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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
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Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates

THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

IV. The Revolution

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson


The History of Old Rome

Chapter XIII - Literature and Art

ELPENOR EDITIONS IN PRINT

The Original Greek New Testament

» Contents of this Chapter

Page 64

If, in conclusion, we glance back at the picture as a whole which the literature and art of Italy unfold to our view from the death of Ennius to the beginning of the Ciceronian age, we find in these respects as compared with the preceding epoch a most decided decline of productiveness. The higher kinds of literature--such as epos, tragedy, history--have died out or have been arrested in their development. The subordinate kinds--the translation and imitation of the intrigue-piece, the farce, the poetical and prose brochure--alone are successful; in this last field of literature swept by the full hurricane of revolution we meet with the two men of greatest literary talent in this epoch, Gaius Gracchus and Gaius Lucilius, who stand out amidst a number of more or less mediocre writers just as in a similar epoch of French literature Courier and Beranger stand out amidst a multitude of pretentious nullities.

In the plastic and delineative arts likewise the production, always weak, is now utterly null. On the other hand the receptive enjoyment of art and literature flourished; as the Epigoni of this period in the political field gathered in and used up the inheritance that fell to their fathers, we find them in this field also as diligent frequenters of plays, as patrons of literature, as connoisseurs and still more as collectors in art. The most honourable aspect of this activity was its learned research, which put forth a native intellectual energy, more especially in jurisprudence and in linguistic and antiquarian investigation.

The foundation of these sciences which properly falls within the present epoch, and the first small beginnings of an imitation of the Alexandrian hothouse poetry, already herald the approaching epoch of Roman Alexandrinism. All the productions of the present epoch are smoother, more free from faults, more systematic than the creations of the sixth century. The literati and the friends of literature of this period not altogether unjustly looked down on their predecessors as bungling novices: but while they ridiculed or censured the defective labours of these novices, the very men who were the most gifted among them may have confessed to themselves that the season of the nation's youth was past, and may have ever and anon perhaps felt in the still depths of the heart a secret longing to stray once more in the delightful paths of youthful error.

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/4-13-literature-art.asp?pg=64