isinclined towards Alexandrinism.
Its season of comparative brilliance was the period shortly before
and after the first Punic war; yet Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius
and generally the whole body of the national Roman authors
down to Varro and Lucretius in all branches of poetical production,
not excepting even the didactic poem, attached themselves,
not to their Greek contemporaries or very recent predecessors,
but without exception to Homer, Euripides, Menander and the other masters
of the living and national Greek literature. Roman literature
was never fresh and national; but, as long as there was a Roman people,
its authors instinctively sought for living and national models,
and copied, if not always to the best purpose or the best authors,
at least such as were original. The Greek literature originating
after Aexander found its first Roman imitators--for the slight
initial attempts from the Marian age(7) can scarcely be taken
into account--among the contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar;
and now the Roman Alexandrinism spread with singular rapidity.
In part this arose from external causes. The increased contact
with the Greeks, especially the frequent journeys of the Romans
into the Hellenic provinces and the assemblage of Greek literati
in Rome, naturally procured a public even among the Italians
for the Greek literature of the day, for the epic and elegiac poetry,
epigrams, and Milesian tales current at that time in Greece. Moreover,
as we have already stated(8) the Alexandrian poetry had its established
place in the instruction of the Italian youth; and thus reacted
on Latin literature all the more, since the latter continued to be
essentially dependent at all times on the Hellenic school-training.
We find in this respect even a direct connection of the new Roman
with the new Greek literature; the already-mentioned Parthenius,
one of the better known Alexandrian elegists, opened, apparently
about 700, a school for literature and poetry in Rome, and the excerpts
are still extant in which he supplied one of his pupils of rank
with materials for Latin elegies of an erotic and mythological
nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt.
But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called
into existence the Roman Alexandrinism; it was on the contrary
a product--perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable--
of the political and national development of Rome. On the one hand,
as Hellas reso