of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance
little conducive to poetry; but the favourite metrical compendia
of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as
the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end
of this or more probably at the commencement of the following period,
the geographical manual of Eratosthenes by Publius Varro of the Aude
and the physico-medicinal manual of Nicander by Aemilius Macer.
It is neither to be wondered at nor regretted that of this countless
host of poets but few names have been preserved to us;
and even these are mostly mentioned merely as curiosities
or as once upon a time great; such as the orator Quintus Hortensius
with his "five hundred thousand lines" of tiresome obscenity,
and the somewhat more frequently mentioned Laevius, whose -Erotopaegnia-
attracted a certain interest only by their complicated measures
and affected phraseology. Even the small epic Smyrna by Gaius
Helvius Cinna (d. 710?), much as it was praised by the clique,
bears both in its subject--the incestuous love of a daughter
for her father--and in the nine years' toil bestowed on it the worst
characteristics of the time.

Catullus

Those poets alone of this school constitute an original
and pleasing exception, who knew how to combine with its neatness
and its versatility of form the national elements of worth still existing
in the republican life, especially in that of the country-towns.
To say nothing here of Laberius and Varro, this description
applies especially to the three poets already mentioned above(20)
of the republican opposition, Marcus Furius Libaculus (652-691),
Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) and Quintus Valerius Catullus
(667-c. 700). Of the two former, whose writings have perished,
we can indeed only conjecture this; respecting the poems of Catullus
we can still form a judgment. He too depends in subject and form
on the Alexandrians. We find in his collection translations of pieces
of Callimachus, and these not altogether the very good,
but the very difficult. Among the original pieces, we meet
with elaborately-turned fashionable poems, such as the over-artificial
Galliambics in praise of the Phrygian Mother; and even the poem,
otherwise so beautiful, of the marriage of Thetis has been
artistically spoiled by the truly Alexandrian insertion
of the complaint of Ariadne in the principal poem. But by the side
of these school-pieces we