No More Learning

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
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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
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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
less
vol. in
77
;
a
if
by
if
;
a
;
(ii.
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.
I7«
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
a
a
a
(p.
(p.
(ii.
i8o LITERATURE AND ART book til
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. The hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of the Homeridae, striving after plastic vivid ness of delineation, took the place of the homely historic narrative. Wherever the circumstances admit, Homer is directly translated; e. g. the burial of those that fell at Heraclea is described after the model of the burial of Patroclus, and under the helmet of Marcus Livius Stolo, the military tribune who fights with the Istrians, lurks none other than the Homeric Ajax; the reader is not even spared the Homeric invocation of the Muse. The epic machinery is fully set agoing ; after the battle of Cannae, for instance, Juno in a full council of the gods pardons the Romans, and Jupiter after obtaining the consent of his wife promises them a final victory over the Carthaginians. Nor do the " Annals " fail to betray the neological and Hellenistic tendencies of the author. The very employment of the gods for mere decoration bears this stamp. The remarkable vision, with which the poem opens, tells in good Pythagorean style how the soul now inhabiting
Quintus Ennius had previously been domiciled in Homer and still
earlier in a peacock, and then in good physicist style explains the nature of things and the relation of the body to the mind. Even the choice of the subject serves the same purpose —at any rate the Hellenic literati of all ages have found an especially suitable handle for their Graeco- cosmopolite tendencies in this very manipulation of Roman history. Ennius lays stress on the circumstance that the Romans were reckoned Greeks :
Cmteniunt Groans, Grains memomrt solaU tea.
18a LITERATURE AND ART book iu
The poetical value of the greatly celebrated Annals may easily be estimated after the remarks which we have already made regarding the excellences and defects of the poet in
It was natural that as a poet of lively sympathies, he should feel himself elevated by the enthusiastic impulse which the great age of the Punic wars gave to the national sensibilities of Italy, and that he should not only often happily imitate Homeric simplicity, but should also and still more frequently make his lines strikingly echo the solemnity and decorum of the Roman character. But the construction of his epic was defective ; indeed it must have been very lax and indifferent, when it was possible for the poet to insert a special book by way of supplement to please an otherwise forgotten hero and patron. On the whole the Annals were beyond question the work in which Ennius fell farthest short of his aim. The plan of making an Iliad pronounces its own condemnation. It was Ennius, who in this poem for the first time introduced into literature that changeling compound of epos and of history, which from that time up to the present day haunts it like a
general.
unable either to live or to die. But the poem
ghost,
certainly
Roman Homer with still greater ingenuousness than Klopstock claimed to be the German, and was received as such by his contemporaries and still more so by posterity. The veneration for the father of Roman poetry was trans mitted from generation to generation; even the polished
Quintilian says, "Let us revere Ennius as we revere an ancient sacred grove, whose mighty oaks of a thousand years are more venerable than beautiful ; " and, if any one is disposed to wonder at this, he may recall analogous phenomena in the successes of the Aeneid, the Henriad,
and the Messiad. A mighty poetical development of the nation would indeed have set aside that almost comic official parallel between the Homeric Iliad and the Ennian
had its success. Ennius claimed to be the
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
183
Annals as easily as we have set aside the comparison of Karschin with Sappho and of Willamov with Pindar; but no such development took place in Rome. Owing to the interest of the subject especially for aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared to the culture of later generations readable or worth reading ; and thus, singularly enough, posterity came to honour this thoroughly anti-national epos of a half- Greek litt'erateur as the true model poem of Rome.
A prose literature arose in Rome not much later than
Roman poetry, but in a very different way. It experienced Utetmtnr* neither the artificial furtherance, by which the school and
the stage prematurely forced the growth of Roman poetry,
nor the artificial restraint, to which Roman comedy in particular was subjected by the stern and narrow-minded censorship of the stage. Nor was this form of literary
activity placed from the outset under the ban of good
society by the stigma which attached to the "ballad-
singer. " Accordingly the prose literature, while far less extensive and less active than the contemporary poetical authorship, had a far more natural growth. While poetry
was almost wholly in the hands of men of humble rank and
not a single Roman of quality appears among the celebrated
poets of this age, there on the contrary, among the
prose writers of this period hardly name that not senatorial; and from the circles of the highest aristocracy, from men who had been consuls and censors—
the Fabii, the Gracchi, the Scipios —that this literature throughout proceeds. The conservative and national tendency, in the nature of the case, accorded better with
this prose authorship than with poetry but here too—and particularly in the most important branch of this literature,
historical composition — the Hellenistic bent had powerful,
in fact too powerful, influence both on matter and form.
