The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 5

I. LIFE, TIMES, AND PERSONAL TRAITS.

I. He was born at Rudiae, a town of Calabria, in B.C. 239, the year after the first representation of a drama on the Roman stage. He first entered Rome in B.C. 204, in the train of Cato, who, when acting as quaestor in Sardinia, found the poet in that island serving, with the rank of centurion, in the Roman army. In the poem of Silius Italicus, he is fancifully represented as distinguis.h.i.+ng himself in personal combat like one of the heroes of the Iliad. After this time he resided at Rome, 'living,' according to the statement of Jerome, 'very plainly, on the Aventine' (the Plebeian quarter of the city), 'attended only by a single maid-servant[1],' and supporting himself by teaching Greek and by his writings. He accompanied M. Fulvius n.o.bilior in his Aetolian campaign. Through the influence of his son, he obtained the honour of Roman citizens.h.i.+p, probably at the time when the colony of Pisaurum was planted in B.C. 184. This distinction Ennius has himself recorded in a line of the Annals which indicates the high value which the Roman allies attached to this privilege:--

Nos sumu' Romani qui fuvimus ante Rudini.

He lived on terms of intimacy with influential members of the n.o.blest families in Rome, and became the familiar friend of the great Scipio.

When he died at the age of seventy, his bust was believed to be placed in the tomb of the Scipios, between those of the conqueror of Hannibal and of the conqueror of Antiochus. He died in the year B.C. 169. The most famous of his works were his Tragedies and the Annals, a long historical poem written in eighteen books. But, in addition to these, he composed several miscellaneous works, of which only very scanty fragments have been preserved.

Among the circ.u.mstances which prepared him to be the princ.i.p.al creator of the national literature, his birthplace and origin, the kind of education available to him in his early years, and the experience which awaited him when first entering on life, had a strong determining influence. His birthplace, Rudiae, is called by Strabo 'a Greek city'; but it was not a Greek colony, like Tarentum and the other cities of Magna Graecia, but an old Italian town, (the epithet _vetustae_ is applied to it by Silius) which had been partially h.e.l.lenised, but still retained its native traditions and the use of the Oscan language. Ennius is thus spoken of as 'Semi-Graecus.' He laid claim to be descended from the old Messapian kings, a claim which Virgil is supposed to acknowledge in the introduction of Messapus leading his followers in the gathering of the Italian races,

Ibant aequati numero regemque canebant.

This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the better cla.s.s of families in his native district; and the consciousness of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies.

He bore witness to his nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius[2]

that 'in the possession of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he possessed three hearts.' Of these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire for the purposes of literature or of social intercourse, was most likely to have been his inherited tongue.

Rudiae, from its Italian nationality, from its neighbourhood to the cities of Magna Graecia, and from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-place, not only of three different languages,--that of common life, that of culture and education, that of military service--but of the three different spirits or tendencies which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas[3]--referred to in the expression of Ovid,--

Calabris in montibus ortus--

and in the phrase of Silius,--

Hispida tellus Miserunt Calabri; Rudiae genuere vetustae,

the poet owed the 'Italian heart,' the virtue of a race still uncorrupted and unsophisticated, the buoyant energy and freshness of feeling which enabled him to apprehend all the novelty and the greatness of the momentous age through which he lived. The South of Italy afforded, at this time, means of education, which were denied to Rome or Latium; and the peace enjoyed by his native district for the first twenty years of his life granted to Ennius leisure to avail himself of these means, which he could not have enjoyed had he been born a few years later. In the short account of his life in Jerome's continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, it is stated that he was born at Tarentum. Though this is clearly an error, it seems probable that the poet may have spent the years of his education there. Though Tarentum, since its capture by the Romans, had lost its political importance, it still continued to be a centre of Greek culture and of social pleasure. Dramatic representations had been especially popular among a people who had drifted far away 'ex Spartana dura illa et horrida disciplina[4]' of their ancestors. From the knowledge of the Attic tragedians displayed by Ennius in his later career it is likely that he had witnessed representations of their works on a Greek stage, before he began, in middle life, to direct his own genius to dramatic composition. The knowledge and admiration of Homer which stimulated him to the composition of his greatest work, might have been acquired in any centre of Greek culture. But the intellectual interests indicated in some of his miscellaneous writings have a kind of local character, distinguis.h.i.+ng them alike from the older philosophies of Athens and from the more recent science of Alexandria. His acceptance of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the physical fancies expressed in some of the fragments of the Epicharmus probably came to him from the teaching of the Neo-Pythagoreans, who were widely spread among the Greeks of Southern Italy. The rationalistic speculations of Euhemerus, which appear in strange union with the 'somnia Pythagorea' of the Annals, were of Sicilian origin. The gastronomic treatise, which Ennius afterwards translated into Latin, was the work of Archestratus of Gela. The cla.s.s of persons for whom such a work would originally be written was likely to be found among the luxurious livers of Sicily and Magna Graecia. Thus while the serious poetry of Ennius was inspired by the older and n.o.bler works of Greek genius, the influence of a more vulgar and prosaic cla.s.s of teachers, transmitted by him to Roman thought and literature, was probably derived from the place of his early education.

His Italian spirit, and the Greek culture acquired by him in early youth, were two of the conditions out of which the new literature was destined to arise. The third condition was his steadfast and ardent Roman patriotism. Born more than a generation after his native district had ceased to be at war with Rome, he grew up to manhood during the years of peace between the first and second Carthaginian wars, when the supremacy of Rome was loyally accepted. Between early manhood and middle life he was a witness of and an actor in the protracted and long doubtful struggle between the two great Imperial States, on the issue of which hung the future destinies of the world:--

Omnia c.u.m belli trepido concussa tumultu Horrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris; In dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum Omnibus humanis esset terraque marique[5].

Though during that struggle the loyalty of some of the Italian communities was shaken, yet the aristocratic party in every city, and the Greek States generally, were true to the Roman alliance[6].

Thus his political sympathies, as well as his Greek education, would incline Ennius to identify himself with the cause of Rome, and his ardent imagination apprehended the grandeur and majesty with which she played her part in the contest. It was in the Second Punic War that the ideal of what was greatest in the character and inst.i.tutions of Rome was most fully realised. Her good fortune supplied from among the contingent furnished to the war by her Messapian allies a man of a nature so sympathetic with her own and an imagination so vivid as to gain for the ideal thus created a permanent realisation.

Of the share which Ennius had in the war we know only that he served in Sardinia with the rank of centurion. That he had become a man of some note in that capacity is suggested by the fact that he attracted the attention of the Roman quaestor Cato, and accompanied him to Rome.

A certain dramatic interest attaches to this first meeting of the typical representative of Roman manners and traditions and great enemy of foreign innovations, with the man by whom, more than by any one else, the mind of Rome was enlarged and liberalised, and many of her most cherished convictions were most seriously undermined. This actual service in a great war left its impress on the work done by Ennius.

Fragments both of his tragedies and his Annals prove how thoroughly he understood and appreciated the best qualities of the soldierly character. This fellows.h.i.+p in hards.h.i.+p and danger fitted him to become the national poet of a race of soldiers. He has drawn from his own observation an image of the fort.i.tude and discipline of the Roman armies, and of the patriotic devotion and resolution of the men by whom these armies were led. There is a strong realism in the expression of martial sentiment in Ennius, marking him out as a man familiar with the life of the camp and the battle-field, and quite distinct from the idealising enthusiasm of Livy and Virgil[7].

Ennius entered on his career as a writer at a time when the long strain of a great struggle was giving place to the confidence and security of a great triumph. He lived for thirty-five years longer, witnessing the rapid advance of Roman conquest in Greece and Asia, and over the barbarous tribes of the West. He died one year before the crowning victory of Pydna. During all his later life his sanguine spirit and patriotic enthusiasm were buoyed up by the success of the Roman and Italian arms abroad; while his political sympathies were in thorough accord with the dominant influences in the government of the State. At no other period of Roman history was the ascendency of the Senate and of the great houses more undisputed, or, on the whole, more wisely and ably exercised. In the lists of those who successively fill the great curule magistracies, we find almost exclusively the names of members of the old patrician or of the more recent plebeian n.o.bility.

