No More Learning

* In 599 there were still no seats in the theatre (Ritschl, Parerg. i. p. xviii. xx. 214 ; romp. Ribbeck, Trag. p. 385) ; but, as not only the authors of the Plautine prologues, but Plautus himself on various occasions, make allusions to a sitting audience [Mil. Glor. 82, 83 ; Aulul. It. 9, 6 ; Trucul. ap. fin. ; Epid. ap. fin. ), most of the spectators must have brought stools with them or have seated themselves on the ground.
(. hap, xiv
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The audience was anything but genteel. The better Audience, classes, it is true, did not keep aloof from the general re
creations of the people ; the fathers of the city seem even
to have been bound for decorum's sake to appear on
these occasions. But the very nature of a burgess festival implied that, while slaves and probably foreigners also were excluded, admittance free of charge was given to every burgess with his wife and children ;1 and accordingly the body of spectators cannot have differed much from what one sees in the present day at public fireworks and
gratis exhibitions. Naturally, therefore, the proceedings were not too orderly ; children cried, women talked and shrieked, now and then a wench prepared to push her way to the stage ; the ushers had on these festivals any thing but a holiday, and found frequent occasion to con fiscate a mantle or to ply the rod.
The introduction of the Greek drama increased the de mands on the dramatic staff, and there seems to have been no redundance in the supply of capable actors : on one occasion for want of actors a piece of Naevius had to be performed by amateurs. But this produced no change in the position of the artist ; the poet or, as he was at this time called, the "writer," the actor, and the composer not only belonged still, as formerly, to the class of workers for hire in itself little esteemed 94), but were still, as formerly, placed in the most marked way under the ban of public opinion, and subjected to police maltreatment
company
Women and children appear to have been at all times admitted to the Roman theatre Val. Max. vi. 3, 12 Plutarch. Quaest Rem. 14 Cicero, de Har. Resp. 12, 24 Vitruv. v. Suetonius, Aug. 44,
but slaves were de jure excluded (Cicero, de Har. Resp. 12, 26 Ritschl, Parerg. p. xix. 223), and the same must doubtless have been the case with foreigners, excepting of course the guests of the community, who took their places among or by the side of the senators (Varro, v. 155 Justin, xliii. 5, 10 Sueton. Aug. 44).
Ac. )
Of course all reputable persons kept aloof from
(ii. 98).
such an occupation. The manager of the
;
1 ;
;
i.
(
;
3,
1 ;
;;
;
(p.
,
140
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grefis, factionis, also choragus), who was ordi narily also the chief actor, was generally a freedman, and its members were ordinarily his slaves ; the composers, whose names have reached us, were all of them non-free. The remuneration was not merely small — a honorarium of 8000 sesterces (;£8o) given to a dramatist is described
shortly after the close of this period as unusually high —but was, moreover, only paid by the magistrates pro viding the festival, if the piece was not a failure. With the payment the matter ended; poetical competitions and
(dominus
such as took place in Attica, were not yet heard of in Rome — the Romans at this time appear to have simply applauded or hissed as we now do, and
to have brought forward only a single piece for exhibition each day. 1 Under such circumstances, where art worked for daily wages and the artist instead of receiving due honour was subjected to disgrace, the new national theatre of the Romans could not present any development either original or even at all artistic ; and, while the noble rivalry of the noblest Athenians had called into life the Attic drama, the Roman drama taken as a whole could be nothing but a spoiled copy of its predecessor, in which the only wonder is that it has been able to display so much grace and wit in the details.
1 It is not necessary to infer from the prologues of Plautus (Cos. 17 ; Amfh. 65) that there was a distribution of prizes (Ritschl, Parerg. i. ■29) ; even the passage Trin. 706, may very well belong to the Greek original, not to the translator ; and the total silence of the didascaliae and prologues, as well as of all tradition, on the point of prize tribunals and prizes is decisive.
That only one piece was produced each day we infer from the fact, that the spectators come from home at the beginning of the piece (Foot. 10), and return home after its close (Epid. Pseud. Pud. SticA. True. ap.
honorary prizes,
They went, as these passages show, to the theatre after the second breakfast, and were at home again for the midday meal ; the performance hus lasted, according to our reckoning, from about noon till half -past
two o'clock, and a piece of Plautus, with music in the intervals between the acts, might probably occupy nearly that length of time (comp. Horal Bp. ii. 1, 189). The passage, in which Tacitus (Ann. xiv. 20) makes the spectators spend "whole days" in the theatre, refers to the state (I matters at a later period.
Jin. ).
chap. XIT LITERATURE AND ART
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In the dramatic world comedy greatly preponderated Comedy, over tragedy ; the spectators knit their brows, when instead
of the expected comedy a tragedy began. Thus it hap
pened that, while this period exhibits poets who devoted themselves specially to comedy, such as Plautus and Caecilius, it presents none who cultivated tragedy alone ;
and among the dramas of this epoch known to us by
name there occur three comedies for one tragedy. Of
course the Roman comic poets, or rather translators,
laid hands in the first instance on the pieces which had possession of the Hellenic stage at the time ; and thus
they found themselves exclusively1 confined to the range
of the newer Attic comedy, and chiefly to its best-known
poets, Philemon of Soli in Cilicia (394 ? 492) and Menander of Athens (412-462). This comedy came to
be of so great importance as regards the development
not only of Roman literature, but even of the nation
at large, that even history has reason to pause and con
sider it
The pieces are of tiresome monotony. Almost without Character exception the plot turns on helping a young man, at the
expense either of his father or of some leno, to obtain Attic
possession of a sweetheart of undoubted charms and of very doubtful morals. The path to success in love regularly lies through some sort of pecuniary fraud ; and the crafty servant, who provides the needful sum and performs the requisite swindling while the lover is mourning over his amatory and pecuniary distresses, is the real mainspring of
1 The scanty use made of what is called the middle Attic comedy does not require notice in a historical point of view, since it was nothing but the Menandrian comedy in a less developed form. There is no trace of any employment of the older comedy. The Roman tragi -comedy- after the type of the Amphitruo of Plautus —was no doubt styled by the Roman literary historians fabula Rhinthonica ; but the newer Attic co medians also composed such parodies, and it is difficult to see why the Romans should have resorted for their translations to Rhinthon and the older writers rather than to those who were nearer to their own times.
comeoy•
860-263. 342-292.
142
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the piece. There is no want of the due accompaniment of reflections on the joys and sorrows of love, of tearful parting-scenes, of lovers who in the anguish of their hearts threaten to do themselves a mischief; love or rather amorous intrigue was, as the old critics of art say, the very life-breath of the Menandrian poetry. Marriage forms, at least with Menander, the inevitable finale; on which occasion, for the greater edification and satisfaction of the spectators, the virtue of the heroine usually comes forth almost if not wholly untarnished, and the heroine herself proves to be the lost daughter of some rich man and so in every respect an eligible match. Along with these love-pieces we find others of a pathetic kind. Among the comedies of Plautus, for instance, the Rudens turns on a shipwreck and the right of asylum ; while the Trinummus and the Captivi contain no amatory intrigue, but depict the generous devotedness of the friend to his friend and of the slave to his master. Persons and situations recur down to the very details like patterns on a carpet ; we never get rid of the asides of unseen listeners, of knocking at the house-doors, and of slaves scouring the streets on some
errand or other. The standing masks, of which there was a certain fixed number — viz. , eight masks for old men, and seven for servants —from which alone in ordinary cases at least the poet had to make his choice, further favoured a stock-model treatment. Such a comedy almost of necessity rejected the lyrical element in the older comedy—the chorus — and confined itself from the first to conversation, or at most recitation ; it was devoid not of the political element only, but of all true passion and of all poetical
elevation. The pieces judiciously made no pretence to any grand or really poetical effect : their charm resided pri marily in furnishing occupation for the intellect, not only through their subject-matter — in which respect the newer comedy was distinguished from the old as much by the
chap, xit LITERATURE AND ART
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greater intrinsic emptiness as by the greater outward com plication of the plot—but more especially through their execution in detail, in which the point and polish of the conversation more particularly formed the triumph of the poet and the delight of the audience. Compli cations and confusions of one person with another, which very readily allowed scope for extravagant, often licenti ous, practical jokes — as in the Casina, which winds up in genuine Falstaffian style with the retiring of the two bridegrooms and of the soldier dressed up as bride— jests, drolleries, and riddles, which in fact for want of real conversation furnished the staple materials of enter tainment at the Attic table of the period, fill up a large portion of these comedies. The authors of them wrote not like Eupolis and Aristophanes for a great nation, but rather for a cultivated society which spent its time, like other clever circles whose cleverness finds little fit
scope for action, in guessing riddles and playing at charades. They give us, therefore, no picture of their times ; of the great historical and intellectual movements of the age no trace appears in these comedies, and we need to recall, in order to realize, the fact that Philemon and Menander were really contemporaries of Alexander and Aristotle. But they give us a picture, equally elegant and faithful, of that refined Attic society beyond the circles of which comedy never travels. Even in the dim Latin copy, through which we chiefly know the grace of the original
not wholly obliterated; and more especially in the pieces wnich are imitated from Menander, the most talented of these poets, the life which the poet saw and shared delicately reflected not so much in its aberrations and distortions as in its amiable every-day course. The friendly domestic relations between father and daughter, husband and wife, master and servant, with their love- affairs and other little critical incidents, are portrayed with
