If the pure Roman intellect and discipline had spontaneously produced any kind of literature, it would have been more likely to have taken the form of history or oratory than of national song or ballad. It was from men of the Italian provinces, and not from her own sons, that Rome received her poetry. The men of the most genuinely Roman type and character long resisted all literary progress. The patrons and friends of the early poets were the more liberal members of the aristocracy, in whom the austerity of the national character and narrowness of the national mind had yielded to new ideas and a wider experience. The art of Greece was communicated to 'rude Latium,' through the medium of those kindred races who had come into earlier contact with the Greek language and civilisation. With less native strength, but with greater flexibility, these races were more readily moulded by foreign influences; and, leading a life of greater ease and freedom, they were more susceptible to all the impulses of Nature. While they were thus more readily prepared to catch the spirit of Greek culture, they had learned, through long years of war and subsequent dependence, to understand and respect the imperial State in which their own nationality had been merged. It is important to remember that the time in which Roman literature arose was not only that of the first active intercourse between Greeks and Romans, but also that in which a great war, against the most powerful State outside of Italy, had awakened the sense of an Italian nationality, of which Rome was the centre. The great Republic derived her education and literature from the accumulated stores of Greek thought and feeling; but these were made available to her through the willing service of poets who, though born in other parts of Italy, looked to Rome as the head and representative of their common country. [Footnote 1: Epist. ii. 1. 157.] [Footnote 2: Georg. ii. 385.] [Footnote 3: It is thus interpreted by the same author:--Nos, lares, juvate. Ne malam luem, Mamers, sinas incurrere in plures. Satur esto, fere Mars. In limen insili. Desiste verberare (limen)! Semones alterni advocate cunctos. Nos, Mamers, juvato. Tripudia. 'Help us, Lares. Suffer not, Mamers, pestilence to fall on the people. Be satisfied, fierce Mars. Leap on the threshold. Cease beating it. Call, in turn, on all the demigods. Help us, Mamers.'--Mommsen, Roem. Geschichte, vol. i. ch. xv.] [Footnote 4: Such is the interpretation of Corssen, Origines Poesis Romanae.] [Footnote 5: Epist. ii. 1. 86.] [Footnote 6: Cf. Virg. Aen. vii. 81, 82:-- At rex sollicitus monstris oracula Fauni, Fatidici genitoris, adit.] [Footnote 7: Cf. Schwegler, Roem. Gesch. i. 24, note 1.] [Footnote 8: Livy xxv. 12.]