Studies in the Poetry of Italy, I. Roman Part 8

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. OLD ROMAN TRAGEDY.

RIBBECK, _Die Romische TraG.o.die_.

WORDSWORTH, _Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin_, pp. 567 and following.

SIMc.o.x, _History of Latin Literature_, Vol. I, pp. 31-44.

SELLAR, _Roman Poets of the Republic_, pp. 47-150.

TYRRELL, _Latin Poetry_, pp. 32-42.

CONINGTON, _Miscellaneous Writings_, Vol. I, pp. 294-347.

MOULTON, _The Ancient Cla.s.sical Drama_, pp. 203-222.

2. LATER ROMAN TRAGEDY AND SENECA.

TEUFFEL, _History of Roman Literature_ (translated by Warr), Vol. II, pp. 48-52.

NEWTON (and others), _Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies Translated into Englysh_ (Spenser Society reprint, 1887).

CONINGTON, _Miscellaneous Writings_, Vol. I, pp. 385-411.

CUNLIFFE, _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy_.

PATIN, _etudes sur les Tragiques Grecs; Euripides_. The work has many valuable comparisons between Euripides and Seneca.

TYRRELL, _Latin Poetry_, pp. 269-272.

SIMc.o.x, _History of Latin Literature_, Vol. II, pp. 24-28.

WARD, _History of English Dramatic Literature_, Vol. I, pp. 189 and following.

MERIVALE, _History of Rome Under the Empire_, Vol. VI, pp. 382 and following.

MOMMSEN, _History of Rome_, Vol. II, pp. 527-538.

3. ROMAN COMEDY.

MOMMSEN, _History of Rome_, Vol. II, pp. 503-526.

SIMc.o.x, _History of Latin Literature_, Vol. I, pp. 45-61.

SELLAR, _Roman Poets of the Republic_, pp. 153-220.

TYRRELL, _Latin Poetry_, pp. 43-58.

MOULTON, _The Ancient Cla.s.sical Drama_, pp. 377-423.

PART II

SATIRE

Satire has always shone among the rest, And is the boldest way, if not the best, To tell men freely of their foulest faults, To laugh at their vain deeds and vainer thoughts.

1. INTRODUCTION AND EARLY SATIRE

What prophecy was to the ancient Hebrews, the drama to the Greeks, the purpose-novel and the newspaper editorial to our own day, satire was to the Roman of the republic and the early empire--the moral mentor of contemporary society. This conception of the prophet as the preacher of his day is often obscured by the conception of him as one who could reveal the future; but a closer study of the life and times of these great religious leaders shows them to have been men profoundly interested in current life, who gave all their energies to the task of raising the standard of the religious and social thought of their own day. The function of Greek tragedy was ever religious. It had its very origin in the wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds; and the presence of the altar as the center of the strophic movements of the chorus was a constant reminder that the drama was dealing with the highest problems of human life.

Added to the general religious atmosphere of tragedy were the direct moral teachings, the highest sentiments of ancient culture, which constantly sounded through the play. Greek comedy, especially of the old and middle type, also served a distinct moral purpose in society. It did not, indeed, sound the same lofty notes as did its sister tragedy; but it was the lash which was mercilessly applied, at first with bolder license to individual sinners in high places, and afterward in a more guarded manner to the vices and follies of men in general. In either case, the powerful stimulus of fear of public ridicule and castigation must have had a real effect upon the manners and morals of the ancient Greeks.

When we turn to our own time, we find the literary preacher at the novelist's desk or in the editor's chair. The influence of the purpose-novel and the editorial can hardly be overestimated. In the generation immediately preceding our own, a very direct influence upon the public social life of his day was wielded by the pen of d.i.c.kens. His eyes were open to abuses of every kind--in educational, charitable, legal, and criminal inst.i.tutions; and he used every weapon known to literary art to right these wrongs. In this task he was ably a.s.sisted by men like Thackeray, Reade, Kingsley, and others. And there can be little doubt that the improved conditions in the England of to-day are due in generous measure to the work of these novelist preachers. The editor's function is still more intimately and constantly to hold the mirror up to society, revealing and reproving its faults. And to-day there is probably no more potent force acting directly upon the opinions and conduct of men than the daily editorial.

