Catullus, dying only a few years before the extinction of popular freedom, is, in every nerve and fibre, the poet of a republic. Virgil, even before the final success of Augustus, proclaimed the advent of the new Empire; and he became the sincere admirer and interpreter of its order and magnificence. Most of the other poets of that age, though born before the overthrow of the Republic, show the influence of their time, not only by sympathy with or acquiescence in the new order of things, but by a perceptible lowering in the higher energies of life. Still, the poetry of the Augustan age, if inferior in natural force to that of the Republic, is the culmination of all the previous efforts of Roman art; and is, at the same time, the most complete and elaborate representation of Roman and Italian life.
The chief interest of Roman poetry, considered as the work of men of natural genius and cultivated taste, and as the expression of great national ideas or of individual thought and impulse, ceases with the end of the Augustan age. Under the continued pressure of the Empire, true poetical inspiration and pure feeling for art were lost. One certain test of this decay is the absence of musical power and sweetness from the verse of the later poets. Yet some of the poets of the Empire have their own peculiar greatness. Lucan and Juvenal recall in their vigorous rhetoric the masculine tone and fervid feeling of the old Roman character, liberalised by the progress of thought and education. In the Satires of Persius, there is an atmosphere of purer morality than in any earlier Roman writer, with the exception of Cicero. There is much vigour, sense, wit, and keen appreciation of life, intermingled with the coarseness of Martial. Yet it is owing rather to their rhetorical or their intellectual ability and to their historical value, than to their poetical genius, that these writers are still read and admired. The artificial epics of Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus may be occasionally read in the interests of learning; but it is hardly probable that they will, or desirable that they should, ever be permanently restored from the neglect and oblivion into which they have long been sinking.
This review of Roman poetry will bring before us the origin and progressive growth of a branch of literature, moulded, indeed, on the forms of a foreign art, but executed with native energy, and expressive of native character. In this poetry not the genius only, but the inner nature and sympathies of some of the more interesting men of antiquity are displayed. It throws light on the impulses of thought and feeling which influenced the action of different epochs in Roman history. The great qualities of Rome are seen to mould and animate her poetry. These qualities are found in harmonious union with the spirit of enjoyment and the sense of exuberant life, fostered by the genial air of Italy; and with a refinement of taste drawn from the purest source of human culture which the world has ever enjoyed. After all deductions have been made for their want of inventiveness, it still remains true, that the Roman poets of the last days of the Republic and of the Augustan age have added to the masterpieces of literature some great works of native feeling as well as of finished execution.
[1] Hom. Od. xxii. 348.
[2] Cf. Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 2, 3. Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti vel recepti. At contra oratorem celeriter complexi sumus: nec eum primo eruditum, aptum tamen ad dicendum.
[3] Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Biography, Art. Catullus.
[4] The following lines might be quoted as a specimen of the majesty of the Aeneid:—
Haec finis Priami fatorum; hic exitus illum
Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem
Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum