Such a spirit has more than once in the history of the arts marked the
point from which their downward course began. _I do not sing the old
things, for the new are far better_, the famous Greek musician Timotheus
had said four centuries earlier, and the decay of Greek music was dated
from that period. But to make any artist, however eminent, responsible
for the decadence of art, is to confuse cause with effect; and the note
of ignominy affixed by Augustus to the _Art of Love_ was as futile as the
action of the Spartan ephor when he cut the strings away from the cithara
of Timotheus. The actual achievement of Ovid was to perfect and
popularise a poetical form of unusual scope and flexibility; to throw a
vivid and lasting life into the world of Graeco-Roman mythology; and,
above all, to complete the work of Cicero and Horace in fixing a certain
ideal of civilised manners for the Latin Empire and for modern Europe. He
was not a poet of the first order; yet few poets of the first order have
done a work of such wide importance.




V.

LIVY.


The Ciceronian age represents on the whole the culmination of Latin
prose, as the Augustan does the culmination of Latin poetry. In the
former field, the purity of the language as it had been used by Caesar
and Cicero could hardly be retained in a period of more diffused culture;
and the influence of the schools of rhetoric, themselves based on
inferior Greek models, became more and more marked. Poetry, too, was for