No More Learning

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'
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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
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
482
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
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.
484
RELIGION, CULTURE, book v
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.
chap, xil LITERATURE, AND ART 489
fessional baker, he trains himself to be a philosopher ; no doubt, when the baker and the philosopher both come under the hammer, the artist of pastry goes off a hundred times dearer than the sage. Singular people, these philo sophers ! One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey— it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with, otherwise where would any honey-wine be left? Another thinks that men grow out of the earth like cresses. A third has invented a world-borer (Koo-jwropvvr)) by which the earth will some day be destroyed.
Poslremo, nemo aegrotus quiequam somniat
Tarn infandum, quod non aliquis dicat phihsophus.
It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard —by which is meant an etymologizing Stoic—cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith's scales ; but there is nothing that sur passes the genuine philosophers' quarrel — a Stoic boxing- match far excels any encounter of athletes. In the satire Marcopolis, irtpi. apxrjs, when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart, matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant, but ill
with the philosopher ; the Ce/er-8t-cvbs-\rifiiJuiTo<i-\6yo<s, son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent — evidently the philosophic Dilemma —with the mattock.
With this morally polemic tendency and this talent for embodying it in caustic and picturesque expression, which, as the dress of dialogue given to the books on Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows, never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily combined an incom parable knowledge of the national manners and language, which is embodied in the philological writings of his old age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness.
Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian, who from the personal observation of many
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RELIGION, CULTURE, book V
years knew his nation in its former idiosyncrasy and secli> sion as well as in its modern state of transition and dis persion, and had supplemented and deepened his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives. His partial deficiency in rational judgment and learning —in our sense of the words —was compensated for by his clear intuition and the poetry which lived within him. He sought neither after antiquarian notices nor after rare antiquated or poetical words ;l but he was himself an old and old-fashioned man and almost a rustic, the classics of his nation were his favourite and long-familiar com panions ; how could it fail that many details of the manners of his forefathers, which he loved above all and especially knew, should be narrated in his writings, and that his dis course should abound with proverbial Greek and Latin phrases, with good old words preserved in the Sabine conversational language, with reminiscences of Ennius, Lucilius, and above all of Plautus ? We should not judge
as to the prose style of these aesthetic writings of Varro's earlier period by the standard of his work on Language written in his old age and probably published in an un finished state, in which certainly the clauses of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative like thrushes on a string ; but we have already observed that Varro rejected on principle the effort after a chaste style and Attic periods
458), and his aesthetic essays, while destitute of the mean bombast and the spurious tinsel of vulgarism, were yet written after an unclassic and even slovenly fashion, in sentences rather directly joined on to each other than regularly subdivided. The poetical pieces inserted on the other hand show not merely that their author knew how to
He himself once aptly says, that he had no special fondness for antiquated words, but frequently used them, and that he was very fond of poetical words, but did not use them.
1
(p.
chap, xii LITERATURE, AND ART
491
mould the most varied measures with as much mastery as any of the fashionable poets, but that he had a right to include himself among those to whom a god has granted the gift of " banishing cares from the heart by song and sacred poesy. "1 The sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem of Lucretius ; to the more general causes which prevented this there falls to be added their thoroughly individual stamp, which was inseparable from the greater age, from the rusticity, and even from the peculiar erudition of their author. But the grace and humour of the Menippean satires above all, which seem to have been in number and importance far superior to Varro's graver works, captivated his contemporaries as well as those in after times who had any relish for originality and national
1 The following description is taken from the Marcipor ("Slave of
Marcus");—
Repente noctis circiter meridie
Cum pictus t1er fervidis late ignibus Caeli chorean astricen ostenderet,
Nubes aquali, frigido veto leves
Caeli cavernas aureus subduxerant, Aquam vomentes inferam mortalibus. Vtntique frigido se at axe eruperant, Pkrenetici scptentrionum filii,
Secum fercntes tegulas, ramos, syrus.
At not caduei, naufragi, ut ciconiae Quarum bipennis fulminis plumas vapor
Perussit, alte maesti in terram cccidimus.
