The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 1

The Roman Poets of the Republic.

by W. Y. Sellar.

PREFACE.

In preparing a second edition of this volume, which has been for some years out of print, I have, with the exception of a few pages added to Chapter IV, retained the first five chapters substantially unchanged.

Chapters VI and VII, on Roman Comedy, are entirely new. I have enlarged the account formerly given of Lucilius in Chapter VIII, and modified the Review of the First Period, contained in Chapter IX.

The short introductory chapter to the Second Period is new. The four chapters on Lucretius have been carefully revised, and, in part, re-written. The chapter on Catullus has been re-written and enlarged, and the views formerly expressed in it have been modified.

In the preface to the first edition I acknowledged the a.s.sistance I had derived from the editions of the Fragments of the early writers by Klussman, Vahlen, Ribbeck, and Gerlach; from the Histories of Roman Literature by Bernhardy, Bahr, and Munk, and from the chapters on Roman Literature in Mommsen's Roman History; from a treatise on the origin of Roman Poetry, by Corssen; from Sir G. C. Lewis's work on 'The Credibility of Early Roman History'; from the Articles on the Roman Poets by the late Professor Ramsay, contained in Smith's 'Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'; and from Articles by Mr. Munro in the 'Journal of Cla.s.sical and Sacred Philology.' In addition to these I have, in the present edition, to acknowledge my indebtedness to the History of Roman Literature by W.

S. Teuffel, to Ribbeck's 'Romische TraG.o.die,' to Ritschl's 'Opuscula,'

to the editions of some of the Plays of Plautus by Brix and Lorenz, to that of the Fragments of Lucilius by L. Muller, to the Thesis of M. G.

Boissier, ent.i.tled 'Quomodo Graecos Poetas Plautus Transtulerit,' to Articles on Lucilius by Mr. Munro in the 'Journal of Philology,' and to the edition of Lucretius, and the 'Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus' by the same writer, to Schwabe's 'Quaestiones Catullianae,'

to Mr. Ellis's 'Commentary on Catullus,' to R. Westphal's 'Catull's Gedichte,' and to M. A. Couat's 'etude sur Catulle.' I have more especially to express my sense of obligation to Mr. Munro's writings on Lucretius and Catullus. In so far as the chapters on these poets in this edition may be improved, this will, in a great measure, be due to the new knowledge of the subject I have gained from the study of his works.

I have retained, with some corrections, the translations of the longer quotations, contained in the first edition, and have added a literal prose version of some pa.s.sages quoted from Plautus and Terence.

Instead of offering a prose version of the longer pa.s.sages quoted from Catullus, I have again availed myself of the kind permission formerly given me by Sir Theodore Martin to make use of his translation.

EDINBURGH, _Dec. 1880_.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY.

A great fluctuation of opinion has taken place, among scholars and critics, in regard to the worth of Latin Poetry. From the revival of learning till the end of last century, the poets of ancient Rome, and especially those of the Augustan age, were esteemed the purest models of literary art, and were the most familiar exponents of the life and spirit of antiquity. Their works were the chief instruments of the higher education. They were studied, imitated, and translated by some of the greatest poets of modern Europe; and they supplied their favourite texts and ill.u.s.trations to moralists and humourists, from Montaigne to the famous English essayists who flourished during the last century. Up to a still later period, their words were habitually used in political debate to add weight to argument and point to invective. Perhaps no other writers, during so long a period, exercised so powerful an influence, not on literary style and taste only, but on the character and understanding, of educated men in the leading nations of the modern world.

It was natural that this excessive deference to their authority should be impaired both by the ampler recognition of the claims of modern poetry, and by a more intimate familiarity with Greek literature. They have suffered, in the estimation of literary critics, from the change in poetical taste which commenced about the beginning of the present century, and, in that of scholars, from the superior attractions of the great epic, dramatic, and lyrical poets of Greece. They were thus, for some time, the objects of undue disparagement rather than of undue admiration. The perception of the large debt which they owed to their Greek masters, led to some forgetfulness of their original merits.

