provided the imitator showed independence in the treatment of his material, and aimed at improvement in form or content. Thus Quintilian, continuing in complete accord with this conception, describes the perfect orator as one: qui etiam propria adiecerit ut suppleat quae deerunt, circumcidat, si quid redundabit. Of course an unsuccessful effort at improvement was properly subject to critical censure. According to Gellius, 9, 9, Probus censures Virgil in the fourth book of the Aeneid for adapting less successfully than Apollonius of Rhodes the comparison of Nausicaa with Artemis. This is the point of Horace's caution in regard to imitation in the Ars Poetica 134 ff.: nec desilies imitator in artum unde pedem proferre pudor vetet aut operis lex. That is, the imitator must not set too narrow limits to his task. On the one hand he must have regard for the dignity of his model (pudor), on the other for the principles governing his own independent literary creation, subject however to the general laws of the genre (lex operis). Both of these principles will unite to discourage too literal a rendering as we see by the preceding line: nec verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus. The related processes by which the ancient literary artist first ranges widely to gain imaginative possession of his store, then laboriously reshapes it in accordance with the promptings of his genius, and finally gives it to the world quite transformed, is aptly compared by ancient literary critics to the operations of the bees in gathering honey, building the comb, and producing honey. For superficial appropriation on the other hand, the daw who struts in borrowed plumage is an equally apt symbol. Macrobius, Saturnalia I, praef. 4 gives the simile of the bee in a highly imaginative form: apes. . . quodammodo debemus imitari, quae vagantur et flores carpunt, deinde quicquid attulere, disponunt ac per favos dividunt et sucum varium in unum saporem mixtura quadam et proprietate spiritus sui mutant. That is, the collection of the essence of the flowers corresponds to inventio, its distribution among the combs to dispositio, and the transformation into honey to expression or elocutio. This simile of the bee is a favorite one for the poet's activity. When thus used it clearly implies the acceptance of what we may call the imitative interpretation of poetic invention. It is used by Lucretius 3, 10 ff.; and by Horace in the odes 4, 2, 27 ff.:39 Horace ep. 1, 3, 17 ff., employs the simile of the jackdaw in borrowed plumage,40 in urging his friend Celsus to make his borrowed material his own by the independent exercise of his poetical power, (in the various technical tasks of composition we have been enumerating): ne, si forte suas repetitum venerit olim grex avium plumas, moveat cornicula risum Such transforming imitation, therefore, proceeding upon the principle of generous rivalry, and aiming at the improvement of the genre, both Greeks and Romans sharply distinguished from plagiarism. Thus Longinus περὶ ὕψους, 1,129 Η: οὐ κλοπή τὸ πρᾶγμα, ἀλλ ̓ ὡς ἀπὸ καλῶν εἰδῶν ἢ πλασμάτων ἢ δημιουργημάτων ἀποτύπωσις. Afranius also with perfect self-confidence defends himself in the prologue of the Compitalia, against the charge of plagiarism from Menander: fateor, sumpsi non ab illo modo, sed ut quisque habuit, conveniret quod mihi, So Goethe, Gespräch. mit Eckermann 108G, who in Faust 7,96 ff. had made Mephistopheles employ a song from Hamlet expresses himself to almost the same effect: So singt mein Mephistopheles ein Lied von Shakespeare und warum sollte er das nicht? Warum sollte ich mir Mühe geben, ein eigenes zu erfinden, wenn das von Shakespeare eben recht war, und eben das sagte was er wollte. Horace himself in the Ars Poetica 131 ff. has given us the most concise summary of the three guiding principles on which artistic imitation should rest. Is it unreasonable to assume, therefore, in view of the extent that similar principles have been shown to determine the nature of literary composition in Greece and Rome, that he observed these principles in the composition of his satires, in which he followed Lucilius as his master? publica materies privati iuris erit, si non circa vilem patulumque moraberis orbem,11 interpres, nec desilies imitator in artum, unde pedem proferre pudor vetet aut operis lex. That is the successful appropriation of the common traditional material is dependent upon the observance of these three laws: (1) Do not journey upon well-travelled ways. (2) Avoid literal translation. (3) Do not be a slave to the original, but keep your creative freedom. Imitation thus freely conceived often develops into independent production, subject only to the general aesthetic laws developed by rhetorical study and by the influence of the earlier masters in the genre upon the later continuators of its high traditions. Thus Horace himself begins in the first book of satires with a number of more or less close studies in the Lucilian form. In the second book of the satires he supplements these with satires much more independently composed and more firmly constructed, illustrated too from contemporary life, satires, however, in the Bionean as well as in the Lucilian manner. Besides these