No More Learning

But it is necessary, more especially with a view to judge correctly the influence of these comedies on the life of the Roman people, to point out the abyss which yawned beneath all that polish and elegance. The coarse nesses and obscenities, which Menander indeed in some measure avoided, but of which there is no lack in the other
are the least part of the evil. Features far worse are, the dreadful desolation of life in which the only oases are lovemaking and intoxication; the fearfully prosaic atmosphere, in which anything resembling enthusiasm is to be found only among the sharpers whose heads have been turned by their own swindling, and who prosecute the trade of cheating with some sort of zeal ; and above all that immoral morality, with which the pieces of Menander in
poets,
CHAP. XIV LITERATURE AND ART
147
particular are garnished. Vice is chastised, virtue is re warded, and any peccadilloes are covered by conversion at or after marriage. There are pieces, such as the
Trinummus of Plautus and several of Terence, in which all the characters down to the slaves possess some admixture of virtue ; all swarm with honest men who allow deception on their behalf, with maidenly virtue wherever possible, with lovers equally favoured and making love in company ; moral commonplaces and well-turned ethical maxims abound. A finale of reconciliation such as that of the Bacchides, where the swindling sons and the swindled fathers by way of a good winding up all go to carouse together in the brothel, presents a corruption of morals thoroughly worthy of Kotzebue.
Such were the foundations, and such the elements which shaped the growth, of Roman comedy. Originality was in its case excluded not merely by want of aesthetic freedom, but in the first instance, probably, by its subjection to police control. Among the considerable number of Latin comedies of this sort which are known to us, there is not
Roman
''
its HellemsTM a necessary result of thelaw-
'
one that did not announce itself as an imitation of a
definite Greek model; the title was only complete when the names of the Greek piece and of its author were also given, and as occasionally happened, the " novelty " of piece was disputed, the question was merely whether had been previously translated. Comedy laid the scene of its plot abroad not only frequently, but regularly and under the pressure of necessity and that species of art derived its special name (fabula palliate? ) from the fact, that the scene was laid away from Rome, usually in Athens, and
that the dramatis personal were Greeks or at any rate not Romans. The foreign costume strictly carried out even in detail, especially in those things in which the unculti vated Roman was distinctly sensible of the contrast. Thus the names of Rome and the Romans are avoided,
com
is
;
it
a
if,
148
LITERATURE AND ART book hi
and, where they are referred to, they are called in good Greek " foreigners " (barbart) ; in like manner among the appellations of moneys and coins, that occur ever so frequently, there does not once appear a Roman coin. We form a strange idea of men of so great and so versatile talents as Naevius and Plautus, if we refer such things to their free choice : this strange and clumsy " exterritorial " character of Roman comedy was undoubtedly due to causes very different from aesthetic considerations. The transference of such social relations, as are
Political **" **.
uniformly delineated in the new Attic comedy, to the Rome of the Hannibalic period would have been a direct outrage on its
civic order and morality. But, as the dramatic spectacles at this period were regularly given by the aediles and praetors who were entirely dependent on the senate, and even extraordinary festivals, funeral games for instance, could not take place without permission of the govern ment ; and as the Roman police, moreover, was not in the habit of standing on ceremony in any case, and least of all in dealing with the comedians ; the reason is self- evident why this comedy, even after it was admitted as one of the Roman national amusements, might still bring no Roman upon the stage, and remained as it were banished to foreign lands.
The compilers were still more decidedly prohibited from naming any living person in terms either of praise or cen sure, as well as from any captious allusion to the circum stances of the times. In the whole repertory of the Plautine and post-Plautine comedy, there is not, so far as we know, matter for a single action of damages. In like manner—if we leave out of view some wholly harmless jests—we meet hardly any trace of invectives levelled at communities (invectives which, owing to the lively municipal spirit of the Italians, would have been specially dangerous), except the significant scoff at the unfortunate Capuans and
chap, xit LITERATURE AND ART
149
Atellans (ii. 366) and, what is remarkable, various sarcasms on the arrogance and the bad Latin of the Praenestines. 1 In general no references to the events or circumstances of the present occur in the pieces of Plautus. The only ex ceptions are, congratulations on the course of the war 2 or on the peaceful times ; general sallies directed against usurious dealings in grain or money, against extravagance, against bribery by candidates, against the too frequent triumphs, against those who made a trade of collecting forfeited fines, against farmers of the revenue distraining for payment, against the dear prices of the oil -dealers; and once — in the Curculio —a more lengthened diatribe as to the doings in the Roman market, reminding us of the parabascs of the older Attic comedy, and but little likely to cause offence
But even in the midst of such patriotic endeavours, which from a police point of view were entirely in order, the poet interrupts himself;
Sed sumne ego stultus, qui rem euro publicam Ubi sunt magistrates, quos curare oporteat t
and taken as a whole, we can hardly imagine a comedy
1 Batch. 24 ; Trin. 609 ; True. iil. a, 33. Naevius also, who in fact was generally less scrupulous, ridicules the Praenestines and Lanuvinl (Com. si, Ribb. ). There are indications more than once of a certain variance between the Praenestines and Romans (Liv. xxiii. 20, xlil. 1) ; and the executions in the time of Pyrrhus (ii. 18) as well as the catastrophe in that of Sulla, were certainly connected with this variance. — Innocent jokes, such as Capt. 160, 881, of course passed uncensured. —The compli ment paid to Massilia in Cos. v. 4, 1 , deserves notice.
* Thus the prologue of the Cistcllaria concludes with the following words, which may have a place here as the only contemporary mention of the Hannibalic war in the literature that has come down to us :—
Hate ra sic gesta est Bene valete, et vincitt Virtute vera, quod fecistis antidhac ;
Servate vostros socios, veteres et novas; Augete auxilia vostris iustis legibus ; Perdite perduelles : parite laudem et lauream
Ut vobis victi Poeni poenas suferant
The fourth line (augete auxilia vostris iustis legibus) has reference to the supplementary payments imposed on the negligent Latin colonies in 550 204. (Liv. xdx. 15 ; see ii. 350).
(p. 124).
ISO
LITERATURE AND ART book ill
politically more tame than was that of Rome in the sixth century. 1 The oldest Roman comic writer of note, Gnaeus Naevius, alone forms a remarkable exceptioa Although he did not write exactly original Roman comedies, the few fragments of his, which we possess, are full of references to circumstances and persons in Rome. Among other liberties he not only ridiculed one Theodotus a painter by name, but even directed against the victor of Zama the following verses, of which Aristophanes need not have been ashamed :
Etiam qui res magnat manu taepe gessit gloriolt,
Cujus facta viva nunc vigent, qui apud gentes solus praestat. Bum tuus pater cum paliio una at amica abduxii.
As he himself says,
Libera lingua toquemur ludis Liieralibut,
he may have often written at variance with police rules, and put dangerous questions, such as :
Cedo qui vestram rem publicam tantam amitittit tam cite t
which he answered by an enumeration of political sins, such as:
Proveniebant oratores novi, stulli aduletceniuli.
But the Roman police was not disposed like the Attic to hold stage-invectives and political diatribes as privileged, or even to tolerate them at all. Naevius was put in prison for these and similar sallies, and was obliged to remain there, till he had publicly made amends and recantation in other comedies. These quarrels, apparently, drove him
1 For this reason we can hardly be too cautious in assuming allusions on the part of Plautus to the events of the times. Recent investigation has set aside many instances of mistaken acuteness of this sort ; but might Dot even the reference to the Bacchanalia, which is found in Cos. v. 4, 1 1 (Ritschl, Parerg. 1. 19a), have been expected to incur censure? We might even reverse the case and infer from the notices of the festival of Bacchus in the Carina and some other pieces [Amph. 703 ; Aul. iii. 1, 3 ; Bacch. 53, 371 ; Mil. Glor. 1016 ; and especially Men. 836), that these were written at a time when it was not yet dangerous to speak of the Bacchanalia.
