Roman Literature in Relation to Roman Art (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: grouped correctly-finished verses of Virgil to the rhetorical style of Lucan, flooded with long descriptions, catalogues, and epigrammatic speeches; it was changed from Scipio's TOMB OF SCI HO. simple tomb to the mausoleum of Augustus, with its bronze statues, its massive Babylonian ledgcd terraces, and its oriental approach flanked with Egyptian obelisks. Nor was it only in the style and subjects of their poetry, or in TOMK AT ATHENS. the ornamentation of their monumental designs that this influence made itself felt. Foreign and oriental mythology introduced itself and brought a composite mixture of gods, heroes, personifications, strange modes of worship, and superstitions innumerable. The danger to which Roman poetical art was exposed by the intrusion of foreign and oriental mythology and art, and a disposition to adopt and combine them with Latin design and execution, is spoken of by Horace in one of his best known critical satires: Atquc ego cum Graccos facerem, natus mare citra, Versiculos, vetuit me tali vocc Ouirinus: In silvam non ligna feras insanius ac si Magnas Graecorum mails implere catervas -SVr/. I. 10, 31. The attempt to render their style ornate and to look learned was naturally the chief cause of this mixture of Greek with Latin, the extent of which will be familiar to the readers of Lucilius and of most early Latin poets, and to those who are fond of reading Cicero's letters. Horace exclaims that to imitate a mere PitholcOn was easy enough, At magnum fecit, quod verbis Graeca Latinis Miscuit. O seri studiorum quine putetis Difficile et mirum, Rhodio quod Pitholeonti Contigit Sat. i, 10,20.' I'itholcon having mixed Latin and Greek in his epigrammatic verses. Cicero in his treatise, Brutus, ch. xix. 75, when comparing...