hout reference to the
Greeks, although in a more archaic and far purer taste, that he
composed, in the 1st century before Christ, his magnificent _De rerum
natura_. By universal consent, this is the noblest didactic poem in the
literature of the world. It was intended to instruct mankind in the
interpretation and in the working of the system of philosophy revealed
by Epicurus, which at that time was exciting the sympathetic attention
of all classes of Roman society. What gave the poem of Lucretius its
extraordinary interest, and what has prolonged and even increased its
vitality, was the imaginative and illustrative insight of the author,
piercing and lighting up the recesses of human experience. On a lower
intellectual level, but of a still greater technical excellence, was the
_Georgics_ of Virgil, a poem on the processes of agriculture, published
about 30 B.C. The brilliant execution of this famous work has justly
made it the type and unapproachable standard of all poetry which desires
to impart useful information in the guise of exquisite literature.
Himself once a farmer on the banks of the Mincio, Virgil, at the apex of
his genius, set himself in his Campanian villa to recall whatever had
been essential in the agricultural life of his boyish home, and the
result, in spite of the ardours of the subject, was what J. W. Mackail
has called "the most splendid literary production of the Empire." In the
rest of surviving Latin didactic poetry, the influence and the imitation
of Virgil and Lucretius are manifest. Manilius, turning again to
Alexandria, produced a fine _Astronomica_ towards the close of the reign
of Augustus. Columella, regretting that Virgil had omitted to sing of
gardens, composed a smooth poem on horticulture. Natural philosophy
inspired Lucilius junior, of whom a didactic poem on Etna survives. Long
afterwards, under Diocletian, a poet of Carthage, Nemesianus, wrote in
the manner of Virgil the _Cynegetica_, a poem on hunting with dogs,
which has had numerous imitations in later European literatures. These
are the most important specimens of didactic poetry which ancient Rome
has handed down to us.

In Anglo-Saxon and early English poetic literature, and especially in
the religious part of it, an element of didacticism is not to be
overlooked. But it would be difficult to say that anything of importance
was written in verse with the sole purpose of imparting information,
until we reach the 16th century.