The Roman Poets of the Republic, 2nd edition
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Title: The Roman Poets of the Republic, 2nd edition
Author: W. Y. Sellar
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC, 2ND EDITION ***
Transcriber's Notes:
* Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
* The corrigenda et addenda listed on page xvi have been applied
to the text.
* Page 167: Original text 'curosity' replaced with 'curiosity'.
* Page 139: Original text in footnote 'Thon' replaced with 'Thou'.
* Page 359: Latin 'At, credo' more usually seen as 'An, credo' but
text in this book not altered.
* * * * *
THE ROMAN POETS
OF
THE REPUBLIC
_SELLAR_
London
HENRY FROWDE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE
7 PATERNOSTER ROW
THE ROMAN POETS
OF
THE REPUBLIC
BY
W. Y. SELLAR, M.A., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
AND
FORMERLY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
_NEW EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED_
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MDCCCLXXXI
[_All rights reserved_]
TO
J. C. SHAIRP, M.A. LL.D.,
PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE, ST. ANDREWS,
PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,
IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF MUCH ACTIVE AND GENEROUS KINDNESS,
AND OF
A LONG AND STEADY FRIENDSHIP,
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
In preparing a second edition of this volume, which has been for some
years out of print, I have, with the exception of a few pages added to
Chapter IV, retained the first five chapters substantially unchanged.
Chapters VI and VII, on Roman Comedy, are entirely new. I have enlarged
the account formerly given of Lucilius in Chapter VIII, and modified
the Review of the First Period, contained in Chapter IX. The short
introductory chapter to the Second Period is new. The four chapters on
Lucretius have been carefully revised, and, in part, re-written. The
chapter on Catullus has been re-written and enlarged, and the views
formerly expressed in it have been modified.
In the preface to the first edition I acknowledged the assistance I
had derived from the editions of the Fragments of the early writers by
Klussman, Vahlen, Ribbeck, and Gerlach; from the Histories of Roman
Literature by Bernhardy, Bähr, and Munk, and from the chapters on
Roman Literature in Mommsen's Roman History; from a treatise on the
origin of Roman Poetry, by Corssen; from Sir G. C. Lewis's work on 'The
Credibility of Early Roman History'; from the Articles on the Roman
Poets by the late Professor Ramsay, contained in Smith's 'Dictionary
of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'; and from Articles by Mr.
Munro in the 'Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology.' In addition
to these I have, in the present edition, to acknowledge my indebtedness
to the History of Roman Literature by W. S. Teuffel, to Ribbeck's
'Römische Tragödie,' to Ritschl's 'Opuscula,' to the editions of some
of the Plays of Plautus by Brix and Lorenz, to that of the Fragments
of Lucilius by L. Müller, to the Thesis of M. G. Boissier, entitled
'Quomodo Graecos Poetas Plautus Transtulerit,' to Articles on Lucilius
by Mr. Munro in the 'Journal of Philology,' and to the edition of
Lucretius, and the 'Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus' by the
same writer, to Schwabe's 'Quaestiones Catullianae,' to Mr. Ellis's
'Commentary on Catullus,' to R. Westphal's 'Catull's Gedichte,' and to
M. A. Couat's 'Étude sur Catulle.' I have more especially to express my
sense of obligation to Mr. Munro's writings on Lucretius and Catullus.
In so far as the chapters on these poets in this edition may be
improved, this will, in a great measure, be due to the new knowledge of
the subject I have gained from the study of his works.
I have retained, with some corrections, the translations of the longer
quotations, contained in the first edition, and have added a literal
prose version of some passages quoted from Plautus and Terence.
Instead of offering a prose version of the longer passages quoted from
Catullus, I have again availed myself of the kind permission formerly
given me by Sir Theodore Martin to make use of his translation.
Edinburgh, _Dec. 1880_.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY.
PAGE
Recent change in the estimate of Roman Poetry 1
Want of originality 2
As compared with Greek Poetry 3
" " with Roman Oratory and History 4
The most complete literary monument of Rome 5
Partly imitative, partly original 6
Imitative in forms 7
" in metres 8
Imitative element in diction 9
" " in matter 11
Original character, partly Roman, partly Italian 13
National spirit 14
Imaginative sentiment 15
Moral feeling 16
Italian element in Roman Poetry 17
Love of Nature 17
Passion of Love 19
Personal element in Roman Poetry 20
Four Periods of Roman Poetry 24
Character of each 24
Conclusion 26
CHAPTER II.
VESTIGES OF INDIGENOUS POETRY IN ROME
AND ANCIENT ITALY.
Niebuhr's theory of a Ballad-Poetry 28
The Saturnian metre 29
Ritual Hymns 31
Prophetic verses 33
Fescennine verses 34
Saturae 35
Gnomic verses 36
Commemorative verses 37
Inferences as to their character 38
From early state of the language 39
No public recognition of Poetry 40
Roman story result of tradition and reflection 41
Inferences from the nature of Roman religion 43
From the character and pursuits of the people 44
Roman Poetry of Italian rather than Roman origin 45
FIRST PERIOD.
FROM LIVIUS ANDRONICUS TO LUCILIUS.
CHAPTER III.
BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. LIVIUS ANDRONICUS.
CN. NAEVIUS, 240-202 B.C.
Contact with Greece after capture of Tarentum 47
First period of Roman literature 49
Forms of Poetry during this period 50
Livius Andronicus 51
Cn. Naevius, his life 52
Dramas 55
Epic poem 57
Style 59
Conclusion 60
CHAPTER IV.
Q. ENNIUS, 239-170 B.C., LIFE, TIMES, AND PERSONAL TRAITS.
VARIOUS WORKS. GENIUS AND INTELLECT.
Importance of Ennius 62
Notices of his life 63
Influences affecting his career 64
Italian birth-place 64
Greek education 65
Service in Roman army 66
Historical importance of his age 68
Intellectual character of his age 69
Personal traits 71
Description of himself in the Annals 72
Intimacy with Scipio 74
His enthusiastic temperament 75
Religious spirit and convictions 77
Miscellaneous works 78
Saturae 81
Dramas 83
Annals 87
Outline of the Poem 88
Idea by which it is animated 91
Artistic defects 93
Roman character of the work 94
Contrast with the Greek Epic 95
Contrast in its personages 95
Contrast in supernatural element 96
Oratory in the Annals 97
Description and imagery 99
Rhythm and diction 101
Chief literary characteristics of Ennius 105
Energy of conception 106
Patriotic and imaginative sentiment 109
Moral emotion 111
Practical understanding 113
Estimate in ancient times 115
Disparaging criticism of Niebuhr 117
Conclusion 118
CHAPTER V.
EARLY ROMAN TRAGEDY. M. PACUVIUS, 219-129 B.C.
L. ACCIUS, 170-ABOUT 90 B.C.
Popularity of early Roman Tragedy 120
Partial adaptation of Athenian drama 121
Inability to reproduce its pure Hellenic character 123
Nearer approach to the spirit of Euripides than of Sophocles 125
Grounds of popularity of Roman Tragedy 127
Moral tone and oratorical spirit 129
Causes of its decline 132
M. Pacuvius, notices of his life 134
Ancient testimonies 135
His dramas 136
Passages illustrative of his thought 137
Of his moral and oratorical spirit 139
Descriptive passages 141
Drama on a Roman subject 142
Character 142
L. Accius, notices of his life 143
His various works 145
Fragments illustrative of his oratorical spirit 147
" " of his moral fervour 148
" " of his sense of natural beauty 149
Conclusion as to character of Roman Tragedy 150
CHAPTER VI.
ROMAN COMEDY. T. MACCIUS PLAUTUS, ABOUT
254 TO 184 B.C.
Flourishing era of Roman Comedy 152
How far any claim to originality? 153
Disparaging judgment of later Roman critics 154
Connection with earlier Saturae 155
Naevius and Plautus popular poets 156
Facts in the life of Plautus 157
Attempt to fill up the outline from his works 159
Familiarity with town-life 160
Traces of maritime adventure 161
Life of the lower and middle classes represented in his plays 162
Love of good living 163
Love of money 164
Artistic indifference 165
Knowledge of Greek 165
Influence of the spirit of his age 166
Dramas adaptations of outward conditions of Athenian New Comedy 167
Manner and spirit, Roman and original 171
Indications of originality in his language 172
" " in his Roman allusions and national
characteristics 173
Favourite plots of his plays 176
Pseudolus, Bacchides, Miles Gloriosus, Mostellaria 177
Aulularia, Trinummus, Menaechmi, Rudens, Captivi, Amphitryo 180
Mode of dealing with his characters 188
Moral and political indifference of his plays 189
Value as a poetic artist 193
Power of expression by action, rhythm, diction 194
CHAPTER VII.
TERENCE AND THE COMIC POETS SUBSEQUENT TO
PLAUTUS.
Comedy between the time of Plautus and Terence 201
Caecilius Statius 202
Scipionic Circle 203
Complete Hellenising of Roman Comedy 204
Conflicting accounts of life of Terence 205
Order in which his Plays were produced 206
His 'prologues' as indicative of his individuality 207
'Dimidiatus Menander' 209
Epicurean 'humanity' chief characteristic 210
Sentimental motive of his pieces 211
Minute delineations of character 212
Diction and rhythm 214
Influence on the style and sentiment of Horace 215
Comoedia Togata, Atellanae, Mimus 216
CHAPTER VIII.
EARLY ROMAN SATIRE. C. LUCILIUS, DIED 102 B.C.
Independent origin of Roman satire 217
Essentially Roman in form and spirit 219
" " in its political and censorial function 220
Personal and miscellaneous character of early satire 222
Critical epoch at which Lucilius appeared 223
Question as to the date of his birth 224
Fragments chiefly preserved by grammarians 227
Miscellaneous character and desultory treatment of subjects 228
Traces of subjects treated in different books 229
Impression of the author's personality 230
Political character of Lucilian satire 232
Social vices satirised in it 233
Intellectual peculiarities 236
Literary criticism 238
His style 240
Grounds of his popularity 243
CHAPTER IX.
REVIEW OF THE FIRST PERIOD.
Common aspects in the lives of poets in the second century B.C. 247
Popular and national character of their works 250
Political condition of the time reflected in its literature 251
Defects of the poetic literature in form and style 253
Other forms of literature cultivated in that age 254
Oratory and history 255
Familiar letters 256
Critical and grammatical studies 257
Summary of character of the first period 258
SECOND PERIOD.
THE CLOSE OF THE REPUBLIC.
CHAPTER X.
TRANSITION FROM LUCILIUS TO LUCRETIUS.
Dearth of poetical works during the next half century 263
Literary taste confined to the upper classes 265
Great advance in Latin prose writing 266
Influence of this on the style of Lucretius and Catullus 267
Closer contact with the mind and art of Greece 268
Effects of the political unsettlement on the contemplative
life and thought 270
" on the life of pleasure, and the art founded on it 271
The two representatives of the thought and art of the time 272
CHAPTER XI.
LUCRETIUS. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.
Little known of him from external sources 274
Examination of Jerome's statement 275
Inferences as to his national and social position 281
Relation to Memmius 282
Impression of the author to be traced in his poem 283
Influence produced by the action of his age 284
Minute familiarity with Nature and country life 286
Spirit in which he wrote his work 288
His consciousness of power and delight in his task 289
His polemical spirit 291
Reverence for Epicurus 292
Affinity to Empedocles 293
Influence of other Greek writers 295
" of Ennius 297
His interests speculative, not national 298
His Roman temperament 299
CHAPTER XII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LUCRETIUS.
Three aspects of the poem 300
General scope of the argument 301
Analysis of the poem 303
Question as to its unfinished condition 313
What is the value of the argument? 316
Weakness of his science 317
Interest of the work as an exposition of ancient physical enquiry 325
" from its bearing on modern questions 326
Power of scientific reasoning, observation, and expression 327
Connecting links between his philosophy and poetry 333
Idea of law 333
" of change 336
" of the infinite 339
" of the individual 340
" of the subtlety of Nature 341
" of Nature as a living power 342
CHAPTER XIII.
THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE AND MORAL TEACHING
OF LUCRETIUS.
General character of Greek epicureanism 348
Prevalence at Rome in the last age of the Republic 350
New type of epicureanism in Lucretius 352
Forms of evil against which his teaching was directed 355
Superstition 356
Fear of death 361
Ambition 366
Luxury 367
Passion of love 368
Limitation of his ethical views 370
His literary power as a moralist 372
CHAPTER XIV.
THE LITERARY ART AND GENIUS OF LUCRETIUS.
Artistic defects of the work 376
" arising from the nature of the subject 377
" from inequality in its execution 378
Intensity of feeling pervading the argument 380
Cumulative force in his rhythm 381
Qualities of his style 382
Freshness and sincerity of expression 383
Imaginative suggestiveness and creativeness 385
Use of analogies 387
Pictorial power 389
Poetical interpretation of Nature 390
Energy of movement in his descriptions 391
Poetic aspect of Nature influenced by his philosophy 393
Poetical interpretation of life 395
Modern interest of the poem 397
CHAPTER XV.
CATULLUS.
Contrast to the poetry of Lucretius 399
The poetry of youth 400
Accidental preservation of his poems 401
Principle of their arrangement 402
Vivid personal revelation afforded by them 404
Uncertainty as to the date of his birth 405
Birth-place and social standing 408
Influences of his native district 410
Identity of Lesbia and Clodia 412
Poems written between 61 and 57 B.C. 414
Poems connected with his Bithynian journey 418
Poems written between 56 and 54 B.C. 421
Character of his poems, founded on the passion of love 424
" " " on friendship and affection 426
His short satirical pieces 430
Other poems expressive of personal feeling 437
Qualities of style in these poems 438
" of rhythm 439
" of form 440
The Hymn to Diana 441
His longer and more purely artistic pieces 442
His Epithalamia 443
His Attis 447
The Peleus and Thetis 448
The longer elegiac poems 455
Rank of Catullus among the poets of the world 457
CORRIGENDA ET ADDENDA.
Page xii, line 25 from top, _for_ Ampitryo _read_ Amphitryo.
" 43, note, _for_ Altus _read_ Attus.
" 90, line 26 from top, _for_ Fos _read_ Flos.
" 157, note 2, add the words, 'Terence, who was by birth a
foreigner, was probably brought to Rome as a child.'
" 194, line 25 from top, _for_ The Italian liveliness, &c.,
made them, _read_ Their liveliness, &c., made the Italians.
" 194, third line from bottom, _for_ nisim _read_ nisam.
" 213, line 12 from top, _for_ Æschylus _read_ Æschinus.
" 215, note, _for_ debacehentur _read_ debacchentur.
" 230, foot of the page, _for_ divitias _read_ divitiis.
" 287, line 12 from top, _for_ arbonis _read_ arboris.
" 289, line 16 from top, _for_ ardera _read_ ardua.
" 289, line 32 from top, _for_ and _read_ or.
" 296, line 9 from bottom, _for_ by _read_ to.
" 343, line 7 from bottom, _for_ fungiferentis _read_
frugiferentis.
" 413, note 1, add the words, 'Cicero also, in his letters to
Caelius, addresses him as mi Rufe,' Ep. II. 9. 3, 12. 2.
THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY.
A great fluctuation of opinion has taken place, among scholars and
critics, in regard to the worth of Latin poetry. From the revival of
learning till comparatively a recent period, the poets of ancient Rome,
and especially those of the Augustan age, were esteemed the purest
models of literary art, and were the most familiar exponents of the
life and spirit of antiquity. Their works were the chief instruments of
the higher education. They were studied, imitated, and translated by
some of the greatest poets of modern Europe; and they supplied their
favourite texts and illustrations to moralists and humourists, from
Montaigne to the famous English essayists who flourished during the
last century. Up to a still later period, their words were habitually
used by statesmen to add weight to their arguments or point to their
invectives. Perhaps no other writers have, for so long a period,
exercised so powerful an influence, not only on literary style and
taste, but on the character and understanding, of educated men in the
leading nations of the modern world.
It was natural that this excessive deference to their authority should
be impaired both by the ampler recognition of the claims of modern
poetry, and by a more intimate familiarity with Greek literature. They
have suffered, in the estimation of literary critics, from the change
in poetical taste which commenced about the beginning of the present
century, and, in that of scholars, from the superior attractions of the
great epic, dramatic, and lyrical poets of Greece. They have thus, for
some time, been exposed to undue disparagement rather than to undue
admiration. The perception of the debt which they owed to their Greek
masters, has led to some forgetfulness of their original merits. Their
Roman character and Italian feeling have been partially obscured by
the foreign forms and metres in which these are expressed. It is said,
with some appearance of plausibility, that Roman poetry is not only
much inferior in interest to the poetry of Greece, but that it is a
work of cultivated imitation, not of creative art; that other forms of
literature were the true expression of the genius of the Roman people;
that their poets brought nothing new into the world; that they have
enriched the life of after times with no pure vein of native feeling,
nor any impressive record of national experience.
It is, indeed, impossible to claim for Roman poetry the unborrowed
glory or the varied inspiration of the earlier art of Greece. To the
genius of Greece alone can the words of the bard in the Odyssey be
applied,
αὐτοδίδακτος δ᾽ εἰμί, θεὸς δέ μοι ἐν φρεσὶν οἴμας
παντοίας ἐνέφυσεν.[1]
Besides possessing the charm of poetical feeling and artistic form in
unequalled measure, Greek poetry is to modern readers the immediate
revelation of a new world of thought and action, in all its lights and
shadows and moving life. Like their politics, the poetry of the Greeks
sprang from many independent centres, and renewed itself in every
epoch of the national civilisation. Roman poetry, on the other hand,
has neither the same novelty nor variety of matter; nor did it adapt
itself to the changing phases of human life in different generations
and different States, like the epic, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic
poetry of Greece. But it may still be answered that the poets of Rome
have another kind of value. There is a charm in their language and
sentiment different from that which is found in any other literature
of the world. Certain deep and abiding impressions are stamped upon
their works, which have penetrated into the cultivated sentiment of
modern times. If, as we read them, the imagination is not so powerfully
stimulated by the revelation of a new world, yet, in the elevated
tones of Roman poetry, there is felt to be a permanent affinity with
the strength and dignity of man's moral nature; and, in the finer and
softer tones, a power to move the heart to sympathy with the beauty,
the enjoyment, and the natural sorrows of a bygone life. If we are no
longer moved by the eager hopes and buoyant fancies of the youthful
prime of the ancient world, we seem to gather up, with a more sober
sympathy, the fruits of its mature experience and mellowed reflexion.
While the literature and civilisation of Greece were still unknown
to them, the Romans had produced certain rude kinds of metrical
composition: they preserved some knowledge of their history in various
kinds of chronicles or annals: they must have been trained to some
skill in oratory by the contests of public life, and by the practice
of delivering commemorative speeches at the funerals of famous men.
