Theocritus only a late flower in the Greek garden of poetry.
§ 98. If I had not written fully on this subject in my recent Greek Life and Thought, and my Greek World under Roman Sway, I should fain conclude with some brief account of the after-glow of Hellenic genius, when the loss of freshness in the language and the life of the people had made pedantry and artificiality common features in the writing of the day. Yet these patent faults did not strike the Romans, whose poets, with only few exceptions, copied Callimachus and Parthenius as the finest models in the world.
From my point of view, though I have cited these facts to show what a superstition the preference of Latin to Greek is, I can urge them as but another evidence of the supremacy of Greece and its right to a spiritual empire over cultivated men. Even debased and decaying Hellenism could produce poetry too good for the ablest disciples to rival, too subtle for any other tongue to express. Can we conclude with any greater tribute to the genius of the race, with any higher recommendation of their history than this, that it is the history of a people whose gifts have never ceased to illumine and to sustain the higher spirits in every society of civilized men?
FOOTNOTES:
[190:1] I am of course speaking generally, nor do I venture to decide without argument the difficult question of the exact status of Greece in the years after 146 B.C.
[196:1] Greek Life and Thought, from Alexander to the Roman Conquest. Macmillan, 1887.
[202:1] The old belief in an original Hebrew Gospel, from which Saint Matthew's was translated, now turns out to have no better foundation than the existence of an old version into Hebrew (Aramaic) for the benefit of the common people who were too ignorant to read Greek. Cf. Dr. Salmon's Introduction to the New Testament.
[203:1] Cf. further details in my Greek Life and Thought, pp. 140, 372.
[206:1] Cf. Mr. W. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, which is built on this idea; also the excellent account in Mr. Bury's new History of the Later Roman Empire, vol. i. chap. i.