The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 3

[Footnote 6: Cf. Virg. Aen. vii. 81, 82:--

At rex sollicitus monstris oracula Fauni, Fatidici genitoris, adit.]

[Footnote 7: Cf. Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. 24, note 1.]

[Footnote 8: Livy xxv. 12.]

[Footnote 9: 'Through this fashion the Fescennine raillery arose and poured forth rustic banter in responsive verse; the spirit of freedom, made welcome, as the season came round, first played its part genially; but soon the jests grew cruel, then changed into sheer fury, and began, with impunity, to threaten and a.s.sail honourable households. Men smarted under the sharp edge of its cruel tooth: even those who were una.s.sailed felt concern for the common weal. A law was pa.s.sed, and a penalty enforced, forbidding any one to be lampooned in scurrilous verses. Thus they changed their style, and were brought back to a kindly and pleasant tone, under fear of a beating.'--Epist. ii. 1. 144-55.]

[Footnote 10: Sei quis ocentasit, casmenue condisit, quod infamiam faxsit flacitiomque alterei, fuste feritor.]

[Footnote 11: Teuffel quotes from Festus: Fescennini versus qui canebantur in nuptiis, ex urbe Fescennina dic.u.n.tur allati, sive ideo dicti quia fascinum putabantur arcere. It seems more natural to connect the name of these verses, which were especially characteristic of the Latin peasantry, with fascinum (the phallic symbol) than with any particular town of Etruria, though the name of that town may perhaps have the same origin.]

[Footnote 12: Mommsen's explanation, 'the masque of the full men' ('saturi'), does not seem to meet with general acceptance.]

[Footnote 13: Cf. Teuffel, vi. 2.]

[Footnote 14: vii. 2.]

[Footnote 15: Cf. Teuffel, Wagner's Translation, p. 102.]

[Footnote 16: Tusc. Disp. iv. 2; Brutus, 19.]

[Footnote 17: Noct. Att. xi. 2. A similar character at one time attached to minstrels in Scotland.]

[Footnote 18: Some of these tales may have been originally aetiological, but the human interest even in these was probably drawn originally from actual incidents and personages of the Early Republic. Some of the aetiological myths, such as that of Attus Navius the augur, have no human interest, though they have an historical interest in connexion with early Roman religion or inst.i.tutions.]

[Footnote 19: Cf. Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. 1. 24.]

CHAPTER III.

THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE--LIVIUS ANDRONICUS--CN. NAEVIUS, B.C. 240-202.

The historical event which first brought the Romans into familiar contact with the Greeks, was the war with Pyrrhus and with Tarentum, the most powerful and flourishing among the famous Greek colonies in lower Italy. In earlier times, indeed, through their occasional communication with the Greeks of c.u.mae, and the other colonies in Italy, they had obtained a vague knowledge of some of the legends of Greek poetry. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced at Rome from Epidaurus in B.C. 293, and the oracle of Delphi had been consulted by the Romans in still earlier times. As the Sibylline verses appear to have been composed in Greek, their interpreters must have been either Greeks or men acquainted with that language[1]. The identification of the Greek with the Roman mythology had probably commenced before Greek literature was known to the Romans, although the works of Naevius and Ennius must have had an influence in completing this process. Greek civilisation had come, however, at an earlier period into close relation with the south of Italy; and the natives of that district, such as Ennius and Pacuvius, who first settled at Rome, were spoken of by the Romans as 'Semi-Graeci.' But, until after the fall of Tarentum, there appears to have been no familiar intercourse between the two great representatives of ancient civilisation. Till the war with Pyrrhus, the knowledge that the two nations had of one another was slight and vague. But, immediately after that time, the affairs of Rome began to attract the attention of Greek historians[2], and the Romans, though very slowly, began to obtain some acquaintance with the language and literature of Greece.

Tarentum was taken in B.C. 272, but more than thirty years elapsed before Livius Andronicus represented his first drama before a Roman audience. Twenty years of this intervening period, from B.C. 261 to B.C. 241, were occupied with the First Punic War; and it was not till the successful close of that war, and the commencement of the following years of peace, that this new kind of recreation and instruction was made familiar to the Romans.

Serus enim Graecis admovit ac.u.mina chartis; Et post Punica bella quietus quaerere coepit, Quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent[3].

