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: CICERO’S POETRY I7 nor to Pliny, who writes of togae triumphum lin- guaeque lauream. Caesar thought highly of the poetry of Cicero, who sometimes betrays some of the characteristic traits of the
fretful tribe. He is very anxious to know what people think of his verses, especially what Caesar thinks. In a letter to his brother he says of the poem which we have been discussing:
What is Caesar’s opinion about my poem ? The first book, I know, he deems excellent, ? not surpassed even in Greek literature; the rest, up to a certain point, he seemed to think ? what shall I say ? ? slipshod. Find out for me, is it the style or the subject he does not like ? 1 We read with pleasure in another letter2 that Cicero abandoned his intention of collaborating with his brother Quintus in a poem on Caesar’s
Gallic Wars, because he
feels no heart for the theme, abest eVtfouo-iacr/io’s. He is too good a republican to enjoy strewing flowers en the path of Caesar to the throne. The Augustans felt no want of heart for the praise of Caesar, nor did Cicero show any lack of enthusiasm when he eulogized Cato or thundered against Antony. A passage from the same unlucky poem, too long to quote, challenges comparison with the splendid verses in thefirst Georgic in which Virgil recounts the portents which presaged Caesar’s death. It is true that there is in Cicero an excessive illustration of the same point. This is a characteristic of the early style, and shows him inferior as an artist to Virgil. But it is one thing to be inferior as an artist to Virgil ? a proposition which may be predicated of nearly every poet who has ever written ? and quite another to be, as Juvenal describes Cicero, so wretched a poetaster that, if in eloquence he had been on the same level, he might have regarded with in…