THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

V. The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

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

Chapter XII - Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art

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Page 45

Once more--and for the last time--the poem of Lucretius is resonant with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet is more at home than in his own degenerate age.(18)

18. This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which the seastorms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that trample down those who are on their own side--pictures, that is, from the Punic wars--appear as if they belong to the immediate present. Comp. ii. 41; v. 1226, 1303, 1339.

To him too his own song "gracefully welling up out of rich feeling" sounds, as compared with the common poems, "like the brief song of the swan compared with the cry of the crane";--with him too the heart swells, listening to the melodies of its own invention, with the hope of illustrious honours--just as Ennius forbids the men to whom he "gave from the depth of the heart a foretaste of fiery song," to mourn at his, the immortal singer's, tomb.

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