But they cannot be said to have produced spontaneously any works of
literary art. Their oratory, history, poetry, and philosophy owed
their first impulse to their intellectual contact with Greece. But
while the form and expression of all Roman literature were moulded
by the teaching of Greek masters and the study of Greek writings, it
may be urged, with some show of truth, that the debt incurred by the
poetry and philosophy of Rome was much greater than that incurred by
her oratory and history. The two latter assumed a more distinct type,
and adapted themselves more naturally to the genius of the people and
the circumstances of the State. They were the work of men who took an
active and prominent part in public affairs; and they bore directly on
the practical wants of the times in which they were cultivated. Even
the structure of the Latin language testifies to the oratorical force
and ardour by which it was moulded into symmetry; as the language of
Greece betrays the plastic and harmonising power of her early poetry.
There is no improbability in the supposition that, if Greek literature
had never existed, or had remained unknown to the Romans, the political
passions and necessities of the Republic would have called forth a
series of powerful orators; and that the national instinct, which clung
with such strong tenacity to the past, would, with the advance of power
and civilisation, have produced a type of history, capable of giving
adequate expression to the traditions and continuous annals of the
commonwealth.
But their poetry, on the other hand, came to the Romans after
their habits were fully formed[2], as an ornamental addition to
their power,--κηπίον καὶ ἐγκαλλώπισμα πλούτου. Unlike the
poetry of Greece, it was not addressed to the popular ear, nor was
it an immediate emanation from the popular heart. The poets who
commemorated the greatness of Rome, or who sang of the passions and
pursuits of private life, in the ages immediately before and after the
establishment of the Empire, were, for the most part, men born in the
provinces of Italy, neither trained in the formal discipline of Rome,
nor taking any active part in practical affairs. Their tastes and
feelings are, in some respects, rather Italian than purely Roman; their
thoughts and convictions are rather of a cosmopolitan type than moulded
on the national traditions. They drew the materials of their art as
much from the stores of Greek poetry, as from the life and action of
their own times. Their art is thus a composite structure, in which old
forms are combined with altered conditions; in which the fancies of
earlier times reappear in a new language, and the spirit of Greece is
seen interpenetrating the grave temperament of Rome, and the genial
nature of Italy.
But, although oratory and history may have been more essential to the
national life of the Romans, and more adapted to their genius, their
poetry still remains their most complete literary monument. Of the
many famous orators of the Republic one only has left his speeches
to modern times. The works of the two greatest Roman historians have
reached us in a mutilated shape; and the most important epochs in the
later history of the Republic are not represented in what remains
of the works of either writer. Tacitus records only the sombre and
monotonous annals of the early Empire; and the extant books of Livy
contain the account of times and events from which he himself was
separated by many generations. Roman poetry, on the other hand, is the
contemporary witness of several important eras in the history of the
Republic and the Empire. It includes many authentic and characteristic
fragments from the great times of the Scipios,--the complete works of
the two poets of finest genius, who flourished in the last days of the
Republic,--the masterpieces of the brilliant Augustan era;--and, of
the works of the Empire, more than are needed to exemplify the decay
of natural feeling and of poetical inspiration under the deadening
pressure of Imperialism. And, besides illustrating different eras, the
Roman poets throw light on the most various aspects of Roman life and
character. They are the most authentic witnesses both of the national
sentiment and ideas, and of the feelings and interests of private life.
They stamp on the imagination the ideal of Roman majesty; and they
bring home to modern sympathies the charm and the pathos of human life,
under conditions widely different from our own.
Roman poetry was the living heir, not the lifeless reproduction of
the genius of Greece. If it seems to have been a highly-trained
accomplishment rather than the irrepressible outpouring of a natural
faculty, still this accomplishment was based upon original gifts of
feeling and character, and was marked by its own peculiar features.
The creative energy of the Greeks died out with Theocritus; but their
learning and taste, surviving the decay of their political existence,
passed into the education of a kindred race, endowed, above all other
races of antiquity, with the capacity of receiving and assimilating
alien influences, and of producing, alike in action and in literature,
great results through persistent purpose and concentrated industry.
It was owing to their gifts of appreciation and their love of labour,
that the Roman poets, in the era of the transition from the freedom
and vigour of the Republic to the pomp and order of the Empire,
succeeded in producing works which, in point of execution, are not much
inferior to the masterpieces of Greece. It was due to the spirit of
a new race,--speaking a new language, living among different scenes,
acting their own part in the history of the world,--that the ancient
inspiration survived the extinction of Greek liberty, and reappeared,
under altered conditions, in a fresh succession of powerful works,
which owe their long existence as much to the vivid feeling as to the
artistic perfection by which they are characterised.
From one point of view, therefore, Roman poetry may be regarded as
an imitative reproduction, from another, as a new revelation of the
human spirit. For the form, and for some part of the substance, of
their works, the Roman poets were indebted to Greece: the spirit and
character, and much also of the substance of their poetry, are native
in their origin. They betray their want of inventiveness chiefly in the
forms of composition and the metres which they employed; occasionally
also in the cast of their poetic diction, and in their conventional
treatment of foreign materials. But, in even the least original aspects
of their art, they are still national. Although, with the exception of
Satire and the poetic Epistle, they struck out no new forms of poetic
composition, yet those adopted by them assumed something of a new type,
owing to the weight of their contents, the massive structure of the
Roman language, the fervour and gravity of the Roman temperament, and
the practical bent and logical mould of the Roman understanding.
They were not equally successful in all the forms which they attempted
to reproduce. They were especially inferior to their masters in
tragedy. They betray the inferiority of their dramatic genius also in
other fields of literature, especially in epic and idyllic poetry, and
in philosophical dialogues. They express passion and feeling either
directly from their own hearts and experience, or in great rhetorical
passages, attributed to the imaginary personages of their story--to
Ariadne or Dido, to Turnus or Mezentius. But this occasional utterance
of passion and sentiment is not united in them with a vivid delineation
of the complex characters of men; and it is only in their comic poetry
that they are quite successful in reproducing the natural and lively
interchange of speech. There is thus, as compared with Homer and
Theocritus, a deficiency of personal interest in the epic, descriptive,
and idyllic poetry of Virgil. The natural play of characters, acting
and reacting upon one another, scarcely, if at all, enlivens the
divinely-appointed action of the Aeneid, nor adds the charm of human
associations to the poet's deep and quiet pictures of rural beauty, and
to his graceful expression of pensive and tender feeling.
The Romans, as a race, were wanting also in speculative capacity; and
thus their poetry does not rise, or rises only in Lucretius, to those
imaginative heights from which the great lyrical and dramatic poets
of Greece contemplated the wonder and solemnity of life. Yet both the
epic and the lyrical poetry of Rome have a character and perfection of
their own. The Aeneid, with many resemblances in points of detail to
the poems of Homer, is yet, in design and execution, a true national
monument. The lyrical poetry of Rome, if inferior to the choral poetry
of Greece in range of thought and in ethereal grace of expression, and
scarcely equalling the few fragments of the early Aeolic poetry in
the force of passion, is yet an instrument of varied power, capable
of investing the lighter moods or more transient joys of life with an
unfading charm, and rising into fuller and more commanding tones to
express the national sentiment and moral dignity of Rome. Didactic
poetry obtained in Lucretius and Virgil ampler volume and profounder
meaning than in their Greek models, Empedocles and Hesiod. It was by
the skill of the two great Latin poets that poetic art was made to
embrace within its province the treatment of a great philosophical
argument, and of a great practical pursuit. The Satires and Epistles of
Horace showed, for the first time, how the didactic spirit could deal
in poetry with the conduct and familiar experience of life. The elegiac
poets of the Augustan age, while borrowing the outward form of their
compositions from the early poets of Ionia and the later writers at
the court of Alexandria, have taken the substance of their poetry to a
great extent from their own lives and interests; and have treated their
materials with a fluent brilliancy of style, and often with a graceful
tenderness of feeling, unborrowed from any foreign source. It may thus
be generally affirmed that the Roman poets, although adding little to
the great discoveries or inventions in literature, and although not
equally successful in all their adaptations of the inventions of their
predecessors, have yet left the stamp of their own genius and character
on some of the great forms which poetry has hitherto assumed.
The metres of Roman poetry are also seen to be adaptations to the Latin
language of the metres previously employed in the epic, lyrical, and
dramatic poetry of Greece. The Italian race had, in earlier times,
struck out a native measure, called the Saturnian,--of a rapid and
irregular movement,--in which their religious emotions, their festive
and satiric raillery, and their commemorative instincts found a rude
expression. But after this measure had been rejected by Ennius,
as unsuited to the gravity of his greatest work, the Roman poets
continued to imitate the metres of their Greek predecessors. But, in
their hands, these became characterised by a slower, more stately,
and regular movement, not only differing widely from the ring of the
native Saturnian rhythm, but also, with every improvement in poetic
accomplishment, receding further and further from the freedom and
variety of the Greek measures. The comic and tragic measures, in which
alone the Roman writers observed a less strict rule than their models,
never attained among them to any high metrical excellence. The rhythm
of the Greek poets, owing in a great measure to the frequency of vowel
sounds in their language, is more flowing, more varied, and more
richly musical than that of Roman poetry. Thus, although their verse
is constructed on the same metrical laws, there is the most marked
contrast between the rapidity and buoyancy of the Iliad or the Odyssey,
and the stately and weighty march of the Aeneid. Notwithstanding their
outward conformity to the canons of a foreign language, the most
powerful and characteristic measures of Roman poetry,--such as the
Lucretian and the Virgilian hexameter, and the Horatian alcaic,--are
distinguished by a grave, orderly, and commanding tone, symbolical of
the genius and the majesty of Rome. In such cases, as the Horatian
sapphic and the Ovidian elegiac, where the structure of the verse
is too slight to produce this impressive effect, there is still a
remarkable divergence from the freedom and manifold harmony of the
early Greek poets to a uniform and monotonous cadence.
The language, also, of Roman poetry betrays many traces of imitation.
Some of the early Latin tragedies were literal translations from the
works of the Athenian dramatists; and fragments of the rude Roman copy
may still be compared with the polished expression of the original.
Some familiar passages of the Iliad may be traced among the rough-hewn
fragments of the Annals of Ennius. Even Lucretius, whose diction, more
than that of most poets, produces the impression of being the immediate
creation of his own mind, has described outward objects, and clothed
his thoughts, in language borrowed from Homer and Empedocles. The short
volume of Catullus contains translations from Sappho and Callimachus,
and frequent imitations of other Greek poets; and, from the extant
fragments of Alcaeus, Anacreon, and others of the Greek lyric poets, it
may be seen how frequently Horace availed himself of some turn of their
expression to invest his own experience with old poetic associations.
Virgil, whose great success is, in no slight measure, due to the skill
and taste with which he used the materials of earlier Greek and native
writers, has reproduced the heroic tones of Homer in his epic, and the
mellow cadences of Theocritus in his pastoral poems; and has blended
something of the antique quaintness and oracular sanctity of Hesiod
with the golden perfection of his Georgics.
But besides the direct debt which each Roman poet owed to the Greek
author or authors whom he imitated, it is difficult to estimate
the extent to which the taste of the later Romans was formed by
the familiar study of a foreign language so much superior to the
rude speech spoken by their fathers. The habitual study of any
foreign language has an influence not on style only, but even on the
structure of thought and the development of emotion. The Roman poets
first learned, from the study of Greek poetry, to feel the graceful
combinations and the musical power of expression, and were thus
stimulated and trained to elicit similar effects from their native
language. It is for this gift, or power over language, that Lucretius
prays in his invocation to the creative power of Nature,--
Quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem;
and it is this which Catullus claims as the characteristic excellence
of his own poems.
The Augustan poets attained a still greater success in the variations
of words and rhythm; but this success was gained with some loss of
direct force and freshness in the expression of feeling. And it may be
said generally that the Latin language, in its adaptation to poetry,
lost some of its powers as an immediate vehicle of thought. In Virgil
and in Horace, words are combined in a less natural order than in
Homer and the Attic dramatists. Their language does not strike the mind
with the spontaneous force of Greek poetry, nor does it seem equally
capable of being rapidly followed by a popular audience. Catullus alone
among the great Roman poets combines perfect grace with the happiest
freedom and simplicity. Yet the studied and compact diction of Latin
poetry, if wanting in fluency, ease, and directness, lays a strong
hold upon the mind, by its power of marking with emphasis what is most
essential and prominent in the ideas and objects presented to the
imagination. The thought and sentiment of Rome have thus been engraved
on her poetical literature, in deep and enduring characters. And,
notwithstanding all manifest traces of imitation, the diction of the
greatest Roman poets attests the presence of genuine creative power. A
strong vital force is recognised in the direct and vigorous diction of
Ennius and Lucretius; and, though more latent, it is not less really
present under the stateliness and chastened splendour of Virgil, and
the subtle moderation of Horace.
Roman poetry owes also a considerable part of its contents to Greek
thought, art, and traditions. This is the chief explanation of that
conventional character which detracts from the originality of some of
the masterpieces of Roman genius. The old religious belief of Rome
and Italy became merged in the poetical restoration of the Olympian
Gods; the story of the origin of Rome was inseparably connected
with the personages of Greek poetry; the familiar manners of a late
civilisation appear in unnatural association with the idealised
features of the heroic age. Even the expression of personal feeling,
experience, and convictions is often coloured by light reflected from
earlier representations. Hence a great deal in Latin poetry appears
to come less directly from the poet's heart, and to fit less closely
to the facts of human life, than the best poetry both of Greece and
of modern nations. This imitative and composite workmanship is more
apparent in the later than in the earlier poets. The substance and
thought of Ennius, Lucretius, and Catullus, even when they reproduce
Greek materials, appear to be more vivified by their own feeling than
the substance and thought of the Augustan poets. The beautiful and
stately forms of Greek legend, which lived a second life in the young
imagination of Catullus, were becoming trite and conventional to
Virgil:--
Cetera, quae vacuas tenuissent carmina mentes,
Omnia jam vulgata.
The ideal aspect of the golden morning of the world has been seized
with a truer feeling in the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis than in
the episode of the 'Pastor Aristacus' in the Georgics. Not only are
the main features in the story of the Aeneid of foreign origin, but
the treatment of the story betrays some want of vital sympathy with
the heterogeneous elements out of which it is composed. The poem is a
religious as well as a great national work; but the religious creed
which is expressed in it is a composite result of Greek mythology, of
Roman sentiment, and of ideas derived from an eclectic philosophy.
The manners represented in the poem are a medley of the Augustan and
of the Homeric age, as seen in vague proportions, through the mists
of antiquarian learning. It must, indeed, be remembered that Greek
traditions had penetrated into the life of the whole civilised world,
and that the belief in the connexion of Rome with Troy had rooted
itself in the Roman mind for two centuries before the time of Virgil.
Still, the tale of the settlement of Aeneas in Latium, as told in the
great Roman epic, bears the mark of the artificial construction of a
late and prosaic era, not of the spontaneous growth of imaginative
legend, in a lively and creative age. So, also, in another sphere of
poetry, while there are genuine touches of nature in all the odes
of Horace, yet the mythological accessories of some of those which
celebrate the praises of a god, or the charms of a mistress, seem to
stand in no vital relation with the genuine convictions of the poet.
Roman poetry, from this point of view, appears to be the old Greek
art reappearing under new conditions: or rather the new art of the
civilised world, after it had been thoroughly leavened by Greek
thought, taste, and education. The poetry of Rome was, however, a
living power, after the creative energy of Greece had disappeared, so
that, were it nothing more, that literature would still be valuable
as the fruit of the later summer of antiquity. As in Homer, the
earliest poet of the ancient world, there is a kind of promise of
the great life that was to be; so, in the Augustan poets, there is a
retrospective contemplation of the life, the religion, and the art
of the past,--a gathering up of 'the long results of time.' But the
Roman poets had also a strong vein of original character and feeling,
and many phases of national and personal experience to reveal. They
had to give a permanent expression to the idea of Rome, and to
perpetuate the charm of the land and life of Italy. In their highest
tones, they give utterance to the patriotic spirit, the dignified
and commanding attributes, and the moral strength of the Imperial
Republic. But other elements in their art proclaim their large
inheritance of the receptive and emotional nature which, in ancient
as in modern times, has characterised the Southern nations. As the
patrician and plebeian orders were united in the imperial greatness
of the commonwealth, as the energy of Rome and of the other Italian
communities was welded together to form a mighty national life, so
these apparently antagonistic elements combined to create the majesty
and beauty of Roman poetry. Either of these elements would by itself
have been unproductive and incomplete. The pure Roman temperament was
too austere, too unsympathetic, too restrained and formal, to create
and foster a luxuriant growth of poetry: the genial nature of the
south, when dissociated from the control of manlier instincts and
the elevation of higher ideas, tended to degenerate into licentious
effeminacy, both in life and literature. The fragments of the earlier
tragic and epic poets indicate the predominance of the gravity and
the masculine strength inherent in the Roman temper, almost to the
exclusion of the other element. Roman comedy, on the other hand,
gave full play to Italian vivacity and sensuousness with only slight
restraint from the higher instincts inherited from ancient discipline.
In Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, moral energy and dignity of character
are most happily combined with susceptibility to the charm and the
power of Nature. Catullus and the elegiac poets of the Augustan age
abandoned themselves to the passionate enjoyment of their lives,
under little restraint either from the pride or the virtue of their
forefathers. Their vices, and still more their weaknesses, are of a
type apparently most opposed to the tendencies of the higher Roman
character. Yet even these may be looked upon as a kind of indirect
testimony to the ancient vigour of the race. Catullus, in his very
coarseness, betrays the grain of that strong nature, out of which,
in a better time, the freedom and energy of the Republic had been
developed. Ovid, even in his libertinism, displays his vigorous and
ardent vitality. The effeminacy of Tibullus looks like the reaction
of a nature, enervated by the circumstances of his age, from the high
standard of manliness, which a sterner time had maintained.
Among the most truly Roman characteristics of Latin poetry, national
and patriotic sentiment is prominently conspicuous. Among the poets of
the Republic, Naevius and Lucilius were animated by strong political
as well as national feeling. The chief work of Ennius was devoted to
the commemoration of the ancient traditions, the august institutions,
the advancing power, and the great character of the Roman State. In the
works of the Augustan age, the fine episodes of the Georgics, the whole
plan and many of the details of the Aeneid, show the spell exercised
over the mind of Virgil by the ancient memories and the great destiny
of his country, and bear witness to his deep love of Italy, and his
pride in her natural beauty and her strong breed of men. Horace rises
above his irony and epicureanism, to celebrate the imperial majesty
of Rome, and to bear witness to the purity of the Sabine households,
and to the virtues exhibited in the best types of Roman character.
The Fasti of Ovid, also, is a national poem, owing its existence to
the strong interest which was felt by the Romans in their mythical
and early story, so long as any living memory of their political life
remained.
The poets of the latest age of the Republic alone express little
sympathy with national or public interests. The time in which they
flourished was not favourable to the pride of patriotism or to
political enthusiasm. The contemplative genius of Lucretius separated
him from the pursuits of active life; and his philosophy taught the
lesson that to acquiesce in any government was better than to engage in
the strife of personal ambition;--
Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum
Quam regere imperio res velle et regna tenere.
Catullus, while eagerly enjoying his life, seems, in regard to all the
grave public questions of his time, to 'daff the world aside, and bid
it pass': yet there is, as has been well said[3], a rough republican
flavour in his careless satire; and he retained to the last, and boldly
asserted, what was the earliest, as well as the latest, instinct of
ancient liberty--the spirit of resistance to the arbitrary rule of any
single man.
