of transition. No one of unprejudiced mind,
and who is not misled by the venerable rust of two thousand years,
can be deceived as to the defectiveness of the Hellenistico-Roman
literature. Roman literature by the side of that of Greece resembles
a German orangery by the side of a grove of Sicilian orange-trees;
both may give us pleasure, but it is impossible even to conceive them
as parallel. This holds true of the literature in the mother-tongue
of the Latins still more decidedly, if possible, than of the Roman
literature in a foreign tongue; to a very great extent the former was
not the work of Romans at all, but of foreigners, of half-Greeks,
Celts, and ere long even Africans, whose knowledge of Latin was only
acquired by study. Among those who in this age came before the public
as poets, none, as we have already said, can be shown to have been
persons of rank; and not only so, but none can be shown to have
been natives of Latium proper. The very name given to the poet was
foreign; even Ennius emphatically calls himself a -poeta-(70). But
not only was this poetry foreign; it was also liable to all those
defects which are found to occur where schoolmasters become authors
and the great multitude forms the public. We have shown how comedy
was artistically debased by a regard to the multitude, and in fact
sank into vulgar coarseness; we have further shown that two of the
most influential Roman authors were schoolmasters in the first
instance and only became poets in the sequel, and that, while the
Greek philology which only sprang up after the decline of the national
literature experimented merely on the dead body, in Latium grammar and
literature had their foundations laid simultaneously and went hand
in hand, almost as in the case of modern missions to the heathen. In
fact, if we view with an unprejudiced eye this Hellenistic literature
of the sixth century--that poetry followed out professionally and
destitute of all productiveness of its own, that uniform imitation
of the very shallowest forms of foreign art, that repertoire of
translations, that changeling of epos--we are tempted to reckon
it simply one of the diseased symptoms of the epoch before us.

But such a judgment, if not unjust, would yet be just only in a very
partial sense. We must first of all consider that this artificial
literature sprang up in a nation which not only did not possess any
national poetic art, but could never attain any such art