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
151
from his native land ; but his successors took warning from his example — one of them indicates very plainly, that he has no desire whatever to incur an involuntary gagging like his colleague Naevius. Thus the result was accomplished —not much less unique of its kind than the conquest of Hannibal — that, during an epoch of the most feverish national excitement, there arose a national stage utterly destitute of political tinge.
But the restrictions thus stringently and laboriously Character imposed by custom and police on Roman poetry stifled its ^j^8 „j very breath. Not without reason might Naevius declare Roman the position of the poet under the sceptre of the Lagidae comeT* and Seleucidae enviable as compared with his position in
free Rome. 1 The degree of success in individual instances
was of course determined by the quality of the original
which was followed, and by the talent of the individual editor; but amidst all their individual variety the whole
stock of translations must have agreed in certain leading features, inasmuch as all the comedies were adapted to
similar conditions of exhibition and a similar audience.
The treatment of the whole as well as of the details was Personi uniformly in the highest degree free ; and it was necessary Jj^ that it should be so. While the original pieces were
in presence of that society which they copied, and in this very fact lay their principal charm, the Roman audience of this period was so different from the Attic, that it was not even in a position rightly to understand that foreign world. The Roman comprehended neither the grace and kindliness, nor the sentimentalism and the whitened emptiness of the domestic life of the Hellenes. The slave -world was utterly different; the Roman slave
1 The remarkable passage in the Tarentilla can have no other
performed
inj :—
Quae ego in theatro hit meis probavi plausibus, Ba non audere quemquam regem rumpere : Quanta libertatem hanc hie superat servitutl
158
LITERATURE AND ART book ill
was a piece of household furniture, the Attic slave was a servant. Where marriages of slaves occur or a master carries on a kindly conversation with his slave, the Roman translators ask their audience not to take offence at such things which are usual in Athens ;1 and, when at a later period comedies began to be written in Roman costume, the part of the crafty servant had to be rejected, because the Roman public did not tolerate slaves of this sort over looking and controlling their masters. The professional figures and those illustrative of character, which were sketched more broadly and farcically, bore the process of transference better than the polished figures of every-day life ; but even of those delineations the Roman editor had to lay aside several —and these probably the very finest and most original, such as the Thais, the match-maker, the moon-conjuress, and the mendicant priest of Menander —and to keep chiefly to those foreign trades, with which the Greek luxury of the table, already very generally diffused in Rome, had made his audience familiar. If the professional cook and the jester in the comedy of Plautus are delineated with so striking vividness and so much relish, the explanation lies in the fact, that Greek cooks had even at that time daily offered their services in the Roman market, and that Cato found it necessary even to instruct his steward not to keep a jester. In like manner the translator could make no use of a very large portion of the elegant Attic conversation in his originals. The Roman citizen or farmer stood in much the same relation to the refined revelry and debauchery of Athens, as the German of a provincial town to the mysteries of the Palais Royal. A science of cookery, in the strict sense,
1 1 be ideas of the modern Hellas on the point of slavery are illustrated by the passage in Euripides (Ion, 854 ; comp. Helena, 738) :—
*E»> yip n toii $oi\oiaw alojpJi'jp' tptpfi. , Totvona' tA S' AXXa Trier a rur 4\ev6ipur. OiSelt kokIwt SovXos, dans 4a0\di p.
chap xiv LITERATURE AND ART
153
never entered into his thoughts; the dinner-parties no doubt continued to be very numerous in the Roman imitation, but everywhere the plain Roman roast pork predominated over the variety of baked meats and the refined sauces and dishes of fish. Of the riddles and drinking songs, of the Greek rhetoric and philosophy, which
played so great a part in the originals, we meet only a stray trace now and then in the Roman adaptation.
The havoc, which the Roman editors were compelled
in deference to their audience to make in the originals, drove them inevitably into methods of cancelling and amalgamating incompatible with any artistic construction.
It was usual not only to throw out whole character-parts of
the original, but also to insert others taken from other comedies of the same or of another poet; a treatment indeed which, owing to the outwardly methodical construc
tion of the originals and the recurrence of standing figures
and incidents, was not quite so bad as it might seem. Moreover the poets, at least in the earlier period, allowed themselves the most singular liberties in the construction
of the plot The plot of the Stichus (performed in 554) 200. otherwise so excellent turns upon the circumstance, that
two sisters, whom their father urges to abandon their absent husbands, play the part of Penelopes, till the husbands return home with rich mercantile gains and with a beautiful damsel as a present for their father-in-law. In the Casina, which was received with quite special favour by the public,
the bride, from whom the piece is named and around whom the plot revolves, does not make her appearance at
all, and the dinouement is quite naively described by the epilogue as "to be enacted later within. " Very often the
plot as it thickens is suddenly broken off, the connecting thread is allowed to drop, and other similar signs of an unfinished art appear. The reason of this is to be sought
probably far less in the unskilfulness of the Roman editors,
Construe-
^u
Roman
than in the indifference of the Roman public to aesthetic laws. Taste, however, gradually formed itself. In the later pieces Plautus has evidently bestowed more care on their construction, and the Captivi for instance, the Pseudolus, and the Bacchides are executed in a masterly manner after their kind. His successor Caecilius, none of whose pieces are extant, is said to have especially distinguished himself by the more artistic treatment of the subject.
In the treatment of details the endeavour of the poet to bring matters as far as possible home to his Roman hearers, and the rule of police which required that the pieces should retain a foreign character, produced the most singular contrasts. The Roman gods, the ritual, military, and
juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange appearance amid the Greek world; Roman aediles and tresviri are grotesquely mingled with agoranomi and demarchi ; pieces whose scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough ; but interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the pieces into a ruder shape, which the editors deemed necessary to suit the far from Attic culture of their audience. It is true that several even of the new Attic poets probably needed no accession to their coarseness ; pieces like the Asinaria of Plautus cannot owe their unsurpassed dulness and vulgarity solely to the translator. Nevertheless coarse incidents so prevail in the Roman comedy, that the trans lators must either have interpolated them or at least have made a very one-sided selection. In the endless abundance of cudgelling and in the lash ever suspended over the back of the slaves we recognize very clearly the household-govern ment inculcated by Cato, just as we recognize the Catonian
154
LITERATURE AND ART book hi
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
155
opposition to women in the never-ending disparagement of wives. Among the jokes of their own invention, with which the Roman editors deemed it proper to season the elegant Attic dialogue, several are almost incredibly unmeaning and barbarous. 1
So far as concerns metrical treatment on the other hand, Metrical the flexible and sounding verse on the whole does all
honour to the composers. The fact that the iambic trimeters, which predominated in the originals and were
alone suitable to their moderate conversational tone, were very frequently replaced in the Latin edition by iambic or trochaic tetrameters, is to be attributed not so much to any want of skill on the part of the editors who knew well how to handle the trimeter, as to the uncultivated taste of the Roman public which was pleased with the sonorous magnificence of the long verse even where it was not appropriate.
