:[79]

"King shall you be
If you do well.
If you do ill
You shall not be."

The other bits of Roman folk poetry which we have are most of them
preserved by Suetonius, the gossipy biographer of the Caesars. They recall
very different scenes. Caesar has returned in triumph to Rome, bringing in
his train the trousered Gauls, to mingle on the street with the toga-clad
Romans. He has even had the audacity to enroll some of these strange
peoples in the Roman senate, that ancient body of dignity and convention,
and the people chant in the streets the ditty:[80]

"Caesar leads the Gauls in triumph,
In the senate too he puts them.
Now they've donned the broad-striped toga
And have laid aside their breeches."

Such acts as these on Caesar's part led some political versifier to write
on Caesar's statue a couplet which contrasted his conduct with that of the
first great republican, Lucius Brutus:

"Brutus drove the kings from Rome,
And first consul thus became.
This man drove the consuls out,
And at last became the king."[81]

We may fancy that these verses played no small part in spurring on Marcus
Brutus to emulate his ancestor and join the conspiracy against the
tyrant. With one more bit of folk poetry, quoted by Suetonius, we may
bring our sketch to an end. Germanicus Caesar, the flower of the imperial
family, the brilliant general and idol of the people, is suddenly stricken
with a mortal illness. The crowds throng the streets to hear the latest
news from the sick-chamber of their hero. Suddenly the rumor flies through
the streets that the crisis is past, that Germanicus will live, and the
crowds surge through the public squares chanting:

"Saved now is Rome,
Saved too the land,
Saved our Germanicus."[82]

The Origin of the Realistic Romance among the Romans

One of the most fascinating and tantalizing problems of literary history
concerns the origin of prose fiction among the Romans. We can trace the
growth of the epic from its infancy in the third century before Christ as
it develops in strength in the poems of Naevius, Ennius, and Cicero until
it reaches its full stature in the _AEneid_, and then we can see the
decline of its vigor in the _Pharsalia_, the _Punica_, the _Thebais_, and
_Achilleis_, until it practically dies a natural death in the mythological
and historical poems of Claudian. The way also in which tragedy, comedy,
lyric po