CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ?1I3.~.. ■:^;'vSi yW'' Date Due Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026479174 cc u I- < > _l UJ h ^ TELLVS MATER. Allcgurical reliel, symbulic of F'eace niid Plenty, frniii the entrance walls of the Ara Pads Au^ustae decieed by the Senate to the limpcror Augustus in 13 B.C. '■ Fertilis frugum pecorisque Tellus Spicta donct Cererem corona." Hor., Carnt. Snfc. zq .«/. " Pax arua colat." Tib., EldJ. 1. X. 45. A Literary History of Rome From the Origins To the Close of the Golden Age By J. Wight ^ff, M.A. Pembroke College, Oxford ; sometime Assistant Professor of Greek, and Classical Examiner in the University of Aberdeen ; Professor of Classics, Armstrong College (in the University of Durham), Newcastle-upon-Tyne New York Charles Scribner's Sons 153-157, Fifth Avenue '1909 ■ wMiih-Ritrrv y^lt' w PA (0003 DtS {All rights reserved.) VXORI AMANTISSIMAE LIBRORVM MEORVM CVRIOSAE ADIVTRICI HOC OPVS D. D. D. Contents PAGE Preface ........ xi INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I. A Foreword on Environment .... 3 II. The Origins, Geographical and Tribal 6 III. The Latin Language — Its History and Qualities . 18 IV. The Roman Character and Religion . . 39 THE EARLIER LITERATURE OF THE REPUBLIC FROM THE ORIGINS TO 70 B.C. I. The Earliest Latin 7ll. The Invasion of Hellenism III. The Pioneers of Roman Poetry •7 IV. The Theatre and the Masters of Comedy ■7 V. Roman Tragedy after Ennius . VI. The Satires of Lucilius and Minor Poetry VII. The Progress of Prose . . . . 63 92 118 156 224 234 249 XVI CONTENTS THE LITERATURE OF THE GOLDEN AGE 70 B.C.— 14 A.D. A Proem to the Golden Age . AGK . 269 THE CICERONIAN PERIOD 70 B.C.— 43 B.C. CHAPTER 7 1. Lucretius, the Poet of Epicureanism jil. The Alexandrine Movement and Catullus 7 III. Varro and Learning 7 IV. Cicero and Oratory 7 V. Caesar and History 27s 303 330 349 398 THE AUGUSTAN PERIOD 43 B.C.— 14 A.D. 7 1. Virgil ..... 711. The Minor Poems attributed to Virgil ■7 III. Horace 7lV. The Elegiac Poets V. Minor Augustan Poetry VI. Augustan Prose and Livy 7 VII. An Epilogue Index 432 483 496 546 612 62s 664 673 .r)m.>ru,f 1 ,^'i h /•-i.'VfaTi/' I.J, ,v!i i../,.t,'-',Ml in ';'i:AHXIA . M/ ■1,.' , un!/-,:i The Library irOi'.-'. ■i. i !■(..' .: of -«!! YHOi:-!: ^ Literary; History Y>< 4-iri.i rn.'uv ,1, vU . !i 'rtfrt-.-Mi ' i I ^t f ikarg of Ptoarg fistorp 1. A LITERARY HISTORY OF INDIA. By R. W. Frazer, LL.B. 2. A LITERARY HISTORY OF IRELAND. By Douglas Hyde, LL.D. 3. A LITERARY HISTORY OF AMERICA. By Barrett Wendell. 4. A LITERARY HISTORY OF PERSIA. From the Earliest Times unHl Firdawsi. By Edward G. Browne, M.A. 5. A LITERARY HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. By J. H. Millar, LL.B. 6. A LITERARY HISTORY OF PERSIA. From Firdawsi until Sa'di. By Edward G. Browne, M.A. 7. A LITERARY HISTORY OF FRANCE. By Emile Faghet. 8. A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE ARABS. By Reynold A. Nicholson, M.A. 9. A LITERARY HISTORY OF RUSSIA. By A. BRfiCKNER. 10. A LITERARY HISTORY OF ROME. By J. Wight Duff, M«A. THE WBRART OF LITERART HISTORT A Literary History of Rome Pref ace This volume endeavours to present a connected account of Latin literature in its earliest phases and in its best period. Some preliminary attention has been paid to the descent of the Romans, their language, and character. For the patient research wherewith scholars have brought together the often lutilated fragments of archaic Latin, literary history lies ^nder a great debt. These are profoundly instructive as jerms of later productions. In this work, by a sketch of I tribal origins, of primitive simplicity in Roman life, of promi- atj^^ in national aiiairs, and of changes in social or Inditions, the suggestion intended to be conveyed idevelopment towards complexity parallel to the 3ut of the old rude monuments of the language into the finish of Cicero or Virgil. Literary advance has been exemplified by noting new modes of thought, new fashions in composition, and the attainment of new suppleness in expres- sion and new effects in metrical harmony. Throughout, one of the aims has been to insist upon the per- manence of the Roman type despite every novelty and despite the inrush of Greek influences. Hellenism notwithstanding, the civilisation of Rome — principles, aspirations, aesthetics — Bained Roman. The Roman borrowed in a Roman way. merely passive and impressionable, his masculine vigour ngly controlled and moulded foreign material. The national aspects of the literature have, therefore, been empha- sised. iiterary movements and figures, English, and occasionally Italian authorities have xii PREFACE beeii consulted. Aid obtained from these and from c periodicals has been acknowledged in the notes. I ai ticularly conscious of obligations to the 1900 English editio: of TeufFel's History of Roman Literature, which remains great quarry of reference, though not always of inspiring criticism. M. Pichon's Histoire de la titterature latine has been frequently suggestive. Though it is impossible, and indeed would be undesirable, to divest the memory of critical judgments with which one has long been familiar, yet the book is not a compilation from other histories of Roman literature. The method has been, besides examining modern results, to weigh ancient evidence, and to record impressions made by an independent reading of each classic concerned. In the survey of eminent writers, then, the original sources touching their careers have been indicated, with the hope of stimulating interest in the foundations of our knowledge aboi ancient authors and books. Citations in the footnotes will if the reader choose, enable him to test these foundationi To know where fact or theory comes from, to verify ho far statements are authentic and how &r constructed qh, work, is obviously essential for the student, have its fascination for the general reader too. ception of an author's genius and of the influe: upon it involves inquiry into his exact date and the order ef his writings, and only by reviewing the salient circumstances determining the genens of great works can literature be shown to reflect not simply the creative mind, but also the communal spirit. Biography, therefore, has been employed to set a man of letters in his environment and to recreate such contempo- rary conditions as directed his choice of theme or mode of treat- ment. Similarly, the array of his forerunners and models is designed to suggest literary heredity.; for here one deals factors which, while they cannot explain individual ge still contributed to make that genius what it was artistic: It is an author's historical significance which is gauged chronicling his total literary output — lost works included^— and by relating him to predecessors, to hisj|fwn.