Outside of this friendly circle of men eminent in letters and social position there were other literary and critical coteries hostile to them, who seem to have chosen the merits of the old writers as the battle-ground on which they engaged the new school of poetry and criticism. These critical coteries Horace treats, as Catullus treats his 'vile poets, pests of the age,' and as Pope treated Dennis and the other poetasters of his time. He was evidently sensitive to the envy excited by his genius and by the favour of Maecenas, and in his later years it afforded him pleasure to be less exposed than he had been to carping criticism:--
Romae principis urbium Dignatur soboles inter amabiles Vatum ponere me choros, Et iam dente minus mordeor invido(82).
But with the final establishment of his reputation his fastidiousness suffered more from the pedantry and importunities of admirers and imitators:--
O imitatores, servum pecus, ut mihi saepe Bilem, saepe iocum vestri movere tumultus(83).
Even the 'mitis sapientia' of Virgil has condescended to immortalise the names of Bavius and Maevius, as Pope has immortalised the heroes of the Dunciad. The often quoted line of Horace,--
Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim(84),
marks the beginning of that 'cacoethes scribendi' which continued to prevail till the days of Juvenal as a symptom of the 'strenua inertia' of life under the Empire.
The almost exclusive devotion to poetry on the part of the meanest as well as the greatest writers of the Augustan Age seems to demand some explanation. The natural genius of Rome was more adapted to oratory, history, and didactic exposition than to any of the great forms of poetry. In the previous generation prose literature had reached the highest degree of perfection. The style of Cicero is one of the most admirable and effective vehicles for the varied purposes of passionate invective or persuasive oratory, of familiar correspondence, and of popularising the results of ethical, political, and religious reflection. In Caesar and Sallust the record of great events in the national life had at last found a power of clear, terse, and chastened diction, superior as a vehicle of simple narrative to the style of the two great historians of later times, if not so rich and varied in colouring and in poetical and reflective suggestion. Of the prose literature of the Augustan Age we possess only one great monument, the extant parts of 'the colossal master-work of Livy;' and that was the product of the later and least brilliant period of this epoch.