we have even such completely independent studies as that on the Sabine farm.42 Finally, in the epistles, where he has attained complete and independent mastery of the form we find only scattering Lucilian allusions.43 STYLISTIC IMITATION But such conscious imitation of the content of the work of the great master of the genre with nice regard to aesthetic and rhetorical principles and to the promptings of the writer's own genius is only half the story. Imitation is as much a matter of style as of content; in fact the line which separates style from content is a tenuous one. This fact will appear most clearly when we come to consider the ancient theory of the three styles, plain, middle, and grand; for as epic and tragedy in matter and manner belong to the grand style, so comedy and the satiric forms by the same natural evolution fall under the plain style, the natural medium for the expression of our daily thoughts and emotions. Moreover, style far more than theme is of the very essence of the man. From this point of view we may look upon the stylistic imitation of the ancients, as the free transformation and application of these rhetorical and aesthetic principles by the literary artist. Lack of space compels me to pass over unconscious imitation." Under the category of what we may call applied theory, there are certain topics belonging to the ordinary technique of the ancient stylist which demand our brief attention. I wish to speak, therefore, of (1) the use of parody, (2) of free translation, (3) of contamination, (4) of modernization, (5) of the use of proverbs and literary commonplaces. Examples of these fundamental principles of literary craftsmanship may be cited from many genres. We shall have occasion to illustrate every one of them as we proceed with our more detailed study of the works of Lucilius and of Horace. We must not, however, lose sight of the larger truth in the study of the phenomenal aspects of the ancient literary forms. Ancient literature is true to form and to type, but in a far higher sense there emerges from such adherence and because of such adherence to type, the higher truth which pervades the world of ideas. For to the ancients imitation is after all the gestation by the human spirit of all the living elements streaming into its depths from the life and culture of the past, and from the works of the great masters mimetic of that life. From this slow process there is born a work of art expressing that larger vision of the individual spirit, which pierces through the shifting shadows of the world of contemporary phenomena and beholds in undimmed clarity the ideals of beauty and truth, seen sub specie aeternitatis. It is, however, our immediate task to analyze the phenomena that we may better appreciate the ideal. PARODY Parody was especially common in ancient literature on account of the absence of contemporary critical reviews of the type so common in England in the first half of the nineteenth century. In oratory and philosophy parody seems to be used as an occasional and ancillary weapon of controversy. So in the Platonic dialogues there certainly existed-though we cannot always clearly appraise and analyze their exact nature today-assaults upon the sophistic tendencies of Antisthenes, the rhetorical philosophy of the school of Isocrates, and the hedonistic tendencies of Aristippus. The part that parody plays in the assaults of Demosthenes upon Aeschines is well known. The later literature of philosophical controversy, of which we are today only imperfectly informed through allusions in Latin philosophical writers, made frequent use of parody, until in the σrovdauoyéλolor of the later Cynics and Stoics parody became one of the favorite vehicles for the diffusion of philosophic truth, and the demolition of error by means of ridicule. Long before this period it is possible in poetry, especially in iambic poetry, in the Old Comedy, and in Satire to observe a much more thorough-going use of parody as a weapon of literary criticism. As examples we may cite from the earlier period the Homeric parodies of Hipponax and the Batrachomyomachia. The criticisms of Euripides and Aeschylus in the Frogs of Aristophanes, the parody on the Cyclopeia in the Wasps 130, on the song of Harmodius in the Wasps 750, on the Homeric Circe in the Plutus 302 ff., will serve to recall how commonly literary criticism was couched in this form in the Old Comedy. It was, in fact, Aristophanes in the Frogs 389 ff., who announced his programme as πολλὰ μὲν γέλοια μ' εἰπεῖν πολλὰ δὲ σπουδαῖα, thus anticipating the designation of the genre which in the hands of the Cynics and Stoics played such an important part in the development of Greek and Roman satire. The oiλo of Timon, which genetically we must regard as Homeric parodies, are perhaps the most striking example of the profound influence of parody upon the literature of this period.46 In Roman satire parodies upon the epic and the tragic style play an important part in the satires of Lucilius.47 In Horace all readers are familiar with the epic parodies interspersed in the Journey to Brundisium. Persius48 begins his fifth satire with a stylistic disquisition upon the characteristics of the plain and the grand |