The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 16

[Footnote 28: 'Glad at their starting, they watch the play of the fish, and are never weary of watching them. Meanwhile, nearly at sunset, the sea grows rough, darkness gathers, the blackness of night and of the storm-clouds hides the world, the lightning flashes between the clouds, the heaven is shaken with the thunder, hail mixed with torrents of rain dashes down in sudden showers; from all quarters all the winds burst forth, the wild whirlwinds arise, the sea boils with the surging waters.'--Quoted partly from Cic. De Div. i. 14; partly from De Orat. iii. 39.]

[Footnote 29: 'The groaning of the ships' tackling, the dashing together of the ships, the uproar, the crash, the rattle of the thunder, and the whistling of the ropes.']

[Footnote 30: 'Give me your foot, that with the brown waters I may wash away the brown dust with those hands with which I have often rubbed gently the feet of Ulysses, and with my hands' softness soothe your weariness.']

[Footnote 31: 'It represented the deeds of Roman kings and generals: hence it is evident that at least it wanted the unity of time of the Greek tragedy; that it was a history like Shakspeare's.'--Niebuhr's Roman History, vol. i. note 1150.]

[Footnote 32: Brutus, 28.]

[Footnote 33: 'Decimus quidem Brutus, summus ille vir et imperator, Accii, amicissimi sui, carminibus templorum ac monumentorum aditus exornavit suorum.'--Chap. 11.]

[Footnote 34: Hist. Nat. x.x.xiv. 10: 'Notatum ab auctoribus, et L. Accium poetam in Camenarum aede maxima forma statuam sibi posuisse, c.u.m brevis admodum fuisset.']

[Footnote 35: Pro Plancio, 24.]

[Footnote 36: De Orat. iii. 58.]

[Footnote 37: 'Tereus, in his wild mood and savage spirit, gazed upon her, maddened with burning pa.s.sion, quite desperate; in his madness, he resolves a cursed deed.']

[Footnote 38: 'Withdraw him within: for the lofty dignity of his aspect has moved my mind to compa.s.sion.']

[Footnote 39: 'That man indeed we pity whose n.o.bleness gives distinction to his misery.']

[Footnote 40: 'Dost thou not know, that whatever rank fortune has a.s.signed to a man, no meanness of station ever weakens a fine nature?']

[Footnote 41: 'This was the part of a man, to bear adversity easily.']

[Footnote 42: 'Though fortune could strip me of kingdom and wealth, it cannot strip me of my virtue.']

[Footnote 43: 'No nature is so strong, no breast so savage, which is not shaken by words, does not melt at misfortune.']

[Footnote 44: 'I trust not those augurs, who enrich the ears of others with their words, that they may enrich their own houses with gold.' There is of course a pun on the _auris_ and _auro_.]

[Footnote 45: 'O king, what men usually do in life, what they think about, care about, see,--their pursuits and occupations, when awake,--if these occur to any one in sleep, it is not wonderful.']

[Footnote 46: 'So huge a ma.s.s is approaching--sounding from the deep with a mighty rushing noise; it rolls the waves before it, forces through the eddies, plunges forward, throws up and dashes back the sea.'--Quoted in Cic. De Nat. Deor. ii.

35.]

[Footnote 47: 'Lying beneath the pole by the seven stars, whence the bl.u.s.tering roar of the north-wind drives before it the chill snows.']

[Footnote 48: 'By chance before the dawn, harbinger of burning rays, when the husbandmen bring forth the oxen from their rest into the fields, that they may break the red, dew-sprinkled soil with the plough, and turn up the clods from the soft soil.']

[Footnote 49: 'That rock makes the pa.s.sage narrow, and from beneath that rock a spring gushing out sweeps past the river's bank.']

[Footnote 50: Inst. Or. x. i. 99.]

CHAPTER VI.

ROMAN COMEDY. PLAUTUS. ABOUT 254 TO 184 B.C.

The era in which Roman epic and tragic poetry arose was also the flourishing era of Roman comedy. A later generation looked back on the age of Ennius and Plautus as an age of great poets, who had pa.s.sed away:--

Ea tempestate flos poetarum fuit Qui nunc abierunt hinc in communem loc.u.m[1].