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Writing of *'
Down to the period of the Hannibalic war there was no historical composition in Rome ; for the entries in the book of Annals were of the nature of records and not of literature, and never made any attempt to develop the connection of events. It is a significant illustration of the peculiarity of Roman character, that notwithstanding the extension of the power of the Roman community far beyond the bounds of Italy, and notwithstanding the constant contact of the noble society of Rome with the Greeks who were so fruitful in literary activity, it was not till the middle of the sixth century that there was felt the need and desire of imparting a knowledge of the deeds and fortunes of the Roman people, by means of authorship, to the contemporary world and to posterity. When at length this desire was felt, there were neither literary forms ready at hand for the use of Roman history, nor was there a public prepared to read and great talent and considerable time were required to create both. In the first instance, accordingly, these difficulties were some measure evaded writing the national history either in the mother- tongue but in that case in verse, or in prose but in that case in Greek. We have already spoken of the metrical chronicles of Naevius (written about 550? ) and of Ennius (written about 581); both belong to the earliest historical literature of the Romans, and the work of Naevius may be regarded as the oldest of all Roman historical works. At nearly the same period were composed the Greek " Histories " of
S04. 178.
■84
LITERATURE AND ART book hi
201. Quintus Fabius Pictor1 (after 553), man of noble family
That this oldest prose work on the history of Rome was composed in Greek, established beyond a doubt by Dionys. and Cicero, de DH 31, 43. The Latin Annals quoted under the same name by Quintilian
and later grammarians remain involved in mystery, and the difficulty increased by the circumstance, that there also quoted under the same name a very detailed exposition of the pontifical law in the Latin language. But the latter treatise will not be attributed by any one, who has traced the development of Roman literature in its connection, to an author of the age of the Hannibalic war and even Latin annals from that age appear problematical, although must remain a moot question whether there has
it
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chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
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who took an active part in state affairs during the Hanni-
balic war, and of Fublius Scipio, the son of Scipio Africanus (f about 590). In the former case they availed 104. themselves of the poetical art which was already to a certain extent developed, and addressed themselves to a public with a taste for poetry, which was not altogether wanting; in the latter case they found the Greek forms ready to their hand, and addressed themselves—as the interest of their subject stretching far beyond the bounds
of Latium naturally suggested —primarily to the cultivated
The former plan was adopted by the plebeian authors, the latter by those of quality ; just as in the time of Frederick the Great an aristocratic literature in the French language subsisted side by side with the native German authorship of pastors and professors, and, while men like Gleim and Ramler wrote war-songs in German, kings and generals wrote military histories in French. Neither the metrical chronicles nor the Greek annals by Roman authors constituted Latin historical composition in the proper sense ; this only began with Cato, whose
" Origines," not published before the close of this epoch, formed at once the oldest historical work written in Latin and the first important prose work in Roman literature. 1
All these works, while not coming up to the Greek conception of history,2 were, as contrasted with the mere
been a confusion of the earlier with a later annalist, Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus (consul in 612), or whether there existed an old Latin 142. edition of the Greek Annals of Fabius as well as of those of Acilius and Albums, or whether there were two annalists of the name of Fabius Pictor.
The historical work likewise written in Greek, ascribed to Lucius Cincius Alimentus a contemporary of Fabius, seems spurious and a com pilation of the Augustan age.
1 Cato's whole literary activity belonged to the period of his old age (Cicero, Cat. 11, 38 ; Nepos, Cato, 3) ; the composition even of the earlier books of the "Origines" falls not before, and yet probably not
long subsequent to, 586 (Plin. //. N. iii. 14, 114). 168,
2 It is evidently by way of contrast with Fabius that Polybius ( xl. 6, 4) calls attention to the fact, that Albinus, madly fond of everything Greek, had given himself the trouble of writing history systematically [irpayfiaTiKty
foreigner.
History of oM>om&
186 LITERATURE AND ART book hi
detached notices of the book of Annals, systematic histories with a connected narrative and a more or less regular structure. They all, so far as we can see, embraced the national history from the building of Rome down to the time of the writer, although in point of title the work of Naevius related only to the first war with Carthage, and that of Cato only to the very early history. They were thus naturally divided into the three sections of the legendary period, of earlier, and of contemporary, history.
In the legendary period the history of the origin of the c'tv of Rome was set forth w'tn great minuteness ; and in its case the peculiar difficulty had to be surmounted, that there were, as we have already shown (ii.
105), two wholly irreconcileable versions of it in circulation : the national version, which, in its leading outlines at least, was probably already embodied in the book of Annals, and the Greek version of Timaeus, which cannot have remained unknown to these Roman chroniclers. The object of the former was to connect Rome with Alba, that of the latter to connect Rome with Troy ; in the former accordingly the city was built by Romulus son of the Alban king, in the latter by the Trojan prince Aeneas. To the present epoch, probably either to Naevius or to Pictor, belongs the amal gamation of the two stories. The Alban prince Romulus remains the founder of Rome, but becomes at the same time the grandson of Aeneas ; Aeneas does not found Rome, but is represented as bringing the Roman Penates to Italy and building Lavinium as their shrine, while his son Ascanius founds Alba Longa, the mother-city of Rome and the ancient metropolis of Latium. All this was a sorry and unskilful patchwork. The view that the original Penates of Rome were preserved not, as had hitherto been believed, in their temple in the Roman Forum, but in the shrine at Lavinium, could not but be offensive to the Romans ; and the Greek fiction was a still worse expedient,
chap, xjv
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187
inasmuch as under it the gods only bestowed on the grand son what they had adjudged to the grandsire. But the redaction served its object : without exactly denying the national origin of Rome, it yet deferred to the Hellenizing tendency, and legalized in some degree that desire to claim kindred with Aeneas and his descendants which was already at this epoch greatly in vogue 130); and thus became the stereotyped, and was soon accepted as the official, account of the origin of the mighty community.
