Short histories of the literatures of the world Volume т. 11

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ...are introduced by intermittent invocations or addresses to a friend, one Battarus, which constitute a kind of refrain. There is no reason to doubt that both these poems were by the same author. If the Lydia is the more attractive this is due to the subject rather than to the execution, which is on the same level in both. This author was not Virgil, though he may well have belonged to his circle. The temper in which Virgil took the confiscation of his farm is quite different from that of the author of the Dirae. The landscape is not that of the Eclogues. The diction has a precision which is distinct from the vague suggestiveness of Virgil. The Salad (Moretum) is a minute and realistic description of how a peasant rises in the morning while it is yet dark, lights his fire, bakes his bread, culls herbs in his garden, pounds them in a mortar, and so sets forth to work secured against hunger for the day. There is no external evidence for the attribution of the Moretum to Virgil. It is not mentioned as Virgil's by Suetonius or Servius. It was not included in the Appendix Virgiliana till the Middle Ages. Internal evidence shows that it belongs to the age of Virgil. But to say with Mackail (Class. Review, May 1908) that "the internal evidence for the Virgilian authorship of the Moretum is so good that it would require but little external support" is surely going too far. It is a pleasing poem. It treats humble subjects without becoming either trivial or vulgar. But the author has no eye or thought for anything but the matter in hand. He is purely objective, as in his minute description of the characteristics of the negress (ll. 232--5). He writes without allusiveness, without consciousness of a larger background. Virgil with all his delight in...