FLAVIAN LITERATURE 83 



epic poets would fain follow Vergil, and managed to keep in his tracks 

 much as Ascanius may have toddled after Aeneas. The lyricists 

 would strive to rival Tibullus and Catullus, and their effusions would 

 frequently compare with the poems of their models as favorably as a 

 crow with Lesbia's sparrow. The Punica of Silius Italicus and the 

 Thebaid of Statius were manifestly inspired by Vergil, and both poems 

 bear innumerable traces of the great classic model. Martial, whose 

 striking originality in many ways would lead us to expect to find in him 

 an exception, affords one of the best illustrations of the general tendency. 

 Even the most casual reader of the epigrams will recognize many traces 

 of the debt, and painstaking monographs have recorded the items 

 according to the most approved dissertation system of bookkeeping. 

 Martial is literally replete with imitations, adaptations, quotations and 

 reminiscences from his predecessors in Latin poetry. Catullus was his 

 great model and received the homage not only of outspoken praise, 

 but also of imitation in countless details of expression and arrangement. 

 Second only to Catullus is Ovid, as we should naturally expect; but 

 Vergil, Horace, Tibullus and Propertius seem to have had less 

 influence solely because we know that Ovid and Catullus had more. 

 The prose writers were scarcely less susceptible to the same influ- 

 ences, as may be seen from Quintilian and Tacitus. The latter writer 

 represents in a way the reaction from the rounded Augustan prose, 

 and at the same time affords an excellent illustration of the influence 

 at present under consideration. The Annals, the most characteristic 

 work of the most characteristic author of Silver Latinity, exhibit the 

 introduction into prose of many syntactical usages from the Augustan 

 poets; the use of many single words in a sense hitherto limited to poetry; 

 and finally the employment of expressions taken directly from the 

 classic writers. The last feature is very prominent and many phrases 

 in the Annals are parts of lines from the Aeneid. The directness and 

 extent of the influence of the Augustan age on the Flavian is probably 

 without a parallel in literary history. 



But even more characteristic of our period than this indebtedness to 

 its great predecessor, is a tendency to satire, heralded by Juvenal's 

 Difficile est satiram non scribere. Of the six writers more commonly 



