otic and mythological
nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt.
But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called
into existence the Roman Alexandrinism; it was on the contrary
a product--perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable--
of the political and national development of Rome. On the one hand,
as Hellas resolved itself into Hellenism, so now Latium
resolved itself into Romanism; the national development of Italy
outgrew itself, and was merged in Caesar's Mediterranean empire,
just as the Hellenic development in the eastern empire of Alexander.
On the other hand, as the new empire rested on the fact
that the mighty streams of Greek and Latin nationality, after having
flowed in parallel channels for many centuries, now at length coalesced,
the Italian literature had not merely as hitherto to seek
its groundwork generally in the Greek, but had also to put itself
on a level with the Greek literature of the present, or in other words
with Alexandrinism. With the scholastic Latin, with the closed number
of classics, with the exclusive circle of classic-reading -urbani-,
the national Latin literature was dead and at an end; there arose
instead of it a thoroughly degenerate, artificially fostered,
imperial literature, which did not rest on any definite nationality,
but proclaimed in two languages the universal gospel of humanity,
and was dependent in point of spirit throughout and consciously
on the old Hellenic, in point of language partly on this,
partly on the old Roman popular, literature. This was no improvement.
The Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar was doubtless a grand and--
what is more--a necessary creation; but it had been called
into life by an arbitrary superior will, and therefore
there was nothing to be found in it of the fresh popular life,
of the overflowing national vigour, which are characteristic of younger,
more limited, and more natural commonwealths, and which the Italian
state of the sixth century had still been able to exhibit.
The ruin of the Italian nationality, accomplished in the creation
of Caesar, nipped the promise of literature. Every one who has
any sense of the close affinity between art and nationality
will always turn back from Cicero and Horace to Cato and Lucretius;
and nothing but the schoolmaster's view of history and of literature--
which has acquired, it is true, in this department the sanction
of prescription--could have called the epoch