In the 'ArdpwrbroKtt we find the lines :
Nan Jit thesauris, non auropeetu' solutum;
Non demunt animis euros at relligiones Persarum monies, non atria diviti Crassi,
But the poet was successful also in a lighter vein. In the Est Modus Matulae there stood the following elegant commendation of wine :
Vino nihil iucundius quisquam bibit.
Hoc aegritudinem ad medendam invenerunt. Hoc hilaritatis duke seminarium.
Hoc continet coagulum convivia.
And in the HLoofunopivi) the wanderer returning home thus concludes his address to the sailors :
Delis habenas animae lent, Dum nos ventus flamine tudo Suavtm ad patriam perducit.
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RELIGION, CULTURE, BOOK v
spirit ; and even we, who are no longer permitted to read them, may still from the fragments preserved discern in some measure that the writer " knew how to laugh and how to jest in moderation. " And as the last breath of the good spirit of the old burgess-times ere it departed, as the latest fresh growth which the national Latin poetry put forth, the Satires of Varro deserved that the poet in his poetical testament should commend these his Menippean children to every one "who had at heart the prosperity of Rome and of Latium "; and they accordingly retain an honourable place in the literature as in the history of the Italian people. 1
1 The sketches of Varro have so uncommon historical and even poetical significance, and are yet, in consequence of the fragmentary shape in which information regarding them has reached us, known to so few and so irksome to study, that we may be allowed to give in this place a risumt of some of them with the few restorations indispensable for making them readable.
The satire' 'Manius (Early Up 1) describes the management of a rural household. Manius summons his people to rise with the sun, and in person conducts them to the scene of their work. The youths make their own bed, which labour renders soft to them, and supply themselves with water-jar and lamp. Their drink is the clear fresh spring, their fare bread, and onions as relish. Everything prospers in house and field. The house is no work of art ; but an architect might learn symmetry from it Care is taken of the field, that it shall not be left disorderly and waste, or go to ruin through slovenliness and neglect ; in return the grateful Cera wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may gladden the heart of the husbandman. Here hospitality still holds good ; every one who has but imbibed mother's milk is welcome. The bread- pantry and wine -vat and the store of sausages on the rafters, lock and key are at the service of the traveller, and piles of food are set before him ; contented sits the sated guest, looking neither before nor behind, dozing by the hearth in the kitchen. The warmest double - wool sheep skin is spread as a couch for him. Here people still as good burgesses obey the righteous law, which neither out of envy injures the innocent,
nor out of favour pardons the guilty. Here they speak no evil agains, their neighbours. Here they trespass not with their feet on the sacred hearth, but honour the gods with devotion and with sacrifices, throw for the house-spirit his little bit of flesh into his appointed little dish, and when the master of the household dies, accompany the bier with the same prayer with which those of his father and of his grandfather were borne forth. " '' "
In another satire there appears a Teacher of the Old [TepovroSiSdaKokos), of whom the degenerate age seems to stand more urgently in need than of the teacher of youth, and he explains how "once everything in Rome"was chaste and pious," and now all things are so entirely changed. Do my eyes deceive me, or do I see slaves in arms
chap, XII LITERATURE, AND ART 493
The critical writing of history, after the manner in which Historical
the Attic authors wrote the national history in their classic period and in which Polybius wrote the history of the world, was never properly developed in Rome. Even in the field most adapted for it—the representation of contemporary and of recently past events —there was nothing, on the whole, but more or less inadequate attempts ; in the epoch especially from Sulla to Caesar the not very important con tributions, which the previous epoch had to show in this field—the labours of Antipater and Asellius—were barely even equalled. The only work of note belonging to this field, which arose in the present epoch, was the history of the Social and Civil Wars by Lucius Cornelius Sisenna
against their masters ? —Formerly every one who did not present himself for the levy, was sold on the part of the state into slavery abroad ; now the censor who allows cowardice and everything to pass is called [by the aristocracy, iii. 10; iv. 125, 380; p. 148] a great citizen, and earns praise because he does not seek to make himself a name by annoying his fellow- citizens. —Formerly the Roman husbandman had his beard shaven once every week ; now the rural slave cannot have it fine enough. — Formerly one saw on the estates a corn-granary, which held ten harvests, spacious cellars for the wine-vats and corresponding wine-presses ; now the master keeps flocks of peacocks, and causes bis doors to be inlaid with African cypress- wood. —Formerly the housewife turned the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot on the hearth in her eye, that the pottage might not be singed ; now," it is said in another satire, "the daughter begs her father for a pound of precious stones, and the wife her husband for a bushel of pearls. — Formerly a newly-married husband was silent and bashful ; now the wife surrenders herself to the f1rst coachman that comes. —Formerly the blessing of children was woman's pride ; now if her husband desires for himsell children, she replies : Knowest thou not what Ennius says ?
