If we except many tender passages from Tibullus, many picturesque passages from Ovid, and many vigorous passages from Lucan, Roman Poetry presents us for centuries with nothing but feeble echoes of Greek models, and those models too often the pedantic and lifeless productions of Alexandria. A genuine Roman Drama may be said never to have existed. Plautus and Terence are but pale reflections of the Attic comedies; the tragedies attributed to Seneca, the only specimens that have come down to us of Roman Tragedy, are but clumsy imitations, or rather travesties, of Sophocles and Euripides. In the declining ages of Roman Literature, Claudian was the only poet who showed genuine originality and freshness of thought, and he, strange to say, was an Alexandrian by birth, to whom the Latin language was not natural, but acquired.
I know of no other instance of a great nation, victorious and dominant over the whole civilised world, humbly sitting as a disciple at the feet of one of her captives, and that not only for a short time, but for the whole course of her intellectual development. Spain, in the Sixteenth Century, borrowed many of her literary fashions from Italy; England, in the Seventeenth Century, modelled her productions in many respects on France, as did Germany somewhat later; but these were merely transient fashions, not deep-rooted customs, and produced no very lasting effect. Rome was alone, and has been since, in her deference to a foreign model, nor can it be said in extenuation that she had only the choice of having poetry on that model or no poetry at all. She had plenty of indigenous material, and Niebuhr has well said that the true poetry of Rome must be found in her history and in her early legends rather than in the finished productions of her literary poets.
This is all the more remarkable, as her greatness was such that it could not fail to inspire even the least susceptible of minds. It made itself felt from the shores of the Baltic to the Persian Gulf, and is attested by ruins more substantial than the uninjured structures of feebler races. Such was its inherent strength, that it withstood the bloodiest civil wars and the most crushing despotism; nor is it easy to surmise what could have undermined it, had not the immigration of barbarian tribes from the mysterious and unexplored regions of the North given shock after shock to that stately system, the work of so many warriors and legislators. It may truly be said that the walls of Rome fell at the blast of the Gothic trumpet.