the need felt for this kind of refreshment from objects of natural beauty.

Other causes have been suggested for the growth of this sentiment, as, for instance, the decay of the polytheistic fancies, which, by regarding each natural object as identified with some spiritual being, made it less an object of affection and curiosity for its own sake. The sudden growth of this sentiment in ancient times in an age of great luxury and culture is analogous to the great development and expansion of the feeling under similar circumstances in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In both cases the sentiment arose from the desire to escape from the tedium of an artificial life. The love of Nature is not, as we might naturally expect it to be, a feeling much experienced by those who live in constant contact and conflict with its sterner forces, as by husbandmen, herdsmen, and hunters; nor is it developed consciously in primitive times or among unsophisticated races. It is the accompaniment of leisure, culture, and refinement of life. Some races are more susceptible of this feeling than others; and perhaps the Greek with his lively social temper, and the tendency of his imagination to reduce all beautiful objects to a human shape, was less capable of the disinterested delight in the sights and sounds of the outward world than the Italian. It was apparently among Siculians, the kindred of the people of Latium, and not among men living in the mountains of Arcadia or Thessaly, that Theocritus found the personages of his rustic idyl. Whether it was from the greater susceptibility of their national temperament, or from the fact that they lived in the later times of the world, to which the sentiment was more congenial, the Roman poets of the Augustan Age and of that immediately preceding it are the truest exponents of the love of Nature in ancient times; though it may be that, without the originating impulse given by the Greek mind in the Alexandrian period, and perpetuated by educated Greeks living in Southern Italy, this love of natural beauty might never have been consciously realised by them as a source of poetic inspiration.

The pursuit of literature in the Alexandrian Age was accompanied with great activity in the other arts, especially in sculpture and painting. These last continued to be carried on by Greeks in Italy after Rome had succeeded to Alexandria as the centre of human culture. Sculpture and carving on wood, works of art in bronze, and the graving on gems continued to perpetuate an aesthetic half-belief in the Olympian deities and in the other creations of the Greek theology. Painting seems to have treated the same kind of subjects and to have aimed at satisfying the same class of feelings as the poetry of the Alexandrian time. Many of its subjects it seems to have drawn directly from the works of poets'. The paintings recovered from Pompeii, which may be presumed to have continued the traditions of a somewhat earlier art, illustrate the same tastes which were gratified by the poetical treatment of mythological subjects, of landscape, and of the passion of love. The knowledge acquired by science seems also to have been pressed into this service by the artist. The frequent representations of wild animals originated in the same kind of interest which animated Nicander to the composition of the enplaná 2. Realistic reproductions from common life seem also to have been frequently executed by ancient, as by modern, painters. If, as is not improbable, the 'Moretum' and the 'Copa' are translations or imitations of Greek originals, they exemplify still further the close connexion between the art of the poet and of the painter among the Alexandrian dilettanti.

The various kinds of art which bring human forms and scenes from outward nature before the eye, and especially the art of the painter, must accordingly be taken into account as means of making the creations of Greek fancy and the objects of Greek sentiment vividly present to the Roman imagination. They not only acted immediately on the mind of the poet by

1 The substance of these remarks is derived from Helbig's Campanische Wandmalerei.

2 Cf. Plautus, Pseudolus, i. 2. 14:

Neque Alexandrina beluata conchuliata tapetia.

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NUMBER OF CONTEMPORARY POETS

49

suggesting to him directly subjects for his art and supplying frequent illustrations for the treatment of native subjects, but they helped to interpret to cultivated minds his allusions to or reproductions from the poets of former times. The whole learning, fancy, and sentiment of the Alexandrians seem to have been absorbed and made their own by the Augustan poets. Virgil and Horace, indeed, formed their ideal of art from the works of a greater time. Their studies of Greek familiarised their minds with what was most perfect in form, noblest in thought, feeling, and expression in the older poets. Yet in so far as Roman poetry is a reproduction of Greek poetry, it is the mind of the Alexandrian rather than of the old Ionian, Aeolian, or Athenian Greek that lives again in the Augustan literature. Probably this has been in favour of the Roman writers. With their highly susceptible and cultivated appreciation of excellence, their originality might have been. altogether overpowered by an exclusive study of the nobler and severer models. In receiving the instruction of contemporary Greeks, based to a great extent on the Alexandrine learning, and in reproducing the materials, manner, and diction of Alexandrine poets, they must have become conscious of the greater freshness and vigour of their own genius, of the more vital force of their own language, of their grander national life, of the privilege of being Romans, and of the blessing of breathing Italian air. Whatever was most worthy to survive in the spirit which animated the refined industry of the Alexandrian Age has been preserved in greater beauty and vitality in Virgil, Propertius, and Ovid, combined with the ideas, feelings, passions, and experience of a new and more vigorous

race.

