Roman

I'd now like to turn to the Roman, um, Latin writers of the period. Their achievements, painting and sculpture - were rather second - rate, and mostly in imitation of the Greeks. And, it's true that Latin writers also wanted to emulate the Greeks and used their writers as models, but somehow the language wouldn't allow it. What I mean to say is, the particular qualities of the Latin tongue made for the excellence of their writings, especially the poetry. For one thing, Latin is capable of great compression - that is to say, it can convey in five or six words what we would need twice the number to say. What also helped Latin writing flourish was the nature of Roman education. Whatever its faults as they would appear to us, its linguistic and literary emphasis seemed designed to produce orators and writers. A drawback of the system was that education was only available to the richer classes of society, and so Roman literature is mainly a product of those classes. This in turn meant that the subject matter was fairly limited and narrow in its social reach - though there were exceptions.