TENNEY FRANK

Life
and
Literature
IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 1957

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
Cambridge University Press
London, England

Copyright, 1930, by
The Regents of the University of California

Originally published as Volume Seven of the
Sather Classical Lectures
Third printing
(First Paper-bound Edition, Second printing)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL FORCES

The story of intellectual pioneering, visualized with difficulty, has not the thrill of a Marco Polo diary, but to the intelligent it has a deeper fascination. Our records are, however, very brief, spanning a few thousand out of many hundred thousand years. What we can review is a small fraction of the whole story. If the human race is more than 300,000 years old, man’s artistic literature is less than 3000: our segment of sure knowledge is less than one per cent of the amazing tale. If the biologist is willing to pry into the strata of a hundred million years to trace the evolution of plant and animal life, it is hardly conceivable that the humanist should disregard any part of our pitifully meager record of spiritual endeavor. This is my excuse for inviting attention to the first efforts of the Romans to express themselves in literary form.

In attempting to tell a part of this story I have chosen to notice especially how the writers of the period responded to their environment, because this aspect of the theme has been somewhat neglected in recent studies of Roman literature. This is of course not a novel method of approach. Taine, for instance, drove the hobby of environmental determinism at a gallop that ought to satisfy the most optimistic behaviorist, and his immediate followers never checked the rein. The method has since had its more deliberate devotees. English classicists in particular, who have usually studied history and literature together, have generally kept a sane and fruitful coordination of men and their milieu. During the last three decades, however, there has been so strong a trend toward deep and narrow specialization in our own universities that here the literary historian has been tempted to neglect social, political, and artistic history with unfortunate results. For instance, the scholar who studies classical prose forms has often kept his eye so intent upon the accumulation of rhetorical rules from Gorgias to Cicero that he has given us a history of a futile scholastic mechanism and not of an ever-vitalized prose which in fact re-created its appropriate medium with every new generation. The scholastic critics of the Roman lyric are sometimes so intent upon tracing external conventions through the centuries that they miss the soul of the poetry that assumes temporarily the mold of the convention. The same is true of all the literary forms. “Sources and influences,” as traceable in words, phrases, and literary customs, things which after all seldom explain creative inspiration, are rather attractive game to men of good verbal memories and are likely to entice them away from the larger work of penetrating comprehension. Beethovan’s fifth symphony receives little illumination from program notes pedantically informing us that the “fate motif” is a borrowed phrase.

Here and there a reaction against an exaggerated reiteration of literary influences has driven critics into the school of those who prefer to approach literature as a “pure” art. Such critics seem to justify their doctrine when they confine their analysis to the more transcendental passages of Shakespeare or Keats, Catullus or Sophocles. When dealing, however, with Dante, Goethe, Vergil, Milton, and in fact with most poets of generous social sympathies, they give a very inadequate account of the poetic product. Modern aesthetics have been teaching us how warm with subjective interpretation is that thing we call beauty. Apparently there is no such thing, even in poetry, as pure, objective, absolute art uniformly sustained. In fact no school of criticism has as yet formulated a doctrine wide enough to compass the broad ranges of artistic creation, nor need we expect an adequate science of aesthetics unless psychology can become scientific.

The protest on the part of one vociferous school of humanists that literary criticism must disregard history and biography is beside the mark so long as our prying minds insist on prying. Contemporaneous literature, of course, deserves first of all to be approached with the aesthetic perceptions all alert, and since the reader lives in the same world as the writer the scant exegesis that may be necessary can be absorbed unconsciously from the text itself. But any great literature of the far past becomes to us, in so far as we are normal humans, something besides art. It is also a body of documents that anyone at all interested in the progress of art, of ideas, or of society in any of its groupings, may find very precious, and he will persist in using it as documentary despite all the protests of jealous literary criticism. For Greece and Rome our documents are none too abundant in any case. It is a very petty humanism that dares insist that no one may touch Vergil or Spenser except and only for aesthetic delight and judgments. It is of course wholly legitimate to read Dante for his haunting lines and his stupendous imagery, but many of us insist on the added privilege of transporting ourselves into his mysterious world of strange ideas if only to read him as did his contemporaries. The true humanist in any case is interested in more than artistic expression, and the humanist who deals with remote literature must be, perforce.

It is of course only fair to say that in calling attention to milieu we would not deny that the innate endowment of each author is and must be considered the prime factor in creative work, while admitting that it may be the most elusive item to analyze. Modern biology insists upon the reality of inheritance, though it also warns us that this inheritance is so complex that it has hitherto escaped analysis and predetermination. We all admit that the study of social or literary atmosphere or of individual training will not explain the passionate force of Catullus, the voluble humor of Plautus, or Cicero’s ear for harmony of sound. However, like Horace in his Ars Poetica, we can do little but admit the facts, recognize the qualities, and proceed to the study of the provocative stimuli.

Moreover, there are special reasons for attempting to place Roman writers in their environment. One is that the evidence regarding the status of Roman society is so scant and so scattered that the casual reader cannot be expected to have a correct understanding of it, and even the specialist is apt to neglect the severe task of reconstructing the social staging. As a result the literary history of the classics too often leaves us with the incorrect feeling that we have there only cold impersonal conventions.

Another is that the milieu is so different from our own that the imagination when left unguarded is in danger of modernizing ancient life and ancient expression to such an extent as to distort both scenery and actors. This is not questioning the fact that the Greeks and Romans were precisely like us. Their bodies had the same capacities, needs, and passions as ours, their senses received impressions as ours, their brains met problems by the same logical processes as ours, despite the amusing claim of the pragmatists that they are just now teaching the true art of “operational thinking.” In these respects the advanced races seem to have reached full development very far back in prehistoric times, many millenia before Homer. The pseudo-anthropology which a few years ago assumed that the study of Hottentot psychology might be useful to the student of Plato joked itself off the stage. The critics who tried to persuade us that the romantic sentiment came into being less than a thousand years ago seem equally ludicrous now. We need not repeat the egregious error of Spengler in confounding mental capacities with temporary conventions of expression that tried to respond to environmental need.

But while granting that human nature was then what it is now, it is important to comprehend the diversity of the customs, fashions, traditions, conventions, and social needs which evoked an appropriate artistic expression that consequently differs from our own. Love and hate doubtless stirred very similar physical sensations in Catullus, in Dante, and in Tennyson, but the words which these three poets used to express those emotions in verses published for their own readers have very different connotations, because the conventions of their respective periods called for a different series of suppressions and revelations. None of the three can be translated directly into the language of any of the others without evoking erroneous impressions. The pagan directness of Catullus’ lines, the Platonic connotations of the Nuova Vita, the Christian romanticism of Tennyson are worlds apart, not because the human being changes but because his environment does. The devotees of nudity who know only the idiom of their own day may accuse Thackeray of hypocrisy because they have not learned to translate him; but that is not literary criticism. Those who miss in Latin poetry the delight in the outburst of spring-time song and color common in medieval poetry from north of the Alps have been prone to assume a temperamental lack in the classical poet, whereas the simple explanation may be that in the north spring brings a sense of release that is hardly realized in Latium where roses linger on till January when the new crocuses and wind-flowers start into blossom. The love of the sea was hardly to be expected till seafaring became fairly safe; the discovery of the compass has a place in the history of romanticism. The romantic enthusiasm for rugged mountain landscape could hardly arise in poets who knew only the placid hills of Italy and to whom the high Alps were known chiefly as the haunts of barbaric bandits.

Accurate interpretation of any author of the past, therefore, implies a complete migration into the time, the society, and the environment of that author. And herein lies the necessity of attempting the difficult task of placing the literary figures which we wish to discuss in their setting. In this first chapter, therefore, I shall attempt to sketch in outline the social changes that need to be kept in mind for the more detailed study of some of the writers of the Republican period.

Rome’s beginnings in self-expression are not so fascinating as those of Greece. The Greeks somehow outstripped all competitors. In mental vigor, in imaginative creativeness, in sureness of taste, they seem to have reached a point 2500 years ago that the more advanced of modern racial groups are still hoping to attain. The sudden flowering of literature as soon as the capacities of the recording art were realized can only be comprehended on the assumption that singing, reciting, narrating, and disputing had proceeded for ages among their ancestors before the alphabet came into use. One may readily imagine that some of the ancestors of the Greeks discussed the “idea of good” around the cavern fire thousands of years before Plato. Brains of that capacity do not suddenly pullulate. Language as supple and rich as Homer’s presupposes ages of keen perceiving and precise talking. But what conclusions those cavemen philosophers reached vanished with the smoke of the hearth fire because no man recorded them. The tale of what the Greek imagination accomplished after it could operate on accumulated records is one the like of which we shall probably never hear again.

Rome’s story is less startling, must perforce be, since like ours, it was subsequent. One does not discover the North Pole or Betelgeuse twice. When the Romans reached the stage of self-consciousness, when they felt the desire to express themselves they found in well-nigh perfect mold the natural forms of expression, developed with sure taste by the Greeks out of song, dance, march-hymn, devotional prayer, dirge, entertaining narrative, or mimic representation. Song, drama, and dialogue are inevitable forms, given human nature, and the forms were at hand and were taken over by the Latins, as they were once more by the Italians at the end of medieval days, when learning disclosed the worth of Rome’s literature.

Rome’s literature made generous use of that of Greece. How much time it saved by entering into such an inheritance we do not know. How much vigor and realism it lost by yielding to the overwhelming persuasion of Greek writers we cannot say. Dante and Petrarch drank from Latin to the point of quickening creation, too many others to the point of dazed intoxication. There were times when the Latin authors also drank too deeply. But what was important was that just when the first contact was made the Romans had reached the mental maturity and developed the capacity to comprehend and use. There were many other peoples of the same period on whom Greek culture was wholly lost because they were incapable of appreciating it. The Phrygians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, Galatians, Armenians, half a dozen Thracian tribes, Syrians, Egyptians, Sicilians, Carthaginians, Oscans, Umbrians, Etruscans, Celts, Iberians, and a score of other tribes contemporaneous with the Romans, and in outward appearances of about the same stage of culture, came into direct contact with the Greeks, some for a much longer period and more intimately than the Latins, and yet they remained unfruitful in literary production. The Romans in fact were the only folk of the scores of neighbors of Greece that as a nation assimilated and worthily carried on the new-found culture.

What were the Romans like at that time—at the beginning of contact with the older Greeks in the middle of the third century B.C.? They were a small group of a few hundred thousand souls, one group of several that had emerged from barbarous central Europe and pushed their way into Italy in search for land, and they had long plodded on in silence at the dull task of making the soil provide food. For a while they had been subdued by the Etruscans, but taught by their conquerors to use arms in strong masses, they had applied this lesson by driving off their oppressors and re-establishing their old independent town meetings, returning again to the tilling of the soil. A prolific and puritanic folk with a strict social morality they outgrew their boundaries and began to expand. In the contests that resulted the Romans came off the victors. In organizing the adjacent tribes into a federal union they revealed a peculiar liberalism—unmatched anywhere among the barbarians of that day—by abstaining from the exaction of tribute; they also betrayed an imagination of high quality in the invention of cooperative leagues, and unusual capacity for legal logic in the shaping of municipal and civic forms. The inventiveness of the barbarian federation-builders of the last fifty years of the fourth century B.C. still commands the admiration of historians, even though all this work was done silently and with so little consciousness of its high quality that no one even thought of keeping a record of it. One does well not to call such a people unimaginative.

To be sure the Latins apparently had few myths or fairy tales, such as have arisen to aid literary effort in certain other regions. Perhaps a penchant for silent doing, a respect for logic and fact may be posited to explain this lack—though such an explanation merely begs the question. We still do not know what is meant by the inheritance of mental qualities. What “myth-making” is we also do not know.

In Greece, where myths grew everywhere to clothe poetic invention, we know at least that the migrant tribes had come in and inherited from the peoples of the Aegean world scores of anthropomorphic deities and heroes that in time aggregated into cycles of more or less related groups. Hittite heroes emerge as Greek gods and Cretan gods as Greek heroes. I do not mean to imply that accident explains all of Greek mythology, for the Greeks enjoyed tales and preserved them. But where the early contacts of the Greeks were fortunate, those of the Romans were not. The Romans on their arrival in central Italy knew no deities in personal form about which tales could gather, and when anthropomorphism came it was imposed by the Etruscans in connection with deities that were never wholly assimilated. The Romans stepped almost from primitive animism to sophistication, and presently to skepticism, and that experience denied them the poetic pabulum which has always been the most envigorating in early art.

Of primitive vocal expression in artistic form at Rome we know but little. It was as thoroughly obliterated by the onrush of Greek as was the native English epic and lyric by the Norman conquest; indeed more, since, not being written, it vanished, while the old English material survived at least in part in dusty archives. Old Romans later said they remembered having heard heroic ballads, and we believe them because the first Hellenizers found a native ballad meter (the Saturnian) which was so well established that they could use it for a translation of the Odyssey and for a native epic. Non-Romans like Livius and Naevius[1] would not have employed the Saturnian verse unless the popular ear had been accustomed to it and demanded it. There were also religious songs accompanied by dancing. A fragment of one of these songs in honor of Mars has survived in a late copy of an early ritual. In Greece a similar ritualistic song had the good fortune of being addressed to Dionysus, a more genial deity, and it seems to have developed into the dithyramb and ultimately gave rise to the drama. On Mars, however, poetry was wasted.

Of a primitive drama we have a vigorous tradition. Simple comic farces were in existence in the village festivals both north and south of Rome—and likely enough at Rome too, though the city preferred to forget its primitive amusements as it grew into a metropolis. Unfortunately the tradition regarding the early Latin drama was vitiated by some early quasi-scholar—apparently Accius—who mingled futile hearsay with a line or two of an early record about Etruscan dancers and with the Aristotelian theory of how Greek drama grew up.[2] He mis-called this putative drama by the name satura. His story unfortunately became orthodox and displaced what might otherwise have survived of a truer tradition. The story is attributed to the year 364 B.C., a time at which no historical records were kept except for the dates and occasions of official priestly sacrifices. That is to say, the story is not worth repeating because it is attributed to a date when no records were kept of such events. All we know is that towns not far from Rome—and therefore presumably Rome as well—had simple drama before Livius began to translate Greek plays.

Such were the germs of the lyric, epic, and drama, vital and capable of growth when and if the times should be favorable. But what is a favorable time? Why, for instance, had not literature come to life among others of the countless tribes about the Mediterranean except the Greeks and Hebrews? I ask, not to answer, but to emphasize the riddle. At Rome a few individuals were emerging from the group, the group was itself breaking out of its boundaries, but experiences were still modest. The citizens were chiefly quiet hard-working farmers who owned and tilled their plots; there was no seafaring commerce that brought tales of adventure from foreign lands, no colonizing beyond the seas, no traveling to foreign parts to bring the Latins a sense of awareness of their own place in the world. Society, as in any democracy where customs of the ruling clique are accepted by the rest, was passing through no strenuous changes, and no religious teacher from beyond the border was entering to shake tradition.

Then, in the third century B.C., came a very remarkable experience: the first great war with Carthage, fought for twenty-three years in Sicily, the victories of which compelled the whole civilized world of the day to recognize the existence of this hitherto unknown people and to invent plausible pedigrees for it. The construction of the first fleet and the sudden defeat of the greatest navy on the seas must have aroused the Romans to self-consciousness, as the Crusades aroused the French and the defeat of the Spanish Armada awakened Elizabethan England. This discovery of the Romans that they existed—that they were being watched and discussed—stirred them into a critical attitude about themselves. They saw that importance in the eyes of others implied expectations. And they discovered that, by the definition of the Greeks, they were barbarians and that the designation was deserved. They set about to learn avidly and to enter into the cultural occupations of the more advanced Greeks.

The first Messala, who had liberated Messana in the second year of the war, imported a painter to depict his victories on the walls of the senate house at Rome. Duilius who had defeated the Punic Armada was voted an honorary column with a long inscription modeled on the most verbose Sicilian laudations. But these are only some of the superficial effects of the new contacts. The Roman youth serving in Sicily was learning much more. Since the war lasted twenty-three years and since it required the services of practically all the able-bodied young men of Rome, these youths, who encamped some six years each in and about the Greek towns of Sicily, carried home an abundance of impressions that meant much for the future of Rome. There can be little doubt that the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Menander were still being played at Syracuse and even in the smaller towns. Indeed Sicily had dramatic writers for many years after Athens had ceased to produce them. Mimes had long been a specialty of Sicily, and Theocritus was still writing them. Rhinton, for a while residing at Syracuse, was producing his farcical parodies of tragedies. Songs, too, tragical, comical, and sentimental were being sung with gestures, with dance and musical accompaniment on the variety stage of Sicilian towns. It was doubtless to satisfy the desires of soldiers who had seen these things that Roman officials immediately after the war introduced the production of Greek tragedies and comedies as a regular feature of the Roman festival. That all important date for Roman and world literature is 240 B.C.

With the war and pride in victory came also the need to write the nation’s history in enduring form. In Sicily the Romans had discovered that they had become the object of wide observation. The Greeks, not knowing how to explain the amazing power of this small group of barbarians, had invented the legend that they must be a remnant of the Trojans. That legend had already found a place in the history of the Sicilian Timaeus, and the Sicilian city of Segesta, which claimed a similar pedigree, had made haste to assert cousinship with Rome, thus winning a favorable alliance with the victors. A pedigree at once so flattering to the Romans and so useful could hardly be disregarded. In less than a generation it came to be the accepted story at Rome—and Naevius, comprehending its literary purport, set out to write the epic of Rome with this legend as his preface. Rome had become conscious and expressive, the third of the western peoples to begin literary creation.

But progress in art is slow. In Greece there was a long silence after Homer. In England there were vast wastes with a few narrow garden spots in the five centuries between Beowulf and Chaucer. Rome had a scanty population of hard-working citizens constantly being recruited for war. After the First Punic War there were frequent conflicts with Ligurians, Celts, and Illyrians. Then in 218 B.C. came the dreaded invasion of Hannibal. Every able-bodied man took up arms. The devastation of crops, the neglect of fields, the burden of taxes, the distressing gloom brought by a succession of defeats precluded all progress in literature. Only the theater continued to give one or two performances a year to grace the religious festivals.

In the middle of this war, in order to keep the Macedonian king from aiding Hannibal, Rome had entered a Greek coalition of states which were at enmity with Philip of Macedonia, and had thus come into close contact with Athens. When, therefore, the Greek states later appealed for aid to save democracy, a strong “philhellenism,” aroused by such contacts and no less by the influence of Euripides and Menander on the Roman stage, brought about Rome’s entrance into the Second Macedonian War.[3] Several men at Rome began (doubtless with the aid of secretaries) to write Roman histories in the Greek language. This does not mean that many Romans could read Greek with ease. It expressed, in a way, a desire that the cultured world should have some knowledge of what this “barbaric” state was accomplishing, and it was a gesture of deference to the one literature then known in the civilized world. Ennius also began to introduce such Greek prose works as he thought the people were ready for, the saws of “Epicharmus” and the cynical theology of Euhemerus. The directest result of philhellenism on literature was the demand for a closer approach to Greek models in the drama. Ennius’ tragedies seem to have restored the Greek chorus, while in comedy men like Luscius and Terence presently vied with each other in claiming to be faithful translators of the Greeks.

In the early decades of the second century it appeared to some observers that Greek literature was about to overwhelm Rome. The younger nobility, led by Scipio Africanus, Flamininus, and their friends, was willing to employ all of Rome’s man power and resources for the liberation of the Greeks from Macedonian rule, and when the Seleucid kingdom began to take advantage of the defeat of Philip and to subjugate the Greek cities of the Anatolian coast, these Romans challenged the great king with the ultimatum: “No Greek shall ever again anywhere be subject to foreign rule.” Never has sentimentalism gone farther in foreign politics. It would not be an overstatement to find in the plays of Euripides produced in translation on the Roman stage the chief factor in this unreasonable wave of enthusiasm for a foreign cause.

But this love of things Greek—which resembles the English enthusiasm for French culture in the Restoration—overshot its mark. The armies that served in Greece and in Asia Minor learned foreign ways too rapidly and brought back too much. Livy (39.6), in a passage which accomplishes its purpose by a sarcastic juxtaposition of incongruous items, tells of the loaded trucks that the returning armies brought home.

There were couches with bronze frames, precious spreads, tapestries and other textiles, and whatever rare furniture could be found; tables with single supports and marble sideboards. Then it was that the Romans began to employ girls who danced and played bagpipes, and posturing houris to entertain guests at dinner. And the dinners were given with delicate care and expense. Cooks, who had formerly been the cheapest of servants, now gave way to expensive chefs, and a slave’s task came to be considered an art.

We have no remains of houses of this period at Rome, but at Pompeii, which went through the same transformation because that seaport town profited by the commerce which Roman armies opened up in the east, we still may see the effects on architectural decoration initiated by this new reverence for things Greek. The lofty atrium of the houses of “Pansa” and “Sallust,” roofed on splendid columns, the Basilica, the theater, and several temples about the Pompeian forum show what that contact with Greece meant to Italian architecture in the second century. Fresco painting had not yet come in, and it is likely that few houses used for wall decoration the oriental hangings mentioned by Livy. But the exquisite Alexander mosaic found in the “House of Pansa” reveals what domestic decoration could be, and the best furniture that has been found at Pompeii is made on patterns introduced from the Hellenized east at that time. In general, though not in all details, we can draw upon the second-century houses of Pompeii for a picture of a few at least of the new Hellenistic palaces that must have been erected at Rome after the Macedonian wars.

