For our purpose, the dawn of literature in Spain begins with the Roman conquest. In colonies like Pax Augusta (Badajoz), Cæsar Augusta (Zaragoza), and Emerita Augusta (Mérida), the Roman influence was strengthened by the intermarriage of Roman soldiers with Spanish women. All over Spain there arose the _odiosa cantio_, as St. Augustine calls it, of Spanish children learning Latin; and every school formed a fresh centre of Latin authority. With their laws, the conquerors imposed their speech upon the broken tribes; and these, in turn, invaded the capital of Latin politics and letters. The breath of Spanish genius informs the Latinity of the Silver Age. Augustus himself had named his Spanish freedman, Gaius Julius Hyginus, the Chief Keeper of the Palatine Library. Spanish literary aptitude, showing stronger in the prodigious learning of the Elder Seneca, matures in the altisonant rhetoric and violent colouring of the Younger, in Lucan's declamatory eloquence and metallic music, in Martial's unblushing humour and brutal cynicism, in Quintilian's luminous judgment and wise sententiousness. All these display in germ the characteristic points of strength and weakness which were to be developed in the evolution of Spanish literature; and their influence on letters was matched by their countrymen's authority on affairs. The Spaniard Balbus was the first barbarian to reach the Consulship, and to receive the honour of a public triumph; the Spaniard Trajan was the first barbarian named Emperor, the first Emperor to make the Tigris the eastern boundary of his dominion, and the only Emperor whose ashes were allowed to rest within the Roman city-walls. And the victory of the vanquished was complete when the Spaniard Hadrian, the author of the famous verses— "_Animula vagula blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quæ nunc abibis in loca, Pallidula rigida nudula, Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos?_"— himself an exquisite in art and in letters—became the master of the world. Gibbon declares with justice that the happiest epoch in mankind's history is "that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus"; and the Spaniard, accounting Marcus Aurelius as a son of Córdoba, vaunts with reasonable pride, that of those eighty perfect, golden years, three-score at least were passed beneath the sceptre of the Spanish Cæsars.