No More Learning

That the casting of lots, the interpretation of dreams, and similar liberal arts supported their professors, was a matter of course. The
The new BoreanUm.
casting of horoscopes was already a scientific pursuit ; Lucius Tarutius of Firmum, a respectable and in his own way learned man, a friend of Varro and Cicero, with all gravity cast the nativity of kings Romulus and Numa and of the city of Rome itself, and for the edification of the credulous on either side confirmed by means of his Chaldaean and Egyptian wisdom the accounts of the Roman annals.
But by far the most remarkable phenomenon in this domain was the first attempt to mingle crude faith with
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART 447
speculative thought, the first appearance of those tendencies,
which we are accustomed to describe as Neo-Platonic, in
the Roman world. Their oldest apostle there was Publius Nigidim
l^as-
Nigidius Figulus, a Roman of rank belonging to the strictest section of the aristocracy, who filled the praetorship in 696 68. and died in 709 as a political exile beyond the bounds of 45. Italy. With astonishing copiousness of learning and still more astonishing strength of faith he created out of the most dissimilar elements a philosophico-religious structure,
the singular outline of which he probably developed still more in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings. In philosophy, seeking deliverance from
the skeletons of the current systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought had still pre sented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches of
science — which, suitably treated, afford even now so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand, and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws lent themselves still more easily to such objects — played in this case, as may readily be conceived, a considerable part. His theology was based essentially on that strange medley, in which Greeks of a kindred spirit had intermingled Orphic and other very old or very new indigenous wisdom with Persian, Chaldaean, and
secret doctrines, and with which Figulus incor porated the quasi-results of the Tuscan investigation into nothingness and of the indigenous lore touching the flight of birds, so as to produce further harmonious confusion. The whole system obtained its consecration —political, religious, and national —from the name of Pythagoras, the ultra-conservative statesman whose supreme principle was "to promote order and to check disorder," the miracle- worker and necromancer, the primeval sage who was a native of Italy, who was interwoven even with the legendary
physical
Egyptian
448
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
history of Rome, and whose statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum. As birth and death are kindred with each other, so—it seemed —Pythagoras was to stand not merely by the cradle of the republic as friend of the wise Numa and colleague of the sagacious mother Egeria, but also by its grave as the last protector of the sacred bird-lore. But the new system was not merely marvellous, it also worked marvels; Nigidius announced to the father of the subse quent emperor Augustus, on the very day when the latter was born, the future greatness of his son ; nay the prophets conjured up spirits for the credulous, and, what was of more moment, they pointed out to them the places where their lost money lay. The new-and-old wisdom, such as it was, made a profound impression on its contemporaries ; men of the highest rank, of the greatest learning, of the most solid ability, belonging to very different parties—the
49. consul of 705, Appius Claudius, the learned Marcus Varro, the brave officer Publius Vatinius—took part in the citation of spirits, and it even appears that a police interference was necessary against the proceedings of these societies. These last attempts to save the Roman theology, like the kindred efforts of Cato in the field of politics, produce at once a comical and a melancholy impression ; we may smile at the creed and its propagators, but still it is a grave matter when even able men begin to addict themselves to absurdity.
Training of youth.
The training of youth followed, as may naturally be supposed, the course of bilingual humane culture chalked out in the previous epoch, and the general culture also of the Roman world conformed more and more to the forms established for that purpose by the Greeks. Even the bodily exercises advanced from ball-playing, running, and fencing to the more artistically-developed Greek gymnastic contests ; though there were not yet any public institutions for gymnastics, in the principal country-houses the palaestra
chap, Xli LITERATURE, AND ART
449
was already to be found by the side of the bath-rooms.
The manner in which the cycle of general culture had Sciences of changed in the Roman world during the course of a JS^^t century, is shown by a comparison of the encyclopaedia of this period. Cato (iii. 195) with the similar treatise of Varro "concern
ing the school-sciences. " As constituent elements of non professional culture, there appear in Cato the art of oratory,
the sciences of agriculture, of law, of war, and of medicine ;
in Varro —according to probable conjecture —grammar,
logic or dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
music, medicine, and architecture. Consequently in the
course of the seventh century the sciences of war, juris
prudence, and agriculture had been converted from general
into professional studies. On the other hand in Varro the
Hellenic training of youth appears already in all its com
pleteness : by the side of the course of grammar, rhetoric,
and philosophy, which had been introduced at an earlier
period into Italy, we now find the course which had longer
remained distinctively Hellenic, of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. 1 That astronomy more especially,
which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless erudite dilettantism of the age and, in its
relations to astrology, to the prevailing religious delusions,
was regularly and zealously studied by the youth in Italy,
can be proved also otherwise ; the astronomical didactic
poems of Aratus, among all the works of Alexandrian
literature, found earliest admittance into the instruction of
Roman youth. Tj this Hellenic course there was added the study of medicine, which was retained from the older Roman instruction, and lastly that of architecture —indispens able to the genteel Roman of this period, who instead of cultivating the ground built houses and villas.
1 These form, as is well known, the so-called seven liberal arts, which, with this distinction between the three branches of discipline earlier naturalized in Italy and the four subsequently received, maintained their position throughout the middle ages.
tout i6a
450 Greek In
junction.
Alexan- drinism.
RELIGION, CULTURE, BOOK V
In comparison with the previous epoch the Greek as well as the Latin training improved in extent and in scholastic strictness quite as much as it declined in purity and in refinement The increasing eagerness after Greek lore gave to instruction of itself an erudite character. To explain Homer or Euripides was after all no art ; teachers and scholars found their account better in handling the Alexandrian poems, which, besides, were in their spirit far more congenial to the Roman world of that day than the genuine Greek national poetry, and which, if they were not quite so venerable as the Iliad, possessed at any rate an age sufficiently respectable to pass as classics with school masters. The love-poems of Euphorion, the " Causes " of Callimachus and his " Ibis," the comically obscure " Alex andra" of Lycophron contained in rich abundance rare vocables {glossae) suitable for being extracted and interpreted, sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis, prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths, and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts. Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult ; these productions, in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently adapted to be lessons for model scholars. Thus the Alexandrian poems took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction, especially as trial-themes, and certainly promoted knowledge, although at the expense of taste and of discretion. The same un healthy appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head. The courses of the Greek masters in
Rome sufficed only for a first start ; every one who wished to be able to converse heard lectures on Greek philosophy at Athens, and on Greek rhetoric at Rhodes, and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor, where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts had
chap, xii LITERATURE, AND ART
451
been continued, although after a mechanical fashion; whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men desirous of culture directed their travels.
The advance in Latin instruction was similar to that of Latin In- Greek. This in part resulted from the mere reflex influ
ence of the Greek, from which it in fact essentially borrowed
its methods and its stimulants. Moreover, the relations of
politics, the impulse to mount the orators' platform in the Forum which was imparted by the democratic doings to an ever-widening circle, contributed not a little to the diffusion and enhancement of oratorical exercises ; " wherever one casts his eyes," says Cicero, " every place is full of rhetoricians. " Besides, the writings of the sixth century, the farther they receded into the past, began to be more decidedly regarded as classical texts of the golden age of Latin literature, and thereby gave a greater pre ponderance to the instruction which was essentially concen trated upon them. Lastly the immigration and spreading of barbarian elements from many quarters and the incipient Latinizing of extensive Celtic and Spanish districts, naturally gave to Latin grammar and Latin instruction a higher importance than they could have had, so long as Latium only spoke Latin ; the teacher of Latin literature had from the outset a different position in Comum and Narbo than he had in Praeneste and Ardea. Taken as a whole, culture was more on the wane than on the advance. The ruin of the Italian country towns, the extensive intrusion of foreign elements, the political, economic, and moral deterioration of the nation, above all, the distracting civil wars inflicted more injury on the language than all the schoolmasters of the world could repair. The closer contact with the Hellenic culture of the present, the more decided influence of the talkative Athenian wisdom and of the rhetoric of Rhodes and Asia Minor, supplied to the
45i
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
Roman youth just the very elements that were most per nicious in Hellenism. The propagandist mission which Latium undertook among the Celts, Iberians, and Libyans
i —proud as the task was—could not but have the like con sequences for the Latin language as the Hellenizing of the east had had for the Hellenic. The fact that the Roman public of this period applauded the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator, and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever-widening circle. But at the same time contemporaries capable of judging complain that the
M- Hellenic culture in Italy about 690 was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before ; that opportunities of hearing pure and good Latin were but rare, and these chiefly from the mouth of elderly cultivated ladies ; that the tradition of genuine culture, the good old Latin mother wit, the Lucilian polish, the cultivated circle of readers of the Scipionic age were gradually disappearing. The circumstance that the term urbanitas, and the idea of a polished national culture which it expressed, arose during this period, proves, not that it was prevalent, but that it was on the wane, and that people were keenly alive to the absence of this urbanitas in the language and the habits of the Latinized barbarians or barbarized Latins. Where we still meet with the urbane tone of conversation, as in Varro's Satires and Cicero's Letters, it is an echo of the old fashion which was not yet so obsolete in Reate and Arpinum as in Rome.
Germs of ***? e. . schools.
Thus the previous culture of youth remained substan- tially unchanged, except that — not so much from its own deterioration as from the general decline of the nation —it was productive of less good and more evil than in the preceding epoch. Caesar initiated a revolution also in this
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
453
department. While the Roman senate had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture, the
of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence in fact was humanitas, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it after the Hellenic fashion. If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire was
for on the part of the state, and which form the most significant expression of the new state of humanitas ; and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and had already nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro, as principal librarian, this implied unmistake- ably the design of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.
The development of the language during this period Language turned on the distinction between the classical Latin of cultivated society and the vulgar language of common life.
The former itself was a product of the distinctively Italian
culture; even in the Scipionic circle "pure Latin" had
become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken, no
longer in entire naiveti, but in conscious contradistinction
to the language of the great multitude. This epoch opens The
with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which ofJ^gTM had hitherto exclusively prevailed in the higher language of Minor, conversation and accordingly also in literature —a reaction
which had inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction of a similar nature in the language of Greece. Just about this time the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism. They demanded full
government
provided
454
RELIGION, CULTURE, book*
Roman eansm-
recognition for the language of life, without distinction, whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria and Phrygia ; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste of learned cliques, but for that of the great public. There could not be much objection to the principle; only, it is true, the result could not be better than was the public of Asia Minor of that day, which had totally lost the taste for chasteness and purity of production, and longed only after the showy and brilliant To say nothing of the spurious forms of art that sprang out of this tendency—especially the romance and the history assuming the form of romance — the very style of these Asiatics was, as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish, minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar and affected ; " any one who knows Hegesias," says Cicero, "knows what silliness is. "
Yet this new style found its way also into the Latin world. When the Hellenic fashionable rhetoric, after having at the close of the previous epoch obtruded into the Latin instruction of youth (iv. 214), took at the beginning of the present period the final step and mounted the Roman orators' platform in the person of
Quintus Hortensius. Hortensius (640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the
' Sullan age, it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste of the time ; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism the semblance of an artistic performance. This was of great importance. As in Greece the battles of language were always waged at first in the schools of the rhetoricians, so in Rome the forensic oration to a certain extent even more than literature set the standard of style, and accordingly there was combined, as it were of right, with the leadership of the bar the prerogative of giving the tone to the fashion.
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
455
able mode of speaking and writing. The Asiatic vulgarism
of Hortensius thus dislodged classicism from the Roman
platform and partly also from literature. But the fashion Reactiom. soon changed once more in Greece and in Rome. In the
former it was the Rhodian school of rhetoricians, which, The without reverting to all the chaste severity of the Attic style, Rhod'an attempted to strike out a middle course between it and the
modern fashion : if the Rhodian masters were not too par
ticular as to the internal correctness of their thinking and speaking, they at least insisted on purity of language and
style, on the careful selection of words and phrases, and the
giving thorough effect to the modulation of sentences.
In Italy it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who,
after having in his early youth gone along with the Jij? ! ? ? " Hortensian manner, was brought by hearing the Rhodian masters and by his own more matured taste to better paths,
and thenceforth addicted himself to strict purity of language and the thorough periodic arrangement and modulation of his discourse. The models of language,
which in this respect he followed, he found especially in
those circles of the higher Roman society which had suffered
but little or not at all from vulgarism ; and, as was already
said, there were still such, although they were beginning
to disappear. The earlier Latin and the good Greek literature, however considerable was the influence of the
latter more especially on the rhythm of his oratory, were in
this matter only of secondary moment : this purifying of
the language was by no means a reaction of the language
of books against that of conversation, but a reaction of the language of the really cultivated against the jargon of spurious and partial culture. Caesar, in the department of language also the greatest master of his time, expressed the fundamental idea of Roman classicism, when he enjoined
that in speech and writing every foreign word should be avoided, as rocks are avoided by the mariner ; the poetical
cicero-
The new Roman poetiy.
and the obsolete word of the older literature was rejected as well as the rustic phrase or that borrowed from the language of common life, and more especially the Greek words and phrases which, as the letters of this period show, had to a very great extent found their way into conversa tional language. Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon to the model French of Moliere and Boileau ; while the former classicism had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing beyond recovery. Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself. With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious authorship of the latter gave to this classicism— what it had hitherto lacked — extensive prose texts. Thus Cicero became the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist ; it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less to the statesman, that the panegyrics —extravagant yet not made up wholly of verbiage —applied, with which the most gifted representatives of classicism, such as Caesar and Catullus, loaded him.
They soon went farther. What Cicero did in prose, was carried out in poetry towards the end of the epoch by the new Roman school of poets, which modelled itself on the Greek fashionable poetry, and in which the man of most considerable talent was Catullus. Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm, so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e^r. from the time of Catullus, it is no longer allowable at once
456
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
45J
to begin a verse and to close a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.
At length science stepped in, fixed the law of language, Gnmmatl-
and developed its rule, which was no longer determined on the basis of experience, but made the claim to determine experience. The endings of declension, which hitherto had in part been variable, were now to be once for all fixed ; e. g. of the genitive and dative forms hitherto current side by side in the so-called fourth declension (senatuis and senatus, senatui and senafu) Caesar recognized exclusively as valid the contracted forms (us and In orthography various changes were made, to bring the written more fully into correspondence with the spoken language thus the u in the middle of words like maxumus was replaced after Caesar's precedent /; and of the two letters which had become superfluous, and the removal of the first was effected, and that of the second was at least proposed. The language was, not yet stereotyped, in the course of becoming so was not yet indeed unthinkingly dominated by rule, but had already become conscious of it That this action in the department of Latin grammar derived generally its spirit and method from the Greek, and not only so, but that the Latin language was also directly rectified accordance with Greek precedent, shown, for example, by the treatment of the final which till towards the close of this epoch had at pleasure passed sometimes as consonant, sometimes not as one, but was treated by the new-fashioned poets throughout, as in Greek, as consonantal termination. This regulation of language
the proper domain of Roman classicism in the most various ways, and for that very reason all the more signifi cantly, the rule inculcated and the offence against rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero, by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus whereas the older
cal science.
