y in the
hands of schoolmasters and foreigners and was chiefly translation or
imitation; but, if the primary object of poetry was simply to form
a bridge from Latium to Hellas, Livius and Ennius had certainly a
vocation to the poetical pontificate in Rome, and a translated
literature was the simplest means to the end. It was still less
seemly that Roman poetry preferred to lay its hands on the most worn-
out and trivial originals; but in this view it was appropriate. No
one will desire to place the poetry of Euripides on a level with that
of Homer; but, historically viewed, Euripides and Menander were quite
as much the oracles of cosmopolitan Hellenism as the Iliad and
Odyssey were the oracles of national Hellenism, and in so far
the representatives of the new school had good reason for
introducing their audience especially to this cycle of literature.
The instinctive consciousness also of their limited poetical powers
may partly have induced the Roman composers to keep mainly by
Euripides and Menander and to leave Sophocles and even Aristophanes
untouched; for, while poetry is essentially national and difficult to
transplant, intellect and wit, on which the poetry of Euripides as
well as of Menander is based, are in their very nature cosmopolitan.
Moreover the fact always deserves to be honourably acknowledged, that
the Roman poets of the sixth century did not attach themselves to the
Hellenic literature of the day or what is called Alexandrinism, but
sought their models solely in the older classical literature, although
not exactly in its richest or purest fields. On the whole, however
innumerable may be the false accommodations and sins against the rules
of art which we can point out in them, these were just the offences
which were by stringent necessity attendant on the far from scrupulous
efforts of the missionaries of Hellenism; and they are, in a
historical and even aesthetic point of view, outweighed in some
measure by the zeal of faith equally inseparable from propagandism.
We may form a different opinion from Ennius as to the value of his new
gospel; but, if in the case of faith it does not matter so much what,
as how, men believe, we cannot refuse recognition and admiration to
the Roman poets of the sixth century. A fresh and strong sense of the
power of the Hellenic world-literature, a sacred longing to transplant
the marvellous tree to the foreign land, pervaded the whole poetry of
the sixth century, an