Their Roman character and Italian feeling were insufficiently recognised under the foreign forms and metres in which these qualities were expressed. It used to be said, with some appearance of plausibility, that Roman poetry is not only much inferior in interest to the poetry of Greece, but that it is a work of cultivated imitation, not of creative art; that other forms of literature were the true expression of the genius of the Roman people; that their poets brought nothing new into the world; that they enriched the life of after times with no pure vein of native feeling, nor any impressive record of national experience.

It is, indeed, impossible to claim for Roman poetry the unborrowed glory or the varied inspiration of the earlier art of Greece. To the genius of Greece alone can the words of the bard in the Odyssey be applied,

[Greek: autodidaktos d' eimi, theos de moi en phresin oimas pantoias enephysen[1].]

Besides possessing the charm of poetical feeling and artistic form in unequalled measure, Greek poetry is to modern readers the immediate revelation of a new world of thought and action, in all its lights and shadows and moving life. Like their politics, the poetry of the Greeks sprang from many independent centres, and renewed itself in every epoch of the national civilisation. Roman poetry, on the other hand, has neither the same novelty nor variety of matter; nor did it, like the epic, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poetry of Greece, adapt itself to the changing phases of human life in different generations and different States. But the poets of Rome have another kind of value.

There is a charm in their language and sentiment distinct from that which is found in any other literature of the world. Certain deep and abiding impressions are stamped upon their works, which have penetrated into the cultivated sentiment of modern times. If, as we read them, the imagination is not so powerfully stimulated by the revelation of a new world, yet, in the elevated tones of Roman poetry, there is felt to be a permanent affinity with the strength and dignity of man's moral nature; and, in the finer and softer tones, a power to move the heart to sympathy with the beauty, the enjoyment, and the natural sorrows of a bygone life. If we are no longer moved by the eager hopes and buoyant fancies of the youthful prime of the ancient world, we seem to gather up, with a more sober sympathy, the fruits of its mature experience and mellowed reflexion.

While the literature and civilisation of Greece were still unknown to them, the Romans had produced certain rude kinds of metrical composition; they preserved some knowledge of their history in various kinds of chronicles or annals: they must have been trained to some skill in oratory by the contests of public life, and by the practice of delivering commemorative speeches at the funerals of famous men.

But they cannot be said to have produced spontaneously any works of literary art. Their oratory, history, poetry, and philosophy owed their first impulse to their intellectual contact with Greece. And while the form and expression of all Roman literature were moulded by the teaching of Greek masters and the study of Greek writings, the debt incurred by the poetry and philosophy of Rome was greater than that incurred by her oratory and history. The two latter a.s.sumed a more distinct type, and adapted themselves more naturally to the genius of the people and the circ.u.mstances of the State. They were the work of men for the most part eminent in the State; and they bore directly on the practical wants of the times in which they were cultivated. Even the structure of the Latin language testifies to the oratorical force and ardour by which it was moulded into symmetry; as the language of Greece betrays the plastic and harmonising power of her early poetry. There is no improbability in the supposition that, if Greek literature had never existed, or had remained unknown to the Romans, the political pa.s.sions and necessities of the Republic would have called forth a series of powerful orators; and that the national instinct, which clung with such strong tenacity to the past, would, with the advance of power and civilisation, have produced a type of history, capable of giving adequate expression to the traditions and continuous annals of the commonwealth.

But their poetry, on the other hand, came to the Romans after their habits were fully formed[2], as an ornamental addition to their power,--[Greek: kepion kai enkallopisma ploytou]. Unlike the poetry of Greece, it was not addressed to the popular ear, nor was it an immediate emanation from the popular heart. The poets who commemorated the greatness of Rome, or who sang of the pa.s.sions and pleasures of private life, in the ages immediately before and after the establishment of the Empire, were, for the most part, men born in the provinces of Italy, neither trained in the formal discipline of Rome, nor taking any active part in practical affairs. Their tastes and feelings are, in some ways, rather Italian than purely Roman; their thoughts and convictions are rather of a cosmopolitan type than moulded on the national traditions. They drew the materials of their art as much from the stores of Greek poetry as from the life and action of their own times. Their art is thus a composite structure, in which old forms are combined with altered conditions; in which the fancies of earlier times reappear in a new language, and the spirit of Greece is seen interpenetrating the grave temperament of Rome, and the genial nature of Italy.