> some degree to successors. But alongsidj >wV lels IS m % ;d by w^wlm PREFACE xijj Bee, with its points of racial and literary evolution, the KgniHcance of the artist claims appreciation. Here, rical methods must be combined a humanistic atti- ch essays through sympathy and taste to divine some portion of the mysterious beauty inherent in a masterpiece. To support literary criticisms, illustrative passages have been introduced. In great measure, Latin has been relegated to notes and English translations given in the text, so as to raider it more continuously readable for those who know little Latin. For these versions, into English prose and a variety of metres I am myself responsible. Except a few published in magazines, they have been written for this work. They gave pleasure to compose : they will, I trust, give some pleasure to read. A brief bibliography, chiefly of modern texts and reference I porks, and not intended to be exhaustive, is among the notes o each author. The rule in spelling Latin words has been p let the ancients spell in their own way. Classical quota- tions have M, not v ; and Fy not U. Thus, if cited as Latin, Seruius appears ; but, if used in the course of an English sentence, no good purpose is served by giving anything but the usual form, "Servius." On similar lines, in quoting a scholar of the eighteenth century, his spelling is left untouched, and the v purposely retained, as well as his Firgilius for Vergilius. The Cicero chapter had the signal advantage of being read by Dr. J. S. Reid, Fellow and Tutor of Gonville and Caius College and Professor of Ancient History in the University of Cambridge. I am much indebted to his kindness for several important modifications. I have to thank Professor R. S. Con- way, of the University of Manchester, for discussing matters ar^ng Italic peoples, and Dr. W. M. Lindsay, Fellow of oi^e. Oxford, and Professor of Humanity in St. diversity, for answering questions regarding his furnian verse. In selecting the frontispiece I was greatly aided by the advice of Dr. T. Ashby, Head of the British School of Rome. He also most kindly secured for me the right of reproduction xiv PREFACE from the Gabinetto Fotografico of the Italian Mj Public Instruction. The feW authentic busts of li of the best period being perhaps too well known, peian frescoes belonging to a later period, it was deci a careful process of rejection, to reproduce the allegorical relief of Tellus Mater. Besides being genuinely Augustan, it serves to illustrate the thesis, upheld in the literature, of the essentially Roman quality of Roman art. I am, further, very grateful to my wife, who wrote out the complete MS, of my book and gave constant help in proof- reading ; to Mr. Basil Anderton, B.A., Public Librarian of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who read the whole MS. and made many useful suggestions ; and to other friends who, like Mr. Harry Anderson and Mr. Malcolm Quin, rendered assistance at different stages of what has been enjoyable though arduous work. I oflFer my best thanks Xo Mr. Fisher Unwi: ' for extending the time originally arranged for the completioi of a volume which College routine and questions of Universi curriculum inevitably retarded. J. W. D. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, March 31, 1909. gh : INTRODUCTION Literary History of Rome CHAPTER I A FOREWORD ON ENVIRONMENT Literature and Environment — The idea of Rome — Factors which shaped Rome and the Romans— Nature, Descent, Family, State, Religion. The history of Roman literature, like the history of Rome itself, is an ever-widening circle. The city-state by the Tiber had, in many generations, wrought itself through the stage of kingship into the strongest republic, first of Latium and then of Italy, and had grappled in deadly conflict with Carthaginian and with Greek, before litera- ture, in a true aesthetic sense, was evolved. It is natural, therefore, as it is traditional, to date the beginning of the literature from the time of Livius Andronicus, about 240 B.C., when Rome had already entered into relations with the Mediterranean world, and was on the eve of rapid expansion towards West and East. But the origins lie. deeper. Roman literature, as the written expression of the national genius, cannot be understood independently of the circumstances and races which determined the growth and the character of the people. Magnetically drawing writers and inspiration from every quarter of the known world, Rome, although profoundly influenced by them, possessed through a process of vital reaction 4 A FOREWORD ON ENVIRONMENT the inalienable faculty of fixing her own impress upon one and all. The prevailing tendency of thought and ambition was centripetal, as in France it has been towards Paris. In a literary history of Rome, contact with many provinces of the world geographical and intellectual is of high significance; but the cardinal subject, first and last, is Rome and the Romans. This very idea qf Rome — even though our concern here be with pagan Romfe mainly — is an idea so composite that one is inevitably thrown back upon its elements. Which were the fectors that moulded the national character, and were therefore, in the ultimate resort, what may be called the feeders of the literature ? It is impossible to lose sight of— though no history, and least of all a literary history, can hope exhaustively to discuss — the determining facts of exist- ence which constituted the Roman environment. Among the myriad factors of environment which act upon and develop a people — proportionately more complex than those which act upon its individuals — there are some which refuse to be over- looked. External nature, descent, family life, religion, the state, with all their implications, may broadly summarise these. Under the head of nature, there is the factor of land, whether it be the ancestral home with its physical advantage; and dis- advantages for military, comm,ercial, and colonial expansion, or new territory invaded and conquered ; there is, too, the factor of immediate neighbourhood to other Italian tribes and peoples, who, whether in peace or war, modified the national ways of thought and the national mode of expressing thought in language. Under the head of descent, there are semi- biological questions of Wood-inheritance and kinship. Under family life come the workings of domestic discipline and custom as well as traditional lore, partly in the form of historical legends, partly in the form of sacred usage. Und«i religion come observances and beliefs of permanent moment in shaping character. Under the state may be grouped th? multitudinous and intricate traces graven on the Roman temperament by the long record of struggles within and without the city, its laws, its contact with foreign and di$tai|| FACTORS WHICH SHAPED ROME 5 peoples, notably with the Greeks, and its development of an imperial idea which was at once a political institution and an inspiring consecration. Thus, in brief, the land, the city, the Latin people, and the other inhabitants of the peninsula, their languages, the general course of military, constitutional, economic, social, domestic, and religious development, together form a background which, though its details fall withirt the province of ethnologist or philologist or historian, must still broadly be kept in view for a discriminating estimate of the literature. The character produced in the people and the stage of civilisation