And among these poets the writers of comedy were both most numerous and apparently the most popular in their own time[2]. Besides the names of Naevius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence, we know the names of other comic poets of less fame[3], and from allusions in the extant plays of Plautus[4] and in the prologues of Terence we infer that there were other compet.i.tors for public favour whose names were unknown to a later generation. In the Ciceronian age the works of these forgotten playwrights were for the most part attributed to Plautus, probably with the view of gaining some temporary popularity for them. In the time of Gellius no fewer than 130 plays pa.s.sed under his name; among these, twenty-one were regarded as undoubtedly his, nineteen more as probably genuine, and the rest as spurious. They were however all of the cla.s.s of _palliatae_; and as the _fabulae togatae_ seem, after the time of Terence, to have been composed in much greater number than those founded on Greek originals, most of them must have belonged to the first half of the second century B.C. Plays of a later date would have clearly shown by their diction that they were not the work of Plautus.

Although this form of literature has little in common with the higher Roman mood, and exercised comparatively slight influence on the style and sentiment of later Roman poetry[5], yet no review of the creative literature of the Republican period would be complete without some attempt to estimate the value of the comedy of Plautus and Terence.

The difficulty of doing so adequately arises from an opposite cause to that which makes our judgment on the art and genius of the Roman tragic poets so incomplete. In the latter case we know what was the character of their Greek models; but we can only conjecture from a number of unconnected fragments, how far the copy deviated in tone and spirit from the original. On the other hand, while we have between twenty and thirty specimens of Latin comedy, we have no finished work of Greek art in the same style, with which to compare them. It makes a great difference in our opinion, not only of the genius of the Roman poets, but of the productive force of the Roman mind, whether we regard Plautus and Terence as facile translators, or as writers of creative originality who filled up the outlines which they took from the new comedy of Athens with matter drawn from their own observation and invention. It makes a great difference in the literary interest of these works, whether we regard them as blurred copies of pictures from later Greek life, or, like so much else in Roman literature, as compositions which, while Greek in form, are yet in no slight degree Roman or Italian in substance, character, life, and sentiment. How far can we answer these questions, either by general considerations, or by a special attention to the actual products of Latin comedy which we possess?

We have seen that there was a certain apt.i.tude in the graver Roman spirit for tragedy:--

Nam spirat tragic.u.m satis et feliciter audet.

The rhetorical character of Roman education and the rhetorical tendencies of the Roman mind secured favour for this kind of composition till the age of Quintilian. His dictum 'in comoedia maxime claudicamus,' on the other hand, implies that the educated taste of Romans under the Empire did not find much that was congenial in the works of Plautus, Caecilius, or Terence. The tone of Horace is more contemptuous towards Plautus than towards Ennius and the tragic poets.

While tragedy continued to be cultivated by eminent writers in the Augustan age and early Empire, few original comedies seem to have been written after the beginning of the first century B.C.[6] The higher efforts of the comic muse were almost, if not entirely, superseded by the Mimus. These considerations show that comedy was not congenial to the educated or the uneducated taste of Romans in the last years of the Republic, and in the early Empire. But, on the other hand, the popularity enjoyed by the old comedy between the time of Naevius and of Terence, and even down to the earlier half of the Ciceronian age, when some of the great parts in Plautus continued to be performed by the 'accomplished Roscius,' and the admiration expressed for its authors by grammarians and critics, from Aelius Stilo down to Varro and Cicero, show its adaptation to an earlier and not less vigorous, if less refined stage of intellectual development; while the actual survival of many Roman comedies can only be accounted for by a more real adaptation to human nature, both in style and substance, than was attained by Roman tragedy in its straining after a higher ideal of sentiment and expression.

The task undertaken by Naevius and Plautus was indeed a much easier one than that accomplished by the early writers of tragedy. They were not called upon to create a new taste, or to gratify a taste recently acquired in Sicily and the towns of Magna Graecia. They had only to give ampler and more defined form, fuller and more coherent substance, to a kind of entertainment which was indigenous in Italy. The improvised 'Saturae'--'dramatic medleys or farces with musical accompaniment'--had been represented on Roman holidays for more than a century before the first performance of a regular play by Livius Andronicus. And these 'Saturae' had been themselves developed partly out of the older Fescennine dialogues--the rustic raillery of the vintage and the harvest-home,--partly out of mimetic dances imported from Etruria. Another kind of dramatic entertainment, the 'Osc.u.m ludicrum,' which was developed into the literary form of the 'fabulae Atellanae,' with its standing characters of Maccus, Pappus, Bucco, and Dossennus, had been transferred to the city from the provinces of southern Italy, and ultimately became so popular as to be performed, not by professional actors, but by the free-born youth of Rome. The extant comedies of Plautus show considerable traces of both of these kinds of entertainment, both in the large place a.s.signed to the 'Cantica,' which were accompanied by music and gesticulation[7], and in the farcical exaggeration of some of his characters, which provoked the criticism of Horace,--

Quantus sit Dossennus edacibus in parasitis.

