The golden age of classical literature covers this last half-century of the Republic and the first half-century of the Empire. There is, on the whole, little trace of division between the general character of Republican and Imperial letters except that with Augustus the principal writers are definitely engaged under the Emperor’s banner of reform. The main characteristic of both is rhetoric and convention. It is to Alexandria and its state-fostered writing-club that the world owes convention in literature. The Romans drew their inspiration from Greece but mainly from Alexandria, and as literature at Rome was now chiefly in the hands of a clique of nobles it was possible for a classical style to grow strong there. Cicero and his friends evolved a style, not only of literature but even of thought, which could pronounce itself as “urbane,” and all else as barbarian or rustic. Roman literature of the first centuries before and after Christ was as much under the domination of epithets like “urbane” and “humane” as was the literature of the eighteenth century under “elegant” and “ingenious.” Even Livy as an outsider was suspected of mingling “Patavinity” with his Latinity. It is the aristocracies of literature, such as the court of Louis XIV. or of Charles II., or such as the coffee-house cliques of Addison’s day or the Johnsonian clubs, which create and maintain our periods of classical convention. Literature, as we have already seen occasion to remark, since it works in the most plastic medium, is generally the first of the arts to develop; and literature is only yet beginning. But then Rome borrowed her arts wholesale from Greece, and thus her culture has no true infancy. The burning problem of Roman originality in Art must be reserved until we reach the Augustan age. For the present we must still deny the existence of any really spontaneous art growth at Rome during the Republic. Where native art may be looked for with the highest probability of finding it is in architecture, portrait-sculpture, and painting; in architecture, partly because the Romans had a natural passion for building and partly because their religious and social habits called for quite distinct types of construction in palaces, halls, amphitheatres, triumphal arches, _fora_, and other secular buildings upon which the Greeks had wasted little of their attention; in portraiture because it was a peculiar custom at Rome to make and display images of their ancestors, whereas the Greeks in their love of the ideal had until latterly shrunk from the presentation of casual human lineaments and still idealised them as far as possible, and also because the Etruscans, who were the first nurses of Roman culture, had developed portraiture for themselves; and in painting, partly owing to the same Etruscan influence and partly because the Romans, using inferior building materials such as brick, limestone, and terra-cotta covered with stucco, were naturally drawn to mural painting