Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/52

 34 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. relevancy of treatment of subjects having real interest to irrelevancy of treatment of subjects having no real interest ; from setting forth veritable features of human life to devising preposterous fictions; from large de- lineation of human character to the absence of any veritable and distinctive characterization of persons real or imaginary; from setting forth the course of human life according to its most truly considered laws to setting it forth in ways of happening and accident, which bear no true relation to character and situation. These decadent traits do not all appear in any one class of compositions; but those writ- ings which exhibit them most strikingly are those which also show characteristics of mediaeval litera- ture. Among these are works which continued in vogue through the Middle Ages, or served as the originals from which by translation and adaptation were constructed some of the most popular mediaeval compositions. Thus these latter-day Graeco-Roman writings illustrate how the classical, or rather the Graeco-Roman, or Hellenized Roman personality, was intellectually declining to the level of the men of the early mediaeval times, whether barbarians by birth or native denizens of the Empire. Rhetorical studies, and compositions of a rhetorical character, illustrate the indiscriminate use of subjects void of real interest, as well as the irrelevancy of treatment even of the subject chosen. Roman rheto- ric had been a great civilizer and Romanizer of con- quered provinces. The rhetorician followed hard on the army to teach the new provincials the Roman Latin literature, and in a way which fostered oratory