Lastly, the arrangements for the production of the pieces on the stage bore the like stamp of indifference to
1 For instance, in the otherwise very graceful examination which in the Stichus of Plautus the father and his daughters institute into the qualities of a good wife, the irrelevant question —whether it is better to marry a virgin or a widow —is inserted, merely in order that it may be answered by a no less irrelevant and, in the mouth of the interlocutrix, altogether absurd commonplace against women. But that is a trifle compared with the following specimen. In Menander's Plocium a husband bewails his troubles to his friend :—
Scenic ^J**"
"Ex&> 5' iTrWkqpov Adfjuav owe ef/njard <r<* TouT' ; tlr' dp' o6\l ; Kvplav rijs olittat
Kal Twi> dypum kclI irdrrar dyr' iKcknp *Ex°fuy> 'AtoWov, lis xaXeiruSi' xaXcTtiTaTor. "Axao-i 4" dp7oX/o 'art*, ofl* ifiol fiMvif,
VUf, toXA fioKKov Ovyarpl. —rpayfi. ' tfiaxo* \iyai' EC otta.
In the Latin edition of Caecilius, this conversation, so elegant In Its simplicity, is converted into the following uncouth dialogue :—
Sed tua morosam uxor quaeso est f— Ua I rogas t— Qui tandem t— Taedet mentionis, quae mihi
Ubi domum advent ae sedi, extemplo savium
Dot jejuna anima. —Nil peccat de savio:
Ut devomas volt, quod fori* fotaveriu
156
LITERATURE AND ART book ill
aesthetic requirements on the part of the managers and the
The stage of the Greeks — which on account of the extent of the theatre and from the performances taking place by day made no pretension to acting properly so called, employed men to represent female characters, and absolutely required an artificial strengthening of the voice of the actor — was entirely dependent, in a scenic as well as acoustic point of view, on the use of facial and resonant masks. These were well known also in Rome; in amateur performances the players appeared without exception masked. But the actors who were to perform the Greek comedies in Rome were not supplied with the masks— beyond doubt much more artificial—that were necessary for them; a circumstance which, apart from all else in connection with the defective acoustic arrangements of the stage,1 not only compelled the actor to exert his voice
but drove Livius to the highly inartistic but inevitable expedient of having the portions which were to be sung performed by a singer not belonging to the staff of actors, and accompanied by the mere dumb show of the actor within whose part they fell. As little were the givers of the Roman festivals disposed to put themselves to material expense for decorations and machinery. The Attic stage regularly presented a street with houses in the background, and had no shifting decorations ; but, besides various other apparatus, it possessed more especially a contrivance for pushing forward on the chief stage a smaller one representing the interior of a house. The Roman theatre, however, was not provided with this; and we can hardly therefore throw the blame on the poet, if everything, even childbirth, was represented on the street
1 Even when the Romans built stone theatres, these had not the sounding-apparatus by which the Greek architects supported the efforts of the actors ( Vitruv. v. 5, 8).
public.
unduly,
CHar. xiv LITERATURE AND ART
157
Such was the nature of the Roman comedy of the sixth Aesthetic century. The mode in which the Greek dramas were resulL transferred to Rome furnishes a picture, historically invaluable, of the diversity in the culture of the two
nations ; but in an aesthetic and a moral point of view the original did not stand high, and the imitation stood still lower. The world of beggarly rabble, to whatever extent the Roman editors might take possession of it under the benefit of the inventory, presented in Rome a forlorn and strange aspect, shorn as it were of its delicate characteristics : comedy no longer rested on the basis of reality, but persons and incidents seemed capriciously or carelessly mingled as in a game of cards ; in the original a picture from life, it became in the reproduction a caricature. Under a
management which could announce a Greek agon with
(p. 127);
frivolity and rudeness. It was quite possible, nevertheless, that there might arise among them individuals of lively and vigorous talent, who were able at least to repress the foreign and factitious element in poetry, and, when they had found their fitting sphere, to produce pleasing and even important creations.
At the head of these stood Gnaeus Naevius, the first Roman who deserves to be called a poet, and, so far as the accounts preserved regarding him and the few fragments of his works allow us to form an opinion, to all appearance as regards talent one of the most remarkable and most important
choirs of dancers, tragedians, and athletes,
flute-playing,
and eventually convert it into a boxing-match
and in presence of a public which, as later poets complain, ran away en masse from the play, if there were pugilists, or rope-dancers, or even gladiators to be seen ; poets such as the Roman composers were —workers for hire and of inferior social position —were obliged even perhaps against their own better judgment and their own better taste to accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing
Naevius.
158
LITERATURE AND ART book III
names in the whole range of Roman literature. He was a younger contemporary of Andronicus — his poetical activity began considerably before, and probably did not end till after, the Hannibalic war—and felt in a general sense his influence; he was, as is usually the case in artificial literatures, a worker in all the forms of art produced by his predecessor, in epos, tragedy, and comedy, and closely adhered to him in the matter of metres. Nevertheless, an immense chasm separates the poets and their poems. Naevius was neither freedman, schoolmaster, nor actor, but a citizen of unstained character although not of rank, belonging probably to one of the Latin communities of Campania, and a soldier in the first Funic war. 1 In thorough contrast to the language of Livius, that of Naevius is easy and clear, free from all stiffness and affectation, and seems even in tragedy to avoid pathos as it were on purpose ; his verses, in spite of the not unfrequent hiatus and various other licences afterwards disallowed, have a smooth and graceful flow. * While the quasi-poetry
1 The personal notices of Naevius are sadly confused. Seeing that he fought in the first Punic war, he cannot have been born later than 495- Dramas, probably the first, were exhibited by him in 519 ((Jell. xii.
259. 285.
304. aI> 45)- That he had died as early as 550, as is usually stated, was
doubted by Varro (up. Cic. Brut. 15, 60), and certainly with reason ; if it were true, he must have made his escape during the Hannibalic war to the soil of the enemy. The sarcastic verses on Scipio (p. 150) cannot have been written before the battle of Zama. We may place his life between
261. 194. 4yo and 560, so that he was a contemporary of the two Scipios who fell in 543 211. (Cic. de Rep. iv. io), ten years younger than Andronicus, and perhaps ten
years older than Plautus. His Campanian origin is indicated by Gellius, and his Latin nationality, if proof of it were needed, by himself in his epitaph. The hypothesis that he was not a Roman citizen, but possibly a burgess of Cales or of some other Latin town in Campania, renders the fact that the Roman police treated him so unscrupulously the more easy of explanation. At any rate he was not an actor, for he served In the army.
* Compare, e. g. , with the verse of Livius the fragment from Naeviui' tragedy of Lycurgus! —
Vos, qui regalis corporis custodial Agitatis, ite actutum in frundiferos locos, Ingtnio arbusta uH naia sunt, non obsita;
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
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of Livius proceeded, somewhat like that of Gottsched in Germany, from purely external impulses and moved wholly in the leading-strings of the Greeks, his successor emancipated Roman poetry, and with the true divining- rod of the poet struck those springs out of which alone in Italy a native poetry could well up — national history and comedy. Epic poetry no longer merely furnished the schoolmaster with a lesson-book, but addressed itself independently to the hearing and reading public. Com posing for the stage had been hitherto, like the preparation of the stage costume, a subsidiary employment of the actor or a mechanical service performed for him ; with Naevius the relation was inverted, and the actor now became the servant of the composer. His poetical activity is marked throughout by a national stamp. This stamp is most distinctly impressed on his grave national drama and on his national epos, of which we shall have to speak hereafter ; but it also appears in his comedies, which of all his poetic performances seem to have been the best adapted to his talents and the most successful. It was
probably, as we have already said 150), external considerations alone that induced the poet to adhere in comedy so much as he did to the Greek originals and this did not prevent him from far outstripping his successors and probably even the insipid originals in the freshness of his mirth and in the fulness of his living interest in the present indeed in certain sense he reverted to the paths of the Aristophanic comedy. He felt full well, and in his epitaph expressed, what he had been to bis nation
or the famous words, which in the Hector Profiscitcens Hector addresses to
Priam
Laetus sum laudari me abs te, pater, laudato vim; and the charming verse from the Tarentilla —
Alii adnutat, alii adnittat alium amat, alium tenet.
