The History of Roman Literature Part 3

per liquidum mare sudantes | ditem vexarant.

or the unaccented syllable may be altogether omitted, as in the second half of the line--

"ditem vexarant."

In a line of Naevius--

"Runcus atque Purpureus | filii terras."

we have in _Purpureus_ an instance of accent dominating over quant.i.ty. But the first two words, in which the _ictus_ is at variance with both accent and quant.i.ty, show the loose character of the metre. An interesting table is given by Corssen proving that the variance between natural and metrical accent is greater in the Saturnian verses than in any others, and in Plautus than in subsequent poets, and in iambics than in trochaics. [25]

We should infer from these facts (1) that the trochaic metre was the one most naturally suited to the Latin language; (2) that the progress in uniting quant.i.ty and accent, which went on in spite of the great inferiority of the poets, proves that the early poets did not understand the conditions of the problem which they had set before them. To follow out this subject into detail would be out of place here. The main point that concerns our present purpose is, that the great want of skill displayed in the construction of the Saturnian verse [26] shows the Romans to have been mere novices in the art of poetical composition.

The Romans, as a people, possessed a peculiar talent for public speaking.

Their active interest in political life, their youthful training and the necessity of managing their own affairs at an age which in most countries would be wholly engrossed with boyish sports, all combined to make readiness of speech an almost universal acquirement. The weighty earnestness (_gravitas_) peculiar to the national character was nowhere more conspicuously displayed than in the impa.s.sioned and yet strictly practical discussions of the senate. Taught as boys to follow at their father's side, whether in the forum, at the law courts, in the senate at a great debate, or at home among his agricultural duties, they gained at an early age an insight into public business and a patient apt.i.tude for work, combined with a power of manly and natural eloquence, which nothing but such daily familiarity could have bestowed. In the earlier centuries of Rome the power of speaking was acquired solely by practice. Eloquence was not reduced to the rules of an art, far less studied through manuals of rhetoric. The celebrated speech of Appius Claudius when, blind, aged, and infirm, he was borne in a litter to the senate-house, and by his burning words shamed the wavering fathers into an att.i.tude worthy of their country, was the greatest memorial of this unstudied native eloquence.

When Greek letters were introduced, oratory, like everything else, was profoundly influenced by them; and although it never, during the republican period, lost its national character, yet too much of mere display was undoubtedly mixed up with it, and the severe self-restraint of the native school disappeared, or was caricatured by antiquarian imitators. The great nurse of Roman eloquence was Freedom; when that was lost, eloquence sank, and while that existed, the mere lack of technical dexterity cannot have greatly abated from the real power of the speakers.

The subject which the Romans wrought out for themselves with the least a.s.sistance from Greek thought, was Jurisprudence. In this they surpa.s.sed not only the Greeks, but all nations ancient and modern. From the early formulae, mostly of a religious character, which existed in the regal period, until the publication of the Decemviral code, conservatism and progress went hand in hand. [27] After that epoch elementary legal knowledge began to be diffused, though the interpretation of the Twelve Tables was exclusively in the hands of the Patricians. But the limitation of the judicial power by the establishment of a fixed code, and the obligation of the magistrate to decide according to the written letter, naturally encouraged a keen study of the sources which in later times expanded into the splendid developments of Roman legal science. The first inst.i.tution of the table of _legis actiones_, attributed to Appius Claudius (304 B.C.), must be considered as the commencement of judicial knowledge proper. The _responsa prudentium_, at the giving of which younger men were present as listeners, must have contributed to form a legal habit of thought among the citizens, and prepared a vast ma.s.s of material for the labours of the philosophic jurists of a later age.

But inasmuch as neither speeches nor legal decisions were generally committed to writing, except in the bare form of registers, we do not find that there was any growth of regular prose composition. The rule that prose is posterior to poetry holds good in Rome, in spite of the essentially prosaic character of the people. It has been already said that religious, legal, and other formulae were arranged in rhythmical fas.h.i.+on, so as to be known by the name of _carmina_. And conformably to this we see that the earliest composers of history, who are in point of time the first prose writers of Rome, did not write in Latin at all, but in Greek. The history of Latin prose begins with Cato. He gave it that peculiar colouring which it never afterwards entirely lost. Having now completed our preliminary remarks, we shall proceed to a more detailed account of the earliest writers whose names or works have come down to us.