To complete the sketch we must also recall that this philhellenism was at first favorable toward eastern cults. The mystic cult of Bacchus, for instance, which apparently had its origin among the slaves brought to Rome from Tarentum and Locri during the last days of the Second Punic War,[4] was for several years allowed to spread undisturbed because so many of Rome’s citizens had become accustomed to such things in Greece and Asia. With all these changes came also a laxity in manners and customs. Young men began to keep companions openly in the Greek manner. The Greek tutors engaged to teach young men Greek literature, rhetoric, and philosophy did not always inculcate respect for old Roman customs. In the Roman family, where woman enjoyed a freedom not known in Greece, new ideas of morality began to affect women as well as men, and since marriage was a contract and not a religious sacrament, bonds were easily loosened and divorces came to be of frequent occurrence. The reflection of these experiences we may observe faintly in the later plays of Plautus and abundantly in the earlier togatae.

All this resulted of course in a severe reaction not unlike the puritanic wave that swept over England after the catalysis of Elizabethan prosperity. Cato supported by many of the conservative nobles undertook to lead the revolt against philhellenism on every possible score. He attacked the foreign policy of the Scipios, which in his opinion wasted Rome’s youth and resources without compensation for a sentimental cause, and the Scipionic group was accordingly stripped of political power. He attacked the returning generals for permitting the soldiers to be debauched by Greek vices; he directed an attack against the Bacchanalian cult till the senate passed a bill inflicting the death penalty upon those who persisted in furthering the cult; he used all the power of his censorship to degrade senators who had yielded to new customs and to conduct a rigid examination of the plate, furniture, and table expenses of his opponents.

Of course this drastic reform movement could not stop the cultural changes that were bound to come. Skepticism and sophistication can hardly be banished by legislation and law courts; but the outward signs of the new culture were for a season obscured. There is no doubt that Greek literature became less popular in the latter days of Cato. Such books as the “Sacred History” of Euhemerus were not again translated for a long time. Those who wished to read Greek poetry and philosophy had to confine themselves for many years to the originals; to put those things into Latin, to translate, paraphrase, or to write similar things in Latin, was not encouraged. Greek rhetoric might still be taught for the comprehension of Greek authors, but to put the Greek rules of rhetoric into Latin for general use was frowned upon. Greek tragedy in Roman adaptations—by Ennius and Pacuvius—had been established at the festivals so long that they remained, and, as adapted to the moral tone of the Romans by those dramatists, there could be little objection to them. But the efforts begun by Scipio Africanus to encourage such plays by making them as inviting as possible to senators bore little fruit. The permanent theater, for which a contract had been let by the censors ten years after Cato’s crusade, was not completed, and when another effort was made to complete it twenty years later the senate had it torn down. Translated Greek comedies were still permitted at the festivals, but it was necessary to indicate that the scene was Greek and not Roman. Latin comedies, togatae—from our point of view not a whit better in morals—then came into fashion. To draw the crowd the authors were permitted a certain freedom of expression but here at least the vices were Roman and hence pardonable.

Such were the effects of the puritanic, anti-Greek reaction supported by Cato. It doubtless did some harm to the drama by precluding the official recognition that might have encouraged better workmanship; it cast a shadow of disapproval over the more delicate forms of literature which were associated in thought with Greece; it must bear some of the blame for the fact that the century after Cato is a period of prosaic nationalistic literature in which no man of real genius appears. Direct contact with the decadent Greeks of the day soon destroyed the sentimental respect that the great literature of classical Greece had created.

Meanwhile, however, a social change was in progress which eventually affected literary production and the literary market at many points, and particularly the drama and prose. I refer especially to the silent movement which before the end of the second century had largely eliminated the free middle classes, substituting for them a slave economy of unusual proportions. When the Second Punic War began, though there were not a few rich nobles who lived in the city enjoying the fruits of country estates, the majority of the citizens were land-owning, working farmers of the type that we have known so well in our central and western states. At that time there was much free farm labor. Slave labor was also used to some extent, but since these slaves were usually of Italic race and thinly distributed they were well treated, indeed they were regarded as members of the family, as was customary with farm hands among the pioneers of our west. Such slaves usually were put in the way of some property with which they could buy their freedom; and with freedom came full citizenship.

The Second Punic War was the beginning of the end of this simple economy. Many small farmers went to the wall, farm labor became scarce because of the heavy casualties in the war. Hence investors often combined many small farms into large estates. At the end of the war, also, commissions were appointed by the State to draw in vast tracts that had been recovered from the Punic occupation in the south, and as colonists did not suffice for the settlement of these tracts much remained public land to be rented out in large estates for grazing. At the end of the war and during the next fifty years, hordes of war captives were brought to the block at Rome: Carthaginians, Iberians of Spain, Sardinians, Celts of the Po Valley, Macedonians, Illyrians, and Asiatics, and also many slaves that Greek owners were glad to sell on an expanding western market. These were bought cheaply, placed on the large estates and on ranches. With cheap labor it was possible to go into olive and vine culture and extensive cattle-raising. And with this capitalistic exploiting the small farmers found it difficult to compete. Many gave up the contest and moved to Cisalpine Gaul or overseas. The middle class of free folk began to dwindle. The few who knew how to adapt themselves to the new conditions acquired estates and lived in luxury. Naturally the hordes of slaves increased rapidly. In the cities also the slaves were increasing and driving out free labor, and they were slaves of foreign stock. Trained up to hard labor and an easy unconcern for morals, these slaves when they gained their freedom got the petty industries and shops in their control, and the citizen poor found it difficult to survive. This was a thoroughgoing social change that progressed silently and steadily through the second century and caused the Gracchi to launch a revolution in their vain attempt to bring back the conditions of a century before.

These changes—which in some respects remind us of conditions in our southern states before 1860—necessarily affected artistic production. At dramatic performances on Roman holidays the audience was of course gradually changing in type and quality and by no means for the better. The audiences to which public speeches were addressed—the speeches that had so much to do with shaping Latin prose style—were not the same in Caesar’s day as in Cato’s. And in view of the dwindling of the middle class, the class which usually provides the larger number of authors, we cannot be surprised if the dilettante production of the aristocratic writers and the hack work of servile producers fill a considerable space in the history of the late Republic. It is generally recognized, I think, that in our southern states between 1800 and 1860 literature fared badly, despite the orthodox argument that the existence of slave drudges gave leisure to genius to develop the nobler arts. Parasitic leisure has seldom employed its talents in artistic production.

This is one side of the social picture of the second century B.C.—the cheapening of the theatrical audiences at Rome which compelled a cheapening of the spectacles produced for them. At the same time, however, there was a rapid expanding beyond Rome of a reading public that spread with the gradual advance of the Latin language throughout Italy. For while in Cato’s lifetime Latin was read only in Latium and in a few colonies, in Sulla’s day the language was understood and used in almost every part of Italy from the Alps to the Greek cities of the southern coast. Hence while dramatic production was deteriorating in the theater at Rome, the non-dramatic literature of published books was winning an ever larger circle of readers. Furthermore, there was at the same time a deepening of cultural interests in the ruling class; for the nobles were becoming aware of their responsibilities as participants in world affairs, were finding a sounder education for their sons, were acquiring libraries and beginning to encourage literary effort. And since the nobles were constantly engaged in public service, their influence told especially in the field of history and forensic prose. This was in fact the period in which Rome’s prose expression developed into a magnificent art.

This is a very brief sketch of the social changes that especially concern the student of republican literature, the details of which we shall try to notice more adequately when we reach the precise problems of each period. To the direct literary influence of specific Greek authors we need only refer at present, for that is less intangible and has frequently been discussed. That influence must not be minimized, for the Romans were generally as devoted to their predecessors as the Italians of the Renaissance were to the Romans, and the English Elizabethans were to the Italians, and they were as frank in acknowledging their debt. If this were a full history of Republican literature, we should have to give very many of its pages to an estimate of the Greek influences.

On the large question of what is called the racial character that is supposed to emerge in Rome’s literature, I am convinced that it is too early to speak. Roman political, social, and religious behavior seem at times to justify the assumption of a certain homogeneity of mental and emotional traits in the Romans. Archaeology does not refute this assumption, for it sustains the view that the ancestral tribes invaded Italy in compact groups that may well have preserved inherited characters for a long period. Again the very fact that the Latin language had fairly well retained its very fragile declensional endings—which Latin lost quickly in the folk-mixture of the middle ages—would lend support to the theory that those tribes had long lived in groups relatively compact. Finally, anthropology seems ready to assume that in the later stone ages, before Europe was thickly settled by agrarians and before the arts of agriculture induced folk-movements in search of land, there was a slow emergence of several diverse peoples in different regions of Europe who, by processes of elimination and adaptation, had attained to what may fairly be called distinct racial peculiarities.[5] It is, therefore, scientific enough to assume the possibility of Latin or Italic traits of character, as distinguished, for instance, from Hellenic, Iberic, or Celtic.

During the Republic there is a certain similarity between the Catos, Fabii, Claudii, Metelli, Scipios, and the rest. From such men we expect prudence rather than speed of thought, a respect for courage rather than dash, for puritanic conduct rather than for unconventionality. We know them as generals who stuck at a campaign “if it took all summer,” or many summers, as soldiers who refused to acknowledge defeat, as administrators who were sympathetic and patient with provincials but merciless to the disobedient, as lawmakers gifted with the knack of seeing the vital point at issue and reaching it in blunt phrases. They could be counted upon for sanity, stability, patience, and thoroughness. They expressed themselves better in architecture than in sculpture or painting; their lyricists and musicians were not numerous. They enjoyed comedy but it must be quick and pointed rather than subtle. They were peculiarly fond of tragedy but the theme must have dignity and purpose. Above all they loved good sound prose, in the histories of their nation told in periods worthy of the subject or in the long roll of the organ-voiced orator in the senate house.

It would, however, be misleading to stress these facts, which are more patent in public, social, and religious activity than in art. During the republic at least the literature is experimental, and it reveals many diverse tendencies, some of which did not survive in the Augustan day. While tragedy sought to continue the traditions of the best classical Greek work, it chose as its model the Euripidean tragedy with its more modern humanism rather than the older drama whose problems seemed to them archaic. Responding also to the social ideals of a more normal domestic life than old Greece possessed, Roman tragedy was somewhat more romantic in theme, and it broke up the Greek form in order to admit a larger space for the newer music. Comedy on the other hand neglected the Aristophanic type completely, building upon the social plays of Menander and his contemporaries. Rome took patriotism too seriously to care to have policies of state and august consuls ridiculed upon the stage. Yet the delicate art of Menander was not the goal of writers like Naevius and Plautus. His scrupulous respect for words, his fastidious striving toward a quiet contemplative expression of emotion, his insistence upon form, that directed its art toward the reader long after the first performance was forgotten, had made him more genuinely classic in effect than Aristophanes. The Roman dramatist wrote for a single performance, where effects must be translucent and immediate to an audience that was used to the robust fun of homemade plays. Plautus has no connections with rigorously classical ideals. He cares for spontaneous, natural, paganly human laughter.

The Roman lyric of the Republic also rejects classification. Before the Greek lyric reached Rome the great singers of Greece had already been forgotten by decadent Athens as thoroughly as seventeenth-century England had forgotten Chaucer. When the Romans began to study lyrical forms they apparently did not even hear the names of Sappho and Alcaeus; they were told about the dainty epigrams of Alexandria, and they began to copy these. Aedituus and Laevius might as well have lived at Samos. Catullus at first fed on the same fare, but one stirring experience set him free. Thereafter he wrote songs that no Greek could have claimed. They have the lilt, beauty, and precision of his models, but a natural freedom, a lucidity, and a convincing passion that make the epigrams of the Garland seem lucubratory. They obviously spring out of a society that is less artificial and out of a life that grows in a young world.

Lucretius again refuses to fall into a conventional pattern. He has no standards, no proportions, no models. The early Greeks had staidly versified science so that it might easily be memorized. That was not Lucretius’ purpose. Alexandrians had versified science again because the interest in the subject had become general. Lucretius wrote for a public that had cared little for science, but he wrote with the zeal of a prophet because he could not keep silent, and his voice was heard. His work has no unity, no controlling plan or single mood. He hurls his bald facts, his images, his logic, and his pleas indiscriminately. There is nothing else in Greece or Rome like him. And so we might go on.

What are the Romans of the republic? When we read their political history we feel a unity of spirit and are prone to say that we understand them. This may be because of a certain racial trait or perhaps because a certain limited aristocracy set the traditions early which became so binding that political activity followed the mos majorum. But the men who entered literature were not of one class nor did they express the ideals of any one group. They came out of different strata of different localities and spoke for different mores. Whatever we may say we must admit that the really personal literature of the republic was neither conformist nor monotonous, neither Greek nor classical in spirit. It was frankly experimental, but it always proves to reflect some phase of Roman life.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The tradition regarding early bards can be traced to the elder Cato. It is therefore not contaminated by the scholastic traditions which later vitiated the story of the drama.

[2] See Hendrickson, “A Pre-Varronian Chapter of Roman Literary History,” Am. Jour. Phil., 1898, 285. Of the famous chapter in Livy (VII, 2) I should attribute only a scanty line regarding the Etruscan ludii to the Annales Maximi. The rest is unreliable reconstruction, since it refers to a period that antedates historical records by over a century. Many attempts have been made to enucleate the kernel of a dramatic history from the passage, but no one who has dealt with the historical sources of the fourth century can accept such attempts.

[3] Historians who read only Polybius and Livy persist in denying that philhellenism was a factor in Roman politics. If they will but study the fragments of early Roman poetry they will emend their histories.

[4] See Class. Quarterly, 1927, 128.

[5] History has nothing to do with racial types classified by cranial measurements, for such typology deals with races that were mixed scores of thousands of years ago. The so-called Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic groups have for ages inherited the mixed nervous systems of each and all. The typology that concerns the historians of the ancient Mediterranean world is rather one of temperament and the various types grew out of segregated groups that shaped themselves during the few thousands of years that preceded the great European migrations of the second millenium B.C.

CHAPTER II
EARLY TRAGEDY AND EPIC

Browning has recalled the story of how Greek war captives taken at Syracuse in the Peloponnesian war earned their release by reciting snatches from the plays of Euripides. It was a century and a half after that siege that the Romans came to Sicily in the First Punic War, and the city was still interested in the old drama, indeed was now taking its part in producing tragedies. One of the last of the dramatists, one of the so-called “Pleiad,” was a Syracusan of Hiero’s time, and King Hiero was himself so devoted to the drama that he even built a theater for Agyrion, a petty village on the border of his small kingdom. We have noticed how the Roman youth who campaigned year after year in Sicily learned something of the arts of civilization and on their return home created a demand for the things they had come to enjoy while abroad. The year after the victorious troops returned from Sicily, Livius, a schoolmaster of Greek origin, staged a translation of a Greek tragedy as a supplement to the annual chariot race. This production marks the beginning of Rome’s education in letters. There must be some close connection between this homecoming of the army, and the performance of Livius’ play, for the change in character of a great religious festival could not have been suggested by a freedman. The magistrates responsible for the performance were senators and the senate had of course requested the play. In all likelihood it was also the senate that invited King Hiero of Syracuse to Rome to see the games; for he, if any one, would have been asked to supply some actor to help stage the first play, and it was only appropriate that he should come to inaugurate the new era of culture.

From that time on plays were produced every year. Five years after the first performance, Naevius, who had served in the Sicilian campaigns (and had perhaps learned Greek there), began to help in the work of adapting Greek plays for the Roman stage. Only brief fragments of those early plays have survived and in reviewing the list of titles we might wonder at the enthusiasm they reveal for plays shaped on the old Greek mythology. But the predominance of titles derived from the Trojan cycle explains this enthusiasm. It was in Sicily that the Roman soldiers had learned the Greek story of how Rome had been founded by Trojan refugees. The stories of Hector, of the Trojan horse, Achilles, Ajax, Iphigenia, and the rest were therefore not without personal interest in the barbaric city. The unlettered shoemakers, smiths, and carpenters at Rome, men whose modern equals could hardly be expected to sit patiently through a performance of Gilbert Murray’s Trojan Women, eagerly listened to the half-comprehended lines of Livius’ translation. They had been told that these were the stories of their long-lost ancestors.

Livius is merely a name, which is unfortunate, since we know that he deserved well of Roman civilization. Naevius is less shadowy, a personality whose creative work left an impress on such powerful men as Cicero and Vergil two centuries later. He wrote not only plays, but an epic, condensing Rome’s history in an annalistic poem, the climax of which was the great victory over Carthage in which he had had a share. From the sixty scattered lines of this epic rescued by late lexicographers we do not quite find the justification for Vergil’s high regard. There is no poetry in them. But grammarians pick their lines to illustrate linguistic usage and not for effective phrasing. Even Shakespeare becomes prose if judged by the citations found in Webster. However, for the preservation of the metrical schemes employed by Naevius we are grateful. Though he had used a large variety of Greek meters for his drama, he did not in his epic. Here he preserves the native Saturnian line that had been used in religious songs, and apparently in ballads. That he did not adopt a standard Greek meter for his epic, as he did for his tragedies and comedies, is proof enough that the old native narrative verse was fully established in a well-known body of poetry which we have lost.

In many respects this verse resembles the old English line that relies upon alliteration and rhythmic ictuses which balance each other in the two severed parts of the line:

In a sómer séson whan sóft was the sónne.

But the Saturnian had six ictuses instead of four, and as Latin verse was more aware of its quantities and less of its word stress than English the ictuses, while somewhat regardful of word accent, were more attentive to quantity. Finally, since alliteration is more effective when the ictus falls on the first syllable, and since the Latin accent had to a large extent shifted away from the first syllable by the time of Naevius, the use of alliteration was somewhat less frequent in Naevius than in Beowulf. In Vergil’s day the effect of this verse must have been somewhat like that of Langland’s poems upon the Elizabethans. The shift of the Latin word accent toward the penult was already destroying the effectiveness of the verse even when Naevius wrote; and the break of the line in the center rendered it ineffective for sustained narration. Its halting movement may be somewhat inadequately illustrated by a paraphrase of Naevius’ own epitaph:

If death of any mortal sadden hearts immortal,

The heavenly Muses surely Naevius’ death bemoan;

For after he departed to the shades of Orcus

The voice of Rome is silent music is forgotten.

Ennius abandoned the line, and it was eventually doomed, just as the Anglo-Saxon meters in England began to disappear when the richer rhythms of French poetry came to be appreciated.

It was Naevius also who broke away from Greek subjects in the drama, though with what success we cannot say. He made what we may call a “chronicle play” of the Romulus legend which disregarded the conventional unities, and he also wrote a pageantry play to commemorate the heroic single combat of Marcellus with a Celtic chieftain. He is therefore among the first to stage contemporary drama and to disregard the restrictions of time and place. That he made the same innovations in comedies like his Hariolus is probable but cannot be proved from the few lines that remain.

An independent creator he was and might have carried progress far had not so large a part of his activity fallen in the restraining period of the Second Punic War. His end was in character. Accustomed to speak his mind freely in his comedies, he vigorously supported the Fabian policy when it was unpopular, and after the group supporting Scipio, which demanded a more aggressive conduct of the war, came into power, he continued his sarcastic criticism of the Scipionic group. Rome had always tolerated free speech, but even at Rome patience was short in war time. War censorship discovered an old law which, with a little imaginative interpretation, could be stretched to cover the case of this satirist.[1] Only one line has survived of the satiric comedy which referred to the fact that Metellus, a friend of Scipio’s, had taken advantage of a fortuitous circumstance to stand for the consulship. He was elected through no desert of his own. The point of the line—Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consoles—rests on a double entendre, because fato may be construed either as ablative or as dative, while Romae may be genitive or locative. The line therefore may mean either:

“The Metelli became consuls at Rome by chance,”

which is hardly a flattering remark, or what is even less flattering:

“The Metelli became consuls to Rome’s sorrow.”

The Metelli apparently thought Naevius meant to suggest both, which is likely enough, and they succeeded in having him imprisoned, and eventually banished. He seems to have found a home in Carthage, the land of the enemy against whom he had once fought.