;
:
:
;
aa
;
;
(p.
Ite
LITERATURE AND ART
book hi
Immortales mortales si font fas Jlert, Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam ;
I
Obliti sunt Romae loquier lingua Latino.
Plautas. 861-184.
Such proud language on the part of the man and the poet well befitted one who had witnessed and had personally taken part in the struggles with Hamilcar and with Hannibal, and who had discovered for the thoughts and feelings of that age—so deeply agitated and so elevated by mighty joy—a poetical expression which, if not exactly the highest, was sound, adroit, and national. We have already mentioned 150) the troubles into which his licence brought him with the authorities, and how, driven presumably by these troubles from Rome, he ended his life at Utica. In his instance likewise the individual life was sacrificed for the common weal, and the beautiful for the useful.
His younger contemporary, Titus Maccius Plautus (500? —570), appears to have been far inferior to him both in outward position and in the conception of his poetic calling. A native of the little town of Sassina, which was originally Umbrian but was perhaps this time Latinized, he earned his livelihood in Rome at first as an actor, and then—after he had lost in mercantile speculations what he had gained by his acting — as theatrical composer repro ducing Greek comedies, without occupying himself with any other department of literature and probably without laying claim to authorship properly so called. There seems to have been at that time considerable number of persons who made trade of thus editing comedies in Rome but their names, especially as they did not perhaps in general publish their works,1 were virtually forgotten, and the pieces
This hypothesis appears necessary, because otherwise the ancients could not have hesitated in the way they did as to the genuineness or spuriousness of the pieces of Plautus in the case of no author, properly so called, of Roman antiquity, do we find anything like a similar uncer tainty as to his literary property. In this respect, as in so many other external points, there exists the most remarkable analogy between Plautus and Shakespeare.
tuque, poslquam est Orci traditus thesauro,
:
a
by
1
a
(p.
;
a
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART 161
belonging to this stock of plays, which were preserved,
in after times under the name of the most popular of them, Plautus. The litteratores of the following century reckoned up as many as 1 30 such " Plautine pieces " ; but of these a large portion at any rate were merely revised by Plautus or had no connection with him at all ; the best of them are still extant. To form a proper judgment, however, regarding the poetical character of the editor is very difficult, if not impossible, since the originals have not been
That the editors reproduced good and bad pieces without selection ; that they were subject and subordinate both to the police and to the public ; that they were as indifferent to aesthetical requirements as their audience, and to please the latter, lowered the originals to a farcical and vulgar tone—are objections which apply rather to the whole manufacture of translations than to the individual remodeller. On the other hand we may regard as characteristic of Plautus, the masterly handling of the language and of the varied rhythms, a rare skill in adjusting and working the situation for dramatic effect, the almost always clever and often excellent dialogue, and, above all, a broad and fresh humour, which produces an irresistible comic effect with its happy jokes, its rich vocabulary of nick
names, its whimsical coinage of words, its pungent, often mimic, descriptions and situations —excellences, in which we seem to recognize the former actor. Undoubtedly the editor even in these respects retained what was successful in the originals rather than furnished contributions of his own. Those portions of the pieces which can with certainty be traced to the translator are, to say the least, mediocre ; but they enable us to understand why Plautus became and remained the true popular poet of Rome and the true centre of the Roman stage, and why even after the passing away of the Roman world the theatre has repeatedly re verted to his plays.
VOL. Ill -j6
passed
preserved.
CaadUaa.
162 LITERATURE AND ART book hi
Still less are we able to form a special opinion as to the
third and last — for though Ennius wrote comedies, he did
so altogether unsuccessfully —comedian of note in this epoch, Statius Caecilius. He resembled Plautus in his position in life and his profession. Born in Cisalpine Gaul in the district of Mediolanum, he was brought among the Insubrian prisoners of war (ii. 228, 371) to Rome, and earned a livelihood, first as a slave, afterwards as a freedman, by remodelling Greek comedies for the theatre down to his probably early death (586). His language was not pure, as was to be expected from his origin ; on the other hand, he directed his efforts, as we have already said 154), to more artistic construction of the plot His pieces ex
but dull reception from his contemporaries, and the public of later times laid aside Caecilius for Plautus and Terence; and, nevertheless the critics of the true literary age of Rome — the Varronian and Augustan epoch —assigned to Caecilius the first place among the Roman editors of Greek comedies, this verdict appears due to the mediocrity of the connoisseur gladly preferring kindred spirit of mediocrity in the poet to any special features of excellence. These art-critics probably took Caecilius under their wing, simply because he was more regular than Plautus and more vigorous than Terence notwithstanding which he may very well have been far inferior to both.
If therefore the literary historian, while fully acknow- ledging the very respectable talents of the Roman comedians, cannot recognize in their mere stock of translations a pro duct either artistically important or artistically pure, the
of history respecting its moral aspects must necessarily be far more severe. The Greek comedy which formed its basis was morally so far matter of indifference, as was simply on the same level of corruption with its audience but the Roman drama was, at this epoch when men were wavering between the old austerity and the new
Moral result"
168.
perienced
judgment
it ;
a
;
a
a if
(p.
a
chap, xit LITERATURE AND ART
163
corruption, the academy at once of Hellenism and of vice. This Attico-Roman comedy, with its prostitution of body and soul usurping the name of love—equally immoral in shamelessness and in sentimentality —with its offensive and unnatural generosity, with its uniform glorification of a life of debauchery, with its mixture of rustic coarseness and foreign refinement, was one continuous lesson of Romano- Hellenic demoralization, and was felt as such. A proof of this is preserved in the epilogue of the Captivi of Plautus :—
Spectatores, ad pudicos mores facta hate fabulast
Neque in hoc subigitationes sunt neque ulla amatio
Nee pueri suppositio nee argenti circumductTM,
Neque ubi amans adulcseens scortum liberet clam suum patrem. Huius modi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias,
Ubi boni melioresjiani. Nunc vos, si vobis placet,
Bt si placuimus neque odio/uimus, signum hoc mittite ; Qui pudicitiae esse voltis praemium, plausum date I
We see here the opinion entertained regarding the Greek comedy by the party of moral reform ; and it may be added, that even in those rarities, moral comedies, the morality was of a character only adapted to ridicule innocence more surely. Who can doubt that these dramas gave a practical impulse to corruption ? When Alexander the Great derived no pleasure from a comedy of this sort which its author read before him, the poet excused himself by saying that the fault lay not with him, but with the king ; that, in order to relish such a piece, a man must be in the habit of holding revels and of giving and receiving blows in an intrigue. The man knew his trade : therefore, the Roman burgesses gradually acquired taste for these Greek comedies, we see at what price was bought.
reproach to the Roman government not that did so little
behalf of this poetry, but that tolerated Vice no doubt powerful even without pulpit
at alL but that To debar the Hellenic comedy from immediate contact with the
no excuse for erecting pulpit to proclaim
is
in
a
it
;
it
is
it a it
a
it
if,
a
It is a
National comedy.
persons and institutions of Rome, was a subterfuge rather than a serious means of defence. In fact, comedy would probably have been much less injurious morally, had they allowed it to have a more free course, so that the calling of the poet might have been ennobled and a Roman poetry in some measure independent might have been developed ; for poetry is also a moral power, and, if it inflicts deep wounds, it can do much to heal them. As it was, in this field also the government did too little and too much; the political neutrality and moral hypocrisy of its stage-police contributed their part to the fearfully rapid breaking up of the Roman nation.
