landscape could hardly arise in poets who knew only the placid hills of Italy and to whom the high Alps were known chiefly as the haunts of barbaric bandits. Accurate interpretation of any author of the past, therefore, implies a complete migration into the time, the society, and the environment of that author. And herein lies the necessity of attempting the difficult task of placing the literary figures which we wish to discuss in their setting. In this first chapter, therefore, I shall attempt to sketch in outline the social changes that need to be kept in mind for the more detailed study of some of the writers of the Republican period. Rome’s beginnings in self-expression are not so fascinating as those of Greece. The Greeks somehow outstripped all competitors. In mental vigor, in imaginative creativeness, in sureness of taste, they seem to have reached a point 2500 years ago that the more advanced of modern racial groups are still hoping to attain. The sudden flowering of literature as soon as the capacities of the recording art were realized can only be comprehended on the assumption that singing, reciting, narrating, and disputing had proceeded for ages among their ancestors before the alphabet came into use. One may readily imagine that some of the ancestors of the Greeks discussed the “idea of good” around the cavern fire thousands of years before Plato. Brains of that capacity do not suddenly pullulate. Language as supple and rich as Homer’s presupposes ages of keen perceiving and precise talking. But what conclusions those cavemen philosophers reached vanished with the smoke of the hearth fire because no man recorded them. The tale of what the Greek imagination accomplished after it could operate on accumulated records is one the like of which we shall probably never hear again. Rome’s story is less startling, must perforce be, since like ours, it was subsequent. One does not discover the North Pole or Betelgeuse twice. When the Romans reached the stage of self-consciousness, when they felt the desire to express themselves they found in well-nigh perfect mold the natural forms of expression, developed with sure taste by the Greeks out of song, dance, march-hymn, devotional prayer, dirge, entertaining narrative, or mimic representation. Song, drama, and dialogue are inevitable forms, given human nature, and the forms were at hand and were taken over by the Latins, as they were once more by the Italians at the end of medieval days, when learning disclosed the worth of Rome’s literature.