any man of the capital have written a poem like the deeply pathetic one on his brother’s death, or the excellent genuinely homely festal hymn for the marriage of Manlius and Aurunculeia.  Catullus, although dependent on the Alexandrian masters and standing in the midst of the fashionable and clique poetry of that age, was yet not merely a good scholar among many mediocre and bad ones, but himself as much superior to his masters as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters.  Eminent creative vigour indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him; he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems are, as he himself calls them, nothing but “pleasantries and trifles.”  Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art-critics of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries as well as their successors were completely right.  The Latin nation has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection as in Catullus; and in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show.

Poems in Prose
Romances

Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch.  The law of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which had hitherto remained unchangeable—­that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting should go together—­gave way before the intermixture and disturbance of all kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant features of this period.  As to romances indeed nothing farther is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian of this epoch, Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to translate into Latin the much-read Milesian tales of Aristides—­licentious fashionable novels of the most stupid sort.

Varro’s Aesthetic Writings

A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this debateable border-land between poetry and prose was the aesthetic writings of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative of Latin philologico-historical research, but one of the most fertile and most interesting authors in belles-lettres.  Descended from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate, strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,(21) and already at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course, to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic part in its doings and sufferings.  He supported it, partly in literature—­as when he combated the first coalition, the “three-headed monster,” in pamphlets; partly in more serious warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant of Further Spain.(22) When the cause of the republic was lost, Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library which was to be formed in the capital.  The troubles of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex, and it was not till seventeen years after Caesar’s death, in the eighty-ninth year of his well-occupied life, that death called him away.