Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

The corrigenda et addenda listed on page xvi have been applied to the text.

Page 167: Original text 'curosity' replaced with 'curiosity'.

Page 139: Original text in footnote 'Thon' replaced with 'Thou'.

Page 359: Latin 'At, credo' more usually seen as 'An, credo' but text in this book not altered.

THE ROMAN POETS
OF
THE REPUBLIC

SELLAR

London

HENRY FROWDE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE

7 PATERNOSTER ROW

THE ROMAN POETS
OF
THE REPUBLIC

BY

W. Y. SELLAR, M.A., LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
AND
FORMERLY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD

NEW EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

MDCCCLXXXI

[All rights reserved]

TO

J. C. SHAIRP, M.A. LL.D.,

PRINCIPAL OF THE UNITED COLLEGE, ST. ANDREWS,
PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,

IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF MUCH ACTIVE AND GENEROUS KINDNESS,
AND OF
A LONG AND STEADY FRIENDSHIP,
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In preparing a second edition of this volume, which has been for some years out of print, I have, with the exception of a few pages added to Chapter IV, retained the first five chapters substantially unchanged. Chapters VI and VII, on Roman Comedy, are entirely new. I have enlarged the account formerly given of Lucilius in Chapter VIII, and modified the Review of the First Period, contained in Chapter IX. The short introductory chapter to the Second Period is new. The four chapters on Lucretius have been carefully revised, and, in part, re-written. The chapter on Catullus has been re-written and enlarged, and the views formerly expressed in it have been modified.

In the preface to the first edition I acknowledged the assistance I had derived from the editions of the Fragments of the early writers by Klussman, Vahlen, Ribbeck, and Gerlach; from the Histories of Roman Literature by Bernhardy, Bähr, and Munk, and from the chapters on Roman Literature in Mommsen's Roman History; from a treatise on the origin of Roman Poetry, by Corssen; from Sir G. C. Lewis's work on 'The Credibility of Early Roman History'; from the Articles on the Roman Poets by the late Professor Ramsay, contained in Smith's 'Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology'; and from Articles by Mr. Munro in the 'Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology.' In addition to these I have, in the present edition, to acknowledge my indebtedness to the History of Roman Literature by W. S. Teuffel, to Ribbeck's 'Römische Tragödie,' to Ritschl's 'Opuscula,' to the editions of some of the Plays of Plautus by Brix and Lorenz, to that of the Fragments of Lucilius by L. Müller, to the Thesis of M. G. Boissier, entitled 'Quomodo Graecos Poetas Plautus Transtulerit,' to Articles on Lucilius by Mr. Munro in the 'Journal of Philology,' and to the edition of Lucretius, and the 'Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus' by the same writer, to Schwabe's 'Quaestiones Catullianae,' to Mr. Ellis's 'Commentary on Catullus,' to R. Westphal's 'Catull's Gedichte,' and to M. A. Couat's 'Étude sur Catulle.' I have more especially to express my sense of obligation to Mr. Munro's writings on Lucretius and Catullus. In so far as the chapters on these poets in this edition may be improved, this will, in a great measure, be due to the new knowledge of the subject I have gained from the study of his works.

I have retained, with some corrections, the translations of the longer quotations, contained in the first edition, and have added a literal prose version of some passages quoted from Plautus and Terence. Instead of offering a prose version of the longer passages quoted from Catullus, I have again availed myself of the kind permission formerly given me by Sir Theodore Martin to make use of his translation.

Edinburgh, Dec. 1880.

CONTENTS.

CORRIGENDA ET ADDENDA.

Page xii, line 25 from top, for Ampitryo read Amphitryo.

" 43, note, for Altus read Attus.

" 90, line 26 from top, for Fos read Flos.

" 157, note 2, add the words, 'Terence, who was by birth a foreigner, was probably brought to Rome as a child.'

" 194, line 25 from top, for The Italian liveliness, &c., made them, read Their liveliness, &c., made the Italians.

" 194, third line from bottom, for nisim read nisam.

" 213, line 12 from top, for Æschylus read Æschinus.

" 215, note, for debacehentur read debacchentur.

" 230, foot of the page, for divitias read divitiis.

" 287, line 12 from top, for arbonis read arboris.

" 289, line 16 from top, for ardera read ardua.

" 289, line 32 from top, for and read or.

" 296, line 9 from bottom, for by read to.

" 343, line 7 from bottom, for fungiferentis read frugiferentis.

" 413, note 1, add the words, 'Cicero also, in his letters to Caelius, addresses him as mi Rufe,' Ep. II. 9. 3, 12. 2.

THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC.

CHAPTER I.
GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY.

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

It was natural that this excessive deference to their authority should be impaired both by the ampler recognition of the claims of modern poetry, and by a more intimate familiarity with Greek literature. They have suffered, in the estimation of literary critics, from the change in poetical taste which commenced about the beginning of the present century, and, in that of scholars, from the superior attractions of the great epic, dramatic, and lyrical poets of Greece. They have thus, for some time, been exposed to undue disparagement rather than to undue admiration. The perception of the debt which they owed to their Greek masters, has led to some forgetfulness of their original merits. Their Roman character and Italian feeling have been partially obscured by the foreign forms and metres in which these are expressed. It is said, with some appearance of plausibility, that Roman poetry is not only much inferior in interest to the poetry of Greece, but that it is a work of cultivated imitation, not of creative art; that other forms of literature were the true expression of the genius of the Roman people; that their poets brought nothing new into the world; that they have enriched the life of after times with no pure vein of native feeling, nor any impressive record of national experience.

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

αὐτοδίδακτος δ᾽ εἰμί, θεὸς δέ μοι ἐν φρεσὶν οἴμας παντοίας ἐνέφυσεν.[1]

Besides possessing the charm of poetical feeling and artistic form in unequalled measure, Greek poetry is to modern readers the immediate revelation of a new world of thought and action, in all its lights and shadows and moving life. Like their politics, the poetry of the Greeks sprang from many independent centres, and renewed itself in every epoch of the national civilisation. Roman poetry, on the other hand, has neither the same novelty nor variety of matter; nor did it adapt itself to the changing phases of human life in different generations and different States, like the epic, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poetry of Greece. But it may still be answered that the poets of Rome have another kind of value. There is a charm in their language and sentiment different from that which is found in any other literature of the world. Certain deep and abiding impressions are stamped upon their works, which have penetrated into the cultivated sentiment of modern times. If, as we read them, the imagination is not so powerfully stimulated by the revelation of a new world, yet, in the elevated tones of Roman poetry, there is felt to be a permanent affinity with the strength and dignity of man's moral nature; and, in the finer and softer tones, a power to move the heart to sympathy with the beauty, the enjoyment, and the natural sorrows of a bygone life. If we are no longer moved by the eager hopes and buoyant fancies of the youthful prime of the ancient world, we seem to gather up, with a more sober sympathy, the fruits of its mature experience and mellowed reflexion.

While the literature and civilisation of Greece were still unknown to them, the Romans had produced certain rude kinds of metrical composition: they preserved some knowledge of their history in various kinds of chronicles or annals: they must have been trained to some skill in oratory by the contests of public life, and by the practice of delivering commemorative speeches at the funerals of famous men. But they cannot be said to have produced spontaneously any works of literary art. Their oratory, history, poetry, and philosophy owed their first impulse to their intellectual contact with Greece. But while the form and expression of all Roman literature were moulded by the teaching of Greek masters and the study of Greek writings, it may be urged, with some show of truth, that the debt incurred by the poetry and philosophy of Rome was much greater than that incurred by her oratory and history. The two latter assumed a more distinct type, and adapted themselves more naturally to the genius of the people and the circumstances of the State. They were the work of men who took an active and prominent part in public affairs; and they bore directly on the practical wants of the times in which they were cultivated. Even the structure of the Latin language testifies to the oratorical force and ardour by which it was moulded into symmetry; as the language of Greece betrays the plastic and harmonising power of her early poetry. There is no improbability in the supposition that, if Greek literature had never existed, or had remained unknown to the Romans, the political passions and necessities of the Republic would have called forth a series of powerful orators; and that the national instinct, which clung with such strong tenacity to the past, would, with the advance of power and civilisation, have produced a type of history, capable of giving adequate expression to the traditions and continuous annals of the commonwealth.

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

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

Roman poetry was the living heir, not the lifeless reproduction of the genius of Greece. If it seems to have been a highly-trained accomplishment rather than the irrepressible outpouring of a natural faculty, still this accomplishment was based upon original gifts of feeling and character, and was marked by its own peculiar features. The creative energy of the Greeks died out with Theocritus; but their learning and taste, surviving the decay of their political existence, passed into the education of a kindred race, endowed, above all other races of antiquity, with the capacity of receiving and assimilating alien influences, and of producing, alike in action and in literature, great results through persistent purpose and concentrated industry. It was owing to their gifts of appreciation and their love of labour, that the Roman poets, in the era of the transition from the freedom and vigour of the Republic to the pomp and order of the Empire, succeeded in producing works which, in point of execution, are not much inferior to the masterpieces of Greece. It was due to the spirit of a new race,—speaking a new language, living among different scenes, acting their own part in the history of the world,—that the ancient inspiration survived the extinction of Greek liberty, and reappeared, under altered conditions, in a fresh succession of powerful works, which owe their long existence as much to the vivid feeling as to the artistic perfection by which they are characterised.