At no other period does the tribunician opposition to the senatorian direction of affairs and to the authority of the magistrate appear weaker or more intermittent. It was not till a generation after the death of Ennius that the moral corruption and political and social disorganisation--the ultimate results of the great military successes gained under the absolute ascendency of the Senate,--became fully manifest. It is difficult to say how far the aristocratic and antipopular bias of all Roman literature may have been determined by the political conditions of the time in which that literature received the most powerful impulse, and by the personal relations and peculiar stamp of character of the man by whom that impulse was given.

Along with the military and political activity of the time, during which Ennius lived in Rome, the stirring of a new intellectual life was apparent. Even during the war dramatic representations continued to take place, and the most active part of the career of Naevius, and a considerable part of that of Plautus, belong to the years during which Hannibal was still in Italy. After the cessation of the war, we note in the pages of Livy that much greater prominence is given to the celebration of public games, of which at this time dramatic representations formed the chief part. The regular holidays for which the Aediles provided these entertainments became more numerous; and the art of the dramatist was employed to enhance the pomp of the spectacle on the occasion of a great triumph, or of the funeral of an ill.u.s.trious man. The death of Livius Andronicus and the banishment of Naevius, which must have happened about the time that Ennius arrived at Rome, had deprived the Roman stage of the only writers of any name, who had attempted to introduce upon it the works of the Greek tragedians. Ennius had, indeed, rather to create than to revive the taste for tragedy. The prologue to the Amphitryo[8] shows how much more congenial the reproduction of the ordinary life of the Greeks was to the uneducated audiences of Rome than the higher effort to familiarise them with the personages and adventures of the heroic age.

The great era of Roman comedy was coincident with the literary career of Ennius. It was then that the best extant plays of Plautus were produced, and that Caecilius Statius, whom ancient critics ranked as his superior, flourished. The quality attributed to the latter in the line of Horace,

Vincere Caecilius gravitate, Terentius arte,

indicates a closer affinity with the spirit of Ennius, than the moral and political indifference of the older dramatist. The aim of Ennius was to raise literature from being a mere popular recreation, and to bring it into accord with the higher mood of the nation; to use it as a medium both of elevation and enlightenment. In carrying out this aim he appealed to the temper and to the newly awakened interests of members of the aristocratic cla.s.s, who were coming into close contact with educated Greeks, and were beginning to appreciate the treasures of art and literature now opened up to them. The career of Q. Fabius Pictor, the first historian of Rome, and the first who made a name for himself in painting, who lived at this time, attests this twofold attraction. The friendly relations which Roman generals, such as T.

Quintius Flamininus, established with the famous Greek cities, in which they appeared as liberators rather than conquerors, were the result of intellectual enthusiasm as much as of a definite policy.

With the wars of Pyrrhus and the capture of Tarentum, the first stage of the process described in the lines of Horace began[9]: the end of the Second Punic War was the second stage in the process. It is to this period, rather than to the progress of the war, that the words of the Grammarian, Porcius Licinus, most truly apply,

Poenico bello secundo Musa pinnato gradu Intulit se bellicosam in Romuli gentem feram.

The more frequent and closer contact with the mind of Greece not only refined the taste and enlarged the intelligence of those capable of feeling its influence, but produced at the same time a change in men's deepest convictions. Though the definite tenets of Stoicism and Epicureanism did not acquire ascendency till a later time, the dissolving force of Greek speculative thought and Greek views of life forced its way into Rome through various channels,--especially through the adaptations of the tragedies of Euripides and of the comedy of Menander. All these tendencies of the time acted on Ennius, stimulating his mental activity in various directions. His natural temperament and his acquired culture brought him into harmony with the spirit of his age without raising him too much above it. A poet of more delicacy of taste and perfection of execution would have been unintelligible to his contemporaries. A more systematic thinker would have been out of harmony with the conditions of life by which he was surrounded. Breadth, vigour, a spirit clinging to what was most vital in the old state of things, and yet readily adapting itself to what was new, were the qualities needed to establish a literature true to the genius of Rome in the second century B.C., and containing the promise of the more perfect accomplishment of a later age. And these qualities belonged to Ennius by natural gifts and the experience and culture of his earlier years.