Roman poetry is pervaded also by a peculiar vein of imaginative
emotion. There is no feeling so characteristic of the works of Roman
genius as the sense of majesty. This feeling is called forth by the
idea or outward manifestation of strength, stability, vastness, and
order; by whatever impresses the imagination as the symbol of power
and authority, whether in the aspect of Nature, or in the works,
actions, and institutions of man. It is in their most serious and
elevated writings, and chiefly in their epic and didactic poetry,
that the Romans show their peculiar susceptibility to this grave and
dignified emotion. Even the plain and rude diction of Ennius rises into
rugged grandeur when he is moved by the vastness or massive strength
of outward things, by 'the pomp and circumstance' of war, or by the
august forms and symbols of government. The majestic tones of Lucretius
seem to give a voice to the deep feeling of the order and immensity of
the universe, which possessed him. The sustained dignity of the Aeneid,
and the splendour of some of its finest passages--such for instance as
that which brings before us the solemn and magnificent spectacle of
the fall of Troy--attest how the imagination of Virgil was moved to
sympathy with the attributes of ancient and powerful sovereignty[4].
Further, in the fervour and dignity of their moral feeling, the Roman
poets are true exponents of the genius of Rome. Their spirit is
more authoritative, and less speculative than that of Greek poetry.
They speak rather from the will and conscience than from the wisdom
that has searched and understood the ways of life. Greek poetry
strengthens the will or purifies the heart indirectly, by its truthful
representation of the tragic situations in human life; Roman poetry
appeals directly to the manlier instincts and more magnanimous impulses
of our nature. This glow of moral emotion pervades not the poetry
only, but the oratory, history, and philosophy of Rome. It has cast a
kind of religious solemnity around the fragments of the early epic,
tragic, and satiric poetry: it has given an intenser fervour to the
stern consistency and desperate fortitude of Lucretius: it has added
the element of strength to the pathos and fine humanity in the Æneid.
It is by his moral, as well as his national enthusiasm, that Horace
reveals the Roman gravity that tempered his genial nature. The language
of Lucan, Persius, and Juvenal still breathed the same spirit in the
deadening atmosphere of the Empire. Of all the great poets of Rome,
Catullus alone shows little trace of this grave ardour of feeling, the
more usual accompaniment of the firm temper of manhood than of the
prodigal genius of youth.
There are, however, as was said above, other feelings expressed in
Roman poetry, which are, perhaps, more akin to modern sympathies. In
no other branch of ancient literature is so much prominence given to
the enjoyment of Nature, the passion of love, and the joys, sorrows,
tastes, and pursuits of the individual. The gravity and austerity
of the old Roman life, and the predominance of public over private
interests in the best days of the Republic, tended to repress, rather
than to foster, the birth of these new modes of emotion. They are
like the flower of that more luxuriant but less stately Italian life
which spread itself abroad under the shadow of Roman institutions, and
came to a rapid maturity after her conquests had brought to Rome the
accumulated treasures of the world, and left to her more fortunate sons
ample leisure to enjoy them.
The love of natural scenery and of country life is certainly more
prominently expressed in Roman than in Greek poetry. Homer, indeed,
among all the poets of antiquity, presents the most vivid and true
description of the outward world; and the imagination of Pindar and
the Attic dramatists appears to have been strongly, though indirectly,
affected both by the immediate aspect and by the invisible power of
Nature. Thucydides and Aristophanes testify to the enjoyment which the
Athenians found in the ease and abundance of their country life, and
to the affection with which they clung to the old religious customs
and associations connected with it. The conscious enjoyment of Nature
as a prominent motive of poetry first appears in the Alexandrian era.
The great poets of earlier times were too deeply penetrated by the
thought of the mystery and the grandeur in human life, to dwell much
on the spectacle of the outward world. Though their delicate sense of
beauty was unconsciously cherished and refined by the air which they
breathed, and the scenes by which they were surrounded, yet they do
not, like the Roman poets, yield to the passive pleasures derived from
contemplating the aspect of the natural world; nor do they express the
happiness of passing out of the tumult of the city into the peaceful
security of the country. The difference between the two nations in
social temper and customs is connected with this difference in their
aesthetic susceptibility. The spirit in which a Greek enjoyed his
leisure, was one phase of his sociability, his communicativeness, his
constant passion for hearing and telling something new,--a disposition
which made the λέσχη a favourite resort so early as the time of
Homer, and which is seen still characterising the most typical
representatives of the race in the days of St. Paul. The Roman
statesman, on the other hand, prized his _otium_ as the healthy
repose after strenuous exertion. The chief relaxation to his proud and
self-dependent temper consisted in being alone, or at ease with his
household and his intimate friends. This desire for rest and retirement
was one great element in the Roman taste for country life;--a taste
which was manifested among the foremost public men, such as the Scipios
and Laelius, long before any trace of it is betrayed in Roman poetry.
But, as the practice of spending the unhealthy months of autumn away
from Rome became general among the wealthier classes, and as new modes
of sentiment were fostered by greater leisure and finer cultivation,
a genuine love of Nature,--taking the form either of attachment to
particular places, or of enjoyment in the life and beautiful forms of
the outward world,--was gradually awakened in the more susceptible
minds of the Italian race.
The poetry of the Augustan age and of that immediately preceding it is
deeply pervaded by this new emotion. Each of the great poets manifests
the feeling in his own way. Lucretius, while contemplating the majesty
of Nature's laws, and the immensity of her range, is, at the same
time, powerfully moved to sympathy with her ever-varying life. He
feels the charm of simply living in fine weather, and looking on the
common aspects of the world,--such as the sea-shore, fresh pastures and
full-flowing rivers, or the new loveliness of the early morning. He
represents the punishment of the Danaides as a symbol of the incapacity
of the human spirit to enjoy the natural charm of the recurring seasons
of the year. Catullus, too, although his active social temper did not
respond to the spell which Nature exercised over the contemplative and
pensive spirits of Lucretius and Virgil, has many fine images from the
outward world in his poems. He delights in comparing the grace and
the passion of youth with the bloom of flowers and the stateliness of
trees; he associates the beauty of Sirmio with his bright picture of
the happiness of home; he feels the return of the genial breezes of
spring as enhancing his delight in leaving the dull plains of Phrygia,
and in hastening to visit the famous cities of Asia. Virgil's early art
was characterised by his friend and brother poet in the lines,--
Molle atque facetum
Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure camenae[5].
The love of natural, and especially of Italian, beauty blends with all
his patriotic memories, and with the charm which he has cast around
the common operations of rustic industry. The freedom and peace of his
country life, among the Sabine hills, kept the heart of Horace fresh
and simple, in spite of all the pleasures and flatteries to which he
was exposed; and enabled him, till the end of his course, to mingle
the clear fountain of native poetry,--'ingeni benigna vena,'--with the
stiller current of his meditative wisdom.
The passion of love was a favourite theme both of the early lyrical
poets of Greece, and of the courtly writers of Alexandria; but the
works of the former have reached us only in inconsiderable fragments;
and the latter, with the exception of Theocritus, are much inferior to
the Roman poets who made them their models. It is in Latin literature
that we are brought most near to the power of this passion in the
ancient world. Few among the poets who have recorded their own
experience of love, in any age, have expressed a feeling so true or so
intense as Catullus. He has all the ardent, self-forgetful devotion, if
he wants the chivalry and purity, of modern sentiment. He has painted
the love of others, also, with graceful fidelity. He has shown the
finest sense in discerning, and the finest power in delineating the
charm of youthful passion, when first awakening into life, or first
unfolding into true affection. It is by his delineation of the agony
of Dido that Virgil has imparted the chief personal interest to the
story of the Aeneid. If he has failed to embody any complex type of
character, he has described the agitation and pathos of this particular
passion at least with a powerful hand. Horace is the poet of the
lighter and gayer moods of love. Without ever becoming a slave to it
he experienced enough of its pains and pleasures, to enable him to
paint the fascination or the waywardness of a mistress with the equable
feeling of an epicurean, but, at the same time, with the refined
observation of a poet. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, making
pleasure the chief pursuit of their lives, have made the more ignoble
and transient phases of this passion the predominant motive of their
poetry. Yet the effeminacy of Tibullus is redeemed by real tenderness
of heart; there is ardent emotion expressed by Propertius for his
living mistress, and true affection in the lines in which he recalls
her memory after death; the profligacy of Ovid is, if not redeemed, at
least relieved, by his buoyant wit and his brilliant fancy.
Roman poetry is also interesting as the revelation of personal
experience and character. The biographies of ancient authors are, for
the most part, meagre and untrustworthy; and thus it is chiefly through
the conscious or unconscious self-portraiture in their writings that
the actual men of antiquity are brought into close contact with the
modern world. Few men of any age or country are so well known to us
as Horace; and it is from his own writings, exclusively, that this
intimate knowledge has been obtained. The lines in which he describes
Lucilius are more applicable to himself than to any extant writer of
Greece or Rome,--
Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
Credebat libris: neque si male cesserat, unquam
Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit, ut omnis
Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella
Vita senis[6].
He has described himself, his tastes and pursuits, his thoughts and
convictions, with perfect frankness and candour, and without any of
the triviality or affectation of literary egotism. Catullus, although
sometimes wanting in proper reticence, and altogether devoid of that
meditative art with which Horace transmutes his own experience into the
common experience of human nature, is known also as a familiar friend,
from the force of feeling with which he realised, and the transparent
sincerity with which he recorded, all the pain and the pleasure of his
life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age have written, neither from
so strong a heart as that of Catullus, nor with the good taste and
self-respect of Horace; but yet one of the chief sources of interest in
their poetry, as of that of Martial in a later age, arises from their
strong realisation of life, their unreserved communicativeness, and the
light they thus throw on one phase of personal and social manners in
ancient times.
Nor are these indications of individual character confined to the poets
who profess to communicate their own feelings, and to record their own
fortunes. All the works of Roman poetry bear emphatically the impress
of their authors. While the finest Greek poetry seems like an almost
impersonal emanation of genius, Roman poetry is, to a much greater
extent, the expression of character. The great Roman writers manifest
that kind of self-consciousness which accompanies resolute and
successful effort; while the Greeks enjoy that happy self-forgetfulness
which attends the unimpeded exercise of a natural gift. The epitaphs
composed for themselves by Naevius, Plautus, Ennius, and Pacuvius,
and the assertion of their own originality and of their hopes of
fame, which occurs in the poetry of Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace,
were dictated by a strong sense of their own personality, and of the
importance of the task on which they were engaged. Catullus, although
he is much preoccupied with, and most frank in communicating his
feelings and pursuits, has much less of the consciousness of genius, is
much more humble in his aspirations, and more modest in his estimate
of himself. In this, as in other respects, he approaches nearer to the
type of Greek art than any of his brother-poets of Rome.
It is a common remark that the very greatest poets are those about
whose personal characteristics least is known. It is impossible in
their case to determine where they have expressed their real sympathies
or convictions. They rise above the prejudices of their country and
the accidents of their time, and can see the good and evil inseparably
mixed in all human action. No criticism can throw any trustworthy
light on the personal position, the pursuits and aims, the outward
and inward experience of Homer. It cannot even be determined with
certainty how much of the poetry which bears his name is the creation
of one, seemingly, inexhaustible genius; and how much is the 'divine
voice' of earlier singers still 'floating around him.' Such inquiries
are ever attracting and ever baffling a high curiosity. They leave the
mind perplexed with the doubt whether it is discerning, in the far
distance, the outline of solid mountain-land, or only the transient
shapes of the clouds. Hesiod, on the other hand, a poet of perhaps
equal antiquity, but of an infinitely lower order of genius, has left
his own likeness graphically delineated on his remains. There is much
to interest a reader in the old didactic poem, 'The Works and Days,'
but it is not the interest of studying a work of art or of creative
genius. The charm of the book consists partly in its power of calling
up the ideas of a remote antiquity and of human life in its most
elemental conditions; partly in the distinct impression which it bears
of a character of an antique and primitive and yet not unfamiliar
type;--a character of deep natural piety and righteousness, but with a
quaint intermixture of other qualities, homespun sagacity and worldly
wisdom;--genuine thrift, and horror of idleness, of war, of seafaring
enterprise;--sardonic dislike of the airs and vices of women, and a
grim discontent with his own condition, and with the poor soil which
it was his lot to till[7]. It is through his want of those gifts of
genius which have made Homer immortal as a poet, and a mere name as
a man, that Hesiod has left so distinct a picture of himself to the
latest times. In like manner Roman poetry, while never rising to the
heights of creative and impersonal genius, from this very defect, is
a truer revelation of the poets themselves. The Aeneid supplies ample
materials for understanding the affections and convictions of Virgil.
Lucretius makes his personal presence felt through the whole march of
his argument, and supports every position of his system not with his
logic only, but with the whole force of his nature. The fragments of
Ennius and of Lucilius afford ample evidence by which we may judge what
kind of men they were.
It thus appears that, over and above their higher and finer
excellencies, the Roman poets have this additional source of interest,
that, more than any other authors in the vigorous times of antiquity,
they satisfy the modern curiosity in regard to personal character and
experience. These poets have themselves left the most trustworthy
record of their happiest hours and most real interests; of their
standard of conduct, their personal worth, and their strength of
affection; of the studies and the occupations in which they passed
their lives, and of the spirit in which they awaited the certainty of
their end.
* * * * *
It remains to say a few words in regard to the historical progress of
this branch of literature. The history of Roman poetry may be divided
into four great periods:--
I. The age of Naevius, Ennius, Lucilius, etc., extending from about
B.C. 240 till about B.C. 100:
II. The age of Lucretius and Catullus, whose active poetical career
belongs to the last age of the Republic, the decennium before the
outbreak of the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey:
III. The Augustan age:
IV. The whole period of the Empire after the time of Augustus.
The poetry of each of these periods is distinctly marked in form,
style, and character. There is evidently a great progress in artistic
accomplishment and in poetical feeling, from the rude cyclopean remains
of the annals of Ennius to the stately proportions and elaborate
workmanship of the Aeneid. Yet this advance was attended with some loss
as well as gain. With infinitely less accomplishment and less variety,
the older writers show signs of a robuster life and a more vigorous
understanding than some at least of those who adorn the Augustan era.
They endeavoured to work in the spirit of the great masters, who had
made the most heroic passions and most serious interests of men the
subject of their art. They were men also of the same fibre as the chief
actors on the stage of public affairs, living with them in familiar
friendship, while at the same time maintaining a close sympathy with
popular feeling and the national life. Their fragments are thus, apart
from their intrinsic merits, especially valuable as the contemporary
language of that great time, and as giving some expression to the
strength, the dignity, and the freedom which were stamped upon the old
Republic.
For more than a generation after the death of Accius and Lucilius, no
new poet of any eminence appeared at Rome. The vivid enjoyment of
life, and the sense of security which usually accompany and foster
the successful cultivation of art, had been rudely interrupted by the
convulsions of the State. A new birth of Roman poetry took place during
the brief lull between the storms of the first and second civil wars.
The new poets arose independently of the old literature. They appealed
not to popular favour, but to the tastes of the few and the educated;
they gave expression not to any public or national sentiment, but to
their individual thought and feeling. Their works reflect the restless
agitation of a time of revolution; but they show also all the vigour
and sincerity of republican freedom. While greatly superior to the
fragments of the older poetry in refinement of style, and in depth
and variety of poetical feeling, they want the simple strength of
moral conviction, and the interest in great practical affairs, which
characterised their predecessors. They are inferior to the poets of the
Augustan age in artistic skill; but they show more force of thought,
or more intensity of passion, a stronger and livelier inspiration, a
bolder and more independent character.
The short interval between the death of Catullus and the appearance of
the Bucolics of Virgil marks the beginning of a new era in literature
and in history:
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
Catullus, dying only a few years before the extinction of popular
freedom, is, in every nerve and fibre, the poet of a republic. Virgil,
even before the final success of Augustus, proclaimed the advent of the
new Empire; and he became the sincere admirer and interpreter of its
order and magnificence. Most of the other poets of that age, though
born before the overthrow of the Republic, show the influence of their
time, not only by sympathy with or acquiescence in the new order of
things, but by a perceptible lowering in the higher energies of life.
Still, the poetry of the Augustan age, if inferior in natural force to
that of the Republic, is the culmination of all the previous efforts
of Roman art; and is, at the same time, the most complete and elaborate
representation of Roman and Italian life.
The chief interest of Roman poetry, considered as the work of men of
natural genius and cultivated taste, and as the expression of great
national ideas or of individual thought and impulse, ceases with
the end of the Augustan age. Under the continued pressure of the
Empire, true poetical inspiration and pure feeling for art were lost.
One certain test of this decay is the absence of musical power and
sweetness from the verse of the later poets. Yet some of the poets
of the Empire have their own peculiar greatness. Lucan and Juvenal
recall in their vigorous rhetoric the masculine tone and fervid feeling
of the old Roman character, liberalised by the progress of thought
and education. In the Satires of Persius, there is an atmosphere of
purer morality than in any earlier Roman writer, with the exception
of Cicero. There is much vigour, sense, wit, and keen appreciation of
life, intermingled with the coarseness of Martial. Yet it is owing
rather to their rhetorical or their intellectual ability and to their
historical value, than to their poetical genius, that these writers are
still read and admired. The artificial epics of Silius Italicus and
Valerius Flaccus may be occasionally read in the interests of learning;
but it is hardly probable that they will, or desirable that they
should, ever be permanently restored from the neglect and oblivion into
which they have long been sinking.
This review of Roman poetry will bring before us the origin and
progressive growth of a branch of literature, moulded, indeed, on the
forms of a foreign art, but executed with native energy, and expressive
of native character. In this poetry not the genius only, but the inner
nature and sympathies of some of the more interesting men of antiquity
are displayed. It throws light on the impulses of thought and feeling
which influenced the action of different epochs in Roman history. The
great qualities of Rome are seen to mould and animate her poetry.
These qualities are found in harmonious union with the spirit of
enjoyment and the sense of exuberant life, fostered by the genial air
of Italy; and with a refinement of taste drawn from the purest source
of human culture which the world has ever enjoyed. After all deductions
have been made for their want of inventiveness, it still remains true,
that the Roman poets of the last days of the Republic and of the
Augustan age have added to the masterpieces of literature some great
works of native feeling as well as of finished execution.
[Footnote 1: Hom. Od. xxii. 348.]
[Footnote 2: Cf. Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 2, 3. Sero igitur a nostris poetae
vel cogniti vel recepti. At contra oratorem celeriter complexi sumus:
nec eum primo eruditum, aptum tamen ad dicendum.]
[Footnote 3: Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Biography, Art. Catullus.]
[Footnote 4: The following lines might be quoted as a specimen of the
_majesty_ of the Aeneid:--
Haec finis Priami fatorum; hic exitus illum
Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem
Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum
Regnatorem Asiae.--Aen. ii. 554-7.
]
[Footnote 5: Horace, Sat. i. 10. 45.]
[Footnote 6: 'He used from time to time to intrust all his secret
thoughts to his books, as to trusty friends; it was to them only he
turned in evil fortune or in good; and thus it is, that the whole life
of the old poet lies before our eyes, as if it were portrayed on a
votive picture.'--Sat. ii. 1. 30.]