CHAPTER III.

THE INTRODUCTION OF GREEK LITERATURE--LIVIUS AND NAEVIUS (240-204 B.C.).

It is not easy for us to realise the effect produced on the Romans by their first acquaintance with Greek civilisation. The debt incurred by English theology, philosophy, and music, to Germany, offers but a faint parallel. If we add to this our obligations to Italy for painting and sculpture, to France for mathematical science, popular comedy, and the culture of the _salon_, to the Jews for finance, and to other nations for those town amus.e.m.e.nts which we are so slow to invent for ourselves, we shall still not have exhausted or even adequately ill.u.s.trated the multifarious influences shed on every department of Roman life by the newly transplanted genius of h.e.l.las. It was not that she merely lent an impulse or gave a direction to elements already existing. She did this; but she did far more. She kindled into life by her fruitful contact a literature in prose and verse which flourished for centuries. She completely undermined the general belief in the state religion, subst.i.tuting for it the fair creations of her finer fancy, or when she did not subst.i.tute, blending the two faiths together with sympathetic skill; she entwined herself round the earliest legends of Italy, and so moulded the historical aspirations of Rome that the great patrician came to pride himself on his own ancestral connection with Greece, and the descent of his founder from the race whom Greece had conquered. Her philosophers ruled the speculations, as her artists determined the aesthetics, of all Roman amateurs. Her physicians held for centuries the exclusive practice of scientific medicine; while in music, singing, dancing, to say nothing of the lighter or less reputable arts of ingratiation, her professors had no rivals. The great field of education, after the break up of the ancient system, was mainly in Greek hands; while her literature and language were so familiar to the educated Roman that in his moments of intensest feeling it was generally in some Greek apophthegm that he expressed the pa.s.sion which moved him. [1]

It would, therefore, be scarcely too much to a.s.sert that in every field of thought (except that of law, where Rome remained strictly national) the Roman intellect was entirely under the ascendancy of the Greek. There are, of course, individual exceptions. Men like Cato, Varro, and in a later age perhaps Juvenal, could understand and digest Greek culture without thereby losing their peculiarly Roman ways of thought; but these patriots in literature, while rewarded with the highest praise, did not exert a proportionate influence on the development of the national mind. They remained like comets moving in eccentric orbs outside the regular and observed motion of the celestial system.

The strongly felt desire to know something about Greek literature must have produced within a few years a pioneer bold enough to make the attempt, if the accident of a schoolmaster needing text-books in the vernacular for his scholars had not brought it about. The man who thus first clothed Greek poetry in a Latin dress, and who was always gratefully remembered by the Romans in spite of his sorry performance of the task, was LIVIUS ANDRONICUS (285-204? B.C.), a Greek from Tarentum, brought to Rome 275 B.C., and made the slave probably of M. Livius Salinator. Having received his freedom, he set up a school, and for the benefit of his pupils translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. A few fragments of this version survive, but they are of no merit either from a poetical or a scholastic point of view, being at once bald and incorrect. [2] Cicero [3]

speaks slightingly of his poems, as also does Horace, [4] from boyish experience of their contents. It is curious that productions so immature should have kept their position as text-books for near two centuries; the fact shows how conservative the Romans were in such matters.

Livius also translated tragedies from the Greek. We have the names of the _Achilles_, _Aegisthus_, _Ajax_, _Andromeda_, _Danae, _Equus Troja.n.u.s_, _Tereus_, _Hermione_. In this sphere also he seems to have written from a commendable motive, to supply the popular want of a legitimate drama. His first play was represented in 240 B.C. He himself followed the custom, universal in the early period, [5] of acting in his own dramas. In them he reproduced some of the simpler Greek metres, especially the trochaic; and Terentia.n.u.s Maurus [6] gives from the _Ino_ specimens of a curious experiment in metre, viz. the subst.i.tution of an iambus for a spondee in the last foot of a hexameter. As memorials of the old language these fragments present some interest; words like _perbitere (= perire), anculabant ( =hauriebant), nefrendem (= infantem), dusmus (= dumosus)_, disappeared long before the cla.s.sical period.

