well-known vein of wit and keen satire upon passers and passing events, or listening to the declamations of sophists, and other noisy disputants. A few clubs of wits are occasionally to be met with in the present epoch of the history of this people; and a few select assemblies for polite literature and elegant conversation: of which last the most remarkable, perhaps, was that held at the house of the celebrated Aspasia: since it was attended by Socrates and Alcibiades, as well as by almost every other scholar or philosopher of reputation, and by all the most renowned artists of the day. But we meet with no public establishment for a general course of science like that of the universities or the Institutions (as they called) of our own times, excepting their schools, nor with any public library of much note, except that of Pisistratus, which was carried away by Xerxes into Persia before the epoch to which our attention is now directed commenced. Private libraries, however, were not uncommon, though seldom extensive. Those of Aristotle, of Theophratus, and of Euclid, the founder of the school of Megara, were perhaps the largest and most valuable. The art of printing being unknown, books were rare, and copied with great difficulty and expense; sometimes by individuals for their own benefit; but more generally by professional transcribers, who formed a distinct trade. The great mass of Athenians, moreover, though of exquisite taste and elegance, and certainly wealthier than most of the other Grecian states, seldom displayed those splendid fortunes which were so common in Persia. A freehold of the value of fifteen or twenty talents (about four or five thousand pounds sterling), raised a man considerably above the middle ranks of life. The father of Demosthenes was esteemed rich, the whole of whose property on his death amounted to not more than fourteen talents, or £3150 sterling. Plato appears to have given a hundred minæ, or £375 for three small treatises by Philolaus.* But this was a costly purchase: for Aristotle bought the whole library of Speusippus, small indeed, but select, for three talents, or £675.† Hence the trade of bookselling at Athens was generally upon a limited scale, and usually engaged in by persons of but little property, whose stock consisted mostly of books of mere amusement; a part of which, however, was often sent to the adjacent countries, and sometimes as far as to the Greek colonies on the coast of the Euxine.* In respect to books, and the possession of public libraries, RoME was far more fortunate than Athens; and 1 shall now hasten to a brief survey of its literary and scientific character in what may be regarded as its most classical and cultivated era; not the Augustan age, which has usually been contemplated as such, but that which immediately preceded it, reaching from the dictatorship of Sylla to the establishment of Augustus, and of course terminating a few years before the birth of our Saviour. The Romans, who had hitherto devoted themselves altogether to arms and agriculture, and who had even despised eloquence, and paid no attention to the improvement of their native tongue, became attached to literature all of a sudden. The Achæans were accused by the Roman people of having acted hostilely towards them; and a thousand of them were sent as deputies, or rather as hostages, to plead their cause, and obtain the best terms they could for their country before the senate of this aspiring republic. Contrary, however, to the engagement stipulated with them, they were not allowed to enter upon their defence; were scattered over different parts of the republic; forbidden to appear before the senate; and detained, in a state of captivity, for not less than seventeen years. For the most part these Achæans were men of taste and elegant accomplishments, and many of them were scholars of profound and diversified erudition. Such, more especially, was Polybius, who was soon introduced into public favour under the patronage of Scipio Emilianus, and whose elegant Greek writings were now read and studied by every one. The whole republic became enamoured of the various acquisi *Diog. Laert. in Plat. lib. iii. sec. 9, viii. 85. Diog. Laert. in Speus. lib. iv. sec. 5. Aul. Gell. fil. 17t Xenoph. Exped. Cyr. lib. vii. p. 412. Travels of Anacharsis (Eugl. vers.), fii. 130. १ OF FORMER TIMES. tions of its new, but mistreated visitants: and in matters of polite literature the conquerors soon yielded to the conquered. Hence schools for the study and exercise of rhetoric and eloquence, superintended by native Greeks, became in a short time so frequent, that scarcely a Roman youth was to be found who would engage in any other avocation; and the whole body of Greek philosophers and rhetoricians, that remained after the return of the Achæan deputies, were expelled by a decree of the senate during the consulship of Caius Fannius Strabo and Valerius Messala, in the year of the city 592, in consequence of the ascendency they had acquired over the public mind. This expulsion, however, was too late; a general taste for Grecian literature had been caught, and the classical contagion had spread universally. Polybius was still