Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/283

 that without her Rome might never have possessed a Catullus, an Ovid, a Vergil. Where shall we find the cause of this indebtedness? In similarity of social conditions, in the great truth that literature, even in its imitative work, depends on contemporary life and thought; that no number of exquisite models can make up for deficiencies in these living sources of inspiration. If it were otherwise, not only would the making of literatures be matter of chance or personal caprice, but the scientific study of literature would almost be an absurdity.

The main characteristics of Roman, as of Alexandrian, world-literature are its individualism and the colossal personality of the emperor, who, in an age when force alone held the community together, absorbed as the world-god all the divinity Roman courtiers could feel. In the satirists of Rome we have the spirit of this individualism crying aloud, a spirit which only takes permanent possession of a community when a profound belief in human selfishness has become the terrible substitute for a creed. "Satira tota nostra est," says Quintilian; and, though the satiric spirit was by no means absent from Athens, we must allow that, in spite of the moral purposes to which Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal applied it, only the Rome of the empire could have produced such witnesses to social disintegration as the works of the last three writers. It was an error, common until Mommsen (erring, perhaps, in the opposite direction) had exposed the sham of later Roman Republicanism, to suppose that this disintegration was due to the decay of old Roman life alone. It was to a large extent the result of an organised religious, political, and moral hypocrisy which the coexistence of aristocratic rule with mock democracy rendered unavoidable. In a community based