Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/308

 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. On the other hand, novel subjects, a new feeling, and different social conditions evoked novel forms of poetry. Prudentius' FsychomacJiia was a novelty, and his ballad hymns of the Peristephanon had no pagan predecessors; though possibly a certain relationship may be felt between the jaunty hexameters of the Greek Hymn to Hermes and the Latin Christian poet's ballad-hymn in honor of St. Laurence. Pagan poetry had its songs or "hymns" in honor of gods and heroes. But the substance, more especially the feel- ing, of the veritable Christian hymns of worship was so different from anything in pagan literature or life that new forms of composition were evolved as the Christian spirit attained the power of self-expression. The drama is an exception to the general fact of the continuity between the antique and mediaeval forms of Latin literature. Long before the time of Constantino the pantomime and the arena had de- stroyed the theatre. The people cared for neither tragedies nor comedies. In the fourth and fifth cen- turies there was no drama to pass over into Christian literature with the other antique forms of composi- tion. The rhetorical tragedies ascribed to Seneca are the latest extant Latin pagan plays; and probably they were not written to be acted. We know of no further dramatic compositions until the middle of the tenth century, when Hrotsvith of Gandersheim wrote her pious imitations of Terence. Hrotsvith does not Po48ie Alexandrine, p. 62); then the Alexandrians, Philetas, Her- mesianax, Callimachus ; and then the Latins, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Love was the usual theme of the Alexandrian and Latin elegiac poets.