Now, the literary weapon of the Roman moralist was satire. It flourished in all periods of Roman literature, both the word _satire_ and the thing itself being of Latin origin. In other fields of literature there is a large imitation of Greek models. Roman tragedy was at first but little more than a translation of the Greek plays, and the same is true of comedy. Cato, Varro, Vergil, and the rest who wrote of agriculture, had a Greek prototype in Hesiod, who in his _Works and Days_ had treated of the same theme; Lucretius was the professed disciple and imitator of Epicurus; Cicero, in oratory, had ever before his eyes his Demosthenes, and in philosophy his Plato and Aristotle; Vergil had his Homer in epic and his Theocritus in pastoral; Horace, in his lyrics, is Greek through and through, both in form and spirit, for Pindar and Anacreon, Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and the whole tuneful line are forever echoing through his verse. Ovid, in his greatest work, only succeeded in setting Greek mythology in a frame of Latin verse, though he told those fascinating stories as they had never been told before; while the historians, the rhetoricians, the philosophers--all had their Greek originals and models.

But in the field of satire the Romans struck out a new literary path for themselves. Even here we are bound to admit that the spirit is Greek, the spirit of the old comedy, of bold a.s.sault upon the evils of government, of society, of individuals. But still satire, as a form of literature, is the Roman's own; and beginning with Lucilius, the father of satire in the modern sense, the long line of satirists who followed his lead sufficiently attests the strong hold which this particular form of literature gained upon the Roman mind.

We have said that Lucilius was the father of satire in the modern sense; but the name at least, together with many of the features of his satire and that of his successors, reaches far back of him into the recesses of an ancient Italian literature, long since vanished, of which we can gain only the faintest hints. These hints as to the character of that ancient forerunner of the Lucilian satire come to us from two sources--the discussions of the Latin grammarians as to the derivation of the word _satura_ (satire), and the remote reflections and imitations of the old _satura_ in later works.

These far-off imitations give some idea of the character of the genuine satire of the earliest time,--that of a medley of verse of different meters, intermingled with prose, introducing words and phrases of other languages, and treating of a great variety of subjects. This literary medley or jumble probably had its origin in the farm or vineyard, where, in celebration of the "harvest home" or other joyous festival, it would be brought out, perhaps accompanied by some kind of musical recitation, and of course loaded with the rude wit of the time.

Such, then, we may suppose, was the character of the rude satire of ancient Italy. But alas for any real personal knowledge which we may gain of it, those merry, clumsy jests, those rustic songs, are vanished with the simple sun-loving race which produced them. The olive orchards still wave gray-green upon the sunny slopes, the vineyards still cling to every hillside and nestle in every valley; but the ancient peasantry who once called this land their home, whose simple annals old Cato loved to tell, and who could have given us material for precious volumes upon the folk-lore and customs of their times, have gone, and left scarcely a trace of their rude, unlettered literature.

The first tangible literary link that binds us to the old Roman satire is found in the poet Ennius, who flourished about two hundred years before Christ. The story of his life is outlined elsewhere in this book.

His satires seem to have been a sort of literary miscellany which included such of his writings as could not conveniently be cla.s.sified elsewhere.

The merest handful of fragments of these satires remains, although there is good ground for believing that there were six books of these. No adequate judgment can therefore be formed as to their character. It can with safety be said, however, that they were in a sense the connecting link between the early satire and the literary satire of the modern type. As has been said above, they were a literary miscellany or medley, and as such contain some salient features of their predecessors; and it is highly probable that they contained attacks upon the vices and follies of the time, in which respect they looked forward to a more complete development in Lucilian satire.

A most interesting fragment of the _Epicharmus_ describes the nature of the G.o.ds according to the philosophy of Ennius:

And that is he whom we call Jove, whom Grecians call The atmosphere: who in one person is the wind and clouds, then rain, And after, freezing hail; and once again, thin air.

For this, those things are Jove considered which I name to you, Since by these elements do men and cities, beasts.

And all things else exist.

There was a satire by Ennius, as Quintilian tells us, containing a dialogue between Life and Death; but of this we have not a remnant. He also introduced the fables of aesop into his writings. The following is the moral which he deduces from the story of the lark and the farmers--a moral which Aulus Gellius a.s.sures us that it would be worth our while to take well to heart. It may be freely translated as follows:

Now list to this warning, give diligent heed, Whether seeking for pleasure or pelf: Don't wait for your neighbors to help in your need, But just go and do it yourself!

Surely Miles Standish might have gained from his Ennius, as well as from his Caesar, that famous motto: