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 402 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE which Julian was striving towards and imperfectly grasping all through his life, which he might, in a sense, have attained permanently in happier ages. He was a great and humane general, an able and unselfish statesman. But there is fever in his ideals ; there is a horror of conscious weakness in his great attempts. It is the feeling that besets all the Greek mind in its decadence. Roman decadence tends to exaggeration, vainglory, excess of ornament ; Greek decadence is humble and weary. " / pray that I ma.y fulfil your hopes," writes Julian to Themistius, ''but 1 fear I shall fail. The promise you make about me to yourself and others is too large. Long ago I had fancies of emulating Alexander and Marcus and other great and good men ; and a shrinkifig used to come over me and a strange dread of knowing that I was utterly lacking in the courage of the one, and could never even approach the perfect virtue of the other. That was what induced me to be a student. I thought with relief of the 'Attic Essays,' and thought it right to go on repeating them to you my friends, as a man with a heavy burden lightens his trouble by singing. And now your letter has increased the old fear, and shown the struggle to be much, much harder, when you talk to me of the post to which God has called me." One form of literature, indeed, contemporary with Julian, and equally condemned by him and by his chief opponents, shows a curious combination of decay and new life, the Romance. The two earliest traces of prose romance extant are epitomes. There is perhaps no spon- taneous fiction in the Love Stories of Parthenius, an Alexandrian who taught Vergil, and collected these myths for the use of Roman poets who liked to introduce mythical names without reading the original authorities.