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is
a
;
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Literary effort
458
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
generation expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting the revolution which had affected the field of language as remorselessly as the field of politics. 1 But while the new classicism — that is to say, the standard Latin governed by rule and as far as possible placed on a parity with the standard Greek —which arose out of a conscious reaction against the vulgarism intruding into higher society and even into literature, acquired literary fixity and systematic shape, the latter by no means evacu ated the field. Not only do we find it naively employed in the works of secondary personages who have drifted into the ranks of authors merely by accident, as in the account of Caesar's second Spanish war, but we shall meet it also with an impress more or less distinct in literature proper, in the mime, in the semi-romance, in the aesthetic writings of Varro ; and it is a significant circumstance, that it maintains itself precisely in the most national departments of literature, and that truly conservative men, like Varro, take it into protection. Classicism was based on the death of the Italian language as monarchy on the decline of the Italian nation ; it was completely consistent that the men, in whom the republic was still living, should continue to give to the living language its rights, and for the sake of its comparative vitality and nationality should tolerate its aesthetic defects. Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch are everywhere divergent ; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry of Lucretius appears the
modern poetry of Catullus, by the side of Cicero's well-modulated period stands the sentence of Varro intentionally disdaining all subdivision. In this field likewise is mirrored the distraction of the age.
In the literature of this period we are first of all struck by the outward increase, as compared with the former
1 Thus Varro (Dt S. R. i. a) says : ai aeditimo, ut dictrt didirimtu m fatribu1 nottrii ; ut corrigimur ai recentitus urianis, ai atdituo.
thoroughly
chap, xii LITERATURE, AND ART
459
epoch, of literary effort in Rome. It was long since the Greek literary activity of the Greeks flourished no more in the m r,,,^ free atmosphere of civic independence, but only in the scientific institutions of the larger cities and especially of
the courts. Left to depend on the favour and protection
of the great, and dislodged from the former seats of the
Muses1 by the extinction of the dynasties of Pergamus
(621), Cyrene (658), Bithynia (679), and Syria (690) and 138. 96. by the waning splendour of the court of the Lagids —more-
over, since the death of Alexander the Great, necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers among
the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins — the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes towards Rome. Among the host of Greek attendants with which the Roman of quality at this time surrounded him
self, the philosopher, the poet, and the memoir-writer played conspicuous parts by the side of the cook, the boy- favourite, and the jester. We meet already literati of note
in such positions ; the Epicurean Philodemus, for instance, was installed as domestic philosopher with Lucius Piso consul in 696, and occasionally edified the initiated with 68. his clever epigrams on the coarse-grained Epicureanism of
1 The dedication of the poetical description of the earth which passes under the name of Scymnus is remarkable to reference to those relations. After the poet has declared his purpose of preparing to the favourite Menandrian measure a sketch of geography intelligible for scholars and easy to be learned by heart, he dedicates — as Apollodorus dedicated his similar historical compendium to Attains Philadelphia lung of Pergamus
d$di,anu, droW/ioyra 6u;ac 'ArrdXy — ttji Trpayfiarelat Inypatpty €{\r}<ji6ri
his manual to Nicomedes III. king (663 7-679) °f Bithynia I
tytii S' ixoiar, tibn tup rCr fSwriMo*
pAvot pWtXixip xpijatbrrfra Tcpoo<p4ptn, wtipav iircdtiiiija' avrbs tr' tfiavroC XajS«F ital xapayevt<r0at <tal rl jSatriXeA t<rr' ISeir. &ib rg TrpoOtati avpfiovkw t^e\e^i/irji'
• • . rbv 'AirbWuiva tov AtSvflif . • •
off 8,j (rx<56f /idXurra ical Tre-jretaf1tvot
rpis <rijx kotA \iyov J}TM (jcmv/jv yip <rx. (Sb0 rtit 4it\oim$ovffir d»aWJ«xa5) fario*.
91-75*
46o
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
his patron. From all sides the most notable representa tives of Greek art and science migrated in daily-increasing numbers to Rome, where literary gains were now more abundant than anywhere else. Among those thus men tioned as settled in Rome we find the physician Asclepiades whom king Mithradates vainly endeavoured to draw away from it into his service ; the universalist in learning, Alexander of Miletus, termed Polyhistor; the poet Par- thenius from Nicaea in Bithynia; Posidonius of Apamea in Syria equally celebrated as a traveller, teacher, and
61. author, who at a great age migrated in 703 from Rhodes to Rome; and various others. A house like that of Lucius Lucullus was a seat of Hellenic culture and a rendezvous for Hellenic literati almost like the Alexandrian Museum ; Roman resources and Hellenic connoisseurship had gathered in these halls of wealth and science an in comparable collection of statues and paintings of earlier and contemporary masters, as well as a library as carefully selected as it was magnificently fitted up, and every person ofculture and especially every Greek was welcome there— the master of the house himself was often seen walking up and down the beautiful colonnade in philological or philo sophical conversation with one of his learned guests. No doubt these Greeks brought along with their rich treasures of culture their preposterousness and servility to Italy; one of these learned wanderers for instance, the author of
64. the "Art of Flattery," Aristodemus of Nysa (about 700) recommended himself to his masters by demonstrating that Homer was a native of Rome !
In the same measure as the pursuits of the Greek literati
Extent of SeamaM-
the literary pr0Spered in Rome, literary activity and literary interest in-
of the creased among the Romans themselves. Even Greek com-
position, which the stricter taste of the Scipionic age had totally set aside, now revived. The Greek language was now universally current, and a Greek treatise found a quite
chap, XII LITERATURE, AND ART
461
different public from a Latin one ; therefore Romans of rank, such as Lucius Lucullus, Marcus Cicero, Titus Atticus, Quintus Scaevola (tribune of the people in 700), 64 like the kings of Armenia and Mauretania, published occasionally Greek prose and even Greek verses. Such Greek authorship however by native Romans remained a secondary matter and almost an amusement ; the literary
as well as the political parties of Italy all coincided in adhering to their Italian nationality, only more or less pervaded by Hellenism. Nor could there be any com plaint at least as to want of activity in the field of Latin authorship. There was a flood of books and pamphlets of all sorts, and above all of poems, in Rome. Poets swarmed there, as they did only in Tarsus or Alexandria ; poetical publications had become the standing juvenile sin of livelier natures, and even then the writer was reckoned fortunate whose youthful poems compassionate oblivion withdrew from criticism. Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty at a sitting his five hundred hexa meters in which no schoolmaster found anything to censure, but no reader discovered anything to praise. The female world also took a lively part in these literary pursuits ; the ladies did not confine themselves to dancing and music, but by their spirit and wit ruled conversation and talked ex cellently on Greek and Latin literature ; and, when poetry laid siege to a maiden's heart, the beleaguered fortress not seldom surrendered likewise in graceful verses. Rhythms became more and more the fashionable plaything of the big children of both sexes ; poetical epistles, joint poetical exercises and competitions among good friends, were of common occurrence, and towards the end of this epoch institutions were already opened in the capital, at which unfledged Latin poets might learn verse-making for money. In consequence of the large consumption of books the machinery for the manufacture of copies was substan-
The
The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not ^e otherwise, for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes. The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics, the national- Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Helleno- Italian or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy, fought their battles also on the field of litera ture. The former attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre, in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more the character of classical. With less taste and stronger party tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius, and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies. The leaves of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively greater nationality and relatively greater pro ductiveness of the poets of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch of thoroughly developed
C^TthrtS modems,
462
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
tially perfected, and publication was effected with com parative rapidity and cheapness ; bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's shop a usual meeting -place of men of culture. Reading had become a fashion, nay a mania ; at table, where coarser pastimes had not already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library. The superior officer was seen in the camp-tent with the obscene Greek romance, the statesman in the senate with the philosophical treatise, in his hands. Matters accordingly stood in the Roman state as they have stood and will stand in every state where the citizens read " from the threshold to the closet" The Parthian vizier was not far wrong, when he pointed out to the citizens of Seleucia the romances found in the camp of Crassus and asked them whether they still
the readers of such books as formidable op
regarded ponents.
chap, XII LITERATURE, AND ART 4*3
which in literature as decidedly as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall. No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic of the conservatism of this age in general ; and here too there was no want of trimmers. Cicero for instance, although in prose one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency, revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic consti tution and the augural discipline ; "patriotism requires," we find him saying, "that we should rather read a notori
ously wretched translation of Sophocles than the original. " While thus the modern literary tendency cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there were not wanting already bolder judges, who treated the native literature as disrespectfully as the senatorial politics. Not only did they resume the strict criticism of the Scipionic epoch and set store by Terence only in order to condemn Ennius and still more the Ennianists, but the younger and bolder men went much farther and ventured already— though only as yet in heretical revolt against literary orthodoxy —to call Plautus a rude jester and Lucilius a bad verse-smith. This modern tendency attached itself not to the native authorship, but rather to the more
Epigonism,
recent Greek literature or the so-called Alexandrinism.