attained by the social organism from age to age are essential to the appre- ciation of the greater authors. The more distinctly these varied factors are remembered, the better will they be seen to receive in poetry and prose an illustration and eXpiresSion as definite as they do in other products of the Roman mind. Their variety does not detract from the fundamental unity of the idea of Rome. Determining germs of character, endowed with all the potentiality of imperial success, were present in the pastoral folk who settled on the Palatine Hill, just as the basic structure of the language Was, notwithstanding copious literary experiments, innovations, and refinements, essentially what the mouths of the primitive herds and tillers of Latium had made it. CHAPTER II THE ORIGINS — GEOGRAPHICAL AND TRIBAL Rome : Situation of the city— The land of Italy— Aspects of geography and climate— A country of contrasts— Variety of peoples in Italy— The complex heredity of the Latin people and of Latin literature- Etruscans and their enigma— The Italic tribes : Umbrians, Oscans, Sabellians, and Latins- Problems touching their relationship — Their kinship, enmity, and gradual progress towards union — The racial blends in Rome — Was there a non-Aryan strain ? As in Roman political history, so in Roman literature, geographical and ethnological considerations form the proper introduction. The central position of Rome and Latium in Italy and the central position of Italy among the peninsulas of the Mediterranean fitted Latin to be a world-language and a world-literature, just as they fitted Rome to be a world-power. The configuration of Italy, with its comparatively harbourless coast on the Adriatic and with its wide plains left between the Apennine range and the Tuscan sea, concentrated the earlier chapters of Roman expansion on the West and South. As a consequence, Hellenic civilisation acted on Rome for generations through the Greek settlements in Southern Italy and Sicily before contact with Greece itself became easy. The situation of Rome ' on the Tiber " destined her to be ' Roma is perhaps " stream-to-wn," the town by the rumon, the old name of the Tiber (Servius ad Aen. viii. 90), from the Ind.-Eur. root sreu; flow: cf. Gk. pe(F)o), ptvjta, Irish sruaim, stream, O.H.G. stroum. See Lindsay, Latin Language, 1894, p. 307. But Prof. Lindsay now regards Roma as an Etruscan word : see his Introd., p. x, to Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries ofEtruria, 1907. » Tiberis may mean " mountain-stream." Nissen interprets it as " Bergstrom," and compares Tiburaad (since Latin b = Oscan/) Tifenms ROME AND ITALY 7 the emporium i for the towns of the plain-country of Latium ; and the natural outlets by river and sea in this case also looked westwards. But if the back of the peninsula is turned upon the East — and Eastern influences consequently came slowly upon her — Italy faces Spain, as it were " El Dorado " coveted by both Rome and Carthage, while her toe points to Africa and almost touches Sicily with its once varied population of native Sicels, Phoenicians, and Greeks. The great mountain barrier of the Alps, to the north of what we call the plains of Lombardy, formed rather an apparent than a real protection to ancient Italy = against invasion from Central Europe. The Alps are more easily climbed from their northern sides ; and this geographical fact encouraged the successive inroads of races who made up the motley population of Italy in antiquity. The mountains which form so distinctive a feature of the peninsula from north to south were not found impassable. They did not prevent intercourse between different tribes. They were a boon to the land, because they tempered the "anguish of the (mons, amnis), Tifemum, Tifata. Varro, L.L., v. 29, declares it a non- Latin word. Another old name of the river was Albula (Italische Landeskunde, Bd. I., 1883, p. 308). ' This favourable situation, which Ihne rather disparages, cannot be better summarised than in the words which Livy (V. liv. 4) puts into the mouth of Camillas when that leader is urging the Romans not to desert Rome for Veii : " Non sine causa dei hominesque hunc urbi condendse locum elegerunt, saluberrimos colles, flumen opportunum, quo, ex mediter- raneis locis fruges deuehantur, quo maritimi commeatus accipiantur, mare uicinum ad commoditates nee expositum nimia propinquitate ad pericula classium externarum, regionum Italise medium. Ad incrementum urbis natum unice esse locum, argumento est ipsa magnitudo urbis." This mention of the " very healthy hills " of Rome implies by contrast the recognition of the danger of malaria in low-lying and swampy dis- tricts. It is significant that Fever was personified. The goddess Febris had three temples in Rome. " The original "uetus Italia" ("ox-land," cf. uitulus) meant only a small south-western portion of the peninsula, from Passtum, about fifty miles south of Naples, to near Metapontum, on the Gulf of Tarentum. Early in the third century B.C. " Italia " had officially extended north to the Apennines, with the river Rubicon on the east and the Macra on the west as boundaries. It was not till the days of Augustus that " Italia " included the basin of the Po and was bounded by the Alps. 8 THE ORIcmS solstice " with their breezes, made pasture-grounds for flocks, offered sites for villages and towns safe from the malaria of swampy plains, and granted seasonable refuge to the " tired denizen" of Rome, eager, like Horace, to escape from the dust, din, pestiknce, and sweltering heat of the Capital. They also proved a means of developing hardy breeds of Italic stock, in contrast to the enervated inhabitants of many of the Greek settlements, whose enterprise succumbed before the tempta- tions of prosperity and the half-tropical summer of the South. Italy has always been a land of contrasts, with climatic conditions ranging from intense heat to intense Cold ; with soil rich in corn, oil, wine, and pasture, so that perforce agriculture bulked largely in its life and its literature ; but also with fever-haunted marshes and gaunt, barren mountain ranges. Its inhabitants were highlanders of hardy frugality and, at the other extreme, urban voluptuaries, forgetful, and usually dis- dainful, of old-fashioned country ways {prisci mores and rusti- citasj^" in Which, however, some of the best thinkers and statesmen of Rome saw the political asset of moral worth. Corresponding to this variety of physical characteristics, there was in the peninsula a striking medley of peoples, among which four stocks are prominent—Kelts in the north, Greeks on the southern and the south-western seaboard, Etruscans to the north-west of Latium, and in central and southern Italy a variety of Italic peoples, Umbrian, Oscan, Latin, and Sabellian. An aboriginal stratum is represented by scattered traces of the Iberian stock-^certainly non-Aryan — which peopled Spain ; by the Ligurian mountaineers round the Gulf of Genua (Genoa), who used to be pronounced a non- Aryan ' H. NIssen, in his lialische Landeikunde, Bd. I., 1883, deals with seas, mountains, rivers, volcanic districts of Italy, with the