These two dramatists, for reasons which must be discussed later, increased the use of musical accompaniment in tragedy and comedy. In Euripides the body of the drama had been in recited trimeters. The choral parts were of course sung to the accompaniment of rhythmical movements called dance, and there was also music when the actors engaged in dialogue with the chorus, as well as in some of their monologues. But the musical element had been reduced very much during the century that followed Euripides when the drama had gradually dispensed with the chorus even in the staging of Euripides. Rome was then too primitive to provide the twelve or more trained singers and dancers that even the later Greeks had found beyond their resources. Livius indeed had experienced such difficulty in securing actors with good voices that he himself took the leading rôle, and, not adequately gifted for the singing parts, he tried, we are told, the inartistic device (not unknown on our comic stage) of placing a singer beside the musician to carry the melody of the lyric parts while he acted and presumably recited the lines of the songs. That was, of course, only a temporary makeshift, but it shows how difficult it was to provide satisfactory artists at the time. It would seem then that since these early writers found it impossible to produce choruses adequately because these required the elaborate training of many singers in intricate musical compositions, they compensated as best they could by increasing the number of monodies in their plays, writing them in a few well-defined meters, such as the septenarii, cretics, and bacchiacs,[2] which were not too difficult to learn. Thus it was that Roman tragedy became even more like modern opera than the tragedy of the Greek stage had been. These early men of Rome, who mean so little to us, had developed a form which was capable of carrying on the work of Greek tragedy on a primitive stage, and capable also of growing into a richer drama as soon as the resources of the small city should permit. They made the drama possible for Rome.

As a composer of tragedies and epic verse, Ennius succeeded Naevius, but, writing in an era of enthusiastic philhellenism, he came near yielding too much to a great foreign influence. Had he not been a man of remarkable poetic powers his example might well have quenched the spirit of Rome in the rising literature. One of the first Latin authors that we would ask the excavators of Herculaneum to restore to us is Ennius. No single work of his has survived. Of his twenty-five or more tragedies we possess only about four hundred lines; of the eighteen books of Annals a little over five hundred complete lines; of his satires, his Euhemerus and his Epicharmus, not enough fragments have survived to give us a very clear idea of the scope of each. All in all we have about three per cent of his work in scraps, but here at least there are several connected passages cited in appreciation of something else than the grammatical usages they illustrate.

Ennius too, like Naevius, told Rome’s story in verse. One’s impulse is to discount the accuracy of any history that employs artifice. And one must grant of course that a poet will select his incidents with a view to their dramatic values and picturesqueness. One must remember, however, that poetry had a serious place in all early literature for the reason that, before the day of much writing, all teachable things, even history and philosophy, were put into verse for mnemonic purposes. The works of Solon and Heracleitus would not have contained different matter if they had been put into prose. In Ennius’ day many national histories that purported to be accurate were composed in verse. And Ennius probably did not permit himself to include fictive incidents in his Annals, nor has he been proved incorrect at any point.[3] Cicero cited him for the gist of the famous speech of Appius Claudius, and added as a matter of indifference that the original of the speech was in existence. Apparently Ennius’ summary was accurate enough so that it was not necessary to refer to the original text.

The influence of his Annals was in its field comparable to that of Homer. From Ennius all schoolboys got their first impressions of what Rome’s great heroes had accomplished. He was unsurpassed as a painter of character. With a few telling strokes he revealed the essential traits of those strong, bold, tireless heroes who made the old Republic irresistible in power, magnificent in tradition, and a saving inspiration in the days of decadence. He was near to these men, and it was as he saw them that they lived on in memory and still live on. He made Roman character memorable in the two lines on Fabius Maximus:

Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem:

Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem.

and in the single line on Curius:

Quem nemo ferro potuit superare nec auro.

His epic was an exposition of the text he himself devised so effectively:

Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque:

And it was Ennius who more than any one else kept Roman society upon that foundation.

We happen to be able to test his influence by what he did with the portrait of Pyrrhus. Only a generation before Ennius was born this picturesque enemy of Rome had had a friendly alliance with the Messapian tribe to which Ennius himself belonged. The poet, therefore, had heard much about the king. Pyrrhus, in fact, had some very sympathetic traits of character, a remarkable chivalry, and a certain sense of honor and loyalty such as is often found in the chieftains of primitive folk. These qualities stand out in the characterization of him that Ennius has left us; and these are the outstanding traits that we find in all the later Roman references to Pyrrhus. That Ennius should have responded to these qualities is not strange, but that all the rest of the Romans should thus enthusiastically have lauded an enemy who nearly wrecked Rome is less to be expected. The explanation is of course that what Ennius wrote colored the historic conceptions of all who followed. This becomes evident when we read Plutarch, a Greek, and his biography of Pyrrhus. When drawing upon Roman sources for the Italian campaign of the king, Plutarch paints the same picture as Ennius, but when he draws upon Greek authors in describing the Greek campaigns, he reveals the fact that the knightly hero of the Roman historians had a less charming side which certain close observers at home were well aware of. Like all historians Ennius had his enthusiasms, and he had such power of portraiture that not a trait blurred.

He was also fair. Pyrrhus got his meed of praise, but the opponents of Pyrrhus, Fabricius and Appius Claudius, were characterized with equal sympathy. Of his own contemporaries, Fabius the Slow-goer was effectively portrayed as we have seen, and Cato “in caelum tollitur,” as Cicero affirms, although Scipio Africanus, who was bitterly opposed by these conservatives, became, as he deserved to be, the outstanding hero of the book.

It was entirely appropriate that, for his heroic narrative, Ennius borrowed the dactylic hexameter of the Greeks, but it was after all a daring thing to do, since meters seldom transplant with success. However, Naevius’ use of the native Saturnian had demonstrated its inability to carry heroic narrative. Imagine Paradise Lost crammed into the primitive English rhythms of Langland! The dactylic hexameter was in Greek regularly associated with the epic. It had one disadvantage in its requirement of a larger proportion of short syllables than normal Latin writing contained, but that was overcome by simply permitting more spondees than Homeric custom had enjoyed. This resulted in a reduction of tempo which after all suited Roman military movement. There was another difficulty which was more serious. While Greek verse needed to give little attention to word accent, the Latin word accent was jealous of attention. With the relative fixity of the accent, it was impossible to write Latin dactyls based both upon quantity and word-accent. Ennius nevertheless ventured upon an experiment. That he had a very delicate ear for the demands of the Latin language is proved by the careful adjustments in his dramatic senarii, where adjustments were not easy to make. He would not have foisted impossible dactyls upon Rome. The fact that he wrote quantitative dactyls and continued to write them, and that his Annals lived for centuries is proof that he did not overstep the bounds of good taste. The explanation of his success is probably that the word stress in the Latin of his day was so moderate that a conflict with the ictus was not fatal to aesthetic pleasure if only it fell upon long syllables, and also that during the forty years of dramatic performances at Rome, the ears of the audiences had become trained under the influence of music to disregard such conflicts in the many lyric rhythms, including dactyls. By his sensible modification of the Homeric line, Ennius created as great a resource for Latin poetry as Chaucer did for English poetry, and shaped for Vergil’s use “the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.”

Ennius began to write tragedies about 200 B.C. at the very time when philhellenism was at its height. Being a man of wide culture who knew his Greek well he readily responded to the general demand for things Greek. Though he produced one play (The Rape of the Sabine Women) on a Roman theme, and a pageantry play called the Ambracia to commemorate the victory of a friend during the war with Aetolia, he seems to have striven chiefly to reproduce on the Roman stage the effects of Euripides’ tragedies. And now that the restraints of poverty had become somewhat relaxed, and the drama had continued long enough to foster a certain amount of skilful talent for its interpretation, he was freer to present his tragedies more nearly in the old Greek manner. It has accordingly been plausibly conjectured[4] that it was Ennius who reintroduced the chorus so that the Greek plays might be given without cutting. There is no reason for supposing that the choral song in the Thyestes (written in bacchiacs) or the one in the Medea (octonarii) or the one in the Iphigenia (septenarii) were recited by a single singer. It is clear from the fragments that in several of his plays, notably in the Achilles, the Eumenides, the Hector, and the Hecuba, choral groups were actually participants in the plays as they had been in the Greek originals. And since in the plays of his successor, Accius, it can be demonstrated that a chorus sang, we ought to accept the reasonable interpretation of the Ennian fragments and attribute to this philhellenist the importation of choral song into Roman tragedy. Ennius, however, deferred to Roman taste so far as the rhythms were concerned. He adhered largely to the lyric meters which Livius and Naevius had popularized, and seldom attempted to employ the more intricate systems of the Greeks.[5] That Ennius was as successful in his tragedies as in his epic is adequately proved by the fact that many of his plays were still being produced a century after his death and were avidly read by men like Cicero.

Pacuvius, the nephew and successor of Ennius, did not write many plays. From the little that remains of his work we should judge that he preferred themes somewhat off the beaten track and that in choosing plays that contained heterodox discussions of ethical themes, he, too, felt the influence of the new Greek learning and kept in mind the interests of the intellectualist at Rome. The grammarians have also noticed the fact that his lyric meters paid more attention to Latin word stress than those of his predecessors.[6] They cite particularly his care in composing anapaests with caesuras in such a way that long initial syllables fell under the ictus. These anapaests in fact read like dactyls with an anacrusis of two shorts at the beginning. This innovation decidedly proves that the poet had a precise ear and desired to attain harmonious effects. His successors showed that they appreciated his innovation, but they occasionally used the old turbid lines to express emotional excitement.

The most successful of the writers of tragedy was Accius, a poet who spanned the era between the Gracchans and the Social War. We have fragments of more than forty tragedies from his busy pen, and many of his plays were re-staged in Cicero’s day. He was the favorite of the great actors, Aesopus and Roscius. He did not depart far from the customs laid down by Ennius in respect to meters, music, and chorus, but the fact that he freely readapted the Greek plays which furnished themes to his predecessors can only mean that he used the same liberty in giving his own interpretation to old plots that Euripides had used in treating anew the myths that had been staged by Aeschylus and Sophocles. We happen to know from the remarks of Terence that convention did not permit the staging of more than one paraphrase of any given Greek play. When, therefore, Accius writes plays upon familiar themes we must assume that he is offering something essentially original in his interpretation of the old plot. In fact we find good evidence of his original treatment in the fragments. So, for instance, in his Antigone he changed the personnel of the chorus (as Ennius had done in the Iphigenia), which implies that the purpose of the play was altered. It is also clear that Accius made free to disregard the conventional unities of place and time, for in the Brutus there are scenes laid in Gabii, in Ardea, and in Rome.

All these dramatists apparently altered their originals freely in order to make the story and its meaning more plausible to a Roman audience. The Medea of Ennius reveals many changes of this kind. For instance, the Latin author felt that he must prepare the audience early in the play for the gruesome death of the children,[7] a detail unnecessary in Euripides, who wrote for an audience that knew the plot. This kind of thing must have occurred frequently. Again, Ennius had to alter Medea’s long monologue, since before a Roman audience accustomed to seeing a matron in public, there was no point in making her apologize for appearing outside of the palace.[8] Ennius has here been needlessly accused of misunderstanding the Greek original! Ennius knew his Greek; he had learned it at school in Tarentum. His alterations were introduced to suit the psychology of his own audience. Similar changes are numerous and need not be dwelt upon.

The alteration of the very purport of the plays is of more importance to us. For instance, Atreus, the old Greek tyrant of primitive brutality, was calculated to offend Roman taste. It is apparent from the fragments of Accius that it was the sufferings of Thyestes rather than the daring of Atreus which received sympathetic attention—a fact not surprising in a city where the word rex was feared and hated. Euripides’ story of Andromeda had a matter-of-fact plot in which Andromeda’s father begged Perseus to slay the dragon and to rescue his daughter. This plot followed the myth and was expected in Athens. But not so at Rome. In Accius’ play Perseus is rather the chivalrous knight; he rescues the lady first and then pleads for her hand. Similarly, in the Clytemestra of Accius one also finds a very modern note, for Accius suggests that if Agamemnon’s inconstancy could be excused because of his long separation from his wife, Clytemestra might possibly have the benefit of the same argument. In the Andromache of Ennius and the Astyanax of Accius there is an intense note of sorrow for the child of Hector and Andromache that reminds one of Vergil’s lines in the third book of the Aeneid. This is a Roman strain deriving from the Romans’ claim to be descended from the Trojans. In the Phoenissae of Accius the motivation of the whole play is changed by representing Eteocles breaking a command rather than a personal pledge. In the Eurysaces of Accius we have a slightly different reason for the use of Roman motive. This play was re-staged by the great actor Aesopus when Cicero was in exile, because of its picture of the unjust banishment of Telamon. The Roman audience appreciated the possible allusion to Cicero’s suffering and cheered Aesopus’ lines to the echo. Accius may well have written it originally and introduced the changes in order to influence his audience and obtain the recall of some political exile like Popilius, about 130 B.C. The lines have a genuine Roman ring.

In our own day when every dramatist is compelled to create a new plot it is easy to underestimate the originality of men like the Greek Euripides, the Roman Accius, the French Racine, the English Shakespeare, who all in varying degrees were satisfied to use old plots, even old plays, and to give all their attention to a personal and original interpretation of the inner meaning of a familiar story and of the motives that impelled the characters. We may illustrate the old method of procedure by examining Seneca’s Medea, since here we have a complete Latin play which shows what even an uninspired Roman dramatist might do by way of re-reading an ancient legend. Medea in the old unvarnished myth of the barbaric age was apparently a bundle of natural passions, a savage creature gifted with superhuman powers. Jason owed her his life, but since a Greek prince could hardly wed a barbarian and make her his queen, he might reasonably, according to Greek standards, abandon her when his “higher” duties to state and position demanded it. In a rage of jealous hate, the creature might then wreak her vengeance upon Jason and Jason’s children. Such action was quite comprehensible to the semibarbarous age that shaped the myth, but not to the more humane Athenians of Euripides’ day. The Greek dramatist, accordingly, had offered a new explanation of the problem. In his version Jason has disregarded the higher demands of humanity for a selfish passion or a more selfish ambition. Medea, the woman, has been infinitely wronged, and in her helplessness—it is not all jealousy and hate—she slays her children to save them from a worse fate. But to the Roman even this interpretation seems impossible, and the character of Jason least comprehensible of all. A Roman nobleman could not so abandon his sons, and the woman, if she was indeed human, could not slay her children either in hate or in love. Seneca, therefore, while keeping the main plot, seeks a new explanation for the woman’s act. Medea is again painted as the barbaric witch that she was before Euripides transformed her. Jason marries Creusa for the sake of his children—a wholly comprehensible act to a Roman of Nero’s day—and the uncontrollable Medea is driven into a rage that does not hesitate to commit murder. But, however jealous she might have been, Seneca feels that she could not have laid hands upon her own offspring. Yet the tale said that she did. Seneca’s solution of the dilemma is simple. Woe has driven Medea insane and the ghost of her brother hovers before her, a symbol of that insanity. Accordingly, it is in a fit of madness that she does the deed. In Seneca, as in Euripides, the action follows the ancient myth, but the interpretation of that myth varies with the author, and in both cases this reinterpretation is not so much an invention of the dramatist as a reflection of the changed point of view of the society of his time. The moderns have, of course, felt the same need for a re-reading of the story as the widely differing versions of Grillparzer and Catulle Mendéz demonstrate. This is but one simple illustration of how the Roman dramatists could re-stage old myths and yet constantly invite the audience to something new. The emphasis upon the interpretation rather than upon the plot is precisely the same as it was in the days of Racine and Shakespeare.

How far the Roman dramatists were indebted to predecessors for their very striking employment of song is still a moot problem. Leo,[9] following a suggestion of Crusius, held that the Plautine cantica followed the manner of the contemporary music-hall lyrics of Greece as illustrated by the then recently discovered “Grenfell song.” This theory was rejected by Fraenkel[10] because he found no vital similarity between the Grenfell fragment and the Plautine cantica. In his view the Roman predecessors of Plautus—Livius and Naevius—who paraphrased both tragedy and comedy, had probably developed the cantica in tragedy from Euripidean models and then employed them in comedy as well. This theory has a certain plausibility but cannot yet be tested because the cogent examples of cantica in tragedy must be drawn from Ennius, who was not a predecessor but rather a tardy contemporary of Plautus. The view of Leo has received some little support from a brief and peculiar mime-fragment of the British Museum recently published by Milne.[11] However this fragment is so late that it may represent post-Plautine developments, and therefore cannot be pressed into decisive service. It must also be added that recent studies tend to show that Greek New Comedy of the time of Menander had not wholly given up the use of strophic lyrics,[12] and that the Plautine and Ennian cantica themselves seem to have retained not a few traces of strophic structure.[13]

Without attempting to solve a problem for which too many of the quantities are still unknown, I would only wish to suggest the need of considering the practical factors of Roman experience and of Roman exigencies when we try to explain the Roman trend toward an operatic form. In the first place it is well to keep in mind that Naevius, who dominated the Roman theater for thirty years of its formative period, had campaigned in Sicily long enough to become the first annalist of the Punic war. Practically every city of Sicily where Roman troops were stationed had a theater, and in the days of Hiero the demand for dramatic entertainment in Sicily was so vigorous that new theaters were being built. We still have evidence[14] of Hellenistic theaters at Syracuse, Tauromenium, Segesta, Tyndaris, Akrae, Catania, and Agyrion. It is agreed that the Greek tragedies and comedies that were then being produced—the plays that Naevius probably saw—were generally devoid of choruses. The elaborate choruses of the tragedies had fallen away, partly because of the cost of staging them, and partly doubtless because new musical fashions had grown impatient of the somewhat academic formalism of the strophic songs.[15] In comedy, considerations of the expense and a desire for scope and freedom in choosing theme and form in song worked toward the same end. There can be little doubt that in Sicily Naevius saw performances of post-classical tragedies and comedies, not to mention music-hall performances of mimes and farces, that gave him good suggestions as to how the plays of Euripides could be staged without a chorus, and how a paraphrase of a Menandrian comedy that had lost its entr’acte songs could be turned into something like light opera. And a genius as inventive and independent as Naevius would soon break through the limitations of the Roman stage and shape, with the help of such suggestions, a performance suited to Roman needs.

But even if the Sicilian performances offered suggestions of how to stage comedies and tragedies without choruses it seems to have been the Romans who made the old classics conform to the new method and in doing so greatly enlarged rather than diminished the scope of the musical accompaniment. The second reason for this increase in songs seems to me, therefore, to lie in the need for music to help carry the new meters which dramatic writing demanded. Latin had been as poor in meters as early English was later. The chief drudge of all work had been the Saturnian verse, a form unfit for either sustained narrative or for realistic dialogue. Its line was slow and reflective. It had been used for ritual song, for funeral elegy, for lullabies, for gnomic poetry, and apparently also for lampoons; but it was as unfit for the drama as Ennius had found it to be for epic narration. There was also apparently a lively marching verse, the quadratus, the meter with which we are familiar from the trochaic tetrameters of the Greeks and from the lines of Tennyson’s Locksley Hall:

With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder storm.

At least critics are now ready to accept the remark of Horace that lines like

Rex erit qui recte faciet, qui non faciet, non erit,

were sung in the days of old Camillus. Whenever we happen to have a fragment of a soldier’s song quoted in Latin it is in this quick step:

Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat, qui subegit Gallias.

That meter had possibilities in the drama, and it was very freely used, though it doubtless had to be weaned away from its boisterous military associations. For rapid action and excitement it served well. It appears that early tragedy felt that it belonged to music and used it in lyric passages, in recitative chants as well as in dramatic speeches. Naevius was very fond of it.

Tragedy, however, needed an easy line of moderate length for its ordinary dialogues, and several meters in different moods to carry the monologues, songs, and emotional dialogues. For these Livius and Naevius, as we have noticed, had taken over and adapted a large number of Greek verse-forms. Now the adaptation of a foreign meter is a very serious matter. It took English poetry hundreds of years to merge French and old English rhythms, as it took France centuries to find a satisfactory adaptation of the medieval Latin systems. The labor of reshaping Greek meters for use in Latin was all the more difficult at the time because the Latin language happened to be just then at a critical point in its accentual development. The Greek word-accent had but very slight stress, so that quantity was permitted to determine verse-rhythm. In Latin, also, the quantity of the vowel and the syllable was still the dominant element at this time, indeed determined the position of the word accent, and was responsible for the penultimate accent rule that prevailed in most words during the century in which Naevius wrote. Latin must have been nearly as precise in the observance of longs and shorts as Greek. But the difficulty was that the stress of the word accent had also been a marked factor in Latin pronunciation for some time. Now in forming or introducing new rhythms the Latin poets would have to choose either stress or quantity as the decisive element on which to build and force the other element to comply. This is a choice that very few languages have imposed upon their poets. In English there was of course no such decision necessary since our accent remained a strong stress while our syllabic quantities, in the mingling of Germanic and French, became so completely confused that the values of half of them are hardly determinable by ear. This difference between Latin and English has not always been given due weight. When, for instance, the late Poet Laureate of England assumed that the quantitative meters of Ennius and Vergil resemble in effect the quantitative meters that he composed in English, he disregarded the vital difference between the two languages.[16] While in Latin quantities were readily distinguished even by the rabble, a fact that is shown by the emergence of the penultimate law before there were any teachers, in English it requires a laboratory apparatus to decide what really is the length of certain syllables. On the other hand, stress is dominant in English and unmistakable in all colloquial speech, whereas in Latin it was so moderate in the new position it had recently acquired that for many centuries after Plautus it had very little effect upon the morphology of the language. Apparently the first Roman poets chose as wisely as could be expected in determining to base their meters upon quantity rather than upon word-stress. But in doing so they had to face a serious dilemma: a stress-accent does not like to be disregarded, and ultimately (six centuries later) it asserted itself and insisted upon dominance. The quadratus, or trochaic tetrameter, which apparently grew up before the Romans knew Greek or grammar, had made a compromise that satisfied the ear. It looked to quantity as the dominant element, placing the verse-beat invariably upon a long (or its equivalent), but it by no means wholly disregarded word accent. In the lines of soldiers’ songs that survived, it is not often that word accent is slighted more than once in a line, and Ennius, Naevius, and Plautus in their plays seldom permitted themselves to neglect it more often than twice in a spoken line.

