The later development of the Greek intellect was however more critical and scientific than creative. Science, learning, and criticism were especially encouraged and cultivated at Alexandria. The impulse given by Aristotle to natural observation and enquiry, and the large intercourse with the East which followed on the conquests of Alexander and the establishment of the kingdoms of his successors, led to a great increase of knowledge, or, in the absence of definite knowledge, of curiosity and speculation. The spirit of enquiry no longer, as in the days of the older philosophers, endeavoured to solve the whole problem of the universe, but to observe and systematise the phenomena of the special sciences. Natural history, botany, and medicine were studied zealously and successfully; the subjects of astronomy and meteorology excited equal interest, though the want of the appliances necessary for these studies made them more barren in results. A great advance was made in the knowledge of remote places of the earth and of their various products. The novelty of these enquiries, and of the knowledge resulting from them, stimulated curiosity and the imaginative emotion which accompanies it; and the enthusiasm of science combining with the enthusiasm of literary criticism gave birth to a new kind of didactic poetry, which aimed at expounding the phenomena of Nature in the epic diction of Homer. Among the best-known authors of this didactic poetry are Aratus, Callimachus, and Nicander,--the last described as being a poet, a grammarian, and a physician, a combination characteristic of the spirit in which both science and literature were cultivated. These writers supplied materials which Virgil used in the Georgics, and in the special examination of that poem it will be seen that he adopted other characteristics of the Alexandrine learning. The description by Ovid of the poem of Aemilius Macer in the lines
Saepe suas volucres legit mihi grandior aevo, Quaeque necet serpens, quae iuvet herba, Macer(70),
indicates the character not only of that poem, but also of the Alexandrine models on which it was founded.
The poetry of Alexandria touched most on the realities of human life in its treatment of the passion of love and the enjoyment of the beauty of Nature. These are, in unadventurous times and in eras of advanced civilisation, the main motives of the imaginative literature which seeks its interest in the actual life of the present. Callimachus and Euphorion are mentioned as the models followed by Gallus, Propertius, and Tibullus(71). They, as well as their Roman followers, seem largely to have illustrated their own feelings and experience by recondite allusions to the innumerable heroines of ancient mythology. The passion of Medea for Jason is the motive which gives its chief human interest to the Argonautics of Apollonius, as the passion of Dido for Aeneas, suggested by it, gives the chief purely human interest to the Aeneid. But the most powerful delineation of this kind in any writer of that period, recalling in its intensity the 'burning passion set to the lyre by the Aeolian maiden,' is the monologue of Simaetha in the second Idyl of Theocritus, of which Virgil has produced but a faint echo in his