Lucretius again refuses to fall into a conventional pattern. He has no standards, no proportions, no models. The early Greeks had staidly versified science so that it might easily be memorized. That was not Lucretius’ purpose. Alexandrians had versified science again because the interest in the subject had become general. Lucretius wrote for a public that had cared little for science, but he wrote with the zeal of a prophet because he could not keep silent, and his voice was heard. His work has no unity, no controlling plan or single mood. He hurls his bald facts, his images, his logic, and his pleas indiscriminately. There is nothing else in Greece or Rome like him. And so we might go on. What are the Romans of the republic? When we read their political history we feel a unity of spirit and are prone to say that we understand them. This may be because of a certain racial trait or perhaps because a certain limited aristocracy set the traditions early which became so binding that political activity followed the _mos majorum_. But the men who entered literature were not of one class nor did they express the ideals of any one group. They came out of different strata of different localities and spoke for different mores. Whatever we may say we must admit that the really personal literature of the republic was neither conformist nor monotonous, neither Greek nor classical in spirit. It was frankly experimental, but it always proves to reflect some phase of Roman life. FOOTNOTES [1] The tradition regarding early bards can be traced to the elder Cato. It is therefore not contaminated by the scholastic traditions which later vitiated the story of the drama. [2] See Hendrickson, “A Pre-Varronian Chapter of Roman Literary History,” _Am. Jour. Phil._, 1898, 285. Of the famous chapter in Livy (VII, 2) I should attribute only a scanty line regarding the Etruscan ludii to the _Annales Maximi_. The rest is unreliable reconstruction, since it refers to a period that antedates historical records by over a century. Many attempts have been made to enucleate the kernel of a dramatic history from the passage, but no one who has dealt with the historical sources of the fourth century can accept such attempts. [3] Historians who read only Polybius and Livy persist in denying that philhellenism was a factor in Roman politics. If they will but study the fragments of early Roman poetry they will emend their histories. [4] See _Class. Quarterly_, 1927, 128.