But, although oratory and history may have been more essential to the national life of the Romans, and more adapted to their genius, their poetry still remains their most complete literary expression. Of the many famous orators of the Republic one only has left his speeches to modern times. The works of the two greatest Roman historians have reached us in a mutilated shape; and the most important periods in the later history of the Republic are not represented in what remains of the works of any Latin writer. Tacitus records only the sombre and monotonous annals of the early Empire; and the extant books of Livy contain the account of times and events from which he himself was separated by many generations. Roman poetry, on the other hand, is the contemporary witness of several important eras in the history of the Republic and the Empire. It includes many authentic and characteristic fragments from the great times of the Scipios,--the complete works of the two poets of finest genius, who flourished in the last days of the Republic,--the masterpieces of the brilliant Augustan era;--and, of the works of the Empire, more than are needed to exemplify the decay of natural feeling and of poetical inspiration under the deadening pressure of Imperialism. And, besides ill.u.s.trating different eras, the Roman poets throw light on the most various aspects of Roman life and character. They are the most authentic witnesses both of the national sentiment and ideas, and of the feelings and interests of private life. They stamp on the imagination the ideal of Roman majesty; and they bring home to modern sympathies the charm and the pathos of the old Italian life, and the activities and humours of society in the great capital of pleasure and business.

Roman poetry was the living heir, not the lifeless reproduction of the genius of Greece. If it seems to have been a highly-trained accomplishment rather than the irrepressible outpouring of a natural faculty, still this accomplishment was based upon original gifts of feeling and character, and was marked by its own peculiar features.

The creative energy of the Greeks died out with Theocritus; but their learning and taste, surviving the decay of their political existence, pa.s.sed into the education of a kindred race, endowed, above all other races of antiquity, with the capacity of receiving and a.s.similating alien influences, and of producing, alike in action and in literature, great results through persistent purpose and concentrated industry.

It was owing to their gifts of appreciation and their capacity for labour, that the Roman poets, in the era of the transition from the freedom and vigour of the Republic to the pomp and order of the Empire, succeeded in producing works which, in point of execution, are not much inferior to the masterpieces of Greece. It was due to the spirit of a new race,--speaking a new language, living among different scenes, acting their own part in the history of the world,--that the ancient inspiration survived the extinction of Greek liberty, and reappeared, under altered conditions, in a fresh succession of powerful works, which owe their long existence as much to the vivid feeling as to the artistic perfection by which they are characterised.

From one point of view, therefore, Roman poetry may be regarded as an imitative reproduction, from another, as a new revelation of the human spirit. For the form, and for some part of the substance, of their works, the Roman poets were indebted to Greece: the spirit and character, and much also of the substance of their poetry, are native in their origin. They betray their want of inventiveness chiefly in the forms of composition and the metres which they employed; occasionally also in the cast of their poetic diction, and in their conventional treatment of foreign materials. But, in even the least original aspects of their art, they still bear the impress of their nationality. Although, with the exception of Satire and the poetic Epistle, they struck out no new forms of poetic composition, yet those adopted by them a.s.sumed something of a new type, owing to the weight of their contents, the ma.s.sive structure of the Roman language, the fervour and gravity of the Roman temperament, the practical bent and logical mould of the Roman understanding, the strong vitality and the emotional susceptibility of the Italian race.

They were not equally successful in all the forms which they attempted to reproduce. They were especially inferior to their masters in tragedy. They betray the inferiority of their dramatic genius also in other fields of literature, especially in epic and idyllic poetry, and in philosophical dialogues. They express pa.s.sion and feeling either directly from their own hearts and experience, or in great rhetorical pa.s.sages, attributed to the imaginary personages of their story--to Ariadne or Dido, to Turnus or Mezentius. But this occasional utterance of pa.s.sion and sentiment is not united in them with a vivid delineation of the complex characters of men; and it is only in their comic poetry that they are quite successful in reproducing the natural and lively interchange of speech. There is thus, as compared with Homer and Theocritus, some want of personal interest in the epic, descriptive, and idyllic poetry of Virgil. The natural play of characters, acting and reacting upon one another, enlivens the divinely-appointed action of the Aeneid, only in such exceptional pa.s.sages as the episode of Dido; nor does it add the charm of human a.s.sociations to the poet's deep and quiet pictures of rural beauty, and to his graceful expression of pensive and tender feeling.

