In the first place the hero is no hero, and the Roman patricians of even the time of the Scipios would have been revolted by this weakling who is feeble and sentimental like the poet himself, and not much more than a puppet in the hands of his divine mother. Such a weak figure gives no opportunity for strength in the treatment, which is accordingly languid, and the twelve cantos are spun out with monotonous tedium, so that to every one acquainted with Homer the reading of them is a mere task to be got through somehow. And if, from the standpoint of learning, the language and verses seem irreproachable, classical, and even worthy of imitation, all pleasure in them is lost by the fact that we are continually aware of the trouble and labour which they cost the poet. It is characteristic of the times that Virgil possessed a canonical consideration with high and low, and poets and prose writers vied with one another to steal from him. From this fact we may guess the rest, and the loss in this field which has been recorded can have been no great one. But how rapidly literature declined at the end of the period is clearly shown by the epic of M. Annæus Lucanus, the _Pharsalia_. This poem was produced in the reign of Nero, and it is difficult to decide whether the choice of subject or his treatment of it deserves the greater censure. The hero of the poem is Pompey, the Pompey of the civil wars, a figure so little poetical that a more unfortunate selection could scarcely have been made; with the utmost poetical license even without any anxiety to keep to the facts there was nothing to be made of the subject. That the civil wars in themselves might be capable of being made the subject of an epic is indisputable; it is equally indisputable that this could be done only by a poetic talent of the first order. But even Lucan could do it in his way, though he is no poet but a scholar of the school of the rhetoricians and the Stoa. As in the school of rhetorics the energy of the scholar signalised and exhausted itself in individual feats of ingenuity, so the poem is divided into a number of scenes without much connection, but distinguished by a soaring imagination, sounding verses, and pompous tirades, and of course with many learned accessories, without which neither a great nor a small poem was conceivable in that period. Besides this haste, uneasiness, and want of discretion are everywhere apparent, and these, too, belong to the time. On the whole it may be said that this poetry is a true reflection of the society in which it originated, and if we had epics by Seneca they might probably resemble those of his nephew. Of such models there could not fail to be imitations; the attempts even extended to the schools, and the editing of the _Iliad_ may well have been the work of industrious scholars, who knew something of Greek and had learned to imitate their _Virgil_.