Ter tub armis maiim vitam cerntre Quam semel modo parere. —
Formerly the wife was quite content, when the husband once or twice In the year gave her a trip to the country in the uncushioned waggon ; " now, he could add (comp. Cicero, Pro Mil. 21, 55), the wife sulks if her husband goes to his country estate without her, and the travelling lady is attended to the villa by the fashionable host of Greek menials and (he choir. —In a treatise of a graver kind, "Cams or the Training of Children," Varro not only instructs the friend who had asked him for advice on that point, regarding the gods who were according to old usage to be sacrificed to for the children's welfare, but, referring to the more judicious mode of rearing children among the Persians and to his own strictly spent youth, he warns against over-feeding and over-sleeping, against sweet bread and fine fare—the whelps, the old man thinks, are
tfoSJ,
Sisenn*
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78. (praetor in 676). Those who had read it testify that it far
excelled in liveliness and readableness the old
chronicles, but was written withal in a style
impure and even degenerating into puerility ; as indeed the few remaining fragments exhibit a paltry painting of horrible details,1 and a number of words newly coined or derived from the language of conversation. When it is added that the author's model and, so to speak, the only Greek historian familiar to him was Clitarchus, the author of a biography of Alexander the Great oscillating between history and fiction in the manner of the semi-romance which bears the name of Curtius, we shall not hesitate to
recognize in Sisenna's celebrated historical work, not a
dow fed more judiciously than the children—and likewise against the enchantresses' charms and blessings, which in cases of sickness so often take the place of the physician's counsel. He advises to keep the girls at embroidery, that they may afterwards understand how to judge properly of embroidered and textile work, and not to allow them to put off the child's dress too early ; he warns against carrying boys to the gladiatorial games, in which the heart is early hardened and cruelty learned. — In the . ' Man of Sixty Years " Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century. He is astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy's head an old bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog ; but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome. Lucrine oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare ; for which, accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary torch. While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now the disposal is transferred to the latter : he disposes, forsooth, of his father by poison. The comitium had become an exchange, the criminal trial a mine of gold for the jurymen. No law is any longer obeyed save only this one, that nothing is given for nothing. All virtues have vanished ; in their stead the awakened man is saluted by impiety, perfidy, lewdness, as new denizens. "Alas for thee, Marcus, with such a sleep and such an awakening 1 " — The sketch
17. resembles the Catilinarian epoch, shortly after which (about 697) the old man must have written it, and there lay a truth in the bitter torn at the close ; where Marcus, properly reproved for his unseasonable accusations and antiquarian reminiscences, is — with a mock application of a primitive Roman custom— dragged as a useless old man to the bridge and thrown into the Tiber. There was certainly no longer room for such men in Rome.
1 "The innocent," so ran a speech, "thou draggest forth, trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river's bank in the dawn of the morning" [thou causest them to be slaughtered]. Several such phrases, that might be inserted without difficulty in a commonplace novel, occur.
dry thoroughly
chat. XII LITERATURE, AMD ART
495
product of genuine historical criticism and art, but the first Roman essay in that hybrid mixture of history and romance so much a favourite with the Greeks, which desires to make the groundwork of facts life-like and interesting by means of fictitious details and thereby makes it insipid and untrue ; and it will no longer excite surprise that we meet with the same Sisenna also as translator of Greek fashion able romances (p. 483).