We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting this
The Greek remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art, as is ^S^T
requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature of this and the later epochs. The Alexandrian literature was based on the decline of the pure Hellenic idiom, which from the time of Alexander the Great was superseded in daily life by an inferior jargon deriving its origin from the contact of
464
RELIGION, CULTURE, book V
the Macedonian dialect with various Greek and barbarian tribes ; or, to speak more accurately, the Alexandrian litera ture sprang out of the ruin of the Hellenic nation generally, which had to perish, and did perish, in its national indi viduality in order to establish the universal monarchy of Alexander and the empire of Hellenism. Had Alexander's universal empire continued to subsist, the former national and popular literature would have been succeeded by a cos mopolitan literature Hellenic merely in name, essentially denationalized and called into life in a certain measure by royal patronage, but at all events ruling the world ; but, as the state of Alexander was unhinged by his death, the germs of the literature corresponding to it rapidly perished. Never theless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed —with its nationality, its language, its art—belonged to the past It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture —for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed—but of men of erudition that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead ; that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research ; and that, possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous produc tiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism. It is essentially similar to that literature of scholars, which, keeping aloof from the living Romanic nationalities and their vulgar idioms, grew up during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries among a cosmopolitan circle of erudite philologues —as an artificial aftergrowth of the departed antiquity ; the contrast between the classical and the vulgar Greek of the period of the Diadochi is doubtless less strongly marked, but is not, properly speaking, differ ent from that between the Latin of Manutius and the
Italian of Macchiavelli.
Italy had hitherto been in the main disinclined towards
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
465
Alexandrinism. Its season of comparative brilliance was The the period shortly before and after the first Punic war ; yet AjexMi- Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius and generally the whole body driniim. of the national Roman authors down to Varro and Lucretius in all branches of poetical production, not excepting even the didactic poem, attached themselves, not
to their Greek contemporaries or very recent predecessors,
but without exception to Homer, Euripides, Menander and
the other masters of the living and national Greek literature. Roman literature was never fresh and national ; but, as
long as there was a Roman people, its authors instinctively
sought for living and national models, and copied, if not
always to the best purpose or the best authors, at least such
as were original. The Greek literature originating after Alexander found its first Roman imitators—for the slight
initial attempts from the Marian age (iv. 242) can scarcely
be taken into account — among the contemporaries of
Cicero and Caesar; and now the Roman Alexandrinism
spread with singular rapidity. In part this arose from external causes. The increased contact with the Greeks, especially the frequent journeys of the Romans into the
Hellenic provinces and the assemblage of Greek literati in Rome, naturally procured a public even among the Italians
for the Greek literature of the day, for the epic and elegiac poetry, epigrams, and Milesian tales current at that time
in Greece. Moreover, as we have already stated (p. 450)
the Alexandrian poetry had its established place in the instruction of the Italian youth ; and thus reacted on Latin literature all the more, since the latter continued to be essentially dependent at all times on the Hellenic school- training. We find in this respect even a direct connection
of the new Roman with the new Greek literature ; the already-mentioned Parthenius, one of the better known Alexandrian elegists, opened, apparently about 700, a 64. school for literature and poetry in Rome, and the excerpts
vol. V 1 6a
466
RELIGION, CULTURE, BOOK v
are still extant in which he supplied one of his pupils of rank with materials for Latin elegies of an erotic and mythological nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt. But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called into existence the Roman Alexandrinism ; it was on the contrary a product —perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable —of the political and national development of Rome. On the one hand, as Hellas resolved itself into Hellenism, so now Latium resolved itself into Romanism ; the national development of Italy out grew itself, and was merged in Caesar's Mediterranean empire, just as the Hellenic development in the eastern empire of Alexander. On the other hand, as the new empire rested on the fact that the mighty streams of Greek and Latin nationality, after having flowed in parallel channels for many centuries, now at length coalesced, the Italian literature had not merely as hitherto to seek its groundwork generally in the Greek, but had also to put itself on a level with the Greek literature of the present, or in other words with Alexandrinism. With the scholastic Latin, with the closed number of classics, with the exclusive circle of classic-reacting urbani, the national Latin literature was dead and at an end ; there arose instead of it a thoroughly degenerate, artificially fostered, imperial literature, which did not rest on any definite nationality, but proclaimed in two languages the universal gospel of humanity, and was dependent in point of spirit throughout and consciously on the old Hellenic, in point of language partly on this, partly on the old Roman popular, literature. This was no improvement The Mediterranean
monarchy of Caesar was doubtless a grand and—what is more—a necessary creation ; but it had been called into life by an arbitrary superior will, and therefore there was nothing to
be found in it of the fresh popular life, of the overflowing national vigour, which are characteristic of younger, more
chap, xii LITERATURE, AND ART
467
limited, and more natural commonwealths, and which the Italian state of the sixth century had still been able to exhibit The ruin of the Italian nationality, accomplished in the creation of Caesar, nipped the promise of literature. Every one who has any sense of the close affinity between art and nationality will always turn back from Cicero and Horace to Cato and Lucretius; and nothing but the schoolmaster's view of history and of literature —which has acquired, it is true, in this department the sanction of prescription —could have called the epoch of art beginning with the new monarchy pre-eminently the golden age. But while the Romano-Hellenic Alexandrinism of the age of Caesar and Augustus must be deemed inferior to the older, however imperfect, national literature, it is on the other hand as decidedly superior to the Alexandrinism of the age of the Diadochi as Caesar's enduring structure to the ephemeral creation of Alexander. We shall have afterwards to show that the Augustan literature, compared with the kindred literature of the period of the Diadochi, was far less a literature of philologues and far more an imperial literature than the latter, and therefore had a far more permanent and far more general influence in the upper circles of society than the Greek Alexandrinism ever had.
Nowhere was the prospect more lamentable than in
dramatic literature. Tragedy and comedy had already
before the present epoch become inwardly extinct in the and Roman national literature. New pieces were no longer ^^pj^ performed. That the public still in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions — belonging to this epoch—of Plautine comedies with the
titles and names of the persons altered, with reference to
which the managers well added that it was better to see a
good old piece than a bad new one. From this the step
was not great to that entire surrender of the stage to the
Dramatic
TnjSj? '
The mime.
dead poets, which we find in the Ciceronian age, and to which Alexandrinism made no opposition. Its productive ness in this department was worse than none. Real dramatic composition the Alexandrian literature never knew ; nothing but the spurious drama, which was written primarily for reading and not for exhibition, could be introduced by it into Italy, and soon accordingly these dramatic iambics began to be quite as prevalent in Rome as in Alexandria, and the writing of tragedy in particular began to figure among the regular diseases of adolescence. We may form a pretty accurate idea of the quality of these productions from the fact that Quintus Cicero, in order homoeopathically to beguile the weariness of winter quarters in Gaul, composed four tragedies in sixteen days.
