Greek Literature in the Empire

NOTHING, perhaps, testifies more strongly to the vitality of Greek thought than the persistence of the literature for centuries after all political importance had vanished from the nation. After Actium, not only the old centres such as Athens, but the later ones, Alexandria and Pergamon, were in a state of political dependence, ranking, at best, as provincial centres of some importance, and having as much self-government as the lords of the world chose to leave them. Moreover, Rome had by this time a literature of her own, daily growing in importance and indeed excelling the contemporary Greek output. Nevertheless, the Greeks not only continued to write but, when the Augustan age was over, wrote distinctly better than their masters and at one time nearly ousted Latin from the position of a literary language. ¹ Furthermore, during the Roman period they produced a new philosophy and a new literary genre. It should, indeed, be noted that many of that epoch who were culturally Greeks were ethnologically nothing of the kind; yet the number of writers who were of the ancient Hellenic stock, more or less pure, remains astonishingly large.