Those years of the early Empire in which the names of Virgil and Horace
stand out above all the rest were a period of large fertility in Latin
poetry. Great poets naturally bring small poets after them; and there was
no age at Rome in which the art was more assiduously practised or more
fashionable in society. The Court set a tone which was followed in other
circles, and more especially among the younger men of the old
aristocracy, now largely excluded from the public life which had
engrossed their parents under the Republic. The influence of the
Alexandrian poets, so potent in the age of Catullus, was not yet
exhausted; and a wider culture had now made the educated classes familiar
with the whole range of earlier Greek poetry as well. Rome was full of
highly educated Greek scholars, some of whom were themselves poets of
considerable merit. It was the fashion to form libraries; the public
collection formed by Augustus, and housed in a sumptuous building on the
Palatine, was only the largest among many others in the great houses of
Rome. The earlier Latin poets had known only a small part of Greek
literature, and that very imperfectly; their successors had been
trammelled by too exclusive an admiration of the Greek of the decadence.
Virgil and Horace, though professed students of the Alexandrians, had
gone back themselves, and had recalled the attention of the public, to
the poets of free Greece, and had stimulated the widely felt longing to
conquer the whole field of poetry for the Latin tongue.

For this attempt, tradition and circumstance finally proved too strong;
and Augustan poetry, outside of a few definite forms, is largely a
chronicle of failure. This was most eminently so in the drama. Augustan
tragedy seems never to have risen for a moment beyond mere academic
exercises. Of the many poets who attempted it, nothing survives beyond a