Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/126

112 attraction for subsequent generations of poets, and, having been more or less borrowed from and remodelled, according to the demands of their subjects, by the poetical grammarians of Alexandria, was handed over as an example to the Alexandrianising poets of Rome. "The 'Phænomena' of Aratus," writes Professor Conington, in his introduction to the 'Georgics' "found at least two distinguished translators: Lucretius and Manilius gave the form and colour of poetry to the truths of science; Virgil and Horace to the rules of art; and the rear is brought up by such poets as Gratius, Nemesianus, and Serenus Sammonicus." But the 'Phænomena' of Aratus, and its Roman parallel, the 'Astronomica' of Manilius, though conversant with a portion of the same topics as Hesiod's didactic poem, essay a loftier flight of admonitory poetry; and in them the advance of time has substituted for the simplicity and directness of Hesiod, rhetorical turns and artifices, and the efforts of picturesque description. It is the same with Ovid's contemporary, Gratius Faliscus, if we may judge of him by his fragmentary 'Cynegetica.' In carrying out his design of a didactic poem on the chase and its surroundings, he barters simplicity for a forced elevation of moral tone, and spoils the effect of his real insight into his subject by a fondness for sententious maxims "in season and out of season." Nemesianus, who wrote two centuries or more after Gratius, seems to have so completely made Virgil his model that the influence of Hesiod is imperceptible in his poetry, which is diffuse and laboured, and instinct with exag-