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

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

The Romans, as a race, were wanting also in speculative capacity; and thus their poetry does not rise, or rises only in Lucretius, to those imaginative heights from which the great lyrical and dramatic poets of Greece contemplated the wonder and solemnity of life. Yet both the epic and the lyrical poetry of Rome have a character and perfection of their own. The Aeneid, with many resemblances in points of detail to the poems of Homer, is yet, in design and execution, a true national monument. The lyrical poetry of Rome, if inferior to the choral poetry of Greece in range of thought and in ethereal grace of expression, and scarcely equalling the few fragments of the early Aeolic poetry in the force of passion, is yet an instrument of varied power, capable of investing the lighter moods or more transient joys of life with an unfading charm, and rising into fuller and more commanding tones to express the national sentiment and moral dignity of Rome. Didactic poetry obtained in Lucretius and Virgil ampler volume and profounder meaning than in their Greek models, Empedocles and Hesiod. It was by the skill of the two great Latin poets that poetic art was made to embrace within its province the treatment of a great philosophical argument, and of a great practical pursuit. The Satires and Epistles of Horace showed, for the first time, how the didactic spirit could deal in poetry with the conduct and familiar experience of life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, while borrowing the outward form of their compositions from the early poets of Ionia and the later writers at the court of Alexandria, have taken the substance of their poetry to a great extent from their own lives and interests; and have treated their materials with a fluent brilliancy of style, and often with a graceful tenderness of feeling, unborrowed from any foreign source. It may thus be generally affirmed that the Roman poets, although adding little to the great discoveries or inventions in literature, and although not equally successful in all their adaptations of the inventions of their predecessors, have yet left the stamp of their own genius and character on some of the great forms which poetry has hitherto assumed.

The metres of Roman poetry are also seen to be adaptations to the Latin language of the metres previously employed in the epic, lyrical, and dramatic poetry of Greece. The Italian race had, in earlier times, struck out a native measure, called the Saturnian,—of a rapid and irregular movement,—in which their religious emotions, their festive and satiric raillery, and their commemorative instincts found a rude expression. But after this measure had been rejected by Ennius, as unsuited to the gravity of his greatest work, the Roman poets continued to imitate the metres of their Greek predecessors. But, in their hands, these became characterised by a slower, more stately, and regular movement, not only differing widely from the ring of the native Saturnian rhythm, but also, with every improvement in poetic accomplishment, receding further and further from the freedom and variety of the Greek measures. The comic and tragic measures, in which alone the Roman writers observed a less strict rule than their models, never attained among them to any high metrical excellence. The rhythm of the Greek poets, owing in a great measure to the frequency of vowel sounds in their language, is more flowing, more varied, and more richly musical than that of Roman poetry. Thus, although their verse is constructed on the same metrical laws, there is the most marked contrast between the rapidity and buoyancy of the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the stately and weighty march of the Aeneid. Notwithstanding their outward conformity to the canons of a foreign language, the most powerful and characteristic measures of Roman poetry,—such as the Lucretian and the Virgilian hexameter, and the Horatian alcaic,—are distinguished by a grave, orderly, and commanding tone, symbolical of the genius and the majesty of Rome. In such cases, as the Horatian sapphic and the Ovidian elegiac, where the structure of the verse is too slight to produce this impressive effect, there is still a remarkable divergence from the freedom and manifold harmony of the early Greek poets to a uniform and monotonous cadence.

The language, also, of Roman poetry betrays many traces of imitation. Some of the early Latin tragedies were literal translations from the works of the Athenian dramatists; and fragments of the rude Roman copy may still be compared with the polished expression of the original. Some familiar passages of the Iliad may be traced among the rough-hewn fragments of the Annals of Ennius. Even Lucretius, whose diction, more than that of most poets, produces the impression of being the immediate creation of his own mind, has described outward objects, and clothed his thoughts, in language borrowed from Homer and Empedocles. The short volume of Catullus contains translations from Sappho and Callimachus, and frequent imitations of other Greek poets; and, from the extant fragments of Alcaeus, Anacreon, and others of the Greek lyric poets, it may be seen how frequently Horace availed himself of some turn of their expression to invest his own experience with old poetic associations. Virgil, whose great success is, in no slight measure, due to the skill and taste with which he used the materials of earlier Greek and native writers, has reproduced the heroic tones of Homer in his epic, and the mellow cadences of Theocritus in his pastoral poems; and has blended something of the antique quaintness and oracular sanctity of Hesiod with the golden perfection of his Georgics.

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

Quo magis aeternum da dictis, diva, leporem;

and it is this which Catullus claims as the characteristic excellence of his own poems.

The Augustan poets attained a still greater success in the variations of words and rhythm; but this success was gained with some loss of direct force and freshness in the expression of feeling. And it may be said generally that the Latin language, in its adaptation to poetry, lost some of its powers as an immediate vehicle of thought. In Virgil and in Horace, words are combined in a less natural order than in Homer and the Attic dramatists. Their language does not strike the mind with the spontaneous force of Greek poetry, nor does it seem equally capable of being rapidly followed by a popular audience. Catullus alone among the great Roman poets combines perfect grace with the happiest freedom and simplicity. Yet the studied and compact diction of Latin poetry, if wanting in fluency, ease, and directness, lays a strong hold upon the mind, by its power of marking with emphasis what is most essential and prominent in the ideas and objects presented to the imagination. The thought and sentiment of Rome have thus been engraved on her poetical literature, in deep and enduring characters. And, notwithstanding all manifest traces of imitation, the diction of the greatest Roman poets attests the presence of genuine creative power. A strong vital force is recognised in the direct and vigorous diction of Ennius and Lucretius; and, though more latent, it is not less really present under the stateliness and chastened splendour of Virgil, and the subtle moderation of Horace.

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

Cetera, quae vacuas tenuissent carmina mentes,

Omnia jam vulgata.

The ideal aspect of the golden morning of the world has been seized with a truer feeling in the Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis than in the episode of the 'Pastor Aristacus' in the Georgics. Not only are the main features in the story of the Aeneid of foreign origin, but the treatment of the story betrays some want of vital sympathy with the heterogeneous elements out of which it is composed. The poem is a religious as well as a great national work; but the religious creed which is expressed in it is a composite result of Greek mythology, of Roman sentiment, and of ideas derived from an eclectic philosophy. The manners represented in the poem are a medley of the Augustan and of the Homeric age, as seen in vague proportions, through the mists of antiquarian learning. It must, indeed, be remembered that Greek traditions had penetrated into the life of the whole civilised world, and that the belief in the connexion of Rome with Troy had rooted itself in the Roman mind for two centuries before the time of Virgil. Still, the tale of the settlement of Aeneas in Latium, as told in the great Roman epic, bears the mark of the artificial construction of a late and prosaic era, not of the spontaneous growth of imaginative legend, in a lively and creative age. So, also, in another sphere of poetry, while there are genuine touches of nature in all the odes of Horace, yet the mythological accessories of some of those which celebrate the praises of a god, or the charms of a mistress, seem to stand in no vital relation with the genuine convictions of the poet.

Roman poetry, from this point of view, appears to be the old Greek art reappearing under new conditions: or rather the new art of the civilised world, after it had been thoroughly leavened by Greek thought, taste, and education. The poetry of Rome was, however, a living power, after the creative energy of Greece had disappeared, so that, were it nothing more, that literature would still be valuable as the fruit of the later summer of antiquity. As in Homer, the earliest poet of the ancient world, there is a kind of promise of the great life that was to be; so, in the Augustan poets, there is a retrospective contemplation of the life, the religion, and the art of the past,—a gathering up of 'the long results of time.' But the Roman poets had also a strong vein of original character and feeling, and many phases of national and personal experience to reveal. They had to give a permanent expression to the idea of Rome, and to perpetuate the charm of the land and life of Italy. In their highest tones, they give utterance to the patriotic spirit, the dignified and commanding attributes, and the moral strength of the Imperial Republic. But other elements in their art proclaim their large inheritance of the receptive and emotional nature which, in ancient as in modern times, has characterised the Southern nations. As the patrician and plebeian orders were united in the imperial greatness of the commonwealth, as the energy of Rome and of the other Italian communities was welded together to form a mighty national life, so these apparently antagonistic elements combined to create the majesty and beauty of Roman poetry. Either of these elements would by itself have been unproductive and incomplete. The pure Roman temperament was too austere, too unsympathetic, too restrained and formal, to create and foster a luxuriant growth of poetry: the genial nature of the south, when dissociated from the control of manlier instincts and the elevation of higher ideas, tended to degenerate into licentious effeminacy, both in life and literature. The fragments of the earlier tragic and epic poets indicate the predominance of the gravity and the masculine strength inherent in the Roman temper, almost to the exclusion of the other element. Roman comedy, on the other hand, gave full play to Italian vivacity and sensuousness with only slight restraint from the higher instincts inherited from ancient discipline. In Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, moral energy and dignity of character are most happily combined with susceptibility to the charm and the power of Nature. Catullus and the elegiac poets of the Augustan age abandoned themselves to the passionate enjoyment of their lives, under little restraint either from the pride or the virtue of their forefathers. Their vices, and still more their weaknesses, are of a type apparently most opposed to the tendencies of the higher Roman character. Yet even these may be looked upon as a kind of indirect testimony to the ancient vigour of the race. Catullus, in his very coarseness, betrays the grain of that strong nature, out of which, in a better time, the freedom and energy of the Republic had been developed. Ovid, even in his libertinism, displays his vigorous and ardent vitality. The effeminacy of Tibullus looks like the reaction of a nature, enervated by the circumstances of his age, from the high standard of manliness, which a sterner time had maintained.

Among the most truly Roman characteristics of Latin poetry, national and patriotic sentiment is prominently conspicuous. Among the poets of the Republic, Naevius and Lucilius were animated by strong political as well as national feeling. The chief work of Ennius was devoted to the commemoration of the ancient traditions, the august institutions, the advancing power, and the great character of the Roman State. In the works of the Augustan age, the fine episodes of the Georgics, the whole plan and many of the details of the Aeneid, show the spell exercised over the mind of Virgil by the ancient memories and the great destiny of his country, and bear witness to his deep love of Italy, and his pride in her natural beauty and her strong breed of men. Horace rises above his irony and epicureanism, to celebrate the imperial majesty of Rome, and to bear witness to the purity of the Sabine households, and to the virtues exhibited in the best types of Roman character. The Fasti of Ovid, also, is a national poem, owing its existence to the strong interest which was felt by the Romans in their mythical and early story, so long as any living memory of their political life remained.

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

Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum

Quam regere imperio res velle et regna tenere.