In “Rex erit qui recte faciet, qui non faciet, non erit,” aside from the last syllable which of course is hidden in a falling cadence, only erit at the beginning, an unemphatic word, gets what may be called a mechanical accent. But this smoothness is natural chiefly in the trochaic meter and it occurs here because the normal penultimate accent of Latin, which stresses a long syllable next to the final, is by nature adapted to a trochaic quantitative rhythm. Obviously an iambic line can take advantage of all the qualities of the trochaic line if the poet will so adapt the first word as to secure a trochaic swing in the rest of the line. Livius was very skilful in adapting the Greek trimeter to the spirit of the Latin trochaic. He increased the caesuras—that is he freely cut the iambic foot in two—not for the sake of caesuras but in order that by cutting iambic feet he could create a trochaic rhythm which would operate easily with a penultimate accent; he permitted resolved longs in any position except the last foot, because when the penult is short the antepenult receives the accent, and a fair coincidence of accent and ictus is again secured; finally, since there was no way of avoiding a slight clash in the sixth iambic foot, he frequently tempered the fifth foot by insisting that when it contained a single word, this word must be spondaic. That is, by dwelling upon the first syllable of the fifth foot he reduced the ictus on the second.[17] The result of this exceedingly delicate modulation of the line by Livius—a modulation revealing an astonishingly keen ear—was that the dramatic senarius in Latin had a rhythm in which quantitative and accentual beats usually coincided, and this rhythm served its purpose in Latin drama quite as effectively as did the trimeter in Greek. Considering the gentleness of the accent in Latin we may surmise that Latin dramatic senarii, when thus treated, ran at least as smoothly as Browning’s blank verse despite the fact that they had to give heed to accent as well as to quantity.

In teaching the rules of the Latin senarius it is a pedagogical mistake to compare it with the Greek trimeter as Lindsay does in his brilliant book, Early Latin Verse; indeed I am persuaded that it distorts historical facts to do so. If Livius was the man who shaped this line for Latin needs, we must remember that he had reached Rome as a mere child and had as a youth grown accustomed to the swing of verse pronounced in the Saturnian and the quadratus meters and that he would not have had any occasion at Rome to learn to comprehend the amazing precision of the Menandrian trimeter. And Naevius, the Campanian soldier, must have had much the same experience. To such men the Greek trimeter could only have suggested the possibility of writing a six-foot iambic line which would carry through to the end, with the lightness of the quadratus, the opening rhythm of the Saturnian. And the rules of the first hemistich of the Saturnian must have been the determining regulations of the senarius. Those rules had all to do with the purely Latin problem of writing quantitative verse that should not overmuch offend the demands of an accentual stress. Indeed it is fair to say that if Livius had never seen a Greek trimeter but had undertaken to adapt a six-foot iambic line on suggestions taken only from the Saturnian and the quadratus, he would have arrived at precisely what he did. By failing to see this simple historical sequence we have, from Bentley to the elaborate but misleading statistics of Klotz, followed Horace in misconceiving the spirit of the very worthy Latin senarius.

But there was more for the early dramatists to do than to shape a line suitable for dialogue, for Greek drama had taught these poets that a great variety of meters must be used to give the mood and tempo of emotional scenes. The Roman writers of tragedy did not attempt to reproduce the intricate polymetric and antistrophic Greek songs. However, they adopted several very effective meters (perhaps also creating some) which they used for massed effects, such rhythms as the cretic, bacchiac, anapaestic, glyconic, and the longer iambic and trochaic lines, not to mention various rarer forms. In a fragment of Ennius quoted by Cicero, Andromache in distress runs from senarii through a passage of pleading cretics:

(Quid petam praesidi aut exequar quove nunc etc.)

then through excited narration in excellent alliterative septenarii:

(Fana flamma deflagrata tosti alti stant parietes)

into turgid and wild anapaests:

(Priamo vi vitam evitari etc.).

And Cassandra’s mad scene runs similarly from septenarii through dactylic tetrameters, trochaic octonarii, and anapaests into iambic octonarii. The tone of such cretics has been caught fairly well in Tennyson’s The Oak,

All his leaves, fall’n at length,

while the bacchiac rhythm is, if pronounced with care, conveyed by Arnold’s

Ye storm-winds, of autumn

These brief experiments on the part of English poets, which show an observance of word-stress and also of quantity, will indicate the nature of the difficult task which Latin poetry had to face in taking over meters native to the Greek language, except that the Latin poet, conversely, must place his verse ictus on a long syllable and secondarily, if possible, observe the word stress as well. That was a difficulty with which classical Greek did not have to contend, since its word accent was musical and could easily be slighted. German and English poetry—except in learned experiments—has refused to face the double task, a task which has fortunately never been compulsory.

If we keep these facts in mind I think we may be willing to concede that the Latin poets of the early time may have called in the extended aid of the flute and of melody partly in order to obscure the occasionally inevitable conflict between the word accent and verse ictus. The point can be illustrated by a simple example. In Tennyson’s song “Blow, bugle, blow,” the line

And the wild cataract leaps in glory,

which falls unrhythmically in the midst of an iambic system, hides its confusion when sung in regular three-fourths time. The flute or violin, unlike any of the percussion instruments, does not convey a stressing tone, it measures notes and carries a quantitative rhythm readily, thereby obscuring any word accents that fall irregularly.

It is my belief that when the drama came into Rome and found the language just at the point where the quantitative principle was having its conflict for dominance with the accentual factor, a moment when the task of shaping adequate rhythms for new forms would be very difficult, it did the natural thing, accepted quantity as dominant, attempted at the same time to observe the word stress, and then hid occasional discrepancies by using song and recitative freely. And this, it seems to me, is one of the reasons why Roman tragedy was the more willing to go in the direction of modern opera.

If a recent theory concerning French verse be true, we may find there an instructive parallel. It has been suggested that when medieval Latin verse floundered between quantity and accent, early French verse, unable to find usable quantitative distinctions and hampered by a monotonous word accent, hesitated for a dominant principle, and allowed the singing line with its counted notes to assume control. Whether or not this is the reason, at any rate the French lyric emerged with its isosyllabic lines and fluid ictus, and in so far provides a partial parallel to what happened in Latin verse.

It is not improbable that, if the Romans had come in contact with culture a century later than they did, so that the Latin accent might have affected colloquial morphology unhindered by literature and sophistication for another century, native poetry might have abandoned its quantitative basis and frankly accepted word accent as the most vital factor of its rhythm. It would perhaps have been a liberating influence had this happened. As it was, by their use of music and by their reasonable compromise with Greek meters, the early poets accustomed the Roman ear to slight the claims of accent, and Ennius was able to compose spoken lines in hexameters which almost entirely followed the dictates of quantity. Once completely naturalized, this method was no longer questioned, and Lucretius, Horace, and Vergil—except at line ends—could safely disregard the word accents. It was the musical part of the drama that had naturalized such principles of rhythm.

After Accius the writing of tragedy fell off as rapidly at Rome as it had in Greece after the conquests of Alexander. How is this to be explained? Why did not England produce great tragedies after the successes of the Elizabethan stage, or France for a long time after the classical period, or why did not America during the two centuries of play-writing before 1900 beget a single great dramatist? Recently there was published a list of the American plays copyrighted in Washington between 1870 and 1920; it contains over 60,000 titles. How many of these have become a part of the world’s literature? Probably not one in 10,000. Can we explain why?

It is not well to be dogmatic in discussing the reasons for such a phenomenon as the decline of tragedy at Rome, but we may be permitted perhaps to repeat some conjectures. We have already remarked[18] that the second century B.C. was a period of striking social changes, of a decrease in the middle class native stock and a very remarkable increase in the slave population, and from this slave population there grew up at Rome the new generation of proletariat citizens that had to be amused at festival seasons. It was a population that was probably as intelligent as the old, but it had hitherto been brought up in slavery and in the devotion to material advancement that slavery implies. These new Romans could hardly be expected to concern themselves with the quality of the entertainment provided, with civic ideals and artistic standards. In Cicero’s day the games at festivals were more frequently gladiatorial shows and wild beast hunts. To freedmen and freedmen’s sons these seemed to provide what Aristotle called tragic purgation somewhat more effectively than did representations of the Medea, Orestes, and Oedipus. It is apparent that if society was to continue in its course of degeneration the exacting tragedy of the old type was doomed.

Nevertheless, the old plays were being revived by men who were interested in high standards, and when a famous actor played a part he would draw large audiences. Aesopus and Roscius, the best actors of Cicero’s day, were in great demand and both grew rich at their profession. Though references to dramatic performances in Cicero’s day are casual, we hear of not a few. We know, for instance, that there were reproductions of Ennius’ plays a century after his death, and we find in the list his Andromache, Telamo, Thyestes, the Alcumeo, the Iphigenia and the Hector. Of Pacuvius’ plays Cicero had seen the Antiope, the Iliona, and a play about Orestes which he describes as a favorite of the gallery. Accius was even more popular. Aesopus produced his Atreus repeatedly. His Eurysaces was given in 57 B.C., the Clytemestra in 55, and the Tereus in 44 after the authorities had suppressed the Brutus because of its political significance. And there were many more.

This success of the old plays—artificial though it may have been in some instances—shows that respectable audiences could still be reckoned on so long as the Republic lasted, and that the plays were attractive enough to justify the aediles in presenting them. With the Empire, however, the decline was rapid; the populace found the tragedies tedious, and when in Horace’s day a popular actor discovered a way of cutting the plays and presenting the more effective scenes in pantomime, with a lavish amount of music and a gorgeous setting, legitimate tragedy gave way to something resembling a Russian ballet. Old tragedies were cut and adapted for this new kind of presentation and new ones were written that consisted chiefly of scenarios and monologues. Even closet plays, like Seneca’s, were shaped into a succession of recitations in the hope that they might sell to the new industry. Literary tragedy, however, had come to its end at Rome.

This process of decay was natural enough and was only to be expected, given the changes in Rome’s society and with them the decline of Roman ideals. But it is still somewhat of a riddle why at Rome as well as at Athens good playwrights ceased to write a hundred years before tragedy ceased to attract respectable audiences. It would seem as if the art of writing plays lost its stimulus even before the plays themselves ceased to please. The reason for this may well be that tragedy kept too long to its convention of interpreting sacred myths. The themes were outworn, and each myth had had every human interest exploited by the time that several writers had given it their several interpretations.

Today it would seem quite the obvious thing to have dramatized fictitious experience, even as comedy had long ago learned to do. But a moment’s reflection will show that to assume that this might have been done involves an anachronism. Greece did not take this step after Euripides, for Agathon’s experiment was not followed, nor France for some time after the classical period, nor England after the Elizabethan successes, and conditions at Rome in the days of Accius were in many respects analogous to those in the countries named. Though the dramatic instinct seems always to be presumable, the drama depends upon social conditions and must draw its life from that which society provides. Its evolution has accordingly been a fairly consistent story. Early tragedy assumes the rôle of interpreting the most sacred and time-honored of a nation’s stories. The sufferings, thoughts, emotions of the great—heroes, demigods, and kings—are worthy of presentation, and these alone. At first the tale must not be altered, it must be told as nearly as possible in the way that tradition has hallowed. As time goes on, however, and men have changed, the tale thus told will seem inconsonant with human nature; then the dramatist may re-tell it, suppressing what has grown obsolete, emphasizing the elements that still seem true to experience. A very daring realist will venture to present Telephus in tatters, but the critics will be upon his heels immediately. For the hero will remind you of a beggar, and it would be desecration to set mere man upon the stage made for the demigods. Common man belongs in comedy; you may laugh at him and with him, but life’s great lessons are illustrated only in the characters of the great. And that is where Euripides stopped—was doubtless compelled to stop. And it is nearly where Shakespeare found the outward boundary of his tragedies. His tragic plots derive from old Chronicles or from Ancient Rome, or from foreign lands sufficiently removed from his audience by mists of unknown space to make them suitably heroic. His tragic characters never represent the men of contemporary England. They are as real and human as the man of the street, to be sure; but that is after all not the same thing. Try to imagine the heroines of Ibsen or Pinero or O’Neill upon the stage of the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day! The Elizabethan conception of the function of tragedy makes such heroines unthinkable except in comic rôles.

Realistic tragedy is of course a thing of slow growth, or perhaps we should say that a nation fits itself slowly for the reception of it. Comedy paves the way somewhat. When the great may not be laughed at, it is well that comedy should present the foibles and deformities of the common man, if it be merely for ridicule. Slaves served the purpose of comedy for Menander and Plautus, though they were careful not to compromise the dignity of their art by giving title rôles to such humble fellows. Yet as a matter of fact the study of mean subjects contributed directly and very largely to the understanding of the ordinary character as material for tragedy. Shakespeare’s portraiture of Shylock, for example, carried him so far that modern critics do not know where comedy ends and tragedy begins. In the Andria, the Hecyra, and the Heauton of Terence the emotion shifts more than once from laughter to deep sympathy. But something more was needed than the dramatist’s study of the man of the street. Human society must itself change. It is not an accident that genuine realistic tragedy failed to find its fully accepted place upon the stage till the nineteenth century, in a word not till thoroughgoing democracy, by preaching the equality of men, had persuaded us of the dignity of the mere human being, and through the prose novel taught the man on the street to concern himself with his fellows as worthy themes of art. That was a stage of democratic realism which Rome did not reach while the literary art was still creative. And therein probably lies the final explanation of the slow failure of Roman tragedy.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Am. Jour. Phil., 1927, 105.

[2] Livius and Naevius were both very fond of the septenarii; the iambic tetrameter appears in the tragic fragments of Naevius once; cretics are found in the Equos Trojanus, and bacchiacs apparently in Naevius’ Danae and in his Lycurgus. Fraenkel, Hermes (1927), 357 ff., has shown that the trochaic septenarius (quadratus) was an old Latin meter. We need not, however, assume with him that it was derived from the Greek. As a marching rhythm it is too natural to require explanation. The assumption of an Indo-European Urvers needs to be exiled from our books. Song and dance are very old.

[3] See Cambridge Ancient History, VII, 644.

[4] See Duckett, Studies in Ennius, 56, who revises the views of Leo, De Tragoedia Romana (Göttingen, 1910).

[5] For a strophic system in Ennius, see Crusius, Philologus, Supp. XXI, 114.

[6] Gram. Lat. Keil, VI, 77, 7; Vollmer, Röm. Metrik, in Gercke’s Einleitung, I, 8, p. 6; however among the preserved fragments of Pacuvius there are several anapaests that resemble those of Ennius.

[7] Ennius, ed. Vahlen, Scaenica, 272.

[8] See Am. Jour. Phil. 1913, 326.

[9] Leo, Die plautinischen Cantica (1897).

[10] Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus (1922), criticized by Immisch, Sitz. Heid. Akad. 1923.

[11] Milne, Cat. of lit. pap. in British Mus. 1927 (no. 52); cf. Wuest and Croenert, Philol. 1928, 153 ff.

[12] See Marx’s ed. of Rudens, 254 ff.

[13] Crusius, Die Responsion in den plaut. Cantica (1929).

[14] See Bieber, Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen and Bulle, Abh. Bayer. Akad. 1928.

[15] If Horace’s strictures on the new music of the drama in the Ars Poet. 200-15 took a hint from Neoptolemus, we may suppose that Hellenistic critics had objected to this change.

[16] Robert Bridges, Ibant Obscuri. Such hexameters as

They were amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure

Walking forth i’ the void and vasty dominyon of Ades:

As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin’d—

do not represent what happened to Latin in Ennius, for the reason that in Latin pronunciation the quantity was the dominant element controlling even the accent. In English the reverse is true. Fraenkel, Iktus und Akzent, has recently committed a similar mistake in judgment, influenced apparently by the high respect that speakers of German must necessarily have for stress. He has resorted to daring hypotheses in trying to prove that Plautus always correctly observes a species of stress (see Sonnenschein in Class. Quart., 1929, 81). It is significant that the French, who feel little stress in their diction, go to the other extreme and find stress insignificant in Latin. Latin in fact was like neither; it resembled Hungarian in being primarily quantitative, and in its word accent had a moderate stress not without a rather noticeable pitch such as is found in some parts of Sweden.

[17] See Lindsay, Early Latin Verse, Leo, Geschichte Lat. Lit., p. 68. Fraenkel, Iktus und Akzent, seems to me only to have confused the results that have been summarized with consummate skill and good sense by Lindsay.

[18] In chap. I.

CHAPTER III
GREEK COMEDY ON THE ROMAN STAGE

The theme of Roman gravitas has perhaps been overworked. The impression seems to be current that Roman schoolboys cheered at the ball games in periodic sentences, and that Roman babes begged for the moon in quantitative hexameters. It appears to be difficult to imagine that the Romans took a very special pleasure in rollicking comedy. Only twenty-six of their comedies have survived, but it is safe to say that if we now had all the respectable literature of the period before 100 B.C., including the epics, the tragedies, the minor verse, and even the artistic prose, the shelves that held the comedies would easily outnumber all the rest. Of what other nation is that true? We have the titles of over four hundred of these plays for the Republican period and there is no reason to suppose that we have even an approach to the full list.

As we have said, the Romans, like all the peoples who followed the Greeks, had to take cognizance of what had been done before. Livius and Naevius were the first to adapt Greek comedies for the Roman stage, as they had been the first to adapt Greek tragedies. Of their work, however, we have again only fragments, saved usually by late grammarians to illustrate archaic grammar. Of Naevius we know the titles of thirty-four comedies, an average of one a year during his period of activity—but since many of these have come to us by the merest coincidence we should not assume that we know all the names of his comedies by any means. Most of these thirty-four plays were adapted from the Greek, but not all. The man who wrote the first Roman epic and the first Roman chronicle play (praetexta) was probably never a slavish copyist. We have noticed how he came to grief for his daring in attacking the powerful Metelli during a critical period of the war. Such criticism would presumably appear in Roman plays. The fragments of his comedies also show many local references that are best explained as coming from plays purely Roman, and such titles as Hariolus, Tunicularia, and Agitatoria suggest independent work. However, so long as we have only about a hundred complete lines rescued from all the plays we can hardly speak with certainty on this point.

In discussing tragedy we suggested that Livius and Naevius were probably the men who shaped the “operatic” form of Roman tragedy, and it is likely that they too were the men who carried this form into comedy, though its final development seems to be due to Plautus. The distinctly lyric lines are rare, to be sure, but the fragments are too few to permit us to expect many. The majority are iambic, the Roman equivalent of the Greek originals, and they have of course the free Latin form. One line is anapaestic; the old Roman trochaic septenarius, well suited to song, is frequent and so is the iambic octonarius, which Naevius seems to treat like a septenarius with anacrusis. Indeed Cicero[1] calls it a septenarius and indicates that it was sung to the accompaniment of the flute.

These were the comedies which entertained the Romans at their festivals during the gloomy years of the Punic war, those years that are so vividly pictured for us by Livy. If we could recover these plays and interpolate them between the harrowing scenes of Livy’s history we should know more than we do of Roman society during that most critical epoch of the nation’s history.

Plautus, from whom we have twenty plays, had staged a few of them before Naevius went into exile, in fact in the Miles Gloriosus he refers to the imprisonment of his fellow-poet. In his plots Plautus kept rather close to the Greek plays, translating, paraphrasing, and adapting as suited his mood. We shall presently discuss his reasons for doing so. What these themes were we need not repeat. The Greeks of Menander’s day had shaped the comedies of intrigue and of romance fairly well on the lines these have followed ever since. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is very close to Plautus’ Menaechmi, and though it departs from its original in its search for further entanglements, the construction, the type of humor, and the dramatic devices are the same. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff illustrates the Menandrian use of self-deception, from his first boasting to his leap into the basket. The Wives are more in evidence than they would have been in Menander but there is little else to distinguish the play from the standard New Comedy. From the Greek, via Plautus and Terence, came practically all the types and all the tricks in which Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy delighted.

Here it is my task not to discuss Roman comedy as such, but rather to indicate what in Rome’s life and experiences made itself felt through these plays. In the Plautine adaptations of Greek comedies we find two seemingly inconsistent purposes, one to rewrite in such a way as to make the exotic comprehensible, the other to keep a Greek atmosphere in order not to offend Roman taste by permitting the inference that the author approved of the behavior which he presented. The first purpose required simplification, the second avoided it. It is necessary to dwell upon this distinction for a moment since historians frequently fall into error by assuming either that Plautus reproduced a Greek milieu without alteration or on the contrary that he represented Roman life as he found it. In point of fact he did both or either, as best suited his purpose.