But, while the government did not allow the Roman comedian to depict the state of things in his native city or to bring his fellow-citizens on the stage, a national Latin comedy was not absolutely precluded from springing up ; for the Roman burgesses at this period were not yet identified with the Latin nation, and the poet was at liberty to lay the plot of his pieces in the Italian towns of Latin rights just as in Athens or Massilia. In this way, in fact, the Latin original comedy arose (Jabula togata *) : the
1 Togatus denotes, in juristic and generally in technical language, the Italian in contradistinction not merely to the foreigner, but also to the Roman burgess. Thus especially formula togatorum ( Corp. fnscr. Lat , I. n. 200, v. 21, 50) is the list of those Italians bound to render military service, who do not serve in the legions. The designation also of Cisalpine Gaul as Gallia togata, which first occurs in Hirtius and not long after dis appears again from the ordinary usus loquendi, describes this region presum-
164
LITERATURE AND ART book III
gj ably according to its legal position, in so far as in the epoch from 665 to 49. 7°5 lne great majority of its communities possessed Latin rights. Virgil
appears likewise in the gens togata, which he mentions along with the Romans (Aen. i. 282), to have thought of the Latin nation.
According to this view we shall have to recognize in the fabula togata the comedy which laid its plot in Laiium, as the fabula palHata had its plot in Greece ; the transference of the scene of action to a foreign land is common to both, and the comic writer is wholly forbidden to bring on the stage the city or the burgesses of Rome. That in reality the togata could only have its plot laid in the towns of Latin rights, is shown by the fact that all the towns in which, to our knowledge, pieces of Titinius and Afranius had their scene— Setia, Ferentinum, Velitrae, Brundisium, —demonstrably had Latin or, at any rate, allied rights down to the Social war. By the
chap, XIT LITERATURE AND ART
165
earliest known composer of such pieces, Titinius, flourished Titinius. probably about the close of this period. 1
This comedy was also based on the new Attic intrigue- piece ; it was not translation, however, but imitation ; the scene of the piece lay in Italy, and the actors appeared in the national dress 60), the toga. Here the Latin life and doings were brought out with peculiar freshness. The pieces delineate the civil life of the middle-sized towns of Latium the very titles, such as Psaltria or Ftrentinatis,
Tibicina, Iurisperita, Fullones, indicate this and many par ticular incidents, such as that of the townsman who has his shoes made after the model of the sandals of the Alban kings, tend to confirm The female characters prepon derate in remarkable manner over the male. 4 With genuine national pride the poet recalls the great times of the Pyrrhic war, and looks down on his new Latin neigh bours, —
Qui Obsce et Vohcefabulantur nam Latint nesciunl.
This comedy belongs to the stage of the capital quite as much as did the Greek but was probably animated by
extension of the franchise to all Italy the writers of comedy lost this Latin localisation for their pieces, for Cisalpine Gaul, which de jure took the place of the Latin communities, lay too far off for the dramatists of the capital, and so the fabula togata seems in fact to have disappeared. But toe de jure suppressed communities of Italy, such as Capua and Atella, stepped into this gap (ii. 366, iii. 148), and so far the/abula Atellana was in some measure the continuation of the togata.
Respecting Titinius there an utter want of literary information ex
cept that, to judge from fragment of Varro, he seems to have been older
than Terence (558-595, Ritschl, Parerg. 194) for more indeed, cannot be 196-159. inferred from that passage, and though, of the two groups there compared
the second (Trabea, Atilius, Caecilius) on the whole older than the first
(Titinius, Terentius, Atta), does not exactly follow that the oldest of the
junior group to be deemed younger than the youngest of the elder.
Of the fifteen comedies of Titinius, with which we are acquainted, six are named after male characters (baratus coeeus, fullones, Hortensius, Quintus, varus), and nine after female (Gemina, iurisperita, prilia privigna, psaltria or Ferentinatis, Setina, tibicina, Veliterna, Ulu- brana two of which, the iurisperita and the tibicina, are evidently parodies of men's occupations. The feminine world preponderates also in the fragments.
f),
is
;
f
s1
is t
i.
it
;
a it
(ii.
is
;
it.
;
a
;
Tragedies.
166 LITERATURE AND ART BOOK III
something of that rustic antagonism to the ways and the evils of a great town, which appeared contemporaneously in Cato and afterwards in Varro. As in the German comedy, which proceeded from the French in much the same way as the Roman comedy from the Attic, the French Lisette was very soon superseded by the Frauenzimmerchen Franziska, so the Latin national comedy sprang up, if not with equal poetical power, at any rate with the same tendency and per haps with similar success, by the side of the Hellenizing comedy of the capital.
Greek tragedy as well as Greek comedy came in the course of this epoch to Rome. It was a more valuable, and in a certain respect also an easier, acquisition than comedy. The Greek and particularly the Homeric epos, which was the basis of tragedy, was not unfamiliar to the Romans, and was already interwoven with their own national legends ; and the susceptible foreigner found himself far more at home in the ideal world of the heroic myths than in the fish-market of Athens. Nevertheless tragedy also promoted, only with less abruptness and less vulgarity, the anti-national and Hellenizing spirit; and in this point of view it was a circumstance of the most decisive importance, that the Greek tragic stage of this period was chiefly under the sway of Euripides (274—348). This is not the place for a thorough delineation of that remarkable man and of his still more remarkable influence on his contemporaries and posterity ; but the intellectual movements of the later Greek and the Graeco-Roman epoch were to so great an extent affected by him, that it is indispensable to sketch at least the leading outlines of his character. Euripides was one of those poets who raise poetry doubtless to a higher level, but in this advance manifest far more the true sense
of what ought to be than the power of poetically creating it The profound saying which morally as well as poetically sums up all tragic art—that action is passion—holds true
Euripides. 480- 404.
