At the end of the poem the lines:
Illa cantat, nos tacemus. Quando ver venit meum?
Quando fiam ut chelidon et tacere desinam?
Perdidi Musam tacendo nec me Apollo respicit,[132]
sound like the wail of the old literature, which no spring was to awaken to new song. Indeed, the Pervigilium Veneris is almost as much mediæval as classical. Its quantitative rhythm coincides with the natural accent of the words, it is full of assonances that suggest both alliteration and rhyme, its spirit is almost modern in its sentiment; and even in its grammatical structure, especially in the use of the preposition de, it points forward to the great changes to come.
In prose and verse alike, the second century after Christ was a period of innovations. The new methods of Fronto and Apuleius did not hold their own for any great length of time, but they serve as symptoms of the decay of Latin speech, and may even have hastened that decay by turning men away from the continued imitation of the classic writers. The history of classical Roman literature may be said to end with Suetonius. But something of the old spirit survived even into the period of the Middle Ages and affected strongly the literature of the Christian church. For this reason it is well to give a brief sketch of early Christian literature in Latin, and of the surviving remnants of pagan literary activity in the third and fourth centuries.
CHAPTER XVIII
EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITERS