Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/285

 be outdone. In his first Eclogue Vergil does not shrink from calling Augustus his god—

So Horace addresses Augustus as a god to whom altars are being raised—

And gradually this worship of the emperor became not merely a piece of courtly flattery or vulgar servility, but the last substitute for a common creed between Romans of wealth and birth, the proletariate, and the provincials.

If we wish to observe the influence of this divine imperial personage on literature, we cannot do better than turn to the pages of the Roman Thucydides—Tacitus, the man of all others opposed to the new divinity. The cessation of the Comitia, the conversion of the Senate into a mere registering machine for imperial decrees, the dependence of the law-courts on the emperor's despotism, had now checked any farther development of Latin prose—if, indeed, under any circumstances it could have been carried higher than the point in which the eloquence of Cicero had culminated. Moreover, the extension of Latin, for administrative purposes, over a vast extent of conquered territory was beginning to affect Roman literature much as a similar cause some centuries later produced the mixture of pure Arabic with Persian and other languages of peoples subjugated to Islâm. As yet, however, prose, the proper medium of Roman literature (for, except the rude Saturnian, Roman metres were only Greek exotics), showed little sign of decay. It is not any