[Footnote 7: The parallel which Mr. Ruskin draws (Modern Painters, vol
iii. p. 194), between an ancient Greek and 'a good, conscientious, but
illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer of a century or two back,'
becomes intelligible if we regard Hesiod as a normal type of the Greek
mind.]
CHAPTER II.
VESTIGES OF EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY IN ROME AND ANCIENT ITALY.
The Romans themselves traced the origin of their poetry, as of all
their literary culture, to their contact with the mind of Greece.
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes
Intulit agresti Latio.
The first productive literary impulse was communicated to the Roman
mind by the Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who, in the year B.C.
240--one year after the end of the First Punic War--brought out, before
a Roman audience, a drama translated or imitated from the Greek. From
this time Roman poetry advanced along the various channels which the
creative energy of Greek genius had formed.
But it has been maintained, in recent times, that this was but
the second birth of Roman poetry, and that a golden age of native
minstrelsy had preceded this historical development of literature.
The most distinguished supporters of this theory were Niebuhr and
Macaulay. In the preface to his _Lays of Rome_, Macaulay says that
'this early literature abounded with metrical romances, such as are
found in every country where there is much curiosity and intelligence,
but little reading and writing.' Niebuhr went so far as to assert that
the Romans in early times possessed epic poems, 'which in power and
brilliance of imagination leave everything produced by the Romans in
later times far behind them.' He held that the flourishing period
of this native poetry was the fifth century after the foundation of
the city. He supposed that the early lays were of plebeian origin,
strongly animated by plebeian sentiment, and familiarly known among
the mass of the people; that they disappeared after the ascendency of
the new literature, chiefly through the influence of Ennius; and that
his immediate predecessor, Naevius, was the last of the genuine native
minstrels. He professed to find clear traces of these ballads and
epic poems in the fine legends of early Roman history. His theory was
supported by arguments founded on the testimony of ancient writers, on
indications of the early recognition of poetry by the Roman State (as,
for instance, the worship of the Camenae), on the poetical character of
early Roman story, and on the analogy of other nations.
Although there may be no more ground for believing in a golden age of
early Roman poetry than in a golden age of innocence and happiness,
yet the question raised by Niebuhr deserves attention, not only on
account of the celebrity which it obtained, but also as opening up an
inquiry into the nature and value of the rude germs of literature which
the Latin soil spontaneously produced. Though there is no substantial
evidence of the existence among the Romans of anything corresponding
to the modern ballad or the early epic of Greece, yet certain kinds of
metrical composition did spring up and flourish among the Italians,
previous to and independent of their knowledge of Greek literature.
It is worth while to ascertain what these kinds of composition were,
as they throw light on some natural tendencies of the race, which
ultimately obtained their adequate expression, and helped to impart a
native and original character to Latin literature.
It was observed in the former chapter that while the metres of all
the great Roman poets were founded on the earlier metres of Greece,
there was a native Italian metre, called the Saturnian, which was
employed apparently in various kinds of composition, and was quite
different in character from the heroic and lyric measures adopted by
the cultivated poets of a later age. This metre was used not only in
rude extemporaneous effusions, but also in the long poem of Naevius, on
the First Punic War. Horace indicates his sense of the roughness and
barbarism of the metre, in the lines,
Sic horridus ille
Defluxit numerus Saturnius, et grave virus
Munditiae pepulere[8].
Ennius speaks contemptuously of the verse of Naevius, as that employed
by the old prophetic bards, before any of the gifts of poetry had been
received or cultivated--
Quum neque musarum scopulos quisquam superarat
Nec dicti studiosus erat.
The irregularity of the metre may be inferred from a saying of an
ancient grammarian, that, in the long epic of Naevius he could find
no single line to serve as a normal specimen of its structure. From
the few Saturnian lines remaining, it may be inferred that the verse
had an irregular trochaic movement; and it seems first to have come
into use as an accompaniment to the beating of the foot in a primitive
rustic dance. The name, connected with Saturnus, the old Land-God of
Italy, points to the rustic origin of the metre. It was known also by
the name of Faunian, derived from another of the Divinities worshipped
in the rural districts of Italy. It seems first to have been employed
in ritual prayers and thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth, and in
the grotesque raillery accompanying the merriment and license of the
harvest-home. It is of the Saturnian verse that Virgil speaks in the
lines of the second Georgic--
Nec non Ausonii, Troja gens missa, coloni
Versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto[9].
As the long roll of the hexameter and the stately march of the alcaic
were expressive of the gravity and majesty of the Roman State, so the
ring and flow of the Saturnian verse may be regarded as indicative
of the freedom and genial enjoyment of life, characterising the old
Italian peasantry.
The most important kinds of compositions produced in this metre, under
purely native influences, may be classed as,
1. Hymns or ritual verses.
2. Prophetic verses.
3. Festive and satiric verses, uttered in dialogue or in rude mimetic
drama.
4. Short gnomic or didactic verses.
5. Commemorative odes sung or recited at banquets and funerals.
1. The earliest extant specimen of the Latin language is a fragment of
the hymn of the Fratres Arvales, a priestly brotherhood, who offered,
on every 15th of May, public sacrifices for the fertility of the
fields. This fragment is variously written and interpreted, but there
can be no doubt that it is the expression of a prayer, for protection
against pestilence, addressed to the Lares and the god Mars, and that
it was uttered with the accompaniment of dancing. The following is the
reading of the fragment, as given by Mommsen:--
Enos, Lases, juvate.
Ne veluerve, Marmar, sins incurrere in pleores.
Satur fu, fere Mars.
Limen sali.
Sta berber.
Semunis alternis advocapit concto.
Enos, Marmar, juvato.
Triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe[10].
The address to Mars 'Satur fu,' or, according to another reading,
'Satur furere,' 'be satisfied or done with raging,' probably refers
to the severity of the winter and early spring[11]. The words have
reference to the attributes of the God in the old Italian religion, in
which the powers of Nature were deified and worshipped long before Mars
was identified with the Greek Ares. The other expressions in the prayer
appear to be, either directions given to the dancers, or the sounds
uttered as the dance proceeded.
Another short fragment has been preserved from the hymn of the Salii,
also an ancient priesthood, supposed to date from the times of the
early kings. The hymn is characterised by Horace, among other specimens
of ancient literature, as equally unintelligible to himself and to its
affected admirers[12].
From the extreme antiquity of these ceremonial chants it may be
inferred that metrical expression among the Romans, as among the Greeks
and other ancient nations, owed its origin to a primitive religious
worship. But while the early Greek hymns or chants in honour of the
Gods soon assumed the forms of pleasant tales of human adventure, or
tragic tales of human suffering, the Roman hymns retained their formal
and ritual character unchanged among all the changes of creed and
language. In the lines just quoted there is no trace of creative fancy,
nor any germ of devotional feeling, which might have matured into
lyrical or contemplative poetry. They sound like the words of a rude
incantation. They are the obscure memorial of a primitive, agricultural
people, living in a blind sense of dependence on their gods, and
restrained by a superstitious formalism from all activity of thought
or fancy. Such compositions cannot be attributed to the inspiration or
skill of any early poet, but seem to have been copied from the uncouth
and spontaneous shouts of a simple, unsophisticated priesthood, engaged
in a rude ceremonial dance. If these hymns stand in any relation to
Latin literature, they may perhaps be regarded as springing from the
same vein of public sentiment, as called forth the hymn composed by
Livius Andronicus during the Second Punic War, and as rude precursors
of those composed by Catullus and Horace, and chanted by a chorus of
youths and maidens in honour of the protecting Deities of Rome.
2. The verses of the Fauns and Vates spoken of by Ennius, with allusion
to the poem of Naevius, in the lines,
Scripsere alii rem,
Versibu' quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant,
were probably as far removed from poetry as the ritual chants of the
Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Fauni were the woodland gods of
Italy, and were, besides their other functions, supposed to be endowed
with prophetic power[13]. The word _Vates_, a word of Celtic origin,
originally means not a poet, but a soothsayer. The Camenae or Casmenae
(another form of which word appears in Carmenta, the prophetic mother
of Evander) were worshipped, not as the inspirers of poetry, but as
the foretellers of future events[14]. Both Greeks and Romans sought to
obtain a knowledge of the future, either through the interpretation of
omens, or through the voice of persons supposed to be divinely endowed
with foresight. But the Greeks, even in the regard which they paid to
auguries and oracles, were influenced, for the most part, by their
lively imagination; while the Romans, from the earliest to the latest
eras of their history, in all their relations to the supernatural
world, adhered to a scrupulous and unimaginative ceremonialism. The
notices in Latin literature of the functions of these early Vates--as,
for instance, the counsel of the Etrurian seer to drain the Alban Lake
during the war with Veii, and the prophecy of Marcius uttered during
the Second Punic War,
Amnem Trojugena Cannam Romane fuge, etc.[15],
suggest no more idea of poetical inspiration than the occasional
notices, in Latin authors, of the oracles of the Sibylline books.
The language of prophecy naturally assumes a metrical or rhythmical
form, partly as an aid to the memory, partly, perhaps, as a means of
giving to the words uttered the effect of a more solemn intonation. In
Greece, the oracles of the Delphian priestess, and the predictions of
soothsayers, collected in books or circulating orally among the people,
were expressed in hexameter verse and in the traditional diction of
epic poetry; but they were never ranked under any form of poetic art.
The verses of the Vates, so far as any inference can be formed as to
their nature, appear to have been products and proofs of unimaginative
superstition, rather than of any imaginative inspiration among the
early inhabitants of Latium.
3. Another class of metrical compositions, of native origin, but of a
totally opposite character, was known by the name of the 'Fescennine
verses.' These arose out of a very different class of feelings and
circumstances. Horace attributes their origin to the festive meetings
and exuberant mirth of the harvest-home among a primitive, strong, and
cheerful race of husbandmen. He points out how this rustic raillery
gradually assumed the character of fierce lampoons, and had to be
restrained by law:--
Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem
Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit;
Libertasque recurrentes accepta per annos
Lusit amabiliter, donec jam saevus apertam
In rabiem coepit verti jocus et per honestas
Ire domos impune minax. Doluere cruento
Dente lacessiti; fuit intactis quoque cura
Conditione super communi; quin etiam lex
Poenaque lata, malo quae nollet carmine quemquam
Describi; vertere modum, formidine fustis
Ad bene dicendum delectandumque redacti[16].
The change in character, here described, from coarse and good-humoured
bantering to libellous scurrility, may be conjectured to have taken
place when the Fescennine freedom passed from villages and country
districts to the active social and political life within the city.
That this change had taken place in Rome at an early period, is proved
by the fact that libellous verses were forbidden by the laws of the
Twelve Tables[17]. The original Fescennine verse appears, from the
testimony of Horace, to have been in metrical dialogue. This rude
amusement, in which a coarse kind of banter was interchanged during
their festive gatherings, was in early times characteristic of the
rural populations of Greece and Sicily, as well as Italy, and was
one of the original elements out of which Greek comedy and Greek
pastoral poetry were developed. These verses had a kindred origin with
that of the Phallic Odes among the Greeks. They both appear to have
sprung out of the rudest rites and the grossest symbolism of rustic
paganism. The Fescennine raillery long retained traces of this original
character. Catullus mentions the 'procax Fescennina locutio' among the
accompaniments of marriage festivals; and the songs of the soldiers,
in the extravagant license of the triumphal procession, betrayed
unmistakably this primitive coarseness.
These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from
the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum[18], were
the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which
ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which
also was familiar to the Romans before they became acquainted with
Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine
verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more
probable etymology[19] of the word _satura_ connects it in origin
with the _satura lanx_, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit
offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant
originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian _farsa_[20],
and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in
regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a
kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing,
differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and
not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected
plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy[21] to the
representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a
pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to
imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting
nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous
character; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined
with music (_saturas impletas modis_), even after the introduction of
the regular drama.
These scenic saturae, which, from Livy's notice, appear to have been
accompanied with good-humoured hilarity rather than with scurrilous
raillery, prepared the way for the reception of the regular drama among
the Romans, and will, to some extent, account for its early popularity
among them. The later Roman satire long retained traces of a connexion
with this primitive and indigenous satura, evinced both by the
miscellaneous character of its topics, and by its frequent employment
of dramatic dialogue.
4. The didactic tendency which is so conspicuous in the cultivated
literature of Rome manifested itself also in the indigenous
compositions of Italy. The popular maxims and precepts preserved by
the old agricultural writers and afterwards embodied by Virgil in
his Georgics, were handed down from generation to generation in the
Saturnian rhythm. But, apparently, the first metrical composition
committed to writing was a poem of an ethical or didactic character,
written two generations before the first dramatic representation of
Livius Andronicus, by Appius Claudius Caecus, who is also the earliest
known to us in the long line of Roman orators[22].
5. But it was not from any of these sources that Niebuhr supposed the
poetical character of early Roman history to be derived. Nor is there
any analogy between the religious hymns, or the Fescennine verses of
Italy, and the modern ballad. But there is evidence of the existence,
at one time, of other metrical compositions of which scarcely anything
is definitely ascertained, except that they were sung at banquets, to
the accompaniment of the flute, in celebration of the praises of great
men. There is no direct evidence of the time when these compositions,
some of which were believed by Niebuhr to have attained the dimensions
of Epic poems, existed, or when they fell into disuse. Cato, as quoted
by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, and in the Brutus[23], is our
earliest authority on the subject. His testimony is to the effect
that many generations before his time, the guests at banquets were in
the habit of singing, in succession, the praises of great men, to the
music of the flute. Cicero, in the Brutus, expresses a wish that these
songs still existed in his own day; 'utinam exstarent illa carmina,
quae multis saeculis ante suam aetatem in epulis esse cantitata a
singulis convivis de clarorum virorum laudibus in Originibus scriptum
reliquit Cato.' Varro again is quoted, to the effect, that boys
used to be present at banquets, for the purpose of singing 'ancient
poems,' celebrating the praises of their ancestors. Valerius Maximus
mentions 'that the older men used at banquets to celebrate in song the
illustrious deeds of their ancestors, in order to stimulate the youth
to imitate them.' Passages are quoted also from Horace, from Dionysius,
and from Tacitus, implying a belief in the ancient existence of these
compositions.
Besides the odes sung or recited at banquets, there were certain
funeral poems, called _Naeniae_, originally chanted by the female
relatives of the deceased, but afterwards by hired women. As the
practice of public speaking advanced, these gradually passed into a
mere form, and were superseded by funeral orations.
The facts ascertained about these commemorative poems amount to no
more than this,--that they were sung at banquets and the funerals of
great men,--that they were of such length as to admit of several being
sung in succession,--and that they fell into disuse some generations
before the age of Cato. The inferences that may fairly be drawn from
these statements are opposed to some of the conclusions of Niebuhr. The
evidence is all in favour of their having been short lyrical pieces,
and not long narrative poems. As they were sung at great banquets and
funerals, it seems probable that, like the custom of exhibiting the
ancestral images on the same occasions, they owed their origin to the
patrician pride of family, and were not likely to have been animated
by strong plebeian sentiment. If they had been preserved at all, they
were thus more likely to have been preserved by members of the great
houses living within the city walls, than by the peasantry living among
the outlying hills and country districts. If ever there were any golden
age of early Roman poetry, it had passed away long before the time of
Ennius and Cato.
The fact, however, remains, that the Romans did possess, in early
times, some kind of native minstrelsy, in which they honoured the
memory and the exploits of their great men. And this impulse of
hero-worship became in later times an important factor in their epic
poetry. But is there any reason to suppose that these compositions
were of the nature and importance assigned to them by Niebuhr, and
had any value in respect of invention and execution? It is difficult
to believe that such a native force of feeling and imagination,
pouring itself forth in stirring ballads and continuous epic poems,
could have been frozen so near its source; or that a rich, popular
poetry, not scattered through thinly-peopled districts, but the
possession of a great commonwealth--one most tenacious of every
national memorial--could have entirely disappeared, under any foreign
influence, in the course of one or two generations. But even on the
supposition that a great national poetry might have passed from the
memory of men--as, possibly, the poems existing before the time of
Homer may have been lost or merged in the greater glories of the
Iliad and the Odyssey--this early poetry could not have perished
without leaving permanent influence on the Roman language. The growth
of poetical language necessarily accompanies the growth of poetical
feeling and inspiration. The sensuous, passionate, and musical force by
which a language is first moulded into poetry is transmitted from one
generation of poets to another. The language of Homer, by its natural
and musical flow, by its accumulated wealth of meaning, by the use of
traditional epithets and modes of expression, that penetrate far back
into the belief, the feelings, and the life of an earlier time, implies
the existence of a long line of poets who preceded him. On the other
hand, the diction of the fragments of Ennius, in its strength and in
its rudeness, is evidently, in great measure, the creation of his own
time and his own mind. He has no true discernment of the characteristic
difference between the language of prose and of poetry. The materials
of his art had not been smoothed and polished by any long, continuous
stream of national melody, but were rough-hewn and adapted by his own
energy to the rugged structure of his poem.
While, therefore, it appears that the actual notices of the early
commemorative poems do not imply that they were the products of
imagination or poetical feeling, or that they excited much popular
enthusiasm, and were an important element in the early State, their
entire disappearance among a people so tenacious of all their gains,
and, still more, the unformed and prosaic condition of the language and
rhythm used by Naevius, Ennius, and the other early poets, lead to the
presumption, that they were not much valued by the Romans at any time,
and that they were not the creations of poetic genius and art. This
presumption is further strengthened by such indications as there are
of the recognition, or rather the non-recognition, of poets or of the
poetic character at Rome in early times.
The worship of the Camenae was indeed an old and genuine part of the
Roman or Italian religion; but, as was said before, their original
function was to predict future events, and to communicate the knowledge
of divination; not like that of the Greek Muses, to imagine bright
stories of divine and human adventure,--
λησμοσύνην τε κακῶν ἄμπαυμά τε μερμηράων.
Even the names by which two of the Camenae were known--Postvorta and
Antevorta--suggest the prosaic and practical functions which they were
supposed to fulfil. The Romans had no native word equivalent to the
Greek word ἀοιδός, denoting the primary and most essential
of all poetical gifts, the power to awaken the music of language. The
word _vates_, as was seen, denoted a prophet. The title of _scriba_
was applied to Livius Andronicus; and Naevius, who has by some been
regarded as the last of the old race of Roman bards, applies to himself
the Greek name of _poeta_,--
Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam.
The commemorative odes appear to have been recited or sung at banquets,
not by poets or rhapsodists, but by boys or guests. There is one
notice, indeed, of a class of men who practised the profession of
minstrelsy. This passage, which is quoted by Aulus Gellius from the
writings of Cato, implies the very lowest estimation of the position
and character of the poet, and points more naturally to the composers
of the libellous verses forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables,
than to the authors of heroic and national lays:--'Poetry was not held
in honour; if anyone devoted himself to it, or went about to banquets,
he was called a vagabond[24].'