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
167
no doubt also of ancient tragedy ; it exhibits man in action, but it makes no real attempt to individualize him. The unsurpassed grandeur with which the struggle between man and destiny fulfils its course in Aeschylus depends sub stantially on the circumstance, that each of the contending powers is only conceived broadly and generally ; the essential humanity in Prometheus and Agamemnon is but slightly tinged by poetic individualizing. Sophocles seizes human nature under its general conditions, the king, the old man, the sister ; but not one of his figures displays the microcosm of man in all his aspects —the features of indivi dual character. A high stage was here reached, but not the highest ; the delineation of man in his entireness and the entwining of these individual — in themselves finished — figures into a higher poetical whole form a greater achieve ment, and therefore, as compared with Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sophocles represent imperfect stages of development. But, when Euripides undertook to present man as he the advance was logical and in certain sense historical rather than poetical. He was able to destroy the ancient tragedy, but not to create the modern. Everywhere he halted half-way. Masks, through which the expression of the life of the soul as were, translated from the par ticular into the general, were as necessary for the typical tragedy of antiquity as they are incompatible with the tragedy of character but Euripides retained them. With remark ably delicate tact the older tragedy had never presented the dramatic element, to which was unable to allow free scope, unmixed, but had constantly fettered in some measure by epic subjects from the superhuman world of gods and heroes and the lyrical choruses. One feels
that Euripides was impatient under these fetters with his subjects he came down at least to semi-historic times, and his choral chants were of so subordinate importance, that they were frequently omitted in subsequent performance and
:
it
by
it
is, it
;
is,
a
168 LITERATURE AND ART book hi
hardly to the injury of the pieces ; but yet he has neither placed his figures wholly on the ground of reality, nor en tirely thrown aside the chorus. Throughout and on all sides he is the full exponent of an age in which, on the one hand, the grandest historical and philosophical movement was going forward, but in which, on the other hand, the primitive fountain of all poetry—a pure and homely national life—had become turbid. While the reverential piety of the older tragedians sheds over their pieces as it were a reflected radiance of heaven ; while the limitation of the narrow horizon of the older Hellenes exercises its satisfying power even over the hearer ; the world of Euripides appears in the pale glimmer of speculation as much denuded of gods as it is spiritualised, and gloomy passions shoot like lightnings athwart the gray clouds. The old deeply-rooted faith in destiny has disappeared ; fate governs as an out wardly despotic power, and the slaves gnash their teeth as they wear its fetters. That unbelief, which is despairing faith, speaks in this poet with superhuman power. Of necessity therefore the poet never attains a plastic concep tion overpowering himself, and never reaches a truly poetic effect on the whole; for which reason he was in some measure careless as to the construction of his tragedies, and indeed not unfrequently altogether spoiled them in this respect by providing no central interest either of plot or person — the slovenly fashion of weaving the plot in the prologue, and of unravelling it by a Deus ex machina or a similar platitude, was in reality brought into vogue by Euripides. All the effect in his case lies in the details; and with great art certainly every effort has in this respect been made to conceal the irreparable want of poetic whole ness. Euripides is a master in what are called effects ; these, as a rule, have a sensuously-sentimental colouring, and often moreover stimulate the sensuous impression by a special high seasoning, such as the interweaving of subjects
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
169
relating to love with murder or incest. The delineations of Polyxena willing to die and of Phaedra pining away under the grief of secret love, above all the splendid picture of the mystic ecstasies of the Bacchae, are of the greatest beauty in their kind ; but they are neither artistically nor morally pure, and the reproach of Aristophanes, that the poet was unable to paint a Penelope, was thoroughly well founded. Of a kindred character is the introduction of common com passion into the tragedy of Euripides. While his stunted heroes or heroines, such as Menelaus in the Helena, Andromache, Electra as a poor peasant's wife, the sick and ruined merchant Telephus, are repulsive or ridiculous and ordinarily both, the pieces, on the other hand, which keep more to the atmosphere of common reality and exchange the character of tragedy for that of the touching family- piece or that almost of sentimental comedy, such as the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Ion, the Alcestis, produce perhaps the most pleasing effect of all his numerous works. With equal frequency, but with less success, the poet attempts to bring into play an intellectual interest. Hence springs the complicated plot, which is calculated not like the older tragedy to move the feelings, but rather to keep curiosity on the rack; hence the dialectically pointed dialogue, to us non-Athenians often absolutely intolerable; hence the apophthegms, which are scattered throughout the pieces of Euripides like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is replaced in the tragedies of Euripides by moral or political purpose. Without strictly or directly entering on
iyo LITERATURE AND ART book III
the questions of the day, and having in view throughout social rather than political questions, Euripides in the legi timate issues of his principles coincided with the contem porary political and philosophical radicalism, and was the first and chief apostle of that new cosmopolitan
humanity which broke up the old Attic national life. This was the
ground at once of that opposition which the ungodly and un-Attic poet encountered among his contemporaries, and of that marvellous enthusiasm, with which the younger generation and foreigners devoted themselves to the poet of emotion and of love, of apophthegm and of tendency, of philosophy and of humanity. Greek tragedy in the hands of Euripides stepped beyond its proper sphere and conse quently broke down ; but the success of the cosmopolitan poet was only promoted by this, since at the same time the nation also stepped beyond its sphere and broke down likewise. The criticism of Aristophanes probably hit the truth exactly both in a moral and in a poetical point of view; but poetry influences the course of history not in
to its absolute value, but in proportion as it is able to forecast the spirit of the age, and in this respect Euripides was unsurpassed. And thus it happened, that Alexander read him diligently ; that Aristotle developed the idea of the tragic poet with special reference to him ; that the latest poetic and plastic art in Attica as it were originated from him (for the new Attic comedy did nothing but trans fer Euripides into a comic form, and the school of painters which we meet with in the designs of the later vases derived its subjects no longer from the old epics, but from the
Euripidean tragedy) ; and lastly that, the more the old Hellas gave place to the new Hellenism, the more the fame and influence of the poet increased, and Greek life abroad, in Egypt as well as in Rome, was directly or indirectly moulded in the main by Euripides.
The Hellenism of Euripides flowed to Rome through
proportion
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
171
very various channels, and probably produced a speedier Roman and deeper effect there by indirect means than in the form •"*"''• of direct translation. The tragic drama in Rome was not
exactly later in its rise than the comic (p. 136); but the
far greater expense of putting a tragedy on the stage — which was undoubtedly felt as a consideration of moment, at least during the Hannibalic war — as well as the nature of the audience 139) retarded the development of tragedy. In the comedies of Plautus the allusions to tragedies are not very frequent, and most references of this kind may have been taken from the originals. The first and only influential tragedian of this epoch was the younger contemporary of Naevius and Plautus,
Quintus
Ennius (515-585), whose pieces were already travestied 239-169.
by contemporary comic writers, and were exhibited and declaimed posterity down to the days of the empire.
The tragic drama of the Romans far less known to us than the comic on the whole the same features, which have been noticed in the case of comedy, are presented tragedy also. The dramatic stock, in like manner, was mainly formed by translations of Greek pieces. The preference was given to subjects derived from the siege of Troy and the legends immediately connected with
evidently because this cycle of myths alone was familiar to the Roman public through instruction at school their side incidents of striking horror predominate, such as matri cide or infanticide in the Eumenides, the Alcmaeon,
the Cresphontes, the Melanippe, the Medea, and the immolation of virgins in the Polyxena, the Erechthides, the Andromeda,
the Iphigenia —we cannot avoid recalling the fact, that the public for which these tragedies were prepared was in the habit of witnessing gladiatorial games. The female char acters and ghosts appear to have made the deepest im pression. In addition to the rejection of masks, the most remarkable deviation of the Roman edition
from the
; by
it,
by
by :
is
(p.