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

Roman poetry is pervaded also by a peculiar vein of imaginative emotion. There is no feeling so characteristic of the works of Roman genius as the sense of majesty. This feeling is called forth by the idea or outward manifestation of strength, stability, vastness, and order; by whatever impresses the imagination as the symbol of power and authority, whether in the aspect of Nature, or in the works, actions, and institutions of man. It is in their most serious and elevated writings, and chiefly in their epic and didactic poetry, that the Romans show their peculiar susceptibility to this grave and dignified emotion. Even the plain and rude diction of Ennius rises into rugged grandeur when he is moved by the vastness or massive strength of outward things, by 'the pomp and circumstance' of war, or by the august forms and symbols of government. The majestic tones of Lucretius seem to give a voice to the deep feeling of the order and immensity of the universe, which possessed him. The sustained dignity of the Aeneid, and the splendour of some of its finest passages—such for instance as that which brings before us the solemn and magnificent spectacle of the fall of Troy—attest how the imagination of Virgil was moved to sympathy with the attributes of ancient and powerful sovereignty[4].

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

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

The love of natural scenery and of country life is certainly more prominently expressed in Roman than in Greek poetry. Homer, indeed, among all the poets of antiquity, presents the most vivid and true description of the outward world; and the imagination of Pindar and the Attic dramatists appears to have been strongly, though indirectly, affected both by the immediate aspect and by the invisible power of Nature. Thucydides and Aristophanes testify to the enjoyment which the Athenians found in the ease and abundance of their country life, and to the affection with which they clung to the old religious customs and associations connected with it. The conscious enjoyment of Nature as a prominent motive of poetry first appears in the Alexandrian era. The great poets of earlier times were too deeply penetrated by the thought of the mystery and the grandeur in human life, to dwell much on the spectacle of the outward world. Though their delicate sense of beauty was unconsciously cherished and refined by the air which they breathed, and the scenes by which they were surrounded, yet they do not, like the Roman poets, yield to the passive pleasures derived from contemplating the aspect of the natural world; nor do they express the happiness of passing out of the tumult of the city into the peaceful security of the country. The difference between the two nations in social temper and customs is connected with this difference in their aesthetic susceptibility. The spirit in which a Greek enjoyed his leisure, was one phase of his sociability, his communicativeness, his constant passion for hearing and telling something new,—a disposition which made the λέσχη a favourite resort so early as the time of Homer, and which is seen still characterising the most typical representatives of the race in the days of St. Paul. The Roman statesman, on the other hand, prized his otium as the healthy repose after strenuous exertion. The chief relaxation to his proud and self-dependent temper consisted in being alone, or at ease with his household and his intimate friends. This desire for rest and retirement was one great element in the Roman taste for country life;—a taste which was manifested among the foremost public men, such as the Scipios and Laelius, long before any trace of it is betrayed in Roman poetry. But, as the practice of spending the unhealthy months of autumn away from Rome became general among the wealthier classes, and as new modes of sentiment were fostered by greater leisure and finer cultivation, a genuine love of Nature,—taking the form either of attachment to particular places, or of enjoyment in the life and beautiful forms of the outward world,—was gradually awakened in the more susceptible minds of the Italian race.

The poetry of the Augustan age and of that immediately preceding it is deeply pervaded by this new emotion. Each of the great poets manifests the feeling in his own way. Lucretius, while contemplating the majesty of Nature's laws, and the immensity of her range, is, at the same time, powerfully moved to sympathy with her ever-varying life. He feels the charm of simply living in fine weather, and looking on the common aspects of the world,—such as the sea-shore, fresh pastures and full-flowing rivers, or the new loveliness of the early morning. He represents the punishment of the Danaides as a symbol of the incapacity of the human spirit to enjoy the natural charm of the recurring seasons of the year. Catullus, too, although his active social temper did not respond to the spell which Nature exercised over the contemplative and pensive spirits of Lucretius and Virgil, has many fine images from the outward world in his poems. He delights in comparing the grace and the passion of youth with the bloom of flowers and the stateliness of trees; he associates the beauty of Sirmio with his bright picture of the happiness of home; he feels the return of the genial breezes of spring as enhancing his delight in leaving the dull plains of Phrygia, and in hastening to visit the famous cities of Asia. Virgil's early art was characterised by his friend and brother poet in the lines,—

Molle atque facetum

Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure camenae[5].

The love of natural, and especially of Italian, beauty blends with all his patriotic memories, and with the charm which he has cast around the common operations of rustic industry. The freedom and peace of his country life, among the Sabine hills, kept the heart of Horace fresh and simple, in spite of all the pleasures and flatteries to which he was exposed; and enabled him, till the end of his course, to mingle the clear fountain of native poetry,—'ingeni benigna vena,'—with the stiller current of his meditative wisdom.

The passion of love was a favourite theme both of the early lyrical poets of Greece, and of the courtly writers of Alexandria; but the works of the former have reached us only in inconsiderable fragments; and the latter, with the exception of Theocritus, are much inferior to the Roman poets who made them their models. It is in Latin literature that we are brought most near to the power of this passion in the ancient world. Few among the poets who have recorded their own experience of love, in any age, have expressed a feeling so true or so intense as Catullus. He has all the ardent, self-forgetful devotion, if he wants the chivalry and purity, of modern sentiment. He has painted the love of others, also, with graceful fidelity. He has shown the finest sense in discerning, and the finest power in delineating the charm of youthful passion, when first awakening into life, or first unfolding into true affection. It is by his delineation of the agony of Dido that Virgil has imparted the chief personal interest to the story of the Aeneid. If he has failed to embody any complex type of character, he has described the agitation and pathos of this particular passion at least with a powerful hand. Horace is the poet of the lighter and gayer moods of love. Without ever becoming a slave to it he experienced enough of its pains and pleasures, to enable him to paint the fascination or the waywardness of a mistress with the equable feeling of an epicurean, but, at the same time, with the refined observation of a poet. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, making pleasure the chief pursuit of their lives, have made the more ignoble and transient phases of this passion the predominant motive of their poetry. Yet the effeminacy of Tibullus is redeemed by real tenderness of heart; there is ardent emotion expressed by Propertius for his living mistress, and true affection in the lines in which he recalls her memory after death; the profligacy of Ovid is, if not redeemed, at least relieved, by his buoyant wit and his brilliant fancy.

Roman poetry is also interesting as the revelation of personal experience and character. The biographies of ancient authors are, for the most part, meagre and untrustworthy; and thus it is chiefly through the conscious or unconscious self-portraiture in their writings that the actual men of antiquity are brought into close contact with the modern world. Few men of any age or country are so well known to us as Horace; and it is from his own writings, exclusively, that this intimate knowledge has been obtained. The lines in which he describes Lucilius are more applicable to himself than to any extant writer of Greece or Rome,—

Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim

Credebat libris: neque si male cesserat, unquam

Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit, ut omnis

Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella

Vita senis[6].

He has described himself, his tastes and pursuits, his thoughts and convictions, with perfect frankness and candour, and without any of the triviality or affectation of literary egotism. Catullus, although sometimes wanting in proper reticence, and altogether devoid of that meditative art with which Horace transmutes his own experience into the common experience of human nature, is known also as a familiar friend, from the force of feeling with which he realised, and the transparent sincerity with which he recorded, all the pain and the pleasure of his life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age have written, neither from so strong a heart as that of Catullus, nor with the good taste and self-respect of Horace; but yet one of the chief sources of interest in their poetry, as of that of Martial in a later age, arises from their strong realisation of life, their unreserved communicativeness, and the light they thus throw on one phase of personal and social manners in ancient times.

Nor are these indications of individual character confined to the poets who profess to communicate their own feelings, and to record their own fortunes. All the works of Roman poetry bear emphatically the impress of their authors. While the finest Greek poetry seems like an almost impersonal emanation of genius, Roman poetry is, to a much greater extent, the expression of character. The great Roman writers manifest that kind of self-consciousness which accompanies resolute and successful effort; while the Greeks enjoy that happy self-forgetfulness which attends the unimpeded exercise of a natural gift. The epitaphs composed for themselves by Naevius, Plautus, Ennius, and Pacuvius, and the assertion of their own originality and of their hopes of fame, which occurs in the poetry of Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, were dictated by a strong sense of their own personality, and of the importance of the task on which they were engaged. Catullus, although he is much preoccupied with, and most frank in communicating his feelings and pursuits, has much less of the consciousness of genius, is much more humble in his aspirations, and more modest in his estimate of himself. In this, as in other respects, he approaches nearer to the type of Greek art than any of his brother-poets of Rome.

It is a common remark that the very greatest poets are those about whose personal characteristics least is known. It is impossible in their case to determine where they have expressed their real sympathies or convictions. They rise above the prejudices of their country and the accidents of their time, and can see the good and evil inseparably mixed in all human action. No criticism can throw any trustworthy light on the personal position, the pursuits and aims, the outward and inward experience of Homer. It cannot even be determined with certainty how much of the poetry which bears his name is the creation of one, seemingly, inexhaustible genius; and how much is the 'divine voice' of earlier singers still 'floating around him.' Such inquiries are ever attracting and ever baffling a high curiosity. They leave the mind perplexed with the doubt whether it is discerning, in the far distance, the outline of solid mountain-land, or only the transient shapes of the clouds. Hesiod, on the other hand, a poet of perhaps equal antiquity, but of an infinitely lower order of genius, has left his own likeness graphically delineated on his remains. There is much to interest a reader in the old didactic poem, 'The Works and Days,' but it is not the interest of studying a work of art or of creative genius. The charm of the book consists partly in its power of calling up the ideas of a remote antiquity and of human life in its most elemental conditions; partly in the distinct impression which it bears of a character of an antique and primitive and yet not unfamiliar type;—a character of deep natural piety and righteousness, but with a quaint intermixture of other qualities, homespun sagacity and worldly wisdom;—genuine thrift, and horror of idleness, of war, of seafaring enterprise;—sardonic dislike of the airs and vices of women, and a grim discontent with his own condition, and with the poor soil which it was his lot to till[7]. It is through his want of those gifts of genius which have made Homer immortal as a poet, and a mere name as a man, that Hesiod has left so distinct a picture of himself to the latest times. In like manner Roman poetry, while never rising to the heights of creative and impersonal genius, from this very defect, is a truer revelation of the poets themselves. The Aeneid supplies ample materials for understanding the affections and convictions of Virgil. Lucretius makes his personal presence felt through the whole march of his argument, and supports every position of his system not with his logic only, but with the whole force of his nature. The fragments of Ennius and of Lucilius afford ample evidence by which we may judge what kind of men they were.

