For the modern, therefore, it is difficult to restrain a just resentment when he finds Horace referring to these two great predecessors with a sneer.  Yet we can, if we will, detect an adequate explanation of Horace’s attitude.  Very few poets of any time have been able to capture and hold the generation immediately succeeding.  The stronger the impression made by a genius, the farther away is the pendulum of approbation apt to swing.  The neoteroi had to face, in addition to this revulsion, the misfortunes of the time.  The civil wars which came close upon them had little use for the sentimentality of their romances or the involutions of their manner of composition.  And again, Catullus and Calvus had been over-brutal in their attacks upon Julius Caesar, a character lifted to the high heavens by the war and the martyrdom that followed.  And, as fortune would have it, almost all of the new literary men were, as we have seen, peculiarly devoted to Caesar.  We know enough of wars to have discovered that intense partizanship does silence literary judgment except in the case of a very few men of unusual balance.  Vergil was one of the very few; he kept his candle lit at the shrine of Catullus still, but this was hardly to be expected of the rest.

In prose also the Augustans upheld the refined and chaste work of classical Atticism, an ideal which they derived from the Romans of the preceding generation rather than from teachers like Apollodorus.  Pollio and Messalla are now the foremost orators.  Pollio had stood close to Calvus as well as to Caesar, and had witnessed the revulsion of feeling against Cicero’s style which continued to move in its old leisurely course even after the civil war had quickened men’s pulses.  Messalla may have been influenced by the example of his general, Brutus, a man who never wasted words (so long as he kept his temper).  Messalla and Pollio were the dictators of prose style during this period.

We find Vergil, therefore, in a peculiar position.  He was still recognized as a pupil of Catullus and the Alexandrians at a time when the pendulum was swinging so violently away from the republican poets that they did not even get credit for the lessons that they had so well taught the new generation.  Vergil himself was in each new work drifting more and more toward classicism, but he continued to the last to honor Catullus and Calvus, Cinna and Cornificius, and his friend Gallus, in complimentary imitation or by friendly mention.  The new Academy was proud to claim him as a member, though it doubtless knew that Vergil was too great to be bound by rules.  To after ages, while Horace has come to stand as an extremist who carried the law beyond the spirit, Vergil, honoring the past and welcoming the future, has assumed the position of Rome’s most representative poet.

XIV

THE “GEORGICS”