general features of its climate and vegetation, as well as its peoples. A shorter treatment is given in I. MiUler's Handbuch d. klass. AlUrtUniswissenschaft, Bd. III., 1889, pp. 467-501, See also E. A. Freeman, Historical Geog. of Europe, ed. 3, by J. B. Bury, 1903, ch. iii. (esp. pp. 43 sqq. for the peoples). = Pliny [Ep., I. xiv. 4), though himself a good example of urbanitos, uses rusHcitas in a good sense, not as mere cloWhishness. He admires Brixia for being in a district of Italy which keeps the old simplicity of life C'multum adhud uerefcuftdiae, frugaiitatis atque etiam fusUdtatis antiquaS retinet ac seruat "). PEOPLES OF ITALY 9 people of Basque afSnity ; and by the lapygians, who may have come from Illyricutti, rather, perhaps, round than across the Adriatic, and been driven by later comers to their remote southern heel of the land. Relics of the Stone Age or of an early Mediterranean race,' or, again, of a period contemporary with the " Mycenaean " in Greece, have been comparatively less important in Italy, and, in any case, are too remote from literature to concern us here. The case of Italy is not that of Greece, where even " the braves who lived before Agamemnon " have left echoes of their fame in Homer, and where the roots of the earliest literature must be found in the civilisation of the second millennium b.c. The fabulous connexion of Rome with Troy, which in its treatment by Virgil became one of the finest ornaments of Roman literature, throws no real light on this prehistoric darkness. Before we know the relation of the early strata of the population to the later Italian and Roman civilisation, before, indeed, we fully know who Latins and Romans were, and in what order among the Italic tribes they came into Italy, much evidence has yet to be accumulated. Linguistic connexion does not settle racial connexion. Racial connexion must be established in the last resort by the evi- dence of archaeology, and of ethnology aided by the investi- gations of the anatomist and craniologist. The Romans were, it is now generally admitted, of mixed blood. In them met different Aryan strains, perhaps even non-Aryan elements. The ancient tradition that their Ramnes, Titles, and Luceres stood for three stocks-^Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan-^-represents a truth. Even Mommsen's high authority has failed to convince scholars that the Romans were so free from alien admixture as he would have it. A strong Sabine blend is the only explanation of many early • The Neolithic culture of the Terremare represented by lake-dwell- ings in the plains of the Po, but discovered in Latium and Campania as well, is to be assigned to the aboriginal " Ligurian " race, who were con- quered by Siculan and Unlbrian invaders from across the Alps. It is right, however, to add that some authorities consider the Ligurians to have been the Aryan vanguard, and the pile-dwellers to have been " Itali." 10 THE ORIGINS stories of conflict and alliance,^ just as Etruscan predominance in Rome itself is the only explanation of the legends about the Tarquin kings.^ It is when the composite descent of the Latin people is realised that the need is felt for further help from philology, anthropology, and archaeology in the solution of problems important in their bearing on the institutions, folklore, and literature. The action of heredity upon the Roman character, and upon the language too, involves questions of baffling complexity. Many popular customs, characteristics, and beliefs must prove less inscrutable when knowledge can separate them, according to their origin, into borrowings from abroad, direct inheritances from the past, or more subtle atavistic tendencies. Questions such as these arise naturally : How much was Etruscan in Rome ? What does Etruscan mean ? Where did the Etruscans come from ? How far did Etruscan blood leaven Rome as Etruscan thought and art did ? How much of Rome was Sabine ? Is Sabine virtually the same in race and speech as Latin ? Which were the first of the Italic tribes to settle in the peninsula ? And what is the relation of Roman and Latin to them? What effect was wrought on the Roman by his kinsmen the Samnites, or his more distant kinsmen the Kelts ? Supposing these and other queries regarding racial traits could receive final answer, and supposing on the linguistic side we knew more exactly the parts played among the old languages of Central Italy by dialects like Oscan and Umbrian, we should still have, from the standpoint of literature, to confront fresh problems. Roman literature, from what in an aesthetic sense may be called its real birth, in the third century B.C., was largely the work of men who, though they ' E.g., the relations of Romulus and the Sabine king, Titus Tatius. Of the Rape of the Sabine women, Greenidge remarks that in its least signi- ficance it " reveals the fact of the close tie of intermarriage between Rome and a non-Latin community " (Roman Public Life, p. 290). The presence of Sabine families in Rome like the Titurii partly accounts for the varia- tions of view regarding Tarpeia, who in some accounts is a traitress, in others a heroine. See Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, trans, by M. E. Cosenza, 1906, chap, v, ' Ettore Pais discusses this, op. cit, chap. vii. THE EXOT^ IN ROMAN LITERATURE n wrote at Rome, were not Romans. There was in the litera- ture, as among the people, much that was exotic. Andronicus was a Greek ; Plautus an Umbrian ; Ennius a Calabrian, who averred that he possessed three souls corresponding to his three languages — Oscan, Greek, and Latin. Terence was African. Caecilius, holder of the premier place in the drama between Plautus and Terence, was a manumitted Insubrian Gaul. In Virgil certain traits were possibly Keltic,' while Livy's " Patavinity " was also partly of the North. It is pro- phetic of the cosmopolitan character of Roman literature that from the outset its history points the inquirer beyond Rome itself and I^atium to the effect produced on the Roman nature by Umbrian and Oscan, Carthaginian and Greek, and by the Roman nature on them. Later, with the Empire, the literature became less purely a literature of the capital or ot Italy. Spain gave birth to the Senecas, Lucan, Columella, Quintilian, and Martial in classical times ; Transalpine Gaul and Africa, like other provinces, developed their own centres of learning and their own writers, both Pagan and Christian. Ausonius and St. Paulinus were Gauls ; Apuleius, TertuUian, Arnobius, and St. Augustine were Africans. After Nero's death, as Tacitus remarked, men discovered the secret that emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome.2 It soon followed that Roman literature could also be written else- where, though the imperial city never ceased to exercise her potent spell. ' To mention the " Keltic note " is to incense some critics who believe this element to have been exaggerated by many writers since Matthew Arnold published his lectures on The Study of Celtic Literature, It may even be that the Keltic proportion of the people of France has been over- stated, and yet it is not altogether