distinction as the author of original elegies in the style of the amatory poetry of Alexandria, but had translated a poem of Euphorion of Chalcis1, whom Cicero holds up as the type of effeminacy in literature in contrast with the manliness of Ennius2. Tibullus to a certain extent, but still more Propertius and Ovid, followed in the same line. From the Alexandrine poets they derived the form and many of the materials of their art. Virgil, while familiar with the whole range of Greek poetry and pressing it all into his service, has used the Alexandrians more freely than any other Greek writers, with the exception of Homer. Horace is most independent of them; there are no direct traces of their works in any of his writings. The Greek authors to whom he acknowledges his debt are the early Lyrists and Iambic writers, the poets of the New Comedy, the philosophic writers of the later schools which arose out of the teaching of Socrates, and especially Aristippus. Yet even in him the influence of the Alexandrine tone is apparent, especially in his treatment of the subjects taken from the Greek mythology.

This poetry of Alexandria, or rather this poetry of the Greek race in its latter days, was, to a much greater extent, the artificial product of culture and knowledge than the manifestation of original feeling or intellectual power. The very language in which it was written was artificial, far removed, not only in phraseology but in dialectical forms, from the language of common life. Poetry was pursued as the recreation of scholars and men of science; its chief aim was to satisfy a dilettante curiosity:

Cetera quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes.

The writers of this school whose names are most familiarly known are Callimachus, one of the Battiadae of Cyrene, Euphorion of Chalcis, Philetas of Cos, Aratus of Soli, Hermesianax and Nicander of Colophon, Apollonius of Rhodes3, Lycophron of Chalcis, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, 1 Virg. Eclog. vi. 72; x. 50. 2 Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

3 Born at Alexandria, but afterwards settled at Rhodes. He ultimately returned to Alexandria.

from whom Virgil takes a passage about geographical science, Zenodotus of Ephesus, a grammarian,-names suggestive of the widely-diffused culture of the Hellenic race, and at the same time indicative of the absence of any great centre of national life such as Athens had been in former times. To these are sometimes added the more interesting names of Theocritus of Syracuse, and of the idyllic poets Moschus of Syracuse and Bion of Smyrna, although they are more associated with the fresh woods and pastures of Sicily and Southern Italy. The chief materials used by the Alexandrine writers in their poetry were the tales and fancies of the old mythology and the results of natural science; the modes of human feeling to which they mainly gave expression were the passion of love and the sensibility to the beauty of Nature.

Nothing attests more forcibly the original power and richness of faculty which shaped the primitive fancies of the Greek mythology, into legend, poetry, and art, than the perennial vitality with which this mythology has reappeared under many forms, satisfying many different wants of the human mind, at various epochs, from the time of its first birth even down to the present day. In the contrasts often drawn between the classical and the romantic imagination, it is sometimes forgotten that this Greek mythology was richer in romantic personages, situations, and incidents, than the mythology or early legends of any other race. In the nobler eras of Greek literature, after the creative impulse ceased out of which the mythology and its natural accompaniment epic poetry had arisen, the legends and personages of gods and heroes supplied to the lyrical poets an ideal background by connexion with which they glorified the passions and interests of their own time; to the tragic poets of Athens they supplied beings of heroic stature, situations of transcendent import, by means of which they were enabled to give body and shape to the deepest thoughts on human destiny. The Alexandrians, and those Greek writers who came long after them, such as Quintus Calaber and Nonnus, did not

seek to impart any recondite meaning to the legends which they revived, but rather to divest them of any sacred or ethical associations, and to present them to their readers simply as bright and marvellous tales of passion and adventure. They endeavoured, either in the form of continuous epics or in the more appropriate form of 'epyllia' or epic idyls, to enable their readers to escape in fancy from the dull uniformity of their own time into a world of action in the bright morning of the national life. They sought especially to satisfy two impulses of the Greek nature which still survived out of the more powerful energies which had given birth to art and poetry, the childlike curiosity (Ἕλληνες ἀεὶ παιδές) which delights in hearing a story told, and the artistic passion to make present to the eye or the fancy distinct pictures and images of beauty and symmetry.

