ete!

H. P. LOVECRAFT, President.
June 26, 1918.

_THE
UNITED AMATEUR_

OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE UNITED AMATEUR PRESS ASSOCIATION

VOLUME XVIII ATHOL, MASS., NOVEMBER, 1918 NUMBER 2

DEPARTMENT _of_ LITERATURE

The Literature of Rome

H. P. Lovecraft

_The centre of our studies, the goal of our thoughts, the point to
which all paths lead and the point from which all paths start again,
is to be found in Rome and her abiding power._--Freeman.

Few students of mankind, if truly impartial, can fail to select as the
greatest of human institutions that mighty and enduring civilisation
which, first appearing on the banks of the Tiber, spread throughout the
known world and became the direct parent of our own. If to Greece is due
the existence of all modern thought, so to Rome is due its survival and
our possession of it; for it was the majesty of the Eternal City which,
reducing all Western Europe to a single government, made possible the
wide and uniform diffusion of the high culture borrowed from Greece, and
thereby laid the foundation of European enlightenment. To this day the
remnants of the Roman world exhibit a superiority over those parts which
never came beneath the sway of the Imperial Mother; a superiority
strikingly manifest when we contemplate the savage code and ideals of
the Germans, aliens to the priceless heritage of Latin justice,
humanity, and philosophy. The study of Roman literature, then, needs no
plea to recommend it. It is ours by intellectual descent; our bridge to
all antiquity and to those Grecian stores of art and thought which are
the fountain head of existing culture.

In considering Rome and her artistic history, we are conscious of a
subjectivity impossible in the case of Greece or any other ancient
nation. Whilst the Hellenes, with their strange beauty-worship and
defective moral ideals, are to be admired and pitied at once, as
luminous but remote phantoms; the Romans, with their greater practical
sense, ancient virtue, and love of law and order, seem like our own
people. It is with personal pride that we read of the valour and
conquests of this mighty race, who used the alphabet we use, spoke and
wrote with but little difference many of the words we speak and write,
and with divine creative power evolved virtually all the forms of law
which govern us today. To the G