It thus appears that, over and above their higher and finer excellencies, the Roman poets have this additional source of interest, that, more than any other authors in the vigorous times of antiquity, they satisfy the modern curiosity in regard to personal character and experience. These poets have themselves left the most trustworthy record of their happiest hours and most real interests; of their standard of conduct, their personal worth, and their strength of affection; of the studies and the occupations in which they passed their lives, and of the spirit in which they awaited the certainty of their end.

It remains to say a few words in regard to the historical progress of this branch of literature. The history of Roman poetry may be divided into four great periods:—

I. The age of Naevius, Ennius, Lucilius, etc., extending from about B.C. 240 till about B.C. 100:

II. The age of Lucretius and Catullus, whose active poetical career belongs to the last age of the Republic, the decennium before the outbreak of the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey:

III. The Augustan age:

IV. The whole period of the Empire after the time of Augustus.

The poetry of each of these periods is distinctly marked in form, style, and character. There is evidently a great progress in artistic accomplishment and in poetical feeling, from the rude cyclopean remains of the annals of Ennius to the stately proportions and elaborate workmanship of the Aeneid. Yet this advance was attended with some loss as well as gain. With infinitely less accomplishment and less variety, the older writers show signs of a robuster life and a more vigorous understanding than some at least of those who adorn the Augustan era. They endeavoured to work in the spirit of the great masters, who had made the most heroic passions and most serious interests of men the subject of their art. They were men also of the same fibre as the chief actors on the stage of public affairs, living with them in familiar friendship, while at the same time maintaining a close sympathy with popular feeling and the national life. Their fragments are thus, apart from their intrinsic merits, especially valuable as the contemporary language of that great time, and as giving some expression to the strength, the dignity, and the freedom which were stamped upon the old Republic.

For more than a generation after the death of Accius and Lucilius, no new poet of any eminence appeared at Rome. The vivid enjoyment of life, and the sense of security which usually accompany and foster the successful cultivation of art, had been rudely interrupted by the convulsions of the State. A new birth of Roman poetry took place during the brief lull between the storms of the first and second civil wars. The new poets arose independently of the old literature. They appealed not to popular favour, but to the tastes of the few and the educated; they gave expression not to any public or national sentiment, but to their individual thought and feeling. Their works reflect the restless agitation of a time of revolution; but they show also all the vigour and sincerity of republican freedom. While greatly superior to the fragments of the older poetry in refinement of style, and in depth and variety of poetical feeling, they want the simple strength of moral conviction, and the interest in great practical affairs, which characterised their predecessors. They are inferior to the poets of the Augustan age in artistic skill; but they show more force of thought, or more intensity of passion, a stronger and livelier inspiration, a bolder and more independent character.

The short interval between the death of Catullus and the appearance of the Bucolics of Virgil marks the beginning of a new era in literature and in history:

Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

Catullus, dying only a few years before the extinction of popular freedom, is, in every nerve and fibre, the poet of a republic. Virgil, even before the final success of Augustus, proclaimed the advent of the new Empire; and he became the sincere admirer and interpreter of its order and magnificence. Most of the other poets of that age, though born before the overthrow of the Republic, show the influence of their time, not only by sympathy with or acquiescence in the new order of things, but by a perceptible lowering in the higher energies of life. Still, the poetry of the Augustan age, if inferior in natural force to that of the Republic, is the culmination of all the previous efforts of Roman art; and is, at the same time, the most complete and elaborate representation of Roman and Italian life.

The chief interest of Roman poetry, considered as the work of men of natural genius and cultivated taste, and as the expression of great national ideas or of individual thought and impulse, ceases with the end of the Augustan age. Under the continued pressure of the Empire, true poetical inspiration and pure feeling for art were lost. One certain test of this decay is the absence of musical power and sweetness from the verse of the later poets. Yet some of the poets of the Empire have their own peculiar greatness. Lucan and Juvenal recall in their vigorous rhetoric the masculine tone and fervid feeling of the old Roman character, liberalised by the progress of thought and education. In the Satires of Persius, there is an atmosphere of purer morality than in any earlier Roman writer, with the exception of Cicero. There is much vigour, sense, wit, and keen appreciation of life, intermingled with the coarseness of Martial. Yet it is owing rather to their rhetorical or their intellectual ability and to their historical value, than to their poetical genius, that these writers are still read and admired. The artificial epics of Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus may be occasionally read in the interests of learning; but it is hardly probable that they will, or desirable that they should, ever be permanently restored from the neglect and oblivion into which they have long been sinking.

This review of Roman poetry will bring before us the origin and progressive growth of a branch of literature, moulded, indeed, on the forms of a foreign art, but executed with native energy, and expressive of native character. In this poetry not the genius only, but the inner nature and sympathies of some of the more interesting men of antiquity are displayed. It throws light on the impulses of thought and feeling which influenced the action of different epochs in Roman history. The great qualities of Rome are seen to mould and animate her poetry. These qualities are found in harmonious union with the spirit of enjoyment and the sense of exuberant life, fostered by the genial air of Italy; and with a refinement of taste drawn from the purest source of human culture which the world has ever enjoyed. After all deductions have been made for their want of inventiveness, it still remains true, that the Roman poets of the last days of the Republic and of the Augustan age have added to the masterpieces of literature some great works of native feeling as well as of finished execution.

[1] Hom. Od. xxii. 348.

[2] Cf. Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 2, 3. Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti vel recepti. At contra oratorem celeriter complexi sumus: nec eum primo eruditum, aptum tamen ad dicendum.

[3] Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Biography, Art. Catullus.

[4] The following lines might be quoted as a specimen of the majesty of the Aeneid:—

Haec finis Priami fatorum; hic exitus illum

Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem

Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum

Regnatorem Asiae.—Aen. ii. 554-7.

[5] Horace, Sat. i. 10. 45.

[6] 'He used from time to time to intrust all his secret thoughts to his books, as to trusty friends; it was to them only he turned in evil fortune or in good; and thus it is, that the whole life of the old poet lies before our eyes, as if it were portrayed on a votive picture.'—Sat. ii. 1. 30.

[7] The parallel which Mr. Ruskin draws (Modern Painters, vol iii. p. 194), between an ancient Greek and 'a good, conscientious, but illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer of a century or two back,' becomes intelligible if we regard Hesiod as a normal type of the Greek mind.

CHAPTER II.
VESTIGES OF EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY IN ROME AND ANCIENT ITALY.

The Romans themselves traced the origin of their poetry, as of all their literary culture, to their contact with the mind of Greece.

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes

Intulit agresti Latio.

The first productive literary impulse was communicated to the Roman mind by the Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who, in the year B.C. 240—one year after the end of the First Punic War—brought out, before a Roman audience, a drama translated or imitated from the Greek. From this time Roman poetry advanced along the various channels which the creative energy of Greek genius had formed.

But it has been maintained, in recent times, that this was but the second birth of Roman poetry, and that a golden age of native minstrelsy had preceded this historical development of literature. The most distinguished supporters of this theory were Niebuhr and Macaulay. In the preface to his Lays of Rome, Macaulay says that 'this early literature abounded with metrical romances, such as are found in every country where there is much curiosity and intelligence, but little reading and writing.' Niebuhr went so far as to assert that the Romans in early times possessed epic poems, 'which in power and brilliance of imagination leave everything produced by the Romans in later times far behind them.' He held that the flourishing period of this native poetry was the fifth century after the foundation of the city. He supposed that the early lays were of plebeian origin, strongly animated by plebeian sentiment, and familiarly known among the mass of the people; that they disappeared after the ascendency of the new literature, chiefly through the influence of Ennius; and that his immediate predecessor, Naevius, was the last of the genuine native minstrels. He professed to find clear traces of these ballads and epic poems in the fine legends of early Roman history. His theory was supported by arguments founded on the testimony of ancient writers, on indications of the early recognition of poetry by the Roman State (as, for instance, the worship of the Camenae), on the poetical character of early Roman story, and on the analogy of other nations.

Although there may be no more ground for believing in a golden age of early Roman poetry than in a golden age of innocence and happiness, yet the question raised by Niebuhr deserves attention, not only on account of the celebrity which it obtained, but also as opening up an inquiry into the nature and value of the rude germs of literature which the Latin soil spontaneously produced. Though there is no substantial evidence of the existence among the Romans of anything corresponding to the modern ballad or the early epic of Greece, yet certain kinds of metrical composition did spring up and flourish among the Italians, previous to and independent of their knowledge of Greek literature. It is worth while to ascertain what these kinds of composition were, as they throw light on some natural tendencies of the race, which ultimately obtained their adequate expression, and helped to impart a native and original character to Latin literature.

It was observed in the former chapter that while the metres of all the great Roman poets were founded on the earlier metres of Greece, there was a native Italian metre, called the Saturnian, which was employed apparently in various kinds of composition, and was quite different in character from the heroic and lyric measures adopted by the cultivated poets of a later age. This metre was used not only in rude extemporaneous effusions, but also in the long poem of Naevius, on the First Punic War. Horace indicates his sense of the roughness and barbarism of the metre, in the lines,

Sic horridus ille

Defluxit numerus Saturnius, et grave virus

Munditiae pepulere[8].

Ennius speaks contemptuously of the verse of Naevius, as that employed by the old prophetic bards, before any of the gifts of poetry had been received or cultivated—

Quum neque musarum scopulos quisquam superarat

Nec dicti studiosus erat.