The Romans, as a race, were wanting in speculative capacity; and thus their poetry does not rise, or rises only in Lucretius, to those imaginative heights from which the great lyrical and dramatic poets of Greece contemplated the spectacle of human life in all its wonder and solemnity. Yet both the epic and the lyrical poetry of Rome have a character and perfection of their own. The Aeneid, with many resemblances in points of detail to the poems of Homer, is yet, in design and execution, a true national monument. The lyrical poetry of Rome, if inferior to the choral poetry of Greece in range of thought and in ethereal grace of expression, and, apparently, to the early Iambic and Melic poetry of Greece in the range of the emotions to which it appeals, is yet an instrument of varied power, capable of investing the more serious or more transient joys and sorrows of life with an unfading charm, and rising into fuller and more commanding tones to express the national sentiment and moral dignity of Rome.

Didactic poetry obtained in Lucretius and Virgil ampler volume and profounder meaning than in their Greek models, Empedocles and Hesiod.

It was by the skill of the two great Latin poets that poetic art was made to embrace within its province the treatment of a great philosophical argument, and of a great and ancient form of human industry. The Satires and Epistles of Horace showed, for the first time, how the didactic spirit could deal in poetry with the whole conduct and familiar experience of life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, while borrowing the metre of their compositions from the early poets of Ionia and the later writers at the court of Alexandria, have taken the substance of their poetry to a great extent from their own lives and interests; and have treated their materials with a fluent and varied brilliancy of style, and often with a graceful tenderness and sincerity of feeling, unborrowed from any foreign source. It may thus be generally affirmed that the Roman poets, although adding little to the great discoveries or inventions in literature, and although not equally successful in all their adaptations of the inventions of their predecessors, have yet left the stamp of their own genius and character on some of the great forms which poetry has a.s.sumed.

The metres of Roman poetry are also adaptations to the Latin language of the metres previously employed in the epic, lyrical, dramatic and elegiac poetry of Greece. The Italian race had, in earlier times, struck out a native measure, called the Saturnian,--of a rapid and irregular movement,--in which their religious emotions, their festive and satiric raillery, and their commemorative instincts found a rude expression. But after this measure had been rejected by Ennius, as unsuited to the gravity of his greatest work, the Roman poets continued to imitate the metres of their Greek predecessors. But, in their hands, these became characterised by a slower, more stately, and regular movement, not only differing widely from the ring of the native Saturnian rhythm, but also, with every improvement in poetic accomplishment, receding further and further from the freedom and variety of the Greek measures. The comic and tragic measures, in which alone the Roman writers observed a less strict rule than their models, never attained among them to any high metrical excellence. The rhythm of the Greek poets, owing in a great measure to the frequency of vowel sounds in their language, is more flowing, more varied, and more richly musical than that of Roman poetry. Thus, although their verse is constructed on the same metrical laws, there is the most marked contrast between the rapidity and buoyancy of the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the stately and weighty march of the Aeneid.

Notwithstanding their outward conformity to the canons of a foreign language, the most powerful and characteristic measures of Roman poetry,--such as the Lucretian and the Virgilian hexameter, and the Horatian alcaic,--are distinguished by a grave, orderly, and commanding tone, symbolical of the genius and the majesty of Rome. In such cases, as the Horatian sapphic and the Ovidian elegiac, where the structure of the verse is too slight to produce this impressive effect, there is still a remarkable divergence from the freedom and manifold harmony of the early Greek poets to a more uniform and monotonous cadence.

The diction also of Roman poetry betrays many traces of imitation.

Some of the early Latin tragedies were literal translations from the works of the Athenian dramatists; and fragments of the rude Roman copy may still be compared with the polished expression of the original.