is is
it,
144 LITERATURE AND ART book hi
so broad a truthfulness, that even now they do not miss their effect: the servants' feast, for instance, with which the Stichus concludes in the limited range of its re lations and the harmony of the two lovers and the one sweetheart, of unsurpassed gracefulness in its kind. The elegant grisettes, who make their appearance perfumed and adorned, with their hair fashionably dressed and varie gated, gold-embroidered, sweeping robes, or even perform their toilette on the stage, are very effective. In their train come the procuresses, sometimes of the most vulgar sort, such as one who appears in the Curculio, sometimes duennas like Goethe's old Barbara, such as Scapha in the Mostettaria and there no lack of brothers and comrades ready with their help. There great abundance and variety of parts representing the old there appear in turn
the austere and avaricious, the fond and tender-hearted, and the indulgent accommodating, papas, the amorous old
man, the easy old bachelor, the jealous aged matron with her old maid-servant who takes part with her mistress against her master; whereas the young men's parts are less prominent, and neither the first lover, nor the virtuous model son who here and there occurs, lays claim to much significance. The servant-world —the crafty valet, the stern house-steward, the old vigilant tutor, the rural slave redolent of garlic, the impertinent page —forms transition to the very numerous professional parts. A standing figure among these the jester (parasitus) who, in return for permission to feast at the table of the rich, has to entertain the guests with drolleries and charades, or, according to circumstances, to let the potsherds be flung at his head. This was at that time formal trade in Athens and certainly no mere poetical fiction which represents such a parasite as expressly preparing himself for his work by means of his books of witticisms and anecdotes. Favourite parts, moreover, are those of the cook, who understands
a
is
;
a
it is
is
is :
;
in
is,
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
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not only how to boast of unheard-of sauces, but also how to pilfer like a professional thief; the shameless leno, com placently confessing to the practice of every vice, of whom Ballio in the Pseudolus is a model specimen ; the military braggadocio, in whom we trace a very distinct reflection of the free-lance habits that prevailed under Alexander's successors; the professional sharper or sycophant, the stingy money-changer, the solemnly silly physician, the priest, mariner, fisherman, and the like. To these fall to be added, lastly, the parts delineative of character in the strict sense, such as the superstitious man of Menander and the miser in the Aulularia of Plautus. The national- Hellenic poetry has preserved, even in this its last creation, its indestructible plastic vigour; but the delineation of character is here copied from without rather than repro duced from inward experience, and the more so, the more the task approaches to the really poetical. It is a sig nificant circumstance that, in the parts illustrative of character to which we have just referred, the psychological truth is in great part represented by abstract development of the conception ; the miser here collects the parings of his nails and laments the tears which he sheds as a waste of water. But the blame of this want of depth in the portraying of character, and generally of the whole poetical and moral hollowness of this newer comedy, lay less with the comic writers than with the nation as a whole.
Every thing distinctively Greek was expiring : fatherland, national faith, domestic life, all nobleness of action and sentiment were gone; poetry, history, and philosophy were inwardly exhausted; and nothing remained to the Athenian save
the school, the fish -market, and the brothel. It is no matter of wonder and hardly a matter of blame, that poetry, which is destined to shed a glory over human existence, could make nothing more out of such a life than the Menandrian comedy presents to us. It is at the same
vou in
75
146 LITERATURE AND ART book hi
time very remarkable that the poetry of this period, wherever it was able to turn away in some degree from the corrupt Attic life without falling into scholastic imitation, immediately gathers strength and freshness from the ideal. In the only remnant of the mock-heroic comedy of this period —the Amphitruo of Plautus —there breathes through out a purer and more poetical atmosphere than in all the other remains of the contemporary stage. The good- natured gods treated with gentle irony, the noble forms from the heroic world, and the ludicrously cowardly slaves present the most wonderful mutual contrasts; and, after the comical course of the plot, the birth of the son of the gods amidst thunder and lightning forms an almost grand concluding effect But this task of turning the myths into irony was innocent and poetical, as compared with that of the ordinary comedy depicting the Attic life of the period. No special accusation may be brought from a historico-moral point of view against the poets, nor ought it to be made matter of individual reproach to any particular poet that he occupies the level of his epoch : comedy was not the cause,
but the effect of the corruption that prevailed in the national life. 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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
;
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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,
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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.
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chap, xit LITERATURE AND ART
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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
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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-
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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;
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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
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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.