The irregularity of the metre may be inferred from a saying of an ancient grammarian, that, in the long epic of Naevius he could find no single line to serve as a normal specimen of its structure. From the few Saturnian lines remaining, it may be inferred that the verse had an irregular trochaic movement; and it seems first to have come into use as an accompaniment to the beating of the foot in a primitive rustic dance. The name, connected with Saturnus, the old Land-God of Italy, points to the rustic origin of the metre. It was known also by the name of Faunian, derived from another of the Divinities worshipped in the rural districts of Italy. It seems first to have been employed in ritual prayers and thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth, and in the grotesque raillery accompanying the merriment and license of the harvest-home. It is of the Saturnian verse that Virgil speaks in the lines of the second Georgic—

Nec non Ausonii, Troja gens missa, coloni

Versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto[9].

As the long roll of the hexameter and the stately march of the alcaic were expressive of the gravity and majesty of the Roman State, so the ring and flow of the Saturnian verse may be regarded as indicative of the freedom and genial enjoyment of life, characterising the old Italian peasantry.

The most important kinds of compositions produced in this metre, under purely native influences, may be classed as,

1. Hymns or ritual verses.

2. Prophetic verses.

3. Festive and satiric verses, uttered in dialogue or in rude mimetic drama.

4. Short gnomic or didactic verses.

5. Commemorative odes sung or recited at banquets and funerals.

1. The earliest extant specimen of the Latin language is a fragment of the hymn of the Fratres Arvales, a priestly brotherhood, who offered, on every 15th of May, public sacrifices for the fertility of the fields. This fragment is variously written and interpreted, but there can be no doubt that it is the expression of a prayer, for protection against pestilence, addressed to the Lares and the god Mars, and that it was uttered with the accompaniment of dancing. The following is the reading of the fragment, as given by Mommsen:—

Enos, Lases, juvate.

Ne veluerve, Marmar, sins incurrere in pleores.

Satur fu, fere Mars.

Limen sali.

Sta berber.

Semunis alternis advocapit concto.

Enos, Marmar, juvato.

Triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe[10].

The address to Mars 'Satur fu,' or, according to another reading, 'Satur furere,' 'be satisfied or done with raging,' probably refers to the severity of the winter and early spring[11]. The words have reference to the attributes of the God in the old Italian religion, in which the powers of Nature were deified and worshipped long before Mars was identified with the Greek Ares. The other expressions in the prayer appear to be, either directions given to the dancers, or the sounds uttered as the dance proceeded.

Another short fragment has been preserved from the hymn of the Salii, also an ancient priesthood, supposed to date from the times of the early kings. The hymn is characterised by Horace, among other specimens of ancient literature, as equally unintelligible to himself and to its affected admirers[12].

From the extreme antiquity of these ceremonial chants it may be inferred that metrical expression among the Romans, as among the Greeks and other ancient nations, owed its origin to a primitive religious worship. But while the early Greek hymns or chants in honour of the Gods soon assumed the forms of pleasant tales of human adventure, or tragic tales of human suffering, the Roman hymns retained their formal and ritual character unchanged among all the changes of creed and language. In the lines just quoted there is no trace of creative fancy, nor any germ of devotional feeling, which might have matured into lyrical or contemplative poetry. They sound like the words of a rude incantation. They are the obscure memorial of a primitive, agricultural people, living in a blind sense of dependence on their gods, and restrained by a superstitious formalism from all activity of thought or fancy. Such compositions cannot be attributed to the inspiration or skill of any early poet, but seem to have been copied from the uncouth and spontaneous shouts of a simple, unsophisticated priesthood, engaged in a rude ceremonial dance. If these hymns stand in any relation to Latin literature, they may perhaps be regarded as springing from the same vein of public sentiment, as called forth the hymn composed by Livius Andronicus during the Second Punic War, and as rude precursors of those composed by Catullus and Horace, and chanted by a chorus of youths and maidens in honour of the protecting Deities of Rome.

2. The verses of the Fauns and Vates spoken of by Ennius, with allusion to the poem of Naevius, in the lines,

Scripsere alii rem,

Versibu' quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant,

were probably as far removed from poetry as the ritual chants of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Fauni were the woodland gods of Italy, and were, besides their other functions, supposed to be endowed with prophetic power[13]. The word Vates, a word of Celtic origin, originally means not a poet, but a soothsayer. The Camenae or Casmenae (another form of which word appears in Carmenta, the prophetic mother of Evander) were worshipped, not as the inspirers of poetry, but as the foretellers of future events[14]. Both Greeks and Romans sought to obtain a knowledge of the future, either through the interpretation of omens, or through the voice of persons supposed to be divinely endowed with foresight. But the Greeks, even in the regard which they paid to auguries and oracles, were influenced, for the most part, by their lively imagination; while the Romans, from the earliest to the latest eras of their history, in all their relations to the supernatural world, adhered to a scrupulous and unimaginative ceremonialism. The notices in Latin literature of the functions of these early Vates—as, for instance, the counsel of the Etrurian seer to drain the Alban Lake during the war with Veii, and the prophecy of Marcius uttered during the Second Punic War,

Amnem Trojugena Cannam Romane fuge, etc.[15],

suggest no more idea of poetical inspiration than the occasional notices, in Latin authors, of the oracles of the Sibylline books. The language of prophecy naturally assumes a metrical or rhythmical form, partly as an aid to the memory, partly, perhaps, as a means of giving to the words uttered the effect of a more solemn intonation. In Greece, the oracles of the Delphian priestess, and the predictions of soothsayers, collected in books or circulating orally among the people, were expressed in hexameter verse and in the traditional diction of epic poetry; but they were never ranked under any form of poetic art. The verses of the Vates, so far as any inference can be formed as to their nature, appear to have been products and proofs of unimaginative superstition, rather than of any imaginative inspiration among the early inhabitants of Latium.

3. Another class of metrical compositions, of native origin, but of a totally opposite character, was known by the name of the 'Fescennine verses.' These arose out of a very different class of feelings and circumstances. Horace attributes their origin to the festive meetings and exuberant mirth of the harvest-home among a primitive, strong, and cheerful race of husbandmen. He points out how this rustic raillery gradually assumed the character of fierce lampoons, and had to be restrained by law:—

Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem

Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit;

Libertasque recurrentes accepta per annos

Lusit amabiliter, donec jam saevus apertam

In rabiem coepit verti jocus et per honestas

Ire domos impune minax. Doluere cruento

Dente lacessiti; fuit intactis quoque cura

Conditione super communi; quin etiam lex

Poenaque lata, malo quae nollet carmine quemquam

Describi; vertere modum, formidine fustis

Ad bene dicendum delectandumque redacti[16].

The change in character, here described, from coarse and good-humoured bantering to libellous scurrility, may be conjectured to have taken place when the Fescennine freedom passed from villages and country districts to the active social and political life within the city. That this change had taken place in Rome at an early period, is proved by the fact that libellous verses were forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables[17]. The original Fescennine verse appears, from the testimony of Horace, to have been in metrical dialogue. This rude amusement, in which a coarse kind of banter was interchanged during their festive gatherings, was in early times characteristic of the rural populations of Greece and Sicily, as well as Italy, and was one of the original elements out of which Greek comedy and Greek pastoral poetry were developed. These verses had a kindred origin with that of the Phallic Odes among the Greeks. They both appear to have sprung out of the rudest rites and the grossest symbolism of rustic paganism. The Fescennine raillery long retained traces of this original character. Catullus mentions the 'procax Fescennina locutio' among the accompaniments of marriage festivals; and the songs of the soldiers, in the extravagant license of the triumphal procession, betrayed unmistakably this primitive coarseness.

These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum[18], were the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which also was familiar to the Romans before they became acquainted with Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more probable etymology[19] of the word satura connects it in origin with the satura lanx, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian farsa[20], and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing, differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy[21] to the representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous character; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined with music (saturas impletas modis), even after the introduction of the regular drama.

These scenic saturae, which, from Livy's notice, appear to have been accompanied with good-humoured hilarity rather than with scurrilous raillery, prepared the way for the reception of the regular drama among the Romans, and will, to some extent, account for its early popularity among them. The later Roman satire long retained traces of a connexion with this primitive and indigenous satura, evinced both by the miscellaneous character of its topics, and by its frequent employment of dramatic dialogue.

4. The didactic tendency which is so conspicuous in the cultivated literature of Rome manifested itself also in the indigenous compositions of Italy. The popular maxims and precepts preserved by the old agricultural writers and afterwards embodied by Virgil in his Georgics, were handed down from generation to generation in the Saturnian rhythm. But, apparently, the first metrical composition committed to writing was a poem of an ethical or didactic character, written two generations before the first dramatic representation of Livius Andronicus, by Appius Claudius Caecus, who is also the earliest known to us in the long line of Roman orators[22].

5. But it was not from any of these sources that Niebuhr supposed the poetical character of early Roman history to be derived. Nor is there any analogy between the religious hymns, or the Fescennine verses of Italy, and the modern ballad. But there is evidence of the existence, at one time, of other metrical compositions of which scarcely anything is definitely ascertained, except that they were sung at banquets, to the accompaniment of the flute, in celebration of the praises of great men. There is no direct evidence of the time when these compositions, some of which were believed by Niebuhr to have attained the dimensions of Epic poems, existed, or when they fell into disuse. Cato, as quoted by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, and in the Brutus[23], is our earliest authority on the subject. His testimony is to the effect that many generations before his time, the guests at banquets were in the habit of singing, in succession, the praises of great men, to the music of the flute. Cicero, in the Brutus, expresses a wish that these songs still existed in his own day; 'utinam exstarent illa carmina, quae multis saeculis ante suam aetatem in epulis esse cantitata a singulis convivis de clarorum virorum laudibus in Originibus scriptum reliquit Cato.' Varro again is quoted, to the effect, that boys used to be present at banquets, for the purpose of singing 'ancient poems,' celebrating the praises of their ancestors. Valerius Maximus mentions 'that the older men used at banquets to celebrate in song the illustrious deeds of their ancestors, in order to stimulate the youth to imitate them.' Passages are quoted also from Horace, from Dionysius, and from Tacitus, implying a belief in the ancient existence of these compositions.

