Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
The history of Roman Classical Literature, althoughit comprehends the names of many illustrious writers andmany voluminous works, is, chronologically speaking,contained within narrow limits. Dating from its earliestinfancy, until the epoch when it ceased to deserve thetitle of classical, its existence occupies a period of lessthan four centuries.
The imperial city had been founded for upwards of fivehundred years without exhibiting more than those rudestgerms of literary taste which are common to the mostuncivilized nations, without producing a single authoreither in poetry or prose.
The Roman mind, naturally vigorous and active, wasstill uncultivated, when, about two centuries and a halfbefore the Christian era,[1] conquest made the inhabitantsof the capital acquainted, for the first time, with Greekscience, art, and literature; and the last rays of classictaste and learning ceased to illumine the Roman worldbefore the accession of the Antonines.[2]
Such a history, however, must be introduced by areference to times of much higher antiquity. Theivlanguage itself must be examined historically, that is,its progress and its formation from its primitive elements,must be traced with reference to the influences exercisedupon it from without by the natives who spoke the dialectsout of which it was composed; and the earliest indicationsof a taste for poetry, and a desire to cultivatethe intellectual powers, must be marked and followed outin their successive stages of development. In this investigation,it will be seen how great the difficulties werewith which literary men had to struggle under the Republic—difficultiesprincipally arising from the physicalactivity of the people, and the practical character of theRoman mind, which led the majority to undervalue anddespise devotion to sedentary and contemplative pursuits.
The Roman, in the olden times, had a high and self-denyingsense of duty—he was ambitious, but his ambitionwas for the glory, not of himself, but his country;he thus lived for conquest: his motive, however, was notself-aggrandizement but the extension of the