Some familiar pa.s.sages of the Iliad may be traced among the rough-hewn fragments of the Annals of Ennius. Even Lucretius, whose diction, more than that of most poets, produces the impression of being the immediate creation of his own mind, has described outward objects, and clothed his thoughts, in language borrowed from Homer, Empedocles, and Euripides. The short volume of Catullus contains translations from Sappho and Callimachus, and frequent imitations of other Greek poets; and, from the extant fragments of Alcaeus, Anacreon, and others of the Greek lyric poets, it may be seen how frequently Horace availed himself of some turn of their expression to invest his own experience with old poetic a.s.sociations. Virgil, whose great success is, in no slight measure, due to the skill and taste with which he used the materials of earlier Greek and native writers, has reproduced the heroic tones of Homer in his epic, and the mellow cadences of Theocritus in his pastoral poems; and has blended something of the antique quaintness and oracular sanct.i.ty of Hesiod with the golden perfection of his Georgics.

But besides the direct debt which each Roman poet owed to the Greek author or authors whom he imitated, it is difficult to estimate the extent to which the taste of the later Romans was formed by the familiar study of Greek literature. The habitual study of any foreign language has an influence not on style only, but even on the structure of thought and the development of emotion. The Roman poets first learned, from the study of Greek poetry, to feel the graceful combinations and the musical power of expression, and were thus stimulated and trained to elicit similar effects from their native language. It is for this gift, or power over language, that Lucretius prays in his invocation to the creative power of Nature,--

Quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem;

and those who came after him devoted still greater study to attain perfection in the diction and rhythm of poetry. But their success was gained with some loss of direct force and freshness in the expression of feeling. In Virgil and in Horace words are combined in a less natural order than in Homer and the Attic dramatists. Their language does not strike the mind with the spontaneous force of Greek poetry, nor does it seem equally capable of gaining and retaining the ear of a popular audience. Catullus alone among the great Roman poets combines in those short poems, which are the direct expression of his feeling, perfect grace with the happiest freedom and simplicity. Yet the studied and compact diction of Latin poetry, if wanting in fluency, ease, and directness, lays a strong hold upon the mind, by its power of marking with emphasis what is most essential and prominent in the ideas and objects presented to the imagination. The thought and sentiment of Rome have thus been engraved on her poetical literature, in deep and enduring characters. And, notwithstanding all manifest traces of imitation, the diction of the greatest Roman poets attests the presence of genuine creative power. A strong vital force is recognised in the direct and vigorous diction of Ennius and Lucretius; and, though more latent, it is felt no less really to pervade the stateliness and chastened splendour of Virgil, and the subtle moderation of Horace.

Roman poetry owes also a considerable part of its substance to Greek thought, art, and traditions. This is the chief explanation of that conventional character which detracts from the originality of some of the masterpieces of Roman genius. The old religious belief of Rome and Italy became merged in the poetical restoration of the Olympian G.o.ds; the story of the origin of Rome was inseparably connected with the personages of Greek poetry; the familiar manners of a late civilisation appear in unnatural a.s.sociation with the idealised features of the heroic age. Even the expression of personal feeling, experience, and convictions is often coloured by light reflected from earlier representations. Hence a good deal of Latin poetry appears to fit less closely to the facts of human life, than the best poetry of Greece and of modern nations. This imitative and composite workmanship is more apparent in the later than in the earlier poets. The substance and thought of Ennius, Lucretius, and Catullus, even when they reproduce Greek materials, appear to be more vivified by their own feeling than the substance and thought of the Augustan poets. The beautiful and stately forms of Greek legend, which lived a second life in the young imagination of Catullus, were becoming trite and conventional to Virgil:--

Cetera, quae vacuas tenuissent carmine mentes, Omnia jam vulgata.

The ideal aspect of the golden morning of the world has been seized with a truer feeling in the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis than in the episode of the 'Pastor Aristaeus' in the Georgics. Not only are the main features in the story of the Aeneid of foreign origin, but the treatment of the story betrays some want of vital sympathy with the heterogeneous elements out of which it is composed. The poem is a religious as well as a great national work; but the religious creed which is expressed in it is a composite result of Greek mythology, of Roman sentiment, and of ideas derived from an eclectic philosophy. The manners represented in the poem are a medley of the Augustan and of the Homeric age, as seen in vague proportions, through the mists of antiquarian learning. It must, indeed, be remembered that Greek traditions had penetrated into the life of the whole civilised world, and that the belief in the connexion of Rome with Troy had rooted itself in the Roman mind for two centuries before the time of Virgil.