fanciful in M. Pichon to recognise certain qualities of his own country in Roman writers. " Les Gaulois Cisalpins ont deja bien des traits de I'esprit fran^ais, la clarte, I'eqi^ilibre, la mesure harmonieuse, le naturel, la douceur et la grace ; la simplicite passionee de CatuUe et de Virgile, 1' eloquence souple et lumineiise de Tite-Live, I'ingenieuse finesse de Pline le Jeune, nous font reconnaJtre en eux nos vrais compatriotes " (Histoire de la Litterature latine, 1903, P-S). ■ Tac, Hist., I. iv. : " Euolgato imperii arcano posse principem alibi quam Romae fieri." n/ 12 THE ORIGINS Of the peoples in Italy, those with whom Rome was most concerhed for many generations, and who must engage our attention briefly, were the Etruscans and the various Italic tribes. The Etruscans are the standing riddle of Italian ethnology. There is, however, now something like general agreement that neither the race nor the language belonged to the Indo-European family. A thick-set, fleshy race, they were manifestly alien among the slender Italians. Their inscriptions, written in an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, can be read, and at least partially understood. But their piro- venance is a mystery.^ By ethnologists they have been brought from Central Europe, and especially from the Rhsetian Alps; they have been brought from the East, and especially, in ac- cordance with ancient tradition, recorded both by Herodotus and Tacitus, from Lydia ;2 they have been classed as Mon- golian ; they have been brought from the South ultimately, as " Pelasgians," and as a branch of the primitive Mediterranean race of African descent.3 Whatever the origin of this mysterious people, the " Rasena," much is clear about their power, their civilisation, and their influence on Rome. They once ruled from the Alps to Campania, and their strength centred in a league of twelve cities, perhaps a model for the Latin League. In the eighth century B.C., their commerce began to rival that of the Phoenicians, and they exploited the mineral wealth of Sardinia, Corsica, and Elba. In the sixth century B.C., they combined with the Carthaginians to ruin the Greek colony at Alalia in Corsica. A long period of power ' Modern investigators are not so dogmatic as J. W. Dorlaldson, who dismissed the legend that the Etruscans were Lydians as " entirely desti- tute of historical fonndation," and declared that "unless the Etruscans were old Low Germans of the purest Gothic stock, there is no family of men to whom they could have belonged" I (Varronianus, 3fd ed., i860, p. 18), = The indifference to paternity, which implies descent traced through the mother and a system of female kinship, is regarded by Dr. J. G. Frazer as confirming "the common opinion which modern historians have too lightly set aside, that the Etruscans were of Lydian origin" {Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, p. 248). 3 ''The Etruscans are western Pelasgians," says Prof. Sergi, the Mediterranean Race, 1901. ETRUSCANS 13 elapsed before they were checked in the south, or cripplpd and confined by Gauls in the north. Workers in metal, builders of fortresS'Ttoyirng, makers of roads and drains, they left an indelible impress upon lt*ly. With works of Greek art for models, they often distorted their beauty to a tendency towards the grotesque, the sombre, and s^pmetimes the brutal.* Many of their religious notion^, much of their ritual, magic, and soothsaying, their divination through th? entrails of victims, the insignia of their magistrates, their bloodthirsty amusements, and their dramatic performances, exerted a deep effect upon the younger civilisation of Rome. Something Etruscan has been remarked,* perhaps rightly, in the obscurity of Persius. It seems more strained to qjte Propertius and Tacitus as typical Etruscans ; fpr Propertius was at most an Umbrian borderer, and the birthplace ()f Tacitus is too un^ certain to form either the basis or t;he example of a theory. Of the Italic tribes yirho inhabited Cemtral Italy, it should be said that their proper grouping among themselves and their relationship to the Latins are matters not yet absolutely settled. Their area may be fairly well mapped out by the places in which their linguistic remains have been discovered. The chief example of Umbrian consists, of the Iguvinian or "Eugubine" bronze tablets, dealing with the ritual of, a priestly brotherhood, and found at Iguvium, now Gubbio : and ojle of the most important of Oscan inscriptions is th^ Tabul/i Bantina, containing a set of municipal regulations applicable to Bantia, which lies SE. from Horace's birthplace, Venusia. That Umbrjans, Oscans, Sabellians, and Latins were piBoples closely akin, and that they spoke allied dialects, we » Some relations p£ Etruscan to Greek art are traced by M. Jules Martha in VArchdologie Etrvsque et Romaine, esp. ch. iii. Duruy remarks, " One particular feature of Etruscan manners is, however, in absolute contradiction to the Greek manners. This seiisu9J people loved to heighten pleasure by scenes of death" [History qf Rqme, Eng. trans., Introd. chap. 3). = By M. Pichon, op. cit, p. 5: "Les auteurs originaires de I'Etrurie ont qiielque chose de plus penible, de plus tonrmente: ilssont obscurs, comme si la langue et I'esprit de Rome leur etaient moins familiers : Perse et Properoe sont du nombre, et si Tacite, comme on I'a souvent cru, etait ne en, Btrurie, ij ne ferait pas exception." 14 THE ORIGINS know ; but the period and the order of their entering Italy are still largely matters of speculation. It has been put for- ward as a surmise of high probability that about the time of the Dorian immigration into Greece, some ten centuries before the Christian era, many Italic peoples were displaced by the invasion of the Etruscans.^ But it is more likely that this displacement was due to the expansion rather than the original appearance of the Etruscans.^ The Umbri, tradition- ally the first of the Italic stock to settle in Italy, seem to have been dispossessed by the Etruscans of their wider domains from sea to sea, and when driven eastwards left many place- names in Etruria to mark their older limits.3 The Oscans,* in the narrower sense, were a Campanian tribe ; but the term " Oscan " is broadly used to include Samnite, as by Livy when he records the &ct that in war with the Samnites a Roman consul employed spies who knew the Oscan tongue.S Possibly this implies rather similarity than identity of language ; the Oscans may have spread over Campania, Lucania, and Apulia before the Samnites settled as their neighbours. The tradition of the Sabine origin of the Samnites is supported by philology and refers them to the Sabellian group, which includes such tribes as the Paeligni, Marrucini, and Vestini. It has been doubted whether any great diflFerence existed between Sabines and Latins. Recent research more than ever seems to prove that Latins and Romans were essentially the same people as Sabines and Samnites.