No More Learning

Commercial intercourse provided for itself a more thorough remedy. The lively intercourse between Romans and non-Romans had long ago developed in Rome an international private law (Jus gentium; i. 200), that is to say, a body of maxims especially relating to commercial matters, according to which Roman judges pronounced judgment, when a cause could not be decided either according to their own or any other national code and they were compelled —setting aside the peculiarities of Roman, Hellenic, Phoenician and other law — to revert to the common views of right underlying all dealings. The formation of the newer law attached itself to this basis. In the first place as a standard for the legal dealings of Roman burgesses with each other, it de facto substituted for the old urban law, which had become practically useless, a new code based in substance on a compromise between the national law of the Twelve Tables and the international law or so-called law of nations. The former was essentially adhered to, though of course with modifications suited to the times, in the law of marriage, family, and inheritance ;
whereas in all regulations which concerned dealings with property, and consequently in reference to ownership and contracts, the international law was the standard ; in these matters indeed various important arrangements were borrowed even from local provincial law, such as the legisla tion as to usury 401), and the institution of hypotiuea.
432
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
(p.
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
433
Through whom, when, and how this comprehensive innova tion came into existence, whether at once or gradually, whether through one or several authors, are questions to which we cannot furnish a satisfactory answer. We know only that this reform, as was natural, proceeded in the first instance from the urban court; that it first took formal shape in the instructions annually issued by the praetor urbanus, when entering on office, for the guidance of the parties in reference to the most important maxims of law to be observed in the judicial year then beginning (edictum annuum or perpetuum praetoris urbani de iuris dictione) ; and that, al though various preparatory steps towards it may have been taken in earlier times, it certainly only attained its completion in this epoch. The new code was theoretic and abstract, inasmuch as the Roman view of law had therein divested itself of such of its national peculiarities as it had become aware of ; but it was at the same time practical and positive, inasmuch as it by no means faded away into the dim twilight of general equity or even into the pure nothingness of the so-called law of nature, but was applied by definite functionaries for definite concrete cases according to fixed rules, and was not merely capable of, but had already essentially received, a legal embodiment in the urban edict. This code moreover corresponded in matter to the wants of the time, in so far as it furnished the more convenient forms required by the increase of intercourse for legal pro cedure, for acquisition of property, and for conclusion of contracts. Lastly, it had already in the main become subsidiary law throughout the compass of the Roman empire, inasmuch as — while the manifold local statutes were retained for those legal relations which were not directly commercial, as well as for local transactions between members of the same legal district — dealings relating to property between subjects of the empire belong ing to different legal districts were regulated throughout
rOL. V l6l
Caesar's
codieca- tion.
after the model of the urban edict, though not applicable de jure to these cases, both in Italy and in the provinces. The law of the urban edict had thus essentially the same position in that age which the Roman law has occupied in our political development ; this also so far as such opposites can be combined, at once abstract and positive this also recommended itself its (compared with the earlier legal code) flexible forms of intercourse, and took its place by the side of the local statutes as universal subsidiary law. But the Roman legal development had an essential advantage over ours in this, that the denationalized legislation appeared not, as with us, prematurely and by artificial birth, but at the right time and agreeably to nature.
Such was the state of the law as Caesar found If ne ProJected the plan for new code, not difficult to say what were his intentions. This code could only com prehend the law of Roman burgesses, and could be general code for the empire merely so far as code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass of the empire. In criminal law, the plan embraced this at all, there was needed only revision and adjustment of the Sullan ordinances. In civil law, for state whose nation ality was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law. The first step
87. towards this had been taken the Cornelian law of 687, when enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily to administer other law (iv. 457)— regulation, which may well be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law as that collection for the fixing of the earlier.
434
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
by a
by
it
a
it is
a
if
a
a
it a;
is,
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
435
But although after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict ; and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law in judicial usage as in legal instruction —every urban judge was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates, and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law. The subsidiary application of the urban edict in the court of the praetor peregrinus at Rome and in the different provincial judicatures was entirely subject to the arbitrary pleasure of the individual presiding magistrates. It was evidently necessary to set aside definitely the old urban law, so far as it had not been transferred to the newer, and in the case of the latter to set suitable limits to its arbitrary alteration by each individual urban
judge, possibly also to regulate its subsidiary application by the side of the local statutes. This was Caesar's design, when
he projected the plan for his code ; for it could not have been otherwise. The plan was not executed ; and thus that troublesome state of transition in Roman jurisprudence was perpetuated till this necessary reform was accomplished six centuries afterwards, and then but imperfectly, by one of the successors of Caesar, the Emperor Justinian.
