It is in Christian writers alone that we find the vigour of life. The earliest work of Christian apologetics is the Octavius of Minucius Felix, a contemporary of Fronto. It is thoroughly classical in style. Quite different is the work of Q. Septimius Florens Tertullianus (Tertullian, c. 150-230), a native of Car thage, the most vigorous of the Latin champions of the new faith. His style shows the African revolt of which we have already spoken, and in its medley of archaisms, Graecisms and Hebraisms reveals the strength of the disintegrating forces at work upon the Latin language. A more commanding figure is that of Aurelius Augustinus or St. Augustine (354-430), bishop of Hippo, who for comprehensiveness and dialectical power stands out in the same way as Hieronymus or St. Jerome (c. 331 or 340-420), a native of Stridon in Dalmatia, does for many-sided learning and scholarship.
Grammarians and Jurists.—The decline of literature proper was attended by an increased output of grammatical and critical studies. The grammarian M. Valerius Probus (c. A.D. 6o) was the first critical editor of Latin texts. In the next century we have Velius Longus's treatise De Orthograpliia, and then a very inter esting miscellany, the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, and (c. 200) a treatise in verse by Terentianus, an African, upon Latin pronunciation, prosody and metre. The tradition was continued in the 4th century by Nonius Marcellus and C. Marius Victorinus, both Africans, Flavius Sosipater Charisius and Diomedes. Com mentaries on Terence, Horace, and Virgil have come down to us under the names of Acro, Porphyrio, Donatus, and Servius; of these "Donatus" on Terence and "Servius" on Virgil preserve a great deal of ancient learning. Ambrosius Macrobius Theodosius (c. 40o) wrote a treatise on Cicero's Somnium Scipionis and seven books of miscellanies (Saturnalia) ; and Martianus Capella (c. a native of Africa, published a compendium of the seven liberal arts, written in a mixture of prose and verse, with some literary pretensions. The last grammarian who need be named is the most widely known of all, the celebrated Priscianus, who published his text-book at Constantinople probably in the middle of the 5th century.
In jurisprudence, which may be regarded as one of the out lying regions of literature, Roman genius had had some of its greatest triumphs, and, if we take account of the "codes," was active to the end. The most distinguished of the early jurists (whose works are lost) were Q. Mucius Scaevola, who died in 82 B.C., and following him Ser. Sulpicius Rufus, who died in 43 B.C. In the Augustan age M. Antistius Labeo and C. Ateius Capito headed two opposing schools in jurisprudence, Labeo being an advocate of method and reform, and Capito being a conservative and empiricist. The strife, which reflects the controversy between the "analogists" and the "anomalists" in philology, continued long after their death. Salvius Iulianus was entrusted by Hadrian
with the task of reducing into shape the immense mass of law which had grown up in the edicts of successive praetors—thus taking the first step towards a code. Sex. Pomponius, a con temporary, wrote an important legal manual of which fragments are preserved. The most celebrated handbook, however, is the Institutiones of Gaius, who lived under Antoninus Pius. The most eminent of all the Roman jurists was Aemilius Papinianus, the intimate friend of Septimius Severus; of his works only f rag ments remain. Other considerable writers were Domitius Ulpi anus (c. 215) and Iulius Paulus, his contemporary. The last juristical writer of note was Herennius Modestinus (c. 240). But the effects of their work remained and are clearly visible long after in the "codes"—the code of Theodosius (438) and that of Justinian (529 and 533), with which is associated the name of Tribonianus.
This vast mass of literature has been studied with more or less intelligence ever since it was written, and especially since the Revival of Letters (see CLAssics). But in the present century there has been a healthy tendency to treat the literature along with the other means open to us of understanding the life and thought of antiquity, and break down the barriers which the 19th century was prone to set up between "pure scholarship," or philology, and history, archaeology, and so forth (realien, to use the convenient German title). Thus, the observations on Virgil and on Gallus in this article rest largely on the application to literature of Mommsen's interpretation of an inscription found in Egypt, on first-hand investigations of Virgil's country, and on the works of men such as the late W. Warde Fowler, who have investigated Roman religious ideas.' At the same time, the actual text of the great authors is being set upon a sounder basis than before by the study, not simply of their language, but of their mss. tradition (itherlieferungsge schichte). Thanks to modern methods of palaeographical study and the history of mss., it is often possible to some extent to reverse the process of copying, with its necessary accumulation of small corruptions, and reconstruct, more or less exactly, the text as it was in the 4th century, for instance. The danger of this method is that in the hands of an inferior editor it may be taken as a substitute for, instead of a help to, the sympathetic under standing of the thought and language of the author.' Another aspect of this tendency is the readiness to study au thors, not as isolated literary phenomena, but against the back ground of their own time and in relation to the movements of literature and thought of which they formed a part; to consider Quintilian, for example, not in the abstract as a monument of literary criticism or educational theory, but as part of the long history of the development of certain ideas.