In the "picture of life" or mime alone the last still vigorous product of the national literature, the Atellan farce, became engrafted with the ethological offshoots of Greek comedy, which Alexandrinism cultivated with greater poetical vigour and better success than any other branch of poetry. The mime originated out of the dances in character to the flute, which had long been usual, and which were performed sometimes on other occasions, e. g. for the entertainment of the guests during dinner, but more especially in the pit of the theatre during the intervals between the acts. It was not difficult to form out of these dances—in which the aid of speech had doubtless long since been occasionally employed —by means of the intro duction of a more organized plot and a regular dialogue little comedies, which were yet essentially distinguished from the earlier comedy and even from the farce by the facts, that the dance and the lasciviousness inseparable from such dancing continued in this case to play a chief part, and that the mime, as belonging properly not to the boards but to the pit, threw aside all ideal scenic effects,
468
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
469
such as masks for the face and theatrical buskins, and— what was specially important — admitted of the female
characters being represented by women. This new mime, which first seems to have come on the stage of the capital about 672, soon swallowed up the national harlequinade, 82, with which it indeed in the most essential respects coin cided, and was employed as the usual interlude and especially as afterpiece along with the other dramatic per formances. 1 The plot was of course still more indifferent, loose, and absurd than in the harlequinade ; if it was only sufficiently chequered, the public did not ask why it laughed, and did not remonstrate with the poet, who instead of untying the knot cut it to pieces. The subjects were chiefly of an amorous nature, mostly of the licentious sort ; for example, poet and public without exception took part against the husband, and poetical justice consisted in
the derision of good morals.
The artistic charm depended wholly, as in the Atellana, on the portraiture of the manners of common and low life ; in which rural pictures are laid aside for those of the life and doings of the capital, and the sweet rabble of Rome—just as in the similar Greek pieces the rabble of Alexandria —is summoned to applaud its own likeness. Many subjects are taken from the life of tradesmen ; there appear the — here also inevitable — " Fuller," then the " Ropemaker," the " Dyer," the "Salt- man," the "Female Weavers," the "Rascal"; other pieces
1 Cicero testifies that the mime in his time had taken the place of the
Atellana (Ad Fam. ix. 16) ; with this accords the fact, that the mimi and
mimac first appear about the Sullan epoch (Ad Her. i. 14, 24 ; 13, 19
Atta Fr. Ribbeck PUn. H. N. vii. 48, 158 Plutarch, Sull. 2, 36).
The designation mimu1, however, sometimes inaccurately applied to
the comedian generally. Thus the mimus who appeared at the festival of
Apollo in 542-543 (Festus under salva res est; comp. Cicero, De Orat. 212-211, ii. 59, 242) was evidently nothing but an actor of the palliata, for there
was at this period no room in the development of the Roman theatre for real mimes in the later sense. —
With the mimus of the classical Greek period prose dialogues, in which genre pictures, particularly of a rural kind, were presented — the Roman mimus had no especial relation.
is
1
;
;
ii.
;
47» RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
give sketches of character, as the " Forgetful," the " Brag gart," the "Man of 100,000 sesterces";1 or pictures of other lands, the "Etruscan Woman," the "Gauls," the " Cretan," " Alexandria " ; or descriptions of popular festi vals, as the " Compitalia," the "Saturnalia," "Anna Pe- renna," the " Hot Baths " ; or parodies of mythology, as the "Voyage to the Underworld," the " Arvernian Lake. " Apt nicknames and short commonplaces which were easily retained and applied were welcome ; but every piece of nonsense was of itself privileged; in this preposterous
. world Bacchus is applied to for water and the fountain^ nymph for wine. Isolated examples even of the political allusions formerly so strictly prohibited in the Roman theatre are found in these mimes. 2 As regards metrical form, these poets gave themselves, as they tell us, "but moderate trouble with the versification " ; the language abounded, even in the pieces prepared for publication, with vulgar expressions and low newly-coined words. The mime was, it is plain, in substance nothing but the former farce; with this exception, that the character-masks and the standing scenery of Atella as well as the rustic impress are dropped, and in their room the life of the capital in its boundless liberty and licence is brought on the stage. Most pieces of this sort were doubtless of a very fugitive nature and made no pretension to a place in literature;
* With the possession of this sum, which constituted the qualification for the first voting-class and subjected the inheritance to the Voconian law, the boundary line was crossed which separated the men of slender means (tenuiorts) from respectable people. Therefore the poor client of Catullus (xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.
1 In the "Descensus ad Inferos" of Laberius all sorts of people come forward, who have seen wonders and signs ; to one there appeared a husband with two wives, whereupon a neighbour is of opinion that this is still worse than the vision, recently seen by a soothsayer in a dream, of six aediles. Caesar forsooth desired—according to the talk of the time— to introduce polygamy in Rome (Suetonius, Caes. 8a) and he nominated In reality six aediles instead of four. One sees from this that Laberiui understood how to exercise the fool's privilege and Caesar how to permit the fool's freedom.
chap, XH LITERATURE, AND ART
471
but the mimes of Laberius, full of pungent delineation of Laberfcu. character and in point of language and metre exhibiting
the hand of a master, maintained their ground in it ; and
even the historian must regret that we are no longer per
mitted to compare the drama of the republican death- struggle in Rome with its great Attic counterpart
With the worthlessness of dramatic literature the increase Dramatic of scenic spectacles and of scenic pomp went hand in hand. spectac Dramatic representations obtained their regular place in
the public life not only of the capital but also of the
country towns ; the former also now at length acquired by
means of Pompeius a permanent theatre (699 ; see p. 117), 56.
and the Campanian custom of stretching canvas over the
theatre for the protection of the actors and spectators
during the performance, which in ancient times always
took place in the open air, now likewise found admission
to Rome (676). As at that time in Greece it was not the 78. —more than pale —Pleiad of the Alexandrian dramatists,
but the classic drama, above all the tragedies of Euripides,
which amidst the amplest development of scenic resources
the stage, so in Rome at the time of Cicero the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, and the comedies of Plautus were those chiefly produced. While the latter had been in the previous period supplanted by the more tasteful but in point of comic vigour far inferior Terence, Roscius and Varro, or in other words the theatre and philology, co-operated to procure for him a resurrection similar to that which Shakespeare experienced at the hands of Garrick and Johnson ; but even Plautus had to suffer from the degenerate susceptibility and the impatient haste of an audience spoilt by the short and slovenly farces, so that the managers found themselves compelled to excuse the length of the Plautine comedies and even perhaps to make omissions and alterations. The more limited the stock of plays, the more the activity of the managing and
kept
47a
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
executive staff as well as the interest of the public was directed to the scenic representation of the pieces. There was hardly any more lucrative trade in Rome than that of
I the actor and the dancing-girl of the first rank. The princely estate of the tragic actor Aesopus has been already mentioned (p. 384); his still more celebrated contem porary Roscius (iv. 236) estimated his annual income at 600,000 sesterces (^6000) 1 and Dionysia the dancer esti mated hers at 200,000 sesterces (^2000). At the same time immense sums were expended on decorations and costume; now and then trains of six hundred mules in harness crossed the stage, and the Trojan theatrical army was employed to present to the public a tableau of the nations vanquished by Pompeius in Asia. The music which accompanied the delivery of the inserted choruses likewise obtained a greater and more independent im portance ; as the wind sways the waves, says Varro, so the skilful flute-player sways the minds of the listeners with every modulation of melody. It accustomed itself to the use of quicker time, and thereby compelled the player to more lively action. Musical and dramatic connoisseurship was developed ; the habitue recognized every tune by the first note, and knew the texts by heart ; every fault in the music or recitation was severely censured by the audience. The state of the Roman stage in the time of Cicero vividly reminds us of the modern French theatre. As the Roman mime corresponds to the loose tableaux of the pieces of the day, nothing being too good and nothing too bad for either the one or the other, so we find in both the same traditionally classic tragedy and comedy, which the man of culture is in duty bound to admire or at least to applaud. The multitude is satisfied, when it meets its own reflection
1 He obtained from the state for every day on which he acted loco denar1i (£40) and besides this the pay for his company. In later yean he declined the honorarium for himself.
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
473
in the farce, and admires the decorative pomp and receives the general impression of an ideal world in the drama ; the man of higher culture concerns himself at the theatre not with the piece, but only with its artistic representation. Moreover the Roman histrionic art oscillated in its different 1 spheres, just like the French, between the cottage and the !
It was nothing unusual for the Roman dancing-girls to throw off at the finale the upper robe and to give a dance in undress for the benefit of the public ; but on the other hand in the eyes of the Roman Talma the supreme law of his art was, not the truth of nature, but
symmetry.
In recitative poetry metrical annals after the model of Metrical
drawing-room.
those of Ennius seem not to have been wanting ; but they were perhaps sufficiently criticised by that graceful vow of his mistress of which Catullus sings —that the worst of the bad heroic poems should be presented as a sacrifice to holy Venus, if she would only bring back her lover from his vile political poetry to her arms.
Indeed in the whole field of recitative poetry at this epoch the older national- Roman tendency is represented only by a single work of note, which, however, is altogether one of the most important poetical products of Roman literature. It is the didactic poem of Titus Lucretius Carus
Lucretitu,
"Concerning the Nature of Things," whose 99-66. author, belonging to the best circles of Roman society, but taking no part in public life whether from weakness of health
or from disinclination, died in the prime of manhood shortly before the outbreak of the civil war. As a poet he attached himself decidedly to Ennius and thereby to the classical
Greek literature. Indignantly he turns away from the
" hollow Hellenism " of his time, and professes himself with
his whole soul and heart to be the scholar of the " chaste Greeks," as indeed even the sacred earnestness of Thucy-
dides has found no unworthy echo in one of the best-known
(655—699)
474
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
sections of this Roman poem. As Ennius draws his wisdom from Epicharmus and Euhemerus, so Lucretius borrows the form of his representation from Empedocles, "the most glorious treasure of the richly gifted Sicilian isle " ; and, as to the matter, gathers " all the golden words together from the rolls of Epicurus," " who outshines other wise men as the sun obscures the stars. " Like Ennius, Lucretius dis dains the mythological lore with which poetry was over loaded by Alexandrinism, and requires nothing from his reader but a knowledge of the legends generally current. 1 In spite of the modern purism which rejected foreign words from poetry, Lucretius prefers to use, as Ennius had done, a significant Greek word in place of a feeble and obscure Latin one. The old Roman alliteration, the want of due correspondence between the pauses of the verse and those of the sentence, and generally the older modes of expression and composition, are still frequently found in Lucretius' rhythms, and although he handles the verse more melodi ously than Ennius, his hexameters move not, as those of
the modern poetical school, with a lively grace like the rippling brook, but with a stately slowness like the stream of liquid gold. Philosophically and practically also Lucretius leans throughout on Ennius, the only indigenous poet whom his poem celebrates. The confession of faith of the singer
of Rudiae (iii. 175) —
Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed as not curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus—
describes completely the religious standpoint of Lucretius, and not unjustly for that reason he himself terms his poem as it were the continuation of Ennius :—
1 Such an individual apparent exception as Pancbaea the land of incense (ii. 417) is to be explained from the circumstance that this had passed from the romance of the Travels of Euhemerus already perhaps into the poetry of Ennius, at any rate into the poems of Lucius Manlius (iv. 04a ; Plin. H. N. x. a, 4) and thence was well known to the public for which Lucretius wrote.
chap, xii
LITERATURE, AND ART
Ennius ut muter ctcinit, qui primus amoeno Detulit ex Heliame perenni fronde coronam, Pergeniis /tolas hominutn quae clara clueret
475
more —and for the last time — the poem of Lucre
Once
tius is resonant with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet is more at home than I in his own degenerate age. 1 To him too his own song " gracefully welling up out of rich feeling " sounds, as com pared with the common poems, " like the brief song of the swan compared with the cry of the crane " ;—with him too the heart swells, listening to the melodies of its own inven tion, with the hope of illustrious honours —just as Ennius forbids the men to whom he " gave from the depth of the heart a foretaste of fiery song," to mourn at his, the immortal singer's, tomb.
It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents, far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most if not to all his contemporaries, fell upon an age in which he felt himself strange and forlorn, and in conse quence of this made the most singular mistake in the selection of a subject. The system of Epicurus, which converts the universe into a great vortex of atoms and undertakes to explain the origin and end of the world as well as all the problems of nature and of life in a purely mechanical way, was doubtless somewhat less silly than the conversion of myths into history which was attempted by Euhemerus and after him by Ennius ; but it was not an ingenious or a fresh system, and the task of poetically unfolding this mechanical view of the world was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life and art on
' This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which the sea- storms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that trample down those who are on their own side—pictures, that from the Punic wars- appear as they belong to the immediate present Comp. ii. 41 v.
1226, 1303, 1339.
if
j
is,
476
RELIGION, CULTURE, »oor V
a more ungrateful theme. The philosophic reader censures in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points of the system, the superficiality especially with vhich controversies are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions, with quite as good reason as 'he poetical reader frets at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part of the poem absolutely unreadable, in spite of these incredible defects, before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed, this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on any ; and it was by no means merely the occasional similitudes, and the other inserted descriptions of mighty natural phenomena and yet mightier passions, which acquired for the poet this chaplet The genius which marks the view of life as well as the poetry of Lucretius depends on his unbelief, which came forward and was entitled to come forward with the full victorious power of truth, and therefore with the full vigour of poetry, in opposition to the prevailing hypocrisy or superstition.
Humana ante oculos fotdc cum vita iacertt
In terris oppressa gravi sub religiont.
Quae caput a caeli rtgionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspect u mortalibus instant,
Primum Graius homo mortalis tendere contra
Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra.
Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe Jtammantia moenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoqut.
The poet accordingly was zealous to overthrow the gods, as Brutus had overthrown the kings, and " to release nature from her stern lords. " But it was not against the long ago enfeebled throne of Jovis that these flaming words were hurled ; just like Ennius, Lucretius fights practically above all things against the wild foreign faiths and super stitions of the multitude, the worship of the Great Mother for instance and the childish lightning-lore of the Etruscans.
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
477
Horror and antipathy towards that terrible world in general, in which and for which the poet wrote, suggested his poem. It was composed in that hopeless rime when the rule of the oligarchy had been overthrown and that of Caesar had not yet been established, in the sultry years during which the outbreak of the civil war was awaited with long and painful
If we seem to perceive in its unequal and restless utterance that the poet daily expected to see the wild tumult of revolution break forth over himself and his work, we must not with reference to his view of men and things forget amidst what men, and in prospect of what things, that view had its origin. In the Hellas of the epoch before Alexander it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born, and the next best to die. Of all views of the world possible to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children in a dark room ; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods A the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal blessed rest ; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life, but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those that obey than to press int the confused crowd of candidates for the office of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes. This philosophico-practical tendency
suspense.
The
feshio1uibi poetry.
is the true ideal essence of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid, not choked, by all the dreariness of its physical demonstrations. Essentially on this rests its comparative wisdom and truth. The man who with a reverence for his great predecessors and a vehement zeal, to which this century elsewhere knew no parallel, preached such doctrine and embellished it with the charm of art, may be termed at once a good citizen and a great poet. The didactic poem concerning the Nature of Things, however much in it may challenge censure, has remained one of the most
I brilliant stars in the poorly illuminated expanse of Roman literature ; and with reason the greatest of German philo- logues chose the task of making the Lucretian poem once more readable as his last and most masterly work.
