adjacent districts, to swell the turbulent rabble of Clodius.(32)

The territory of Rome, the demesne-lands formerly cultivated by Roman citizens, in which resided the strength of the Roman people, had been gradually drained of the free population. For several centuries it had filled the legions, and those legions had achieved the conquest of the world. But that conquest was not won without enormous loss. The best blood of the Roman people had fertilized the earth, almost from the Euphrates to the Western Ocean. The veterans who returned received apportionments of land; but more frequently in remote parts of Italy: the actual Roman territory therefore, that in which the old Roman language was the native dialect, and in which might survive that Roman pride which would cherish the poetic reminiscences of Roman glory, was now, for the most part, either occupied by the rising villas of the patricians, or by the large farms of the wealthy, and cultivated by slaves. The homestead, from whence a Camillus issued to rescue his country from the Gauls, may now have become a workhouse, in which crouched the slaves of some Verres, enriched with provincial plunder, or some usurious knight; a gang of Africans or Asiatics may have tilled the field where Cincinnatus left his plough to assume the consular fasces. For centuries this

(32) Vell. Paterc. ii. 2; Valer. Max. vi. 2; Cicer. ad Q. Fratrem, ii. 3.

66 Mercedibus emptæ

Et viles operæ, quibus est mea Roma noverca."-Petron. v. 164.

:

change had been gradually going on the wars, and even the civil factions, were continually wasting away the Roman population; while the usurpation of wealth and pride was as constantly keeping up its slow aggression, and filling up the void with the slaves which poured in with every conquest. The story of Spartacus may tell how large a part of the rural population of Italy was servile; and, probably, the nearer to Rome, in the districts formerly inhabited by the genuine Roman people, the change (with some exceptions) was most complete: the Sabine valleys might retain some of the old rough hereditary virtues, the hardihood and frugality; but at a distance from the city it would be their own local or religious traditions which would live among the peasantry, rather than the songs which had been current in the streets among the primitive commons of Rome.

Thus, both in city and in country, had died away the genuine old Roman people; and with them, no doubt, died away the last echo of national song. The extension of the right of Roman citizenship, the diffusion of the pride of the Roman name through a wider sphere, tended still more to soften away the rigid and exclusive spirit of nationality; and it was this spirit alone which would cling pertinaciously to that which laboured under the unpopularity of rudeness and barbarism. The new Romans appropriated the glories of the old, but disregarded the only contemporary, or at least the earliest, witnesses to those glories. The reverse of the fate of the Grecian heroes

(excepting here and there a tragedia prætextata) of Livius Andronicus, Accius, Pacuvius, Plautus, Terence were on Grecian subjects. So completely was this admitted by the time of Horace, that his advice to the dramatic poet is to study Grecian models by night and day:

"Vos exemplaria Græca

Nocturnâ versate manu, versate diurnâ.“

But, on the other hand, the wonderful energies which were developed in the universal conquests of Rome, and in her civil factions, in which the great end of ambition was to be the first citizen in a state which ruled the world, could not but awaken intellectual powers of the highest order. The force and vigour of the Roman character is manifest in the fragments of their early poetry. However rude and inharmonious these translations (for, after all, they are translations), they are full of bold, animated, and sometimes picturesque expressions; and that which was the natural consequence of the domiciliation of a foreign literature among a people of strong and masculine minds invariably took place. Wherever their masters in the art had attained to consummate perfectionwherever the genius of the people had been reflected in their poetry with complete harmony-there, however noble might be the emulation of the disciple, it was impossible that he should approach to his model, especially where his own genius and national character were adverse both to the form and to the poetic conception.