[286]. Here, however, as elsewhere, the fatally parasitic character of the whole literature comes in. There is little doubt (see Nettleship, op. cit.) that the piece was very closely modelled upon the work of a certain Neoptolemus of Parium, an Alexandrian critic, whose date is not known.
[287]. Here comes in one of the most famous and often-quoted of the “tags”—difficile est proprie communia dicere, a sentence which, hackneyed as it is, is not altogether easy to translate fully even by itself, and becomes in the context less easy still.
[288]. I had hoped that no reader would want explanation of this, but it has been hinted to me that some may. For them only, I note that the saying, the thought of which has found various and frequent expression, is slightly altered in form from Dryden, and is one of his happiest scholasticisms. It glances, utilising the old philosophical opposition-connection of γένεσις and φθορά, at the theory, put later by another person of genius more bluntly, that critics are those who “have failed in literature and art.”
[289]. Poet. Lat. Min. (Baehrens), vi. 139-266. Our greatest English Latinists recently have been singularly unkind to this poet. Munro made what I can only call a violent attack on him: and Mr Nettleship, while allowing him “extraordinary vigour” and “the ring of Caius Gracchus” (see his Essay on the Satires (second series),[series),] where Munro’s diatribe is quoted), practically indorses this. Against such judges I should not have a word to say on the linguistic side: but I claim full parrhesia on the literary. The Virtue passage (which Munro specially refuses to except) is as rough as, say, Marston; but it has a far sincerer, loftier, and more truly poetical tone than anything of the kind in Horace, and than most things in Juvenal. And everywhere I see quality, passion, phrase. Here, at least, I can agree with Cicero (De Orat., ii. 6 and elsewhere), though perurbanus is not exactly the epithet that I should, from his extant writings, myself select for Lucilius.
[290]. Mr Nettleship justly and, considering his enthusiasm for Horace generously contrasts the “comprehensive sympathy” of Ovid (Am., i. 15-19, Trist., ii. 423) with the lack of the same quality in the Venusian.
[291]. Seneca, Contr., i. 2.
[292]. xiv. and xv. Ed. cit. inf. (p. 279 note), pp. 154-169.
[293]. Ibid., xii. The so-called Pasti Cadaveribus. Ed. cit. inf., p. 126.
[294]. Suas., ii. 17. His name, too, was Seneca; and the text is curiously worded.
[295]. Of these equivalents of “Hear! hear!” or “Bravo!” the second is good adopted Latin of all times. The first, well known from Martial, is post-Augustan; the third (which Cicero did not much like) seems to have been both lukewarm and affected.