The protest on the part of one vociferous school of humanists that literary criticism must disregard history and biography is beside the mark so long as our prying minds insist on prying. Contemporaneous literature, of course, deserves first of all to be approached with the aesthetic perceptions all alert, and since the reader lives in the same world as the writer the scant exegesis that may be necessary can be absorbed unconsciously from the text itself. But any great literature of the far past becomes to us, in so far as we are normal humans, something besides art. It is also a body of documents that anyone at all interested in the progress of art, of ideas, or of society in any of its groupings, may find very precious, and he will persist in using it as documentary despite all the protests of jealous literary criticism. For Greece and Rome our documents are none too abundant in any case. It is a very petty humanism that dares insist that no one may touch Vergil or Spenser except and only for aesthetic delight and judgments. It is of course wholly legitimate to read Dante for his haunting lines and his stupendous imagery, but many of us insist on the added privilege of transporting ourselves into his mysterious world of strange ideas if only to read him as did his contemporaries. The true humanist in any case is interested in more than artistic expression, and the humanist who deals with remote literature must be, perforce. It is of course only fair to say that in calling attention to milieu we would not deny that the innate endowment of each author is and must be considered the prime factor in creative work, while admitting that it may be the most elusive item to analyze. Modern biology insists upon the reality of inheritance, though it also warns us that this inheritance is so complex that it has hitherto escaped analysis and predetermination. We all admit that the study of social or literary atmosphere or of individual training will not explain the passionate force of Catullus, the voluble humor of Plautus, or Cicero’s ear for harmony of sound. However, like Horace in his _Ars Poetica_, we can do little but admit the facts, recognize the qualities, and proceed to the study of the provocative stimuli. Moreover, there are special reasons for attempting to place Roman writers in their environment. One is that the evidence regarding the status of Roman society is so scant and so scattered that the casual reader cannot be expected to have a correct understanding of it, and even the specialist is apt to neglect the severe task of reconstructing the social staging. As a result the literary history of the classics too often leaves us with the incorrect feeling that we have there only cold impersonal conventions.