It appears that, on this ground also, there is no reason for believing
in the existence of any golden age of Roman poetry before the time of
Ennius, or in the theory that the legendary tales of Roman history were
created and shaped by native minstrels. To what cause, then, can we
attribute their origin? These tales have a strong human interest, and
represent marked and original types of antique heroism. They have the
elements of true tragic pathos and moral grandeur. They could neither
have arisen nor been preserved except among a people endowed with
strong capacities of feeling and action. But the strength of the Roman
mind consisted more in retentive capacity than in creative energy.
Their art and their religion, their family and national customs,
aimed at preserving the actual memory of men and of their actions:
not like the arts, ceremonies, and customs of the Greeks, which aimed
at lifting the mind out of reality into an ideal world. As one of the
chief difficulties of the Homeric controversy arises from our ignorance
of the power of the memory during an age when poetry and song were
in the fullest life, but the use of letters was either unknown, or
extremely limited; so there is a parallel difficulty in all attempts
to explain the origin of early Roman history, from our ignorance of
the power of oral tradition in a time of long established order, but
yet unacquainted with any of the forms of literature. The indifference
of barbarous tribes to their past history can prove little or nothing
as to the tenacity of the national memory among a people far advanced
towards civilisation like the Romans after the establishment of their
Republican form of government. Nor can the analogy of early Greek
traditions be fairly applied to those of Rome, owing to the great
difference in the circumstances and the genius of the two nations.
Many real impressions of the past might fix themselves indelibly in
the grave and solid temperament of the Romans, which would have been
lost amid the inexhaustible wealth of fancy that had been lavished upon
the Greeks. The strict family life and discipline of the Romans, the
continuity of their religious colleges, the unity of a single state as
the common centre of all their interests, the slow and steady growth
of their institutions, their strong regard for precedent, were all
conditions more favourable to the preservation of tradition than the
lively social life, the numerous centres of political organization, and
the rapid growth and vicissitudes of the Greek Republics.
It cannot, indeed, be disputed that although the legendary tales of
Roman history may have drawn more of their colour from life than
from imagination, yet there is no criterion by which the amount of
fact contained in them can be separated from the other elements of
which they were composed. Oral tradition among the Romans, as among
other nations, was founded on impressions originally received without
any careful sifting of evidence; and these first impressions would
naturally be modified in accordance with the feelings and opinions of
each generation, through which they were transmitted. Aetiological
myths, or the attempt to explain some institution or memorial by some
concrete fact, and the systematic reconstruction of forgotten events,
have also entered largely into the composition of Roman history. But
these admissions do not lead to the conclusion that the art or fancy
of any class of early poets was added to the unconscious operation of
popular feeling in moulding the impressive tales of early heroism,
partly out of the memory of real events and personages, partly out
of the ideal of character, latent in the national mind. It has been
remarked by Sir G. C. Lewis that many even of the Greek myths,
abounding 'in striking, pathetic, and interesting events,' existed
as prose legends, and were handed down in the common speech of the
people. In like manner, such tales as those of Lucretia and Virginia,
of Horatius and the Fabii, of Cincinnatus, Coriolanus, and Camillus,
which stand out prominently in the twilight of Roman history, may have
been preserved in the _fama vulgaris_, or among the family traditions
of the great houses, till they were gathered into the poem of Ennius
and the prose narratives of the early annalists[25]. In so far as they
are shaped or coloured by imagination, they do not bear traces of the
conscious art of a poet, but rather of an unconscious conformity to the
national ideal of character. The most impressive of these legendary
stories illustrate the primitive virtues of the Roman character, such
as chastity, frugality, fortitude, and self-devotion; or the national
characteristics of patrician pride and a stern exercise of parental
authority. There is certainly no internal evidence that any of them
originated in a pure poetic impulse, or gave birth to any work of
poetic art deserving a permanent existence in literature.
The analogy of other nations might suggest the inference that a race
which in its maturity produced a genuine poetic literature must, in
the early stages of its history, have given some proof of poetic
inspiration. It is natural to associate the idea of poetry with youth
both in nations and individuals. Yet the evidence of their language,
of their religion, and of their customs, leads to the conclusion that
the Romans, while prematurely great in action and government, were, in
the earlier stages of their national life, little moved by any kind of
poetical imagination. The state of religious feeling or belief which
gives birth to or co-exists with primitive poetry has left no trace
of itself upon the early Roman annals. It is generally found that a
fanciful mythology, of a bright, gloomy, or grotesque character, in
accordance with the outward circumstances and latent spirit or humour
of the particular race among whom it originates, precedes and for a
time accompanies the poetry of romantic action. The creative faculty
produces strange forms and conditions of supernatural life out of
its own mysterious sympathy with Nature, before it learns to invent
tales of heroic action and of tragic calamity out of its sympathy with
human energy and passion and its interest in marking the course of
destiny, and the vicissitudes of life. The development of the Roman
religion betrays the absence, or at least the weaker influence of that
imaginative power which shaped the great mythologies of different races
out of the primeval worship of nature. The later element introduced
into Roman religion was due not to imagination but to reflection. The
worship of Fides, Concordia, Pudicitia, and the like, marks a great
progress from the early adoration of the sun, the earth, the vault of
heaven, and the productive power of nature; but it is a progress in
understanding and moral consciousness, not in poetical feeling nor
imaginative power. It shows that Roman civilisation advanced without
this vivifying influence, that the mind of the race early reached the
maturity of manhood, without passing through the dreams of childhood or
the buoyant fancies of youth.
The circumstances of the Romans, in early times, were also different
from those by which the growth of a romantic poetry has usually been
accompanied. Though, like all races born to a great destiny, they
had much latent imaginative ardour of feeling, this was employed by
them, unconsciously, in elevating and purifying the ideal of the State
and the family, as actually realised in experience. Their orderly
organisation,--the early establishment of their civic forms,--the
strict discipline of family life among them,--the formal and ceremonial
character of their national religion,--and their strong interest in
practical affairs,--were not calculated either to kindle the glow of
individual genius, or to dispose the mass of the people to listen to
the charm of musical verse. The wars of the young Republic, carried on
by a well-trained militia for the acquisition of new territory, formed
the character to solid strength and steady discipline, but could not
act upon the fancy in the same way as the distant enterprise, the
long struggles for national independence, or the daring forays, which
have thrown the light of romance around the warlike youth of other
races. The tillage of the soil, in which the brief intervals between
their wars were passed, was a tame and monotonous pursuit compared with
the maritime adventure which awoke the energies of Greece, or with
the wild and lonely, half-pastoral, half-marauding life, out of which
a true ballad poetry arose in modern times. Some traces of a wilder
life, or some faint memories of their Sabine forefathers, may be dimly
discerned in the earliest traditions of the Roman people; but their
youth was essentially practical,--great and strong in the virtues of
temperance, gravity, fortitude, reverence for law and the majesty of
the State, combined with a strong love of liberty and sturdy resistance
to wrong. These qualities are the foundations of a powerful and orderly
State, not the root nor the sap by which a great national poetry is
nourished[26].
If the pure Roman intellect and discipline had spontaneously produced
any kind of literature, it would have been more likely to have taken
the form of history or oratory than of national song or ballad. It was
from men of the Italian provinces, and not from her own sons, that
Rome received her poetry. The men of the most genuinely Roman type and
character long resisted all literary progress. The patrons and friends
of the early poets were the more liberal members of the aristocracy,
in whom the austerity of the national character and narrowness of the
national mind had yielded to new ideas and a wider experience. The
art of Greece was communicated to 'rude Latium,' through the medium
of those kindred races who had come into earlier contact with the
Greek language and civilisation. With less native strength, but with
greater flexibility, these races were more readily moulded by foreign
influences; and, leading a life of greater ease and freedom, they were
more susceptible to all the impulses of Nature. While they were thus
more readily prepared to catch the spirit of Greek culture, they
had learned, through long years of war and subsequent dependence,
to understand and respect the imperial State in which their own
nationality had been merged. It is important to remember that the time
in which Roman literature arose was not only that of the first active
intercourse between Greeks and Romans, but also that in which a great
war, against the most powerful State outside of Italy, had awakened
the sense of an Italian nationality, of which Rome was the centre.
The great Republic derived her education and literature from the
accumulated stores of Greek thought and feeling; but these were made
available to her through the willing service of poets who, though born
in other parts of Italy, looked to Rome as the head and representative
of their common country.
[Footnote 8: Epist. ii. 1. 157.]
[Footnote 9: Georg. ii. 385.]
[Footnote 10: It is thus interpreted by the same author:--Nos, lares,
juvate. Ne malam luem, Mamers, sinas incurrere in plures. Satur esto,
fere Mars. In limen insili. Pesiste verberare (limen)! Semones alterni
advocate cunctos. Nos, Mamers, juvato. Tripudia.
'Help us, Lares. Suffer not, Mamers, pestilence to fall on the people.
Be satisfied, fierce Mars. Leap on the threshold. Cease beating it.
Call, in turn, on all the demigods. Help us, Mamers.'--Mommsen, Röm.
Geschichte, vol. i. ch. xv.]
[Footnote 11: Such is the interpretation of Corssen, Origines Poesis
Romanae.]
[Footnote 12: Epist. ii. 1. 86.]
[Footnote 13: Cf. Virg. Aen. vii. 81, 82:--
At rex sollicitus monstris, oracula Fauni,
Fatidici genitoris adit.
]
[Footnote 14: Cf. Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. i. 24, note 1.]
[Footnote 15: Livy xxv. 12.]
[Footnote 16: 'The Fescennine raillery in this way, arose and poured
forth its rustic banter in responsive strains; the spirit of freedom,
made welcome, as the season came round, first played a kindly part; but
soon the jests grew cruel, then changed into sheer fury, and began,
with impunity, to threaten and assail honourable households. Men
smarted under the sharp edge of its cruel tooth: even those who were
unassailed felt concern for the common weal. A law was passed, and a
penalty enforced, forbidding any one to be branded in libellous verses.
Thus they changed their style, and were brought back to a kindly and
pleasant tone, under fear of a beating.'--Epist. ii. 1. 144-55.]
[Footnote 17: Sei quis ocentasit, casmenue condisit, quod infamiam
faxsit flacitiomque alterei, fuste feritor.]
[Footnote 18: Teuffel quotes from Festus: Fescennini versus qui
canebantur in nuptiis, ex urbe Fescennina dicuntur allati, sive ideo
dicti quia fascinum putabantur arcere. It seems more natural to connect
the name of these verses, which were especially characteristic of the
Latian peasantry, with fascinum (the phallic symbol) than with any
particular town of Etruria, though the name of that town may probably
have the same origin.]
[Footnote 19: Mommsen's explanation, 'the masque of the full men'
('saturi'), does not seem to meet with general acceptance.]
[Footnote 20: Cf. Teuffel, vi. 2.]
[Footnote 21: vii. 2.]
[Footnote 22: Cf. Teuffel, Wagner's Translation, p. 102.]
[Footnote 23: Tusc. Disp. iv. 2; Brutus, 19.]
[Footnote 24: Noct. Att. xi. 2. A similar character at one time
attached to minstrels in Scotland.]
[Footnote 25: Some of these tales may have been originally
aetiological, but the human interest even in these was probably drawn
originally from actual incidents and personages of the Early Republic.
Some of the aetiological myths, such as that of Attus Navius the augur,
have no human interest, though they have an historical interest in
connexion with early Roman religion or institutions.]
[Footnote 26: Cf. Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. i. 1. 24.]
CHAPTER III.
THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE--LIVIUS ANDRONICUS--CN. NAEVIUS, B.C.
240-202.
The historical event which first brought the Romans into familiar
contact with the Greeks, was the war with Pyrrhus and with Tarentum,
the most powerful and flourishing among the famous Greek colonies
in lower Italy. In earlier times, indeed, through their occasional
communication with the Greeks of Cumae, and the other colonies in
Italy, they had obtained a vague knowledge of some of the legends of
Greek poetry. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced at Rome from
Epidaurus in B.C. 293 and the oracle of Delphi had been consulted by
the Romans in still earlier times. As the Sibylline verses appear to
have been composed in Greek, their interpreters must have been either
Greeks or men acquainted with that language[27]. The identification
of the Greek with the Roman mythology had probably commenced before
Greek literature was known to the Romans, although the works of Naevius
and Ennius must have had an influence in completing this process.
Greek civilisation had come, however, at an earlier period into close
relation with the south of Italy; and the natives of that district,
such as Ennius and Pacuvius, who first settled at Rome, were spoken of
by the Romans as 'Semi Graeci.' But, until after the fall of Tarentum
there appears to have been no familiar intercourse between the two
great representatives of ancient civilisation. Till the war with
Pyrrhus, the knowledge that the two nations had of one another was
slight and vague. But, immediately after that time, the affairs of Rome
began to attract the attention of Greek historians[28], and the Romans,
though very slowly, began to obtain some acquaintance with the language
and literature of Greece.
Tarentum was taken in B.C. 272, but more than thirty years elapsed
before Livius Andronicus represented his first drama before a Roman
audience. Twenty years of this intervening period, from B.C. 261 to
B.C. 241, were occupied with the First Punic War; and it was not till
the successful close of that war, and the commencement of the following
years of peace, that this new kind of recreation and instruction was
made familiar to the Romans.
Serus enim Graecis admovit acumina chartis;
Et post Punica bella quietus, quaerere coepit
Quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent[29].
Two circumstances, however, must in the meantime have prepared the
minds of the Romans for the reception of the new literature. Sicily
had been the chief battle-field of the contending powers. In their
intercourse with the Sicilian Greeks, the Romans had great facilities
for becoming acquainted with the Greek language, and frequent
opportunities of being present at dramatic representations. Many Greeks
also had been brought to Rome as slaves after the capture of Tarentum,
and were employed in educating the young among the higher classes.
Thus many Roman citizens were prepared, by their circumstances and
education, to take interest in the legends and in the dramatic form of
literature introduced from Greece; while the previous existence of the
saturae, and other scenic exhibitions at Rome, tended to make the new
drama acceptable to the great mass of the population.
The earliest period of Roman poetry extends from the close of the
First Punic War till the beginning of the first century B.C. During
this period of about a century and a half, in which Roman oratory,
history, and comedy, were also actively cultivated, we hear only of
five or six names as eminent in different kinds of serious poetry. The
whole labour of introducing and of keeping alive, among an unlettered
people, some taste for the graver forms of literature thus devolved
upon a few men of ardent temperament, vigorous understanding, and great
productive energy; but with little sense of art, and endowed with
faculties seemingly more adapted to the practical business of life
than to the idealising efforts of genius. They had to struggle against
the difficulties incidental to the first beginnings of art and to the
rudeness of the Latin language. They were exposed, also, to other
disadvantages, arising from the natural indifference of the mass of
the people to all works of imagination, and from the preference of the
educated class for the more finished works already existing in Greek
literature.
Yet this long period, in which poetry, with so much difficulty and such
scanty resources, struggled into existence at Rome, is connected with
the age of Cicero by an unbroken line of literary continuity. Naevius,
the younger contemporary of Livius, and the first native poet, was
actively engaged in the composition of his poems till the time of his
death; about which period his greater successor first appeared at Rome.
For about thirty years, Ennius shone alone in epic and tragic poetry.
The poetic successor of Ennius was his nephew, Pacuvius. He, in the
later years of his life, lived in friendly intercourse with his younger
rival Accius, who, again, in his old age, had frequently conversed with
Cicero[30]. The torch, which was first lighted by Livius Andronicus
from the decaying fires of Greece, was thus handed down by these few
men, through this long period, until it was extinguished during the
stormy times which fell in the youth of the great orator and prose
writer of the Republic.
The forms of serious poetry, prevailing during this period, were the
tragic drama, the annalistic epic, and satire. Tragedy was earliest
introduced, was received with most favour, and was cultivated by all
the poets of the period, with the exception of Lucilius and the comic
writers. The epic poetry of the age was the work of Naevius and Ennius.
It has greater claims to originality and national spirit, both in
form and substance, and it exercised a more powerful influence on the
later poetry of Rome, than either the tragedy or comedy of the time.
The invention of satire, the most purely original of the three, is
generally attributed to Lucilius; but the satiric spirit was shown
earlier in some of the dramas of Naevius; and the first modification of
the primitive satura to a literary shape was the work of Ennius, who
was followed in the same style by his nephew Pacuvius.
No complete work of any of these poets has been preserved to modern
times. Our knowledge of the epic, tragic, and satiric poetry of this
long period is derived partly from ancient testimony, but chiefly
from the examination of numerous fragments. Most of these have been
preserved, not by critics on account of their beauty and worth, but
by grammarians on account of the obsolete words and forms of speech
contained in them,--a fact, which probably leads us to attribute to
the earlier literature a more abnormal and ruder style than that which
really belonged to it. A few of the longest and most interesting
fragments have come down in the works of the admirers of those ancient
poets, especially of Cicero and Aulus Gellius. The notion that can
be formed of the early Roman literature must thus, of necessity,
be incomplete. Yet these fragments are sufficient to produce a
consistent impression of certain prevailing characteristics of thought
and sentiment. Many of them are valuable from their own intrinsic
worth; others again from the grave associations connected with their
antiquity, and from the authentic evidence they afford of the moral
and intellectual qualities, the prevailing ideas and sympathies of the
strongest race of the ancient world, about, or shortly after, the time
when they attained the acme of their moral and political greatness.
The two earliest authors who fill a period of forty years in the
literary history of Rome, extending from the end of the First to the
end of the Second Punic War, are Livius Andronicus and Cn. Naevius.
Of the first very little is known. The fragments of his works are
scanty and unimportant, and have been preserved by grammarians merely
as illustrative of old forms of the language. The admirers of Naevius
and Ennius, in ancient times, awarded only scanty honours to the older
dramatist. Cicero, for instance, says of his plays 'that they are not
worth reading a second time[31].' There is no ground for believing that
Livius was a man of original genius. The importance which attaches to
him consists in his being the accidental medium through which literary
art was first introduced to the Romans. He was a Greek, and, as is
generally supposed, a native of Tarentum. If he was among the captives
taken after the fall of that city, he must have resided thirty years
at Rome before he ventured to reproduce a Greek drama in the Latin
language. He educated the sons of his master, M. Livius Salinator, from
whom he afterwards received his freedom. The last thirty years of his
life were devoted to literature, and chiefly to the reproduction of the
Greek drama in a Latin dress. His tragedies appear all to have been
founded on Greek subjects; most of them, probably, were translations.
Among the titles, we hear of the _Aegisthus_, _Ajax_, _Equus Trojanus_,
_Tereus_, _Hermione_, etc.--all of them subjects which continued to be
popular with the later tragedians of Rome. No fragment is preserved
sufficient to give any idea of his treatment of the subjects, or of
his general mode of thought and feeling. Little can be gathered from
the scanty remains of his works, except some idea of the harshness and
inelegance of his diction.
In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey into Saturnian
verse. This work long retained its place as a school-book, and is
spoken of by Horace as forming part of his own early lessons under
the rod of Orbilius[32]. One or two lines of the translation still
remain, and exemplify its bald and prosaic diction, and the extreme
irregularity of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey[33],
οὐ γὰρ ἔγωγέ τί φημι κακώτερον ἄλλο θαλάσσης
ἄνδρα γε συγχεῦαι, εἰ καὶ μάλα καρτερὸς εἴη;
are thus rendered:--
Namque nilum pejus
Macerat hemonem, quamde mare saevom, viris quoi
Sunt magnae, topper confringent importunae undae.