His plodding industry and laudable aims obtained him the respect of the people. He was not only selected by the Pontifices to write the poem on the victory of Sena (207 B.C.), [7] but was the means of acquiring for the cla.s.s of poets a recognised position in the body corporate of the state.

His name was handed down to later times as the first awakener of literary effort at Rome, but he hardly deserves to be ranked among the body of Roman authors. The impulse which he had communicated rapidly bore fruit.

Dramatic literature was proved to be popular, and a poet soon arose who was fully capable of fixing its character in the lines which its after successful cultivation mainly pursued. CN. NAEVIUS, (269?-204 B.C.) a Campanian of Latin extraction and probably not a Roman citizen, had in his early manhood fought in the first Punic war. [8] At its conclusion he came to Rome and applied himself to literary work. He seems to have brought out his first play as early as 235 B.C. His work mainly consisted of translations from the Greek; he essayed both tragedy and comedy, but his genius inclined him to prefer the latter. Many of his comedies have Latin names, _Dolus_, _Figulus_, _Nautae_, &c. These, however, were not _togatae_ but _palliatae_, [9] treated after the same manner as those of Plautus, with Greek costumes and surroundings. His original contribution to the stage was the _Praetexta_, or national historical drama, which thenceforth established itself as a legitimate, though rarely practised, branch of dramatic art. We have the names of two _Praetextae_ by him, _Clastidium_ and _Romulus_ or _Alimonium Romuli et Remi_.

The style of his plays can only be roughly inferred from the few pa.s.sages which time has spared us. That it was masculine and vigorous is clear; we should expect also to find from the remarks of Horace as well as from his great antiquity, considerable roughness. But on referring to the fragments we do not observe this. On the contrary, the style both in tragedy and comedy is simple, natural, and in good taste. It is certainly less laboured than that of Ennius, and though it lacks the racy flavour of Plautus, shows no inferiority to his in command of the resources of the language. [10] On the whole, we are inclined to justify the people in their admiration for him as a genuine exponent of the strong native humour of his day, which the refined poets of a later age could not appreciate.

Naevius did not only occupy himself with writing plays. He took a keen interest in politics, and brought himself into trouble by the freedom with which he lampooned some of the leading families. The Metelli, especially, were a.s.sailed by him, and it was probably through their resentment that he was sent to prison, where he solaced himself by composing two comedies.

[11] Plautus, who was more cautious, and is by some thought to have had for Naevius some of the jealousy of a rival craftsman, alludes to this imprisonment [12]:--

"Nam os columnatum poetae esse indaudivi barbaro, Quoi bini custodes semper totis horis accubant."

The poet, however, did not learn wisdom from experience. He lampooned the great Scipio in some spirited verses still extant, and doubtless made many others feel the shafts of his ridicule. But the censors.h.i.+p of literary opinion was very strict in Rome, and when he again fell under it, he was obliged to leave the city. He is said to have retired to Utica, where he spent the rest of his life and died (circ. 204 B.C.). It was probably there that he wrote the poem which gives him the chief interest for us, and the loss of which by the hand of time is deeply to be regretted.

Debarred from the stage, he turned to his own military experience for a subject, and chose the first Punic war. He thus laid the foundation of the cla.s.s of poetry known as the "National Epic," which received its final development in the hands of Virgil. The poem was written in Saturnian verse, perhaps from a patriotic motive; and was not divided into books until a century after the poet's death, when the grammarian Lampadio arranged it in seven books, a.s.signing two to the mythical relations of Rome and Carthage, and the remainder to the history of the war. The narrative seems to have been vivid, truthful, and free from exaggerations of language. The legendary portion contained the story of Aeneas's visit to Carthage, which Virgil adopted, besides borrowing other single incidents. What fragments remain are not very interesting and do not enable us to p.r.o.nounce any judgment. But Cicero's epithet "_luculente_ scripsit" [13] is sufficient to show that he highly appreciated the poet's powers; and the popularity which he obtained in his life-time and for centuries after his death, attests his capacity of seizing the national modes of thought. He had a high opinion of himself; he held himself to be the champion of the old Italian school as opposed to the Graecising innovators. His epitaph is very characteristic: [14]

"Mortales immortales si foret fas flere, Flerent Divae Camenae Naevium poetam.

