=Importance of the Latin Literature and Language.=—­Latin literature profited by the conquests of Rome; the Romans carried it with their language to their barbarian subjects of the West.  All the peoples of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the Danubian lands discarded their language and took the Latin.  Having no national literature, they adopted that of their masters.  The empire was thus divided between the two languages of the two great peoples of antiquity:  the Orient continued to speak Greek; almost the entire Occident acquired the Latin.  Latin was not only the official language of the state functionaries and of great men, like the English of our day in India; the people themselves spoke it with greater or less correctness—­in fact, so well that today eighteen centuries after the conquest five languages of Europe are derived from the Latin—­the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Roumanian.

With the Latin language the Latin literature extended itself over all the West.  In the schools of Bordeaux and Autun in the fifth century only Latin poets and orators were studied.  After the coming of the barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who were still speaking their native languages.  Throughout almost the whole mediaeval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science were written in Latin.  In the convents and the schools they read, copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of piety only the Latin authors were known—­Vergil, Horace, Cicero, and Pliny the Younger.  The renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted partly in reviving the forgotten Latin writers.  More than ever it was the fashion to know and to imitate them.

As the Romans constructed a literature in imitation of the Greeks, the moderns have taken the Latin writers for their models.  Was this good or bad?  Who would venture to say?  But the fact is indisputable.  Our romance languages are daughters of the Latin, our literatures are full of the ideas and of the literary methods of the Romans.  The whole western world is impregnated with the Latin literature.

THE ARTS

=Sculpture and Painting.=—­Great numbers of Roman statues and bas-reliefs of the time of the empire have come to light.  Some are reproductions and almost all are imitations of Greek works, but less elegant and less delicate than the models.  The most original productions of this form of art are the bas-reliefs and the busts.

Bas-reliefs adorned the monuments (temples, columns, and triumphal arches), tombs, and sarcophagi.  They represent with scrupulous fidelity real scenes, such as processions, sacrifices, combats, and funeral ceremonies and so give us information about ancient life.  The bas-reliefs which surround the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius bring us into the presence of the great scenes of their wars.  One may see the soldiers fighting against the barbarians, besieging their fortresses, leading away the captives; the solemn sacrifices, and the emperor haranguing the troops.