The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-08-27
ANCIENT ROME IN FICTION.
DISLLLUSIONMENT THROUGH
 THE SUBSTITUTION
or the Realistic for the Convention

UT tne Realistic for the Convention.
 IL is an obviously true if somewhat trite observation that our attitude to- wards the ancient Graeco- Roman world has changed materially during the last forty years or so. We know more about that world, and the knowledge, such as it is, is more widely distributed; and familiarity has bred, not indeed, contempt, but a certain decrease of rev. erence. That vague traditional .senti- ment of superstitious veneration, which gave kind of superhuman magnitude , to the heroes of antiquity and all that pertained to them, has gone the way of most superstitions. Sober reason and the historical method have opened our eyes to the fact that these great ones were after all, men of like passions with ourselves. Some have been de- throned fromtheir pedestals, others raised from the abyss; we are taught to know now that Cicero was only an ad- Vocate, and not very good one; and to recognize the essentially bourgeois" el- ement in the tragedies of Sophocles; Tiberius is whitewashed, and there is a good deal to say for Caligula. In short, they all belong to world like our own, where no one is wholly good or entirely bad; and as a consequence the golden age of the classics-the period of halo and glamour-is over; antiquity and the language of antiquity has lost its in- spring magic: we live in the midst of Realen and Gas we are told that Pom peius entered the mysterius temple of Jerusalem only to find "vacuas ,sedes ct mania arcana') so the substitution of the realistic for the conventional has brought with it a certain inevitable measure of disillusionment. It is much now if we write even an epitaph in Latin. Parliamentary eloquence no longer clinches ts arguments beyond refultation with quotations from the second book of the Aeneid nor do mill itary veterans in these latter days, like Rawdon Crawley, advise their offspring to stick to the classics. my boy, be- cause there's nothing like 'em. Alas! there are number of thinks like 'em'' now-only more so.
 This Is a change which has notably affected the "fictionar' treatment of sub jects taken from the domain of ancient history. And here it must be under stood that we are speaking primarily and mainly of the Roman and not the Hellenic world. For various reasons, noyelists have rearely, if ever, drawn on Greek history for inspiration. Greek has always been to certain ex- tent a terra incognita, the property of your Persons and such like, thorny subject and dangerous to meddle with. Here and there the researches of
 Ouida" may enable her to head chapter with the fascinating title, '.Thalassis!" or to dwell fondly on the heroic days when the "Io Triumphe echoed up the vineclad slopes of the Acropolis;" but for the most part novel; ists, knowing thatr public and it's limi- ists, knowing thatr public and its limi- tations, have been wisely content to deal with the merest commonplaces of Greek history-Thermopyla Socrates draught of hemlock, and so on-and this only by way of casual allusion.
 The Latin world, on the other hand, has always had a strong hold on popu- lar sentiment: the British public has always, by a convention, Known" cer- tain periods in Roman history; which, \ indeed, is the defence which protects Latin. at the present day from the at- tacks which are daily made upon Greek. Every argument used against the teaching of the latter language could be equally employed against the necessity of the former But Greek is suspect, as the property of mere scholars; Latin is defended by remnant of the belief that every gentleman knows his Hor- ace.
 Moreover, to take the story writer's point of view, what period has Greek history to offer like the (for purposes of fiction) wholly admirable first centu- ry of the Christian era at Rome? It is only, perhaps, rather strange that more use has not been made of such possibili- ties as must be offered by the Rome and Italy of that epoch, with its-even to these prosaic days-almost too strong contrasts of light and shade; it's great city,, and capital and center of the world; it's vicious court the overgrown luxuries of its society, described and de- nounced by satire; it's men, the very types of so many heroes of modern fic- tion, ''pravi aut industrii, eadem vi" it's tyrants and martyrs, it's effeminate des- peradoes and virile debauchees-all these brought into the most picturesque relations with the new religion, already blending with and modifying the socie- # tys and the culture of it's prosecutors, v pure amid corruption, martyred yet tri- umphant, conquered but destined to conquer. Surely never was such mate rial ready to the hand of a practiced story-teller, who, indeed, if he chose, could find a score of pots ready-made In the pages of Tacitus. Consider, moreover, that the public is so familiar with the leading characteristics and the prominent figures of this time that the novelist may adorn his pages with all kinds of classical material, yet never be under the painful necessity of explain ing to his readers who Juvenal was,, or # what is the precise meaning of, say, .tMorituri to salutamus;" and it is small wonder that imperial Rome-wlth it's { gallery of such attractive figures as the Bad Emperor the Dying Gladiator, the Supple Greek, and the inevitable but al- ways charming Christian maiden should have furnished the plot of at least three popular stories within the last sixty years.-London Times,