Yet we can, if we will, detect an adequate explanation of Horace's
attitude. Very few poets of any time have been able to capture and hold
the generation immediately succeeding. The stronger the impression made
by a genius, the farther away is the pendulum of approbation apt to
swing. The _neoteroi_ had to face, in addition to this revulsion, the
misfortunes of the time. The civil wars which came close upon them had
little use for the sentimentality of their romances or the involutions
of their manner of composition. And again, Catullus and Calvus had been
over-brutal in their attacks upon Julius Caesar, a character lifted to
the high heavens by the war and the martyrdom that followed. And, as
fortune would have it, almost all of the new literary men were, as we
have seen, peculiarly devoted to Caesar. We know enough of wars to have
discovered that intense partizanship does silence literary judgment
except in the case of a very few men of unusual balance. Vergil was one
of the very few; he kept his candle lit at the shrine of Catullus still,
but this was hardly to be expected of the rest.
In prose also the Augustans upheld the refined and chaste work of
classical Atticism, an ideal which they derived from the Romans of the
preceding generation rather than from teachers like Apollodorus.
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