Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/284

 on slave-labour it was really impossible that the democratic sentiment of equality could count for much. The Roman citizen had only to walk out into streets thronged with slaves in order to realise the truth that plebeian citizenship was, after all, only an aristocracy with a larger radius than the old circle of patrician kinship. To the other ruinous results of Roman slavery—decline of production and population, discredit of manual labour, discouragement of legitimate marriage, and the like—must be added the constant evidence it afforded that high-flown language of social reformers, as in appeals to the "Law of Nature," were but expressions of an organised hypocrisy. When it is also remembered that old Roman religion long before the time of the emperors had become such a farce that Cicero wondered how two augurs could meet without bursting into laughter in one another's face, it need not surprise us that Roman literature produced its most original works in satires which exposed the political, religious, and moral hypocrisy upon which the decaying republic as well as the empire depended for social stability. In such works the rage of an Archilochus or the misanthropy of a Swift can do great things, because they are built out of unsocial antipathies, personal piques, and all that little meanness which is fatal to the truly constructive imagination nothing but wide and deep social sympathies can create.

§ 69. But over and above this individualism, which must have sadly chilled any original imagination of the Roman poets, there was another cause which, from the rise of the empire, turned the makers of Roman literature to cosmopolitan and courtly Alexandria for guidance. This was the centralisation of all power in the person of the emperor. The adulation of Callimachus, who found among the stars the stolen tresses of Berenice, was now to