There is no reason to believe that he had obtained any eminence in literature before he settled in middle age at Rome. His genius was of that robust order which grows richer and livelier with advancing years. The Annals was the work of his old age,--the ripe fruit of a strong and energetic manhood, prolonged to the last in hopeful activity. Cicero speaks of 'the cheerfulness with which he bore the two evils of old age and poverty[10].' Wherever the poet speaks of himself, his words reveal a sanguine and contented spirit; as, in that fine simile, where he compares himself, at the close of his active and successful career, to a brave horse which has often won the prize at the Olympian games, and in old age obtains his well-deserved repose:--

Sicut fortis equus, spatio qui saepe supremo Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectu' quiescit.

In none of his fragments is there any trace of that melancholy after-thought which pervades the poetry of his greatest successors, Lucretius and Virgil. From the humorous exaggeration of Horace,

Ennius ipse pater nunquam, nisi potus, ad arma Prosiluit dicenda;

and from the poet's own confession,

Nunquam poetor, nisi si podager,

it may be inferred that he belonged to the cla.s.s of poets of a l.u.s.ty and social nature, of which Dryden is a type in modern times, who enjoyed the pleasures of wine and good fellows.h.i.+p. The well-known anecdote, told by Cicero, of the interchange of visits between Scipio Nasica and Ennius[11], though not a brilliant specimen of Roman wit, is interesting from the light which it throws on the easy terms of intimacy in which the poet lived with the members of the most eminent Roman families. Such testimonies and traits of personal character make us think of Ennius as a man of genial and social temper, as well as of 'an intense and glowing mind.'

It was probably through his position as a teacher of Greek that Ennius first became known to the leading men of Rome. If this position was at first one of dependence, similar to that in which in earlier times the client stood to his patron, it soon changed into one of mutual esteem and admiration. We can best understand the relation in which he stood to men eminent in the state and in the camp, from a pa.s.sage from the seventh book of the Annals quoted by Aulus Gellius. In that pa.s.sage the poet is stated, on the authority of L. Aelius Stilo[12] (an early grammarian, a friend of Lucilius, and one of Cicero's teachers), to have drawn his own portrait, under an imaginary description of a confidential friend of the Roman general, Servilius Geminus. The portrait has the air of being drawn from the life, with a rapid and forcible hand, and with a minuteness of detail significant of close personal observation:--

Haece locutu' vocat quoc.u.m bene saepe libenter Mensam sermonesque suos rerumque suarum Congeriem part.i.t, magnam c.u.m la.s.su' diei Partem fuisset de summis rebu' regendis Consilio, indu foro lato sanctoque senatu: Cui res audacter magnas parvasque joc.u.mque Eloqueretur, cuncta simul malaque et bona dictu Evomeret, si qui vellet, tutoque locaret.

Quoc.u.m multa volup ac gaudia clamque palamque!

Ingenium cui nulla malum sententia suadet Ut faceret facinus levis aut malu', doctu', fidelis, Suavis h.o.m.o, facundu', suo contentu', beatus, Scitu', secunda loquens in tempore, commodu', verb.u.m Pauc.u.m, multa tenens antiqua sepulta, vetustas Quem fecit mores veteresque novosque tenentem, Multorum veterum leges divumque hominumque; Prudenter qui dicta loquive tacereve possit.

Hunc inter pugnas Servilius sic compellat[13].

