and it is a significant
circumstance, that it maintains itself precisely in the most national
departments of literature, and that truly conservative men,
like Varro, take it into protection. Classicism was based
on the death of the Italian language as monarchy on the decline
of the Italian nation; it was completely consistent that the men,
in whom the republic was still living, should continue to give
to the living language its rights, and for the sake of its comparative
vitality and nationality should tolerate its aesthetic defects.
Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch
are everywhere divergent; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry
of Lucretius appears the thoroughly modern poetry of Catullus,
by the side of Cicero's well-modulated period stands the sentence
of Varro intentionally disdaining all subdivision. In this field
likewise is mirrored the distraction of the age.

Literary Effort
Greek Literati in Rome

In the literature of this period we are first of all struck
by the outward increase, as compared with the former epoch,
of literary effort in Rome. It was long since the literary activity
of the Greeks flourished no more in the free atmosphere
of civic independence, but only in the scientific institutions
of the larger cities and especially of the courts. Left to depend
on the favour and protection of the great, and dislodged
from the former seats of the Muses(6) by the extinction
of the dynasties of Pergamus (621), Cyrene (658), Bithynia (679),
and Syria (690) and by the waning splendour of the court
of the Lagids--moreover, since the death of Alexander the Great,
necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers
among the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins--
the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes
towards Rome. Among the host of Greek attendants with which
the Roman of quality at this time surrounded himself, the philosopher,
the poet, and the memoir-writer played conspicuous parts
by the side of the cook, the boy-favourite, and the jester.
We meet already literati of note in such positions; the Epicurean
Philodemus, for instance, was installed as domestic philosopher
with Lucius Piso consul in 696, and occasionally edified the initiated
with his clever epigrams on the coarse-grained Epicureanism
of his patron. From all sides the most notable representatives
of Greek art and science migrated in daily-increasing numbers to Rome
wher