Itaque postquamst Orcino traditus thesauro Obliti sunt Romae loquier Latina lingua."

CHAPTER IV.

ROMAN COMEDY--PLAUTUS TO TURPILIUS (254-103 B.C.).

Before entering upon any criticism of the comic authors, it will be well to make a few remarks on the general characteristics of the Roman theatre.

Theatrical structures at Rome resembled on the whole those of Greece, from which they were derived at first through the medium of Etruria, [1] but afterwards directly from the great theatres which Magna Graecia possessed in abundance. Unlike the Greek theatres, however, those at Rome were of wood not of stone, and were mere temporary erections, taken down immediately after being used. On scaffoldings of this kind the plays of Plautus and Terence were performed. Even during the last period of the Republic, wooden theatres were set up, sometimes on a scale of profuse expenditure little consistent with their duration. [2] An attempt was made to build a permanent stone theatre, 135 B.C., but it was defeated by the Consul Scipio Nasica. [3]

The credit of building the first such edifice is due to Pompey (55 B.C.), who caused it to have accommodation for 40,000 spectators. Vitruvius in his fifth book explains the ground-plan of such buildings. They were almost always on the same model, differing in material and size. On one occasion two whole theatres of wood, placed back to back, were made to turn on a pivot, and so being united, to form a single amphitheatre. [4]

In construction, the Roman theatre differed from the Greek in reserving an arc not exceeding a semicircle for the spectators. The stage itself was large and raised not more than five feet. But the orchestra, instead of containing the chorus, was filled by senators, magistrates, and distinguished guests. [5] This made it easier for the Romans to dispense with a chorus altogether, which we find, as a rule, they did. The rest of the people sat or stood in the great semicircle behind that which formed the orchestra. The order in which they placed themselves was not fixed by law until the later years of the Republic, and again, with additional safeguards, in the reign of Augustus. [6] But it is reasonable to suppose that the rules of precedence were for the most part voluntarily observed.

It would appear that in the earliest theatres there were no tiers of seats (_cunei_), but merely a semicircle of sloping soil, banked up for the occasion (_cavea_) on which those who had brought seats sat down, while the rest stood or reclined. The stage itself is called _pulpitum_ or _proscaenium_, and the decorated background _scaena_. Women and children were allowed to be present from the earliest period; slaves were not, [7]

though it is probable that many came by the permission of their masters.

The position of poets and actors was anything but reputable. The manager of the company was generally at best a freedman; and the remuneration given by the Aediles, if the piece was successful, was very small; if it failed, even that was withheld. The behaviour of the audience was certainly none of the best. Accustomed at all times to the enjoyment of the eye rather than the ear, the Romans were always impatient of mere dialogue. Thus Terence tells us that contemporary poets resorted to various devices to produce some novel spectacle, and he feels it necessary to explain why he himself furnishes nothing of the kind. Fair criticism could hardly be expected from so motley an a.s.sembly; hence Terence begs the people in each case to listen carefully to his play and then, and not till then, if they disapprove, to hiss it off the stage. [8] In the times of Plautus and Ennius the spectators were probably more discriminating; but the steady depravation of the spectacles furnished for their amus.e.m.e.nt contributed afterwards to brutalise them with fearful rapidity, until at the close of the Republican period dramatic exhibitions were thought nothing of in comparison with a wild-beast fight or a gladiatorial show.

At first, however, comedy was decidedly a favourite with the people, and for one tragic poet whose name has reached us there are at least five comedians. Of the three kinds of poetry cultivated in this early period, comedy, which, according to Quintilian [9] was the least successful, has been much the most fortunate. For whereas we have to form our opinion of Roman tragedy chiefly from the testimony of ancient authors, we can estimate the value of Roman comedy from the ample remains of its two greatest masters. The plays of Plautus are the most important for this purpose. Independently of their greater talent, they give a truer picture of Roman manners, and reflect more accurately the popular taste and level of culture. It is from them, therefore, that any general remarks on Roman comedy would naturally be ill.u.s.trated.