Apart from the fable of the origin of the city, the Greek historiographers had otherwise given themselves little or no concern as to the Roman commonwealth so that the presentation of the further course of the national history must have been chiefly derived from native sources. But the scanty information that has reached us does not enable us to discern distinctly what sort of traditions, addition to the book of Annals, were at the command of the earliest chroniclers, and what they may possibly have added of their own. The anecdotes inserted from Herodotus1 were probably still foreign to these earliest annalists, and direct borrowing of Greek materials in this section cannot be proved. The more remarkable, therefore, the tendency, which everywhere, even in the case of Cato the enemy of the Greeks, very distinctly apparent, not only to connect Rome with Hellas, but to represent the Italian and Greek nations as having been originally identical. To this tendency we owe the primitive-Italians or Aborigines who were immi grants from Greece, and the primitive-Greeks or Pelas- gians whose wanderings brought them to Italy.
The current story led with some measure of connection, The earlier though the connecting thread was but weak and loose. ■■*■*• through the regal period down to the institution of the
For instance the history of the siege of Gabii compiled from the anecdotes in Herodotus as to Zopyrus and the tyrant Thrasybulus, and one version of the story of the exposure of Romulus framed on the model of
the history of the youth of Cyrus as Herodotus relates it
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from the expulsion of king Tarquinius down to the Pyrrhic war, by presenting in its own way the main result of that history— the union of Italy under the hegemony of Rome,
Contemporary history, again, was treated in a connected an(* detailed manner. Naevius described the first, and Fabius the second, war with Carthage from their own
188 LITERATURE AND ART book hi
republic but at that point legend dried uj. ; and it was not merely difficult but altogether impossible to lorm a narrative, in any degree connected and readable, out of the lists of magistrates and the scanty notices appended to them. The poets felt this most. Naevius appears for that reason to have passed at once from the regal period to the war regard ing Sicily : Ennius, who in the third of his eighteen books was still describing the regal period and in the sixth had already reached the war with Pyrrhus, must have treated the first two centuries of the republic merely in the most general outline. How the annalists who wrote in Greek managed the matter, we do not know. Cato adopted a peculiar course. He felt no pleasure, as he himself says, "in relating what was set forth on the tablet in the house of the Pontifex Maximus, how often wheat had been dear, and when the sun or moon had been eclipsed ; " and so he devoted the second and third books of his historical work to accounts of the origin of the other Italian communities and of their admission to the Roman confederacy. He thus got rid of the fetters of chronicle, which reports events year by year under the heading of the magistrates for the time being ; the statement in particular, that Cato's historical work narrated events " sectionally," must refer to this feature of his method. This attention bestowed on the other Italian communities, which surprises us in a Roman work, had a bearing on the political position of the author, who leaned throughout on the support of the municipal
Italy in his opposition to the doings of the capital; while it furnished a sort of substitute for the missing history of Rome
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
189
knowledge; Ennius devoted at least thirteen out of the eighteen books of his Annals to the epoch from Pyrrhus down to the Istrian war 372); Cato narrated the fourth and fifth books of his historical work the wars from the first Punic war down to that with Perseus, and in the two last books, which probably were planned on different and ampler scale, he related the events of the last twenty years of his life. For the Pyrrhic war Ennius may have employed Timaeus or other Greek authorities but on the whole the accounts given were based, partly on personal observation or communications of eye-witnesses, partly on each other.
Contemporaneously with historical literature, and some Speeches
sense as an appendage to arose the literature of speeches
and letters. This like manner was commenced
for the Romans possessed nothing of an earlier age except some funeral orations, most of which probably were only brought to light at later period from family archives, such as that which the veteran Quintus Fabius, the opponent of Hannibal, delivered when an old man over his son who had died his prime. Cato on the other hand committed to writing in his old age such of the numerous orations which he had delivered during his long and active public career as were historically important, as sort of political memoirs, and published them partly in his historical work, partly, would seem, as independent supplements to There also existed collection of his letters.
With non-Roman history the Romans concerned them- selves so far, that certain knowledge of was deemed indispensable for the cultivated Roman even old Fabius said to have been familiar not merely with the Roman, but also with foreign, wars, and distinctly testified that Cato
read Thucydides and the Greek historians in
diligently
general.
anecdotes and maxims which Cato compiled for himself as
But, we leave out of view the collection of
"
Cato;
History of °ther nauons.
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Uncritical treatment of history.
ioo LITERATURE AND ART BOOK III
the fruits of this reading, no trace is discernible of any literary activity in this field.
