The epic poets of the Silver Age of Roman Literature also labored
in different degrees under the triple burden of self-consciousness,
learning, and empty rhetoric. Their task was the more difficult
because Homer and Virgil had preceded them, so that whether they
chose an historical or mythological theme, they were timorously
conscious that they were doomed to second place. This is, for the
most part, only another way of saying that the epics under considera-
tion spring each from its own age. The ninth and eighth centuries
before our era could not have produced a poem suited for example
to the Alexandrian Age, when Greece, her great creative impulse lost,
became conscious of self and sought glory rather pedantically in her
great traditions; still less could those early centuries have given us
an epic of world empire. On the other hand, the age of Augustus and
even more the century that followed him were powerless to recover
the heroic spirit and adventurous temper of the Hellenic stocks on the
coast of Asia Minor when their world was young.
Prophecy, the foretelling of events, must carry the warrant of its
validity with it to gain attention. It may be given by a god or by one
who is divinely endowed with an understanding of signs and portents,
with a knowledge of fate and the future; if it be spoken by a mortal
who has received no special inspiration, the character and force of the
speaker, and the circumstances under which he speaks, must be such
as to carry conviction, or the effect is lost. Although the poet him-
self may utter prophecies, he rarely ventures to do so in the epic, for
this form of poetry is largely objective; he usually, therefore, leaves
the r1le of prophet to his characters. He may announce his theme
by calling on the Goddess to sing the wrath of Achilles, or by bidding
the Muse relate the fate of far-wandering Odysseus, after he had
sacked the sacred city of Troy; indeed, if he belong to a more sub-
jective age he may say openly, as does Apollonius the Rhodi