Comedy, being based on the fluctuating circ.u.mstances of real life, lends itself more easily than tragedy to a change of form. Hence, while tragic art after once pa.s.sing its prime slowly but steadily declines, comedy seems endued with greater vitality, and when politics and religion are closed to it, readily contents itself with the less ambitious sphere of manners. Thus, at Athens, Menander raised the new comedy to a celebrity little if at all inferior to the old; while the form of art which he created has retained its place in modern literature as perhaps the most enduring which the drama has a.s.sumed. In Rome there was far too little liberty of speech for the Aristophanic comedy to be possible. Outspoken attacks in public on the leading statesmen did not accord with the senatorial idea of government. Hence such poets as possessed a comic vein were driven to the only style which could be cultivated with impunity, viz. that of Philemon and Menander. But a difficulty met them at the outset. The broad allusions and rough fun of Aristophanes were much more intelligible to a Roman public than the refined criticism and quiet satire of Menander, even supposing the poet able to reproduce these. The author who aspired to please the public had this problem before him,--while taking the Middle and New Comedy of Athens for his model, to adapt them to the coa.r.s.er requirements of Roman taste and the national rather than cosmopolitan feeling of a Roman audience, without drawing down the wrath of the government by imprudent political allusions.

It was the success with which Plautus fulfilled these conditions that makes him pre-eminently the comic poet of Rome; and which, though purists affected to depreciate him, [10] excited the admiration of such men as Cicero, [11] Varro, and Sisenna, and secured the uninterrupted representation of his plays until the fourth century of the Empire.

The life of Plautus, which extended from 254 to 184 B.C. presents little of interest. His name used to be written M. ACCIUS, but is now, on the authority of the Ambrosian MS. changed to T. MACCIUS PLAUTUS. He was by birth an Umbrian from Sa.s.sina, of free parents, but poor. We are told by Gellius [12] that he made a small fortune by stage decorating, but lost it by rash investment; he was then reduced to labouring for some years in a corn mill, but having employed his spare time in writing, he established a sufficient reputation to be able to devote the rest of his life to the pursuit of his art. He did not, however, form a high conception of his responsibility. The drudgery of manual labour and the hards.h.i.+ps under which he had begun his literary career were unfavourable to the finer susceptibilities of an enthusiastic nature. So long as the spectators applauded he was satisfied. He was a prolific writer; 130 plays are attributed to him, but their genuineness was the subject of discussion from a very early period. Varro finally decided in favour of only 21, to which he added 19 more as probably genuine, the rest he p.r.o.nounced uncertain. We may join him in regarding it as very probable that the plays falsely attributed to Plautus were productions of his own and the next generation, which for business reasons the managers allowed to pa.s.s under the t.i.tle of "Plautine." Or, perhaps, Plautus may have given a few touches and the benefit of his great name to the plays of his less celebrated contemporaries, much as the great Italian painters used the services of their pupils to multiply their own works.

Of the 20 plays that we possess (the entire Varronian list, except the _Vidularia_, which was lost in the Middle Ages) all have the same general character, with the single exception of the _Amphitruo_. This is more of a burlesque than a comedy, and is full of humour. It is founded on the well- worn fable of Jupiter and Alcmena, and has been imitated by Moliere and Dryden. Its source is uncertain; but it is probably from Archippus, a writer of the old comedy (415 B.C.). Its form suggests rather a development of the Satyric drama.

The remaining plays are based on real life; the real life that is pourtrayed by Menander, and by no means yet established in Rome, though soon to take root there with far more disastrous consequences the life of imbecile fathers made only to be duped, and spendthrift sons; of jealous husbands, and dull wives; of witty, cunning, and wholly unscrupulous slaves; of parasites, lost to all self-respect; of traffickers in vice of both s.e.xes, sometimes cringing, sometimes threatening, but almost always outwitted by a duplicity superior to their own; of members of the _demi- monde_, whose beauty is only equalled by their shameless venality, though some of them enlist our sympathies by constancy in love, others by unmerited sufferings (which, however, always end happily); and, finally, of an array of cooks, go-betweens, confidantes, and nondescripts, who will do any thing for a dinner--a life, in short, that suggests a gloomy idea of the state into which the once manly and high-minded Athenians had sunk.