These first essays in historical literature were all of them, as a matter of course, pervaded by an easy, uncritical spirit ; neither authors nor readers readily took offence at inward or outward inconsistencies. King Tarquinius the Second, although he was already grown up at the time of his father's death and did not begin to reign till thirty-nine years afterwards, is nevertheless still a young man when he ascends the throne. Pythagoras, who came to Italy about a genera tion before the expulsion of the kings, is nevertheless set down by the Roman historians as a friend of the wise Numa.
492. The state-envoys sent to Syracuse in the year 262 transact business with Dionysius the elder, who ascended the throne
408. eighty-six years afterwards (348). This naive uncritical spirit is especially apparent in the treatment of Roman chronology. Since according to the Roman reckoning — the outlines of which were probably fixed in the previous epoch — the foundation of Rome took place 240 years before the consecration of the Capitoline temple 106) and 360 years before the burning of the city by the Gauls (ii. 101), and the latter event, which mentioned also in Greek historical works, fell according to these in the year of the Athenian archon Pyrgion 388 B. C. 01. 98, the building of Rome accordingly fell on 01. 1. This was, according to the chronology of Eratosthenes which was already recognized as canonical, the year 436 after the fall of Troy; nevertheless the common story retained as the founder of Rome the grandson of the Trojan Aeneas. Cato, who like good financier checked the calculation, no doubt drew attention in this instance to the incongruity but he does not appear to have proposed any mode of getting over the difficulty —the list of the Alban kings, which was after wards inserted with this view, certainly did not proceed from him.
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CHA7. x:» LITERATURE AND ART
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The same uncritical spirit, which prevailed in the early history, prevailed also to a certain extent in the representa tion of historical times. The accounts certainly without exception bore that strong party colouring, for which the Fabian narrative of the commencement of the second war with Carthage is censured by Polybius with the calm severity characteristic of him. Mistrust, however, is more appro priate in such circumstances than reproach. It is somewhat ridiculous to expect from the Roman contemporaries of Hannibal a just judgment on their opponents; but no conscious misrepresentation of the facts, except such as a simple-minded patriotism of itself involves, has been proved against the fathers of Roman history.
The beginnings of scientific culture, and even of author- ship relating to also fall within this epoch. The instruc tion hitherto given had been substantially confined to read ing and writing and knowledge of the law of the land. 1 But closer contact with the Greeks gradually suggested to the Romans the idea of more general culture and stimulated the endeavour, not directly to transplant this Greek culture to Rome, at any rate to modify the Roman culture to some extent after its model.
Partiality,
First of all, the knowledge of the mother-tongue began
to shape itself into Latin grammar; Greek philology transferred its methods to the kindred idiom of Italy.
The active study of grammar began nearly at the same
time with Roman authorship. About 520 Spurius Carvi- 284. lius, teacher of writing, appears to have regulated the Latin alphabet, and to have given to the letter g, which
was not previously included in 14), the place of the
which could be dispensed with—the place which still holds
the modern Occidental alphabets. The Roman school-
Plautus [Mostell. 126) says of parents, that they teach their children iitterat, iura, Ufa; and Plutarch (Cato Mai, 20) testifies to the same effect.
Selene*,
Grammar,
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masters must have been constantly working at the settlement of orthography ; the Latin Muses too never disowned their scholastic Hippocrene, and at all times applied themselves to orthography side by side with poetry. Ennius especially —resembling Klopstock in this respect also—not only practised an etymological play on assonance quite after the Alexandrian style,1 but also introduced, in place of the simple signs for the double consonants that had hitherto been usual, the more accurate Greek double writing. Of Naevius and Plautus, it is true, nothing of the kind is known; the popular poets in Rome must have treated orthography and etymology with the indifference which is usual with poets.
The Romans of this epoch still remained strangers to rnetoric ana" philosophy. The speech in their case lay too decidedly at the very heart of public life to be accessible to the handling of the foreign schoolmaster; the genuine orator Cato poured forth all the vials of his indignant ridicule over the silly Isocratean fashion of ever learning, and yet never being able, to speak. The Greek philosophy, although it acquired a certain influence over the Romans through the medium of didactic and especially of tragic poetry, was nevertheless viewed with an apprehension compounded of boorish ignorance and of instinctive mis
giving. Cato bluntly called Socrates a talker and a revolu tionist, who was justly put to death as an offender against the faith and the laws of his country; and the opinion, which even Romans addicted to philosophy entertained regarding may well be expressed in the words of Ennius
Philosophari est mihi necesse, at paucis, nam omnino haut placet. Degustandum ex e&, mm in eam ingurgitandum censeo.
Nevertheless the poem on Morals and the instructions in
Thus in his Epicharmian poems Jupiter so called, quod iuvat; and Ceres, quod gerit fruges.