studied, and the consul Rutilius Rufus had published, in elegant Greek, a history of his own country. The Greek scholars, indeed, were still farther avenged a few years afterward, by the general comparison which was drawn between their own genuine taste and that of the tribe of Latin sophists and declaimers, who, in consequence of their banishment, had sprung up and occupied their place: men who were bloated with conceit, instead of being inspired by wisdom; and who substituted the mere tinsel of verbiage for the sterling gold of perspicuous argument and fair induction. With this foppery of learning the Roman government soon became far more disgusted than with the seductive talents of the Greek teachers; and hence, in the year of the city 661, during the censorship of Crassus, the Latin declaimers shared the fate of their predecessors, and were formally banished from Rome. In their own language, therefore, we meet with but few successful specimens of prosaic eloquence down to this period: yet Cato the censor, Lælius, and Scipio were orators of no inconsiderable powers, and eminently, as well as deservedly, esteemed in their day. In poetry, however, the republic had already a right to boast of its productions; for Andronicus, Nævius, and Ennius had long delighted their countrymen with their dramatic as well as their epic labours: Pacuvius and Accius, Plautus, Cæcilius, and Afranus had improved upon the models thus offered them in the former department, and Terence had just carried it to its highest pitch of perfection.* Public museums, also libraries, and collections of valuable curiosities of all kinds, from Greece, Syracuse, Spain, and other parts of the world, were, at this period, becoming frequent and fashionable. Italy was never more emptied of its elegancies and ornaments by Buonaparte, than Syracuse was by Marcellus, when stratagem and treachery at length gave him an admission into the city. In the forcible words of Livy, "he left nothing to the Spain and Africa were in wretched inhabitants, but their walls and houses." the same manner ransacked by the elder Scipio; Macedon and Lacedæmon by Flaminius; Carthage by Scipio Africanus; and Corinth, in the very same year, by Mummius. Nothing, however, can afford a stronger proof of the general want of taste for the fine arts among the Romans, even at this period, than the threat given by Mummius to the masters of the transports to whom he committed his invaluable pillage of the best pictures and statues of Achaia, that if they lost or injured any of them he would oblige them to find others at their own cost. In addition to which I may also observe, that Polybius, who was at this time with the Roman army, found a party of Roman legionaries, shortly after the capture of Corinth, playing at dice on the Bacchus of Aristides; a picture so exquisitely finished as to be accounted one of the wonders of the world. Not knowing the value of it they were readily persuaded to part with it for a more convenient table; and when the spoils of Corinth were afterward put up to sale, Attalus, king of Pergamus, a much better judge of painting than the Roman soldiers, offered for it six hundred thousand sesterces, or about five thousand pounds sterling. Mummius, the Roman consul and general, disbelieving that a picture of any kind could be so valuable of itself, thought it must contain some magical virtue in it; and See the author's Life of Lucretius, prefixed to his translation of the poem De Rerum Natura hence would not allow it to be parted with, notwithstanding the remonstrances of Attalus. He did not, however, appropriate it to his own use, but placed it in the temple of Ceres, where Strabo informs us he had the pleasure of seeing it not long before it was consumed in the fire by which that temple was reduced to ashes.* But the library and museum of most importance at this period, and which most attracted the attention of the Romans, was that established under the patronage and superintendence of the illustrious L. Æmilius Paulus; and consisted of an immense number of volumes, statues, and paintings, which he had imported from Epirus, upon the general plunder and destruction of that unfortunate country, in consequence of its adherence to Perses, king of Macedon, and which had been accumulating ever since the reign of Alexander the Great. This early and valuable collection was continually augmented by presents of other books from men of letters or warriors, into whose hands they occasionally fell as a part of the public spoil: but was more indebted to Lucullus, who had studied philosophy under Antiochus the Ascalonite, than to any one else; and who, about the middle of the seventh century of the city, added to it the whole of the royal library he had seized from Mithridates upon his conquest of Pontus. Yet the transplantation into the Roman capital of the extensive and invaluable libraries of Aristotle and Theophrastus contributed, perhaps, more than any other circumstance, to inflame the Roman people with a love of Grecian literature. This was effected by the conquest of Sylla, and anteceded the public present of Lucullus by about fifteen years. These unrivalled libraries were the property