tradition, we find here a field favourable to the development of epic poetry."[1] But peoples who have never developed an epic (the Chinese, for example) have possessed in a high degree this "tendency to cherish the ecollection of past events," and the value of metre as a support for the memory has been recognised all the world over. It would be as absurd to suppose that the fables of a Lokman should suffice to create a drama (as Voltaire seems to have supposed in his introductory letter to L'Orphelin de la Chine) as to think that the use of metre and a desire to chronicle the past suffice to create "a field favourable to the development of epic poetry." The form and spirit of poetry depend to a large extent upon social life; and, as already observed, Niebuhr's theory of an early ballad-poetry (with which the imaginary epic of early Rome has been closely connected) strangely overlooks this dependence. The life of the city commonwealth is not favourable to the growth of epic poetry; for the heroes of the epic are always exalted above the level of human character, always hostile to the democratic sentiments of the city. Moreover, the city life of Rome was peculiarly opposed to the individualised spirit of epic poetry; for the communal organisation of the gentes checked the rise of any literary forms in which personal character would predominate. We shall, therefore, believe that Roman poetry, if left to itself, would have assumed neither the epic nor the lyric, but the dramatic form.
The nature of the early Roman drama, so far as we can now recover it by the aid of a few scattered references, was exactly such as the social conditions of early Rome would lead us to anticipate. This drama (if we may so call it) was a comic spectacle in which personal character
- ↑ Hist. Lat. Lit. (Wagner's translation), vol. i. p. 27.