The later development of the Greek intellect was however more critical and scientific than creative. Science, learning, and criticism were especially encouraged and cultivated at Alexandria. The impulse given by Aristotle to natural observation and enquiry, and the large intercourse with the East which followed on the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the kingdoms of his successors, led to a great increase of knowledge, or, in the absence of definite knowledge, of curiosity and speculation. ▸ The spirit of enquiry no longer, as in the days of the older philosophers, endeavoured to solve the whole problem of the universe, but to observe and systematise the phenomena of the special sciences. Natural history, botany, and medicine were studied zealously and successfully; the subjects of astronomy and meteorology excited equal interest, though the want of the appliances necessary for these studies made them more barren in results. A great advance was made in the knowledge of remote places of the earth and of their various products. The novelty of these enquiries, and of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the imaginative emotion which accom#panies it; and the enthusiasm of science combining with

the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,—the last described as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician,-a combination characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were cultivated. These writers supplied materials. which Virgil used in the Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The description by Ovid of the poem of Æmilius Macer in the lines

Saepe suas volucres legit mihi grandior aevo, Quaeque necet serpens, quae iuvet herba, Macer1, indicates the character not only of that poem, but also of the Alexandrine models on which it was founded.

The poetry of Alexandria touched most on the realities of human life in its treatment of the passion of love and the enjoyment of the beauty of Nature. These are, in unadventurous and unwarlike times and in eras of advanced civilisation, the main motives of the imaginative literature which seeks its interest in the actual life of the present. Callimachus and Euphorion are mentioned as the models followed by Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus 2. They, as well as their Roman followers, seem largely to have illustrated their own feelings and experience by recondite allusions to the innumerable heroines of ancient mythology. The passion of Medea for Jason is the motive which gives its chief human interest to the Argonautics of Apollonius, as the passion of Dido for Aeneas, suggested by it, gives the chief purely human interest to the Aeneid. But the most powerful delineation of this kind in any writer of that period, recalling in its intensity the

commissi calores Aeoliae fidibus puellae,

is the passionate monologue of Simaetha in the second

1 Trist. iv. 10. 43-44.

2 Sueton. De Viris Illustribus.

Idyl of Theocritus, of which Virgil has produced but a faint echo in his

Ducite ab urbe domum, mea carmina, ducite Daphnim.

The love of Nature, though not then for the first time awakened, for there are clear indications of the powerful influence of this sentiment, though in subordination to human interests, in the earlier epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry,-came then prominently forward as an element of refined pleasure in life, and as an inspiring influence both to poets and painters. The cause of the growth of this sentiment has been sought1 partly in the rise of great cities, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Alexandria, which by debarring men from that free familiar contact with the forms and motions and life of Nature enjoyed by the older Greeks, created an imaginative longing for a return to this communion as to a lost paradise. The longing to escape from the heat and confinement of a great southern city to the fresh sights and free air of woods and mountains must certainly have been often felt by poets and artists who had exchanged their homes on the shores and the islands of the Aegean for the dusty streets of Alexandria. Probably the Metamorphoses of Ovid convey as good an idea as anything in Latin literature of the various influences active in the Alexandrine poetry, and the kind of scene which he takes most delight in painting in that poem is that of a cool and clear stream hidden in the thick shade of woods and haunted by the Nymphs. The taste for gardens within great cities, first developed at this time and afterwards carried to an extreme pitch of luxury in the early Roman Empire2, further illustrates the need felt for this kind of refreshment from objects of natural beauty.

1 Woermann, Ueber den landschaftlichen Natursinn der Griechen und Römer; Helbig, Campanische Wandmalerei.

2 Cf. 'Senecae praedivitis hortos.' Juv. 'Pariterque hortis inhians, quos ille a Lucullo coeptos insigni magnificentia extollebat.' Tac. Ann. xi. 1.