as the last note of 

 Roman eloquence : the author was distinguished in 

 Rome as a forensic orator. We can best judge of 

 the fallen state of eloquence by examining the works 

 of Fronto, and later orators (the panegyrists), in 

 imitation of Pliny. Quinctilian, a contemporary of 

 Pliny, is to be regarded as the last stay of rhetoric, 

 both by instruction and his own example. We 

 have under his name nineteen greater and 145 

 smaller declamations. But his merit is greater as a 

 rhetorician and grammarian. In his twelve books 

 De Institutione oratorica, he explains the characte- 

 ristics of the best models, and at the same time lays 

 down the best rules. Cicero, Caesar, and Terentius 

 Varro, in the most flourishing ages of Roman lite- 

 rature, had, by their grammatical writings, contri- 

 buted to promote a scientific study of the language, 

 and to give it thereby a settled form. Varro, the 

 most learned philologist and antiquarian of his age, 

 wrote a work upon the Latin language, in twenty- 

 four books, of which only six remain entire. In a 

 rhetorical view, the declamations (controversies and 

 suasoriae) of Marcus Seneca, and particularly the 

 valuable dialogue On the Causes of the Decline of 

 Eloquence, which has been attributed by most 

 authors to Quinctilian, must be named. Latei 

 grammarians, or teachers of language and literature 

 of the age of the Antonines, are Aulus Gellius, 

 Censorinus, Nonius Marcellus, Pomponius Festus, 

 Macrobius, Donatus and Priscianus, who are valu- 

 able for their grammatical information, their com- 

 mentaries upon more ancient authors, and their 

 preservation of fragments of them. The first his- 

 torical writings were merely details of events, pre- 

 served in the annals of the high priest (pontifex 

 maximus), upon a tablet in his house, and the cat:i. 

 logue of the consuls, with a notice of the most re- 

 markable events, recorded in the temple of Juno 

 Moneta (libri lintei). Fabius Pictor, Albinus Post- 

 humius, the elder Cato, Callus Fannius, Valerius 

 of Antium, and some others, were the first historians 



