" The Parthian vizier
was not far wrong, when he pointed out to the citizens of Seleucia
the romances found in the camp of Crassus and asked them whether
they still regarded the readers of such books as formidable opponents.

The Classicists and the Moderns

The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not be otherwise,
for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes.
The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics,
the national-Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Helleno-Italian
or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy,
fought their battles also on the field of literature. The former
attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre,
in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more
the character of classical. With less taste and stronger party
tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius,
and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies. The leaves
of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively
greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets
of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch
of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly
as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors
as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall.
No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion
of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic
of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too
there was no want of trimmers. Cicero for instance, although in prose
one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency,
revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same
antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution
and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying,
"that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation
of Sophocles than the original." While thus the modern literary tendency
cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even
among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there were not wanting already
bolder judges, who treated the native literature as disrespectfully
as the senatorial politics. Not only did they resume the strict
criticism of the Scipionic epoch and set store by Terence only in order
to condemn Ennius and still more