Lastly, in money, measures, and weights the substantial equalization of the Latin and Hellenic systems had long been in progress. It was very ancient so far as concerned the definitions of weight and the measures of capacity and of length indispensable for trade and commerce
263/), and in the monetary system little more recent than the introduction of the silver coinage (iii. 87). But these older
equations were not sufficient, because in the Hellenic
(i.
436
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
world itself the most varied metrical and monetary systems subsisted side by side ; it was necessary, and formed part doubtless of Caesar's plan, now to introduce everywhere in the new united empire, so far as this had not been done already, Roman money, Roman measures, and Roman weights in such a manner that they alone should be reckoned by in official intercourse, and that the non-Roman systems should be restricted to local currency or placed in a — once for all regulated — ratio to the Roman. 1 The action of Caesar, however, can only be pointed out in two of the most important of these departments, the monetary system and the calendar.
The Roman monetary system was based on the two prec>ous metals circulating side by side and in a fixed relation to each other, gold being given and taken according to weight,8 silver in the form of coin; but practically in consequence of the extensive transmarine intercourse the
far preponderated over the silver. Whether the acceptance of Roman silver money was not even at an earlier period obligatory throughout the empire, is uncertain ; at any rate uncoined gold essentially supplied the place of imperial money throughout the Roman territory, the more so as the Romans had prohibited the coining of gold in all the provinces and client-states, and the denarius had, in addition to Italy, de jure or de facto naturalized itself in Cisalpine Gaul, in Sicily, in Spain and various other places, especially in the west (iv. 180). But the imperial coinage begins with Caesar. Exactly like Alexander, he
1 Weights recently brought to light at Pompeii suggest the hypothesis that at the commencement of the imperial period alongside of the Roman pound the Attic mina (presumably in the ratio of 3 : 4) passed current as a second imperial weight (Hermes, xvi. 311).
s The gold pieces, which Sulla (iv. 179) and contemporarily Pompeius caused to be struck, both in small quantity, do not invalidate this proposi tion ; for they probably came to be token solely by weight just like the golden Phillippei which were in circulation even down to Caesar's time. They are certainly remarkable, because they anticipate the Caesarian Imperial gold just as Sulla's regency anticipated the new monarchy.
Gold coin
currency. currency.
gold
chap, xi THE NEW MONARCHY
437
marked the foundation of the new monarchy embracing the civilized world by the fact that the only metal forming an universal medium obtained the first place in the coinage. The greatness of the scale on which the new Caesarian gold piece (20s. 7& according to the present value of the metal) was immediately coined, is shown by the fact that in a single treasure buried seven years after Caesar's death 80,000 of these pieces were found together. It is true that financial speculations may have exercised a collateral influence in this respect. 1 As to the silver money, the exclusive rule of the Roman denarius in all the west, for which the foundation had previously been laid, was finally established by Caesar, when he definitively closed the only Occidental mint that still competed in silver currency with the Roman, that of Massilia. The coining of silver or copper small money was still permitted to a number of Occidental communities ; three-quarter denarii were struck by some Latin communities of southern Gaul, half denarii by several cantons in northern Gaul, copper small coins in various instances even after Caesar's time by communes of the west; but this small money was throughout coined after the Roman standard, and its acceptance moreover was probably obligatory only in local dealings. Caesar does not seem any more than the earlier government to have contemplated the regulation with a view to unity of the monetary system of the east, where great masses of coarse silver money — much of which too easily admitted of being debased or worn away —and to some extent even, as in Egypt, a copper coinage akin to our paper money
1 It appears, namely, that in earlier times the claims of the state- creditors payable in silver could not be paid against their will in gold according to its legal ratio to silver ; whereas it admits of no doubt, that from Caesar's time the gold piece had to be taken as a valid tender for 100 silver sesterces. This was just at that time the more important, as in consequence of the great quantities of gold put into circulation by Caesar it stood for a time in the currency of trade 25 per cent below the legal ratio.
Reform of the calendar.
were in circulation, and the Syrian commercial cities would have felt very severely the want of their previous national coinage corresponding to the Mesopotamian currency. We find here subsequently the arrangement that the denarius has everywhere legal currency and is the only medium of official reckoning,1 while the local coins have legal currency within their limited range but according to a tariff unfavour able for them as compared with the denarius} This was probably not introduced all at once, and in part perhaps may have preceded Caesar; but it was at any rate the essential complement of the Caesarian arrangement as to the imperial coinage, whose new gold piece found its immediate model in the almost equally heavy coin of Alexander and was doubtless calculated especially for circulation in the east
Of a kindred nature was the reform of the calendar.
The republican calendar, which strangely enough was still the old decemviral calendar—an imperfect adoption of the octaeteris that preceded Meton (ii. 216)—had by a com bination of wretched mathematics and wretched administra tion come to anticipate the true time by 67 whole days, so that e. g. the festival of Flora was celebrated on the nth July instead of the 28th April. Caesar finally removed this evil, and with the help of the Greek mathematician Sosigenes introduced the Italian farmer's year regulated according to the Egyptian calendar of Eudoxus, as well as a rational system of intercalation, into religious and official use ; while at the same time the beginning of the year on
1 There is probably no inscription of the Imperial period, which specifies sums of money otherwise ihan in Roman coin.
2 Thus the Attic drachma, although sensibly heavier than the denarius, was yet reckoned equal to it ; the Utradrachmon of Antioch, weighing on an average 15 grammes of silver, was made equal to 3 Roman denarii, which only weigh about ia grammes ; the cistaphorus of Asia Minor was according to the value of silver above 3, according to the legal tariff =aj denarii \ the Rhodian half drachma according to the value of silver = J, according to the legal tariff = J of a denarius, ind so on.
438
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND BOOK V
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY
439
the 1st March of the old calendar was abolished, and the
date of the ist January—fixed at first as the official term for
changing the supreme magistrates and, in consequence of this, long since prevailing in civil life—was assumed also as
the calendar- period for commencing the year. Both changes came into effect on the ist January 709, and *& along with them the use of the Julian calendar so named after its author, which long after the fall of the monarchy
of Caesar remained the regulative standard of the civilized world and in the main is so still. By way of explanation there was added in a detailed edict a star-calendar derived from the Egyptian astronomical observations and trans ferred — not indeed very skilfully — to Italy, which fixed the rising and setting of the stars named according to days of the calendar. 1 In this domain also the Roman and Greek worlds were thus placed on a par.
Such were the foundations of the Mediterranean mon- Caesar and
archy of Caesar. For the second time in Rome the social question had reached a crisis, at which the antagonisms not only appeared to be, but actually were, in the form of their exhibition, insoluble and, in the form of their expression, irreconcilable. On the former occasion Rome had been saved by the fact that Italy was merged in Rome and Rome in Italy, and in the new enlarged and altered home those old antagonisms were not reconciled, but fell into abeyance. Now Rome was once more saved by the fact that the coun tries of the Mediterranean were merged in it or became prepared for merging; the war between the Italian poor
1 The Identity or this edict drawn up perhaps by Marcus Flavius (Macrob. Sai. i. 14, 2) and the alleged treatise of Caesar, De Stellis, is shown by the joke of Cicero (Plutarch, Caes. 59) that now the Lyre rises according to edict
We may add that it was known even before Caesar that the solar year of 365 days 6 hours, which was the basis of the Egyptian calendar, and which he made the basis of his, was somewhat too long. The most exact calculation of the tropical year which the ancient world was acquainted with, that of Hipparchus, put it at 365 d. 5 h. 52' 12" ; the true length is 365 d. 5 h. 48' 48".
wor
440
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND book v
and rich, which in the old Italy could only end with the destruction of the nation, had no longer a battle-field or a meaning in the Italy of three continents. The Latin colonies closed the gap which threatened to swallow up the Roman community in the fifth century ; the deeper chasm of the seventh century was filled by the Transalpine and transmarine colonizations of Gaius Gracchus and Caesar. For Rome alone history not merely performed miracles, but also repeated its miracles, and twice cured the internal crisis, which in the state itself was incurable, by regenerating the state. There was doubtless much corruption in this regeneration ; as the union of Italy was accomplished over the ruins of the Samnite and Etruscan nations, so the Mediterranean monarchy built itself on the ruins of count less states and tribes once living and vigorous ; but it was a corruption out of which sprang a fresh growth, part of which remains green at the present day. What was pulled
down for the sake of the new building, was merely the secondary nationalities which had long since been marked out for destruction by the levelling hand of civilization. Caesar, wherever he came forward as a destroyer, only carried out the pronounced verdict of historical
develop ment ; but he protected the germs of culture, where and as he found them, in his own land as well as among the sister nation of the Hellenes. He saved and renewed the Roman
type ; and not only did he spare the Greek type, but with the same self-relying genius with which he accomplished the renewed foundation of Rome he undertook also the regeneration of the Hellenes, and resumed the interrupted work of the great Alexander, whose image, we may well believe, never was absent from Caesar's soul. He solved these two great tasks not merely side by side, but the one by means of the other. The two great essentials of humanity —general and individual development, or state and culture—once in embryo united in those old Graeco-Italians
chap, XI THE NEW MONARCHY 441
feeding their flocks in primeval simplicity far from the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean, had become dissevered when these were parted into Italians and Hellenes, and had thenceforth remained apart for many centuries. Now the descendant of the Trojan prince and the Latin king's daughter created out of a state without distinctive culture and a cosmopolitan civilization a new whole, in which state and culture again met together at the acme of human exist ence in the rich fulness of blessed maturity and worthily filled the sphere appropriate to such an union.
The outlines have thus been set forth, which Caesar drew for this work, according to which he laboured himself, and according to which posterity—for many centuries con fined to the paths which this great man marked out— endeavoured to prosecute the work, if not with the intellect and energy, yet on the whole in accordance with the inten tions, of the illustrious master. Little was finished ; much even was merely begun. Whether the plan was complete, those who venture to vie in thought with such a man may decide ; we observe no material defect in what lies before us—every single stone of the building enough to make a man immortal, and yet all combining to form one harmo- 1 nious whole. Caesar ruled as king of Rome for five years and a half, not half as long as Alexander ; in the intervals of seven great campaigns, which allowed him to stay not more than fifteen months altogether l in the capital of his empire, he regulated the destinies of the world for the
and the future, from the establishment of the boundary-line between civilization and barbarism down to the removal of the pools of rain in the streets of the capital, and yet retained time and composure enough attentively to follow the prize-pieces in the theatre and to confer the
1 Caesar staved in Rome in April and Dec. 705, on each occasion for a 49.
few days ; from Sept. to Dec. 707 ; some four months in the autumn of 47.
the year of fifteen months 708, and from Oct. 709 to March 710. 46. 46. 44.
present
THE OLD REPUBLIC AND NEW MONARCHY bk. v
chaplet on the victor with improvised verses. The rapidity and self-precision with which the plan was executed prove that it had been long meditated thoroughly and all its parts settled in detail ; but, even thus, they remain not much less wonderful than the plan itself. The outlines were laid down and thereby the new state was defined for all coming time; the boundless future alone could complete the structure. So far Caesar might say, that his aim was at tained ; and this was probably the meaning of the words which were sometimes heard to fall from him—that he had "lived enough. " But precisely because the building was an endless one, the master as long as he lived restlessly added stone to stone, with always the same dexterity and always the same elasticity busy at his work, without ever
442
or postponing, just as if there were for him merely a to-day and no to-morrow. Thus he worked and created as never did any mortal before or after him ; and as a worker and creator he still, after wellnigh two thousand years, lives in the memory of the nations — the first, and withal unique, Imperator Caesar.