In technicalities of law, to take a simple illustration, Plautus’ procedure was to simplify with little regard for consistency. At times when it did not matter he substituted Roman officials or institutions for Greek ones without concern as to whether they were exact equivalents. If in presenting the details of a lawsuit a literal translation of the Greek would seem obscure to a Roman audience, Plautus substituted some comprehensible point and reshaped the whole passage to conform to his illustration. In short, he used mere common sense in adapting foreign plays for stage production. Had Plautus been translating for a reading public he might have given a literal rendering and inserted a note of explanation. But plays written for a single presentation have no occasion for employing explanatory notes.

Scholars have also been troubled by the fact that the plays of Plautus bristle with Greek words. There is an average of about ninety occurrences a play, counting repetitions of the same word. How would our comedies fare on the stage if foreign words were used with equal lavishness? Not a few of these words—like amphora, ancora, epistula—had of course been acclimated through commerce, and would cause no trouble. A few technical names that could not be translated—of Greek magistrates, for instance—were illumined by the context. In a few instances Plautus literally dumps in Greek words for amusement, as when an irate husband reels off the items of the bill he has received from the modiste, or reads the menu that will cost him more than he is able to pay. Such words the audience were hardly expected to know. The very outlandish extravagance of the list is intentional. But after we have made these subtractions, the bulk remains.[2] Are we to assume that Plautus addressed his plays to the score of cultured gentlemen who had had Greek tutors? If he had, the aediles would hardly have gone to the expense of buying the plays and presenting them, for the purpose of the games was to attract and amuse the holiday masses. Can it be that Plautus indolently neglected to invent Latin jokes in place of the Greek ones of his models? That is hardly a satisfactory solution in the case of a writer who inundates his scenes with rollicking fun. Another common explanation—too frequently hazarded—that the streets were already overrun with Greek captives who had spread a knowledge of Greek, will hardly serve. In neither of the Punic wars had many Greek captives been taken—the captives had been chiefly Carthaginian, and their Spanish, Gallic, and Ligurian mercenaries—and these are not noticed in the Plautine plays.[3]

The simple explanation is that most of the Roman populace had served in many campaigns in Greek cities and with Greek contingents and had become familiar with a great number of colloquial Greek expressions, in the same way that American boys acquired not a few French phrases some years ago in their one brief campaign overseas. The older generation had served in Sicily in the First Punic War and had been billeted in Greek towns for periods of from six to twelve years. The younger men had all served in the Greek districts of southern Italy before Hannibal was finally driven out in 203 B.C. Both of these wars strained Rome’s man power to the very limit so that practically every adult male saw service in Greek-speaking communities. And finally, during the last years of Plautus’ activity, a dozen legions were sent across the Adriatic for the campaigns against Philip and Antiochus. Plautus could probably assume therefore that at least ninety per cent of the able-bodied men of his audience had served in campaigns among and with Greeks. Those retired soldiers were happy to be complimented with reminders of their services to the state, and Plautus did it by frequent references to the language they had acquired in the wars.[4]

The liberal use of military terms like machaera,[5] ballista, catapulta, phylaca, techina, machina, even in all kinds of figurative senses; of exclamations and terms of abuse that the soldiers would hear when out prowling for extra rations: barbarus, harpago, dierecte, latro, morus, plaga, colapus, mastigia, ganeum gerrae, apage, pax, papae, babae, eia, eugepae, and the rest; of canteen phrases convenient on pay-days in Sicily: drachuma, danista, trapezita, opsonium, cyathisso, crapula, oenopolium, macellum, comissatum eo (and shall we add gynaeceum?), this tells an unmistakable story. A large number of these expressions were little used at Rome after the period of general campaigning among the Greeks. Many point directly to Sicily. The word lautumiae, for example, reminds us of the convict quarries of Syracuse, basilike (“right royally”) seems to betray the soldiers’ respect for the lavish court of King Hiero, as Siculi logi reflects their impression of a talkative people. A large number of the words are Doric in formation, deriving apparently from Sicily or Tarentum: choragus (used in an un-Attic sense and sound), plaga, machina, zamia, catapulta,[6] colapus, ganeum, gerrae, sumbola, and many others. Not a few words were demonstrably adopted by speakers rather than by writers, as phylaca, gerrae, balineum, lanterna, etc.

This is but a brief indication of the linguistic evidence that the soldiers returned home with a convenient Greek vocabulary of no small scope. How freely Plautus could assume its ready use is revealed by his lavishness in compounding such Greek words with Latin termination as in athletice, dulice, euscheme, inanilogista, morologus, pultiphagus, pancratice, opsonari, plagipatidae, elleborosus, ulmitriba, and even in the use of Greek oaths (μὰ τὸν Ἀπόλλων) of semi-Greek puns (opus est chryso Chrysalo, etc.), and Greek slang (argentum οἴχεται). But we may be sure that Plautus knew very well the precise limits of this camp language. He does not venture to employ the common colloquialisms of the literary Greek of Menander if they are not a part of the military store of his day. For those he finds Latin substitutes. Very likely Plautus had himself served as a soldier in southern Italy during the Hannibalic war and had there acquired an accurate knowledge of the diction that could be intelligible to his audience of soldier folk.

There has also been much speculation concerning Plautus’ relatively free use of Greek mythology, since the sophisticated new Greek comedy rather avoided any reference to it.[7] In the Bacchides of Plautus the clever slave compares his exploits in detail with the devices used in the capture of Troy (the theft of the Palladium and the building of the Trojan horse); in the Rudens, Charmides promises a “feast of Thyestes”; in the Captives, Tyndarus refers familiarly to Orestes and Lycurgus; everywhere the names of Achilles, Hector, Medea, and the like are spoken of as well known. This cannot be explained by recalling that the Odyssey had been translated into Latin, since reading was by no means general, nor by pointing to the use of these myths for illustrations on Etruscan vases and mirrors. Not one in a thousand of the auditors had come into contact with Homer or with such objects of art. But the crowds for whom Plautus wrote had for thirty years had free seats on the holidays when the tragedies of Livius, Naevius, and Ennius were played, and they knew the characters of those tragedies as well as the laboring men of today know the names of our baseball pitchers and cinema stars.

The Trojan cycle was particularly familiar from the theater because the dramatists, exploiting the tradition that the Romans were descendants of the Trojans, had presented all the good plays that they could find on this theme. Livius had produced an Equus Trojanus, an Achilles, an Aegisthus, and an Ajax, which must have told of every phase of the subject, and the Livian Hermione had familiarized them with some of the aftermath of the war. Plautus’ ready mention of Procne and Philomela is readily explained by recalling that Livius had presented the Tereus. The impression made by the Trojan cycle of Livius had been deepened by the several plays written on these myths by Naevius; the Hesione, Iphigenia, Hector, Equus Trojanus, and Andromache all dealt with characters of the Trojan cycle, while the Danae and the Lycurgus supplied adjacent myths that the Plautine audiences evidently knew. These plays—and of course there were many whose names have been lost—would account for most of the familiar references in Plautus. Furthermore, Ennius was producing tragedies at the very festivals for which Plautus wrote, and here and there we can actually recognize in Plautus certain lines that were spoken as parodies of Ennian lines.[8] We do not know the chronology of the plays of these dramatists. If we could synchronize them now we should probably find that the references to Andromeda, Alcumeo, Thyestes, and other characters of the Greek myths would fall in neatly with plays of Ennius on these themes which had been recently produced.

It is quite beside the point to ask how much “literature” the Plautine audience knew. They knew no literature as such, but they all attended the festival shows which were free. There they learned the stories of a large number of the plays of Euripides and Sophocles as easily as our working classes learn, without opening a book, about Arab sheikhs, Long Island drawing rooms, Roman chariot races, and Cleopatra’s wiles. To them in fact a play of Euripides was often the latest popular sensation.

Many years ago when Max Reinhardt first staged Oedipus in the Circus at Berlin at prices that attracted hundreds of laboring men I overheard these remarks: “This Sophocles, is he a Berliner?” “I don’t know; the name sounds Russian; but he knows how to make a good show.” Those two men had enjoyed the play all the more because they did not know they were being educated in the ancient classics; and that is how Plautus’ audience had innocently learned its Greek mythology. Naturally Plautus was too wise not to exploit this rich vein of interest.

So thoroughly un-Greek is Plautus in his type of rollicking humor, in his volubility, in his skurrying speed, and in his love for exciting intrigue—if we may assume that the recently discovered plays of Menander are typical of the Greek New Comedy—that we are surprised at his refusal to write original and purely Roman comedies. He invariably keeps the scene in Greece, dresses his characters in Greek garb, and gives them Greek names. What is the reason? Naevius had written plays on Roman themes. Why did not Plautus? That it was diffidence one can hardly believe after noting the originality he displayed in adapting the plays to musical settings and the success he achieved in writing the scenes that are demonstrably his.

The secret of Plautus’ behavior in this matter seems to me to lie in his appreciation of the fact that Rome was still too conservative to accept as Roman the intrigues and plots that would make the richest comedy. “Spoon River,” as we have learned, has its vices, but at Spoon River they are studiously hidden under a cloak of Sunday respectability. When a modern playwright wishes to add more piquancy to a play than an American milieu will unprotestingly support he lays his scene in Paris or on a South Sea island. There is enough human nature under the frown—or smile—to comprehend what is presented, and sins can be the more openly discussed and condemned—or laughed at—if the spectator is permitted at the same time to express his puritanic superiority to the mores of an exotic society admittedly going to its deserved ruin. This seems to be the reason why Plautus lets his amusingly extravagant slaves, demi-mondaines, and reckless young men play freely with moral values in a Greek setting, usually with an explicit condemnation of the villain at the end, and often with a reminder that “such things are possible at Athens.”[9] The characters of Plautus, therefore, are never Roman in outward appearance, and it is a mistake to assume that Roman manners are depicted in his plays, even if here and there he is compelled to take cognizance of Roman morals.

The spendthrift young men with the resourceful slaves who help them to their desires by concocting astute schemes are Greek. The Athens of Menander was sophisticated. There clever young men had penetrated beyond Epicurus’ ethical sophistry to the logical naturalism of his premises; they had even waved aside the forced idealistic definition of “nature” which Zeno was teaching them to follow and had learned to give allegiance to a simpler nature more responsive to immediate wishes. Pristine authority, filial respect, and the compulsion of academic ethics were all weakened by the prevalent discovery that no system of faith as yet invented had withstood penetrating criticism. Young men saw no valid objection in logic to doing as they liked. And many were in a position to do as they liked, since theirs was the generation for which Alexander had ransacked the treasures of the east, opened lucrative commerce to shrewd traders, sent hordes of cheap slaves to do the hard work of a civilized world, and caravans of music girls, dancers, and courtesans to entertain a sophisticated city. The jeunesse dorée of Athens, pleasure-loving, undisciplined, helplessly inexperienced, epicures living to the ragged edge of incomes and beyond, were fit subjects for a comedy whose god was luck. They were not yet brutalized, they usually had a gentlemanly code of a kind, and they were often generously devoted humans. But they had no anchorage in principles. Such were the young men in Menander, and such Plautus, who had an eye for color, preferred to keep them, despite their non-Roman aspect. But he was very careful to keep them Greek.

At Rome at the end of the great Punic war a young man’s life was a very different matter. For nearly twenty years the dreadful scourge of Punic raids had impoverished the people. Every able-bodied man of military age was in the trenches living on the most frugal fare; farms were mortgaged and lying waste; war taxes were growing; the state was pressing down with sumptuary laws that forbade luxury, limiting clothing to homespun, and food to a few cents a day. And even when the Punic war was over, the aftermath of campaigns against the rebellious Gauls, against Spain and Macedonia gave no respite till near the end of Plautus’ life. Doubtless the young men, who could see the Plautine plays on the three or four holidays each year when they were given, enjoyed vicariously a release of spirit which they could comprehend because they were human beings. But not one of them had actually lived at home in the atmosphere reproduced on the Plautine stage. It is not surprising, therefore, that Plautus kept the Greek setting. There was little to draw upon from Roman life. Had he put his people in Roman dress the incongruity would have been ludicrous; and the censors would have realized the danger to morality and suppressed the plays. As exotic myths they seemed less harmful—though the time was to come and sooner than could have been expected when the characters of these plays were to take on a semblance of realism even at Rome.

What is true of Plautus’ young roués is also true of the Plautine parasites and slaves. The amusing parasites, the Athenian wits who got their bread by providing entertaining talk, were as useful in the New Comedy as are the futile expatriate artists in the modern international novel, but there is no evidence that these creatures had as yet made their way to Rome. The Plautine slave is a mixed character. It has been customary to say that Rome’s culture depended more heavily on slavery than Greece’s and that therefore the comic slave is Plautine rather than Greek. But that assumption disregards a century of economic change. The slave of comedy usually is a very clever rascal, very loyal to his young master for whose least pleasure he will trick parents and police; he is amazingly resourceful, quick of wit, possessed of a sauciness that we cannot associate with early Roman custom, and capable of enduring blows if he has a good conscience from having successfully perpetrated his crimes. In sophisticated Athens this character is wholly plausible; at Rome in the day of Plautus he is not. It is true that Menander’s fragments use slaves less than the Plautine plays; this probably means that Plautus, in following some of the dramatists of the New Comedy, avoided Menandrian plays because they had not enough boisterous fun for him per page. It does not mean that Plautus in this respect is closer to Roman life. We used to be told also that scenes of slave torture in comedy were purely Roman, but we now have a scene in Menander’s Perinthia which goes so far in cruelty that Terence omitted this scene. Here again, therefore, we have not a Roman characteristic. The fact is that in Plautus’ day slaves were relatively scarce at Rome; the working classes in the city were still largely free natives, the farms were usually owned in small plots by working farmers, and the few slaves on them were still treated in the way that single farm hands are usually treated in our own simpler rural districts, that is, as members of the household. Bound slaves were very rare, the ergastulum was hardly known as yet, and the slave when set free still became a citizen with the same status as his master. It was not till the end of the Punic war that Rome for the first time knew what it was to possess non-Italic captives in considerable numbers—slaves who had to be bound and watched—and of course it required a generation or two of slave culture on large villas and estates before the saucy type could appear, the type familiar to us in the comedies. No, this type would perhaps be plausible at Rome in the Gracchan day, but not before. My feeling is that Plautus has not only given us the Greek type as he found it, but, since the morality of citizens was not involved in a slave’s rascalities, he has somewhat padded his plays with slave intrigue in order to speed up his action. Not from a single trait should we infer that he depicted the Roman slave of his own day. It is significant that when true Roman comedies began to be written the slave rôle was at once toned down because, as Donatus says, a Roman master ought not be represented as outwitted by a slave.

In the treatment of female characters Plautus’ procedure is somewhat different. Greek New Comedy had a type of woman in the rather respectable hetaerae well adapted to its purpose, and in fact the only type usable, since the Greek housewife was so bound to the dull routine of the rear-of-the-house that she was too devitalized for literary treatment. The metic companion—of Aspasia’s station and juristic standing—moved about freely in the city, could be placed in almost any social group, and could by an easy fiction and the proper birth tokens be discovered to be an unrecognized citizen. Since this was the only respectable class available for Menander’s intrigues, he naturally employed hetaerae for his many plays that contained love scenes. Roman adapters, however, encountering such heroines, who represented a social class foreign to Roman society, found considerable difficulty in transplanting them to Italian soil. It may be remembered that in the Victorian period the plays of Dumas fils could not readily be transposed into English, just as the romantic English plays of that day failed of comprehension in France, because the relations between the sexes were based on different customs in each country. What, for instance, would Plautus have done on the Roman stage with Habratonon, the shrewd but generously human hetaera of Menander’s Arbitrants, who, when she had to make her choice, surrendered her own advantages over her lover and restored him to his wife and child? Plautus if he had used such a play would have had to substitute for her a Roman courtesan or else destroy the plot. And if he did employ a courtesan, Roman realism would have demanded that she be depicted without generosity, for at Rome it would not do to let a woman of such a class seem virtuous. The matrons of Rome would have objected.[10] In the Roman society of Plautus’ day family relations were puritanic, divorce was almost unknown, and the Roman matron was her husband’s equal in the home and in society. She was not relegated to the spinning room in the back of the house as in Greece; she did not mope in her chamber while her husband went to dinner parties and to the theater with his boon companions. She was the companion. In such a society there may be and were some “daughters of joy” for pagan youth, but they were not spoken of, they did not appear, they were in the dark where generous virtues do not grow. One might suppose that Plautus could have abandoned the Greek scene, eliminated the demi-monde, and staged a normal Roman comedy. But if he were to keep the love story he would have had to resort to the postmarital triangle used in such circumstances by the French—a device unthinkable in the social atmosphere of his day—or to the romances of free adolescents—a theme not easily illustrated from the urban life of southern countries where young girls are carefully cloistered. In other words, Plautus was very nearly compelled to choose either to abandon the theme of love-making in a comic setting, or to adopt the Greek hetaera; and if he did the latter he was obliged to deprive her of various pleasant qualities that might have been hers in Greece or incur the enmity of Roman moral censorship. Plautus has been severely blamed, especially by French critics, for making his women futile twaddlers with no redeeming features. It is true that this description fits them well enough, but what was he to do? Titinius seems to have found a way out later, but it was not a very obvious way. The method of Plautus should not be ascribed to a coarse grain in the dramatist. It grew naturally from his comprehension of the real status of the Roman family. In adapting Greek slaves, parasites, and young men with little or no change, he might take a risk, but on the subject of Roman womanhood he could not compromise.

It is noticeable that Terence could. Bacchis in the Hecyra, who harks back to Habratonon in Menander, has an appealingly generous nature despite her station, and even the morose old man of the play has to admit it. But Terence wrote the Hecyra more than twenty years after Plautus’ death, at a time when Greek customs had invaded Rome. Today Terence receives the credit for a liberal humanity denied to Plautus, but it is safe to say that Terence would not have ventured to present his Bacchis a generation earlier. His respect for the position and the deserved rights of the women of old Rome would have made him feel that it was a cheap thing to do.

The most striking departure of Roman comedy from the Greek resides in the omission of the choral interludes and the substitution of long lyrical monodies in the place of spoken and recited lines. In the Greek plays the acts were separated by choral interludes, dances, revels, and the like. With the careful costuming as well as with the frequent doubling of rôles in the Greek theater, much time was required for changes of garb. Plautus had few trained singers available for an effective chorus, few dancers, and he needed but little time between the acts, since there was no scene-shifting and masks were not used in his day. A Plautine play was almost a continuous performance, and a performance with an abundance of music. The rapid dialogue that carried the most vital action was usually spoken without musical accompaniment in six-foot iambics. This dialogue usually constituted about a third of the play. Soliloquies, monologues (except in prologues), and scenes of tense emotion were apt to be sung to the flute in a variety of meters that kept changing to suit the mood and the emotion. These parts, called cantica, were rare in some plays and especially in the early ones, while in others they took up as much as a third of the play. To these cantica we shall presently return. Certain scenes composed of recitative were accompanied by the flute. Such scenes we are accustomed to even now, especially in sentimental plays where love-making and moonlight are signals for the muted violins to accompany the spoken words with a soft obligato. In Plautus the meters of such scenes, usually seven- and eight-foot lines, vary considerably from the normal dialogue verse.

There is only one passage in ancient comedy in which we happen to have the original Greek material re-cast into a Roman canticum. A late critic, Aulus Gellius,[11] quotes a song of Caecilius, and with it the original Greek to demonstrate what he calls the inadequacy of the Latin paraphrase. Gellius, however, misses the point. The substance of the Greek—the conventional complaints of a scold-ridden husband—was deliberately changed. The smooth narration of the original was not suited to song, and Caecilius wanted a text that would give the musician a chance to bring out effectively the constantly changing emotions of the speaker. In the Greek the husband simply informs the audience, with suitable comment, that his wife, jealous of her slave maid, has had her sold to get her out of the house. There is of course no great depth to the husband’s emotions, though the range from pity to sarcasm is well enough brought out. The Latin version stresses this variation of mood by a constant shift of meters, the verse running speedily from the tripping trochaic septenarii through cretics, bacchiacs, cretics again, and then iambics. The man comes on shouting to music that changes its rhythm with every line.

(— ◡ ) Always scolding, nagging, dinning she compelled me to obey:

(— ◡ —) Innocence goes for naught: the maid is sold.

(◡ — —) Now gloating and boasting my good wife appears:

(— ◡ —) Tell me pray, what am I? Who is master here?

The point made by the ancient critic that Caecilius did not adequately reproduce the original quality is wholly beside the point. He was not attempting to. He was making a plausible libretto for a brief song and dance in which melody, pitch, tempo, and gesture should aid in the expression of his varying moods. Menander indeed had written a readable play—he always did, and paid the penalty by seldom taking the prize. But Caecilius produced a musical comedy which, it is safe to wager, kept the audience physically responsive.

