of art beginning
with the new monarchy pre-eminently the golden age. But while
the Romano-Hellenic Alexandrinism of the age of Caesar and Augustus
must be deemed inferior to the older, however imperfect, national
literature, it is on the other hand as decidedly superior
to the Alexandrinism of the age of the Diadochi as Caesar's enduring
structure to the ephemeral creation of Alexander. We shall have
afterwards to show that the Augustan literature, compared with
the kindred literature of the period of the Diadochi, was far less
a literature of philologues and far more an imperial literature
than the latter, and therefore had a far more permanent
and far more general influence in the upper circles of society
than the Greek Alexandrinism ever had.

Dramatic Literature
Tragedy and Comedy Disappear

Nowhere was the prospect more lamentable than in dramatic literature.
Tragedy and comedy had already before the present epoch
become inwardly extinct in the Roman national literature.
New pieces were no longer performed. That the public still
in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions--
belonging to this epoch--of Plautine comedies with the titles
and names of the persons altered, with reference to which
the managers well added that it was better to see a good old piece
than a bad new one. From this the step was not great to that entire
surrender of the stage to the dead poets, which we find
in the Ciceronian age, and to which Alexandrinism made no opposition.
Its productiveness in this department was worse than none.
Real dramatic composition the Alexandrian literature never knew;
nothing but the spurious drama, which was written primarily for reading
and not for exhibition, could be introduced by it into Italy, and soon
accordingly these dramatic iambics began to be quite as prevalent
in Rome as in Alexandria, and the writing of tragedy in particular
began to figure among the regular diseases of adolescence.
We may form a pretty accurate idea of the quality of these productions
from the fact that Quintus Cicero, in order homoeopathically
to beguile the weariness of winter quarters in Gaul,
composed four tragedies in sixteen days.

The Mime
Laberius

In the "picture of life" or mime alone the last still vigorous
product of the national literature, the Atellan farce,
became engrafted with the ethological offshoots of Greek comedy,
which Alexandrinism cultivated with greater poetical vigo