Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/417

 THE AUGUSTAN AGE 393 enemies, a beaten soldier to think more of the truth than of his own hindered glory. How different from the splendid but jaundiced genius of Tacitus, or the mere belles lettres of the Isocratean Livy ! II The Roman and Byzantine Periods The establishment of the Roman Empire shifted the intellectual centre of gravity, and threw upon Greek lite- rature a certain definite and somewhat narrowing task. Greece became essentially the paid teacher of the Roman world. In the East, indeed, the great Hellenistic civili- sation founded by Alexander remained to some extent self-sufficing and independent of Rome ; and in the East, Greek literature retained much creative power and original impulse. But our remains of the first two centuries A.D. consist chiefly of the books that were read in Rome; and for the most part the Western world was calling so loud for the Greeks to come and educate her that they forgot everything else in this mission. The original poets al- most cease. Babrius, the fabulist, is no poet ; Oppian's poem on fish. is seldom very interesting. Only the senti- mental elegy, now contracted into epigrams about eight lines long, really flourishes. MeleAger of Gadara wrote spontaneously ; he was scholar and educator enough to form the collection from which our Palatine Anthology has been gradually built up ; but he was also a real and exquisite poet in a somewhat limited domain. His numerous little love-poems are full of sweetness, and there is great tenderness in his elegies on death. Yet even in Meleager signs of the age are not wanting.