The Roman Poets of the Republic Part 8

Unus erit quem tu tolles in caerula caeli Templa,--

they are introduced as debating, 'tectis bipatentibus,' on the admission of Romulus into heaven. Again, in the account of the Second Punic War, Jupiter is introduced as promising to the Romans the destruction of Carthage; and Juno abandons her resentment against the descendants of the Trojans,--

Romanis coepit Juno placata favere.

It may be remarked, as a strong proof of the hold which their mythology had on the minds of the ancients, that men so sincere as Ennius and Lucretius, while openly expressing opposition to that system of religious belief, cannot separate themselves from its influence and a.s.sociations in their poetry. But it is not to be supposed that Ennius, in the pa.s.sages just referred to, was merely using an artificial machinery to which he attached no meaning. In this representation of the councils of the G.o.ds, he embodies that faith in the Roman destiny, which was at the root of the most serious convictions of the Romans, in the most sceptical as well as the most believing ages of their history. This, too, is the real belief, which gives meaning to the supernatural agency in the Aeneid. Aeneas is an instrument in the hands of Fate; Jupiter merely foreknows and p.r.o.nounces its decrees; the parts a.s.signed to Juno and Venus, in thwarting and advancing these decrees, seem to be an artistic addition to this original conception, suggested perhaps as much by the experience of female influence and intrigue in the poet's own age as by the memories of the Iliad.

Homer makes his personages known to us in speech as well as in action.

Among epic poets he alone possessed the finest dramatic genius. But over and above the natural dialogue or soliloquy, in which every feeling of his various personages is revealed, he has invested his heroes with the charm of fluent and powerful oratory, in the council of chiefs and before the a.s.sembled people. The words of his speakers pour on, as he says of the words of Odysseus,--

[Greek: niphadessin eoikota cheimeriesi],

in the rapid vehemence of pa.s.sion or the subtle fluency of persuasion.

The fragments of Ennius, on the other hand, scarcely afford sufficient ground for attributing to him a genuine dramatic faculty. But, as the citizen of a republic in which action was first matured in council, and living in the age when public speech first became a recognised power in the State, it was inc.u.mbent on him to embody in 'his abstract and chronicle of the time' the speech of the orator no less than the achievement of the soldier. In his estimate of character this power of speech is honoured as the fitting accompaniment of the wisdom of the statesman. In the following lines, for instance, he laments the subst.i.tution of military for civil preponderance in public affairs.

Pellitur e medio sapientia, vi geritur res: Spernitur orator bonus, horridu' miles amatur: Haut doctis dictis certantes, sed maledictis Miscent inter sese inimicitiam agitantes; Non ex jure manu consertum, sed magi' ferro Rem repetunt, regnumque petunt, vadunt solida vi[42].

Many lines of the Annals are evidently fragments of speeches. The most remarkable of these pa.s.sages is one from a speech of Pyrrhus, and is characterised by Cicero as expressing 'sentiments truly regal and worthy of the race of the Aeacidae[43].' This fragment, although evincing nothing of the fluency, the pa.s.sion, or the argumentative subtlety of debate, yet suggests the power of a great orator by its grave authoritative appeal to the moral dignity of man:--

Nec mi aurum posco, nec mi pretium dederitis: Non cauponantes bellum, sed belligerantes, Ferro non auro vitam cernamus utrique.

Vosne velit an me regnare era quidve ferat Fors, Virtute experiamur. Et hoc simul accipe dictum: Quorum virtutei belli fortuna pepercit, Eorundem libertati me parcere certum est.

Dono ducite, doque volentibu' c.u.m magnis dis[44].

Of the same severe and lofty tone is that appeal of Appius Claudius, blind and in extreme old age, to the Senate, when wavering in its resolution, and inclined to make peace with Pyrrhus:--

Quo vobis mentes rectae quae stare solebant Antehac, dementes sese flexere viai[45]?

As Milton, in his representation of the great debate in Pandemonium, idealised and glorified the stately and serious speech of his own time, so Ennius, in his graphic delineation of the age in which he lived, gave expression to that high magnanimous mood in accordance with which the acts of Roman statesmen were a.s.sailed or vindicated, and the policy of the State was shaped before Senate and people--

indu foro lato sanctoque senatu.

The great poets of human action and pa.s.sion are for the most part to be ranked among the great poets of the outward world. If they do not seem to have penetrated with so much personal sympathy into the inner secret of the life of Nature, as the great contemplative poets of ancient and modern times, yet they show, in different ways, that their sense and imagination were powerfully affected both by her outward beauty and by her manifold energy. Homer, not so much by direct description of the scenes in which the action of his poems is laid, as by many indirect touches, by vivid imagery and picturesque epithets, reveals the openness of his mind to every impression from the outward world, and the fresh delight with which his imagination reproduced the impressions immediately received from the 'world of eye and ear.' If he has left any personal characteristic stamped upon his poetry, it is the trace of adventure and keen enjoyment in the open air, among the most stirring sights and sounds and forces of Nature. The imagery of Virgil is of a more peaceful cast. It seems rather to be 'the harvest of a quiet eye,' gathered in the conscious contemplation of rural beauty, and stored up for after use along with the products of his study and meditation. The fragments of Ennius, on the other hand, afford few indications either of active toil and unconscious enjoyment among the solitudes of Nature, or of the luxurious and pensive susceptibility to beauty by which the poetry of Virgil is pervaded.