Still, the tale of the settlement of Aeneas in Latium, as told in the great Roman epics, bears the mark of the artificial construction of a late and prosaic era, not of the spontaneous growth of imaginative legend, in a lively and creative age. So, also, in another sphere of poetry, while there are genuine touches of nature in all the odes of Horace, yet the reproduction of Greek mythology which plays so large a part in many of them is a result of his artistic sympathy, and has not any vital root in his own belief or the beliefs of his age.

Roman poetry, from this point of view, appears to be the old Greek art reappearing under new conditions: or rather the new art of the civilised world, after it had been leavened by Greek thought, taste, and education. The poetry of Rome was, however, a living power, after the creative energy of Greece had disappeared, so that, were it nothing more, that literature would still be valuable as the fruit of the later summer of antiquity. As in Homer, the earliest poet of the ancient world, there is a kind of promise of the great life that was to be; so, in the Augustan poets, there is a retrospective contemplation of the life, the religion, and the art of the past,--a gathering up of 'the long results of time.' But the Roman poets had also a strong vein of original character and feeling, and many phases of national and personal experience to reveal. They had to give a permanent expression to the idea of Rome, and to perpetuate the charm of the land and life of Italy. In their highest tones, they give utterance to the patriotic spirit, the dignified and commanding attributes, and the moral strength of the Imperial Republic. But other elements in their art proclaim their large inheritance of the receptive and emotional nature which, in ancient as in modern times, has characterised the Southern nations. As the patrician and plebeian orders were united in the imperial greatness of the commonwealth, as the energy of Rome and of the other Italian communities was welded together to form a mighty national life, so these apparently antagonistic elements combined to create the majesty and beauty of Roman poetry. Either of these elements would by itself have been unproductive and incomplete. The pure Roman temperament was too austere, too unsympathetic, too restrained and formal, to create and foster a luxuriant growth of poetry: the genial nature of the south, when dissociated from the control of manlier instincts and the elevation of higher ideals, tended to degenerate into licentious effeminacy, both in life and literature. The fragments of the earlier tragic and epic poets indicate the predominance of the gravity and the masculine strength inherent in the Roman temper, almost to the exclusion of the other element. Roman comedy, on the other hand, gave full play to Italian vivacity and sensuousness with only slight restraint from the higher instincts inherited from ancient discipline.

In Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, moral energy and dignity of character are most happily combined with susceptibility to the charm and the power of Nature. Catullus and the elegiac poets of the Augustan age abandoned themselves to the pa.s.sionate enjoyment of their lives, under little restraint either from the pride or the virtue of their forefathers. Their faults and weaknesses are of a type apparently most opposed to the tendencies of the higher Roman character. Yet even these may be looked upon as a kind of indirect testimony to the ancient vigour of the race. Catullus, in his very coa.r.s.eness, betrays the grain of that strong nature, out of which the freedom and energy of the Republic had been developed. Ovid, in his libertinism, displays his vigorous and ardent vitality. The indifference of Tibullus and Propertius to the graver duties and interests of life, looks like a reaction from a standard of manliness too high to be permanently upheld.

Among the most truly Roman characteristics of Latin poetry, national and patriotic sentiment is conspicuous. Among the poets of the Republic, Naevius and Lucilius were animated by political as well as national feeling. The chief work of Ennius was devoted to the commemoration of the ancient traditions, the august inst.i.tutions, the advancing power, and the great character of the Roman State. In the works of the Augustan age, the fine episodes of the Georgics, the whole plan and many of the details of the Aeneid, show the spell exercised over the mind of Virgil by the ancient memories and the great destiny of his country, and bear witness to his deep love of Italy, and his pride in her natural beauty and her strong breed of men. Horace rises above his irony and epicureanism, to celebrate the imperial majesty of Rome, and to bear witness to the purity of the Sabine households, and to the virtues exhibited in the best types of Roman character. The Fasti of Ovid, also, is a national poem, owing its existence to the renewed interest imparted to the mythical and early story of Rome by the establishment of the Empire. The other elegiac poets, though they devote much less of their writings to the subject, yet betray a graver and deeper feeling in the rare pa.s.sages in which they appeal to patriotic memories.