He was appointed also, on one occasion, near the end of the Second
Punic War, to compose a hymn to be sung by 'virgines ter novenae,'
which is described by Livy, the historian, as rugged and unpolished[34].
Livius was the schoolmaster of the Roman people rather than the father
of their literature. To accomplish what he did required no original
genius, but only the industry, knowledge, and tastes of an educated
man. If his long residence among his grave and stern masters, and the
hardships and constraint of slavery, had subdued in him the levity
and gaiety of a Tarentine Greek, they did not extinguish his love
of his native literature and the intellectual cultivation peculiar
to his race. In spite of the disadvantage of writing in a foreign
language, and of addressing an unlettered people, he was able to
give the direction which Roman poetry long followed, and to awaken a
new interest in the legends and heroes of his race. It was necessary
that the Romans should be educated before they could either produce
or appreciate an original poet. Livius performed a useful, if not a
brilliant service, by directing those who followed him to the study and
imitation of the great masters who combined, with an unattainable grace
and art, a masculine strength and heroism of sentiment congenial to the
better side of Roman character.
Cn. Naevius is really the first in the line of Roman poets, and the
first writer in the Latin language whose fragments give indication of
original power. He is believed to have been a Campanian by birth, on
the authority of Aulus Gellius, who characterised his famous epitaph as
'plenum superbiae Campanae.' Though the arrogance of Campania may have
been proverbial, yet the expression could scarcely with propriety have
been applied, except to a native of that district. If not a Roman by
birth, he at least belonged to a district which had become thoroughly
Latinised long before his time, and he showed himself to be, like his
successor Ennius, thoroughly Roman in his sympathies. He served as
a soldier in the First Punic War, and recorded his services in his
epic poem on that subject. The earliest drama of Naevius was brought
out in B.C. 235, five years after the first representation of Livius
Andronicus. The number of dramas which he is known to have composed
affords proof of great industry and activity, from that time till the
time of his banishment from Rome. He was more successful in comedy than
in tragedy, and he used the stage, as it had been used by the writers
of the old Attic comedy, as an arena of popular invective and political
warfare. A keen partisan of the commonalty, he attacked with vehemence
some of the chiefs of the great senatorian party. A line, which had
passed into a proverb in the time of Cicero, is attributed to him,--
Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules;
to which the Metelli are said to have replied in the pithy Saturnian,
Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae.
It is, however, doubted whether the first of these lines was really
written by Naevius, as the Metelli did not enjoy their rapid succession
of consulships till nearly a century after his death; but even at the
time of the Second Punic War they were powerful enough to procure the
imprisonment of the poet, in consequence of some offence which he had
given them. Plautus[35] alludes to this event, in one of the few
passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of
Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While
in prison, he composed two plays (the _Hariolus_ and _Leon_), which
contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated
through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. Being
afterwards banished, he took up his residence at Utica, where he is
said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in
B.C. 204[36], though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus
investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some
time after that date[37]. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero[38],
that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age.
Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere
of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time
between B.C. 261 and B.C. 241, he must have been well advanced in years
at the time of his death.
The best known of all the fragments of Naevius, and the most favourable
specimen of his style, is his epitaph:--
Mortales immortales flere si foret fas,
Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam,
Itaque postquam est Orcino traditus thesauro,
Obliti sunt Romae loquier Latina lingua.
It has been supposed that this epitaph was written as a dying protest
against the Hellenising influence of Ennius; but as Ennius came to
Rome for the first time about B.C. 204, it is not likely, even if the
life of Naevius was prolonged somewhat beyond that date, that the fame
and influence of his younger rival could have spread so rapidly as to
disturb the peace of the old poet in his exile. It might as fairly
be regarded as proceeding from a jealousy of the merits of Plautus,
as from hostility to the innovating tendency of Ennius. The words of
the epitaph are simply expressive of the strong self-assertion and
independence which Naevius maintained till the end of his active and
somewhat turbulent career.
He wrote a few tragedies, of which scarcely anything is known except
the titles,--such as the _Andromache_, _Equus Trojanus_, _Hector
Proficiscens_, _Lycurgus_,--the last founded on the same subject as the
Bacchae of Euripides. The titles of nearly all these plays, as well
as of the plays of Livius, imply the prevailing interest taken in the
Homeric poems, and in all the events connected with the Trojan War. The
following passage from the Lycurgus has some value as containing the
germs of poetical diction:--
Vos, qui regalis corporis custodias
Agitatis, ite actutum in frundiferos locos,
Ingenio arbusta ubi nata sunt, non obsita[39].
He composed a number of comedies, and also some original plays,
founded on events in Roman history,--one of them called _Romulus_, or
_Alimonia Romuli et Remi_. The longest of the fragments attributed to
him is a passage from a comedy, which has been, with less probability,
attributed to Ennius. It is a description of a coquette, and shows
considerable power of close satiric observation:--
Quasi pila
In choro ludens dadatim dat se, et communem facit:
Alii adnutat, alii adnictat, alium amat, alium tenet;
Alibi manus est occupata, alii percellit pedem;
Alii spectandum dat annulum; a labris alium invocat;
Cum alio cantat, attamen dat alii digito literas[40].
The chief characteristic illustrated by the scanty fragments of his
dramas is the political spirit with which they were animated. Thus
Cicero[41] refers to a passage in one of his plays (_ut est in Naevii
ludo_) where, to the question, 'Who had, within so short a time,
destroyed your great commonwealth?' the pregnant answer is given,
Proveniebant oratores novi, stulti adolescentuli[41].
The nobles, whose enmity he provoked, were probably attacked by him
in his comedies. One passage is quoted by Aulus Gellius, in which
a failing of the great Scipio is exposed[42]. Other fragments are
found indicative of his freedom of speech and bold independence of
character:--
Quae ego in theatro hic meis probavi plausibus,
Ea nunc audere quemquam regem rumpere?
Quanto libertatem hanc his superat servitus[43]?
and this also[44]:--
Semper pluris feci potioremque ego
Libertatem habui multo quam pecuniam.
He is placed in the canon of Volcatius Sedigitus immediately after
Plautus in the rank of comic poets. He has more of the stamp of
Lucilius than of his immediate successor Ennius. By his censorious and
aggressive vehemence, by boldness and freedom of speech, and by his
strong political feeling, Naevius in his dramas represents the spirit
of Roman satire rather than of Roman tragedy. He holds the same place
in Roman literature as the Tribune of the Commons in Roman politics.
He expressed the vigorous independence of spirit that supported the
Commons in their long struggle with the patricians, while Ennius may be
regarded as expressing the majesty and authority with which the Roman
Senate ruled the world.
But the work on which his fame as a national and original poet chiefly
rested was his epic or historical poem on the First Punic War. The
poem was originally one continuous work, written in the Saturnian
metre; though, at a later time, it was divided into seven books. The
earlier part of the work dealt with the mythical origin of Rome and
of Carthage, the flight of Aeneas from Troy, his sojourn at the court
of Dido, and his settlement in Latium. The mythical background of the
poem afforded scope for imaginative treatment and invention. Its main
substance, however, appears to have been composed in the spirit and
tone of a contemporary chronicle. The few fragments that remain from
the longer and later portion of the work, evidently express a bare and
literal adherence to fact, without any poetical colouring or romantic
representation.
Ennius and Virgil are both known to have borrowed much from this poem
of Naevius. There are many passages in the Aeneid in which Virgil
followed, with slight deviations, the track of the older poet. Naevius
(as quoted by Servius) introduced the wives of Aeneas and of Anchises,
leaving Troy in the night-time,--
Amborum
Uxores noctu Troiade exibant capitibus
Opertis, flentes abeuntes lacrimis cum multis.
He represents Aeneas as having only one ship built by Mercury,--a
limitation which did not suit Virgil's account of the scale on which
the war was carried on, after the landing in Italy. The account of the
storm in the first Aeneid, of Aeneas consoling his followers, of Venus
complaining to Jupiter, and of his comforting her with the promise of
the future greatness of Rome (one of the cardinal passages in Virgil's
epic), were all taken from the old Saturnian poem of Naevius. He
speaks also of Anna and Dido, as daughters of Agenor, though there
is no direct evidence that he anticipated Virgil in telling the tale
of Dido's unhappy love. He mentioned also the Italian Sibyl and the
worship of the Penates--materials which Virgil fused into his great
national and religious poem. Ennius followed Naevius in representing
Romulus as the grandson of Aeneas. The exigencies of his chronology
compelled Virgil to fill a blank space of three hundred years with the
shadowy forms of a line of Alban kings.
Whatever may have been the origin of the belief in the connexion of
Rome with Troy, it certainly prevailed before the poem of Naevius was
composed, as at the beginning of the First Punic War the inhabitants
of Egesta opened their gates to Rome, in acknowledgment of their
common descent from Troy. But the story of the old connexion of Aeneas
and Dido, symbolising the former league and the later enmity between
Romans and Carthaginians, most probably first assumed shape in the
time of the Punic Wars. The belief, as shadowed forth in Naevius,
that the triumph of Rome had been decreed from of old by Jupiter,
and promised to the mythical ancestress of Aeneas, proves that the
Romans were possessed already with the idea of their national destiny.
How much of the tale of Aeneas and Dido is due to the imagination of
Naevius it is impossible to say; but his treatment of the mythical
part of his story,--his introduction of the storm, the complaint of
Venus, etc.,--merits the praise of happy and suggestive invention,
and of a real adaptation to his main subject. There was more meaning
in the mythical foreshadowing of the deadly strife between Romans and
Carthaginians, at a time when the two nations were fighting for their
very existence, and for the ultimate prize of the empire of the world,
than in the age of Virgil, when the power of Carthage was only a memory
of the past, and the immediate danger from which Rome had escaped had
arisen not so much from any foreign enemy, as from the fierce passions
of her own sons.
The mythical part of the poem was a prelude to the main subject, the
events of the First Punic War. Naevius and Ennius, like others among
the Roman poets of a later date, allowed the provinces of poetry and
of history to run into one another. They composed poetical chronicles
without any attempt to adhere to the principles and practice of the
Greek epic. The work of Naevius differed from that of Ennius in this
respect, that it treated of one particular portion of Roman history,
and did not profess to unfold the whole annals of the State. The slight
and scanty fragments that remain from the latter part of the poem, are
expressed with all the bareness, and, apparently, with the fidelity
of a chronicle. They have the merit of being direct and vigorous, but
are entirely without poetic grace and ornament. Rapid and graphic
condensation is their chief merit. There is a dash of impetuosity
in some of them, suggestive of the bold, impatient, and energetic
temperament of the poet; as for instance in the lines
Transit Melitam Romanus exercitus, insulam integram
Urit, populatur, vastat, rem hostium concinnat[45].
But the fragments of the poem are really too unimportant to afford
ground for a true estimate of its general merit. They supply some
evidence in regard to the irregularity of the metre in which it was
written. The uncertainty which prevails as to its structure may be
inferred from the fact that different conjectural readings of every
fragment are proposed by different commentators. A saying of an old
grammarian, Atilius Fortunatianus, is quoted to the effect that he
could not adduce from the whole poem of Naevius any single line, as
a normal specimen of the pure Saturnian verse. Cicero bears strong
testimony to the merits of the poem in point of style. He says in one
place, 'the Punic War delights us like a work of Myron[46].' In the
dialogue 'De Oratore,' he represents Crassus as comparing the idiomatic
purity which distinguished the conversation of his mother-in-law,
Laelia, and other ladies of rank, with the style of Plautus and
Naevius. 'Equidem quum audio socrum meam Laeliam (facilius enim
mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod, multorum sermonis
expertes, ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt); sed eam sic audio,
ut Plautum mihi aut Naevium videar audire. Sono ipso vocis ita recto et
simplici est, ut nihil ostentationis aut imitationis afferre videatur;
ex quo sic locutum ejus patrem judico, sic majores[47].' Expressions
from his plays were, from their weight and compact brevity, quoted
familiarly in the days of Cicero; and one of them 'laudari a laudato
viro,' like so many other pithy Latin sayings, is still in use to
express a distinction that could not be characterised in happier or
shorter terms. It is to be remarked also that the merit, which he
assumes to himself in his epitaph, is the purity with which he wrote
the Latin language.
Our knowledge of Naevius is thus, of necessity, very limited and
fragmentary. From the testimony of later authors it may, however, be
gathered that he was a remarkable and original man. He represented
the boldness, freedom, and energy, which formed one side of the Roman
character. Like some of our own early dramatists, he had served as
a soldier before becoming an author. He was ardent in his national
feeling; and, both in his life and in his writings, he manifested a
strong spirit of political partisanship. As an author, he showed great
productive energy, which continued unabated through a long and vigorous
lifetime. His high self-confident spirit and impetuous temper have left
their impress on the few fragments of his dramas and of his epic poem.
Probably his most important service to Roman literature consisted in
the vigour and purity with which he used the Latin language. But the
conception of his epic poem seems to imply some share of the higher
gift of poetical invention. He stands at the head of the line of Roman
poets, distinguished by that force of speech and vehemence of temper,
which appeared again in Lucilius, Catullus, and Juvenal; distinguished
also by that national spirit which moved Ennius and, after him, Virgil,
to employ their poetical faculty in raising a monument to commemorate
the power and glory of Rome.
[Footnote 27: Cf. Lewis, Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i.
chap. ii. 14.]
[Footnote 28: Cf. Lewis, Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i.
chap. ii. 14, 15.]
[Footnote 29: Horace, Epist. ii. 1. 161-3.]
[Footnote 30: Cic. Brutus, ch. 28.]
[Footnote 31: Brutus, 18.]
[Footnote 32: Epist. ii. 1. 71.]
[Footnote 33: viii. 138.]
[Footnote 34: xxvii. 17.]
[Footnote 35: Miles Gloriosus, ii. 2. 27.]
[Footnote 36: Brutus, 15.]
[Footnote 37: Mommsen remarks that he could not have retired to Utica
till after it fell into the possession of the Romans.]
[Footnote 38: De Senectute, 14.]
[Footnote 39: 'Ye who keep watch over the person of the king, hasten
straightway to the leafy places, where the copsewood is of nature's
growth, not planted by man.']
[Footnote 40: 'Like one playing at ball in a ring, she tosses about
from one to another, and is at home with all. To one she nods, to
another winks; she makes love to one, clings to another. Her hand is
busy here, her foot there. To one she gives a ring to look at, to
another blows a kiss; with one she sings, with another corresponds by
signs.'
The reading of the passage here adopted is that given by Munk.]
[Footnote 41: De Senectute, 6.]
[Footnote 42:
Etiam qui res magnas manu saepe gessit gloriose,
Cujus facta viva nunc vigent, qui apud gentes solus praestat,
Eum suus pater cum pallio ab amica abduxit uno.
]
[Footnote 43: 'What I in the theatre here have made good by the
applause given to me, to think that any of these great people should
now dare to interfere with! How much better thing is the slavery
_here_'(_i.e._ represented in this play), 'than the liberty we actually
enjoy?']
[Footnote 44: I have always held liberty to be of more value and a
better thing than money.' The reading is that given by Munk.]
[Footnote 45: Mommsen remarks that, in the fragments of this poem, the
action is generally represented in the _present tense_.]
[Footnote 46: Brutus, 19.]
[Footnote 47: 'I, for my part, as I listen to my mother-in-law, Laelia
(for women more easily preserve the pure idiom of antiquity, because,
from their limited intercourse with the world, they retain always their
earlier impressions), in listening, I say to her, I fancy that I am
listening to Plautus or Naevius. The very tones of her voice are so
natural and simple, that she seems absolutely free from affectation or
imitation; from this I gather that her father spoke, and her ancestors
all spoke, in the very same way.'--Cicero, De Oratore iii. 12.]
CHAPTER IV.
ENNIUS.
The impulse given to Latin literature by Naevius was mainly in two
directions, that of comedy and of a rude epic poetry, drawing its
subjects from Roman traditions and contemporary history. In comedy the
work begun by him was carried on with great vigour and success by his
younger contemporary Plautus: and, in a strictly chronological history
of Roman literature, his plays would have to be examined next in order.
But it will be more convenient to defer the consideration of Roman
comedy, as a whole, till a later chapter, and for the present to direct
attention to the results produced by the immediate successor of Naevius
in epic poetry, Q. Ennius.
The fragments of Ennius will repay a more minute examination than
those of any author belonging to the first period of Roman literature.
They are of more intrinsic value, and they throw more light on the
spirit of the age in which they were written. It was to him, not to
Naevius or to Plautus, that the Romans looked as the father of their
literature. He did more than any other man to make the Roman language a
vehicle of elevated feeling, by forcing it to conform to the metrical
conditions of Greek poetry; and he was the first fully to elicit
the deeper veins of sentiment latent in the national imagination.
The versatility of his powers, his large acquaintance with Greek
literature, his sympathy with the practical interests of his time, the
serious purpose and the intellectual vigour with which he carried out
his work, enabled him to be in letters, what Scipio was in action, the
most vital representative of his epoch. It has happened too that the
fragments from his writings and the testimonies concerning him are more
expressive and characteristic than in the case of any other among the
early writers. There are none of his contemporaries, playing their part
in war or politics, and not many among the writers of later times, of
whom we can form so distinct an image.
I. LIFE, TIMES, AND PERSONAL TRAITS.
I. He was born at Rudiae, a town of Calabria, in B.C. 239, the year
after the first representation of a drama on the Roman stage. He first
entered Rome in B.C. 204, in the train of Cato, who, when acting as
quaestor in Sardinia, found the poet in that island serving, with the
rank of centurion, in the Roman army. In the poem of Silius Italicus,
he is fancifully represented as distinguishing himself in personal
combat like one of the heroes of the Iliad. After this time he resided
at Rome, 'living,' according to the statement of Jerome, 'very plainly,
on the Aventine' (the Plebeian quarter of the city), 'attended only by
a single maid-servant[48],' and supporting himself by teaching Greek
and by his writings. He accompanied M. Fulvius Nobilior in his Aetolian
campaign. Through the influence of his son, he obtained the honour of
Roman citizenship, probably at the time when the colony of Pisaurum was
planted in B.C. 184. This distinction Ennius has himself recorded in a
line of the Annals:--
Nos sumu' Romani, qui fuvimus ante Rudini.
He lived on terms of intimacy with influential members of the noblest
families in Rome, and became the familiar friend of the great Scipio.
When he died at the age of seventy, his bust was believed to be placed
in the tomb of the Scipios, between those of the conqueror of Hannibal
and of the conqueror of Antiochus. He died in the year B.C. 169. The
most famous of his works were his Tragedies and the Annals, a long
historical poem written in eighteen books. But, in addition to these,
he composed several miscellaneous works, of which only very scanty
fragments have been preserved.
Among the circumstances which prepared him to be the creator of a
national literature, his birthplace and origin, the kind of education
available to him in his early years, and the experience which awaited
him when first entering on life, had a strong determining influence.
