thing but "pleasantries
and trifles." Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries
electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art-critics
of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius
as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries
as well as their successors were completely right. The Latin nation
has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance
and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection
as in Catullus; and in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus
is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show.

Poems in Prose
Romances

Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch. The law
of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which had hitherto remained
unchangeable--that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting
should go together--gave way before the intermixture and disturbance
of all kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant
features of this period. As to romances indeed nothing farther
is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian of this epoch,
Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to translate into Latin
the much-read Milesian tales of Aristides--licentious fashionable novels
of the most stupid sort.

Varro's Aesthetic Writings

A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this debateable
border-land between poetry and prose was the aesthetic writings
of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative
of Latin philologico-historical research, but one of the most fertile
and most interesting authors in belles-lettres. Descended
from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land
but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate,
strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,(21) and already
at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro
of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course,
to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic
part in its doings and sufferings. He supported it, partly
in literature--as when he combated the first coalition,
the "three-headed monster," in pamphlets; partly in more serious
warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant
of Further Spain.(22) When the cause of the republic was lost,
Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library
which was to be formed in the capital. The troubles
of the following