of matter, but direct transferences--of Sylvester's Du Bartas. While
Lucretius was a boy, Cicero published the version in Latin hexameters of
the _Phaenomena_ and _Prognostica_ of Aratus to which reference has
already been made. These poems consist of only between eleven and twelve
hundred lines in all, but had, in the later Alexandrian period, a
reputation (like that of the _Sepmaine_ of Du Bartas) far in excess of
their real merit, and were among the most powerful influences in founding
the new style. The many imitations in Lucretius of the extant fragments
of these Ciceronian versions show that he must have studied their
vocabulary and versification with minute care. The increased technical
possibilities shown by them to exist in the Latin hexameter--for in them,
as in nearly all his permanent work, Cicero was mastering the problem of
making his own language an adequate vehicle of sustained expression--may
even have been the determining influence that made Lucretius adopt this
poetical form. Till then it may have been just possible that native
metrical forms might still reassert themselves. Inscriptions of the last
century of the Republic show that the saturnian still lingered in use
side by side with the rude popular hexameters which were gradually
displacing it; and the _Punic War_ of Naevius was still a classic.
Lucretius' choice of the hexameter, and his definite conquest of it as a
medium of the richest and most varied expression, placed the matter
beyond recall. The technical imperfections which remained in it were now
reduced within a visible compass; its power to convey sustained argument,
to express the most delicate shades of meaning, to adjust itself to the
greatest heights and the subtlest tones of emotion, was already acquired
when Lucretius handed it on to Virgil. And here, too, as well as in the
wide field of literature with which his fame is more intimately
connected, from the actual impulse given by his own early work and
heightened by admiration of his brilliant maturity, even more than from
the dubious tradition of his critical revision of the poem, the glory of