That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a Vergil, a
Horace, and--most wonderful of all--an Ovid was an amazing achievement,
rendered not the less astonishing when it is remembered that the stern
bent of the practical Roman mind did not in earlier days give high
promise of poetry. The marvel is not wholly to be explained by the
circumstances of the age. The new sense of power, the revival of the
national spirit under the warming influence of peace and hope, that
characterize the brilliant interval between the fall of the republic and
the turbid stagnation of the empire, are not enough to account for it.
Their influence would have been in vain had they not found remarkable
genius ready for the kindling.

The whole field of literature had been so thoroughly covered by the
great writers of Hellas, that it was hard for the imitative Roman to be
original. As far as epic poetry was concerned, Rome had poor material
with which to deal: neither her mythology--the most prosaic and
business-like of all mythologies--nor her history seemed to give any
real scope for the epic writer. The Greek mythology was ready to hand,
but it was hard for a Roman to treat it with high enthusiasm, and still
harder to handle it with freshness and individuality. The purely
historical epic is from its very nature doomed to failure. Treated with
accuracy it becomes prosy, treated with fancy it becomes ridiculous.
Vergil saw the one possible avenue to epic greatness. He went back into
the legendary past where imagination could have free play, linked
together the great heroic sagas of Greece with the scanty materials
presented by the prehistoric legends of Rome, and kindled the whole work
to life by his rich historical imagination and his sense of the grandeur
of the Rome that was to be. His unerring choice of subject and his
brilliant execution seemed to close to his successors all paths to epic
fame. They had but well-worn and inferior themes wherefrom to choose,