He was the poet, not of the woods and rivers, but, essentially, of the city and the camp. No sentiment could appear less appropriate to him than that of Virgil's modest prayer,--

Flumina amem silvasque inglorius.

Yet both in his ill.u.s.trative imagery and in his narrative, he occasionally reproduces with lively force, if not with much poetical ornament, some aspects of the outward world, as well as many real scenes from the world of action.

His imagery is sometimes borrowed from that of Homer; as, for instance, the following simile, which is also imitated by Virgil:--

Et tum sic ut equus, qui de praesepibu' fartus, Vincla suis magnis animis abrupit, et inde Fert sese campi per caerula laetaque prata Celso pectore, saepe jubam qua.s.sat simul altam, Spiritus ex anima calida spumas agit albas[46].

Other ill.u.s.trations are taken from circ.u.mstances likely to have been familiar to the men of his own time, but without any apparent intention of adding poetical beauty to the object he is representing.

Thus the silent expectation with which the a.s.sembled people watch the rival auspices of Romulus and Remus is brought before the mind by an ill.u.s.tration suggested by, and suggestive of, the pa.s.sionate eagerness with which the public games were witnessed by the Romans of his own age:--

Expectant vel uti consul c.u.m mittere signum Volt, omnes avidi spectant ad carceris oras, Quam mox emittat pictis e faucibu' currus[47].

There may be noticed also, in fragments of the narrative, occasional expressions and descriptive touches implying some sense of what is sublime or picturesque in the familiar aspects of the outward world.

The sky, with its starry host, is poetically presented in that expression, which has been adopted by Virgil, 'stellis ingentibus aptum'; and in the following line,

Vert.i.tur interea caelum c.u.m ingentibu' signis.

In the description of the auspices of Romulus, the scene is enlivened by this vivid flash, 'simul aureus exoritur Sol,' following instantaneously upon the appearance of the first bird of omen. A lively sense of natural scenery is implied in these lines from the dream of Ilia--

Nam me visus h.o.m.o pulcher per amoena salicta Et ripas raptare locosque novos;

in this description of a river, afterwards imitated both by Lucretius and Virgil--

Quod per amoenam urbem leni fluit agmine flumen;

and in these lines which recall a familiar pa.s.sage in the Aeneid:--

Jupiter hic risit tempestatesque serenae Riserunt omnes risu Jovis omnipotentis.[48]

The rhythm and the diction of these fragments suggest another point of contrast between the father of Greek and the father of Roman literature. For the old Saturnian verse of the Fauns and Bards, which had been employed by Livius Andronicus and Naevius, Ennius subst.i.tuted the heroic hexameter, which he moulded to the use of Roman poetry, with little art and grace, but with much energy and weight. As he imitated the metre of Homer, he has in several places (as in a simile already quoted, and again in describing the conduct of a brave tribune in the Istrian war), attempted to reproduce his language. Nothing, however, can show more clearly the vast original difference between the genius of Greece and of Rome than the contrast presented between the rhythm and style of their earliest epic poets. In regard for law and civil order, in military and political organisation, in practical power of understanding, and in the command which that power gave them over the world, the Romans of the second century B.C. had made a great and permanent advance beyond the Greeks of the time of Homer. But the Greeks, when they first become known to us, appear in possession of a gift to which all later generations have been unable to attain. The genius of poetry has never, since the time of Homer, appeared in union with a faculty of expression so true and spontaneous, so faultless in purity, so inexhaustible in resources. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than that between the varied and harmonious power of the earliest Greek epic, and the rugged rhythm and diction of the Annals. Yet the very rudeness of that work is significant of the energy of a man who had to accomplish a gigantic task by his own unaided efforts. His ear had not been pa.s.sively trained by the musical echoes transmitted by earlier minstrels; nor did he inherit the fluency and richness of expression which a long line of poets hands on to their successors. While professing to imitate the structure of the Homeric verse, he was unable to seize its finer cadences. Nor had he learned the stricter conditions under which that metre could be adapted to the powerful and weighty movement of the Latin language.

If he did much to establish Latin prosody on principles deviating considerably from those observed by the contemporary comic poets, yet many points which were regulated unalterably for Virgil were left quite unsettled by Ennius. There are found occasionally in these fragments lines without any _caesura_ before the fifth foot, as the following, in one of the longest and least imperfect of his remains--

Corde capessere: semita nulla pedem stabilibat.

and this in a pa.s.sage in which the sound seems intended to imitate the sense--

Poste rec.u.mbite vestraque pectora pellite tonsis.

And though such marked violations of harmony are rare, yet there is a large proportion of lines in which the laws for the caesura observed by later poets are violated. Again, while the final 's' is in most cases not sounded before a word beginning with a consonant (a usage which finally disappears only in the Augustan poets) the final 'm,' on the other hand, is sometimes left without elision before a vowel, as in the following line--

Miscent inter sese inimicitiam agitantes.

The quant.i.ty of syllables and the inflexions of words were so far unsettled, that such lines as the following are read,

Partem fuisset de summis rebu' regendis;

and this,

Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem;

and

Volturus in spinis miserum mandebat h.o.m.onem.

Among the ruder characteristics of his diction, his use of prosaic and technical terms is especially to be noticed. The following lines, for instance, read more like the bare statement of a chronicle, or of a legal doc.u.ment, than an extract from a poetical narrative:--

Cives Romani tunc facti sunt Campani;

and this

Appius indixit Karthaginiensibu' bellum;

and these lines enumerating the various priesthoods established by Numa,--