Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/215

 war had fused Athenians into a political unity they might otherwise never have attained did the fruits of Attic genius show themselves; and, had internal clan distinctions survived the age of Solon and Peisistratus in anything like their patrician vitality at Rome, Athenian verse and prose would probably never have attained any remarkable degree of beauty and symmetry. The reason for the absence of literature in early Rome has been sought in "the original characteristics of the Latin race;" but, like the answer of Molière's famous doctor, or M. Renan's explanation of Hebrew and Arab monotheism by "Semitic instinct," this explanation simply repeats the problem in another form. The true explanation must be found in causes affecting the general character of men and women at Rome; and any student of Roman law and early social life need not be at a loss for such causes. The conscious contrasts of patrician, plebeian, alien, and servile status, and the strong conservatism of clan character, are the primary causes of that unimaginative life which made the Roman law-court the fountain-head of European jurisprudence, but compelled the mistress of force to look for literary guidance to the mistress of intellect. Without any store of common sympathies which plebeian and patrician might feel alike, Rome had no social ideals such as literature desires; and if she had heroes of her own, they only served to summon up recollections of kingly or aristocratic despotism.

The production of Roman literature, about the middle of the third century, opened with a stock of materials and ideas meagre in the extreme. No kinsmen of Rome had created a vehicle of verse like the hexameter, iambic, or elegiac of Greece; the rude Saturnian seems to have been the only metre known. Nor had any Miletus of the West laid the foundations of Roman prose; chronicles,