It has been usual to suppose that Plautus invented the musical comedy of this type.[12] I have already referred to Naevius’ introduction of the canticum into tragedy. It had the same function in comedy and I need only repeat that Naevius served in Sicily as a soldier in the First Punic War, and that in many of the Greek towns of Sicily where the Roman soldiers were billeted, or at least resorted on furloughs, Greek tragedies and comedies were being produced in the theaters, probably with reduced choruses.[13] That is where Naevius may have found his model of the canticum. It should also be remembered that a great variety of what may be called music-hall singing and dancing went on in such places at that time. If the Roman soldiers grew fond of such performances, it would not be surprising if Naevius tried to supply in his comedies as well as in his tragedies some substitute for what Rome did not have. Audiences may make insistent demands: even Wagner was compelled to insert ballets in his operas in order to satisfy the demands of his Parisian audiences. The fragments from Naevius’ comedies are few, and in them there are none of the purely lyrical meters so often found in Plautus—the cretics, the bacchiacs, and the glyconics. But there is a large proportion of trochaic septenarii, lines which are now assumed to belong to a native Latin song meter.[14] Our evidence is slight as yet but it is perhaps sufficient to support a suggestion that musical comedy may have grown up at Rome through the gradual adaptation of Sicilian forms of entertainment by Naevius and a constant improvement upon these innovations by Plautus. We have also seen that song and chant were a decided aid in the attempt to accommodate new meters to the Roman ear.

In observing how literature may be determined by externals we must not omit to notice certain customs of staging that affected the plays. The Roman ludi, at which the plays were first given, had formerly been devoted chiefly to chariot races. These races seem to have come in at first when, before and after campaigns, the army was purified. The knights and charioteers took part in the lustration and used the occasion to demonstrate the skill of their horses. At the Ludi Romani, held in September, which grew out of triumphal processions to Jupiter’s temple, the races were probably not considered in historical times as having any religious associations. They were held for purposes of entertainment, and the plays, the ludi scaenici, which were added to the races in 240 B.C., were also given for entertainment and had in themselves none of the sacred associations so persistently connected with the Greek performances.

Now these Roman games were directed by the magistrates, who used for them an appropriation granted by the state, an appropriation, however, which seldom covered the costs. The Senate in fact took advantage of the knowledge that men who had reached the aedileship by popular favor were likely to entertain the people well in order to hold that favor at the next election. Obviously the aediles who paid the costs would choose plays of a nature to please the average Roman citizen. In saying the average Roman we mean that most of the men and women of the middle and lower classes would expect to see the plays. Scipio, to be sure, tried to attract the nobility by setting apart the first rows for them, and he probably succeeded to some extent, at least when good tragedies were given, if we may judge from Cicero’s familiarity with the acting of Aesopus. However, had the majority of the senatorial nobles been enthusiastic attendants, Rome would not have had to wait nearly two centuries for a permanent theater. We must assume for most performances a crowd of holiday idlers from the streets and shops who looked for something at least as interesting as tippling at the bar, and who were quite well aware that the aediles expected defeat at the election if the plays were not satisfactory. We can therefore comprehend why Plautus, who quite regularly succeeded in pleasing his audience, packed a great deal more of joking, intrigue, and broad humor into his plays than did Menander, for instance; why his plots are simpler, reveal less characterization, and in general concern themselves less with the artistic unfolding of a story than Menander’s and, finally, why the song and dance scenes constantly increase in number in the late Plautine plays.

Conversely, when we think of the audience, and then compare these plays with the cinema shows sometimes given to entice crowds of voters to political gatherings, we can only be surprised at the relatively high grade of entertainment that the Roman comedies contain. Rome’s holiday crowds in Plautus’ day consisted of plain folk, but they must have been intelligent and unspoiled. The mimes and farces of a century later certainly reflect a decided deterioration in the theater-goers of that time. Horace was not entirely fair when he accused Plautus of writing down for the sake of filling his purse. Perhaps he did, but after all he did not stoop to the kind of audiences that later entertainers amused for profit. Horace in fact should have compared Plautus with Laberius and Publilius and not, as he did, with the nicer closet drama of his own day which never had a chance of being produced.

We may also recall that Plautus wrote for a single performance with no thought of publication, of a reading public or even of a revival of the play. He sold his manuscript and after the play was over the manuscript was placed in the state archives, perhaps never to be seen again. Plautus of course did not know that many of the plays would be dug up for reproduction a generation later when there was a dearth of good writers. We shall also do well to remember that there were no programs distributed at the performances. These circumstances account for the dramatist’s endeavor to make his plays self-explanatory and self-contained, for his willingness to continue the old convention of revealing the plot early, to keep its progress clear and explicit, to get immediate effects and not to concern himself too much as to whether an effective scene at the end is entirely consistent with the implications at the beginning. The spectator could not refer to a published copy, nor return next day to examine the play critically. Most scholarly guessing as to whether blemishes may have crept into these plays by successive revisions is based upon a minute analysis of them in the study, the very kind of analysis that Plautus never expected to receive. Plautus counted to a certain extent on the auditor’s capacity to forget as well as on his ability to remember. One curious result of this habit of presenting a new play at each festival was that a great many plays accumulated in the archives, and so when, in the time of Terence, officials began to resurrect old plays, the available stock glutted the market. At that time the authors of new plays must actually have been hurt by the competition of dead authors.

One of the greatest difficulties that the dramatists had to contend with in the old day was the securing of good actors. Not only did Livius begin without the aid of any trained actors, but for half a century at least the profession was not attractive. Livius seems to have formed his own troupe. Naevius may have depended somewhat on players from Campania who were trained in giving Atellan farces. At least that seems to be the implication of Festus in explaining the term “fabula personata,” and we know that Oscan Pompeii had a permanent theater at that time. Polybius, the Greek, found the acting in Roman tragedies very unsatisfactory. The chief difficulty was of course that the games came so rarely that in the early day no actor could possibly have made a living by the profession. For the first twenty years it is likely that at most only two tragedies and two comedies were produced a year at the annual Ludi Romani. In 220 a new festival, the Ludi plebeii, was added for November, but it is not likely that at first plays were given there. At least none are recorded till twenty years later. In 214 the plays were assigned four days of the Ludi Romani, and in 212 games, including plays, were voted in honor of Apollo. Hence we may assume that by the end of the Punic war there would be about six days a year set apart for dramatic performances, that is, about six tragedies and six comedies were played once each year.

Since the aediles (and praetors, in the case of the Apollo games) selected a new play for each performance, the annual offering of plays might be considerable, and some rivalries sprang up among the poets. For instance, a Terentian prologue[15] reveals an amusing situation in which, after the aediles had paid for the play and were inspecting it, a rival dramatist gained admission to the rehearsal and suddenly started to charge Terence with plagiary. In another prologue of Terence, Ambivius, the producer, reminds his audience of how he had in his youth insisted on re-staging rejected plays of Caecilius Statius till the audience learned to like them, adding that Caecilius had suffered unjustly from the criticism of rival poets. We may then assume a considerable activity and a not unwholesome rivalry among the dramatists.

But the serious danger to the profession in the early days was the rarity of the productions and the meager opportunity for good actors. Six days of work a year is not apt to create or nourish a specialized profession. Because of the scarcity of actors Livius, presumably Plautus, and also occasionally Atilius, acted in their own plays—as had been the old custom of the poets in Greece. Plautus mentions only one of his actors—Pellio—and says unpleasant things about him. Who the other actors were we do not know. Festus conjectures that Naevius had imported Oscan players for the comedy called Personata because of the scarcity of talent. Before the death of Plautus, L. Ambivius Turpio came out as actor-manager for Caecilius, and later we hear of Cincius, a Faliscan, Atilius of Praeneste (perhaps the playwright of that name), and a Minucius. Much later, in the time of Roscius, we know that the scarcity of actors led to the custom of training clever Greek slaves to act, but there is no evidence that slaves were used during the first hundred years of the Roman drama. Very likely the author himself at first took a rôle, brought in Oscan, Greek, and Faliscan actors to some extent, and induced amateurs who made their living by other, occupations to help during the festivals. It is quite certain that well into the second century B.C. there were not enough performances to persuade many Romans to enter the profession for a regular living, or to incur the expense of training or keeping slaves for the occupation, as was done later.

We must also take into account the fact that the performances at Rome were not, as in Greece, connected with old and sacred traditions, so that men were not induced to take up the profession because of its glamour and official honors. Plays were introduced at the games purely as an extra entertainment. In Greece where plays had grown up to interpret sacred myths, acting had some religious import so that the state was called upon to give prizes and honors to the profession.

The economic and social factors that we have mentioned account for the fact that Plautus had to continue the Greek habit of doubling rôles even though he did not employ masks, and though he was not bound by any old tradition as to the proper number of actors.[16] Of course the rule of the three actors had broken down even at the time of Euripides, and Menander probably allowed himself five actors at times. Plautus often had ten or twelve characters, but he seems to get along with about four or five actors and in several instances with only three. This accounts for the somewhat artificial excuses that characters are constantly giving for leaving the stage when the actor has to scurry off to dress for a new rôle. Needless to say, this deficiency of actors must have exerted a restraining influence upon Plautus which he had to bear constantly in mind. It kept many scenes rather thin. When, for instance, in the Rudens after the young man has been searching for his sweetheart through three acts, and after he has just learned that she has been rescued from a shipwreck and a thieving slave-dealer, he suddenly comes face to face with her at last, one naturally expects at least a cheerful exchange of greetings. But he has not a word for her. It takes us aback unless we notice that the girl must be represented on the stage by a mute, because the actor who has been playing her rôle must now be engaged in playing another part. Or again, in the Pseudolus, where Ballio heaps abuse upon three characters, sends them off, engages in a futile monologue, and then calls out three others and continues his tirade, one comprehends the strange interruption by noticing that the second trio cannot exist until the first three actors have gone in and changed their garbs and voices. It will be remembered that Shakespeare suffered from the same technical difficulty. At the end of the Winter’s Tale we see far less of Perdita than we desire and we are hardly consoled by the knowledge that the actor who has been playing her rôle is now busy playing Hermione. Terence was not hampered to quite the same extent as Plautus by a lack of players, but the Greek convention reasserted itself later and was foolishly accepted in Horace’s Ars Poetica to the detriment of the later drama.

As we have said, the early Roman dramatists did not use masks and in fact employed the most simple make-up in quickly adjusted garments and wigs. With the extensive doubling and trebling of rôles there must have been an uncomfortable amount of recognizing of the actors. The late scholiasts like Donatus, who discuss these matters, wrote when masks were again unusual but when actors were more plentiful. They are therefore somewhat obscure about the earlier custom. Their guess that Roscius introduced the mask[17] to hide an ineffectual countenance may be true, but it is very likely that the Greek masks were introduced on the Roman stage—this happened about the Gracchan time—in order to facilitate the doubling of rôles and to remove the confusion that arose from the easy recognition of the actors. By that time Rome was so large and the theater crowd so extensive that the play of features would at any rate be missed by a large part of the audience, and the well-marked masks served the useful purpose of distinguishing the characters at a distance. Opera glasses have now removed that necessity.

There seems to be some misunderstanding about the social status of the Roman actors because our sources of information are late and do not always distinguish between the various periods. The facts now available seem to warrant the statement that slaves were not employed as actors during the first hundred years of the drama when most of the great comedies were written and produced. At that time the authors usually acted themselves, and authors and actors were united in a common guild, honored by the state in the Alexandrian manner by being assigned an official meeting place at Minerva’s temple. Livius and Terence were freedmen, to be sure, but out of respect for their art both were highly honored by the foremost men of the senate. The day when slaves had stigmatized the professions by their participation was still far off. Even in Sulla’s time the great rôles of legitimate comedy and tragedy were assumed by distinguished men like Roscius and Aesopus,[18] men whom Cicero was pleased to number among his friends. Actors gradually lost their position in society only by the deterioration of the drama—of which we shall speak later. It was apparently when the standard plays had to give way to farces and mimes that slaves had to be trained to take rôles which self-respecting citizens refused to play. Then the social brand was marked on the few who demeaned themselves by playing with the slaves. And thus in the late Republic we hear not a little of the cheapness of the actor’s profession. However, that stigma did not even then apply to the great actors who confined themselves to the parts of the good old plays. The exact story of the fall of the profession is lost to us. Cicero is quoted as having said in his De Republica that at Rome actors and others who took part in a profession of entertainment were deprived of their civic rights and had their names struck off the tribal registration list by the censors.[19] These words are assigned to Scipio in a dialogue whose dramatic date is 129 B.C. but, as in several other instances, Cicero may be allowing himself an anachronism. Livy happens to say, without specifying a date, that actors could not serve as soldiers in the Roman legions.

Now there are two possible explanations for this censorial stigma. It is possible that at one of the several puritanic assaults on the theater in the second century B.C.—and during one of these periods of reform the censor Nasica ordered a partly constructed theater to be torn down—a censorial brand may have been placed on the actors in order to discourage citizens from entering the profession. But it is quite as possible that in the early days when actors were difficult to secure for the public festivals some praetor in charge of the festival induced the censor to excuse actors from army service and that, following the Roman practice of using the military rôle for the voting list, he also struck the names of actors from the lists of the tribus. Later when the state was demoralized and slaves had filled the profession, the cancellation of the name, at first effected for practical purposes, may have been continued as morally appropriate. In Roscius’ day the stigma was associated not with appearance on the stage but with playing for remuneration, so that when Roscius ceased to accept a fee he could be raised to the knighthood by Sulla. This fact proves how unstable the theory of the actors’ disability really is and rather supports the view that removal from the tribal list was not at first intended so much as a stigma as an excuse from performing service away from Rome. At any rate the social brand did not apply to recognized actors in the standard drama.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Cic. Tusc. i. 106-7.

[2] Leo, Plautinische Forschungen, 106; Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus, 157; Kahle, De Vocabulis Graecis Plauti aetate: and Hoffmann, in Stoltz-Schmalz, p. 813, have made some interesting observations regarding the use of Greek words in Plautus but have failed to note the pertinent historical facts.

[3] The greeting ave is a curious instance of borrowing from the Punic. The word was perhaps brought back by the soldiers from their camps in the Punic parts of Sicily. The Romans had besieged the Punic forts of Lilybaeum for eight years.

[4] Plautus likes to address the soldiers of his audiences, cf. Capt. 68; Cist. 197; Cas. 87; etc.

[5] It is difficult to say when the great vowel-shift took place in Latin. It is clear that Greek words in Plautus like calamus, colaphus, and hilarus had not come under the influence of the shift. Either they were very recent arrivals or had been used so little in Latin folk-speech (like barbarus, a Greek term of abuse) that Plautus could spell them in the Greek fashion. Words like oliva, Hercules, Massilia, Tarentum were of course acclimated long before and took on the regular vowel changes of Latin. However it is probable that many Greek words that were adopted during the Pyrrhic and first Punic wars felt the full influence of the great shift. This shift seems to have begun after the twelve tables and the Duenos inscription and it was by no means over when Plautus wrote: cf. the inscriptional spelling mereto, soledas, Esquelino, Arimenese, popolom, saxolus, etc. It is difficult to see how Acragas (Agrigentum) could have got into frequent Latin usage before 262 B.C. It is highly probable that the vowel-shift in Latin, like the similar change in English, marks a politico-social shift, an emergence of a social group that pronounced certain vowels in a way not considered correct in aristocratic Rome. We may possibly associate it with the elevation of the plebeians after the Publilian and Hortensian laws of 339 and 287 B.C., which made the tribal assembly supreme in Roman legislation. The new tendencies in pronunciation would then be a strong factor in speech during the First Punic War. Furthermore, the fact that the dramatists could transform Δήμοφων to Demipho at one stroke shows how quickly a word would adapt itself to Latin custom. I feel sure that we have placed the arrival of most of the Greek words too early.

[6] Catapulta was probably not very old in Latin since only the third syllable shows a change, and that a relatively late one. In words like sumbola we doubtless have the Doric pronunciation of u; in the short penult of gynaeceum, balinea, and platea, the cause need not lie wholly in a Latin tendency to shorten one vowel before another but in part perhaps to the similar tendency found in Greek and especially in Sicilian. In Latin latro, barbarus, choragus, and the like we certainly have not standard Greek meanings but such as might have been heard in Sicily during the Punic war. Sturtevant’s interesting discussion “Concerning the Use of Greek in Vulgar Latin,” Trans. Am. Phil. Assoc. (1925), quite misses the heart of the question when it speaks of the “Romans consciously mocking the Greeks of the city.” There were very few Greeks there then, and they were not significant enough to invite mocking.

[7] Fraenkel, Plautinisches im Plautus, chap. III; unfortunately he has failed to comprehend the nature of the Plautine public. Legrand’s Daos makes the more serious mistake of treating the Greek and Roman New Comedy as a single phenomenon.

[8] Sedgwick, Class. Quart. 1927, 88.

[9] Stich. 448, licet haec Athenis nobis: Men. 7-9. At the end of the Bacchides Plautus becomes very apologetic for the immoral last scene.

[10] Selenium in the Cistellaria and Adelphasium in the Poenulus are favorably portrayed so as not to disappoint the audience when they are later to be revealed as freeborn.

[11] A. Gellius, II, 23, 6.

[12] Leo, Plaut. Cantica: Fraenkel, op. cit., chap. X, who, however, draws upon Ennius more than the dates permit. The so-called epitaph of Plautus apparently credited him with special praise for his elaborate songs (numeri innumeri).

[13] There were theaters at least in Syracuse, Tauromenium, Segesta (the seat of a Roman garrison throughout the period of the war), Agyrion, Tyndaris, Akrae, and Catania; see Bieber, Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen, 50. Choragus is a Doric form that might readily have come from Segesta.

[14] Cf. Fraenkel on the “Versus quadratus,” Hermes, 1927, 357.

[15] Ter., Eunuch. 20 and Hecyra, 14.

[16] Cf. C. M. Kurrelmeyer, Economy of Actors in Plautus. The well-known Horatian rule was a later reversion to a Greek rule. Choral singers were apparently imported from Greece in large numbers in the days of Accius; there was a Societas cantorum Graecorum at Rome then: see Raccolta in onore G. Lombroso, 287. In England the early companies that played the interludes seldom numbered over four, and yet they had at times to take care of sixteen or more rôles. Doubling was less drastic in Shakespeare’s theater but it sufficed to allow the dramatist the privilege of producing diversified effects by using many rôles for only one scene or act. In Hamlet alone there are some ten rôles of this type. Plautus and Terence do not hesitate to dismiss a character after the first scene or indeed to introduce one in the last.

[17] Diomedes, in G. L. K., I, 489, quod oculis perversis erat. The late commentators seem to have had very little information on the subject.

[18] On Roscius, see Von der Mühll in Pauly-Wiss. sub. voc., 1123. There is no evidence whatever for the traditional conjecture that Roscius and Aesopus were freedmen. The sister of Roscius married into a well-known family. Aesopus was probably a Greek who, like Archias, had been given citizenship in some municipality as an honor. His position at Rome was such that it is impossible to suppose that he had ever been a slave.

[19] Cic., De Rep. iv 10; Livy VII, 2, is full of anachronisms. Cf. Warnecke, Neue Jahrb. 1914, 94. However, Warnecke fails to note how late the evidence is and how completely it disagrees with the known circumstances of the early Roman drama. Plautus, Cist. 785, which promises a flogging to the incapable actor, is of course one of the jokes of the play. The ninth article of the recently discovered charter of Cyrene excuses from certain public service various people (including doctors and teachers of music) who are engaged in professions of public welfare. Since the actors’ guild at Rome was based upon Alexandrian models, it is not unlikely that certain Ptolemaic regulations were also taken over.

CHAPTER IV
TERENCE AND HIS SUCCESSORS

Plautus lived in the most productive period of Roman comedy. He happens to mention only one rival, the aged Naevius, but from later sources we learn of Caecilius, Licinius, Trabea, Atilius, Titinius, and others who apparently began to write before the death of Plautus. That all of these actually staged plays we may be sure, since manuscripts had no chance of surviving unless they came into the official archives by way of purchase for production. So numerous were the old manuscripts in these archives that Plautus, who could at most not have written more than thirty or forty plays, was later credited with a hundred and thirty. Apparently unsigned plays were attributed to him because of the commercial value of his name. But the fact that so many stray plays were in existence is significant of the activity of writers. It is not surprising therefore that a guild of “writers and actors” flourished in the days of Plautus, and that the state recognized it and assigned it quarters on the Aventine.