It may, however, be questioned whether Plautus did not exceed his models in licentiousness, as he certainly fell below them in elegance. The drama has always been found to exercise a decided influence on public morals; and at Rome, where there was no authoritative teaching on the subject, and no independent investigation of the foundations of moral truth, a series of brilliant plays, in which life was regarded as at best a dull affair, rendered tolerable by coa.r.s.e pleasures, practical jokes, and gossip, and then only as long as the power of enjoyment lasts, can have had no good effect on the susceptible minds of the audience. The want of respect for age, again, so alien to old Roman feeling, was an element imported from the Greeks, to whom at all times the contemplation of old age presented the gloomiest a.s.sociations. But it must have struck at the root of all Roman traditions to represent the aged father in any but a venerable light; and inimitable as Plautus is as a humourist, we cannot regard him as one who either elevates his own art, or in any way represents the n.o.bler aspect of the Roman mind.

The conventional refinement with which Menander invested his characters, and which was so happily reproduced by Terence, was not attempted by Plautus. His excellence lies rather in the bold and natural flow of his dialogue, fuller, perhaps, of spicy humour and broad fun than of wit, but of humour and fun so lighthearted and spontaneous that the soberest reader is carried away by it. In the construction of his plots he shows no great originality, though often much ingenuity. Sometimes they are adopted without change, as that of the _Trinummus_ from the _Thaesauros_ of Philemon; sometimes they are patched together [13] from two or more Greek plays, as is probably the case with the _Epidicus_ and _Captivi_; sometimes they are so slight as to amount to little more than a peg on which to hang the witty speeches of the dialogue, as, for example, those of the _Persa_ and _Curculio_.

The _Menaechmi_ and _Trinummus_ are the best known of his plays; the former would be hard to parallel for effective humour: the point on which the plot turns, viz. the resemblance between two pairs of brothers, which causes one to be mistaken for the other, and so leads to many ludicrous scenes, is familiar to all readers of Shakespeare from the _Comedy of Errors_. Of those plays which border on the sentimental the best is the _Captivi_, which the poet himself recommends to the audience on the score of its good moral lesson, adding with truth--

"Huiusmodi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias Ubi boni meliores fiant."

We are told [14] that Plautus took the greatest pleasure in his _Pseudolus_, which was also the work of his old age. The _Epidicus_ also must have been a favourite with him. There is an allusion to it in the _Bacchides_, [15] which shows that authors then were as much distressed by the incapacity of the actors as they are now.

"Non herus sed actor mihi cor odio sauciat.

Etiam Epidic.u.m quam ego fabulum aeque ac me ipsum amo Nullam aeque invitus specto, si agit Pellio."

The prologues prefixed to nearly all the plays are interesting from their fidelity to the Greek custom, whereas those of Terence are more personal, and so resemble the modern prologue. In the former we see the arch insinuating pleasantry of Plautus employed for the purpose of ingratiating himself with the spectators, a result which, we may be sure, he finds little difficulty in achieving. Among the other plays, the _Poenulus_ possesses for the philologist this special attraction, that it contains a Phoenician pa.s.sage, which, though rather carelessly transliterated, is the longest fragment we possess of that important Semitic language. [16] All the Plautine plays belong to the _Palliatae_, i.e. those of which the entire surroundings are Greek, the name being taken from the _Pallium_ or Greek cloak worn by the actors. There was, however, in the Italian towns a species of comedy founded on Greek models but national in dress, manners, and tone, known as _Comoedia Togata_, of which t.i.tinius was the greatest master. The _Amphitruo_ is somewhat difficult to cla.s.s; if, as has been suggested above, it be a.s.signed to the old comedy, it will be a _Palliata_. If, as others think, it be rather a specimen of the _Hilaro- traG.o.dia_ [17] or _Rhinthonica_ (so called from Rhinthon of Tarentum), it would form the only existing specimen of another cla.s.s, called by the Greeks _Italikae komodia_. Horace speaks of Plautus as a follower of Epicharmus, and his plots were frequently taken from mythological subjects. With regard, however, to the other plays of Plautus, as well as those of Caecilius, Trabea, Licinius Imbrex, Luscius Lavinius, Terence and Turpilius, there is no ground for supposing that they departed from the regular treatment of palliatae. [18]