Two circ.u.mstances, however, must in the meantime have prepared the minds of the Romans for the reception of the new literature. Sicily had been the chief battle-field of the contending powers. In their intercourse with the Sicilian Greeks, the Romans had great facilities for becoming acquainted with the Greek language, and frequent opportunities of being present at dramatic representations. There was a theatre in every important town of Sicily, as may be seen in the ruins still remaining on the sites of Segesta, Syracuse, Tauromenium, and Catana; and the enjoyment of the drama entered largely into the life of the Sicilian, as it had into that of the Italian Greeks. Many Greeks also had been brought to Rome as slaves after the capture of Tarentum, and were employed in educating the young among the higher cla.s.ses. Thus many Roman citizens were prepared, by their circ.u.mstances and education, to take interest in the legends and in the dramatic form of literature introduced from Greece; while the previous existence of the saturae, and other scenic exhibitions at Rome, tended to make the new comic drama at least acceptable to the ma.s.s of the population.

The earliest period of Roman poetry extends from the close of the First Punic War till the beginning of the first century B.C. During this period of about a century and a half, in which Roman oratory, history, and comedy, were also actively cultivated, we hear only of five or six names as eminent in different kinds of serious poetry. The whole labour of introducing and of keeping alive, among an unlettered people, some taste for the graver forms of literature thus devolved upon a few men of ardent temperament, vigorous understanding, and great productive energy, but with little sense of art, and endowed with faculties seemingly more adapted to the practical business of life than to the idealising efforts of genius. They had to struggle against the difficulties incidental to the first beginnings of art and to the rudeness of the Latin language. They were exposed, also, to other disadvantages, arising from the natural indifference of the ma.s.s of the people to all works of imagination, and from the preference of the educated cla.s.s for the more finished works already existing in Greek literature.

Yet this long period, in which poetry, with so much difficulty and such scanty resources, struggled into existence at Rome, is connected with the age of Cicero by an unbroken line of literary continuity.

Naevius, the younger contemporary of Livius, and the first native poet, was actively engaged in the composition of his poems till the time of his death; about which period his greater successor first appeared at Rome. For about thirty years, Ennius shone alone in epic and tragic poetry. The poetic successor of Ennius was his nephew, Pacuvius. He, in the later years of his life, lived in friendly intercourse with his younger rival Accius, who, again, in his old age, had frequently conversed with Cicero[4]. The torch, which was first lighted by Livius Andronicus from the decaying fires of Greece, was thus handed down by these few men, through this long period, until it was extinguished during the stormy times which fell in the youth of the great orator and prose writer of the Republic.

The forms of serious poetry, prevailing during this period, were the tragic drama, the annalistic epic, and satire. Tragedy was earliest introduced, was received with most favour, and was cultivated by all the poets of the period, with the exception of Lucilius and the comic writers. The epic poetry of the age was the work of Naevius and Ennius. It has greater claims to originality and national spirit, both in form and substance, and it exercised a more powerful influence on the later poetry of Rome, than either the tragedy or comedy of the time. The invention of satire, the most purely original of the three, is generally attributed to Lucilius; but the satiric spirit was shown earlier in some of the dramas of Naevius; and the first modification of the primitive satura to a literary shape was the work of Ennius, who was followed in the same style by his nephew Pacuvius.

No complete work of any of these poets has been preserved to modern times. Our knowledge of the epic, tragic, and satiric poetry of this long period is derived partly from ancient testimony, but chiefly from the examination of numerous fragments. Most of these have been preserved, not by critics on account of their beauty and worth, but by grammarians on account of the obsolete words and forms of speech contained in them,--a fact, which probably leads us to attribute to the earlier literature a more abnormal and ruder style than that which really belonged to it. A few of the longest and most interesting fragments have come down in the works of the admirers of those ancient poets, especially of Cicero and Aulus Gellius. The notion that can be formed of the early Roman literature must thus, of necessity, be incomplete. Yet these fragments are sufficient to produce a consistent impression of certain prevailing characteristics of thought and sentiment. Many of them are valuable from their own intrinsic worth; others again from the grave a.s.sociations connected with their antiquity, and from the authentic evidence they afford of the moral and intellectual qualities, the prevailing ideas and sympathies of the strongest race of the ancient world, about, or shortly after, the time when they attained the acme of their moral and political greatness.

