e;
but it yielded in the first instance with rare exceptions only premature
or unripe fruits. The number of the "new-fashioned poets" was legion,
but poetry was rare and Apollo was compelled, as always when so many
throng towards Parnassus, to make very short work. The long poems never
were worth anything, the short ones seldom. Even in this literary age
the poetry of the day had become a public nuisance; it sometimes
happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery
as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's
shop, whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding
and the smooth paper. A real public, in the sense in which national
literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians
as well as to the Hellenic; it was thoroughly the poetry of a clique
or rather cliques, whose members clung closely together,
abused intruders, read and criticised among themselves the new poems,
sometimes also quite after the Alexandrian fashion celebrated
the successful productions in fresh verses, and variously sought
to secure for themselves by clique-praises a spurious and ephemeral
renown. A notable teacher of Latin literature, himself poetically
active in this new direction, Valerius Cato appears to have exercised
a sort of scholastic patronage over the most distinguished men
of this circle and to have pronounced final decision on the relative
value of the poems. As compared with their Greek models,
these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom,
sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products
must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry
still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature.
Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns
far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done,
a greater correctness and consistency in language and metre
were certainly attained; but it was at the expense of the flexibility
and fulness of the national idiom. As respects the subject-matter,
under the influence partly of effeminate models, partly
of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance
little conducive to poetry; but the favourite metrical compendia
of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as
the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end
of this or more probably at the commencement of the following period,
the geographical m