Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/88



portion of the poetry of Catullus which has been considered hitherto is doubtless the most genuine and original; but, with the exception of the two epithalamia, the poems now to be examined, as moulded on the Alexandrine form and subjects, are perhaps the more curious in a literary point of view. Contrasting with the rest of his poetry in their lack of "naturalism essentially Roman and republican," they savour undisguisedly of that Roman-Alexandrinism in poetry which first sprang up in earnest among the contemporaries of Cicero and Cæsar, and grew with all the more rapidity owing to the frequent visits of the Romans to the Greek provinces, and the increasing influx of the Greek literati into Rome. Of the Alexandrine literature at its fountain-head it must be remembered that it was the substitute and successor—on the ruin of the Hellenic nation, and the decline of its nationality, language, literature, and art—of the former national and popular literature of Greece. But it was confined to a limited range. "It was," says Pro-