The two earliest authors who fill a period of forty years in the literary history of Rome, extending from the end of the First to the end of the Second Punic War, are Livius Andronicus and Cn. Naevius. Of the first very little is known. The fragments of his works are scanty and unimportant, and have been preserved by grammarians merely as ill.u.s.trative of old forms of the language. The admirers of Naevius and Ennius, in ancient times, awarded only scanty honours to the older dramatist. Cicero, for instance, says of his plays 'that they are not worth reading a second time[5].' The importance which attaches to Livius consists in his being the accidental medium through which literary art was first introduced to the Romans. He was a Greek, and, as is generally supposed, a native of Tarentum. He educated the sons of his master, M. Livius Salinator, from whom he afterwards received his freedom. The last thirty years of his life were devoted to literature, and chiefly to the reproduction of the Greek drama in a Latin dress. His tragedies appear all to have been founded on Greek subjects; most of them, probably, were translations. Among the t.i.tles, we hear of the _Aegisthus_, _Ajax_, _Equus Troja.n.u.s_, _Tereus_, _Hermione_, etc.--all of them subjects which continued to be popular with the later tragedians of Rome. No fragment is preserved sufficient to give any idea of his treatment of the subjects, or of his general mode of thought and feeling. Little can be gathered from the scanty remains of his works, except some idea of the harshness and inelegance of his diction.

In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. This work long retained its place as a school-book, and is spoken of by Horace as forming part of his own early lessons under the rod of Orbilius[6]. One or two lines of the translation still remain, and exemplify its rough and prosaic diction, and the extreme irregularity of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey[7],

[Greek: ou gar egoge ti phemi kakoteron allo thala.s.ses andra ge syncheuai, ei kai mala karteros eie],

are thus rendered:--

Namque nilum pejus Macerat hemonem, quamde mare saevom, viris quoi Sunt magnae, topper confringent importunae undae.

He was appointed also, on one occasion, near the end of the Second Punic War, to compose a hymn to be sung by 'virgines ter novenae,' which is described by Livy, the historian, as rugged and unpolished[8].

Livius was the schoolmaster of the Roman people rather than the father of their literature. To accomplish what he did required no original genius, but only the industry, knowledge, and tastes of an educated man. In spite of the disadvantage of writing in a foreign language, and of addressing an unlettered people, he was able to give the direction which Roman poetry long followed, and to awaken a new interest in the legends and heroes of his race. It was necessary that the Romans should be educated before they could either produce or appreciate an original poet. Livius performed a useful, if not a brilliant service, by directing those who followed him to the study and imitation of the great masters who combined, with an unattainable grace and art, a masculine strength and heroism of sentiment congenial to the better side of Roman character.

Cn. Naevius is really the first in the line of Roman poets, and the first writer in the Latin language whose fragments give indication of original power. It has been supposed that he was a Campanian by birth, on the authority of Aulus Gellius, who characterised his famous epitaph as 'plenum superbiae Campanae.' But the phrase 'Campanian arrogance' seems to have been used proverbially for 'gasconade'; and as there was a plebeian _Gens Naevia_ in Rome, it is quite as probable that he was by birth a Roman citizen. The strong political partisanship displayed in his plays seems favourable to this supposition, as is also the active interference of the tribunes on his behalf. Weight must however be given to the remark of Mommsen, 'the hypothesis that he was not a Roman citizen, but possibly a citizen of Cales or of some other Latin town in Campania, renders the fact that the Roman police treated him so unscrupulously the more easy of explanation.' On the other hand it has been observed that had he been an alien the tribunes could not have interfered on his behalf. He served either in the Roman army or among the _Socii_ in the First Punic War, and thus must have reached manhood before the year 241 B.C.

