gifts. As the title of _Gesta Populi Romani_ was given to the _Aeneid_ on
its appearance, so the _Historiae ab Urbe Condita_ might be called, with
no less truth, a funeral eulogy--_consummatio totius vitae et quasi
funebris laudatio_--delivered, by the most loving and most eloquent of
her children, over the grave of the great Republic.




VI.

THE LESSER AUGUSTANS.


The impulse given to Latin literature by the great poets and prose
writers of the first century before Christ ebbed slowly away. The end of
the so-called Golden Age may be conveniently fixed in the year which saw
the death of Livy and Ovid; but the smaller literature of the period
suffered no violent breach of continuity, and one can hardly name any
definite date at which the Silver Age begins. Until the appearance of a
new school of writers in the reign of Nero, the history of Roman
literature is a continuation of the Augustan tradition. But it is
continued by feeble hands, and dwindles away more and more under several
unfavourable influences. Among these influences may be specially noted
the growing despotism of the Empire, which had already become grave in
the later years of Augustus, and under his successors reached a point
which made free writing, like free speech, impossible; the perpetually
increasing importance of the schools of declamation, which forced a
fashion of overstrained and unnatural rhetoric on both prose and verse;
and the paralysing effect of the great Augustan writers themselves, which