Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/314

 262 Outlines of European History merchants multiply in the Roman Forum and along the river front. Amid the hum of voices on street or in market the sound of Greek becomes more and more familiar to Roman ears. Here and there a household possesses a Greek slave of educa- tion, and the parents are glad to have their children follow him about the house, picking up verses from Homer, or sit at his- elbow learning to read. Among the Greek slaves from southern Italy in Rome at this time is a youn^ man named Andronicus. Just after the Sicilian war with Carthage he is given his liberty by his lord, and seeing the interest of the Romans in Greek literature, he translates the Homeric Odyssey (p. 142) into Latin as a school book for Roman children. For their elders he likewise renders into Latin the classic tragedies which we have seen in Athens (p. 190), and also a number of Attic comedies (p. 204). These the Romans attend with great delight as they are presented on the stage at the various feasts. Thus the materials and the forms of Greek literature enter Roman life. To be sure, the Latins, like all peasant peoples, have had their folk songs and their simple forms of verse, but these natural prod- ucts of the soil of Latium now disappear as the men of Latin speech feel the influence of an already highly finished literature. Latin literature, therefore, did not develop along its own lines from native beginnings, as did Greek literature, but it grew up on the basis of a great inheritance from abroad. Indeed, we now see, as the poet Horace said, that Rome, the conqueror, was being conquered by the civilization of the Greeks, into whose world Roman power was now pushing out. For books, music, works of art, architecture, and all those things which belong to the more refined and the higher side of life, the Roman was at first dependent entirely upon the Greek. What the Romans were furnishing of their own was a more stable and powerful organi- zation than any devised by the Greeks. These triumphs of Greek civilization in Rome were being achieved at the very time when Roman political and military