Of the earlier men from whose works we have fragments, only two are in any way individualized in the scant remains. Titinius, who seems to have been a late rival of Plautus, was so thoroughly lost to his successors that Cicero seems not to have been aware of him. But Varro refers to Titinius in high terms in his work on the Latin language, written while he was gathering books for Caesar’s projected public library. Varro probably was the man who ferreted out his plays and name from the aediles’ archives. It is signal praise that Varro gives Titinius when he places him by the side of Terence as a delineator of character. An allusion to one of his plays by Horace seems to indicate that some of his work was actually staged in the early Empire (more than a hundred years after the dramatist’s death) for the poet refers to a scene that is visualized rather than to a line read, and he assumes that Augustus will recognize his allusion.[1]

What Titinius did was to follow a suggestion made by Naevius and write original comedies (togatae) with native plots, scenes, and characters. When we recall how Plautus found it prudent to cling to Greek plots for social and moral reasons, we see that Titinius must have had a vein of daring. That he was lauded among the very foremost for characterization is the more remarkable since he did not adapt characters already well outlined. It was no easy task to present before the old Catonian society comedies revolving about Roman men and women, and to rival the plays of Plautus which could legitimately appropriate all the attractive plots of Hellenistic Athens. Donatus remarks naïvely that realistic Roman comedy of the old day, unlike the Greek comedy, could not picture slaves as more clever than their masters. This statement, of course, does not go to the heart of the matter, but it is one way of saying that the Romans, who insisted on social decorum in home life, were in no mood to see themselves pictured as the gulls of spoiled sons and saucy slaves. If the togata had to eliminate all such scenes, it must have altered the whole tone of comedy. But that was not all. We have noticed how Plautus was compelled to change and attenuate feminine rôles because the Romans had nothing to put in the place of the semi-respectable Greek hetaerae with whom the youth of Athens associated freely. What was there for Titinius to do in writing Roman plays? It was out of the question to insult the dignity of the noble household with stories of boisterous love affairs; and yet he apparently did not wish to sacrifice such plots either by avoiding the female characters or by using those that Roman society disdained. He did want the love story and he wanted it both wholesome enough to attract Rome and natural enough to give a free play of emotions in an active plot, and he found it in a way that Plautus had not. He abandoned the jeunesse dorée of the standard Greek play and resorted to the natural and free society of the Italian village communities outside of the great capital, where, as in Italian villages of today, honest young men and women of humble circumstances worked together at daily tasks in shops, at counters, desks, and work benches. Titinius made a real discovery when he left the artificial society of aristocratic Rome because it gave no opportunity for treating of natural relations between the unmarried young of both sexes and went out into the near-by villages of Latium or the humbler streets of the city where more normal conditions obtained. He was perhaps the first writer of Roman comedy who could draw his material from life and still base his comedy on a love story. Only fifteen titles of his plays have survived, but nine of these take their name from the leading female characters in the plays: The Maid of Setia, The Lady of the Dye Shop, The Girl of Velitrae, The Twin Sister, The Girl Who Knows Something about the Law, The Stepmother, Pyrrha the Weaver, The Dancing Girl of Ferentinum, The Flute-player and The Girl of Ulubrae. These heroines are folk in humble life but the fragments show that they are none the less sprightly, quick-witted and interesting creatures. Today we are sadly at a loss in trying to comprehend the life of the great masses of the people during the Plautine period. Plautus in his re-shapings of Greek plots reflects it only in his suppressions and intimations, and then very imperfectly. Livy in his dignified and voluminous history of this period strides majestically over it. We would gladly surrender much of both for the faithful and sympathetic picture that a volume of Titinius could give us. If Varro’s judgment was right in lauding the power of characterization of this author we might, if he were rescued, find him a place by the side of very modern realists.

Caecilius Statius is the other writer of comedy vying with Plautus of whom something is known, and he too deserves to be remembered with a keen hope that his works may some day come to light. He was more orthodox than Titinius, kept, like Plautus, more or less close to his Greek models, and obeyed the same social purpose of not offending puritanic taste by dressing his players in Greek garb. Strange to say, he was a Celt, the first in the history of literature. He had apparently been captured as a boy somewhere near Milan when the Romans were campaigning there during the Hannibalic war. That he was not a mere child at the time becomes evident from the fact that he never wrote Latin quite well enough to suit the discriminating ear of Cicero—who otherwise read him with pleasure. Yet he somehow received a good education—as bright slaves often did—for he knew Greek well. He also got his freedom somehow and became a close associate of Ennius. He lived long enough to give aid to Terence in the production of that young man’s first youthful play, the Andria, and was generous enough to recommend the play to the aediles when they hesitated to accept it. Ambivius, the loyal producer of Terence, remarks in one of the prologues which he spoke for Terence that Caecilius had had a discouraging series of rejections in his youth but that he, Ambivius, confident of the poet’s worth, had persisted in presenting the plays till success was assured.[2] A later critic, Volcacius—who, to be sure, takes no account of the togatae in this particular list—places Caecilius at the very head of the writers of comedy, giving Plautus second place and Terence sixth. Unfortunately we do not happen to know whether this critic was a man of sound judgment.

The plays of Caecilius were constructed much like those of Plautus, with the same dependence upon the Greeks in plot, and with the same devotion to Roman musical accompaniment and to arial monodies. His use of the splendidly rhythmical trochaic septenarii is everywhere noticeable in the fragments. Varro suggests that Caecilius was esteemed rather for his melodramatic effects than for his ability to create characters, in this matter regarding him less highly than Terence, and praises him especially for the composition of his plots. Just why Varro admired his plots he did not say, but if, as we may suspect, Caecilius was the first dramatist to abandon the Greek and early Roman manner of disclosing the trend of the plot in prologues and to focus the interest of his comedies more upon suspense and surprise, Varro’s judgment would be justified. We make this suggestion because, as we shall explain, Terence’s methods were unconventional in this respect, and Terence in writing his comedies had had the advice of Caecilius. If Caecilius was an innovator in this matter, it would account not only for Varro’s high opinion of his plots but also for the fact that Caecilius failed at first to attract an audience used to explicit preparation. In the end, however, Caecilius succeeded and it would seem that he wore well. Manuscripts of his plays apparently were dug out of the archives early for restaging, and revivals were frequent. Cicero knew his works well enough to quote from several of them even when far from his library. Horace alludes to a character of his in the Ars Poetica, and in the second-century craze for the early Latin authors Caecilius kept his place among the foremost.

The six plays of Terence are so well known that little need be said by way of general characterization. It is generally supposed that they are more faithful paraphrases of Greek originals than any of the Plautine comedies. This idea, based partly upon the fact that Terence used the older Greek dramatic form instead of adopting the Plautine custom of introducing cantica, and partly upon the fact that Donatus’ commentary mentions relatively few departures from the Greek, is probably correct. There is also good reason for supposing that Terence might care to reproduce his Greek model with more fidelity than Plautus could. Society had changed so much between 200 and 160 B.C. that the Greek plays could be presented without alteration, even to the point of placing on the stage attractive hetaerae. Moreover, education was general enough so that cultivated persons desired more finished plays and an elimination of some of the Plautine downrightness. The plays of Terence though less amusing than those of Plautus are on a higher literary plane and much of their beauty undoubtedly savors of the delicate humanity that may be found in the recently discovered plays of Menander. Nevertheless we must wait till the actual models of Terence’s comedies are discovered before we deny these graces to Terence himself. We happen to know from Donatus that three of the characters of the Andria were introduced by Terence into his paraphrase of a Menandrian plot. While the rôles are somewhat stilted the characters give expression to some of those penetrating observations that critics are wont to attribute to the original.[3] This proves that Terence was himself capable of very delicate feeling, and until we find his originals it is therefore scientifically defensible to acknowledge Terence as the possible source of some of the best passages in these six comedies.

It has frequently been noticed[4] that the writers of the New Comedy, including Plautus, were far more generous than present-day dramatists in “preparing” their audiences for every turn in the plot and that they depended less for their effects upon the elements of “suspense” and “surprise.” It is generally assumed that the expository prologue was adopted by comedy from tragedy in order that the unlettered spectators who crowded the theater at the festivals should not have any difficulty in following the play. It has also been noted repeatedly that when the interest of the play did not rest in comic situations, buffoonery, ludicrous characters, and the like, but rather in an intricate plot that was solved at the end by a “recognition” or some other unforeseen event, it was necessary to introduce an omniscient “prologue” to explain the situation in an expository monologue. Superhumans like Heros, Agnoia, Elenchus, Tyche, Aer, Auxilium, Arcturus, Fides, and Lar were used, or an abstract “prologus” who could be conceived of as knowing not only the complete situation but also the outcome of the play. Only when the plot was so simple that it unfolded without risk of misconception, could the exposition be trusted to characters or expository dialogue within the play.

Such observations may be accepted as correct so far as they go. However, they do not sufficiently explain the controlling purpose of over-explicit preparation, the consequences of it in dramatic effect, and a noticeable endeavor in Terence’s day to break loose from the limitations of the device. It is doubtful, for example, whether suspense and surprise were avoided merely because of certain intellectual limitations on the part of Menander’s spectators; indeed it is probable that explicit “preparation” was a convention that held the boards without serious objection till Terence experimented in a new method.

Greek New Comedy was shaped in the fourth century for audiences accustomed to the dramatic technique developed upon the tragic stage. Antiphanes reveals clearly in a well-known passage what the audience expected (Kock, II, Antiphanes 191): “Fortunate the task of the tragic poet! Before a word is spoken, the spectator knows the theme ... at the mere mention of the name Oedipus he knows the rest.” Then he proceeds to say that the writer of comedy had to prepare the audience in every detail, since if a single item was missed the spectator started to hiss. This reveals the fact that in viewing a comedy the spectator expected not only to know the situation but also to have a clear clue to the solution, just as he had when viewing tragedies. The well-known prologues of Euripides did not have to foretell as well as prepare; a prologue in tragedy needed at most to remind the spectators of the main outline of the tale and to show the point at which action started. Euripides was well aware that most of his audience would at once know what the end of the story would be.[5] Now if the outcome was foreseen, the ancient dramatist, unlike the modern, could obviously not make free use of suspense and surprise. The writer of tragedy had to draw his emotional values from the pity of a well-informed audience viewing “with a sense of fear or dread” the groping of characters involved in the meshes of fate. Thus the obvious consequence of the use of a known plot was of course dependence upon the theme of fate, the constant employment of gloomy foreshadowing, the use with frequent reiteration of what has been called “tragic irony.” There seems to be a feeling in Aristotle that “pity and dread” are the essential elements of tragedy, but it is safe to say that had Greek tragedy frequently used invented plots Aristotle would have found that sympathetic suspense with catastrophic surprise would rather have been employed to produce the tragic catharsis, and would have been equally effective.

In studying the new comedy we may assume with Antiphanes, and on the basis of Menander, that the writer thought out his plot in terms of this well-established technique. In that case an omniscient prologue must give the situation and give it more explicitly than in tragedy because he had to do much more than remind. He must present the whole situation and in addition he must give explicit hints of the solution, if the spectator was to have the same advantage as he had in tragedy where the solution was a matter of common knowledge. That is the new element forced upon the writer of comedy by fifth-century convention. In Menander’s Perikeiromene, for example, the deferred prologue, Agnoia, not only gives the situation but adds: “this was done ... in order to start the train of revelations, so that in time these people might discover their kin.”

So in Plautus, wherever we have an intricate play that develops to a conclusion which could not be revealed by the characters, the prologue, if it has survived, discloses the outcome to the audience. In the Poenulus the prologus anticipates the solution when he says (line 245) that the father will come and find his daughter. In the Rudens the North Star not only has seen all that has occurred before the opening scene but he reveals the secret of the last act by saying that the girl is the old man’s daughter, and that the lover will appear presently (33 ff. and 80). In the Amphitruo, Mercury, one of the actors, can serve as prologue because he is omniscient. He tells the spectators how to distinguish the characters and says (140-48) that Amphitruo is about to come. The rest was known to the audience because this play, like the tragedies, was based upon a myth. In the Aulularia, the Spirit of the Hearth narrates what it is necessary to know of the past and then adds, “I shall make our neighbor propose marriage to the girl so as to compel the young man to do so” (31 ff.). In the Captives the prologue informs us that Tyndarus is Hegio’s unrecognized son who will come into his own presently and that the other son will also be found. The prologue of the Casina concludes the exposition by the revelation that the girl will turn out to be a freeborn citizen.

And this regard for the fullest preparation of the audience goes far beyond the prologue and the expository first act. Most of the intrigues devised to further the action are first explained, or at least discussed or suggested before they are actually carried out. Any student of Plautus will think of scores of examples: of how Mercury tells the spectators that he is going to climb to the roof to mock at Amphitruo (997), how in the Miles the plan to rescue the girl is explained before it is carried out, how in the Poenulus (550) the trick by which the slave-dealer is to be imposed upon is worked out on the stage before it is played,[6] etc.

Now of course this sort of exposition is too explicit to satisfy modern taste.[7] It is sometimes excused with the reminder that ancient comedies were written for a single performance and must be understood at first presentation without the aid of reviewers’ comments or playbills; and it is sometimes explained as a concession to witless audiences—on whom Horace, following Peripatetic critics, blamed most literary crudities. Such explanations sufficed in the days when we could attribute this undue explicitness to Plautus, but now that we have discovered Menander given to the same type of technique we ought to look farther. The important fact seems to be that the Greek audience was accustomed to preparation and to the devices which the consequent construction of the play demanded, and that the originators of the early New Comedy followed custom. And since in tragedy the general knowledge of the myths used in the plots obviated use of unexpected catastrophes and compelled writers to find compensation in tragic irony, so the adoption of the same method of plot construction for comedy eliminated the use of tension and increased the employment of a kind of comic irony. The effects of this comic irony range all the way from what Aristotle terms educated insolence (πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις) to genial and sympathetic fellow-feeling, according as the victim of the delusion is a villain, a braggart, a buffoon, or a harmless innocent. The foreknowledge which the audience has of what the players are unconsciously stumbling into provides both the “sense of superiority,” which Plato found to be an effect of comedy, and the enjoyment of the incongruous which moderns have often considered its chief ingredient. This comic irony, concocted like its counterpart in tragedy, is a large part of the stock in trade of Menander and of Plautus.

In the Captives of Plautus the audience knows that Hegio has his own son before him in chains, and notices that, not recognizing his son, he causes him much suffering. Throughout the play the attentive spectator will watch for the very effective incongruities that arise from the father’s ignorance. In the Rudens, Daemones, not knowing that the girl who is trying to escape from shipwreck and the slave-dealer is his own daughter, at first seems to the informed spectator extremely insensitive to her suffering. The father’s sympathies are aroused only indirectly by his religious respect for a suppliant at the altar, then by the accident of being called in to arbitrate regarding her basket of birth tokens. Only when he has established her civil status by this accidental judgment does he learn the truth. In a more farcical form comic irony is freely used in the plays of self-deception, for example in the case of a bragging coward like the Miles Gloriosus, or in plays depending upon mistaken identity or some similar delusion, as in the Menaechmi and the Amphitruo. And in very nearly all the plays of Plautus, if it be not the chief mainstay of the plot, it appears at least here and there.

The new fragments of Menander prove that Menander had frequently constructed his plays with this effect in mind. Indeed it is the decisive factor in all that are extensive enough to permit of analysis. In the Arbitrants Smicrines all unconsciously arbitrates against his own child. In the Samia the old man is misled by a chance remark into the belief that his son has betrayed him, and the resulting irony runs through the central part of the play. And even when the facts are disclosed the son immediately sets going another series of misunderstandings (disclosed beforehand to the audience, line 432) by threatening to go into exile. The Perikeiromene is built about the same device. Two men are in love with the same maiden. One is her unrecognized brother, the other is jealous of her attentions to the former. The girl knows that the former is her brother but may not reveal the fact. However, the deity, Agnoia, has informed the spectators of the relationship so that they are in a position to view the intricate play at cross-purposes, but there is little of what we should call suspense because they have also been informed that a recognition scene will end the play satisfactorily.

In the Hero the expository prologue is lost, but we know that the prologue was the omniscient Heros, who adequately prepared the audience for what was to follow.[8] Here a husband (unrecognized), his wife, their “exposed daughter,” not yet known as such, and two lovers of this daughter, one a slave, the other a rich neighbor, all enter a tangle of delusion to which the audience has the key. In the Georgos a man expresses to a woman his desire to marry her daughter. He does not know that he is the girl’s father. As the woman—bound to secrecy—stands wringing her hands in despair, the audience—apparently informed of the secret—experiences a situation as poignant as that of the Oedipus. And finally in the Petrograd fragment of the Phasma we find a mother’s furtive visits to her daughter, born out of wedlock, and an entangled love affair, a situation which again involves the use of irony, since a fragment from the prologue shows us that the audience has been informed in advance.

It would be hazardous to say that Menander always lets the spectator into the secret beforehand so as to make use of dramatic irony, but it is striking that he does so in every instance where we possess enough of his plot in the original to test his methods. It is apparently his usual method of procedure. This is also in accord with his well-known predilection for Tyche, the counterpart in comedy of tragic fate. We need not suppose, as has often been done, that his constant reference to Tyche springs from his own philosophical doctrine. Such well-known passages as “Chance holds the helm; mortal forethought is but a delusion” (Frag., Kock, 482), etc., are, of course, comments of characters in the play. They need not be expressions of the dramatist’s own creed. But such comments would naturally come frequently in plays built on the conventional tragic form which required that the players grope their obscure way through the action in front of an audience which knew the end.

Now these observations are not meant as an attempt to rehabilitate Leo’s doctrine that the New Comedy merely borrowed all its devices of prologue, fate, recognition, and the rest from tragedy. Prescott’s incisive criticism[9] of that view must stand, with its insistence that we take Sicilian antecedents, Aristophanes, and environment into account. The new comedy was hardly as helplessly unoriginal as Leo held. The problem we have raised should rather be approached from the viewpoint of what the spectator expected and desired. It did not necessarily arise in the construction of plotless farces, in the presentation of ludicrous situations, buffoonery, and scenes centering about comical and preposterous characters. When, however, the plot was involved and a long consistent story was to be unraveled, the spectators, who knew nothing of the story, desired to be put at the same point of vantage early in the play that they naturally enjoyed when an Oedipus, a Medea, or an Orestes was presented.

When we turn to the Roman stage we seem to discover an attempt to break away from this convention, if not in Plautus[10] at least in Terence. We do not find conclusive evidence that Plautus seriously changed the construction of the Greek plots which he used except to remove the choral interludes and turn the plays into musical comedies, though it is likely that he usually avoided plays that had very intricate plots, and chose freely from those that contained laughter-producing situations. There is no evidence that he sought for suspense, or revamped any of his originals in order to attain it.

Terence, however, despite his fondness for the Greek originals and his outspoken claim of fidelity to them, seems consciously to have striven for a suspended dénouement. He does not entirely suppress dramatic irony, but he reduces its scope, he eliminates the expository prologue completely, he is chary about giving information to the spectator, preferring to keep him under tension for a part if not for the whole of the play.

A brief reference to the Adelphoe, his last play, will best reveal his procedure. Here two brothers employ different methods in bringing up their sons. Micio, who has adopted one of Demea’s sons, is indulgent, Demea is severe. Both boys enjoy themselves, Micio’s confessedly, Demea’s secretly. In fact the latter throws the burden of his escapades on Micio’s son. Hence when the action begins (1. 182) Demea is found scolding Micio because Micio’s son is setting a bad example to his supposedly virtuous brother. This is completely in Menander’s ironic style, for, as we shall see, Menander in the original had a prologue informing the audience that Demea’s son was the rascal of the two boys.

In Terence’s version, however, there is no expository prologue; the audience does not yet know the secret that Demea’s son is the source of the mischief. The irony is not wholly lost to those who have a good enough memory to recall half an hour later how misplaced Demea’s rebukes actually were. Terence is accumulating effects by suspending the revelation which Menander gave at once. But he goes even further in increasing tension. The prologue of the original had explained the bold deed that started the action, namely, that Micio’s son, in order to aid his brother, had forcibly taken from the slave-dealer the girl whom his brother loved but had not the money to buy or the courage to steal. That fact had to be presented somehow, so Terence, according to Donatus, inserts a scene in Act II which conveys the desired impression. Characteristically Terence still withholds the crucial fact that the boy is committing this crime not for himself but for his brother. Perhaps the shrewder spectators would suspect the truth. In Menander’s play they knew it from the first and laughed at Demea’s misplaced boasts. In Terence’s adaptation, however, they continue in doubt. It is not till a fourth of the play is over that Terence solves this mystery. He holds it back so long indeed that there is danger that the spectator may go too far on a mistaken clue. After the revelation, however, the audience, acquainted with a situation that Demea still fails to comprehend, can proceed for several scenes to enjoy the dramatic irony involved in this circumstance.

But Terence has one more surprise in store at the very end, to which Donatus again supplies the clue for us. At the end of the play Menander had suggested a partial conversion of Demea, while Micio went smiling to the final scene. Not so Terence. Writing for a more puritanic Roman audience, he felt the need of giving an appreciable rebuke to Micio for his lack of principle, and hence compelled him by way of consistency in his easy generosity to marry an unattractive widow.[11] In other words, with a minimum of changes in his paraphrase, Terence, without greatly reducing the dramatic irony inherent in the separate scenes, has so adapted a standard Menandrian plot based upon self-delusion (for which the spectator is prepared) that the elements of suspense and surprise have become vital factors. This seems to me to be Terence’s favorite procedure.

In the Andria, which was Terence’s first play, he apparently reveals the first hesitating attempt at this mode of constructing comedies. He tells us in the preface that he used Menander’s Andria in the main with suggestions from the Perinthia, and the Menandrian fragments of these two plays which can be identified in Terence are fairly well scattered through the Andria. Donatus states that the rôles of Charinus, Byrrhia, and Sosia were added by Terence. Charinus and Byrrhia are so involved in the action of five central scenes that Terence must have re-shaped the play very much in order to include these characters. Since in a recognition scene near the end the heroine turns out to be a citizen we now have a right to assume that Menander’s Andria probably had a prologue revealing this fact. Terence omits the prologue and, therefore, the usual key. But he does not dare, as in the Hecyra, his next play, to rely upon his audience’s being patient until the recognition scene. In the middle of the second act (line 221) he drops the rather broad hint in a monologue: “they have set the story going that the girl is an Athenian.” That would be enough to prevent the spectators from following false leads. The Andria, therefore, seems to reveal Terence’s first attempt at constructing a play in which a deferred hint took the place of full preparation. One wonders whether the aged Caecilius, who helped Terence with this play, may have used the device before Terence and suggested it to him.

