The common thoughtless statement, so often supported by quotations from Schiller, Gervinus, and others, that Greek antiquity was not alive to the beauty of Nature and her responsiveness to human moods, and neither painted scenery nor felt the melancholy poetic charm of ruins and tombs, is therefore a perversion of the truth; but it must be conceded that the feeling which existed then was but the germ of our modern one.  It was fettered by the specific national beliefs concerning the world and deities, by the undeveloped state of the natural sciences, which, except botany, still lay in swaddling-clothes, by the new influence of Christendom, and by that strict feeling for style which, very much to its advantage, imposed a moderation that would have excluded much of our senseless modern rhapsody.

It was not unnatural that Schiller, in distaste for the weak riot of feeling and the passion for describing Nature which obtained in his day, was led to overpraise the Homeric naivete and overblame the sentimentality which he wrongly identified with it.

In all that is called art, the Romans were pupils of the Greek, and their achievements in the region of beauty cannot be compared with his.  But they advanced the course of general culture, and their feeling—­always more subjective, abstract, self-conscious, and reflective—­has a comparatively familiar, because modern, ring in the great poets.

The preference for the practical and social-economic is traceable in their feeling for Nature.  Their mythology also lay too much within the bounds of the intelligible; shewed itself too much in forms and ceremonies, in a cult; but it had not lost the sense of awe—­it still heard the voices of mysterious powers in the depths of the forest.

The dramatists wove effective metaphors and descriptions of Nature into their plays.

Lucretius laid the foundations of a knowledge of her which refined both his enjoyment and his descriptions; and the elegiac sentimental style, which we see developed in Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, first came to light in the great lyrist Catullus.  In Imperial times feeling for Nature grew with the growth of culture in general; men turned to her in times of bad cheer, and found comfort in the great sky spaces, the constant stars, and forests that trembled with awe of the divine Numen.

It was so with Seneca, a pantheist through and through.  Pliny the younger was quite modern in his choice of rural solitudes, and his appreciation of the views from his villa.  With Hadrian and Apuleius the Roman rococo literature began; Apuleius was astonishingly modern, and Ausonius was almost German in the depth and tenderness of his feeling for Nature.  Garden-culture and landscape-painting shewed the same movement towards the sympathetic and elegiac-sentimental.

Those who deny the Roman feeling for Nature might learn better from a glance at the ruins of their villas.  As H. Nissen says in his Italische Landeskunde: