especially in those circles of the higher Roman society which had suffered but little or not at all from vulgarism; and, as was already said, there were still such, although they were beginning to disappear.  The earlier Latin and the good Greek literature, however considerable was the influence of the latter more especially on the rhythm of his oratory, were in this matter only of secondary moment:  this purifying of the language was by no means a reaction of the language of books against that of conversation, but a reaction of the language of the really cultivated against the jargon of spurious and partial culture.  Caesar, in the department of language also the greatest master of his time, expressed the fundamental idea of Roman classicism, when he enjoined that in speech and writing every foreign word should be avoided, as rocks are avoided by the mariner; the poetical and the obsolete word of the older literature was rejected as well as the rustic phrase or that borrowed from the language of common life, and more especially the Greek words and phrases which, as the letters of this period show, had to a very great extent found their way into conversational language.  Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing beyond recovery.  Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself.  With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious authorship of the latter gave to this classicism—­what it had hitherto lacked—­extensive prose texts.  Thus Cicero became the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist; it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less to the statesman, that the panegyrics—­extravagant yet not made up wholly of verbiage—­applied, with which the most gifted representatives of classicism, such as Caesar and Catullus, loaded him.

The New Roman Poetry

They soon went farther.  What Cicero did in prose, was carried out in poetry towards the end of the epoch by the new Roman school of poets, which modelled itself on the Greek fashionable poetry, and in which the man of most considerable talent was Catullus.  Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm, so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e. g. from the time of Catullus, it is no longer allowable at once to begin a verse and to close a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.