173
LITERATURE AND ART book in
original related to the chorus. The Roman theatre, fitted up doubtless in the first instance for comic plays without chorus, had not the special dancing-stage (orchestra) with the altar in the middle, on which the Greek chorus performed its part, or, to speak more correctly, the space thus appropriated among the Greeks served with the Romans as a sort of pit ; accordingly the choral dance at least, with its artistic alternations and intermixture of music and declamation, must have been omitted in Rome, and, even if the chorus was retained, it had but little importance. Of course there were various alterations of detail, changes in the metres, curtailments, and disfigurements; in the Latin edition of the Iphigenia of Euripides, for instance, the chorus of women was — either after the model of another tragedy, or by the editor's own device — converted into a chorus of soldiers. The Latin tragedies of the sixth century cannot be pronounced good translations in our sense of the word;1 yet it is probable that a tragedy of
1 We subjoin, for comparison, the opening lines of (he Medea in the original of Euripides and in the version of Ennius : —
EW &4>t\' 'A/>yo0t n^ SiarrdadaA
cxdoVnI' alar tvariat
KiXxw Zu/irXi)-
y&Sat,
Mr)5' Ir virtual Hi)X/ou rttrcir UtinamneinnemortPclioucuribui
wart
Tpi)8tura rtiru, ui)S' iperuweat
\tpa%
'A. rSpQr Aptrrttr, at To Tiyxpvoor oVpat
Caesa accidisset abiegna ad terram trabes,
Neve inde navit inchoandae ex ordium
Coepisset, quae nunc nominator nomine
Argo, quia Argivi in ea dileeliviri Vtcti petebant pellem inauratam
arietii
Ht\ta lUT^KBoe' oi yip S> S4ma' Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per
i)t. T\
MTJJeia ripym\ 751 ftrXew'
'IuXWat
'Epum. 8vubr im^ayeW 'IdVorot.
dolum.
Nam nunquam era errant mea
domo efferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, autre tmeve
saucia.
The variations of the translation from the original are instructive — not only its tautologies and periphrases, but also the omission or explanation of the less familiar mythological names, e. g. the Symplegades, the lolcian
chap, xit LITERATURE AND ART
173
Ennius gave a far less imperfect image of the original of Euripides than a comedy of Plautus gave of the original of Menander.
The historical position and influence of Greek tragedy Moral in Rome were entirely analogous to those of Greek comedy ; tragedj. and while, as the difference in the two kinds of composition necessarily implied, the Hellenistic tendency appeared in tragedy under a purer and more spiritual form, the tragic
drama of this period and its principal representative Ennius
far more decidedly an anti-national and con sciously propagandist aim. Ennius, hardly the most im portant but certainly the most influential poet of the sixth century, was not a Latin by birth, but on the contrary by virtue of his origin half a Greek. Of Messapian descent
and Hellenic training, he settled in his thirty-fifth year at Rome, and lived there — at first as a resident alien, but after 570 as a burgess 28)—in straitened circumstances, 184, supported partly giving instruction in Latin and Greek, partly by the proceeds of his pieces, partly the donations
of those Roman grandees, who, like Publius Scipio, Titus
Flamininus, and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, were inclined to
displayed
the modern Hellenism and to reward the poet who sang their own and their ancestors' praises and even accompanied some of them to the field in the character, as
were, of poet laureate nominated beforehand to cele brate the great deeds which they were to perform. He has himself elegantly described the client-like qualities requisite for such calling. 1 From the outset and
land, the Argo. Bat the instances in which Ennius has really misunder stood the original are rare.
Beyond doubt the ancients were right in recognizing a sketch of the poet's own character in the passage in the seventh book of the Annals, where the consul calls to his side the confidant,
quocum bene saepe libenttr Mensam sermonesque svos remmque suarum
Congeriem partit, magnam cum lassus din Parttm fuiiset de summis rebus regundis
promote
1
a
by
(p.
by
it
a
by
174
LITERATURE AND ART book in
virtue of the whole tenor of his life a cosmopolite, he had the skill to appropriate the distinctive features of the nations among which he lived — Greek, Latin, and even Oscan — without devoting himself absolutely to any cne of them ; and while the Hellenism of the earlier Roman poets was the result rather than the conscious aim of their poetic activity, and accordingly they at least attempted more or less to take their stand on national ground, Ennius on the contrary is very distinctly conscious of his revolutionary tendency, and evidently labours with zeal to bring into vogue neologico- Hellenic ideas among the Italians. His most serviceable instrument was tragedy. The remains of his tragedies show that he was well ac quainted with the whole range of the Greek tragic drama and with Aeschylus and Sophocles in particular; it is the less therefore the result of accident, that he has modelled the great majority of his pieces, and all those that attained celebrity, on Euripides. In the selection and treatment he was doubtless influenced partly by external considera tions. But these alone cannot account for his bringing forward so decidedly the Euripidean element in Euripides ; for his neglecting the choruses still more than did his original ; for his laying still stronger emphasis on sensuous effect than the Greek; nor for his taking up pieces like
Consilio induforo lata sane toque senatu ;
Cut res audacter magnas parvasque iocumqut Eloqueretur, cuncta simul malaque et bona dictu Evomeret, si qui vellet, tutoque locaret.
Quocum multa volup ac gaudia clamque palamque, Ingenium cut nulla malum sententia suadet
Ut faceret facinus lenis aut malus, doetus Jidelis Suavis homofacundus suo contentus beatus
Scitus secunda loquens in tempore commodus verbum Paucum, multa tenens antiqua srpulta, vetustas Quem fecit mores veteresque novosque tenensem, Multorum veterum leges diwmque hominumqm, Prudenter qui dicta ioquivc taeereve possit
In the line before the last we should probably read multorum hges divumque hominumque.
chap, xrv LITERATURE AND ART
17$
the Thyestes and the Telephus so well known from the immortal ridicule of Aristophanes, with their princes' woes and woful princes, and even such a piece as Menalippa the Female Philosopher, in which the whole plot turns on the absurdity of the national religion, and the tendency to make war on it from the physicist point of view is at once apparent. The sharpest arrows are everywhere — and that partly in passages which can be proved to have been in serted1 —directed against faith in the miraculous, and we almost wonder that the censorship of the Roman stage allowed such tirades to pass as the following : —
Ego deum genus esse semper dixi tt dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus; Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male ma/is, quod nunc abest.
We have already remarked 113) that Ennius scientifically inculcated the same irreligion in didactic
poem of his own and with this freethinking.
evident that he was in earnest With this trait other features are political opposition tinged with radicalism, that here and there appears his singing the praises of the Greek pleasures of the table (p. 123); above all his setting aside the last national element in Latin poetry, the Saturnian measure, and substituting for the Greek hexameter. That the "multiform " poet executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated
hexameters out of language of by no means dactylic Comp. p. 438. Euripides (Iph. in Aul. 956) defines the soothsayer
quite accordant — his
as man,
*Of SSiy' i\7i6ij, iroXXA Si fevSTJ Myti Tt^iiiK, 6tw Si pi) rixOt Sioixerau
This turned by the Latin translator into the following diatribe against the casters of horoscopes —
Astrologorum signa in carlo quaesit, obsemat, Iovis
Cum capra aut nepa out exoritur lumen aliquod beluae. Quod est ante pedes, nemo special caeli scrutantur plagat.
la the Telephus we find him saying —
Palam mutire plebeio piaculum est.
•a1 is
:
:
a
it
;
2
;
it is
a
(p.
176
LITERATURE AND ART book in
structure, and that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with confidence and freedom amidst unwonted measures and forms — are so many evidences of his extraordinary plastic talent, which was in fact more Greek than Roman ; l where he offends us, the offence is owing much more frequently to Greek alliteration * than to Roman ruggedness. He was not a great poet, but a man of graceful and sprightly talent, throughout possessing the vivid sensibilities of a poetic nature, but needing the tragic buskin to feel himself a poet and wholly destitute of the comic vein. We can understand the pride with which the Hellenizing poet looked down on those rude strains
quos dim Faunei vatesqut canebant,
and the enthusiasm with which he celebrates his own artistic poetry :
1 The following verses, excellent in matter and form, belong to the adaptation of the Phoenix of Euripides : —
Sed virum virtute vera vivere animatum addecet, Fortiterque innoxium vocare adversum adversaries* Ea libertas est, qui pectus purum etfirmum gestitat: Aliae res obnoxiosae nocte in obscura latent.
