Then come the Peloponnesian War and the consequent humiliation of Athens; the overthrow of her democratic government, and the partial decline of literature, particularly poetry, with the fall of free institutions. Still, writers of genius are not wanting. The graphic pens of Thucydides and Xenophon lend additional graces to the history of Greece; Plato and Aristotle make her name immortal in philosophy; and the world’s greatest orators electrify her assemblies with their eloquence. Demosthenes, prince of them all, stands forth as the champion of Grecian liberty, and thunders his Philippics at the wily Macedonian who would enthrall his country. But the star of Macedon was in the ascendant. Chærone’a decided the fate of Greece; and she who had withstood the legions of Xerxes, gave way before the invincible phalanx of Philip and Alexander. A sad period of decadence followed. Alexandria, in Egypt, founded by the conqueror whose name it bore (332 B.C.), became the centre of learning as well as commerce; and Athens yielded to her fate, wasting her time in empty philosophical discussions and the pursuit of pleasure. Poetry languished, yet flashed out occasionally in epic or didactic form, bringing to mind the glories of the past. It is true that in the idyls of Theocritus (_little pictures of domestic life_) pastoral verse now bloomed for the first time on European soil, and with fine effect; but it was in far-off Syracuse, not in classic Greece. Here the deepening twilight was fatal to literary growth; and when Egypt fell beneath the power of Rome in the first century B.C., Greek letters sought a new asylum in the city of Romulus. Turning to Rome, we find that she had long displayed an appreciation of Grecian genius as well as a striking talent for imitation. About the middle of the third century B.C., with little or no literature of her own, she gladly appropriated the foreign treasures held up before her admiring eyes by Liv’ius Androni’cus, a Tarentine Greek, whom the fortunes of war had made the slave of a Roman master. This most ancient of Latin poets put upon the stage versions of the Greek dramas, and with his translation of the Odyssey took his captors captive. Nævius and Ennius, following in the path thus opened, gave Italy its first epics; Ter’ence and Plautus made the people familiar with the humors of comedy; and Cato imparted dignity to Latin prose. Oratory, for which the Romans had a natural aptitude, culminated in the speeches of Cicero, who ushered in the golden age. In his writings, as well as in the histories of Cæsar, Sallust, and Livy, prose now attracted with its finished periods. Nor was poetry less notably represented. Catullus, vehement and pathetic by turns, transplanted the ode and epigram to Italy; Lucre’tius threw into verse his ideal of philosophy; Tibullus excelled in simplicity and tenderness; while Virgil and Horace rivalled, as they doubtless imitated, the first poets of Greece.