There are many touches in this picture, which suggest the kind of intimacy in which Ennius may have lived with Fulvius n.o.bilior when accompanying him in his Aetolian campaign, or his bearing when taking part in the light or serious talk of the Scipios. The learning and power of speech, the knowledge of antiquity and of the manners of the day, attributed to this friend of Servilius, were gifts which we may attribute to the poet both on ancient testimony and on the evidence afforded by the fragments of his writings. The good sense, tact, and knowledge of the world, the cheerfulness in life and conversation, the honour and integrity of character represented in the same pa.s.sage, are among the personal qualities which, in all ages, form a bond of union between men eminent in great practical affairs and men eminent in literature. Such were the qualities which, according to his own account, recommended Horace to the intimate friends.h.i.+p of Maecenas.

Many expressive fragments from the lost poetry of Ennius give a.s.surance that he was a man in whom learning and the ardent temperament of genius were happily united with the worth and sense described in this nameless portrait.

By his personal merit he broke through the strongest barriers ever raised by national and family pride, and made the name of poet, instead of a reproach, a name of honour with the ruling cla.s.s at Rome.

The favourable impression which he produced on the 'primitive virtue'

of Cato, by whom he was first brought to Rome, was more probably due to his force of character and social qualities than to his genius and literary accomplishment,--qualities seemingly little valued by his earliest patron, who, in one of his speeches, reproached Fulvius n.o.bilior with allowing himself to be accompanied by a poet in his campaign. But the strongest proof of the worth and the wisdom of Ennius is his intimate friends.h.i.+p with the greatest Roman of the age, and the conqueror of the greatest soldier of antiquity. It is honourable to the friends.h.i.+p of generous natures, that the poet neither sought nor gained wealth from this intimacy, but continued to live plainly and contentedly on the Aventine. Yet after death it was believed that the two friends were not divided; and the bust of the provincial poet found a place among the remains of that time-honoured family, the record of whose grandeur has been preserved, even to the present day, in the august simplicity of their monumental inscriptions.

The elder Africa.n.u.s may have been attracted to Ennius not only by his pa.s.sion for Greek culture, but by a certain community of nature. The mystical enthusiasm, the high self-confidence, the direct simplicity combined with majesty of character, impressed on the language of the poet were equally impressed on the action and bearing of the soldier.

The feeling which Ennius in his turn entertained for Scipio was one of enthusiastic admiration. While paying due honour to the merits and services of other famous men, even of such as Cato and Fabius, who were most opposed to his idol, of Scipio he said that Homer alone could worthily have uttered his praises[14].

In addition to the part which he a.s.signed to him in the Ninth Book of the Annals, he devoted a separate poem to commemorate his achievements. He has left also two short inscriptions, written in elegiac verse, in which he proclaims in words of burning enthusiasm the momentous services and transcendent superiority of the 'great world's victor's victor'--

Hic est ille situs cui nemo civi' neque hostis Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium[15];

and this also,

A sole exoriente supra Maeoti' paludes Nemo est qui factis me aequiperare queat.

Si fas endo plagas caelestium ascendere cuiquam est, Mi soli caeli maxima porta patet[16].

With many marked differences, which distinguish a man of active, social, and national sympathies from a student of Nature and a thinker on human life, there is a certain affinity of character and genius between Ennius and Lucretius. Enthusiastic admiration of personal greatness is one prominent feature in which they resemble one another.

But while Lucretius is the ardent admirer of contemplative and imaginative greatness, it is greatness in action and character which moves the admiration of Ennius. They resemble each other also in their strong consciousness of genius and their high estimate of its function and value. Cicero mentions that Ennius applied the epithet _sanctus_ to poets. Lucretius applies the same epithet to the old philosophic poets, as in the lines of strong affection and reverence which he dedicates to Empedocles,

Nil tamen hoc habuisse viro praeclarius in se, Nec _sanctum_ magis, et mirum carumque videtur[17].

The inscription which Ennius composed for his own bust directly expresses his sense of the greatness of his work, and his confident a.s.surance of fame, and of the lasting sympathy of his countrymen--