^ The theory that the bearers of ethnic ■ See Prof. W. Deecke's Italy, trans, by H. A. Nesbitt, 1904. = "The ancestors of the Latin, Umbrian, and Oscan tribes found Italy already occupied by them " [i.e., the Etruscans), says Prof. W. M. Lindsay in Introd. to his ed. of Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 1907. He believes the immigration of the Etruscans belongs to a far earlier time than that of the Italic peoples. 3 R. S. Conway, Italic Dialects, i., p. 395. « Osci (older Opsci, Gk. 'OjriKot) came early into contact with Etrurians and Greeks, and were probably the earliest of the Italic peoples to borrow an alphabet and write down their language. s Livy X. 20, "gnarosque Oscae linguae, exploratum quid agatur, mittit." 6 " Essi (i.e., Sabini, Hirpini, Campani, Romani ed altre) sono, credo io, essenzialmente nn popolo solo. . . Soltanto gli accident! della storia ITALIC TRIBES 15 names ending in -ci^ were earlier Indo-European inhabitants of Central Italy than the bearers of ethnic names in -ni («.«., that Of«, Vohci^ Aurunciy &c., preceded Sabini, Latini, Romani, &c.) imports considerable order and intelligibility into the confused question of the peopling of Italy by the Italic stocks. It is for archaeology and ethnology to adduce evidence to prove or disprove that in primitive Latium there were two strata of population, both Indo-European, but differing in customs and culture— one the Volsci, pile-dwellers, using bronze and bury- ing their dead ; and the second the Sabini, a race of Keltic affinities, using iron and burning their dead." The kinship of Latins, Sabellians, and Umbrians was not consciously present to their minds as a force making for amity. Some of Rome's fiercest feuds were with her nearest kin. The rise of Rome from Latin town to mistress of Italy never appears more wonderful than when it is realised that Italy at first contained no principle of union so wide as the Greek pan-hellenic sentiment. Autonomous as the different Greek states were, they had a common national spirit brought home to them by the acknowledged kinship of all Hellenes in contrast with "barbarians," by sharing in appeals to the Delphic Oracle, and by the athletic contests at Olympia. The groups of Italian peoples were more isolated. There was a limited community of feeling among the Latins who observed the festival of the Alban Mount ; and there was a recognition of the connexion between the Sabines and the other Sabellian tribes in the old legend about the observance of a uer sacrum fecero i Sanniti rivali invece che fratelli dei Romani " (R. S. Conway, I due strati nella popolazione Indo-Eurofea delV Italia antica, in Rivista d'ltalia, August, 1903). ' In Central Italy tribal names in -no-, Latini, Sabini, Frentani, Hirpini, " seem to belong to the speech of a later stratum of population which everywhere subdued the bearers, some of whom must have been the authors, of the names in -co- (flsci, Volsci, Aurunci, Hemici, Pollusca, Eirusci, Falisci) : cf. Sidi-ci-ni, Marru-ci-ni, where the order of the suffixes is significant" (R. S. Conway, Ital. Dial., i., Pref. ix). ' This is Prof. Conway's contention in the Italian paper already cited. Similar views were maintained in Prof. Ridgeway's paper Who were the Romans f, read before the British Academy, April 24, 1907 {Athenaeum, May 4). r6 THE ORIGINS resulting in the despatch pf settlers from among the younger tribesmen, some of whom became the Samnites with their ox, some the Picentines with their woodpecker, and others th^ Hirpini with their wolf.^ But, broadly speaking, the ethni- cally related I^atins, Sabellians, and Umbrians recognised no closer bonds among themselves than they did with other inhabitants of the peninsula— Etruscans, Gaul?, Japygians, and Greeks, It is true that in time " Rome becomes the great frontier power, the bulwark of the group of blood- related nations against the foreign-speaking Tuscan and the Gaul, whose kinship with herself she had forgotten";* and yet she was slow to overcome her exclusiveness. The late admission of the Italian socii to Roman citizenship proves the narrowness of conception which prevailed almost to the eve of empire. It was the imperial system, teaching through actual circumstances, which widened the views of the Roman beyond anything which the Greeks had ever imagined in the way of confederate politics. The primitive Romans and primitive Rome had little in them to suggest their future greatness, literary and imperial. It would have been surprise enough to hear a prophecy that they would outshine even their neighbour Alba. They sprang from Italian folk whose life was mainly agricultural and pastoral. The kernel of the city was the square enclosure of the Palatine Hill, the " pasture-ground "3 of the herds and flocks of the pre-historic Roman shepherds. From this primi- tive Roma Quadrata the settlement by the Tiber widened into one of seven elevations — a septimontium which anticipated, though it did not equal, the City of the Seven Hills enclosed within the ramparts of Servius TuUius. It is not certain how far the extension of Rome to the Servian limits implies the ' These animals may be associated with the tribes as totems. = Greenidge, Roman Ph^Uc Life, p. 290. 3 Palatium, Palatinus, like .the shepherds' deity Pales, are probably connected with the root in fasco, pabulum, &c. But the meaning has been given as "wandering-place" (c/. falari) of the cattle. Much mis- directed learning and fancy in deriving the word may be found recorded in Commentarii in Pauli Diaconi Excerpta ex Lib. Pompei Festi d^ Signif. Verborum, Lindemann, Cotp, Grammat. Latin., vol. ii., p. 575, COMPLEX HEREDITY OF THE ROMANS 17 blending of uici or pagi racially distinct and politically inde- pendent. Much questioning has arisen as to whether Rome amalgamated varied ethnic elements, Latin, Sabine, and Etrus- can, ^ even in the earliest period of her growth. It has already been pointed out that the names of the three primitive tribes, Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, have been held to argue a mixture of Roman, Sabine, and Etruscan blood. Some would carry the blend of racial types in the Roman community still further back into the mists of primeval history before the coming of men of Indo-European blood. Burial, it is argued, was the custom, not of the Aryan race, but of the indigenous Mediterranean race, from which sprang in time the Roman plehs. Their town on the Palatine dates from an epoch efiaced by heroic fables, when the valley of the Seven Hills formed a swamp and the Palatine was dotted with huts made of reeds. This view pictures Aryan immigrants who practised cremation finding in Italy an aboriginal people, and would endeavour to trace the " autochthonous " race of Ausonia in the plebeians and the later Aryan arrivals in the patricians." Even if this hypothesis of a non-Aryan3 element in the Roman is not accepted, it remains clear that different racial strains met in him, as they have done in so many of the great nationalities in history. ■ Declaring, as already indicated, that the name " Rome" is Etruscan, Prof. Lindsay adds, " It must have been an Etruscan town or village long before Romulus and the Latins appeared on the scene " (Introd. to ed. of Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 1907, p. x). ' The " plebeiens ingenieux et diserts " are thus contrasted with the "patriciens pleins de courage et de foi " by M. Anatole France, who gives this theory an interesting dress in Sur la Pierre Blanche. 