Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/95

Rh possessed in perfection both the delicate irony and the graceful amenity which are essential to the performance of a task so critical. Doubtless Horace, in his own peculiar line, exercised as great an influence in Roman society as Virgil. The laughing philosopher was no less a power among his contemporaries than the religious devotee. Each of them, in his several way, performed an immense service to the government under which he enjoyed favour and reward ; nor can we deny that, considering how necessary the government of Augustus was to the bleeding common wealth, each in his several .way did an invaluable service to his country. Nor, though we may admit that irony and persiflage were Horace s forte, should we do him justice if we supposed that he had no feelings of genuine tenderness and earnest ness. Even Horace had his instinctive sense of religious duty, which peeps out occasionally from under the robe of his pretended philosophy, and shows that he recognised a principle of duty, and felt ill at ease in the consciousness of his own deficiencies. We may recognise in many of his later compositions his growing dissatisfaction with the worldly views of life which he had been wont to recom mend, and some efforts at the attainment of higher sources of satisfaction. Both Virgil and Horace were cut off in middle life, but both, we imagine, had already entered into the cloud, and were painfully conscious that the common wealth they loved had fallen into its decline, and that their own attempts to invigorate or to soothe it were little likely to prove availing. If Virgil deserves our admiration, Horace too is not unworthy of our sympathy ; and it is well that we can part in such good temper from the two most perfect artists of the Roman, or perhaps of the ancient, world altogether.

Of Ovid, the third great poet of the Augustan Age, we can hardly think or speak so favourably. Ovid, too, was a genuine representative of his epoch, which occupied, however, the latter part of the career of Augustus, when the character of the age had begun to show manifest signs of deterioration. In the character of this poet, which may be abundantly gathered from his numerous works, there appears no religious feeling and no moral purpose. Never theless, his writings reflect, in some important particulars, the social tendencies of the epoch, and afford valuable illustrations of the genius of the Augustan Age. To the historian and archaeologist the Fasti presents a store of interesting information ; but in this poetical account of the Roman calendar the writer undoubtedly proposed to meet a social want of the time. The work is in fact a rationale of the divine offices, and expounds to the nation the &quot;seasons and the reasons (tempora cum causis)&quot; of the religious services which the emperor recommended to their pious attention. Minute and manifold as were the memorials of their past history, or of their accredited mythology, which the cult of the Roman temples enshrined, we can imagine how much they must have faded away from the recollection of the people generally during the century of confusion from which they had just emerged, and how even the priests and flamens of the national divinities must have stood in need of a learned interpreter of the rites which they mechanically performed. The Fasti is remarkable as a speaking witness to the fact of the ceremonial revival of the Augustan Age. The generally im Jioral tendency of a great part of Ovid s poetry is well known ; and it speaks all the worse for the character of the age that the writer could declare, and pro bably not without justice, that his personal conduct was purer than the sentiments with which he sought to please the public. The deterioration of sentiment between Virgil and Ovid is marked in the tone with which they speak in the higher flights of their respective poetry. The writer of the ^Eneid fully maintains the pure standard of thought and expression which he received as a tradition from Homer, and which had been respected by the epic poets generally; but Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, an heroic, if not an epic, composition, allows himself to descend far below this exalted level, and is not only licentious in his language, but seems to choose, and of set purpose, the most licen tious of the stories which his varied subject offers. Again, though Horace adopts the lighter tone and looser phraseology of the lyric poets of Greece, there is at least nothing meretricious in his style ; he was not a corrupter of youth himself, nor were the models such which he proposed for adaptation. But Ovid descends to the imitation of a more wanton kind of poetry. He, too, seeks his models for the most part from among the Greeks, but they are the Greeks of a more degenerate age the Greeks of the court of Alex andria, who pandered to the vicious tastes of a corrupt and degraded society. But, imitator as he doubtless was, Ovid had a strong personal individuality, and all his poetry is marked with the genuine sentiment of his age and country. Perhaps we trace more of the real man in his Tristia and Ex Ponto, in which he is thrown entirely on his own resources, though in the depth of his affliction and the decline of his powers, than in the abler and more interesting works in which he owed we know not how much to the Greeks before him.

We have, besides these, the remains of other poets, such as Tibullus and Propertius, who also hold up the mirror to their times, and assist us in scanning its character on all sides. But it will be well to pass them over in this brief sketch, and bring our review of the literature of the Augustan Age to a close with a notice of the great historian Livy. The consummate excellence in form and Livy. style of the work to which we. refer bears witness to the intellectual accomplishments of the epoch. No doubt the Romans did much at a later period to improve their method of teaching, and to extend their acquaintance with the highest models of literary excellence. An age succeeded in which Rome was formed into an academy, like that of Athens or Alexandria, when all the arts and sciences of the time were taught or practised under the direct instruction of approved professors. Great were the merits of the historical literature of Rome at a later age, and illustrious are some of the men who distinguished themselves in its exercise. But, on the whole, a reasonable criticism will award to Livy the palm of merit at least in the two par ticulars just specified, a palm which he may well contest even with the masters of the art in Greece. The form of Livy s history partakes in exquisite proportion of the descriptive, the narrative, and the dramatic ; it is replete with personal characteristics, which bring us into direct acquaintance with the individuals of whom it treats ; it abounds, moreover, in matter of antiquarian interest, v* Inch we who read it at a distance of nineteen centuries feel to be specially valuable, and which did not fail to attract the sympathy even of the writer s own contemporaries. The Romans in the time of Augustus were just beginning to be keenly self-conscious. They felt that they had attained to such a position in the world s history as no people before them had acquired. They were led by all the traditions of their youth to attribute their splendid success to the examples of national virtue paraded before them. They were sensible of the deep debt they owed to theiv ancestors, and they wanted to know who their ancestors were ; they wanted to trace the features of their own character in the lineaments of the great men who had gone before them. Of these ancient heroes of the commonwealth they had hitherto imbibed a faint and vague conception from songs and poems and family or national traditions. The legends connected with their ritual and their laws and 