overturning
chap, xil RELIGION, CULTURE, LITERATURE, ART
443
CHAPTER XII
RELIGION, CULTURE, LITERATURE, AND ART
In the development of religion and philosophy no new State- element appeared during this epoch. The Romano- Hellenic state -religion and the Stoic state-philosophy inseparably combined with it were for every government —oligarchy, democracy or monarchy—not merely a con venient instrument, but quite indispensable for the very reason that it was just as impossible to construct the
state wholly without religious elements as to discover any new state-religion fitted to take the place of the old. So the besom of revolution swept doubtless at times very roughly through the cobwebs of the augural bird-lore (p. in); nevertheless the rotten machine creaking at every joint survived the earthquake which swallowed up the republic itself, and preserved its insipidity and its arrogance without diminution for transference to the new monarchy. As a matter of course, it fell more and more into disfavour with all those who preserved their freedom of judgment. Towards the state-religion indeed public opinion maintained an attitude essentially indifferent; it was on all sides recognized as an institution of political convenience, and no one specially troubled himself about it with the exception of political and antiquarian literati. But towards its philo sophical sister there gradually sprang up among the unpre judiced public that hostility, which the empty and yet per-
444
XELIGION, CULTURE, book v
fidious hypocrisy of set phrases never fails in the long run to awaken. That a presentiment of its own worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way of syncretism. Antiochus of Ascalon (flourishing about
79. 675), who professed to have patched together the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian systems into one organic unity, in reality so far succeeded that his misshapen doctrine became the fashionable philosophy of the conservatives of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti and literati of Rome. Every one who displayed any
I intellectual vigour, opposed the Stoa or ignored It was principally antipathy towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch the extension of the system of Epicurus to larger circle and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy of Diogenes in Rome. However stale and poor in thought the former might be, philosophy, which did not seek the way to wisdom through an alteration of traditional terms but contented itself with those in existence, and throughout recognized only the perceptions of sense as true, was always better than the terminological jingle and the hollow
of the Stoic wisdom and the Cynic philo sophy was of all the philosophical systems of the times in so far by much the best, as its system was confined to the having no system at all and sneering at all systems and all systematizers. In both fields war was waged against the Stoa with zeal and success for serious men, the Epicurean Lucretius preached with the full accents of heartfelt conviction and of holy zeal against the Stoical faith in the gods and providence and the Stoical doctrine of the immortality of the soul for the great public ready to laugh, the Cynic Varro hit the mark still more sharply
conceptions
;
;
;
a
a
it.
chap, XII LITERATURE, AND ART
445
with the flying darts of his extensively-read satires. While thus the ablest men of the older generation made war on the Stoa, the younger generation again, such as Catullus, stood in no inward relation to it at all, and passed a far sharper censure on it by completely ignoring it
But, if in the present instance a faith no longer believed The
in was maintained out of political convenience, they amply °"ePtal made up for this in other respects. Unbelief and supersti
tion, different hues of the same historical phenomenon,
went in the Roman world of that day hand in hand, and
there was no lack of individuals who in themselves com
bined both — who denied the gods with Epicurus, and yet
prayed and sacrificed before every shrine. Of course only
the gods that came from the east were still in vogue, and,
as the men continued to flock from the Greek lands to
Italy, so the gods of the east migrated in ever-increasing numbers to the west The importance of the Phrygian cultusat that time in Rome is shown both by the polemical
tone of the older men such as Varro and Lucretius, and by
the poetical glorification of it in the fashionable Catullus,
which concludes with the characteristic request that the goddess may deign to turn the heads of others only, and
not that of the poet himself.
A fresh addition was the Persian worship, which is said to have first reached the Occidental through the medium of the pirates who met on the Mediterranean from the east and from the west ; the oldest seat of this cultus in the west is stated to have been Mount Olympus in Lycia. That in the adoption of Oriental worships in the west such higher
Worship
and moral elements as they contained were generally allowed to drop, is strikingly evinced by the fact that Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the pure doctrine of Zarathustra, remained virtually unknown in the west, and adoration there was especially directed to that god who had occupied the first place in the old Persian national religion
speculative
Worship
and had been transferred by Zarathustra to the second—the
sun-god Mithra.
But the brighter and gentler celestial forms of the
Persian religion did not so rapidly gain a footing in Rome as the wearisome mystical host of the grotesque divinities of Egypt —Isis the mother of nature with her whole train, the constantly dying and constantly reviving Osiris, the gloomy Sarapis, the taciturn and grave Harpocrates, the dog-headed Anubis. In the year when Clodius emanci-
446
RELIGION, CUi. TURE, book v
68. pated the clubs and conventicles (696), and doubtless in consequence of this very emancipation of the populace, that host even prepared to make its entry into the old stronghold of the Roman Jupiter in the Capitol, and it was with difficulty that the invasion was prevented and the inevitable temples were banished at least to the suburbs of Rome. No worship was equally popular among the lower orders of the population in the capital : when the senate ordered the temples of Isis constructed within the ring-wall to be pulled down, no labourer ventured to lay the first hand on them, and the consul Lucius Paullus was himself
60. obliged to apply the first stroke of the axe (704) ; a wager might be laid, that the more loose any woman was, the more piously she worshipped Isis. 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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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
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his manual to Nicomedes III. king (663 7-679) °f Bithynia I
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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
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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
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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.