That the prospect should be still more lamentable in the field of the general annals of the city and even of the world, was implied in the nature of the case. The increasing activity of antiquarian research induced the expectation that the current narrative would be rectified from documents and other trustworthy sources ; but this hope was not ful filled. The more and the deeper men investigated, the more clearly it became apparent what a task it was to write a critical history of Rome. The difficulties even, which opposed themselves to investigation and narration, were immense ; but the most dangerous obstacles were not those of a literary kind. The conventional early history of Rome, as it had now been narrated and believed for at least ten generations, was most intimately mixed up with the civil life of the nation; and yet in any thorough and honest inquiry not only had details to be modified here and there, but the whole building had to be overturned as much as the Franconian primitive history of king Pharamund or the British of king Arthur. An inquirer of conservative views, such as was Varro for instance, could have no wish to put his hand to such a work; and if a daring freethinker had undertaken an outcry would have been raised all good citizens against this worst of all revolutionaries, who was preparing to deprive the constitutional party even of their
past Thus philological and antiquarian research deterred from the writing of history rather than conduced towards it Varro and the more sagacious men in general evidently gave
Annals d
e
**'
it,
by
Vtkrini
up the task of annals as hopeless; at the most they arranged, as did Titus Fomponius Atticus, the official and gentile lists in unpretending tabular shape—a work by which the synchronistic Graeco- Roman chronology was finally brought into the shape in which it was conventionally fixed for posterity. But the manufacture of city-chronicles of course did not suspend its activity; it continued to supply its contributions both in prose and verse to the great library written by ennui for ennui, while the makers of the books, in part already freedmen, did not trouble themselves at all about research properly so called. Such of these writings as are mentioned to us—not one of them is preserved—seem to have been not only of a wholly secondary character, but in great part even pervaded by interested falsification. It is true that the chronicle of
781 Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius (about 676? ) was written in an old-fashioned but good style, and studied at least a commendable brevity in the representation of the fabulous
66. period. Gaius Licinius Macer (f as late praetor in 688), father of the poet Calvus (p. 481), and a zealous democrat, laid claim more than any other chronicler to documentary research and criticism, but his libri lintei and other matters peculiar to him are in the highest degree suspicious, and an interpolation of the whole annals in the interest of demo cratic tendencies —an interpolation of a very extensive kind,
and which has passed over in part to the later annalists— is probably traceable to him.
Lastly, Valerius Antias excelled all his predecessors in prolixity as well as in puerile story-telling. The falsification of numbers was here systematically carried out down even to contemporary history, and the primitive history of Rome was elaborated once more from one form of insipidity to another ; for instance the narrative of the way in which the wise Numa according to the instructions of the nymph Egeria caught the gods Faunus and Ficuc with wine, and the beautiful
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chap, XII LITERATURE, AND ART
497
conversation thereupon held by the same Numa with the god Jupiter, cannot be too urgently recommended to all worshippers of the so-called legendary history of Rome in order that, if possible, they may believe these things—of course, in substance. It would have been a marvel if the Greek novel-writers of this period had allowed such
materials, made as if for their use, to escape them. In fact there were not wanting Greek literati, who worked up the Roman history into romances ; such a composition, for instance, was the Five Books " Concerning Rome " of the Alexander Polyhistor already mentioned among the Greek literati living in Rome 460), preposterous mixture of vapid historical tradition and trivial, principally erotic, fiction. He, may be presumed, took the first steps towards fill ing up the five hundred years, which were wanting to bring the destruction of Troy and the origin of Rome into the chronological connection required the fables on either
side, with one of those lists of kings without achievements which are unhappily familiar to the Egyptian and Greek chroniclers for, to all appearance, was he that launched into the world the kings Aventinus and Tiberinus and the Alban gens of the Silvii, whom the following times accord ingly did not neglect to furnish in detail with name, period of reigning, and, for the sake of greater definiteness, also
portrait.
Thus from various sides the historical romance of the
Greeks finds its way into Roman historiography and more than probable that not the least portion of what we are accustomed nowadays to call tradition of the Roman
times proceeds from sources of the stamp of Amadis of Gaul and the chivalrous romances of Fouque" — an edifying consideration, at least for those who have relish for the humour of history and who know how to appreciate the comical aspect of the piety still cherished in certain circles of the nineteenth century for king Numa.
primitive
VOL.
165
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it
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;
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;
it
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Universal tory-
A novelty in the Roman literature of this period is the appearance of universal history or, to speak more correctly, of Roman and Greek history conjoined, alongside of the native annals. Cornelius Nepos from Ticinum 650— c
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Nepos.