minds of a literature rich in morality and patriotism, and who reflect
upon the greater amplitude of literary instruction among the ancients,
by whom a Homer, a Virgil, or a Horace was made the vehicle of
discipline so broad and varied as to be an education in itself.


3. HORACE AND THE MIDDLE AGE

There is no such thing as a line marking definitely the time when
ancient Rome ceased to be itself and became the Rome of the Middle Age.
If there were such a line, we should probably have crossed it already,
whether in recording the last real Roman setting of the Horatian house
in order by Mavortius in 527, or in referring to Venantius Fortunatus,
the last of the Latin Christian poets. The usual date marking the end of
the Western Empire, 476, is only the convenient sign for the culmination
of the movement long since begun in the interferences of an army
composed more and more of a non-Italian, Northern soldiery, and ending
in a final mutiny or revolt which assumed the character of invasion and
the permanent seizure of civil as well as military authority. The coming
of Odoacer is the ultimate stage in the process of Roman and Italian
exhaustion, the sign that life is not longer possible except through
infusion of northern blood.

The military and political change itself was only exterior, the outward
demonstration of deep-seated maladies. The too-successful
bureaucratization of Augustus and such of his successors as were really
able and virtuous, the development of authority into tyranny by such as
were neither able nor virtuous, but mad and wilful, had removed from
Roman citizenship the responsibility which in the olden time had made it
strong; and the increase of taxes, assessments, and compulsory honors