The ma.s.s of Roman citizens, both rural and urban, was thus prepared by their festive traditions and habits to welcome the introduction of comedy, just as they were prepared by their political traditions and apt.i.tudes to welcome the appearance of a popular orator.

Naevius and Plautus might thus be poets of the people more truly than any later Roman poet could be. The career of Naevius, and the public and personal elements which he introduced into his plays, afford evidence of his desire to use his position as a popular poet for political ends. His imprisonment and subsequent banishment equally attest the determination of the governing cla.s.s to allow no criticism on public men or affairs, nor anything derogatory to the majesty of the State and the dignified forms of Roman life, to be heard on the stage. Plautus, though prevented either by his own temperament or the vigilance of state-censorship from directly acting on the political sympathies of the commons, maintained the thoroughly popular character of Roman comedy, and poured a strongly national spirit into the forms which he adopted from Greece. Between the death of Plautus and that of Terence there was no cessation in the productiveness of Roman comedy; but the little that is known of Caecilius, and the evidence afforded by the plays of Terence, show that Roman comedy had now begun to appeal to a different cla.s.s of sympathies. The ascendency of Ennius in Roman literature immensely widened the gulf which always separates an educated from an uneducated cla.s.s. One of the great sources of interest in Plautus is that he flourished before this separation became marked, while the upper cla.s.ses were yet comparatively rude and simple in their requirements, and the ma.s.s of the people were yet hearty and vigorous in their enjoyments. The popularity of his plays revived again after the death of Terence, and maintained itself till nearly the end of the Republic, a proof that his genius was not only in harmony with his own age, but satisfied a permanent vein of sentiment in his countrymen, so long as they retained anything of their native vigour and republican spirit. The fact that Roman comedy was not congenial to the educated taste of the early Empire is no proof of its want of originality. It was in harmony with an earlier stage in the development of the Roman people. Had that been all, it might have been completely lost, or preserved only in fragments like those of the Satire of Lucilius. But as being the heir of an older popular kind of composition it enjoyed the advantage, possessed by none of the more artificial forms of poetry introduced at this period, of a fresh, copious, popular, and idiomatic diction. The comic poets of Rome alone inherited, like the epic poets of Greece, a vehicle of expression formed by the improvised utterance of several generations.

The greater fluency of style and the greater ease of rhythmical movement, thus enjoyed by the early comedy, is the most obvious explanation of its permanent hold on the world. But the mere merits of language would scarcely have secured permanence to these compositions apart from the cosmopolitan human interest derived from the Greek originals on which they were founded, and from the strong vitality which the earlier Roman poet drew from the great time into which he was born, and the refined art for which the younger poet was partly indebted to the circle of high-born, aspiring, and accomplished youths into which he was admitted.

Our chief authorities for the life of Plautus are a short statement of Jerome, one or two slight notices in Cicero, and a somewhat longer pa.s.sage in Aulus Gellius (iii. 3. 14). As he died at an advanced age, in the year 184 B.C.[8] (during the censorship of Cato), he must have been born about the middle of the third century B.C. He was thus a younger contemporary of Naevius, and somewhat older than Ennius. His birthplace was Sarsina in Umbria. That this district must have been thoroughly Latinised in the time of Plautus, is attested by the idiomatic force and purity of his style[9]. He probably came early to Rome, and was at first engaged 'in operis artific.u.m scenicorum,'--in some kind of employment connected with the stage. He saved money in this service, and lost it all in foreign trade,--what he himself calls 'marituma negotia'[10]. Returning to Rome in absolute poverty, he was reduced to work as a hired servant in a mill; and while thus employed he first began to write comedies. The names of two of these early works, _Saturio_ and _Addictus_, have been preserved by Gellius.

From this time till his death he seems to have been a most rapid and productive writer. We have no means of determining at what date he began to write. A pa.s.sage quoted from Cicero has been thought to imply that he was writing for the stage during the life-time of P. and Cn.

