PREFACE.

THESE Selections have been compiled with the object of familiarizing younger students with some of the best portions of those Latin Poets whose entire works are in most cases not likely, in a few are not worthy, to be read by ordinary scholars. It can hardly be thought desirable that even a school-boy's knowledge of Roman poetry should be confined to that of a single period, the Augustan, still less to the study of only two authors of that period, although they be as eminent as Virgil and Horace. For any appreciation of the Golden Age itself some acquaintance with the Elegiac and earlier Lyric schools, as represented by Catullus and Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, is scarcely less indispensable than familiarity with the Epic and Didactic poetry of Virgil, or with the Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace; while in order to form any intelligent comparison between the purer ages of the Roman muse, and those of its corruption and decline, the poets of the Neronian, Flavian, and later periods of the Empire ought fairly to have received their share of consideration and study. If moreover, as De Quincey has observed, the poets of the Silver Age be in some sense more thoroughly Roman than those of the Augustan, the works of such writers as Lucan, Statius, and Martial, viewed simply as representative of the national genius and illustrative of the history, society, politics, and manners of the Empire,

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