Lucretius, although his poetical vigour as well as his art was admired by his cultivated contemporaries, yet remained —of late growth as he was —a master without scholars. In the Hellenic fashionable poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars, who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters. With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry—the drama, the epos, the lyric ; the most pleasing and successful performances consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in " short- winded " tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field intervening between narrative and song. Multifarious didactic poems were written. Small half- heroic, half-erotic epics were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic of the philo logical source whence it sprang, in which the poet more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings, predominantly sensuous, with epic shreds from the cycle of Greek legend. Festal lays were diligently and artfully
478
RELIGION, CULTURE, BOOK t
chap, XII LITERATURE, AND ART
479
manufactured; in general, owing to the want of spon taneous poetical invention, the occasional poem prepon derated and especially the epigram, of which the Alex andrians produced excellent specimens. The poverty of materials and the want of freshness in language and
which inevitably cleave to every literature not national, men sought as much as possible to conceal under odd themes, far-fetched phrases, rare words and artificial versification, and generally under the whole apparatus of philologico-antiquarian erudition and technical dexterity.
Such was the gospel which was preached to the Roman boys of this period, and they came in crowds to hear and
to practise it; already (about 700) the love- poems of 54. Euphorion and similar Alexandrian poetry formed the ordinary reading and the ordinary pieces for declamation
of the cultivated youth. 1 The literary revolution took place ; but it yielded in the first instance with rare excep tions only premature or unripe fruits. The number of the
" new-fashioned poets " was legion, but poetry was rare and Apollo was compelled, as always when so many throng towards Parnassus, to make very short work. The long poems never were worth anything, the short ones seldom. Even in this literary age the poetry of the day had become
a public nuisance ; it sometimes happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's
whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding and the smooth paper. A real public, in the sense in which national literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians as well as to the Hellenic;
1 " No doubt," says Cicero (Tusc. Hi. 19, 45) in reference to Ennius, "the glorious poet is despised by our reciters of Euphorion. " "I have safely arrived," he writes to Atticus (vii. 2 init. ), "as a most favourable
north wind blew for us across from Epirus. This spondaic line you may, if you choose, sell to one of the new-fashioned poets as your own " (1/0 telle nobis fiavit at Epiro Unissumus Onchesmites. Hunt rrovfe1rfforra si eui volet Tuir v1u1riywv pro tuo vtndite).
rhythm,
shop,
4&i
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
V it was thoroughly the poetry of a clique or rather cliques, whose members clung closely together, abused intruders, read and criticised among themselves the new poems, sometimes also quite after the Alexandrian fashion cele brated the successful productions in fresh verses, and variously sought to secure for themselves by clique-praises a spurious and ephemeral renown. A notable teacher of Latin literature, himself poetically active in this new direction, Valerius Cato appears to have exercised a sort of scholastic patronage over the most distinguished men of this circle and to have pronounced final decision on the relative value of the poems. As compared with their Greek models, these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom, sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature. Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done, a greater correctness and consistency in language and metre were certainly attained ; but it was at the expense of the flexibility and fulness of the national idiom. As respects the subject-matter, under the influence partly of effeminate models, partly of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance little conducive to poetry ; but the favourite metrical compendia of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end of this or more probably at the commencement
of the following period, the geographical manual of Eratosthenes by Publius Varro of the Aude and the
manual of Nicander by Aemilius Macer. It is neither to be wondered at nor regretted that of this countless host of poets but few names have been preserved
to us; and even these are mostly mentioned merely as
physico-medicinal
chap, tu LITERATURE, AND ART
481
curiositk* or as once upon a time great; such as the orator Quintus Hortensius with his " five hundred thousand lines" of tiresome obscenity, and the somewhat more frequently mentioned Laevius, whose Erotopaegnia attracted
a certain interest only by their complicated measures and affected phraseology. Even the small epic Smyrna by Gaius Helvius Cinna (t71o? ), much as it was praised by 44. the clique, bears both in its subject —the incestuous love
of a daughter for her father — and in the nine years' toil bestowed on it the worst characteristics of the time.
Those poets alone of this school constitute an original
and pleasing exception, who knew how to combine with
its neatness and its versatility of form the national elements
of worth still existing in the republican life, especially in
that of the country-towns. To say nothing here of Laberius
and Varro, this description applies especially to the three
poets already mentioned above (p. 140) of the republican opposition, Marcus Furius liibaculus (652-691), Gaius 102-63. Licinius Calvus (672—706) and Quintus Valerius Catullus 82-48.
Of the two former, whose writings have 87-64. perished, we can indeed only conjecture this ; respecting
the poems of Catullus we can still form a judgment He Catuiiui. too depends in subject and form on the Alexandrians.
We find in his collection translations of pieces of Calli- machus, and these not altogether the very good, but the
very difficult Among the original pieces, we meet with elaborately- turned fashionable poems, such as the over- artificial Galliambics in praise of the Phrygian Mother; and even the poem, otherwise so beautiful, of the marriage of Thetis has been artistically spoiled by the truly Alex andrian insertion of the complaint of Ariadne in the principal poem. But by the side of these school-pieces we mert with the melodious lament of the genuine elegy, the festal poem in the full pomp of individual and almost dramatic execution, above all, the freshest
vol. V
(667-6 700).
miniature 164
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painting of cultivated social life, the pleasant and very unreserved amatory adventures of which half the charm consists in prattling and poetizing about the mysteries of love, the delightful life of youth with full cups and empty purses, the pleasures of travel and of poetry, the Roman and still more frequently the Veronese anecdote of the town, and the humorous jest amidst the familiar circle of friends. But not only does Apollo touch the lyre of the poet, he wields also the bow ; the winged dart of sarcasm spares neither the tedious verse-maker nor the provincial who corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people is endangered. The short- lined and merry metres, often enlivened by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory. These poems lead us alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po ; but the poet is incomparably more at home in the latter. His poems are based on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self- consciousness of a burgess and a burgess in fact of a rural town, on the contrast of Verona with Rome, on the contrast of the homely municipal with the high-born lords of the senate who usually maltreat their humble friends — as that contrast was probably felt more vividly than anywhere else in Catullus' home, the flourishing and comparatively vigorous Cisalpine GauL The most beautiful of his poems reflect the sweet pictures of the Lago di Garda, and hardly at this time could any man of the capital have written a poem like the deeply pathetic one on his brother's death, or the excellent genuinely homely festal hymn for the marriage of Manlius and
Aurunculeia. Catullus, although dependent on the Alex andrian masters and standing in the midst of the fashion able and clique poetry of that age, was yet not merely a
scholar among many mediocre and bad ones, but
good
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART
483
himself as much superior to his masters as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters. Eminent creative vigour indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him ; he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems are, as he himself calls them, nothing but "pleas antries and trifles. " Yet when we find not merely his con temporaries electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art- critics of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries as well as their successors were com pletely right. The Latin nation has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection as in Catullus ; and in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show.
Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch. Poems in The law of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which prose- had hitherto remained unchangeable —that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting should go together
—gave way before the intermixture and disturbance of all
kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant
features of this period. As to romances indeed nothing Romances, farther is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian
of this epoch, Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to
translate into Latin the much-read Milesian tales of
Aristides —licentious fashionable novels of the most stupid
sort.
A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this Varro's debateable border-land between poetry and prose was the ^*ne^ aesthetic writings of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative of Latin philologico- historical re
search, but one of the most fertile and most interesting authors in belles-lettres. Descended from a plebeian gens
Varro't
occupied life, that death called him away.
The aesthetic writings, which have made him name,
were brief essays, some in simple prose and of graver contents, others humorous sketches the prose groundwork of which was inlaid with various poetical effusions. The former were the " philosophico-historical dissertations "
the latter the Menippean Satires. In neither case did he follow Latin models, and the Satura of Varro in particular was by no means based on that of Lucilius. In fact the Roman Satura in general was not properly fixed species of art, but only indicated negatively the fact that the " multifarious poem " was not to be included under any of the recognized forms of art and accordingly the Satura- poetry assumed in the hands of every gifted poet different
" For me when boy," he somewhere says, "there sufficed a single tough coat and a single under-garment, shoes without stockings, horse without a saddle had no daily warm bath, and but seldom a river- bath. " On account of his personal valour he obtained in the Piratic war, where he commanded a division of the fleet, the naval crown.
