enuine work
of art issued from its workshop, but it extended the intellectual
horizon of Hellas over Italy. Viewed even in its mere outward aspect,
Greek poetry presumes in the hearer a certain amount of positive
acquired knowledge. That self-contained completeness, which is one
of the most essential peculiarities of the dramas of Shakespeare for
instance, was foreign to ancient poetry; a person unacquainted with
the cycle of Greek legend would fail to discover the background and
often even the ordinary meaning of every rhapsody and every tragedy.
If the Roman public of this period was in some degree familiar, as the
comedies of Plautus show, with the Homeric poems and the legends of
Herakles, and was acquainted with at least the more generally current
of the other myths,(71) this knowledge must have found its way to the
public primarily through the stage alongside of the school, and thus
have formed at least a first step towards the understanding of the
Hellenic poetry. But still deeper was the effect--on which the most
ingenious literary critics of antiquity justly laid emphasis--produced
by the naturalization of the Greek poetic language and the Greek
metres in Latium. If "conquered Greece vanquished her rude conqueror
by art," the victory was primarily accomplished by elaborating from
the unpliant Latin idiom a cultivated and elevated poetical language,
so that instead of the monotonous and hackneyed Saturnian the senarius
flowed and the hexameter rushed, and the mighty tetrameters, the
jubilant anapaests, and the artfully intermingled lyrical rhythms
fell on the Latin ear in the mother-tongue. Poetical language is the
key to the ideal world of poetry, poetic measure the key to poetical
feeling; for the man, to whom the eloquent epithet is dumb and the
living image is dead, and in whom the times of dactyls and iambuses
awaken no inward echo, Homer and Sophocles have composed in vain.
Let it not be said that poetical and rhythmical feeling comes
spontaneously. The ideal feelings are no doubt implanted by nature
in the human breast, but they need favourable sunshine in order to
germinate; and especially in the Latin nation, which was but little
susceptible of poetic impulses, they needed external nurture. Nor let
it be said, that, by virtue of the widely diffused acquaintance with
the Greek language, its literature would have sufficed for the
susceptible Roman public. The mysterious charm which language
exerci