Besides the odes sung or recited at banquets, there were certain funeral poems, called Naeniae, originally chanted by the female relatives of the deceased, but afterwards by hired women. As the practice of public speaking advanced, these gradually passed into a mere form, and were superseded by funeral orations.

The facts ascertained about these commemorative poems amount to no more than this,—that they were sung at banquets and the funerals of great men,—that they were of such length as to admit of several being sung in succession,—and that they fell into disuse some generations before the age of Cato. The inferences that may fairly be drawn from these statements are opposed to some of the conclusions of Niebuhr. The evidence is all in favour of their having been short lyrical pieces, and not long narrative poems. As they were sung at great banquets and funerals, it seems probable that, like the custom of exhibiting the ancestral images on the same occasions, they owed their origin to the patrician pride of family, and were not likely to have been animated by strong plebeian sentiment. If they had been preserved at all, they were thus more likely to have been preserved by members of the great houses living within the city walls, than by the peasantry living among the outlying hills and country districts. If ever there were any golden age of early Roman poetry, it had passed away long before the time of Ennius and Cato.

The fact, however, remains, that the Romans did possess, in early times, some kind of native minstrelsy, in which they honoured the memory and the exploits of their great men. And this impulse of hero-worship became in later times an important factor in their epic poetry. But is there any reason to suppose that these compositions were of the nature and importance assigned to them by Niebuhr, and had any value in respect of invention and execution? It is difficult to believe that such a native force of feeling and imagination, pouring itself forth in stirring ballads and continuous epic poems, could have been frozen so near its source; or that a rich, popular poetry, not scattered through thinly-peopled districts, but the possession of a great commonwealth—one most tenacious of every national memorial—could have entirely disappeared, under any foreign influence, in the course of one or two generations. But even on the supposition that a great national poetry might have passed from the memory of men—as, possibly, the poems existing before the time of Homer may have been lost or merged in the greater glories of the Iliad and the Odyssey—this early poetry could not have perished without leaving permanent influence on the Roman language. The growth of poetical language necessarily accompanies the growth of poetical feeling and inspiration. The sensuous, passionate, and musical force by which a language is first moulded into poetry is transmitted from one generation of poets to another. The language of Homer, by its natural and musical flow, by its accumulated wealth of meaning, by the use of traditional epithets and modes of expression, that penetrate far back into the belief, the feelings, and the life of an earlier time, implies the existence of a long line of poets who preceded him. On the other hand, the diction of the fragments of Ennius, in its strength and in its rudeness, is evidently, in great measure, the creation of his own time and his own mind. He has no true discernment of the characteristic difference between the language of prose and of poetry. The materials of his art had not been smoothed and polished by any long, continuous stream of national melody, but were rough-hewn and adapted by his own energy to the rugged structure of his poem.

While, therefore, it appears that the actual notices of the early commemorative poems do not imply that they were the products of imagination or poetical feeling, or that they excited much popular enthusiasm, and were an important element in the early State, their entire disappearance among a people so tenacious of all their gains, and, still more, the unformed and prosaic condition of the language and rhythm used by Naevius, Ennius, and the other early poets, lead to the presumption, that they were not much valued by the Romans at any time, and that they were not the creations of poetic genius and art. This presumption is further strengthened by such indications as there are of the recognition, or rather the non-recognition, of poets or of the poetic character at Rome in early times.

The worship of the Camenae was indeed an old and genuine part of the Roman or Italian religion; but, as was said before, their original function was to predict future events, and to communicate the knowledge of divination; not like that of the Greek Muses, to imagine bright stories of divine and human adventure,—

λησμοσύνην τε κακῶν ἄμπαυμά τε μερμηράων.

Even the names by which two of the Camenae were known—Postvorta and Antevorta—suggest the prosaic and practical functions which they were supposed to fulfil. The Romans had no native word equivalent to the Greek word ἀοιδός, denoting the primary and most essential of all poetical gifts, the power to awaken the music of language. The word vates, as was seen, denoted a prophet. The title of scriba was applied to Livius Andronicus; and Naevius, who has by some been regarded as the last of the old race of Roman bards, applies to himself the Greek name of poeta,—

Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam.

The commemorative odes appear to have been recited or sung at banquets, not by poets or rhapsodists, but by boys or guests. There is one notice, indeed, of a class of men who practised the profession of minstrelsy. This passage, which is quoted by Aulus Gellius from the writings of Cato, implies the very lowest estimation of the position and character of the poet, and points more naturally to the composers of the libellous verses forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables, than to the authors of heroic and national lays:—'Poetry was not held in honour; if anyone devoted himself to it, or went about to banquets, he was called a vagabond[24].'

It appears that, on this ground also, there is no reason for believing in the existence of any golden age of Roman poetry before the time of Ennius, or in the theory that the legendary tales of Roman history were created and shaped by native minstrels. To what cause, then, can we attribute their origin? These tales have a strong human interest, and represent marked and original types of antique heroism. They have the elements of true tragic pathos and moral grandeur. They could neither have arisen nor been preserved except among a people endowed with strong capacities of feeling and action. But the strength of the Roman mind consisted more in retentive capacity than in creative energy. Their art and their religion, their family and national customs, aimed at preserving the actual memory of men and of their actions: not like the arts, ceremonies, and customs of the Greeks, which aimed at lifting the mind out of reality into an ideal world. As one of the chief difficulties of the Homeric controversy arises from our ignorance of the power of the memory during an age when poetry and song were in the fullest life, but the use of letters was either unknown, or extremely limited; so there is a parallel difficulty in all attempts to explain the origin of early Roman history, from our ignorance of the power of oral tradition in a time of long established order, but yet unacquainted with any of the forms of literature. The indifference of barbarous tribes to their past history can prove little or nothing as to the tenacity of the national memory among a people far advanced towards civilisation like the Romans after the establishment of their Republican form of government. Nor can the analogy of early Greek traditions be fairly applied to those of Rome, owing to the great difference in the circumstances and the genius of the two nations. Many real impressions of the past might fix themselves indelibly in the grave and solid temperament of the Romans, which would have been lost amid the inexhaustible wealth of fancy that had been lavished upon the Greeks. The strict family life and discipline of the Romans, the continuity of their religious colleges, the unity of a single state as the common centre of all their interests, the slow and steady growth of their institutions, their strong regard for precedent, were all conditions more favourable to the preservation of tradition than the lively social life, the numerous centres of political organization, and the rapid growth and vicissitudes of the Greek Republics.

It cannot, indeed, be disputed that although the legendary tales of Roman history may have drawn more of their colour from life than from imagination, yet there is no criterion by which the amount of fact contained in them can be separated from the other elements of which they were composed. Oral tradition among the Romans, as among other nations, was founded on impressions originally received without any careful sifting of evidence; and these first impressions would naturally be modified in accordance with the feelings and opinions of each generation, through which they were transmitted. Aetiological myths, or the attempt to explain some institution or memorial by some concrete fact, and the systematic reconstruction of forgotten events, have also entered largely into the composition of Roman history. But these admissions do not lead to the conclusion that the art or fancy of any class of early poets was added to the unconscious operation of popular feeling in moulding the impressive tales of early heroism, partly out of the memory of real events and personages, partly out of the ideal of character, latent in the national mind. It has been remarked by Sir G. C. Lewis that many even of the Greek myths, abounding 'in striking, pathetic, and interesting events,' existed as prose legends, and were handed down in the common speech of the people. In like manner, such tales as those of Lucretia and Virginia, of Horatius and the Fabii, of Cincinnatus, Coriolanus, and Camillus, which stand out prominently in the twilight of Roman history, may have been preserved in the fama vulgaris, or among the family traditions of the great houses, till they were gathered into the poem of Ennius and the prose narratives of the early annalists[25]. In so far as they are shaped or coloured by imagination, they do not bear traces of the conscious art of a poet, but rather of an unconscious conformity to the national ideal of character. The most impressive of these legendary stories illustrate the primitive virtues of the Roman character, such as chastity, frugality, fortitude, and self-devotion; or the national characteristics of patrician pride and a stern exercise of parental authority. There is certainly no internal evidence that any of them originated in a pure poetic impulse, or gave birth to any work of poetic art deserving a permanent existence in literature.

The analogy of other nations might suggest the inference that a race which in its maturity produced a genuine poetic literature must, in the early stages of its history, have given some proof of poetic inspiration. It is natural to associate the idea of poetry with youth both in nations and individuals. Yet the evidence of their language, of their religion, and of their customs, leads to the conclusion that the Romans, while prematurely great in action and government, were, in the earlier stages of their national life, little moved by any kind of poetical imagination. The state of religious feeling or belief which gives birth to or co-exists with primitive poetry has left no trace of itself upon the early Roman annals. It is generally found that a fanciful mythology, of a bright, gloomy, or grotesque character, in accordance with the outward circumstances and latent spirit or humour of the particular race among whom it originates, precedes and for a time accompanies the poetry of romantic action. The creative faculty produces strange forms and conditions of supernatural life out of its own mysterious sympathy with Nature, before it learns to invent tales of heroic action and of tragic calamity out of its sympathy with human energy and passion and its interest in marking the course of destiny, and the vicissitudes of life. The development of the Roman religion betrays the absence, or at least the weaker influence of that imaginative power which shaped the great mythologies of different races out of the primeval worship of nature. The later element introduced into Roman religion was due not to imagination but to reflection. The worship of Fides, Concordia, Pudicitia, and the like, marks a great progress from the early adoration of the sun, the earth, the vault of heaven, and the productive power of nature; but it is a progress in understanding and moral consciousness, not in poetical feeling nor imaginative power. It shows that Roman civilisation advanced without this vivifying influence, that the mind of the race early reached the maturity of manhood, without passing through the dreams of childhood or the buoyant fancies of youth.

