ends. Only thirteen or fourteen years later a new era begins with the
appearance of Virgil; but this small interval of time is sufficient to
mark the passage from one age--we might almost say from one civilisation
--to another. During these years poetry was almost silent, while the
Roman world shook with continuous civil war and the thunder of prodigious
armies. The school of minor Alexandrian poets still indeed continued; the
"warblers of Euphorion" with their smooth rhythms and elaborate _finesse_
of workmanship are spoken of by Cicero as still numerous and active ten
years after Catullus' death. But their artifice had lost the gloss of
novelty; and the enthusiasm which greeted the appearance of the Eclogues
was due less perhaps to their intrinsic excellence than to the relief
with which Roman poetry shook itself free from the fetters of so rigorous
and exhausting a convention.




CICERO.


Meanwhile, in the last age of the Republic, Latin prose had reached its
full splendour in the hands of the most copious and versatile master of
style whom the Graeco-Roman world had yet produced. The claims of Cicero
to a place among the first rank of Roman statesmen have been fiercely
canvassed by modern critics; and both in oratory and philosophy some
excess of veneration once paid to him has been replaced by an equally
excessive depreciation. The fault in both estimates lay in the fact that
they were alike based on secondary issues. Cicero's unique and
imperishable glory is not, as he thought himself, that of having put down
the revolutionary movement of Catiline, nor, as later ages thought, that