192
LITERATURE AND ART book in
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:
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chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
193
Oratory, which were found among the writings of Cato, may be regarded as the Roman quintessence or, if the expression be preferred, the Roman caput mortuum of Greek philosophy and rhetoric. The immediate sources whence Cato drew were, in the case of the poem on Morals, presumably the Pythagorean writings on morals (along with, as a matter of course, due commendation of the simple ancestral habits), and, in the case of the book on Oratory, the speeches in Thucydides and more especially the orations of Demosthenes, all of which Cato zealously studied. Of the spirit of these manuals we may form some idea from the golden"oratorical rule, oftener quoted than followed by posterity, to think of the matter and leave the words to
follow from it"1
Similar manuals of a general elementary character were
composed by Cato on the Art of Healing, the Science of War, Agriculture, and Jurisprudence—all of which studies were likewise more or less under Greek influence. Physics and mathematics were not much studied in Rome ; but the applied sciences connected with them received a certain measure of attention. This was most of all true of medicine.
Medicine,
In 535 the first Greek physician, the Peloponnesian Arch- 219. agathus, settled in Rome and there acquired such repute by
his surgical operations, that a residence was assigned to
him on the part of the state and he received the freedom
of the city ; and thereafter his colleagues flocked in crowds to Italy. Cato no doubt not only reviled the foreign medical practitioners with a zeal worthy of a better cause, but attempted, by means of his medical manual compiled from his own experience and probably in part also from the medical literature of the Greeks, to revive the good old fashion under which the father of the family was at the same time the family physician. The physicians and the public gave themselves, as was reasonable, but little concern
VOL. 111
78
1 Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Matbe-
about his obstinate invectives : at any rate the profession, one of the most lucrative which existed in Rome, continued a monopoly in the hands of the foreigners, and for centuries there were none but Greek physicians in Rome.
Hitherto the measurement of time had been treated in Rome with barbarous indifference, but matters were now at least in some degree improved. With the erection of
AgTicul-
the art of ""•
and the art of war were, of course, primarily regulated by the standard of traditional and personal ex- perience, as is very distinctly apparent in that one of the two treatises of Cato on Agriculture which has reached our
time. But the results of Graeco- Latin, and even of Phoenician, culture were brought to bear on these subor
194
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I6S. the first sundial in the Roman Forum in 491 the Greek hour (<apa, kora) began to come into use at Rome : it happened, however, that the Romans erected a sundial which had been prepared for Catana situated four degrees farther to the south, and were guided by this for a whole century. Towards the end of this epoch we find several persons of quality taking an interest in mathematical studies.
191. Manius Acilius Glabrio (consul in 563) attempted to check the confusion of the calendar by a law, which allowed the pontifical college to insert or omit intercalary months at discretion : if the measure failed in its object and in fact aggravated the evil, the failure was probably owing more to the unscrupulousness than to the want of intelligence of the Roman theologians. Marcus Fulvius Nobilior
189. (consul in 565), a man of Greek culture, endeavoured at least to make the Roman calendar more generally known. 166. Gaius Sulpicius Gallus (consul in 588), who not only 168. predicted the eclipse of the moon in 586 but also calculated
the distance of the moon from the earth, and who appears to have come forward even as an astronomical writer, was
on this account by his contemporaries as a prodigy of diligence and acuteness.
regarded
Agriculture
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
19S
dinate fields just as on the higher provinces of intellectual activity, and for that reason the foreign literature relating to them cannot but have attracted some measure of atten tion.
Jurisprudence, on the other hand, was only in a subordi- J«ri»- nate degree affected by foreign elements. The activity of ^^ the jurists of this period was still mainly devoted to the answering of parties consulting them and to the instruction
of younger listeners ; but this oral instruction contributed
to form a traditional groundwork of rules, and literary activity was not wholly wanting. A work of greater import
ance for jurisprudence than the short sketch of Cato was
the treatise published by Sextus Aelius Paetus, surnamed Aelim the " subtle " (catus), who was the first practical jurist of
his time, and, in consequence of his exertions for the public benefit in this respect, rose to the consulship (556) and to 198. the censorship (560). His treatise — the " Tripartita" 194. as it was called — was a work on the Twelve Tables, which appended to each sentence of the text an explanation — chiefly, doubtless, of the antiquated and unintelligible expressions — and the corresponding formula of action. While this process of glossing undeniably indicated the influence of Greek grammatical studies, the portion treating
of the formulae of action, on the contrary, was based on
the older collection of Appius (ii. 113) and on the whole system of procedure developed by national usage and precedent
The state of science generally at this epoch is very dis- Cato's tinctly exhibited in the collection of those manuals composed ~2tt^ by Cato for his son which, as a sort of encyclopaedia, were designed to set forth in short maxims what a " fit man "
(vir bonus) ought to be as orator, physician, husbandman, warrior, and jurist A distinction was not yet drawn between the propaedeutic and the professional study of science ; but so much of science generally as seemed
Character
historical position of Roman literature.
sciences for all ages.
Thus poetry and literature made their entrance into
Rome along with the sovereignty of the world, or, to use the language of a poet of the age of Cicero :
Poenico bello seeundo Musa pennato gradu Intulit se belli cosam Romuli in gentem feram.