The poets of the latest age of the Republic alone express little sympathy with national or public interests. The time in which they flourished was not favourable to the pride of patriotism or to political enthusiasm. The contemplative genius of Lucretius separated him from the pursuits of active life; and his philosophy taught the lesson that to acquiesce in any government was better than to engage in the strife of personal ambition:--

Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum Quam regere imperio res velle et regna tenere.

Catullus, while eagerly enjoying his life, seems, in regard to the political turmoil of his time, to 'daff the world aside, and bid it pa.s.s': yet there is, as has been well said[3], a rough republican flavour in his careless satire; and he retained to the last, and boldly a.s.serted, what was the earliest, as well as the latest, instinct of ancient liberty--the spirit of resistance to the arbitrary rule of any single man.

Roman poetry is pervaded also by a peculiar vein of imaginative emotion. There is no feeling so characteristic of the higher works of Roman genius as the sense of majesty. This feeling is called forth by the idea or outward manifestation of strength, stability, vastness, and order; by whatever impresses the imagination as the symbol of power and authority, whether in the aspect of Nature, or in the works, actions, and inst.i.tutions of man. It is in their most serious and elevated writings, and chiefly in their epic and didactic poetry, that the Romans show their peculiar susceptibility to this grave and dignified emotion. Even the plain and rude diction of Ennius rises into rugged grandeur when he is moved by the vastness or ma.s.sive strength of outward things, by 'the pomp and circ.u.mstance' of war, or by the august forms and symbols of government. The majestic tones of Lucretius seem to give a voice to the deep feeling of the order and immensity of the universe which possessed him. The sustained dignity of the Aeneid, and the splendour of some of its finest pa.s.sages--such for instance as that which brings before us the solemn and magnificent spectacle of the fall of Troy--attest how the imagination of Virgil was moved to sympathy with the attributes of ancient and powerful sovereignty.

Further, in the fervour and dignity of their moral feeling, the Roman poets are true exponents of the genius of Rome. Their spirit is more authoritative, and less speculative than that of Greek poetry. They speak rather from the will and conscience than from the wisdom that has searched and understood the ways of life. Greek poetry strengthens the will or purifies the heart indirectly, by its truthful representation of the tragic situations in human life; Roman poetry appeals directly to the manlier instincts and more magnanimous impulses of our nature. This glow of moral emotion pervades not the poetry only, but the oratory, history, and philosophy of Rome. It has cast a kind of religious solemnity around the fragments of the early epic, tragic, and satiric poetry: it has given an intenser fervour to the stern consistency and desperate fort.i.tude of Lucretius: it has added the element of strength to the pathos and fine humanity in the Aeneid. It is by his moral, as well as his national enthusiasm, that Horace reveals the Roman gravity that tempered his genial nature. The language of Lucan, Persius, and Juvenal still breathed the same spirit in the deadening atmosphere of the Empire. Of the greater poets of Rome, Catullus alone shows little trace of this grave ardour of feeling, the more usual accompaniment of the firm temper of manhood than of the prodigal genius of youth.

There are, however, as was said above, other feelings expressed in Roman poetry, more akin to modern sympathies. In no other branch of ancient literature is so much prominence given to the enjoyment of Nature, the pa.s.sion of love, and the joys, sorrows, tastes, and pursuits of the individual. The gravity and austerity of the old Roman life, and the predominance of public over private interest in the best days of the Republic, tended to repress, rather than to foster, the birth of these new modes of emotion. They are like the flower of that more luxuriant but less stately Italian life which spread itself abroad under the shadow of Roman inst.i.tutions, and came to a rapid maturity after her conquests had brought to Rome the acc.u.mulated treasures of the world, and left to her more fortunate sons ample leisure to enjoy them.