180 LATIN LANGUAGE 



syllables in English verse are not predetermined, as they are in Latin, 

 by rules representing more or less accurately the prose pronunciation. 

 The English poet in building his rime employs expansible and con- 

 tractible bricks. 



Our debt to Greece was finely acknowledged by Shelley, in his 

 preface to Hellas, a poem inspired by sympathy with the cause of 

 Greek independence. " We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, 

 our religion, our arts have all their root in Greece." The truth which 

 lies in this statement, accompanied by some exaggeration, is becom- 

 ing clearer to us every day, in proportion as the achievements of an- 

 cient Hellas in the fields of letters, of art, of science aye, even of 

 religious thought and political organization become better known 

 to us and more justly appreciated. Yet it would probably be truer 

 to say that we are all Romans. For in the first place the Greek 

 influence upon the modern world is mainly indirect, coming to us 

 through Rome; and secondly, there are elements in our culture 

 which are not Greek at all : other influences have been at work 

 these, too, mediated by Rome and the Latin language. As to the 

 former point, no truer word can be spoken than the oft-repeated 

 statement that just as conquered Greece led her conqueror captive, 

 so conquered Rome imposed on the Teutonic barbarians not only her 

 laws but also her culture and her civilization as a whole. 



This second mission of Rome, which began with and before the fall 

 of the Western Empire, was continued down to the Renaissance; 

 and that Italy and the Eternal City might continue to hold the 

 position of instructors of the nations was the prayer of Marco Vida 

 in the sixteenth century: 



Artibus emineat semper studiisque Minervae 

 Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma 

 Quandoquidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit. 1 



As to my second point, the existence of non-Greek elements in our 

 civilization, that is a matter for which neither Vida nor Shelley could 

 be expected to have an open eye. But the fact that not only Greece, 

 but also Judaea, and at later date Arabia, stood at the back of Rome, 

 and that the triumph of Latin civilization was a triumph for these 

 also, is written large in history. 



Rome was, in fact, the heir of at least two civilizations; her culture 

 was the common stream into which had flowed the two rills of a 

 universalized Hellenism and a Hellenized Judaism. But Latin was 

 the medium of communication; so that we may fairly describe the 

 complex unity of modern civilization as mainly a Latin unity. There 

 have also been direct influences of Greece upon the modern world, 

 notably at the time of the Humanistic Renaissance of the four- 

 teenth and fifteenth centuries, and during the last hundred years; 

 1 Marco Vida (1489-1566), Poetica, n, 11, 63-65. 