His birthplace, Rudiae, is called by Strabo 'a Greek city;' but it
was not a Greek colony, like Tarentum and the other cities of Magna
Graecia, but an old Italian town, (the epithet _vetustae_ is applied to
it by Silius) which had been partially Hellenised, but still retained
its native traditions and the use of the Oscan language. Ennius is thus
spoken of as 'Semi-Graecus.' He laid claim to be descended from the old
Messapian kings, a claim which Virgil is supposed to acknowledge in the
introduction of Messapus leading his followers in the gathering of the
Italian races,
Ibant aequati numero regemque canebant.
This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the
better class of families in his native district; and the consciousness
of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the
high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine
the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies. He bore witness to his
nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius[49] that 'in the possession
of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he possessed three hearts.' Of
these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire
for the purposes of literature or of social intercourse, was most
likely to have been his inherited tongue. Rudiae, from its Italian
nationality, from its neighbourhood to the cities of Magna Graecia, and
from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time
of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-place, not only of three different
languages,--that of common life, that of culture and education, that
of military service--but of the three different spirits or tendencies
which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home
among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas--referred to in a line of
the Annals,--
Ad patrios montes et ad incunabula nostra--
in the expression of Ovid,--
Calabris in montibus ortus--
and in the phrase of Silius,--
Hispida tellus
Miserunt Calabri; Rudiae genuere vetustae
the poet owed the 'Italian heart' the virtue of a race still
uncorrupted and unsophisticated, the buoyant energy and freshness
of feeling which enabled him to apprehend all the novelty and the
greatness of the momentous age through which he lived. The South of
Italy afforded, at this time, means of education, which were denied
to Rome or Latium; and the peace enjoyed by his native district for
the first twenty years of the life of Ennius granted leisure to avail
himself of these means, which he could not have enjoyed had he been
born a few years later. In the short account of his life in Jerome's
continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, it is stated that he was born
at Tarentum. Though this is clearly an error, it seems probable that
the poet may have spent the years of his education there. Though
Tarentum had lost its political importance since its capture by the
Romans, it still continued to be a centre of Greek culture and of
social pleasure. Dramatic representations had been especially popular
among a people who had drifted far away 'ex Spartana dura illa et
horrida disciplina[50]' of their ancestors. From the intimate knowledge
of the Attic tragedians displayed by Ennius in his later career it
is likely that he had witnessed representations of their works on a
Greek stage, before he began, in middle life, to direct his own genius
to dramatic composition. The knowledge and admiration of Homer which
stimulated him to the composition of his greatest work, might have
been acquired in any centre of Greek culture. But the intellectual
interests indicated in some of his miscellaneous writings have a
kind of local character, distinguishing them alike from the older
philosophies of Athens and from the more recent science of Alexandria.
His acceptance of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the
physical fancies expressed in some of the fragments of the Epicharmus
probably came to him from the teaching of the Neo-Pythagoreans,
who were widely spread among the Greeks of Southern Italy. The
rationalistic speculations of Euhemerus, which appear in strange union
with the 'somnia Pythagorea' of the Annals, were of Sicilian origin.
The gastronomic treatise, which Ennius afterwards translated into
Latin, was the work of Archestratus of Gela. The class of persons for
whom such a work would originally be written was likely to be found
among the luxurious livers of Sicily and Magna Graecia. Thus while the
serious poetry of Ennius was inspired by the older and nobler works
of Greek genius, the influence of a more vulgar and prosaic class of
teachers, transmitted by him to Roman thought and literature, was
probably derived from the place of his early education.
His Italian spirit, and the Greek culture acquired by him in early
youth, were two of the conditions out of which the new literature was
destined to arise. The third condition was his steadfast and ardent
Roman patriotism. Born more than a generation after his native district
had ceased to be at war with Rome, he grew up to manhood during the
years of peace between the first and second Carthaginian wars, when
the supremacy of Rome was loyally accepted. Between early manhood and
middle life he was a witness of and an actor in the protracted and long
doubtful struggle between the two great Imperial States, on the issue
of which hung the future destinies of the world:--
Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu
Horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris;
In dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum
Omnibus humanis esset terraque marique[51].
Though during that struggle the loyalty of some of the Italian
communities was shaken, yet the aristocratic party in every city, and
the Greek States generally, were true to the Roman alliance[52]. Thus
his political sympathies, as well as his Greek education, would incline
Ennius to identify himself with the cause of Rome, and his ardent
imagination apprehended the grandeur and majesty with which she played
her part in the contest. It was in the Second Punic War that the ideal
of what was greatest in the character and institutions of Rome was most
fully realised. Her good fortune supplied from among the contingent
furnished to the war by her Messapian allies a man of a nature so
sympathetic with her own and an imagination so vivid as to gain for the
ideal thus created a permanent realization.
Of the share which Ennius had in the war we know only that he served
in Sardinia with the rank of centurion. That he had become a man of
some note in that capacity is suggested by the fact that he attracted
the attention of the Roman quaestor Cato, and accompanied him to Rome.
A certain dramatic interest attaches to this first meeting of the
typical representative of Roman manners and traditions and great enemy
of foreign innovations, with the man by whom, more than by any one
else, the mind of Rome was enlarged and liberalised, and many of her
most cherished convictions were most seriously undermined. This actual
service in a great war left its impress on the work done by Ennius.
Fragments both of his tragedies and his Annals prove how thoroughly
he understood and appreciated the best qualities of the soldierly
character. This fellowship in hardship and danger fitted him to become
the national poet of a race of soldiers. He has drawn from his own
observation an image of the fortitude and discipline of the Roman
armies, and of the patriotic devotion and resolution of the men by whom
these armies were led. There is a strong realism in the expression of
martial sentiment in Ennius, marking him out as a man familiar with
the life of the camp and the battle-field, and quite distinct from the
idealising enthusiasm of Livy and Virgil[53].
Ennius entered on his career as a writer at a time when the long strain
of a great struggle was giving place to the confidence and security
of a great triumph. He lived for thirty-five years longer, witnessing
the rapid advance of Roman conquest in Greece and Asia, and over the
barbarous tribes of the West. He died one year before the crowning
victory of Pydna. During all his later life his sanguine spirit and
patriotic enthusiasm were buoyed up by the success of the Roman and
Italian arms abroad; while his political sympathies were in thorough
accord with the dominant influences in the government of the State. At
no other period of Roman history was the ascendency of the Senate and
of the great houses more undisputed, or, on the whole, more wisely and
ably exercised. In the lists of those who successively fill the great
curule magistracies, we find almost exclusively the names of members of
the old patrician or of the more recent plebeian nobility. At no other
period does the tribunician opposition to the senatorian direction of
affairs and to the authority of the magistrate appear weaker or more
intermittent. It was not till a generation after the death of Ennius
that the moral corruption and political and social disorganisation--the
ultimate results of the great military successes gained under the
absolute ascendency of the Senate,--became fully manifest. It is
difficult to say how far the aristocratic and antipopular bias of all
Roman literature may have been determined by the political conditions
of the time in which that literature received the most powerful
impulse, and by the personal relations and peculiar stamp of character
of the man by whom that impulse was given.
Along with the military and political activity of the time, during
which Ennius lived in Rome, the stirring of a new intellectual life
was apparent. Even during the war dramatic representations continued
to take place, and the most active part of the career of Naevius, and
a considerable part of that of Plautus, belong to the years during
which Hannibal was still in Italy. After the cessation of the war,
we note in the pages of Livy that much greater prominence is given
to the celebration of public games, of which at this time dramatic
representations formed the chief part. The regular holidays for which
the Aediles provided these entertainments became more numerous; and the
art of the dramatist was employed to enhance the pomp of the spectacle
on the occasion of a great triumph, or of the funeral of an illustrious
man. The death of Livius Andronicus and the banishment of Naevius,
which must have happened about the time that Ennius arrived at Rome,
had deprived the Roman stage of the only writers of any name, who had
attempted to introduce upon it the works of the Greek tragedians.
Ennius had, indeed, rather to create than to revive the taste for
tragedy. The prologue to the Amphitryo[54] shows how much more
congenial the reproduction of the ordinary life of the Greeks was to
the uneducated audiences of Rome than the higher effort to familiarise
them with the personages and adventures of the heroic age. The great
era of Roman comedy was coincident with the literary career of Ennius.
It was then that the best extant plays of Plautus were produced, and
that Caecilius Statius, whom ancient critics ranked as his superior,
flourished. The quality attributed to the latter in the line of Horace,
Vincere Caecilius gravitate, Terentius arte,
indicates a closer affinity with the spirit of Ennius, than the moral
and political indifference of the older dramatist. The aim of Ennius
was to raise literature from being a mere popular recreation, and to
bring it into accord with the higher mood of the nation; to use it
as a medium both of elevation and enlightenment. In carrying out this
aim he appealed to the temper and to the newly awakened interests of
members of the aristocratic class, who were coming into close contact
with educated Greeks, and were beginning to appreciate the treasures
of art and literature now opened up to them. The career of Q. Fabius
Pictor, the first historian of Rome, and the first who made a name
for himself in painting, who lived at this time, attests this twofold
attraction. The friendly relations which Roman generals, such as T.
Quintius Flamininus, established with the famous Greek cities, in which
they appeared as liberators rather than conquerors, were the result of
intellectual enthusiasm as much as of a definite policy. With the wars
of Pyrrhus and the capture of Tarentum, the first stage of the process
described in the lines of Horace began[55]: the end of the Second Punic
War was the second stage in the process. It is to this period, rather
than to the progress of the war, that the words of the Grammarian,
Porcius Licinus, most truly apply,
Poenico bello secundo Musa pinnato gradu
Intulit se bellicosam in Romuli gentem feram.
The more frequent and closer contact with the mind of Greece not only
refined the taste and enlarged the intelligence of those capable of
feeling its influence, but produced at the same time a change in
men's deepest convictions. Though the definite tenets of Stoicism
and Epicureanism did not acquire ascendency till a later time, the
dissolving force of Greek speculative thought and Greek views of life
forced its way into Rome through various channels,--especially through
the adaptations of the tragedies of Euripides and of the comedy of
Menander. All these tendencies of the time acted on Ennius, stimulating
his mental activity in various directions. His natural temperament and
his acquired culture brought him into harmony with the spirit of his
age without raising him too much above it. A poet of more delicacy
of taste and perfection of execution would have been unintelligible
to his contemporaries. A more systematic thinker would have been out
of harmony with the conditions of life by which he was surrounded.
Breadth, vigour, a spirit clinging to what was most vital in the old
state of things, and yet readily adapting itself to what was new, were
the qualities needed to establish a literature true to the genius of
Rome in the second century B.C., and containing the promise of the more
perfect accomplishment of a later age. And these qualities belonged to
Ennius by natural gifts and the experience and culture of his earlier
years.
There is no reason to believe that he had obtained any eminence in
literature before he settled in middle age at Rome. His genius was of
that robust order which grows richer and livelier with advancing years.
The Annals was the work of his old age,--the ripe fruit of a strong and
energetic manhood, prolonged to the last in hopeful activity. Cicero
speaks of 'the cheerfulness with which he bore the two evils of old age
and poverty[56].' Wherever the poet speaks of himself, his words reveal
a sanguine and contented spirit; as, in that fine simile, where he
compares himself, at the close of his active and successful career, to
a brave horse which has often won the prize at the Olympian games, and
in old age obtains his well-deserved repose:--
Sicut fortis equus, spatio qui saepe supremo
Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectu' quiescit.
In none of his fragments is there any trace of that melancholy
after-thought which pervades the poetry of his greatest successors,
Lucretius and Virgil. From the humorous exaggeration of Horace,
Ennius ipse pater nunquam, nisi potus, ad arma
Prosiluit dicenda;
and from the poet's own confession,
Nunquam poetor, nisi si podager,
it may be inferred that he belonged to the class of poets of a lusty
and social nature, of which Dryden is a type in modern times, who
enjoyed the pleasures of wine and good fellowship. The well-known
anecdote, told by Cicero, of the interchange of visits between Scipio
Nasica and Ennius[57], though not a brilliant specimen of Roman wit,
is interesting from the light which it throws on the easy terms of
intimacy in which the poet lived with the members of the most eminent
Roman families. Such testimonies and traits of personal character make
us think of Ennius as a man of genial and social temper, as well as of
'an intense and glowing mind.'
It was probably through his position as a teacher of Greek that Ennius
first became known to the leading men of Rome. If this position was
at first one of dependence, similar to that in which in earlier times
the client stood to his patron, it soon changed into one of mutual
esteem and admiration. We can best understand the relation in which
he stood to men eminent in the state and in the camp, from a passage
from the seventh book of the Annals quoted by Aulus Gellius. In that
passage the poet is stated, on the authority of L. Aelius Stilo[58] (an
early grammarian, a friend of Lucilius, and one of Cicero's teachers),
to have drawn his own portrait, under an imaginary description of
a confidential friend of the Roman general, Servilius Geminus. The
portrait has the air of being drawn from the life, with a rapid and
forcible hand, and with a minuteness of detail significant of close
personal observation:--
Haece locutu' vocat quocum bene saepe libenter
Mensam sermonesque suos rerumque suarum
Congeriem partit, magnam cum lassu' diei
Partem fuisset de summis rebu' regendis
Cousilio, indu foro lato sanctoque senatu:
Cui res audacter magnas parvasque jocumque
Eloqueretur, cuncta simul malaque et bona dictu
Evomeret, si qui vellet, tutoque locaret.
Quocum multa volup ac gaudia clamque palamque:
Ingenium cui nulla malum sententia suadet
Ut faceret facinus levis aut malu', doctu', fidelis,
Suavis homo, facundu', suo contentu', beatus,
Scitu', secunda loquens in tempore, commodu', verbum
Paucum, multa tenens antiqua sepulta, vetustas
Quem fecit mores veteresque novosque tenentem.
Multorum veterum leges divumque hominumque;
Prudenter qui dicta loquive tacereve possit.
Hunc inter pugnas Servilius sic compellat[59].
There are many touches in this picture, which suggest the kind of
intimacy in which Ennius may have lived with Fulvius Nobilior when
accompanying him in his Aetolian campaign, or his bearing when taking
part in the light or serious talk of the Scipios. The learning and
power of speech, the knowledge of antiquity and of the manners of the
day, attributed to this friend of Servilius, were gifts which we may
attribute to the poet both on ancient testimony and on the evidence
afforded by the fragments of his writings. The good sense, tact, and
knowledge of the world, the cheerfulness in life and conversation, the
honour and integrity of character represented in the same passage,
are among the personal qualities which, in all ages, form a bond of
union between men eminent in great practical affairs and men eminent
in literature. Such were the qualities which, according to his own
account, recommended Horace to the intimate friendship of Maecenas.
Many expressive fragments from the lost poetry of Ennius give assurance
that he was a man in whom learning and the ardent temperament of
genius were happily united with the worth and sense described in this
nameless portrait.
By his personal merit he broke through the strongest barriers ever
raised by national and family pride, and made the name of poet, instead
of a reproach, a name of honour with the ruling class at Rome. The
favourable impression which he produced on the 'primitive virtue' of
Cato, by whom he was first brought to Rome, was more probably due
to his force of character and social qualities than to his genius
and literary accomplishment,--qualities seemingly little valued by
his earliest patron, who, in one of his speeches, reproached Fulvius
Nobilior with allowing himself to be accompanied by a poet in his
campaign. But the strongest proof of the worth and the wisdom of Ennius
is his intimate friendship with the greatest Roman of the age, and the
conqueror of the greatest soldier of antiquity. It is honourable to
the friendship of generous natures, that the poet neither sought nor
gained wealth from this intimacy, but continued to live plainly and
contentedly on the Aventine. Yet after death it was believed that the
two friends were not divided; and the bust of the provincial poet found
a place among the remains of that time-honoured family, the record of
whose grandeur has been preserved, even to the present day, in the
august simplicity of their monumental inscriptions.
The elder Africanus may have been attracted to Ennius not only by his
passion for Greek culture, but by a certain community of nature. The
mystical enthusiasm, the high self-confidence, the direct simplicity
combined with majesty of character, impressed on the language of the
poet were equally impressed on the action and bearing of the soldier.
The feeling which Ennius in his turn entertained for Scipio was one
of enthusiastic admiration. While paying due honour to the merits and
services of other famous men, even of such as Cato and Fabius, who were
most opposed to his idol, of Scipio he said that Homer alone could
worthily have uttered his praises[60].
In addition to the part which he assigned to him in the Ninth Book of
the Annals, he devoted a separate poem to commemorate his achievements.
He has left also two short inscriptions, written in elegiac verse,
in which he proclaims in words of burning enthusiasm the momentous
services and transcendent superiority of the 'great world's victor's
victor'--
Hic est ille situs cui nemo civi' neque hostis
Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium[61];
and this also,
A sole exoriente supra Maeoti' paludes
Nemo est qui factis me aequiperare queat.
Si fas endo plagas coelestium ascendere cuiquam est,
Mi soli caeli maxima porta patet[62].
With many marked differences, which distinguish a man of active,
social, and national sympathies from a student of Nature and a thinker
on human life, there is a certain affinity of character and genius
between Ennius and Lucretius. Enthusiastic admiration of personal
greatness is one prominent feature in which they resemble one another.
But while Lucretius is the ardent admirer of contemplative and
imaginative greatness, it is greatness in action and character which
moves the admiration of Ennius. They resemble each other also in their
strong consciousness of genius and their high estimate of its function
and value. Cicero mentions that Ennius applied the epithet _sanctus_ to
poets. Lucretius applies the same epithet to the old philosophic poets,
as in the lines of strong affection and reverence which he dedicates to
Empedocles,
Nil tamen hoc habuisse viro praeclarius in se,
Nec _sanctum_ magis, et mirum carumque videtur[63].
The inscription which Ennius composed for his own bust directly
expresses his sense of the greatness of his work, and his confident
assurance of fame, and of the lasting sympathy of his countrymen--
Aspicite, O cives, senis Enni imagini' formam,
Hic vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum.
Nemo me lacrimis decoret nec funera fletu
Faxit. Cur? Volito vivu' per ora virum[64].
Two lines from one of his satires--
Enni poeta salve qui mortalibus
Versus propinas flammeos medullitus[65].
indicate in still stronger terms his burning consciousness of power.
Some of the greatest of modern poets, such as Dante, Milton, and
Wordsworth, have manifested a feeling similar to that expressed by
Ennius and Lucretius. Although appearing in strange contrast with the
self-suppression of the highest creative art (as seen in Homer, in
Sophocles, and in Shakspeare), this proud self-confidence, 'disdainful
of help or hindrance,' is the usual accompaniment of an intense nature
and of a genius exercised with some serious moral, religious, or
political purpose. The least pleasing side of the feeling, even in
men of generous nature, is the scorn,--not of envy, but of imperfect
sympathy,--which they are apt to entertain towards rival genius or
antagonistic convictions. Something of this spirit appears in the
disparaging allusion of Ennius to his predecessor Naevius:--
Scripsere alii rem
Versibu', quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant,
Quum neque Musarum scopulos quisquam superarat
Nec dicti studiosus erat[66].
The contempt here expressed for the metre employed by the older poet
seems to be the counterpart of his own exultation in being the first to
introduce what he called 'the long verses' into Latin literature.
