The most prolific writer of epics in the latter half of the Ciceronian Age was Varro Atacinus, the first Transalpine Gaul who appears in Roman literature; the same who is mentioned by Horace as having made an unsuccessful attempt to revive the satire of Lucilius:—
Hoc erat, experto frustra Varrone Atacino[447], etc.
He had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul, and wrote a poem on the war against the Sequani in the traditional form. He also opened up to his countrymen that vein of epic poetry which had been wrought by the Alexandrians. The most famous poem of this kind in the literature of the Republic was the Jason of Varro, imitated probably from the Argonautics of Apollonius. Propertius speaks of this poem in a passage where he classes Varro also among the writers of amatory poetry before his own time, such as Catullus, Cinna, Gallus, and Virgil in his Eclogues:—
Haec quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro,
Varro Leucadiae maxima flamma suae[448].
He is thus as a writer of epic poems, on the one side, of the native school of Ennius and the Annalists; on the other, he is the originator of that other type of Roman epic which appears under the Empire in the Thebaid and Achilleid of Statius and the Argonautics of Valerius Flaccus.
The two great poets of the later Ciceronian era introduced a great change into Roman poetry,—the practice of careful composition. They are the first artistic poets of Rome. The rapidity of composition which characterised all the earlier writers was, in the rude state of the language at that time, incompatible with high accomplishment. We read of Cicero writing five hundred hexameters in a night, and of his brother Quintus writing four tragedies in sixteen days. The true sense of artistic finish first appeared in Lucretius, and to a greater degree in Catullus, and the younger men of the Ciceronian Age, Licinius Calvus, Helvius Cinna, etc. The contempt with which the younger school regarded the old fashion of composition appears in Catullus’ references—neither delicate nor complimentary—to the ‘Annales Volusi,’ the ponderous annalistic epic of his countryman (conterraneus) Tanusius Geminus[449]. But in this younger school, poetry separated itself entirely from [pg 293]the national life, or dealt with it only in the form of personal epigrams on the popular leaders and their partisans. The dignity of the hexameter was reserved by them for didactic or philosophic poetry and short epic idyls treating of the heroic legends of Greece. Didactic poetry, directing the attention to contemplation instead of action, established itself as a successful rival to the old historical epic, in the province of serious literature.
The latter, however, still found representatives in the following generation. Thus Anser, the panegyrist of Antony, is familiarly known, owing to one of the few satiric allusions which have been attributed to Virgil:—
Nam neque adhuc Vario videor nec dicere Cinna
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores[450].