In the Scipio, which was probably incorporated in the collection of miscellaneous poems, the graphic lines occurred :—
mundus caeli vastus constitit silentio,
Et Neptunus saevus undis asperis pausam dedit. Solequis iter repressit ungulis volantibus; Constitere amnes perennes, arbores vento vacant.
This last passage affords us a glimpse of the way in which the poet worked up his original poems. It is simply an expansion of the words which occur in the tragedy Hectoris Lustra (the original of which was probably by Sophocles) as spoken by a spectator of the combat between Hephaestus and the Scamander : —
Constitit credo Scamander, arbores vento vacant,
and the incident is derived from the Iliad (xxi. 381). ' Thus in the Phoenix we find the line :—
stultust, qui capita cupiens cupienter cufit,
and this is not the most absurd specimen of such recurring He also indulged in acrostic verses (Cic. de Div. 54, in).
ii.
chap, Xiv LITERATURE AND ART
Enni foela, salve, gut mortalihis Versuspropinas flammeos medullitus.
177
The clever man had an instinctive assurance that he had spread his sails to a prosperous breeze ; Greek tragedy became, and thenceforth remained, a possession of the Latin nation.
Through less frequented paths, and with a less favour- National able wind, a bolder mariner pursued a higher aim. dram"*'
Naevius not only like Ennius — although with far success — adapted Greek tragedies for the Roman stage, but also attempted to create, independently of the Greeks, a grave national drama (fabula praetextatd). No outward obstacles here stood in the way ; he brought forward subjects both from Roman legend and from the contem porary history of the country on the stage of his native land. Such were his Nursing of Romulus and Remus or the Wilf, in which Amulius king of Alba appeared, and his
Clastidium, which celebrated the victory of Marcellus over
the Celts in 532 (ii. 228). After his example, Ennius in his 222. Ambrada described from personal observation the siege of
that city by his patron Nobilior in 565 476). But the 189. number of these national dramas remained small, and that
species of composition soon disappeared from the stage the scanty legend and the colourless history of Rome were unable permanently to compete with the rich cycle of Hellenic legends. Respecting the poetic value of the pieces we have no longer the means of judging but, we may take account of the general poetical intention, there were in Roman literature few such strokes of genius as the creation of Roman national drama. Only the Greek tragedians of that earliest period which still felt itself nearer to the gods—only poets like Phrynichus and Aeschylus —had the courage to bring the great deeds which they had witnessed, and in which they had borne part, on the stage the
side of those of legendary times and here, anywhere, we
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Recitative poetry.
are enabled vividly to realize what the Punic wars were and how powerful was their effect, when we find a poet, who like Aeschylus had himself fought in the battles which he sang, introducing the kings and consuls of Rome upon that stage on which men had hitherto been accustomed to see none but gods and heroes.
Recitative poetry also took its rise during this epoch at Rome. Livius naturalized the custom which among the ancients held the place of our modern publication —the public reading of new works by the author—in Rome, at least to the extent of reciting them in his school. As poetry was not in this instance practised with a view to a
livelihood, or at any rate not directly so, this branch of it was not regarded by public opinion with such disfavour as writing for the stage : towards the end of this epoch one or two Romans of quality had publicly come forward in this manner as poets. 1 Recitative poetry however was chiefly cultivated by those poets who occupied themselves with writing for the stage, and the former held a subordinate place as compared with the latter ; in fact, a public to which read poetry might address itself can have existed only to a very limited extent at this period in Rome.
Above all, lyrical, didactic, and epigrammatic poetry found but feeble representation. The religious festival chants—as to which the annals of this period certainly have already thought it worth while to mention the author—as well as the monumental inscriptions on temples and tombs, for which the Saturnian remained the regular measure, hardly belong to literature proper. So far as the minor poetry makes its appearance at all, it presents itself ordinarily, and that as early as the time of Naevius, under the name of
Satura.
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LITERATURE AND ART BOOK III
1 Besides Cato, we find the names of two " consulars and poets " belonging to this period (Sueton. Vita Terent. 4)—Quintns Labeo, consul 188. 178. in 571, and Marcus Popillius, consul in 581. But it remains uncertain
whether they published their poems. Even in the case of Cato this may be doubted.
chap. xiv LITERATURE AND ART
179
satura. This term was originally applied to the old stage- poem without action, which from the time of Livius was driven off the stage by the Greek drama ; but in its application to recitative poetry it corresponds in some measure to our " miscellaneous poems," and like the latter denotes not any positive species or style of art, but simply poems not of an epic or dramatic kind, treating of any matters (mostly subjective), and written in any form, at the pleasure of the author. In addition to Cato's "poem on Morals" to be noticed afterwards, which was presumably written in Saturnian verses after the precedent of the older first attempts at a national didactic poetry i00), there came under this category especially the minor poems of Ennius, which that writer, who was very fertile in this department, published partly in his collection of saturae, partly separately. Among these were brief narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus
113), of the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name of Epicharmus 113), and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela, poet who treated of
The attempts at metrical treatment of the national Metrical annals lay claim to greater poetical and historical *****- importance. Here too was Naevius who gave poetic Naeviiu. form to so much of the legendary as well as of the contemporary history as admitted of connected narrative;
and who, more especially, recorded in the half-prosaic Saturnian national metre the story of the first Punic war
the higher cookery; as also
Death, fables of Aesop,
parodies and epigrammatic
indicative of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this field, which the censorship did not reach.
dialogue between Life and collection of moral maxims, trifles — small matters, but
a it
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simply and distinctly, with a straightforward adherence to fact, without disdaining anything at all as unpoetical, and without at all, especially in the description of historical times, going in pursuit of poetical flights or embellishments —maintaining throughout his narrative the present tense. 1 What we have already said of the national drama of the same poet, applies substantially to the work of which we are now speaking. The epic, l ike the tragic, poetry of the Greeks lived and moved essentially in the heroic period ; it was an alto gether new and, at least in design, an enviably grand idea— to light up the present with the lustre of poetry. Although in point of execution the chronicle of Naevius may not have been much better than the rhyming chronicles of the middle ages, which are in various respects of kindred character, yet the poet was certainly justified in regarding this work of his with an altogether peculiar complacency. It was no small achievement, in an age when there was absolutely no historical literature except official records, to have composed for his countrymen a connected account of the deeds of their own and the earlier time, and in addition to have placed before their eyes the noblest incidents of that history in a dramatic form.
says: Again
Bland* et doete percental —Aeneas quo pacto Troiam urban liquerit.
of Amulius :
Manusqve susum ad caelum —sustulit suas rat Amulius; gratulatur —divis.
1 The following fragments will give some idea of its tone.
Of Dido be
Part of a speech where the indirect construction is remarkable :
Sin illos deserantfor—tissumos virorum Magn um stuprum populo—fieri per genlis.
186. With reference to the landing at Malta in 498 :
Transit Melitam Romanus — insulam integrum Urit populatur vastat — rem hostium concinnaU
Laitfar as to the peace which terminated the war concerning Sicily :
Id quoque paciscunt moenia — sint I utatium qua» Reconcilient ; captives — plurimos idem
Sicilienses paciscit —obsides ut reddant.
chap, XIV LITERATURE AND ART 181
Ennius proposed to himself the very same task as Ennius. Naevius ; but the similarity of the subject only brings out
into stronger relief the political and poetical contrast between the national and the anti-national poet. Naevius
sought out for the new subject a new form ; Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos.