Post-Augustan Poetry | Page 7

turbid stagnation of the empire, are not enough to account for it.
Their influence would have been in vain had they not found remarkable
genius ready for the kindling.
The whole field of literature had been so thoroughly covered by the
great writers of Hellas, that it was hard for the imitative Roman to be
original. As far as epic poetry was concerned, Rome had poor material
with which to deal: neither her mythology--the most prosaic and
business-like of all mythologies--nor her history seemed to give any
real scope for the epic writer. The Greek mythology was ready to hand,
but it was hard for a Roman to treat it with high enthusiasm, and still
harder to handle it with freshness and individuality. The purely
historical epic is from its very nature doomed to failure. Treated with
accuracy it becomes prosy, treated with fancy it becomes ridiculous.
Vergil saw the one possible avenue to epic greatness. He went back
into the legendary past where imagination could have free play, linked
together the great heroic sagas of Greece with the scanty materials
presented by the prehistoric legends of Rome, and kindled the whole
work to life by his rich historical imagination and his sense of the
grandeur of the Rome that was to be. His unerring choice of subject and
his brilliant execution seemed to close to his successors all paths to epic
fame. They had but well-worn and inferior themes wherefrom to
choose, and the supremacy of Vergil's genius dominated their minds,
becoming an obsession and a clog rather than an assistance to such
poetic genius as they possessed. The same is true of Horace. As
complete a master in lyric verse as Vergil in heroic, he left the
after-comer no possibility of advance. As for Ovid, there could be only

one Ovid: the cleverest and most heartless of poets, he at once
challenged and defied imitation. Satire alone was left with real chance
of success: while the human race exists, there will always be fresh
material for satire, and the imperial age was destined to give it peculiar
force and scope. Further, satire and its nearest kin, the epigram, were
the only forms of literature that were not seriously impaired by the
artificial system of education that had struck root in Rome.
Otherwise the tendency to artificiality on the one hand and inadequacy
of thought on the other, to which the conditions of its birth and growth
exposed Roman literature, were aggravated to an almost incredible
extent by the absurd system of education to which the unformed mind
of the young Roman was subjected. It will be seen that what Greece
gave with the right hand she took away with the left.
There were three stages in Roman education, the elementary, the
literary, the rhetorical. The first, in which the litterator taught the three
R's, does not concern us here. In the second stage the grammaticus
gave instruction in Greek and Latin literature, together with the
elements of grammar and style. The profound influence of Greece is
shown by Quintilian's recommendation[52] that a boy should start on
Greek literature, and by the fact that boys began with Homer.[53]
Greek authors, particularly studied, were Aesop, Hesiod, the tragedians,
and Menander.[54] Among Roman authors Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius,
Accius, Afranius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence were much read,
though there was a reaction against these early authors under the
empire, and they were partly replaced by Vergil, Horace, and Ovid.[55]
These authors were made vehicles for the teaching of grammar and of
style. The latter point alone concerns us here. The Roman boy was
taught to read aloud intelligently and artistically with the proper
modulation of the voice. For this purpose he was carefully taught the
laws of metre, with special reference to the peculiarities of particular
poets. After the reading aloud (lectio) came the enarratio or
explanation of the text. The educational value of this was doubtless
considerable, though it was impaired by the importance assigned to
obscure mythological knowledge and unscientific archaeology.[56] The
pupil would be further instructed by exercises in paraphrase and by the

treatment in simple essay form of themes (sententiae). 'Great store was
set both in speaking and writing on a command of an abundance of
general truths or commonplaces, and even at school boys were trained
to commit them to memory, to expand them, and illustrate them from
history.'[57] Finally they were taught to write verse. Such at least is a
legitimate inference from the extraordinary precocity shown by many
Roman authors.[58] This literary training contained much that was of
great value, but it also had grave disadvantages. There seems in the first
place to have been too much 'spoon-feeding', and too little genuine
brain exercise for the pupil.[59] Secondly, the fact that at this stage
boys were nurtured