3 It will be noted that the theory of Sur la Pierre Blanche brings in a stratum of population which is not part of Prof. Conway's theory in / due strati nella populazione Indo-Europea dell' Italia Antica. CHAPTER III THE LATIN LANGUAGE ITS HISTORY AND QUALITIES The Latin language— Its affinities with Greek, and especially with Keltic— Sister Italic dialects— Persistence of the dialects- Influence of the dialects on Latin— Main periods of the language— Cultured diction and the vernacular — Characteristics of plebeian Latin — Effect of spoken Latin on literature — De- velopments in the history of the literary language— Latin after the classical period — The chief qualities of Latin — Lack of the Greek lightness and variety — Positive merits — Clumsiness over- come by perseverance — Roman complaints about the language — ^The impress of Cicero and Tertullian upon Latin — Lasting correspondence between language and people — Horace's at-ti- tude to novelties in diction more liberal than Caesar's — Supreme mastery achieved in the classical age. Latin, at first the language spoken by the Latini, the men of the plains to the left of the lower reaches of the Tiber, became the language of a great empire and of a great literature. It did more than achieve ofHcial and literary greatness. Its spoken form became the parent of the modern languages of Western Europe, Belonging to the Indo-European or Indo- Germanic family, it has marked affinities with Greek, and still better marked affinities with the Keltic group, as represented by the ancient Gaulish, Irish, and Welsh.' Apart from a mass of common roots, striking grammatical forms shared by Latin and Keltic point to a period when the ancestral forms of the Keltic and of the Italic tongues must have been spoken " The linguistic relations between Keltic and Latin are discussed in E. Windisch's chapter on " Keltische Sprache," contributed to Grober's Grundriss d. romanischen Philologie, Bd. L, 1888, pp. 283-312. IS AFFINITIES OF LATIN 19 in close proximity. Such similarities are, among verbs, the passive in -r; > imperfects and futures in -hh- (the Latin -ham and -ho) ; among nouns, formations in -ria, tion-is, corresponding to Irish -iiu, and certain datives plural in -hhos (Gaulish matrebo{s). Old Irish matrib, Lat. matribus, in early poetry matrihu'). On these and other grounds, a " Kelto-Italic " period rather than a " Graeco-Italic " is likely to have pre- ceded the invasion of the peninsula by the ancestors of the Italic tribes. The minutiae of the relationship of Latin to the sister Italic dialects, Umbrian, Oscan, and Sabellian, must fall to the province of linguistic study,= It is noteworthy that some of the dialects labialise an original guttural sound which remains guttural in Latin (Latin quis, Oscan and Umbro-Volscian pis), and that a curious parallelism exists, not only among Greek dialects but also within the Keltic group, where Welsh often shows p against the Irish guttural. Other characteristics in phonology, inflexion, and syntax, which distinguish Latin and Faliscan on the one hand from most of the Italic dialects on the other, do not concern us here. The truth is that, although the study of dialect inscriptions has thrown light on many Latin forms and constructions, the Italic dialects do not play the part in Latin literature which the Hellenic dialects do in Greek. Many of these latter became literary. With the exception of Oscan, there is no evidence that the Italic dialects did so. Yet two matters deserve passing comment ; firstly, the lingering of the dialects in Italy has a bearing on the history of the language, for it shows how slowly Latin won ; secondly, the known presence of dialect words in Latin suggests that, had the ancients been closer investigators in this field, and ' Dr. Giles points out thatZimmer in Kuhn's ZeiUchrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, 30, p. 240, considers this identity of form has another explanation (see A Short Manual of Comparative Philology, ed. 2, 1901, p. 26). » For a general account of the early languages of Italy, see W. Deecke's chapter on " Die Italischen Sprachen," contributed to Grober's Grundriss d. rom. Phil., Bd. I., pp. 33S-3SO- • 20 THE LATIN LANGUAGE could modern philology obtain fuller data, the influence of the dialects on the language and literature would stand out as really considerable. Under the first of these heads it is significant that by 240 B.C., at the birth of the artistic literature, Rome had con- quered, though she had not successfully attached to herself, the peoples of the peninsula.' While she grappled with Hannibal, there were widespread eflForts on the part of Italians and Kelts for liberty and against the Romanisation which followed the war with Pyrrhus. After Hannibal's repulse the process of Romanisation again went forward. The evidence of inscrip- tions best enables one to realise the gradual spread of Latin in Italy. For instance, in the central Oscan area, Larinum,^ a town of the tribe of the Frentani, had adopted Latin as its official language by 200 B.C., influenced, doubtless, by neigh- bourhood to the Latin colony founded at Luceria in 314 B.C. In the South Oscan region the tabula Bantina, which may be dated from 133 to 118 b.c,,3 shows that the Latin alphabet, it not the Latin language, could be read in Apulia in the second century B.C. Strabo (66 B.C.-21 a.d.) expressly testifies that by his day the Lucanians had become Romans, that is, spoke Latin.4 But there is the contrasted phenomenon of the per- sistence of certain dialects. Only gradually did Latin oust them. The victory of the language followed far in the wake of the victory of the state. Even so, it was not an absolutely uniform language which spread over Italy. Needless to say, local peculiarities of sound and idiom frequently prevailed. There were many parts of Italy where Oscan was spoken long after Latin was common in Spain and Southern Gaul. Many of the dialects, for example, Paelignian,S spoken in the region ' Of the "non-Italic "dialects, Etruscan maintained its individuality obstinately. A native Etruscan drama still flourished in the time of Cicero. One representative of it was known to Varro : " Volnius qui tragoedias Tuscas scripsit" (Varro, De Ling. Lat, v. 55). In the second century of our era Etruscan was still spoken. Gellius implies this in his tale of the man who surprised his hearers with Old Latin words, as much as if he were speaking Tuscan or Gallic (Noct. Att, XI. vii. 4). » R. S. Conway, Italic Dialects, i., p. 206. 3 md., op. cit, i., p. 23. « Cited by Conway, op. cit., i., p. 11. s Conway, op. cit., l, p. 234. ITALIC DIALECTS 21 to which Ovid belonged, lasted at any rate to the middle ot the first century b.c. At Pompeii, where the inhabitants, before they fell under Rome, had been, according to Strabo (V. iv. 8), successively Oscans, Etruscans with Pelasgians, and then Samnites, the old Oscan survived side by side with Latin in the first century b.c,' To judge from the ephemeral graffiti found on the walls, Oscan lasted right up to the destruction of the town by the eruption of 79 a.d.