One other circumstance has yet to be taken into account as affecting the culture and taste of the age, viz. the number of poets who lived at the time and the relations which subsisted between them. Those whose works have been preserved are only a few out of a larger circle who worked each in his own province of art, and listened to and criticised the works of their

friends. Of the poets belonging to this circle whose works have not reached us, Varius, the older contemporary and lifelong friend of Virgil, first acquired distinction as a writer of that kind of epic peculiar to Rome which treated of contemporary subjects and was dedicated to the personal glory of some great man. This kind of poem had probably originated with the Scipio' of Ennius, but it had been especially cultivated in the age of Cicero. Varius performed the office from which Virgil and Horace shrank, that, namely, of telling in verse the contemporary history of his own time, glorifying in one poem the memory of Julius Caesar, in another celebrating the wars of Augustus. Afterwards he resigned to Virgil the honours of epic poetry, and entered into rivalry with Pollio as the author of tragedy. His drama of Thyestes was represented at the Games celebrated after the battle of Actium, and for this drama he is said to have received a million sesterces'. This play is praised both by Quintilian and Tacitus in the dialogue De Oratoribus. Quintilian says of it, 'it may be compared with any work of the Greeks: but the drama is the branch of literature in which the judgment of a Latin critic is of least value. The Thyestes, like the Medea of Ovid, was probably a play of that rhetorical kind which was cultivated under the Empire, and which never got possession of the stage as the older tragedies of Attius and Pacuvius did. Cornelius Gallus has been already mentioned among the men of public eminence who cultivated poetry. He was a follower of the Alexandrians, and is mentioned by Propertius and Ovid as their own precursor in elegiac poetry. Aemilius Macer, a native of Verona, nearly of the same age as Virgil, and supposed to be shadowed forth as the Mopsus of the fifth Eclogue, was the author of a didactic poem called Ornithogonia, written in imitation of the Alexandrine Nicander. Valgius Rufus and Aristius Fuscus, mentioned by Horace as among the friendly critics by whom he wished his Satires to be approved, and to

1 Scholium quoted by W. S. Teuffel in his account of L. Varius.

§ 5] FRIENDLY RELATIONS AMong men of leTTERS 51

whom he addresses some of his Odes and Epistles, are also known as authors. In his later life Horace maintained friendly relations and correspondence with the younger men, such as Iulus Antonius, Florus, etc., who united a taste for poetry with the pursuits of young men of rank. And among the pleasures which Ovid recalls in the dreary days of his exile, none seem to have been more prized by him than the familiar relations in which he had lived with the older poets and with those of his own standing'. The Alexandrine influence is visible in the kinds of poetry chiefly cultivated by these writers, especially in the didactic poem, the artificial epic, and the erotic elegy. We hear also of epic or narrative poems on contemporary subjects, of one or two dramatic writers, and also of writers in verse on grammatical and rhetorical subjects 2.

There is no feature in the social life of the Augustan Age so pleasant to contemplate as the brotherly friendship, free apparently from the jealousies of individuals and the petty passions of literary coteries, in which the most eminent poets and men of letters lived with one another. The only exception to the general state of good feeling of which there is any indication is an apparent coolness between Horace and Propertius. The latter poet neither mentions nor alludes to his illustrious contemporary, though both were friends of Maecenas and of Virgil; and Horace, though he does not mention Propertius by name, as he does Tibullus and most of the other distinguished poets of the time, probably alludes to him in a passage which was not intended to be complimentary. But in general what Plato says of the souls engaged in the pursuit and contemplation of intellectual beauty-Envy stands aloof from the divine company'-was true of the divine company' of poets

1 Tristia, iv. 10. 41, etc.

2 W. S. Teuffel.

3

Discedo Alcaeus puncto illius: ille meo quis?

Quis nisi Callimachus? Si plus adposcere visus,

Fit Mimnermus, et optivo cognomine crescit. Ep. ii. 2. 99. Propertius may have been dead at the time when these lines were published; but we may remember that the famous lines on 'Atticus' did not see the light till after the death of Addison.