Scipio, i.e. before 212 B.C. But the earliest allusion to contemporary events that we find in any of his extant plays, is that in the Miles Gloriosus, to the imprisonment of Naevius, probably in 206-5 B.C.[11]

We have no certainty that any of the extant plays were written before that date, although the mention of Hiero in the Menaechmi, and the use of some more than usually archaic inflexions in that play, have been supposed to indicate an earlier date for it. Of the other plays, the Cistellaria and Stichus were written within a year or two of the Second Punic War[12]. The larger number of the extant comedies belong to the last ten years of the poet's life. His plays do not seem to have been published as literary works during his life-time, but to have been left in possession of the acting companies, by whom pa.s.sages may have been interpolated and others omitted, before they were finally reduced into a literary shape. Most of the prologues to his plays belong to a later time, probably that of the generation after his death[13]. Of the twenty-one plays which Varro accepted, on the ground of their intrinsic merits, as certainly genuine, we possess twenty, and fragments of the remaining one, the _Vidularia_. The names of some other genuine plays, such as the _Saturio_, _Addictus_, and _Commorientes_, are also known to us.

How far are we able to fill up this meagre outline by personal indications of the poet left on his works? In the case of any dramatist this is always difficult; and Plautus is not in form only, but in spirit, essentially dramatic. Nothing marks the difference between the popular and the aristocratic tendencies of Roman thought and literature more than the entire absence of any didactic tendency in his plays. He does not think of making his hearers better by his representations, nor does he believe that it is possible to do so[14].

He identifies himself as heartily for the time being with his rogues of both s.e.xes as with his rarer specimens of honest men and virtuous women. He seldom indulges in reflexions on life. When he does so it is by the mouth of a slave, who winds up the unfamiliar process in some such way as Pseudolus, 'sed iam satis est philosophatum[15],' or in the lyrical self-reproaches of some prodigal, whose good resolutions vanish on the reappearance of his mistress. Among the innumerable terms of reproach which one slave addresses to another, none is expressive of more withering contempt than the term 'philosophe[16].'

But even if we could trace any predominant sympathies in Plautus, or any special vein of reflexion which might seem to throw light on his own experience, some doubt would always remain as to whether he was not in these pa.s.sages reproducing his original. The loss of many of his prologues deprives us of the kind of knowledge of his circ.u.mstances and position which Terence affords us in his prologues.

Even the 'asides' to the spectators, which often occur in Plautus, may in many cases be due to the comedians of a later time.

Yet perhaps it is not impossible to enlarge our notion of his personal circ.u.mstances and characteristics by tracing some hints of them in his extant works.

We find one reference to his birthplace, in the form of a bad pun altogether devoid of any trace of sentiment or affection[17].

He mentions other districts or towns in Italy in the tone of half-humorous, half-contemptuous indifference, which a Londoner of last, or a Parisian of the present century, might adopt to the provinces[18]. More than one allusion indicates that the citizens of Praeneste were especially regarded as b.u.t.ts by the wits of Rome[19].

The contempt of the town for the country also appears unmistakeably in the dialogue between Grumio and Tranio in the 'Mostellaria[20],' and in the boorish manners of the country lover in the 'Truculentus.' In the eyes of a town-bred wit the chief use of the country is to supply elm-rods for the punishment of pert or refractory slaves. A large number of his ill.u.s.trations are taken from the handicrafts of the city, but very few are indicative of familiarity with rustic occupations. There is no breath of the poetry of rural nature in Plautus. If he betrays any poetical sensibility to natural influences at all, it is to be found in pa.s.sages in which the aspects of the sea, in calm or storm, are recalled. Mommsen speaks of 'a most remarkable a.n.a.logy in many external points between Plautus and Shakespeare[21].

'Yet there is contrast rather than a.n.a.logy in the impression left upon their respective works by the a.s.sociations of their early homes.

On the other hand we find, in many of his plays, traces of intimate familiarity with the adventures of a mercantile life. It is most probable that some of the pa.s.sages in which these appear would have been found in his originals had they been preserved to us. Yet the emotions of thankfulness for a safe return to harbour, or of curiosity and pleasure in landing at a strange town[22], are expressed so frequently and with such liveliness as to seem like the reminiscence of personal experience. We get, somehow, the impression of one who had travelled widely, had 'seen the cities of many men and learned their minds,' had marked with humorous observation many varieties of character, had taken note, but without any special aesthetic sensibility, of the works of art which were scattered throughout the h.e.l.lenic cities, had shared in the pleasures which these cities held out freely to their visitors, and had encountered the dangers of the sea not without some sense of their sublimity and picturesqueness[23].

The G.o.d most frequently appealed to in prayer or thanksgiving is Neptune[24]. The colloquial use of Greek phrases in many of his plays seems to imply a familiar habit of employing them, in active intercourse with Greeks on his maritime adventures. The day-dream of Gripus, after finding his treasure, might almost be taken as a humorous comment on the various motives of curiosity and mercantile enterprise by which he himself was prompted to become engaged in maritime speculation:--