This chronological review of Roman litera ture may be supplemented by a brief summary and estimate of Latin writers.by classes accord ing to their form or subject matter. In the comparative simplicity of the ancient literatures the connection between writers in the same class was more direct and therefore more note worthy than it is in modern times.
The Roman drama, having been early checked in its possible growth by the introduc tion of Greek models, took almost entirely a Greco-Roman form. Of the tragedies nothing has been preserved except the book-plays of Seneca, and the writing of tragedy for the stage had come to an end before the time of Cicero. The form of drama which took its subjects from Roman legend appears to have been only slightly successful and it is evident that the serious drama had little hold upon Roman life. The comedies, even those of Greek form like the extant plays of Plautus and Terence, expressed more of the Italian spirit and retained their hold upon the stage, and the farces, the mimes and the Atellan plays were even more popular. The Italian interest, then as now, was more in the acting and impersonation than in the dramatic form Or story.
In epic poetry the glory of the Homeric poems was so great as to determine, somewhat to its disadvantage, the form of the Roman na tional epic. It is not unlikely that Ennius was in this respect more truly national than Virgil. The poet of the VEneid) was in truth hampered by the Homeric machinery of gods and heroes and by the supposed necessity of imitating in one part of his poem the wanderings, of Odys seus, in another the battles of the Iliad. These things were not real to him; they were epic conventionalities which he felt obliged to adopt, as he adopted at times the phrases and the similes of the Homeric style. In all these re spects, in which the VEneid) is most fre quently and quite properly compared with the Greek epic, Virgil is plainly the inferior and they are sufficient to exclude him from the small company of the world's greatest poets. But in the occasional passages where he is in spired by the opportunity of expressing his real theme — the greatness of the Roman state — he writes with a proud dignity and a conscious understanding of the meaning of history, to which there is no parallel in the Homeric poems. His verse also is suited to the dignity
of his thought; his hexameters are composed as wholes; while the Homeric hexameter ap pears 'to retain the traces of its composition out of two short half-verses. The Virgilian verse is less suited to the simplicity of nar rative, but is unequalled in elevation.
Didactic writing in prose and verse was es pecially natural and attractive to the Roman mind and the series of didactic works extends from the earliest times down to the end. The most notable in verse are the great poem of Lucretius Rerum Natura' and the of Virgil. Both depend largely— Lucretius wholly—on Greek authorities for their subject matter, but two more thoroughly Roman poems could not be named. In form the work of Lucretius is incomplete; the is one of the most perfectly finished poems in Latin literature.
Lyric poetry in Latin has an especial inter est from the fact that the Greek lyrics of the best period are preserved only in fragments and our conception of this important form of poetry In ancient literature must be derived chiefly from Catullus and Horace. Apparently the best qualities of Alcmus and Sappho are better re produced by the free spontaneity of Catullus than by the careful workmanship and mature intelligence of Horace. We are fortunate in the possession of both. Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil and Horace are the four cornerstones of Latin poetry.
The elegy is closely allied to the lyric, from which it differs chiefly in the use of the elegiac couplet, hexameter and pentameter. The ex amples that we have in Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid do not conform to the rule of ancient grammarians that elegy should deal with melan choly themes. But the somewhat despondent temperament of Tibullus and the simplicity of his treatment are well suited to elegy. Proper tins is more virile, but is over-much given to the display of Alexandrian learning. In the amatory elegiacs of Ovid his extraordinary cleverness has a congenial field and his lack of essential manliness is less detrimental than elsewhere.