Cicero mentions that he lived to a good old age, and that he died in exile about the end of the third century B.C.[9]. The date of his birth may thus be fixed with approximate probability about the year 265 B.C. No particulars of his military service are recorded, but it is most probable that the scene of his service was the west of Sicily, on which the struggle was concentrated during the later years of the war. If we connect the newly developed taste for the drama with the intercourse of Romans with Sicilian Greeks during the war, we may connect another important influence on Roman literature and Roman belief which first appeared in the epic poem of Naevius with the Phoenician settlements in the west of Sicily. The origin of the belief in the mythical connexion of Aeneas and his Trojans with the foundation of Rome may probably be attributed to the Sicilian historian Timaeus; but the contact of the Romans and the Carthaginians in the neighbourhood of Mount Eryx, may have suggested that part of the legend which plays so large a part in the Aeneid, which brings Aeneas from Sicily to Carthage and back again to the neighbourhood of Mount Eryx. The actual collision of Roman and Phoenician on the western sh.o.r.es of Sicily, of which Naevius may well have been a witness, if it did not originate, gave a living interest to the mythical origin of that antagonism in the relations of Aeneas and Dido.

The earliest drama of Naevius was brought out in B.C. 235, five years after the first representation of Livius Andronicus. The number of dramas which he is known to have composed affords proof of great industry and activity, from that time till the time of his banishment from Rome. He was more successful in comedy than in tragedy, and he used the stage, as it had been used by the writers of the old Attic comedy, as an arena of popular invective and political warfare. A keen partisan of the commonalty, he attacked with vehemence some of the chiefs of the great senatorian party. A line, which had pa.s.sed into a proverb in the time of Cicero, is attributed to him,--

Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules;

to which the Metelli are said to have replied in the pithy Saturnian,

Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae.

In the year 206 B.C. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M.

Metellus Praetor Urba.n.u.s, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested[10], with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed.

The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circ.u.mstance to which Plautus[11] alludes in one of the few pa.s.sages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circ.u.mstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the _Hariolus_ and _Leon_), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in B.C. 204[12], though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date[13]. It is inferred, from a pa.s.sage in Cicero[14], that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between B.C. 261 and B.C. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

The best known of all the fragments of Naevius, and the most favourable specimen of his style, is his epitaph:--

Mortales immortales flere si foret fas, Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam, Itaque postquam est Orcino traditus thesauro, Obliti sunt Romae loquier Latina lingua.

It has been supposed that this epitaph was written as a dying protest against the h.e.l.lenising influence of Ennius; but as Ennius came to Rome for the first time about B.C. 204, it is not likely, even if the life of Naevius was prolonged somewhat beyond that date, that the fame and influence of his younger rival could have spread so rapidly as to disturb the peace of the old poet in his exile. It might as fairly be regarded as proceeding from a jealousy of the merits of Plautus, as from hostility to the innovating tendency of Ennius. The words of the epitaph are simply expressive of the strong self-a.s.sertion and independence which Naevius maintained till the end of his active and somewhat turbulent career.

He wrote a few tragedies, of which scarcely anything is known except the t.i.tles,--such as the _Andromache_, _Equus Troja.n.u.s_, _Hector Proficiscens_, _Lycurgus_,--the last founded on the same subject as the Bacchae of Euripides. The t.i.tles of nearly all these plays, as well as of the plays of Livius, imply the prevailing interest taken in the Homeric poems, and in all the events connected with the Trojan War. The following pa.s.sage from the Lycurgus has some value as containing the germs of poetical diction:--

Vos, qui regalis corporis custodias Agitatis, ite actutum in frundiferos locos, Ingenio arbusta ubi nata sunt, non obsita[15].

He composed a number of comedies, and also some original plays, founded on events in Roman history,--one of them called _Romulus_, or _Alimonia Romuli et Remi_. The longest of the fragments attributed to him is a pa.s.sage from a comedy, which has been, with less probability, attributed to Ennius. It is a description of a coquette, and shows considerable power of close satiric observation:--

Quasi pila In choro ludens datatim dat se, et communem facit: Alii adnutat, alii adnictat, alium amat, alium tenet; Alibi ma.n.u.s est occupata, alii percellit pedem; Alii spectandum dat annulum; a labris alium invocat; c.u.m alio cantat, attamen dat alii digito literas[16].

The chief characteristic ill.u.s.trated by the scanty fragments of his dramas is the political spirit by which they were animated. Thus Cicero[17] refers to a pa.s.sage in one of his plays (_ut est in Naevii ludo_) where, to the question, 'Who had, within so short a time, destroyed your great commonwealth?' the pregnant answer is given,