In the Hecyra, the second play of Terence, there is no preparation, and the delay in relieving the tension of the spectator is carried to extreme lengths. The old story of a maiden violated at the festival during a dark night provides the entanglement. In the end the guilty father of her child turns out to be the very man she has married. Even through the Latin text one can see that the early scenes of the original[12] presupposed an informed audience enjoying the delusions of characters working on mistaken suppositions. But Terence blotted out the information by deleting the prologue of the original. The semi-expository first act gives the immediate situation but reserves the key-fact for line 829 near the end of the play. If that fact—that the unknown violator was Pamphilus, the husband—had been revealed to the spectators at the beginning they might have enjoyed the dramatic irony of the scene (II, 1) in which Laches scolds his wife for imagined wrongs, and especially the incongruity of Pamphilus’ oath, by all that is sacred, that he is not to blame for the separation (line 476). Terence has done a very daring thing here in keeping the audience in doubt and in anxiety. He has assumed that the audience will patiently bear in mind these puzzling quarrels and asseverations and watch the mysteries accumulating without any key to the solution for several hundred lines. A modern, used to that kind of thing in detective stories, finds it less difficult to do, but our students usually have to read the Hecyra with unusually alert attention, and it is certain that they would miss much of the delicate play if they were to see it hurriedly acted on the stage without previous preparation. In fact, Terence commits the sin of hinting at incorrect solutions. Pamphilus (at line 260) learns of the child and only betrays bewilderment, which is apt to mislead the spectator; at line 517 Pamphilus’ father also learns of the child but draws an incorrect conclusion, giving a new starting point for a possible erroneous guess; at line 577 his mother, half-informed, imagines that her son has deserted his wife for ugly reasons. Only at line 827 does the resolution of the intrigue take place. There is not one ancient play before the day of Terence, so far as we know, where an audience was left in such complete suspense before an accumulating mass of perplexities; and this was an audience, it will be remembered, accustomed to be taken into the confidence of the prologue. It is not surprising, therefore, that this play—one of the most human in the classical repertoire—failed twice, and that the spectators rushed away from it to see a boxing match. But Terence apparently was proud of what he had done and insisted that the play have its chance. Only after he had established his reputation by the success of the Eunuchus was it at last played with success.

The Heautontimoroumenos, produced two years after the failure of the Hecyra, puts less strain upon the audience, since half the secret—that Clinea’s sweetheart has proved faithful and worthy of him—is disclosed fairly early (line 243). From that point the spectators are permitted without too much anxiety to enjoy the dramatic irony involved in the delusions of the over-confident Chremes who bestows on his neighbor the pity that is his own due. Soon after the middle of the play (675 ff.) the spectators are admitted to the last important fact, namely, that Clinea’s sweetheart is freeborn, while the impossible courtesan seems likely to become Chremes’ daughter-in-law. Since, however, Chremes refuses to accept the evidence of his own eyes, the self-delusion only increases the irony, and the play continues from that point in the Menandrian style. The play is indeed one of the best in point of construction, since by abandoning the expository prologue[13] Terence was enabled to accumulate mysteries which he gradually solved in such a way as to substitute Menandrian satire for tension.

In the Eunuchus Terence for once shifts to the Plautine manner, resting his play chiefly on buffoons, imposture, and ludicrous situations. Indeed he borrows caricatures from another play in order to cram in the fun. There is no prologue, but none was needed. Thais stands self-revealed from the first scene, while Pamphila’s station is more than hinted at in the second scene. The tricking of a braggart captain did not involve much anxiety, even though the preparation is slight. The play is full of fun and easy to follow. Terence had for once yielded to popular demand and he was materially rewarded. It was the only play of his that was immediately put on a second time, and the aediles paid for it what was then considered the very high sum of 8000 sesterces.

The Phormio, like the Heauton and the Adelphoe, employs a good mingling of suspense and preparation. There is no expository prologue. That one existed in the original is probable from the occurrence of such unconscious allusions to actuality as the story concocted in court that the girl was a kinswoman (line 117). The fact that Chremes has a daughter like the one in question is not made known to the audience till half the play is over—a restraint which is surpassed only in the Hecyra. However, from line 570 the solution is surmised and it finally is evident at line 755. Henceforth the interest is provided by a series of quick though unprepared-for surprises.

Whether or not Terence should have all the credit for breaking away from the old conventional construction imposed on tragedy by the accident that the plots were known, we cannot say. It is not likely that Menander introduced this innovation, since all the plots that have recently been discovered seem to retain the older construction. Plautus, except in plays subsequently revised, like the Epidicus and the Mercator, is true to the convention every time that his plot is intricate and ends with an important “discovery.” We have suggested that Caecilius, who was Terence’s critic in his first play, may possibly have shown the way since he somehow gained fame for his plot construction. But we have no definite evidence of this. At any rate the modernization comes after Plautus and seems, therefore, to be a discovery of the Roman stage. It might be claimed that the discovery was due to the accident that the prologue was desired for the expression of the author’s personal opinion, so that it was not available for exposition.[14] However, this would not explain Terence’s procedure. In the Adelphoe, for instance, he seems to transfer some of the exposition from the eliminated prologue to the opening monologue of Micio. What is noticeable is that he here gives a very chary exposition in the monologue, gives some more details in the inserted kidnaping scene, and yet carefully withholds the secret—which could so easily have been disclosed—that the girl was stolen for the supposedly virtuous brother. In a word, Terence is conscious of what he is doing. He has apparently eliminated the expository prologue purposely in order to rid himself of an old convention and to intensify comedy by injecting into his plots the elements of surprise and suspense.

After Terence the aediles seem to have saved money by resorting freely to the archives and reviving old plays. At any rate many of the Plautine comedies bear signs of having been tampered with at this time. Long speeches were cut, explicit prologues were excised or reduced so as to introduce the element of surprise. In other words, the comedies were modernized in type and given speed. It is more than likely that this refurbishing of old plays discouraged young writers, since the generation following Terence left few names of dramatists to posterity. Only Turpilius, who worked in the Plautine tradition, was well known later. He died at a very old age about 103 B.C.

The togata, however, kept its place better through the voluminous contributions of Afranius, whose floruit was just before the Gracchan day. Of his works, praised by such fair judges as Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian, we have some seventy titles and over six hundred lines. By mere chance, we hear of a revival of a play of his in Caesar’s day and of another even in Nero’s time. Rome was now cosmopolitan enough so that a writer of comedy need not limit his range. In matter and sentiment Afranius reminded critics of Menander and Terence, yet his fragments show that, like Plautus, he availed himself of the advantages of very generous musical accompaniments. The most striking reference to him which has come down to us is that of Seneca who says that Afranius blended the spirit of comedy and tragedy in his work. If we may judge from this statement he may in this respect have been a precursor of Molière. After Afranius came Atta who has left us a dozen bare titles and little else.

But legitimate comedy was doomed at Rome. On festival days the populace had to be amused, and the Roman populace was rapidly changing in character as slavery was pushing out free labor. Even before the Gracchan reform Scipio the younger could face the crowds of the Forum with the remark that most of them had come to Rome as slaves. The Gracchans did not improve the quality of those crowds when they instituted the corn-doles. The free manumission of slaves was creating a polyglot proletariat which corn doles now tended to keep in the city, where they were fed and amused. In response to the desires of such folk, chariot races were made more exciting and the gladiatorial shows, introduced from Campania, became more frequent and more gruesome. Needless to say the well constructed plots of Plautus and Terence could not hold such audiences in their seats. The aediles and praetors, who wished to keep the entertainment on as high a level as possible, still persisted in producing some respectable plays at every festival, but to save their popularity in view of future elections they were driven to admit an increasing number of the more trivial plays as well.

After Sulla’s time, though great actors like Roscius still played old rôles, the farce gained ground over the legitimate comedy. The farce, a more or less extemporaneous form, like the commedia d’arte shaped as much by the actors as by the authors, had long been in use as a brief epilogue to performances of tragedies. The form most frequently used was the so-called Atellana, named from an Oscan village in Campania which was captured by Rome during the Hannibalic war. At first Oscan players had presented these farces in the Oscan dialect. It is very likely that the many Campanians who were trying to make a living at Rome after they had been driven off their lands in 210 brought these amusing plays along to produce in the Oscan “colony” of Rome, and that in time the Romans discovered how entertaining they were and began to employ the players at festivals. One is reminded of how the producers of Vienna and Innsbruck have frequently invited the village players from the Tyrolese hill-towns to give their simple homemade comedies before sophisticated urban audiences.

The Atellan farces were usually spontaneous bits of improvised fun in which the witty players, unhampered by a fixed text, developed their own parts. There was much sameness of plot and rôle, usually a ridiculous situation at the expense of some extravagant character, the fat fellow, the old simpleton, the self-deluded wiseacre, the country bumpkin, or what not. There was also much display of countryside wisdom and frequently of broad and coarse wit. By Sulla’s day various city-wits—we know the names of some and have more than a hundred titles of their works—exploited this old form and wrote Latin farces on the Atellan models, obeying literary conventions so far as to employ verse instead of prose. Even Sulla, who was a devotee of the theater, tried his hand at writing this style of comedy.

But these plays also had to give way to something lighter, namely the mime. Simple realistic mimes had appeared at unofficial folk festivals for many years before literature became aware of them. They avoided such artificiality as mask and extravagant garb. They alone employed actresses for female rôles. They got their names from their special devotion to mimicry and caricature, but they proceeded to invade the whole field of comedy; and had the respectable togata not been bound by convention to exclude actresses on the stage and to adopt the mask, there is no reason why the two should not have merged. In fact the mime came to be a more realistic togata, and as such might have played a dignified rôle in literature. And in Cicero’s day there were writers like Laberius and actresses like Arbuscula and Cytheris who revealed an ambition to elevate the mime into the region of serious art. The fate of the mime, however, lay at the mercy of the rabble who demanded ever cheaper amusement. And the scenario writers of the late Republic and early Empire supplied it. They wrote plots and created female rôles that not even Arbuscula would play, and that self-respecting Romans would not go to see. And so the mime—which indeed lived on for centuries—fell into the class of the tawdriest performances.

The farces and the mimes, while incapable of embodying careful characterization or lines of any real literary value, could at their best provide a vehicle for current ideas and a fruitful entertainment in skilful caricature and much rollicking fun. Their descent to the lower strata of amusement was not so much the fault of the forms as of the audiences that determined their content. It is not surprising, therefore, that these audiences—eager for entertainment which might exclude all possibility of having to exercise the intellect—finally demanded an extravaganza that appealed solely to eye and ear.

Horace lived to see and bemoan the discovery of the pantomime which, as its name implies, was wholly mimicry, with nothing to disturb a lazy brain. What Pylades did with tragedy, Bathyllus of Alexandria did with comedy. He silently acted his rôles using interpretative gestures to the accompanying rhythms of seductive music. There at last the rabble found supreme satisfaction. But Horace at any rate in reviewing the history of the stage did not argue that every new change had marked progress. In his opinion the stage had descended to the lowest depth of inanity.

At Rome, as elsewhere, the drama had proved to be a fairly accurate barometer not of the culture of the educated classes but of the populace. Nothing in the form of official censorship had at any time exercised any serious effect upon the theater. The praetors and aediles were not to blame for what happened. They had placed good plays on the stage as long as could be expected at the risk of offending the masses. Time and again, relying upon their convictions as to the worth of a comedy, they had staged plays that had failed; they were willing to pay very high salaries, partly out of their own purses, to great actors like Aesopus and Roscius who tried to revive the best plays and to win back to the theater an intelligent group of listeners; they had set aside reserved seats first for the senators and later for the knights in order to secure good audiences for literary productions of a high order. Nevertheless the drama declined. What the people demanded had in the end to be provided.

Individual criticism probably served its purpose to some extent, but could not prevent the ebb. Men like Cicero ridiculed the cheap entertainments and refused to attend them, they went out of their way to encourage the better plays, and they did everything in public speeches, in their essays, and in their social functions to show their appreciation of serious actors like Roscius and Aesopus. Young poets like Asinius Pollio and Varius Rufus filed away at poetic dramas that were published for library shelves but never reached the stage. Critics like Horace wrote to prove that what the populace greeted at every change as a new and remarkable advance was nothing but a new step downward. And down it went. The drama in some form remained a necessity for the populace and they kept it at their level. The intelligent, who had in themselves, their companions and their libraries their own means of entertainment, deserted the theater which had grown unendurable to them.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Horace, Epist. I, 13: he mentions Pyrrha’s posture on the stage.

[2] Terence, Hecyra, 15-20.

[3] See Wessner, Aemilius Asper. E.g., the refusal of Charinus to win his love by unworthy threats (317), and Pamphilus’ refusal to take credit for a deed which he says a gentleman could not fail to perform (330). It should also be noticed that in the Perinthia Menander had a scene of brutal slave-torturing which Terence took the liberty of eliminating.

[4] Cf. especially Leo, Plaut. Forsch. chap. IV; Legrand, Daos, 490 ff.; Michaut, Plaute, II, 116 ff.; Wilamowitz, Menander, Das Schiedsgericht, 142 ff. A part of this chapter has appeared in the Am. Jour. Phil., 1928, 309.

[5] One may add that if he was more explicit than one would think necessary he was perhaps giving aid to the many strangers that came to the theater in his day.

[6] For other instances see Miles, 238, 381, 767, 904, 1170; Pseud., 725; Casina, 683; Most., 662; Menaechmi, 831; Trin., 1137; cf. Legrand, Daos, 533 ff.

[7] The Merry Wives of Windsor, though it contains no prologue, is fully as explicit in the preparation of every incident—even the two basket-scenes—as any play of Plautus. Indeed most of Shakespeare’s plays give more attention to preparation than is customary on the stage today even though his plots were usually familiar ones. The Romeo and Juliet even has a prologue which goes so far as to disclose the outcome.

[8] The expository dialogue between the two slaves gives the immediate situation so plainly that a Heros would hardly have been employed for the prologue except to reveal the secret hidden to the characters.

[9] In Class. Phil. 1916, 125 ff.; 1917, 405 ff.; 1918, 113 ff.; 1919, 108 ff.

[10] The Epidicus probably once had a prologue (Wheeler, Am. Jour. Phil. 1917, 264). One may suspect that the play in its present form—which requires as patient reading as the Hecyra—was due to a post-Terentian revision. The Mercator has a prologue that does not reveal much of the plot but in the second act the outcome is hinted at by way of a dream. The play as we have it is a revision.

[11] According to Donatus, Menander’s play also contained the marriage, but without objection on the part of Micio. Since in Terence Micio is represented as resisting, the marriage must have been considered as punishment.

[12] The Hecyra according to Donatus was modeled upon a play of Apollodorus, but it is now clear that that play was in turn modeled upon Menander’s Arbitrants. That Terence suppressed the prologue of Apollodorus is apparent from the comment of Donatus (who had a copy of the Greek play at hand) on 1.58: Hoc (the use of protatica prosopa) maluit Terentius quam per prologum narraret argumentum aut θεὸν ἀπὸ μηχανῆς induceret loqui. Since the list of characters and the beginning of Menander’s Arbitrants are lost, there may be some doubt regarding his use of preparation in this play, but since the whole play operates with “dramatic irony” and since Apollodorus had a prologue, it is more than likely that he “prepared” his audience here as elsewhere. At any rate Menander’s audience discover the owner of the finger ring in the second act.

[13] I assume that Menander had revealed something about the escapades of Chremes’ own son in the prologue, since Chremes’ pretenses at knowing how to bring up children (152 ff.) were doubtless written in the first place to amuse an audience that foresaw his failure.

[14] Leo, Gesch. Lit., 218, assumes that Caecilius had used the prologue for personal criticism; Euanthius III. 2 says deos argumentis narrandis machinatos ceteri Latini ad instar Graecorum habent, Terentius non habet, which of course does not exclude an occasional use of the personal prologue. After Terence, Afranius sometimes employs superhuman prologues (Priapus, Sapientia, and Remeligo), but he seems also to have used the prologue for personal statements in the manner of Terence (lines 25-8).

CHAPTER V
THE PROSE OF THE ROMAN STATESMEN

“Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race,” says Mackail, a critic who is unusually sensitive to qualities of style. In saying this, he doubtless had in mind not only the orotund periods of the Pro Milone, the elaborately rhythmical movement of the Pro Archia, the vehement force of the first Catilinarian or the easy colloquialism of the familiar letters. It was rather the lucid and copious exposition of essays like the De Oratore in which, without revealed effort, a versatile mind found appropriate and dignified expression for all its concepts and moods. How did such prose come to be?

Cicero worked incessantly for years to acquire his command of the tools of expression. When very young he memorized the standard rules of rhetoric that emphasized the need for clarity, arrangement, conciseness, luminosity, and all the rest. Do such rules make great writers? On that point Cicero did not deceive himself. He knew that adults did not need them, but he recognized that schoolboys would save time by having their attention called to what practice would eventually reveal. Such rules might prove guide posts to intelligent beginners, but one has only to read the three books of the De Oratore[1] to discover that rhetoric was for Cicero a schoolroom crutch to outgrow and forget. Another device much recommended by the Roman teachers of his day was imitation, the study of the masters of diverse styles. It is a method that has recently been employed to good effect in the classroom for the awakening of taste and sharpening of critical acumen. Cicero did not scorn its use, but he knew too well that style is personal[2] to attempt to acquire in this way a garb that would not fit his own mental processes. When he sought out Apollonius of Rhodes as a critic it was not in order to adapt himself to that teacher’s mode of expression. He first decided what his own taste and capacity needed, and what the Roman Forum and Curia would require of him; then he sought for the teacher who could best help him by his criticism. His complete independence is shown by the fact that he traveled long, trying one after the other of the famous teachers of the east, abandoning them one by one as soon as he discovered that they did not suit his purposes.[3] Cicero did not impose the Rhodian style upon himself. He made his own curriculum to fit his temperament and sought out the tutor who could help him attain what he demanded. This procedure seems to me characteristic of the great Roman stylists. Cicero and Caesar, Sallust and Livy, Seneca and Tacitus, betray themselves in their sentence structure. The secret of their expression will never be disclosed by a search for their models nor in the rhetorical rules then current.

The aim of this chapter is limited. It cannot even attempt the important task of illustrating from a study of Cicero the valid rule that style is the man. It will attempt only to sketch the growth of Latin prose up to Cicero’s day in order to suggest how that prose became adequate to clothe the varied expression of so versatile a genius.

Roman, like English, prose developed its sonority, dignity, and rhythm in persuasive speech. As in England during the religious reformation, pulpit oratory molded speech, so in Rome, during the period of political reformation from Cato to Cicero, forensic contests in the senate house and at the tribunals transformed Roman expression. This parallel may seem obvious, but one offers it with hesitation because Roman oratorical style is generally supposed to have been shaped by the study of Greek rhetoric in the schoolroom. Quite apart, however, from the fact that true art is seldom amenable to the compulsion of precept, chronology militates against this theory. Roman prose had traveled far before it resorted to any guidance from Greece.

Like the English of Wycliffe, early Roman prose was formless. It merely followed the habits of unshaped spontaneous conversation. If anything was to be recorded with care, it employed the forms of art, that is, of verse. Naevius and Ennius wrote their chronicles in meter. Even Chaucer, who is so luminous in his verse narratives, becomes involved and at times almost incoherent in his few attempts to write prose, unless in fact he yields to the temptation of admitting rhythm into his sentences. But Chaucer is one of the last of the great writers to flounder thus. The Wyclifite Bible marked the beginning of a religious contest that continued for two centuries with more or less intensity, and finally with passionate vehemence. It was a contest that, to many, involved a question of life and death and to even more the problem of eternal salvation. The gravity of the theme called for the noblest possible expression, while the deep concern of all classes, even the most ignorant, required clarity and directness of utterance. The temptation of the learned to exaggerate rhetoric into Euphuism was immediately checked by the need of being intelligible to the congregation, while the tendency of plain persons toward colloquial formlessness was checked both by the deep respect for the sacred theme and by the high level of cultural taste among the clergy of the time. We need not deny the great influence of Ciceronian and Augustinian models upon these learned men, and in Lyly’s courtly group we know how ancient rhetoric ran pell-mell into preciosity. But that was an aberration that affected only those who had a thin message to convey. When men are intensely engaged in saving their fellows, speech will grow clear, and when these men are at the same time persons endowed with great intellects, their speech will take on dignity of structure and of sound. Before that contest English prose had babbled thus:[4]

And in that country is an old castle that stands upon a rock, the which is cleped the Castle of the Sparrowhawk, that is beyond the city of Layays, beside the town of Pharsipee, that belongeth to the lordship of Cruk, that is a rich lord and a good Christian man, where men find a sparrowhawk upon a perch right fair and right well made, and a fair Lady of Fayrye that keepeth it, etc.