In the districts using the Sabellian and Etruscan dialects also there must have been at the same period no want of intellectual movement Tragedies in the Etruscan language are mentioned, and vases with Oscan inscriptions show that the makers of them were acquainted with Greek comedy. The question accordingly presents itself, whether,
196
LITERATURE AND ART
necessary or useful was required of every true Roman. The work did not include Latin grammar, which con sequently cannot as yet have attained that formal develop ment which is implied in a properly scientific instruction in language; and it excluded music and the whole cycle of the mathematical and physical sciences. Throughout it was the directly practical element in science which alone was to be handled, and that with as much brevity and simplicity as possible. The Greek literature was doubtless made use of, but only to furnish some serviceable maxims of experience culled from the mass of chaff and rubbish : it was one of Cato's commonplaces, that " Greek books must be looked
into, but not thoroughly studied. " Thus arose those household manuals of necessary information, which, while rejecting Greek subtlety and obscurity, banished also Greek acuteness and depth, but through that very
peculiarity moulded the attitude of the Romans towards the Greek
with Naevius and Cato, a Hellenizing literature like the Roman may not have been in course of
formation on the Arnus and Volturnus. But all information on the point is lost, and history can in such circumstances only indicate the blank.
The Roman literature is the only one as to which we
contemporarily
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
197
can still form an opinion ; and, however problematical its Hdleniring
absolute worth may appear to the aesthetic judge, for those who wish to apprehend the history of Rome it remains of unique value as the mirror of the inner mental life of Italy in that sixth century — full of the din of arms and pregnant for the future — during which its distinctively Italian phase closed, and the land began to enter into the broader career of ancient civilization. In it too there prevailed that antagonism, which everywhere during this epoch pervaded the life of the nation and characterized the age of transition. No one of unprejudiced mind, and who is not misled by the venerable rust of two thousand years, can be deceived as to the defectiveness of the Hellenistico-Roman literature. Roman literature by the side of that of Greece resembles a German orangery by the side of a grove of Sicilian orange- trees ; both may give us pleasure, but it is impossible even to conceive them as parallel. This holds true of the literature in the mother-tongue of the Latins still more decidedly, if possible, than of the Roman literature in a foreign tongue ; to a very great extent the former was not the work of Romans at all, but of foreigners, of half-Greeks, Celts, and ere long even Africans, whose knowledge of Latin was only acquired by study. Among those who in this age came before the public as poets, none, as we have already said, can be shown to have been persons of rank ; and not only so, but none can be shown to have been natives of Latium proper. The very name given to the poet was foreign ; even Ennius emphatically calls himself a
poeta} But not only was this poetry foreign ; it was also liable to all those defects which are found to occur where
1 See the lines already quoted at p. 177.
The formation of the name poeta from the vulgar Greek xm/Hp instead of irmirrfc —as iirb-r\utv was in use among the Attic potters—is character istic. We may add that poeta technically denotes only the author of epic or recitative poems, not the composer for the stage, who at this time was styled icrita (p. 139 ; Festus, s. v. , p. 333 M. ).
,erature-
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schoolmasters become authors and the great multitude forms the public. We have shown how comedy was artistically debased by a regard to the multitude, and in fact sank into vulgar coarseness ; we have further shown that two of the most influential Roman authors were schoolmasters in the first instance and only became poets in the sequel, and that, while the Greek philology which only sprang up after the decline of the national literature experimented merely on the dead body, in Latium grammar and literature had their foundations laid simultaneously and went hand in hand, almost as in the case of modern missions to the heathen. In fact, if we view with an unprejudiced eye this Hellenistic literature of the sixth century —that poetry followed out professionally and destitute of all productiveness of its own, that uniform imitation of the very shallowest forms of foreign art, that rtpertoire of translations, that changeling of epos — we are tempted to reckon it simply one of the diseased symptoms of the epoch before us.
But such a judgment, if not unjust, would yet be just only in a very partial sense. We must first of all consider that this artificial literature sprang up in a nation which not only did not possess any national poetic art, but could never attain any such art. In antiquity, which knew nothing of the modern poetry of individual life, creative poetical activity fell mainly within the mysterious period when a nation was experiencing the fears and pleasures of growth : without prejudice to the greatness of the Greek epic and tragic poets we may assert that their poetry mainly consisted in reproducing the primitive stories of human gods and divine men. This basis of ancient poetry was totally wanting in Latium : where the world of gods remained shapeless and legend remained barren, the golden apples of poetry could not voluntarily ripen. To this falls to be added a second and more important consideration.
