eat poets
and orators, is certain to breed a whole army of slaves. The teachers,
employed by the machine to expound ideas not their own, soon erect
systems of pedantic dogma, under which the living part of literature is
buried. The experience of ancient Rome is being repeated in the England
of to-day. The officials responsible for education, whatever they may
uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities of their work to
encourage uniformity, and national education becomes a warehouse of
second-hand goods, presided over by men who cheerfully explain the mind
of Burke or of Shakespeare, adjusting the place of each, and balancing
faults against merits. But Roman education throughout the Empire had
further difficulties to encounter. To understand these it must be
remembered what Latin literature was. The Latins, when we first discern
them in the dim light of the past, were a small, strenuous, political
people, with a passion for government and war. They first subdued Italy,
and no very serious culture-problem resulted from that conquest. The
Etruscans certainly contributed much to Latin civilization, but their
separate history is lost. No one knows what the Etruscans thought. The
Romans do not seem to have cared. They welded Italy together, and
thereafter came into contact with the older, richer civilizations of the
Mediterranean shores. The chief of these, in its influence, was the
Greek civilization, as it had developed in that famous group of free city
states, fostered by the sun and air, and addicted to life. In Athens, at
the time of her glory, life was not a habit, but an experiment. Even the
conservative Romans were infected. They fell under the sway of Greek
thought. When a practical man of business becomes intimate with an
artist, he is never the same man again. The thought of that
disinterested mode of life haunts his dreams. So Rome, though she had
paid little regard to the other ancient peoples with whom she had had
traffic and war, put herself to school to the Greeks. She accepted the
Greek pantheon, renamed the Greek gods and goddesses, and translated and
adopted Greek culture. The real Roman religion was a religion of the
homestead, simple, pious, domestic, but they now added foreign ornaments.
So also with literature; their own native literature was scanty and
practical--laws and rustic proverbs--but they set themselves to produce a
new literature, modelled on the Greek. Virgil followed