just failed." Rome has no philosophy worth the name, no first-hand original thought; and except Caesar, her historians, though great writers, are partisan and somewhat uncritical. If we have not read Tacitus and Cicero, we hardly realise what man can achieve both in concentrated epigram and close-packed thought, and in ample, rich rhetoric, "like a spreading conflagration enveloping and devouring the land"; 2 but the other Roman prose writers may be matched in more recent literatures. It would be a literary loss never to know that gift of throwing a thought into a few words, which is the peculiar property of Latin, and which has made it the great language for inscriptions. Monumental phrases like the following are typical: Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant (an unfair description of Roman dealings with subject races). Feminis lugere honestum est, viris meminisse. Principes mortales, rempublicam aeternam esse. Breves et infaustos populi Romani amores (on the death of Germanicus). Deorum iniurias dis curae (Tacitus' reply to an obsequious senator who wished a contemporary to be prosecuted for taking in vain the name of the deified 1 H. W. Garrod, A Book of Latin Verse, p. 24. Augustus). Magis alii homines quam alii mores. Volunt reprehendi dum conspici (on fashionable people). Ecce res magna habere imbecillitatem hominis, securitatem dei1 (of the Stoic). No other literature can shew language cut in such high relief, and to be ignorant of Latin is not to know what the human mind can achieve in expression. Still, this by itself could not justify the place of Latin in education. German critics have said that the value of Roman literature is that it has been the vehicle which conveyed Greek ideas to the world; and though this statement is more discreditable to the critics than to the Romans, it contains a particle of truth. The Romans themselves are quite frank in the matter. All their literary forms and metres 2 come from Greece, large masses of their poetry are translations or close imitations of Greek originals. They took their thought, art, and, as far as civilisa 66 دو 1"They make a solitude and call it peace.' "Women should mourn, men remember." Emperors are mortal, the state is eternal." "The darlings of the Roman people are brief-lived and ill-starred." 66 Wrongs to heaven are heaven's affair." "A change of men but not of morals." "Indifferent "It is a great thing to blame, if they can attract attention." to be weak as man, as secure as God.” 2 Except Saturnian and the Versus populares. tion rests on these, their civilisation from Greece: and in the golden age of Rome, when Horace is asked advice by some young tragic poets, he says: My friends, make Greece your model when you write, It is as though all English art came from France, while English literature was either a translation or an imitation of French. Some of the Why, then, do we study Latin? reasons are given by Cicero in a passage where he sums up the excellences of Greece and Rome, and declares the grounds on which his country has a claim to be considered great. "Our mastery of character and of national life, of the family and of the home is far higher and nobler than theirs; our ancestors devised for the state an indubitably better system of laws and institutions. Or again, take the art of war: and think what Rome has achieved in individual heroism and even more in collective discipline. In these achievements which depend not on literary gifts but on character, neither Greece nor any other people can be com1 A.P. 268-9 (tr. Conington). Vos exemplaria Graeca Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna. 1 pared to us. Where will you find a sense of dignity, a resolution of purpose, a loftiness of spirit, a feeling of truth and honour which can be matched with those of old Rome? In learning, in every branch of literature the Greeks are our masters; and victory is easy in an undefended field." In fact he allows intellect to Greece, but claims character for Rome. Shelley has expressed the same thought with a poet's imagination: "The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true and majestic, they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist." 2 It is just here where Greece differs from Rome. When we think of Greece, we think of Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Euripides, not of Alcibiades, Themistocles or Eubulus; and of Pericles himself less as a statesman than as a political thinker. When we think of Rome we think of Cato or Augustus or Pompey or Caesar-and of the last rather as a statesman than as a writer; only in the second place do we think of Horace or Vergil or Livy. What we value in the achievements of Greece is what is written in her literature; what we value in the achievements of Rome is what was 1 Tusc. I. I. 2. 2 Defence of Poetry. done outside her literature. For that literature is not directly concerned with the big problems which Rome had to solve; only at times do its poets complain of their pressure or triumph in their solution, whereas in Greece the poet is as much in the fighting line as the statesman. It is not the fault of Vergil and Horace; the difficulties of their age were material rather than spiritual, and the business of poetry is not with material things. But the fact deprives Roman literature of the peculiar interest of the literature of Greece. If either Greek or Latin had to disappear from education, every lover of literature would prefer that Latin should go. For its literary masterpieces, for its sane and steady view of life, for its intellectual inspiration and stimulus, Greece is unmatched and unmatchable: the Greek temper is so necessary to us, yet so alien from us, that we require it as constitutions of a certain habit require iron. "Greek," as Mr. J. W. Headlam says, "is a medicine, it is not something that belongs to us, it is something to which we go to supplement, correct, and change what is native and indigenous." But to drop either Greek or Latin would be to lame classical education, to cut off one of its two legs. They are complementary; each has a |