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
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The inward mental development and the outward political evolution of Italy had equally reached a point at which it was no longer possible to retain the Roman nationality based on the exclusion of all higher and individual mental culture, and to repel the encroachments of Hellenism. The propagation of Hellenism in Italy had certainly a revolutionary and a denationalizing tendency, but it was indispensable for the necessary intellectual equalization of the nations ; and this primarily forms the historical and even the poetical justification of the Romano-Hellenistic literature. Not a single new and genuine work of art issued from its workshop, but it extended the intellectual horizon of Hellas over Italy. Viewed even in its mere outward aspect, Greek poetry presumes in the hearer a certain amount of positive acquired knowledge. That self-contained com pleteness, which is one of the most essential peculiarities of the dramas of Shakespeare for instance, was foreign to ancient poetry ; a person unacquainted with the cycle of Greek legend would fail to discover the background and
often even the ordinary meaning of every rhapsody and every tragedy. If the Roman public of this period was in some degree familiar, as the comedies of Plautus show, with the Homeric poems and the legends of Herakles, and was acquainted with at least the more generally current of the other myths,1 this knowledge must have found its way to the public primarily through the stage alongside of the school, and thus have formed at least a first step towards the understanding of the Hellenic poetry. But still deeper was the effect —on which the most ingenious literary critics of antiquity justly laid emphasis — produced by the natural
1 Even subordinate figures from the legends of Troy and of Herakles make their appearance, e. g. Talthybius (Stich. 305), Autolycus (Bacch. 275), Parthaon (Men. 745). Moreover the most general outlines must have been known in the case of the Theban and the Argonautic legends, and of the stories of Bellerophon (Bacch. 810), Pentheus (Merc. 467), Procneand Philomela (Rud. 604), Sappho and Phaon (Mil. 1247).
aoo LITERATURE AND ART book hi
ization of the Greek poetic language and the Greek metres in Latium. If " conquered Greece vanquished her rude conqueror by art," the victory was primarily accomplished by elaborating from the unpliant Latin idiom a cultivated and elevated poetical language, so that instead of the monotonous and hackneyed Saturnian the senarius flowed and the hexameter rushed, and the mighty tetrameters, the jubilant anapaests, and the artfully intermingled lyrical rhythms fell on the Latin ear in the mother- tongue. Poetical language is the key to the ideal world of poetry, poetic measure the key to poetical feeling ; for the man, to whom the eloquent epithet is dumb and the living image is dead, and in whom the times of dactyls and iambuses awaken no inward echo, Homer and Sophocles have composed in vain. Let it not be said that poetical and rhythmical feeling comes spontaneously. The ideal feelings are no doubt implanted by nature in the human breast, but they need favourable sunshine in order to germinate ; and especially in the Latin nation, which was but little suscep tible of poetic impulses, they needed external nurture. Nor let it be said, that, by virtue of the widely diffused acquaint ance with the Greek language, its literature would have sufficed for the susceptible Roman public. The mysterious charm which language exercises over man, and which
poetical language and rhythm only enhance, attaches not to any tongue learned accidentally, but only to the mother- tongue. From this point of view, we shall form a juster judgment of the Hellenistic literature, and particularly of the poetry, of the Romans of this period. If it tended to transplant the radicalism of Euripides to Rome, to resolve the gods either into deceased men or into mental con ceptions, to place a denationalized Latium by the side of a denationalized Hellas, and to reduce all purely and distinctly developed national peculiarities to the problematic notion of general civilization, every one is at liberty to find this
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART sol
tendency pleasing or disagreeable, but none can doubt its historical necessity. From this point of view the very defectiveness of the Roman poetry, which cannot be denied, may be explained and so may in some degree be justified. It is no doubt pervaded by a disproportion between the trivial and often bungled contents and the comparatively finished form ; but the real significance of this poetry lay precisely in its formal features, especially those of language and metre. It was not seemly that poetry in Rome was principally in the hands of schoolmasters and foreigners and was chiefly translation or imitation ; but, if the primary object of poetry was simply to form a bridge from Latium to Hellas, Livius and Ennius had certainly a vocation to the poetical pontificate in Rome, and a translated literature was the simplest means to the end. It was still less seemly that Roman poetry preferred to lay its hands on the most worn-out and trivial originals ; but in this view it was appropriate. No one will desire to place the poetry of Euripides on a level with that of Homer ; but, historically viewed, Euripides and Menander were quite as much the
oracles of cosmopolitan Hellenism as the Iliad and Odyssey were the oracles of national Hellenism, and in so far the representatives of the new school had good reason for introducing their audience especially to this cycle of litera ture. The instinctive consciousness also of their limited poetical powers may partly have induced the Roman composers to keep mainly by Euripides and Menander and to leave Sophocles and even Aristophanes untouched ; for, while poetry is essentially national and difficult to trans plant, intellect and wit, on which the poetry of Euripides as well as of Menander is based, are in their very nature cosmopolitan. Moreover the fact always deserves to be honourably acknowledged, that the Roman poets of the sixth century did not attach themselves to the Hellenic literature of the day or what is called Alexandrinism, but
National opposition,
«» LITERATURE AND ART book ill
sought their models solely in the older classical literature, although not exactly in its richest or purest fields. On the whole, however innumerablemaybethe false accommodations and sins against the rules of art which we can point out in them, these were just the offences which were by stringent necessity attendant on the far from scrupulous efforts of the missionaries of Hellenism ; and they are, in a historical and even aesthetic point of view, outweighed in some measure by the zeal of faith equally inseparable from propagandism. We may form a different opinion from Ennius as to the value of his new gospel ; but, if in the case of faith it does not matter so much what, as how, men believe, we cannot refuse recognition and admiration to the Roman poets of the sixth century. A fresh and strong sense of the power of the Hellenic world-literature, a sacred longing to trans plant the marvellous tree to the foreign land, pervaded the whole poetry of the sixth century, and coincided in a
manner with the thoroughly elevated spirit of that great age. The later refined Hellenism looked down on the poetical performances of this period with some degree of contempt ; it should rather perhaps have looked up to the poets, who with all their imperfection yet stood in a more intimate relation to Greek poetry, and approached nearer to genuine poetical art, than their more cultivated successors. In the bold emulation, in the sounding rhythms, even in the mighty professional pride of the poets of this age there more than in any other epoch of Roman literature, an imposing grandeur; and even those who are under no illusion as to the weak points of this poetry may apply to the proud language, already quoted, in which Ennius celebrates its praise
Enni porta, salve, qui mortalibus Versus propinas Jlammeos medullitus.
