ing
the Nature of Things, however much in it may challenge censure,
has remained one of the most brilliant stars in the poorly illuminated
expanse of Roman literature; and with reason the greatest of German
philologues chose the task of making the Lucretian poem
once more readable as his last and most masterly work.

The Hellenic Fashionable Poetry

Lucretius, although his poetical vigour as well as his art was admired
by his cultivated contemporaries, yet remained--of late growth
as he was--a master without scholars. In the Hellenic fashionable
poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars,
who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters.
With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets
avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry--the drama,
the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances
consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short-
winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains
bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field
intervening between narrative and song. Multifarious didactic
poems were written. Small half-heroic, half-erotic epics
were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy
peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic
of the philological source whence it sprang, in which the poet
more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings,
predominantly sensuous, with epic shreds from the cycle of Greek legend.
Festal lays were diligently and artfully manufactured; in general,
owing to the want of spontaneous poetical invention, the occasional poem
preponderated and especially the epigram, of which the Alexandrians
produced excellent specimens. The poverty of materials and the want
of freshness in language and rhythm, which inevitably cleave
to every literature not national, men sought as much as possible
to conceal under odd themes, far-fetched phrases, rare words,
and artificial versification, and generally under the whole apparatus
of philologico-antiquarian erudition and technical dexterity.
Such was the gospel which was preached to the Roman boys of this period,
and they came in crowds to hear and to practise it; already (about 700)
the love-poems of Euphorion and similar Alexandrian poetry formed
the ordinary reading and the ordinary pieces for declamation
of the cultivated youth.(19) The literary revolution took plac