and the supremacy of Vergil's genius dominated their minds, becoming an
obsession and a clog rather than an assistance to such poetic genius as
they possessed. The same is true of Horace. As complete a master in
lyric verse as Vergil in heroic, he left the after-comer no possibility
of advance. As for Ovid, there could be only one Ovid: the cleverest and
most heartless of poets, he at once challenged and defied imitation.
Satire alone was left with real chance of success: while the human race
exists, there will always be fresh material for satire, and the imperial
age was destined to give it peculiar force and scope. Further, satire
and its nearest kin, the epigram, were the only forms of literature that
were not seriously impaired by the artificial system of education that
had struck root in Rome.

Otherwise the tendency to artificiality on the one hand and inadequacy
of thought on the other, to which the conditions of its birth and growth
exposed Roman literature, were aggravated to an almost incredible extent
by the absurd system of education to which the unformed mind of the
young Roman was subjected. It will be seen that what Greece gave with
the right hand she took away with the left.

There were three stages in Roman education, the elementary, the
literary, the rhetorical. The first, in which the _litterator_ taught
the three R's, does not concern us here. In the second stage the
_grammaticus_ gave instruction in Greek and Latin literature, together
with the elements of grammar and style. The profound influence of Greece
is shown by Quintilian's recommendation[52] that a boy should start on
Greek literature, and by the fact that boys began with Homer.[53] Greek
authors, particularly studied, were Aesop, Hesiod, the tragedians, and
Menander.[54] Among Roman authors Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius,
Afranius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence were much read, though there