As the Hellenico-Roman literature of this period was jssgntjjjly marke(i by dominant tendency, so was also its
peculiar
a
:
it
is,
chap. JOT LITERATURE AND ART
303
antithesis, the contemporary national authorship. While the former aimed at neither more nor less than the anni hilation of Latin nationality by the creation of a poetry Latin in language but Hellenic in form and spirit, the best and purest part of the Latin nation was driven to reject and place under the ban of outlawry the literature of Hellenism along with Hellenism itself. The Romans in the time of Cato stood opposed to Greek literature, very much as in the time of the Caesars they stood opposed to Christianity; freedmen and foreigners formed the main body of the poetical, as they afterwards formed the main body of the Christian, community ; the nobility of the nation and above all the government saw in poetry as in Christianity an absolutely hostile power ; Plautus and Ennius were ranked with the rabble by the Roman aristocracy for reasons nearly the same as those for which the apostles and bishops were put to death by the Roman government In this field too it was Cato, of course, who took the lead as the vigorous champion of his native country against the
The Greek literati and physicians were in his view the most dangerous scum of the radically corrupt Greek people,1 and the Roman "ballad -singers" are treated by him with ineffable contempt 98). He and those who shared his sentiments have been often and
" As to these Greeks, " he says to his son Marcus, shall tell at the proper place, what came to learn regarding them at Athens and shall
foreigners.
show that
thoroughly.
me, this
will ruin everything, and most especially send hither its physicians. They have conspired to despatch all barbarians by their physicking, but they get themselves paid for it, that people may trust them and that they may the more easily bring us to ruin. They call us also barbarians, and indeed revile us by the still more vulgar name of Opicans. interdict thee, therefore, from all dealings with the practitioners of the healing art. "
Cato in his zeal was not aware that the name of Opicans, which had in Latin an obnoxious meaning, was in Greek quite unobjectionable, and that the Greeks had in the most innocent way come to designate the Italians by that term
useful to look into their writings, but not to study them They are an utterly corrupt and ungovernable race — believe
true as an oracle that people bring hither its culture,
168).
(i.
I
I' it
if it
is
is
; if
it
I
1
(ii. ;
304
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harshly censured on this account, and certainly the ex pressions of his displeasure are not unfrequently character ized by the bluntness and narrowness peculiar to him ; on a closer consideration, however, we must not only confess him to have been in individual instances
substantially right, but we must also acknowledge that the national
opposition in this field, more than anywhere else, went beyond the manifestly inadequate line of mere negative defence. When his younger contemporary, Aulus Postu- mius Albinus, who was an object of ridicule to the Hellenes themselves by his offensive Hellenizing, and who, for example, even manufactured Greek verses—when this Albinus in the preface to his historical treatise pleaded in excuse for his defective Greek that he was by birth a Roman — was not the question quite in place, whether he had been doomed by authority of law to meddle with matters which he did not understand ? Were the trades of the professional translator of comedies and of the poet
celebrating heroes for bread and protection more honour able, perhaps, two thousand years ago than they are now ? Had Cato not reason to make it a reproach against Nobilior, that he took Ennius—who, we may add, glorified in his verses the Roman potentates without respect of persons, and overloaded Cato himself with praise—along with him to Ambracia as the celebrator of his future achievements ? Had he not reason to revile the Greeks, with whom he had become acquainted in Rome and
Athens, as an incorrigibly wretched pack? This opposition to the culture of the age and the Hellenism of the day was well warranted ; but Cato was by no means chargeable with an opposition to culture and to Hellenism in general. On the contrary it is the highest merit of the national party, that they comprehended very clearly the necessity of creating a Latin literature and of bringing the stimulating influences of Hellenism to bear on it ; only their intention
chap, xiv LITERATURE AND ART
aos
was, that Latin literature should not be a mere copy taken from the Greek and intruded on the national feelings of Rome, but should, while fertilized by Greek influences, be developed in accordance with Italian nationality. With a genial instinct, which attests not so much the sagacity of individuals as the elevation of the epoch, they perceived that in the case of Rome, owing to the total want of earlier poetical productiveness, history furnished the only subject- matter for the development of an intellectual life of their own. Rome was, what Greece was not, a state; and the mighty consciousness of this truth lay at the root both of the bold attempt which Naevius made to attain by means of history a Roman epos and a Roman drama, and of the creation of Latin prose by Cato.