had not merely as hitherto to seek its groundwork generally in the Greek, but had also to put itself on a level with the Greek literature of the present, or in other words with Alexandrinism.  With the scholastic Latin, with the closed number of classics, with the exclusive circle of classic-reading -urbani-, the national Latin literature was dead and at an end; there arose instead of it a thoroughly degenerate, artificially fostered, imperial literature, which did not rest on any definite nationality, but proclaimed in two languages the universal gospel of humanity, and was dependent in point of spirit throughout and consciously on the old Hellenic, in point of language partly on this, partly on the old Roman popular, literature.  This was no improvement.  The Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar was doubtless a grand and—­ what is more—­a necessary creation; but it had been called into life by an arbitrary superior will, and therefore there was nothing to be found in it of the fresh popular life, of the overflowing national vigour, which are characteristic of younger, more limited, and more natural commonwealths, and which the Italian state of the sixth century had still been able to exhibit.  The ruin of the Italian nationality, accomplished in the creation of Caesar, nipped the promise of literature.  Every one who has any sense of the close affinity between art and nationality will always turn back from Cicero and Horace to Cato and Lucretius; and nothing but the schoolmaster’s view of history and of literature—­ which has acquired, it is true, in this department the sanction of prescription—­could have called the epoch of art beginning with the new monarchy pre-eminently the golden age.  But while the Romano-Hellenic Alexandrinism of the age of Caesar and Augustus must be deemed inferior to the older, however imperfect, national literature, it is on the other hand as decidedly superior to the Alexandrinism of the age of the Diadochi as Caesar’s enduring structure to the ephemeral creation of Alexander.  We shall have afterwards to show that the Augustan literature, compared with the kindred literature of the period of the Diadochi, was far less a literature of philologues and far more an imperial literature than the latter, and therefore had a far more permanent and far more general influence in the upper circles of society than the Greek Alexandrinism ever had.

Dramatic Literature
Tragedy and Comedy Disappear

Nowhere was the prospect more lamentable than in dramatic literature.  Tragedy and comedy had already before the present epoch become inwardly extinct in the Roman national literature.  New pieces were no longer performed.  That the public still in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions—­ belonging to this epoch—­of Plautine comedies with the titles and names of the persons altered, with reference to which the managers well added that it was better to see a good old piece than a bad new