The circumstances of the Romans, in early times, were also different from those by which the growth of a romantic poetry has usually been accompanied. Though, like all races born to a great destiny, they had much latent imaginative ardour of feeling, this was employed by them, unconsciously, in elevating and purifying the ideal of the State and the family, as actually realised in experience. Their orderly organisation,—the early establishment of their civic forms,—the strict discipline of family life among them,—the formal and ceremonial character of their national religion,—and their strong interest in practical affairs,—were not calculated either to kindle the glow of individual genius, or to dispose the mass of the people to listen to the charm of musical verse. The wars of the young Republic, carried on by a well-trained militia for the acquisition of new territory, formed the character to solid strength and steady discipline, but could not act upon the fancy in the same way as the distant enterprise, the long struggles for national independence, or the daring forays, which have thrown the light of romance around the warlike youth of other races. The tillage of the soil, in which the brief intervals between their wars were passed, was a tame and monotonous pursuit compared with the maritime adventure which awoke the energies of Greece, or with the wild and lonely, half-pastoral, half-marauding life, out of which a true ballad poetry arose in modern times. Some traces of a wilder life, or some faint memories of their Sabine forefathers, may be dimly discerned in the earliest traditions of the Roman people; but their youth was essentially practical,—great and strong in the virtues of temperance, gravity, fortitude, reverence for law and the majesty of the State, combined with a strong love of liberty and sturdy resistance to wrong. These qualities are the foundations of a powerful and orderly State, not the root nor the sap by which a great national poetry is nourished[26].

If the pure Roman intellect and discipline had spontaneously produced any kind of literature, it would have been more likely to have taken the form of history or oratory than of national song or ballad. It was from men of the Italian provinces, and not from her own sons, that Rome received her poetry. The men of the most genuinely Roman type and character long resisted all literary progress. The patrons and friends of the early poets were the more liberal members of the aristocracy, in whom the austerity of the national character and narrowness of the national mind had yielded to new ideas and a wider experience. The art of Greece was communicated to 'rude Latium,' through the medium of those kindred races who had come into earlier contact with the Greek language and civilisation. With less native strength, but with greater flexibility, these races were more readily moulded by foreign influences; and, leading a life of greater ease and freedom, they were more susceptible to all the impulses of Nature. While they were thus more readily prepared to catch the spirit of Greek culture, they had learned, through long years of war and subsequent dependence, to understand and respect the imperial State in which their own nationality had been merged. It is important to remember that the time in which Roman literature arose was not only that of the first active intercourse between Greeks and Romans, but also that in which a great war, against the most powerful State outside of Italy, had awakened the sense of an Italian nationality, of which Rome was the centre. The great Republic derived her education and literature from the accumulated stores of Greek thought and feeling; but these were made available to her through the willing service of poets who, though born in other parts of Italy, looked to Rome as the head and representative of their common country.

[8] Epist. ii. 1. 157.

[9] Georg. ii. 385.

[10] It is thus interpreted by the same author:—Nos, lares, juvate. Ne malam luem, Mamers, sinas incurrere in plures. Satur esto, fere Mars. In limen insili. Pesiste verberare (limen)! Semones alterni advocate cunctos. Nos, Mamers, juvato. Tripudia.

'Help us, Lares. Suffer not, Mamers, pestilence to fall on the people. Be satisfied, fierce Mars. Leap on the threshold. Cease beating it. Call, in turn, on all the demigods. Help us, Mamers.'—Mommsen, Röm. Geschichte, vol. i. ch. xv.

[11] Such is the interpretation of Corssen, Origines Poesis Romanae.

[12] Epist. ii. 1. 86.

[13] Cf. Virg. Aen. vii. 81, 82:—

At rex sollicitus monstris, oracula Fauni,

Fatidici genitoris adit.

[14] Cf. Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. i. 24, note 1.

[15] Livy xxv. 12.

[16] 'The Fescennine raillery in this way, arose and poured forth its rustic banter in responsive strains; the spirit of freedom, made welcome, as the season came round, first played a kindly part; but soon the jests grew cruel, then changed into sheer fury, and began, with impunity, to threaten and assail honourable households. Men smarted under the sharp edge of its cruel tooth: even those who were unassailed felt concern for the common weal. A law was passed, and a penalty enforced, forbidding any one to be branded in libellous verses. Thus they changed their style, and were brought back to a kindly and pleasant tone, under fear of a beating.'—Epist. ii. 1. 144-55.

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

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

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

[20] Cf. Teuffel, vi. 2.

[21] vii. 2.

[22] Cf. Teuffel, Wagner's Translation, p. 102.

[23] Tusc. Disp. iv. 2; Brutus, 19.

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

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

[26] Cf. Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. i. 1. 24.

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

The historical event which first brought the Romans into familiar contact with the Greeks, was the war with Pyrrhus and with Tarentum, the most powerful and flourishing among the famous Greek colonies in lower Italy. In earlier times, indeed, through their occasional communication with the Greeks of Cumae, and the other colonies in Italy, they had obtained a vague knowledge of some of the legends of Greek poetry. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced at Rome from Epidaurus in B.C. 293 and the oracle of Delphi had been consulted by the Romans in still earlier times. As the Sibylline verses appear to have been composed in Greek, their interpreters must have been either Greeks or men acquainted with that language[27]. The identification of the Greek with the Roman mythology had probably commenced before Greek literature was known to the Romans, although the works of Naevius and Ennius must have had an influence in completing this process. Greek civilisation had come, however, at an earlier period into close relation with the south of Italy; and the natives of that district, such as Ennius and Pacuvius, who first settled at Rome, were spoken of by the Romans as 'Semi Graeci.' But, until after the fall of Tarentum there appears to have been no familiar intercourse between the two great representatives of ancient civilisation. Till the war with Pyrrhus, the knowledge that the two nations had of one another was slight and vague. But, immediately after that time, the affairs of Rome began to attract the attention of Greek historians[28], and the Romans, though very slowly, began to obtain some acquaintance with the language and literature of Greece.

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

Serus enim Graecis admovit acumina chartis;

Et post Punica bella quietus, quaerere coepit

Quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent[29].

Two circumstances, however, must in the meantime have prepared the minds of the Romans for the reception of the new literature. Sicily had been the chief battle-field of the contending powers. In their intercourse with the Sicilian Greeks, the Romans had great facilities for becoming acquainted with the Greek language, and frequent opportunities of being present at dramatic representations. Many Greeks also had been brought to Rome as slaves after the capture of Tarentum, and were employed in educating the young among the higher classes. Thus many Roman citizens were prepared, by their circumstances and education, to take interest in the legends and in the dramatic form of literature introduced from Greece; while the previous existence of the saturae, and other scenic exhibitions at Rome, tended to make the new drama acceptable to the great mass of the population.

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

Yet this long period, in which poetry, with so much difficulty and such scanty resources, struggled into existence at Rome, is connected with the age of Cicero by an unbroken line of literary continuity. Naevius, the younger contemporary of Livius, and the first native poet, was actively engaged in the composition of his poems till the time of his death; about which period his greater successor first appeared at Rome. For about thirty years, Ennius shone alone in epic and tragic poetry. The poetic successor of Ennius was his nephew, Pacuvius. He, in the later years of his life, lived in friendly intercourse with his younger rival Accius, who, again, in his old age, had frequently conversed with Cicero[30]. The torch, which was first lighted by Livius Andronicus from the decaying fires of Greece, was thus handed down by these few men, through this long period, until it was extinguished during the stormy times which fell in the youth of the great orator and prose writer of the Republic.

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

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

The two earliest authors who fill a period of forty years in the literary history of Rome, extending from the end of the First to the end of the Second Punic War, are Livius Andronicus and Cn. Naevius. Of the first very little is known. The fragments of his works are scanty and unimportant, and have been preserved by grammarians merely as illustrative of old forms of the language. The admirers of Naevius and Ennius, in ancient times, awarded only scanty honours to the older dramatist. Cicero, for instance, says of his plays 'that they are not worth reading a second time[31].' There is no ground for believing that Livius was a man of original genius. The importance which attaches to him consists in his being the accidental medium through which literary art was first introduced to the Romans. He was a Greek, and, as is generally supposed, a native of Tarentum. If he was among the captives taken after the fall of that city, he must have resided thirty years at Rome before he ventured to reproduce a Greek drama in the Latin language. He educated the sons of his master, M. Livius Salinator, from whom he afterwards received his freedom. The last thirty years of his life were devoted to literature, and chiefly to the reproduction of the Greek drama in a Latin dress. His tragedies appear all to have been founded on Greek subjects; most of them, probably, were translations. Among the titles, we hear of the Aegisthus, Ajax, Equus Trojanus, Tereus, Hermione, etc.—all of them subjects which continued to be popular with the later tragedians of Rome. No fragment is preserved sufficient to give any idea of his treatment of the subjects, or of his general mode of thought and feeling. Little can be gathered from the scanty remains of his works, except some idea of the harshness and inelegance of his diction.

In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. This work long retained its place as a school-book, and is spoken of by Horace as forming part of his own early lessons under the rod of Orbilius[32]. One or two lines of the translation still remain, and exemplify its bald and prosaic diction, and the extreme irregularity of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey[33],

οὐ γὰρ ἔγωγέ τί φημι κακώτερον ἄλλο θαλάσσης

ἄνδρα γε συγχεῦαι, εἰ καὶ μάλα καρτερὸς εἴη;

are thus rendered:—

Namque nilum pejus

Macerat hemonem, quamde mare saevom, viris quoi

Sunt magnae, topper confringent importunae undae.

He was appointed also, on one occasion, near the end of the Second Punic War, to compose a hymn to be sung by 'virgines ter novenae,' which is described by Livy, the historian, as rugged and unpolished[34].