of Apellicon of Teia, who had accumulated an immense collection of books of intrinsic value at an incredible expense. Apellicon does not appear to have been, in any respect, a scholar: but he was a man of inordinate wealth; and, as it sometimes occurs in the present day, a library was his hobby-horse, and the greater part of his rental was expended in augmenting it. For this purpose he ransacked all the public and private collections of books in Asia: he surpassed, in many instances, the offers even of the kings Eumenes and Mithridates, for valuable volumes that had become scarce; and when he was precluded from purchasing, he frequently induced the librarians, by considerable presents, to steal for him. During the first war, however, between Mithridates and the Roman republic, in which Sylla ultimately triumphed, and acquired a high degree of personal glory, Athens, in an evil hour, had united her fortunes with those of the Asiatic prince; and hence, at the conclusion of the war, was left totally at the mercy of the Roman conqueror. Sylla appears to have thrown a wishful eye upon every thing of value that lay within his reach: and having sacrilegiously invaded the groves of Academus and the Lyceum, the library of Apellicon was one of the next objects that captivated his attention. He was determined to add it to his other treasures. Force, however, was now become unnecessary: for at this very moment the bookworm Apellicon died, and he met with no resistance from his relations. The Romans, by thus enriching themselves with the spoils of all the world, became possessed of an influx of wealth that enabled most of the citizens to gratify themselves, not only in this respect, but in almost every other that merely depended upon money. Of the wealth of various individuals, we may form some opinion by the following anecdote. Cæsar, by his unlimited liberality in furnishing shows to the people, had incurred a debt to an enormous amount; and when on the eve of setting out for Spain, the province that fell to him after his prætorship, was abruptly stopped by his creditors. On this occasion Crassus stood forward as his surety, for more than two millions of our own money† (bis millies et quingenties), or, in exact English calculation, £2,018,229 38. 4d. sterling. But the literature of Greece was, nevertheless, best to be acquired in Greece itself; and the Romans, though they transplanted books, could not equally Strab. lib. viii. p. 381. ↑ Stewart's Life of Sallust, i. p. 135; Plut. in Jul. Cæs. p. 712, ed Francof. Suet, in Jul. Cæs. xviii. 22 9 e. trans noft ACT OF FORMER TIMES. transplant the taste and spirit that produced them. Athens, although plundered of her ornaments, shorn of the glory of her original constitution, and dependent upon Rome for protection, had still to boast of her schools and her scholars. Every scene, every edifice, every conversation, was a living lecture of elegance and erudition. Here was the venerable grove in which Plato unfolded his sublime mysteries to enraptured multitudes;-here the awful Lyceum, in which Aristotle had anatomized the springs of human intellect and action;-here the porch of Zeno, still erect and stately as its founder; and here the learned shades and winding walks of THE GARDEN of Epicurus, in which he delineated the origin and nature of things, and inculcated tranquillity and temperance. Here Homer had sung, and Apelles painted; here Sophocles had drawn tears of tenderness, and Demosthenes fired the soul to deeds of heroism and patriotic revenge. The monuments of every thing great or glorious, dignified or refined, wise or virtuous, were still existing at Athens; and she had still philosophers to boast of, who were worthy of her fairest days, of her most resplendent reputation. To this celebrated city, therefore, this theatre of universal learning, the Roman youth of all the first families with the following names, as coperiod we are now contemplatiam, lies were sent for education. And at the students, and chiefly attendants upon the Epicurean school, forming a most extraordinary concentration of juvenile talents and genius: Tully, and his two brothers Lucius and Quintus, the last of whom was afterward a poet, and as signally distinguished in the profession of arms, as the first was in that of eloquence; Titus Pomponius, from his critical knowledge of the Greek tongue surnamed Atticus, but who derives this higher praise from Cornelius Nepos, that "he never deviated from the truth, nor would associate with any one who had done so ;" Lucretius, author of the well-known poem on the Nature of Things; Caius Memmius, the bosom friend of Lucretius, of whose talents and learning the writings of Tully offer abundant proofs, and to whom Lucretius dedicated his poem; Lucretius Vespilio, whom Cicero has enumerated among the orators of his day; Marcus Junius Brutus, Caius Cassius, and Caius Velleius, each of whom immortalized himself by preferring the freedom of his country to the friendship of Cæsar. And when to these I add the names of the following contemporaries, most of whom, we have reason to believe, were also co-students at Athens with those just enumerated-Julius Cæsar