pay a sincere tribute to virtue in all its forms. The
luxurious extravagance of imperial Rome has been equalled and surpassed in
more recent times, and, apart from the vices of slavery and the arena,
modern society has little wherewith to reproach that of the principate.

II. THE INTELLECTUAL WORLD

*Literature.* The principate had two literatures; one Greek, the other
Roman. But the forms of literary production were the same in each, and the
Roman authors took rank with those of Greece in their respective fields.
For the Romans could boast that they had adapted the Latin tongue to the
literary types of the older culture world, while preserving in their work
a spirit genuinely Roman.

*The Augustan age.* The feeling of relief produced by the cessation of the
civil wars, and the hopes engendered by the policy of Augustus inspired a
group of writers whose genius made the age of Augustus the culminating
point in the development of Roman poetry, like the age of Cicero in Roman
prose. Foremost among the poets of the new era was Virgil (70-19 B. C.),
the son of a small landholder of Mantua, whose _Aeneid_, a national epic,
the glorification alike of Rome and of the Julian house, placed him with
Homer in the front rank of epic poets for all time. His greatest
contemporary was Horace (65-8 B. C.), the son of a freedman from South
Italy. It was Horace who first wrote Latin lyrics in the complicated
meters of Greece, and whose genial satire and insight into human nature
have combined with his remarkable happiness of phrase to make him the
delight of cultivated society both in antiquity and modern times. The
leading elegiac poets were Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid (43 B. C.-17
A. D.). In his _Fasti_ and _Metamorphoses_ the latter recounted with
masterly narrative skill the legends of Greek and Roman mythology. His
elegies reveal the spirit of the pleasure-seeking society of new Rome and
show the ineffectiveness of the attempt of Augustus to bring about a moral
regeneration of the Roman people. This, probably, was the true ground for
his banishment from Rome. Livy (59 B. C.-17 A. D.) was the one prose
writer of note in the Augustan age. His history of Rome is a great work of
art, an _Aeneid_ in prose, which celebrated the past greatness of Rome and
the virtues whereby this had been attained--those virtues which Augustus
aimed to revive.

*The age of Nero.* From Augustus to Nero there are no names of