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

Cn. Naevius is really the first in the line of Roman poets, and the first writer in the Latin language whose fragments give indication of original power. He is believed to have been a Campanian by birth, on the authority of Aulus Gellius, who characterised his famous epitaph as 'plenum superbiae Campanae.' Though the arrogance of Campania may have been proverbial, yet the expression could scarcely with propriety have been applied, except to a native of that district. If not a Roman by birth, he at least belonged to a district which had become thoroughly Latinised long before his time, and he showed himself to be, like his successor Ennius, thoroughly Roman in his sympathies. He served as a soldier in the First Punic War, and recorded his services in his epic poem on that subject. The earliest drama of Naevius was brought out in B.C. 235, five years after the first representation of Livius Andronicus. The number of dramas which he is known to have composed affords proof of great industry and activity, from that time till the time of his banishment from Rome. He was more successful in comedy than in tragedy, and he used the stage, as it had been used by the writers of the old Attic comedy, as an arena of popular invective and political warfare. A keen partisan of the commonalty, he attacked with vehemence some of the chiefs of the great senatorian party. A line, which had passed into a proverb in the time of Cicero, is attributed to him,—

Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules;

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

Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae.

It is, however, doubted whether the first of these lines was really written by Naevius, as the Metelli did not enjoy their rapid succession of consulships till nearly a century after his death; but even at the time of the Second Punic War they were powerful enough to procure the imprisonment of the poet, in consequence of some offence which he had given them. Plautus[35] alludes to this event, in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. Being afterwards banished, he took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in B.C. 204[36], though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date[37]. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero[38], that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between B.C. 261 and B.C. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

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

Mortales immortales flere si foret fas,

Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam,

Itaque postquam est Orcino traditus thesauro,

Obliti sunt Romae loquier Latina lingua.

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

He wrote a few tragedies, of which scarcely anything is known except the titles,—such as the Andromache, Equus Trojanus, Hector Proficiscens, Lycurgus,—the last founded on the same subject as the Bacchae of Euripides. The titles of nearly all these plays, as well as of the plays of Livius, imply the prevailing interest taken in the Homeric poems, and in all the events connected with the Trojan War. The following passage from the Lycurgus has some value as containing the germs of poetical diction:—

Vos, qui regalis corporis custodias

Agitatis, ite actutum in frundiferos locos,

Ingenio arbusta ubi nata sunt, non obsita[39].

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

Quasi pila

In choro ludens dadatim dat se, et communem facit:

Alii adnutat, alii adnictat, alium amat, alium tenet;

Alibi manus est occupata, alii percellit pedem;

Alii spectandum dat annulum; a labris alium invocat;

Cum alio cantat, attamen dat alii digito literas[40].

The chief characteristic illustrated by the scanty fragments of his dramas is the political spirit with which they were animated. Thus Cicero[41] refers to a passage in one of his plays (ut est in Naevii ludo) where, to the question, 'Who had, within so short a time, destroyed your great commonwealth?' the pregnant answer is given,

Proveniebant oratores novi, stulti adolescentuli[41].

The nobles, whose enmity he provoked, were probably attacked by him in his comedies. One passage is quoted by Aulus Gellius, in which a failing of the great Scipio is exposed[42]. Other fragments are found indicative of his freedom of speech and bold independence of character:—

Quae ego in theatro hic meis probavi plausibus,

Ea nunc audere quemquam regem rumpere?

Quanto libertatem hanc his superat servitus[43]?

and this also[44]:—

Semper pluris feci potioremque ego

Libertatem habui multo quam pecuniam.

He is placed in the canon of Volcatius Sedigitus immediately after Plautus in the rank of comic poets. He has more of the stamp of Lucilius than of his immediate successor Ennius. By his censorious and aggressive vehemence, by boldness and freedom of speech, and by his strong political feeling, Naevius in his dramas represents the spirit of Roman satire rather than of Roman tragedy. He holds the same place in Roman literature as the Tribune of the Commons in Roman politics. He expressed the vigorous independence of spirit that supported the Commons in their long struggle with the patricians, while Ennius may be regarded as expressing the majesty and authority with which the Roman Senate ruled the world.

But the work on which his fame as a national and original poet chiefly rested was his epic or historical poem on the First Punic War. The poem was originally one continuous work, written in the Saturnian metre; though, at a later time, it was divided into seven books. The earlier part of the work dealt with the mythical origin of Rome and of Carthage, the flight of Aeneas from Troy, his sojourn at the court of Dido, and his settlement in Latium. The mythical background of the poem afforded scope for imaginative treatment and invention. Its main substance, however, appears to have been composed in the spirit and tone of a contemporary chronicle. The few fragments that remain from the longer and later portion of the work, evidently express a bare and literal adherence to fact, without any poetical colouring or romantic representation.

Ennius and Virgil are both known to have borrowed much from this poem of Naevius. There are many passages in the Aeneid in which Virgil followed, with slight deviations, the track of the older poet. Naevius (as quoted by Servius) introduced the wives of Aeneas and of Anchises, leaving Troy in the night-time,—

Amborum

Uxores noctu Troiade exibant capitibus

Opertis, flentes abeuntes lacrimis cum multis.

He represents Aeneas as having only one ship built by Mercury,—a limitation which did not suit Virgil's account of the scale on which the war was carried on, after the landing in Italy. The account of the storm in the first Aeneid, of Aeneas consoling his followers, of Venus complaining to Jupiter, and of his comforting her with the promise of the future greatness of Rome (one of the cardinal passages in Virgil's epic), were all taken from the old Saturnian poem of Naevius. He speaks also of Anna and Dido, as daughters of Agenor, though there is no direct evidence that he anticipated Virgil in telling the tale of Dido's unhappy love. He mentioned also the Italian Sibyl and the worship of the Penates—materials which Virgil fused into his great national and religious poem. Ennius followed Naevius in representing Romulus as the grandson of Aeneas. The exigencies of his chronology compelled Virgil to fill a blank space of three hundred years with the shadowy forms of a line of Alban kings.

Whatever may have been the origin of the belief in the connexion of Rome with Troy, it certainly prevailed before the poem of Naevius was composed, as at the beginning of the First Punic War the inhabitants of Egesta opened their gates to Rome, in acknowledgment of their common descent from Troy. But the story of the old connexion of Aeneas and Dido, symbolising the former league and the later enmity between Romans and Carthaginians, most probably first assumed shape in the time of the Punic Wars. The belief, as shadowed forth in Naevius, that the triumph of Rome had been decreed from of old by Jupiter, and promised to the mythical ancestress of Aeneas, proves that the Romans were possessed already with the idea of their national destiny. How much of the tale of Aeneas and Dido is due to the imagination of Naevius it is impossible to say; but his treatment of the mythical part of his story,—his introduction of the storm, the complaint of Venus, etc.,—merits the praise of happy and suggestive invention, and of a real adaptation to his main subject. There was more meaning in the mythical foreshadowing of the deadly strife between Romans and Carthaginians, at a time when the two nations were fighting for their very existence, and for the ultimate prize of the empire of the world, than in the age of Virgil, when the power of Carthage was only a memory of the past, and the immediate danger from which Rome had escaped had arisen not so much from any foreign enemy, as from the fierce passions of her own sons.

The mythical part of the poem was a prelude to the main subject, the events of the First Punic War. Naevius and Ennius, like others among the Roman poets of a later date, allowed the provinces of poetry and of history to run into one another. They composed poetical chronicles without any attempt to adhere to the principles and practice of the Greek epic. The work of Naevius differed from that of Ennius in this respect, that it treated of one particular portion of Roman history, and did not profess to unfold the whole annals of the State. The slight and scanty fragments that remain from the latter part of the poem, are expressed with all the bareness, and, apparently, with the fidelity of a chronicle. They have the merit of being direct and vigorous, but are entirely without poetic grace and ornament. Rapid and graphic condensation is their chief merit. There is a dash of impetuosity in some of them, suggestive of the bold, impatient, and energetic temperament of the poet; as for instance in the lines

Transit Melitam Romanus exercitus, insulam integram

Urit, populatur, vastat, rem hostium concinnat[45].

But the fragments of the poem are really too unimportant to afford ground for a true estimate of its general merit. They supply some evidence in regard to the irregularity of the metre in which it was written. The uncertainty which prevails as to its structure may be inferred from the fact that different conjectural readings of every fragment are proposed by different commentators. A saying of an old grammarian, Atilius Fortunatianus, is quoted to the effect that he could not adduce from the whole poem of Naevius any single line, as a normal specimen of the pure Saturnian verse. Cicero bears strong testimony to the merits of the poem in point of style. He says in one place, 'the Punic War delights us like a work of Myron[46].' In the dialogue 'De Oratore,' he represents Crassus as comparing the idiomatic purity which distinguished the conversation of his mother-in-law, Laelia, and other ladies of rank, with the style of Plautus and Naevius. 'Equidem quum audio socrum meam Laeliam (facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod, multorum sermonis expertes, ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt); sed eam sic audio, ut Plautum mihi aut Naevium videar audire. Sono ipso vocis ita recto et simplici est, ut nihil ostentationis aut imitationis afferre videatur; ex quo sic locutum ejus patrem judico, sic majores[47].' Expressions from his plays were, from their weight and compact brevity, quoted familiarly in the days of Cicero; and one of them 'laudari a laudato viro,' like so many other pithy Latin sayings, is still in use to express a distinction that could not be characterised in happier or shorter terms. It is to be remarked also that the merit, which he assumes to himself in his epitaph, is the purity with which he wrote the Latin language.

Our knowledge of Naevius is thus, of necessity, very limited and fragmentary. From the testimony of later authors it may, however, be gathered that he was a remarkable and original man. He represented the boldness, freedom, and energy, which formed one side of the Roman character. Like some of our own early dramatists, he had served as a soldier before becoming an author. He was ardent in his national feeling; and, both in his life and in his writings, he manifested a strong spirit of political partisanship. As an author, he showed great productive energy, which continued unabated through a long and vigorous lifetime. His high self-confident spirit and impetuous temper have left their impress on the few fragments of his dramas and of his epic poem. Probably his most important service to Roman literature consisted in the vigour and purity with which he used the Latin language. But the conception of his epic poem seems to imply some share of the higher gift of poetical invention. He stands at the head of the line of Roman poets, distinguished by that force of speech and vehemence of temper, which appeared again in Lucilius, Catullus, and Juvenal; distinguished also by that national spirit which moved Ennius and, after him, Virgil, to employ their poetical faculty in raising a monument to commemorate the power and glory of Rome.