Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/89

Rh fessor Mommsen, "only in a comparatively narrow circle, not of men of culture—for such, strictly speaking, did not exist—but of men of erudition, that the Greek literature was cherished even when dead; that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism." Originality found a substitute in learned research. Multifarious learning, the result of deep draughts at the wells of criticism, grammar, mythology, and antiquities, gave an often cumbrous and pedantic character to laboured and voluminous epics, elegies, and hymnology (a point and smartness in epigram being the one exception in favour of this school), whilst the full genial spirit of Greek thought, coeval with Greek freedom, was exchanged for courtly compliment, more consistent with elaboration than freshness. Among the best of the Alexandrian poets proper—indeed, the best of all, if we except the original and genial Idyllist, Theocritus—was the learned Callimachus; and it is upon Callimachus especially that Catullus has drawn for his Roman-Alexandrine poems, one of them being in fact a translation of that poet's elegy "On the Hair of Queen Berenice;" whilst another, his "Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis," has been supposed by more than one critic to be a translation of Callimachus also. This is, indeed, problematical; but there is no doubt that for his mythologic details, scholarship, and other features savouring of ultra erudi-