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 taking, the place of old political freedom. In both the elegant imitation of models was choking any inspiration of genuine poetry. In both literature had become the peculiar possession of the few. In both individualism was well pleased to offer the incense of its learned refinement to any human god who was strong enough to embody the force of government and propitious to grant official reward. Perhaps there was no domain of poetry in which the Romans could breathe a little freely from the mastering spirit of Greek song save one—that of natural poetry; but the Eclogues of Vergil show us that no such freedom was to be attempted. Abounding in imitations of Theocritus—for out of the 840 lines of which they are made up we may reckon at least 150, or about one-fifth, as imitations of Theocritus more or less distinct—the Eclogues illustrate a fact in the imitation literature of Rome which is singularly significant and often singularly overlooked. This is the fact that Roman littérateurs sought their models less in the splendid masterpieces of the free Athenian commonwealth than in the cosmopolitan writings of Athenian decay and Alexandrian pedantry. If the models of Plautus and Terence were found in Menander, Philemon, Diphilus, and the "New Comedy" in general, Vergil is deeply indebted—more deeply than most scholars suppose—to the Argonauts of Apollonius Rhodius, the pupil of Callimachus. Aratus, the poetic scientist of Alexandria who threw the astronomy of Eudoxus into hexameter verse, was the model of Cicero's and Domitian's poetic attempts. In Callimachus and Philetas Propertius found his models; and the Coma Berenices of Catullus is a close translation of the courtly flattery in which Callimachus delighted. It was in imitation of Callimachus, too, that Ovid wrote his Ibis. In a word, Roman poetry owes so deep a debt to Alexandria