'I then turned my attention to expressing the same thoughts in elegiac verse; I rattled these off at equal speed, and wrote some additional lines, being beguiled into doing so by the fluency with which I wrote the metre. On my return to Rome I read the verses to my friends. They approved. Then in my leisure moments, especially when travelling, I attempted other metres. Finally, I resolved to follow the example of many other writers and compose a whole separate volume in the hendecasyllabic metre; nor do I regret having done so. For the book is read, copied, and even sung; even Greeks chant my verses to the sound of the _cithara_ or the lyre; their passion for the book has taught them to use the Latin tongue.' It was this volume of hendecasyllables about which Pliny displays such naïve enthusiasm that led Augurinus to compare Pliny to Calvus and Catullus. Pliny's success had come to him comparatively late in life; but it emboldened him to the composition of another volume of poems[453] in various metres, which he read to his friends. He cites one specimen in elegiacs[454] which awakens no desire for more, for it is fully as prosy as the hexameters to which we have already referred. Of the hendecasyllables nothing survives, but Pliny tells us something as to their themes and the manner of their composition.[455] 'I amuse myself by writing them in my leisure moments at the bath or in my carriage. I jest in them and make merry, I play the lover, I weep, I make lamentation, I vent my anger, or describe something or other now in a pedestrian, now in a loftier vein.' As this little catalogue would suggest, these poems were not always too respectable. The good Pliny, like Martial, thinks it necessary to apologize[456] for his freedom in conforming to the fashionable licence of his age by protesting that his muse may be wanton, but his life is chaste. We can readily believe him, for he was a man of kindly heart and high ideals, whose simple vanity cannot obscure his amiability. But it is difficult to believe that the loss of his poetry is in any way a serious loss to the world.[457] We have given Pliny the poet more space than is his due; our excuse must be the interest of his engaging self-revelations. In spite of Pliny's enthusiasm for his poet friends, there is no reason to suppose that the reign of Trajan saw the production of any poetry, save that of Juvenal, which even approached the first rank. With the accession of Hadrian we enter on a fresh era, characterized by the rise of a new prose style and the almost entire disappearance of poetry. Rome had produced her last great poet. The _Pervigilium Veneris_ and a few slight but beautiful fragments of Tiberianus are all that illumine the darkness till we come upon the interesting but uninspired elegiacs of Rutilius Namatianus, the curiously uneven and slipshod poetry of Ausonius, and the graceful, but cold and lifeless perfection of the heroic hexameters of Claudian. II SULPICIA