Another point in which there is some affinity between Ennius and
Lucretius is their religious temper and convictions. There is indeed
no trace in Ennius of the rigid intellectual consistency of Lucretius,
nor in Lucretius any gleam of the mysticism which Ennius inherited from
the speculations of Pythagoras. But in both deep feelings of awe and
reverence are combined with a scornful disbelief of the superstition
of their time. They both apply the principles of Euhemerism to resolve
the bright creations of the old mythology into their original elements.
Ennius, like Lucretius, seems to deny the providence of the gods.
He makes one of the personages of his dramas give expression to the
thought which perplexed the minds of Thucydides and Tacitus--the
thought, namely, of the apparent disconnexion between prosperity and
goodness, as affording proof of the divine indifference to human
well-being--
Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus;
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest[67]:
and he exposed, with caustic sense, the false pretences of augurs,
prophets, and astrologers. His translation of the Sacred Chronicle of
Euhemerus exercised a permanent influence on the religious convictions
of his countrymen. But while led to these conclusions by the spirit
of his age, and by the study of the later speculations of Greece, he
believed in the soul's independence of the body, and of its continued
existence, under other conditions, after death. He declared that the
spirit of Homer, after many changes,--at one time having animated a
peacock[68], again, having been incarnate in the sage of Crotona,--had
finally passed into his own body: and he told how the shade--which he
regards as distinct from the soul or spirit--of his great prototype had
appeared to him from the invisible world,--
Quo neque permaneant animae neque corpora nostra
Sed quaedam simulacra modis pallentia miris,
and explained to him the whole plan of nature. These dreams of the
imagination may not have been without effect in enabling Ennius to
escape from the gloom which 'eclipsed the brightness of the world' to
Lucretius. The light in which the world appeared to the older poet was
that of common sense strangely blended with imaginative mysticism.
He thus seems to stand midway between the spiritual aspirations of
Empedocles and the negation of Lucretius. Born in the vigorous prime of
Italian civilisation he came into the inheritance of the bold fancies
of the earlier Greeks and of the dull rationalism of their later
speculation. His ideas on what transcends experience appear thus to
have been without the unity arising from an unreflecting acceptance of
tradition, or from the basis of philosophical consistency.
II. HIS WORKS.--(1) MISCELLANEOUS WORKS.
II. (1) In laying the foundations of Roman literature, Ennius displayed
not only the fervent sympathies and active faculty of genius, but also
great energy and industry, and a many-sided learning. The composition
of his tragedies and of the Annals, while making most demand on his
original gifts, implied also a diligent study of Homer and of the
Greek tragedians, and a large acquaintance with the traditions and
antiquities of Rome. But besides the works on which his highest
poetical faculty was employed, other writings, of a philosophical,
didactic, and miscellaneous character, gave evidence of the versatility
of his powers and interests. It does not appear that he was the
author of any prose writing. His version of the Sacred Chronicle
of Euhemerus was more probably a poetical adaptation than a literal
prose translation of that work. The work of Euhemerus was conceived in
that spirit of vulgar rationalism, which is condemned by Plato in the
Phaedrus. He explained away the fables of mythology, by representing
them as a supernatural account of historical events. Several extracts
of the work quoted by Lactantius, as from the translation of Ennius,
look as if they had been reduced from a form originally metrical into
the prose of a later era[69]. There is thus no evidence, direct or
indirect, to prove that Ennius had any share in forming the style of
Latin prose. But if verse was the sole instrument which he used, this
was certainly not due to the poetical character of all the topics which
he treated, but, more likely, to the fact that his acquired aptitude,
and the state of the Latin language in his time, made metrical writing
more natural and easy than prose composition.
One of his works in verse was a treatise on good living, called
Hedyphagetica, founded on the gastronomic researches of Archestratus
of Gela,--a sage who is said to have devoted his life to the study of
everything that contributed to the pleasures of the table, and to have
recorded his varied experience and research with the grave dignity of
epic verse. A few lines from this translation or adaptation of Ennius,
giving an account of the coasts on which the best fish are to be found,
have been preserved by Apuleius. The lines are curious as exemplifying
that tone of half-serious enthusiasm, which all who treat, either in
prose or verse, of the pleasures of eating seem naturally to adopt[70].
The language in which the _scarus_, a fish unhappily lost to the modern
epicure, is described as 'the brain almost of almighty Jove,' fits all
the requirements of gastronomic rapture:--
Quid turdum, merulam, melanurum umbramque marinam
Praeterii, atque scarum, cerebrum Jovi' paene supremi?
Nestoris ad patriam hic capitur magnusque bonusque.
He wrote also a philosophical poem in trochaic septenarian verse,
called Epicharmus, founded on writings attributed to the old Sicilian
poet, which appear to have resolved the gods of the Greek mythology
into natural substances[71]. A few slight fragments have been preserved
from this poem. They speak of the four elements or principles of the
universe as 'water, earth, air, the sun'; of 'the blending of heat with
cold, dryness with moisture'; of 'the earth bearing and supporting all
nations and receiving them again back into herself.' The following is
the longest fragment from the poem:--
Istic est is Jupiter quem dico, quem Graeci vocant
Aërem: qui ventus est et nubes; imber postea
Atque ex imbre frigus: ventus post fit, aër denuo,
Haece propter Jupiter sunt ista quae dico tibi,
Quoniam mortalis atque urbes beluasque omnis juvat[72].
These fragments and a passage from the opening lines of the Annals,
where the shade of Homer was introduced as discoursing to Ennius (like
the shade of Anchises to Aeneas), on 'the nature of things,' are
specimens of that vague curiosity about the facts and laws of Nature,
which, in ancient times, supplied the absence of scientific knowledge.
Such physical speculations possessed a great attraction for the Roman
poets. The spirit of the Epicharmus, as well as of the Sacred Chronicle
of Euhemerus, reappears in the poem of Lucretius. Ennius was the first
among his countrymen who expressed that curiosity as to the ultimate
facts of Nature and that sense of the mysterious life of the universe,
which acted as the most powerful intellectual impulse on the mind of
Lucretius, and which fascinated the imagination of Virgil.
Another of his miscellaneous works, probably of a moral and didactic
character, was known by the name of Protreptica. It is possible that
all of these works[73], as well as the Scipio, formed part of the
Saturae, or Miscellanies, under which title Ennius composed four,
or, according to another authority, six books. The Romans looked
upon Lucilius as the inventor of satire in the later sense of that
word[74];--he having been the first to impress upon the satura the
character of censorious criticism, which it has borne since his time.
But there was another kind of satura, of which Ennius and Pacuvius in
early times, and Varro at a somewhat later time, were regarded as the
principal authors. This was really a miscellany treating of various
subjects, in various metres, and, as employed by Varro, was written
partly in prose, partly in verse. This kind of composition, as well
as the Lucilian satire, arose out of the old indigenous satura or
dramatic medley, familiar to the Romans before the introduction of
Greek literature. When the scenic element in the original satura was
superseded by the new comedy introduced from Greece, the old name
was first applied to a miscellaneous kind of composition, in which
ordinary topics were treated in a serious but apparently desultory
way; and even as employed by Lucilius and Horace the satura retained
much of its original character. The satires of Ennius were written
in various metres, iambic, trochaic, and hexameter, and treated of
various topics of personal and public interest. The few passages which
ancient authorities quote as fragments from them are not of much value
in themselves, but when taken in connexion with the testimonies as to
their character, they are of some interest as showing that this kind of
composition was a form intermediate between the old dramatic satura and
the satire of Lucilius and Horace. It is recorded that in one of these
pieces, Ennius introduced a dialogue between Life and Death;--thus
transmitting in the use of dialogue (which appears very frequently in
Horace and Persius) some vestige of the original scenic medley. Ennius
also appears, like Lucilius and Horace, to have communicated in his
satires his own personal feelings and experience, as in the fragment
already quoted:--
Nunquam poetor, nisi si podager.
Further satire, in the hands of its chief masters, aimed at practical
moral teaching, not only by precept, ridicule, and invective, and
by portraiture of individuals and classes, but also by the use of
anecdotes and fables. This last mode of combining amusement with
instruction is common in Horace. It appears, however, to have been
first used by Ennius. Aulus Gellius mentions that Aesop's fable of the
field-lark and the husbandman 'is very skilfully and gracefully told
by Ennius in his satires'; and he quotes the advice, appended to the
fable, 'Never to expect your friends to do for you what you can do for
yourself:'
Hoc erit tibi argumentum semper in promptu situm:
Nequid expectes amicos, quod tute agere possies[75].
These miscellaneous works of Ennius were the fruits of his learning
and literary industry, rather than of his genius. Such works might
have been written in prose, if the art of prose composition had been
as familiar as that of verse. It is in the fragments of his dramas,
and still more of the Annals, that his poetic power is most apparent,
and that the influence which he exercised over the Roman mind and
literature is discerned.
(2) DRAMAS.
(2) Before the time of Ennius, the Roman drama, both tragic and comic,
had established itself at Rome, in close imitation of the tragedy
and the new comedy of Athens. The latter had been most successfully
cultivated by Naevius and his younger contemporary, Plautus. The
advancement of tragedy to an equal share of popular favour was due
to the severer genius of Ennius. He appears however to have tried,
though without much success, to adapt himself to the popular taste in
favour of comedy. The names of two of his comedies, viz. _Cupuncula_
and _Pancratiastae_, have come down to us; but their fragments are too
insignificant to justify the formation of any opinion on their merits.
His admirers in ancient times nowhere advance in his favour any claim
to comic genius. Volcatius Sedigitus, an early critic, who wrote a
work _De Poetis_, and who has already been referred to as assigning
the third rank in the list of comic poets to Naevius, mentions Ennius
as tenth and last, solely 'antiquitatis causa.' Any inference that
might be drawn from the character exhibited in the other fragments
of Ennius, would accord both with the negative and positive evidence
of antiquity, as to his deficiency in comic power. He has nothing in
common with that versatile and dramatic genius, in which occasionally
the highest imagination has been united with the most abundant humour.
The real bent of his mind, as revealed in his higher poetry, is grave
and intense, like that of Lucretius or Milton. Many of the conceits,
strained effects, and play on words, found in his fragments, imply want
of humour as well as an imperfect poetic taste. Thus, in the following
fragment from one of his satires, the meaning of the passage is more
obscured than pointed by the forced iteration and play upon the word
_frustra_:--
Nam qui lepide postulat alterum frustrari,
Quom frustrast, frustra illum dicit frustra esse.
Nam qui se frustrari quem frustra sentit,
Qui frustratur frustrast, si ille non est frustra[76].
The love of alliteration and assonance, which is conspicuous also in
Plautus and in the fragments of Pacuvius and Accius, and which seems
to have been the natural accompaniment of the new formative energy
imparted to the Latin language by the earliest poets and orators,
appears in its most exaggerated form in such lines as the
O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tiranne tulisti,
quoted from the Annals. Many of his fragments show indeed that he
possessed the caustic spirit of a satirist; but it was in the light of
common sense, not of humour, that he viewed the follies of the world.
The general character of Roman tragedy, so far as it can be ascertained
from ancient testimony and the extant fragments of the early
tragedians, will be examined in the following chapter. It is not
possible to determine what dramatic power Ennius may have displayed
in the evolution of his plots or the delineation of his characters.
His peculiar genius is more distinctly stamped on his epic than on his
dramatic fragments. Still many of the latter, in their boldness of
conception and expression, and in their strong and fervid morality,
are expressive of the original force of the poet, and of the Roman
temper of his mind. Some of them will be brought forward in the sequel,
along with passages from the Annals, as important contributions to our
estimate of the poet's genius and intellect.
It was certainly due to Ennius that Roman tragedy was first raised to
that pitch of popular favour which it enjoyed till the age of Cicero.
While actively employed in many other fields of literature, he carried
on the composition of his tragedies till the latest period of his life.
Cicero records that the _Thyestes_ was represented at the celebration
of the Ludi Apollinares, shortly before the poet's death[77]. The
titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known, and a few
fragments remain from all of them. About one half of these bear the
titles of the heroes and heroines connected with the Trojan cycle
of events, such as the _Achilles_, _Achilles Aristarchi_, _Ajax_,
_Alexander_, _Andromache Aechmalotis_, _Hectoris Lutra_, _Hecuba_,
_Iphigenia_, _Phoenix_, _Telamo_. One at least of his tragedies,
the _Medea_, was literally translated from the Greek of Euripides,
whom he seems to have made his model, in preference to the older
Attic dramatists. Cicero[78] speaks of it, along with the Antiope of
Pacuvius, as being translated word for word from the Greek; and a
comparison of the fragments of the Latin with the passages in the Medea
of Euripides shows how closely Ennius followed his original. In one
place he has mistranslated his author,--the passage (Eur. Med. 215),
οἶδα γὰρ πολλοὺς βροτῶν
σεμνοὺς γεγῶτας, τοὺς μὲν ὀμμάτων ἄπο
τοὺς δ᾽ ἐν θυραίοις,
being thus rendered in Latin,--
Multi suam rem bene gessere et publicam patria procul.
The opening lines of the Medea of Ennius may be quoted as probably a
fair specimen of the degree of faithfulness with which the early Roman
tragedians translated from their originals. There is some nervous
force, but little either of poetical grace or musical flow in the
language:--
Utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus
Caesa cecidisset abiegna ad terram trabes,
Neve inde navis inchoandae exordium
Coepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine
Argo, quia Argivi in ea dilecti viri
Vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis
Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum;
Nam nunquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia[79].
In his Hecuba, also, and probably in his Iphigenia, Ennius made free
use of the dramas founded on the same subjects by Euripides. But in
many of his dramatic fragments the sentiment expressed is clearly
that of a Roman, not of a Greek mind[80]. The subjects of many of
his dramas, such as the Achilles, the Ajax, the Hectoris Lutra, the
Telamon, the Iphigenia, afforded scope for the exhibition of the
soldierly character. Cicero[81] adduces the wounded Eurypylus as an
example of the kind of fortitude and superiority to pain produced
by the discipline of the Roman armies. The same author quotes with
great admiration scenes from the Alexander and from the Andromache
Aechmalotis, in which pathos is the predominant sentiment. He adds to
his quotations the comments 'O poema tenerum, et moratum, et molle;'
and again, 'O poetam egregium, quamquam ab his cantoribus Euphorionis
contemnitur! Sentit omnia repentina et necopinata esse graviora ...
praeclarum carmen est enim et rebus et verbis et modis lugubre[82].'
In the former of these scenes Cassandra, under the influence of
Apollo, reluctant and _ashamed_ (perhaps in this feeling the hand of a
Roman rather than of a Greek poet may be recognised), yet mastered by
prophetic fury, bursts forth in these wild, agitated tones:--
Adest, adest fax obvoluta sanguine atque incendio:
Multos annos latuit: cives ferte opem et restinguite.
Iamque mari magno classis cita
Texitur: exitium examen rapit.
Advenit, et fera velivolantibus
Navibus complevit manus litora[83].
We see in this passage how the passionate character of the situation
is enhanced by the mysterious power attributed to Cassandra. A similar
excitement of feeling, produced by supernatural terror, appears in
a fragment of the Alcmaeon, quoted also by Cicero, and of another
the motive is the awe associated with the dim and pale realms of the
dead[84]. In these and similar passages we note the power of expressing
the varying moods of passion by varied effects of metre. Horace
characterises his ordinary verse in the line,
In scaenam missos cum magno pondere versus;
and this slow and weighty movement seems to have been the general
character of his metre in the calmer parts of his dramas. But in a
large number of the fragments of the dialogue, where there is any
excitement of feeling or intensity of thought, we find him using
the more rapid trochaic septenarian, with quick transitions to the
anapaestic dimeter or tetrameter, as the passion passes beyond the
control of the speaker.
In two of his dramas, the Sabinae and Ambracia, he made use of
materials supplied by the early legendary history of Rome, and by a
great contemporary event. The first of these, like the Romulus of
Naevius, belonged to the class of 'fabulae Praetextatae,' and was
founded on the intervention of the Sabine women in the war between
Romulus and Tatius. The second, representing the capture of the town
of Ambracia, in the Aetolian war, may, like the Clastidium of the
older poet (written in celebration of the victory of Marcellus over
the Gauls), have had more of the character of a military pageant and,
in all probability, was composed for representation at the games
celebrated on the triumphal return of M. Fulvius Nobilior from that war.
(3) THE ANNALS.
(3) But the poem which was the chief result of his life, and made an
epoch in Latin literature, was the Annals. On the composition of this
work he rested his hopes of popular and permanent fame--
Hic vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum:
and again, apparently at the opening of the poem, he wrote,--
Latos per populos terrasque poemata nostra
Clara cluebunt.
At its conclusion, he claimed for his old age the repose due to a brave
and triumphant career. He composed the eighteenth book, the last, in
his sixty-seventh year, three years before his death[85]. The great
length to which the poem extended, and the vast amount of materials
which it embraced, imply a long and steady concentration of his powers
on the task. It was one requiring much learning as well as original
conception. The fragments of the poem afford proofs of a familiarity
with Homer, and of acquaintance with the Cyclic poets[86]. It is
impossible to say how much of the early Roman history, as it has come
down to modern times, is due to the diligence of Ennius in collecting,
and to his genius in giving life to the traditions and ancient records
of Rome. He was certainly the earliest writer who gathered them up, and
united them in a continuous narrative. The work accomplished by him
required not only the antiquarian lore of a man
Multa tenens, antiqua, sepulta,
and the power of imagination to give a new shape to the past, but an
intimate knowledge of the great events and the great men of his own
time, and a sympathetic insight into the spirit by which they were
animated.
The poem was written in eighteen books. Of these books about six
hundred lines have been preserved in fragments, varying from about
twenty lines to half a line in length. From the minuteness with which
comparatively unimportant matters are described, it is inferred that
the separate books extended to a much greater length than those either
of the Iliad or of the Aeneid. Of the first book there remain about 120
lines, including the dream of Ilia in seventeen lines, and the auspices
of Romulus in twenty lines. In it were narrated the mythical events
from the time
Quum veter occubuit Priamus sub marte Pelasgo,
to the death and deification of Romulus;
Romulus in caelo cum dis genitalibus aevum
Degit.
There is no allusion in these fragments to the Carthaginian adventures
of Aeneas, which Naevius had introduced into his poem on the First
Punic War. Aeneas seems at once to have been brought to Hesperia, a
land,
Quam prisci casci populi tenuere Latini.
Ilia is represented as the daughter of Aeneas. The birth and infancy
of Romulus and Remus appear to have been described at great length. In
commenting on Virgil's lines at Aeneid viii. 630--
Fecerat et viridi fetam Mavortis in antro
Procubuisse lupam: geminos huic ubera circum
Ludere pendentes pueros, et lambere matrem
Impavidos; illam terreti cervice reflexam
Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere lingua,--
Servius says 'Sane totus hic locus Ennianus est.' The second and third
books contained the history of the remaining Roman kings. Virgil
imitated the description given in these books of the destruction of
Alba (the story of which is told by Livy also with much poetic power,
perhaps reproduced from the pages of Ennius), in his account of the
capture of Troy, at Aeneid ii. 486--
At domus interior gemitu miseroque tumultu, etc.
One short fragment of the third book contains a picturesque notice of
the founding
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