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which had its home in the Sabine land but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate, strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,' and already at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus
116-27. Terentius Varro of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course, to the constitutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic part in its doings and suffer ings. He supported partly in literature —as when he combated the first coalition, the "three-headed monster," in pamphlets partly more serious warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant of Further Spain (p. 219). When the cause of the republic was lost, Varro was destined his conqueror to be librarian of the library which was to be formed in the capital. The troubles of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex, and was not till seventeen
years after Caesar's death, in the eighty-ninth year of his well-
{logistorici),
I;
a
1
a a
a
a
; it
in by
it,
;
chap, XH LITERATURE, AND ART
485
and peculiar character. It was rather in the pre- Alexandrian Greek philosophy that Varro found the models
for his more severe as well as for his lighter aesthetic works ; for the graver dissertations, in the dialogues of Heraclides of Heraclea on the Black Sea (t about 450), 300. for the satires, in the writings of Menippus of Gadara in Syria (flourishing about 475). The choice was significant. 280. Heraclides, stimulated as an author by Plato's philosophic dialogues, had amidst the brilliance of their form totally lost sight of the scientific contents and made the poetico- fabulistic dress the main matter ; he was an agreeable and largely-read author, but far from a philosopher. Menippus
was quite as little a philosopher, but the most genuine literary representative of that philosophy whose wisdom consisted in denying philosophy and ridiculing philosophers the cynical wisdom of Diogenes ; a comic teacher of serious wisdom, he proved by examples and merry sayings that except an upright life everything is vain in earth and heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes of so- called sages. These were the true models for Varro, a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent, but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact, but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans. 1 But Varro was no slavish pupil. The impulse and in general the form he derived from Heraclides and Menippus; but his was a
1 There is hardly anything more childish than Varro' s scheme of all the philosophies, which in the first place summarily declares all systems that do not propose the happiness of man as their ultimate aim to be non existent, and then reckons the number of philosophies conceivable under this supposition as two hundred and eighty-eight. The vigorous man was unfortunately too much a scholar to confess that he neither could nor would be a philosopher, and accordingly as such throughout life he per formed a blind dance — not altogether becoming — between the Stoa,
Pythagortanisra, and Diogenism.
V«mi'i philo- sophico- historical ways.
nature too individual and too decidedly Roman not to keep his imitative creations essentially independent and national.
For his grave dissertations, in which a moral maxim or other subject of general interest is handled, he disdained in his framework to approximate to the Milesian tales, as Heraclides had done, and so to serve up to the reader even childish little stories like those of Abaris and of the maiden reawakened to life after being seven days dead. But seldom he borrowed the dress from the nobler myths of the Greeks, as in the essay " Orestes or concerning Madness " ; history ordinarily afforded him a worthier frame for his subjects, more especially the contemporary history of his country, so that these essays became, as they were called, laudationes of esteemed Romans, above all of the Coryphaei of the constitutional party. Thus the dissertation " concerning Peace " was at the same time a memorial of Metellus Pius, the last in the brilliant series of successful generals of the senate ; that " concerning the Worship of the Gods " was at the same time destined to preserve the memory of the highly -respected Optimate and Pontifex Gaius Curio; the essay " on Fate " was connected with Marius, that " on the Writing of History" with Sisenna the first historian of this epoch, that " on the Beginnings of the Roman Stage " with the princely giver of scenic spectacles Scaurus, that ''on Numbers" with the highly-cultured Roman banker Atticus. The two philosophico-historical essays " Laelius or concerning Friendship," " Cato or concerning Old Age," which Cicero wrote probably after the model of those of Varro, may give us some approximate idea of Varro's half- didactic, half-narrative, treatment of these subjects.
The Menippean satire was handled by Varro with equal originality of form and contents ; the bold mixture of prose and verse is foreign to the Greek original, and the whole intellectual contents are pervaded by Roman idiosyncrasy
486
RELIGION, CULTURE,
Varro's Menippean satires.
chap, x:i LITERATURE, AND ART
487
—one might say, by a savour of the Sabine soil. These satires like the philosophico-historical essays handle some moral or other theme adapted to the larger public, as is shown by the several titles — Columnae Herculis, mpl Sd^s;
ij Aoiras rb Iltuyxu, irtpl yeya/iijKOTcav J -Est Modus Alatulae, irtpl /te&js; Papiapapae, irtpl tyKiap. iu>v. The plastic dress, which in this case might not be wanting, is of course but seldom borrowed from the history of his native country, as in the satire Serranus, irtpl apxa1pto-1Zv. The Cynic-world of Diogenes on the other hand plays, as might be expected, a great part ; we meet with the Kwurrwp, the "Kwopprpup, the Ithtokvidv, the i8poKvu>v, the KwoS1Sac- Kak1Kov and others of a like kind. Mythology is also laid under contribution for comic purposes ; we find a Prometheus Liber, an Ajax Stramentieius, a Hercules Socratieus, a Sesqueulixes who had spent not merely ten but fifteen years in wanderings. The outline of the dramatic or romantic framework is still discoverable from the fragments in some pieces, such as the Prometheus Liber, the Sexagessis, Manius ; it appears that Varro frequently, perhaps regularly, narrated the tale as his own experience ; e. g. in the Manius the dramatis personal go to Varro and discourse to him "because he was known to them as a maker of books. " As to the poetical value of this dress we are no longer allowed to form any certain judgment ; there still occur in our fragments several very charming sketches full of wit and liveliness —thus in the Prometheus Liber the hero after the loosing of his chains opens a manufactory of men, in which Goldshoe the rich (Chrysosandalos) bespeaks for himself a maiden, of milk and finest wax, such as the Milesian bees gather from various flowers, a maiden without bones and sinews, without skin or hair, pure and polished, slim, smooth, tender, charming. The life-breath of this
poetry is polemics — not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius and Catullus practised, but the
EC/>ev
48S
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
general moral antagonism of the stern elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly, or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry,1 of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise regulations. In the constitutional struggle Varro did what seemed to him the duty of a citizen ; but his heart was not in such party-doings — " why," he complains on one occasion, " do ye call me from my pure life into the filth of your senate-house ? " He belonged to the good old time, when the talk savoured of onions and garlic, but the heart was sound. His polemic against the hereditary foes of the genuine Roman spirit, the Greek philosophers, was only a single aspect of this old-fashioned opposition to the spirit of the new times ; but it resulted both from the nature of the Cynical philosophy and from the temperament of Varro, that the Menippean lash was very specially plied round the cars of the philosophers and put them accordingly into proportional alarm — it was not without palpitation that the philosophic scribes of the time transmitted to the " severe man " their newly-issued treatises.
/ Philosophizing is truly no art. With the tenth part of the trouble with which a master rears his slave to be a pro-
1 On one occasion he writes, " Quintiporis Clodii foria acpoemata ejus gargaridians dices ; 0 fortuna, O fors fortunal" And elsewhere, "Cum Quintipor Clodius tot comoedias sine ulla fecerit Musa, ego unum libel! um non ' edolem ' utaitEnnius t" This not otherwise known Clodius must have
been in all probability a wretched imitator of Terence, as those woids sarcastically laid at his door " O fortuna, O fors fortunal" are found occurring in a Terentian comedy.
The following description of himself by a poet in Varro's 'Orot Aipat,
Pacuv1 discipulus dicor, porro is fitit Enni, Ennius Musarum ; Pompilius clueor
might aptly parody the introduction of Lucretius (p. 474), to whom Varro as a declared enemy of the Epicurean system cannot have been well disposed, and whom he never quotes.