Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/194

 Athenian. From the time of the XII. Tables down to the utmost relaxation of the Patria Potestas the spirit of Roman life was more or less that of the clan narrowed for the most part into the dimensions of the familia. But it is just this conservatism that prevents Rome from competing with Athens as the proper type of the city commonwealth in literary development. The reconciliation of the clanned with the unclanned Romans is reached too late to allow a Roman literature, common property of plebeian and patrician, to spring up. The struggles of Plebs and Patres—essentially one of the clanless against the clansmen for equal rights of marriage, landed property, and political capacity—prevent the rise of Roman unity until the city commonwealth has become the metropolis of a municipal empire of force which must borrow its intellectual refinement from abroad. Not so with Athens. Here the commonwealth is neither parted asunder into gentiles and those who can boast no gens (plebs gentem non habet), nor widened, while thus internally divided, into the metropolis of a municipal empire. Nor like Florence, split into factions almost as permanently hostile as those of Rome, is Athens oppressed by membership of any world-empire; the freedom of her thought knows not the restrictions of a world-religion, and that of her art is unoppressed by models whose imitation cannot but disappoint and whose existence often damps the ardour of young genius. The burning of the Alexandrian Library by the Khalif Omar, it has been said, may not have inflicted so severe a loss on civilisation as some have supposed, "inasmuch as the inheritance of so vast a collection of writings from antiquity would, by engrossing all the leisure and attention of the moderns, have diminished their zeal and their opportunities for original productions." It would be interesting to estimate how