himself, Crassus, Sulpitius, Calvus, Varro, Catullus, Sallust, Hortensius, Calpurnius, Piso, Marcus, Marcellus, whose son Caius married Octavia, the sister of Augustus, Atheius, and Asinius Pollio, to whom Virgil dedicated his fourth eclogue, and who founded, expressly for the use of his country, one of the most splendid and extensive libraries the republic was ever possessed of, collected from the spoils of all the enemies he had at any time subdued, and still farther enriched by him at a vast expense, we meet with a galaxy of talents and learning, which neither the Augustan nor any other age in the whole history of the Roman republic can presume to rival. It was the son of Octavia whose ripening virtues and untimely death Virgil is so well known to have referred to in the pathetic tribute introduced into the vision of Eneas: t7.rotalonta on valti flap of noited rumpas, doli to morave na Heu miserande puer: si qua fata aspera Ah, couldst thou break, lov'd youth! thro' fate's decree, This accomplished youth, the delight of the Roman people, appears to have been well entitled to so high a compliment. It was the intention of his uncle Augustus that he should succeed him, and Virgil received from Octavia, for the verses that related to Marcellus, a pecuniary present of the value of £2500. Cicero acted wisely, therefore, in sending, as he expressly declares he did, all his young friends to Greece, who evinced a love of study, "that they See the author's Life of Lucretius, prefixed to his Translation of the Nature of Things, p. xxix. † Enaid. vi. 881. might drink from fountains rather than from rivulets."-" Meos amicos, in quibus est studium, in Græciam mitto: id est ad Græciam ire jubeo: ut ea à fontibus potius hauriant, quàm rivulos consectentur." Horace alludes to the same seat of learning, and nearly the same habit of studying there in his own case, by way of finishing his education, after having read Homer at home ; Romæ nutriri mihi contigit, atque doceri, Nor were other branches of science, or even the extensive circle of arts and manufactures, forgotten in the midst of the fashionable study of philosophy and literature, either at Rome or in the Greek states. We have not time to enter into a survey of the very extensive and, in various respects, accurate views that were taken of many of the most important pursuits of our own day, and the activity with which they were followed up. In statuary and architecture, as well as in poetry and eloquence, the models of ancient Rome, as well as of ancient Greece, are still the models of our own times. We have already touched upon the skill of the Greek masters in the art of designing; which they practised with great perfection in every diversity, from simple outline or linear drawing, to every variety of silhouette, or light and shadow, as well as every kind of painting with colours; while in one or two varieties they went far beyond our own day, as in encaustic painting, both on wax and on ivory; a branch of the art which has, unfortunately, been lost for ages, yet the most valuable of all, as being the most durable. Their acquirements are truly astonishing in almost every ramification of invention or execution that the mind can follow up; and the progress which we have still proofs of their having exhibited in metallurgy, crystallography, mirrors, mi neralogy, chemistry, mechanics, navigation, optics and catoptrics, weaving, dyeing, pottery, and a multiplicity of other manufacturing or handicraft trades, must appear incredible to those who have not deeply entered into the subject. Their splendid purple cloths-Babylonica magnifico colore-have, perhaps, never been equalled since; the immense and fearful machinery invented by Archimedes, at Syracuse, for laying hold of the largest and most formidable Roman galleys with its ponderous and gigantic arms, and whirling them with instantaneous destruction into the air, as they approached the walls of this famous city during its siege ;-the burning-glasses contrived by him for setting them on fire at a distance, by a concentration of the sun's heat alone; their knowledge of the existence and fall of meteoric stonesnot many years ago laughed at as a chimera among ourselves ;-and the adumbration, to call it by no stricter term, with which the grand principles of the Copernican system of the heavens was approached by Nicetas, Philolaus, Aristarchus, and other disciples of the Copernican school,-are, I trust, sufficient proofs of the truth of this remark, though hundreds of other examples might be added to the list. Still, however, the observation I have made with respect to the education and study of the Athenians applies with considerable, though not altogether with equal, force to those of the Romans. Elegance and accomplishment seem rather to have been the chief objects of attainment than deep physical *Acad. Quest. 1.2. ↑ Epist. Lib. II. ij, 41. On a former occasion the author had an opportunity of following up and developing this interesting subject at considerable length; and those who are desirous of pursuing it with him, may turn to the running commentary to his Translation of Lucretius, vol. i. p. 338. 414; vol. ii. p. 50. 13). 135. 154. 159. 401 491. 568. |