^ The influence of the dialects is an allied matter. The longer their survival, the deeper their influence presumably was. In especial, Oscan, once a literature,3 the original language of the Atellane plays and of a people in prolonged contact with both Greeks and Romans, is certain to have affected Latin. It is significant that, among the pioneers of Roman literature, Ennius,4 Pacuvius, and Lucilius were born in Oscan-speaking districts. Such Italic influence upon Latin is better appreciated by the scientific philologist of to-day than by the old Roman scholars themselves. A great amount of the closest philological and epigraphical research has gone to secure the results already reached. The inquiry is mainly for the science of language, but the conclusions are obviously germane to questions in the literature of Rome. Thc/jgh ancient philologists like Varro, Macrobius, Servius, Festus in his abridgment of Verrius, and Paulus in turn in his abridgment of Festus, do record glosses S from such dialects as Oscan, there is great reason to wish for fuller information from antiquity. These matters are more than linguistic. It ' Conway, op. cit, i., p. SS- ' Buck, Grammar of Oscan and Utnbrian, p. 4 ; Giles, Manual Compar. Phil., ed. 2, p. 569. 3 This was Mommsen's view, and is widely accepted ; but it has been denied, e.g., Schanz, in his Geschichte der rdmischen Litteratur (I. Miiller's Handb. d. Mass. Alter., Bd. VIII., p. 10), referring to Oscan as well as Umbrian, remarks: "Das politische tJbergewicht des romischen Volkes hinderte die Entwicklung jener verwandten Idiome, sie wurden keine Litteratursprachen," u.s.w. * Not only are there " Oscisms " in Ennius, but even some of his Greek importations reveal an Oscan form, e.g., dracuma from Spax/ia, and lucinus from Xvxvoe, Mohl, Introd, d la Chronol. du Lat. Vulgaire, p. 50. s These will be found collected in Conway's Italic Dialects, vol. i. 22 THE LATIN LANGUAGE is illuminating to have Macrobius^ tell us that Punic and Oscan words had once been used in Latin, and that Virgil did not reject non-Latin words {peregrina uerba), such as the Gallic uri for "bufialoes" {Georg., ii. 374), and the word almost certainly Oscan " which he uses to describe " crumpled horns" — camuris hirtae sub cornibus aures {Georg., iii. 55)- Varied flavour is given to a Latin passage if it is recognised to contain words derived from, let us say, one of the "/^dialects "3 of Italy, words like bufo, rufus, scrofa, tufus, uafer, or other even commoner words like caesius, casa, caseus, omasum, rosa, whose dialectic origin is likely.4 A proper name, too, gains in significance if its provenance can be discovered ; for example, Caesar, the ending of which is probably Oscan. S Pompeius and Pontius are Oscan equivalents of the Roman proper names Quintus and Quinctius, and would originally mean " fifth son." Nero is Sabine for " man " or " manly," and is cognate with aviip. To be enabled authoritatively to isolate Umbrian elements in Plautus and Oscan elements in Ennius would possess more than philological value, just as truly as proving the presence of typical Warwickshire words in the text of Shakespeare. What gives the Italic dialects great significance is the part they played in the formation of the general Latin of Italy. Mohl,6 in accord with Sittl, strongly contends that the pro- vincial Latin of Italy, i.e., the rusticitas Latina modified by the words and pronunciation of such tribes as Oscans, Volscians, Hernicans, Paelignians, Marsians, and Picentines, was the almost exclusive source of the vulgar Latin of the Empire, and there- fore all-important for understanding the rise of the Romance languages. In this light, linguistic phenomena of the Italic dialects acquire a new attraction. Fresh point is given to ' Macrob., Sflfetr., VI. iv. 23, "Necnon et Punicis Oscisque uerbis usi sunt ueteres, quorum imitatione Vergilius peregrina uerba non respuit " = Conway, Ital. Dial., i., p. 218. 3 ibid., op. cit., i., p. 222. ♦ Ibid. op. cit., i., p. 223. Rosa is, however, ultimately from Greek (Aeoiic poKd for poSia). s Keller, cited by Conway, op. cit., i., p. 223. ' Mohl, op. cit., p. 16. PERIODS IN THE HISTORY OF LATIN 23 Augustus's habit ^ of using the genitive domos, when it turns out to be a scrap of Volscian grammar brought by him from his native district of Velitrae.= Oscan and Umbrian sounds or idioms become literally alive if they can be traced, not merely in the literature, but handed down through spoken Latin to modern languages. Thus, it was probably owing to Northern Italic influence that ae became e in later Latin. The middle vowels of quaero came eventually to be treated like the first vowel of decern because dialects like Faliscan and Umbrian identified the two.3 Similarly, the triumph of certain Italic vocalisms over Latin is seen in the history of the gutturals in vulgar Latin.4 The history of Latin may be followed in outline through the main periods of the literature, with this diflference, how- ever, that the records of the language go back to a date at least two hundred years before the date generally assigned to the beginning of the literature. These periods are approximately :S (i) Circiter 500 B.C.-240 B.C. — the period of the Earliest Latin. This is usually treated as pre-literary and is mainly represented by inscriptions and by legal and ritual remains to be illustrated in a separate chapter. Valuable philologically, the language at this stage is rugged and unwieldy, yet virile and emphatic. The old rustic Latin spoken beside the Tiber in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. began its gradual spread over Italy, as conquest and military colonisation advanced. This pre-literary Latin, originally nothing more than a patois^ and not always closely in contact with the regularising language of the metropolis, was especially subject to local influences of idiom, phonology and vocabulary, from the kindred dialects, many elements of which it eventually absorbed. (2) 240 B.C. — 70 B.C. In the first century of this period. ' Suet., Aug., Ixxxvii. ' Mohl, op. cit, p. 87. 3 Cf. Umbrian kvesiur (Lat. quaestor) alongside of deien (Lat. decern). < Mohl, of. cit., ch. vi. s It is probably needless to say that there is continuity throughout, and that the dates represent not breaks, but convenient divisions. 24 THE LATIN LANGUAGE as the Latin of early Epic and early Comedy, of Ennius and Plautus, the literary language had already begun to diverge from the spoken language. Towards the end of the period it passed through its transition towards its epoch of highest finish. The last two generations of the period were marked by activity in political and judicial oratory, which contributed to the ad- vance of prose especially. As to spoken Latin, its struggle for mastery over the Italic dialects had resulted by the time of Hannibal in the formation of certain Latino-Italic varieties in the north and the midlands. In the south this polydialectal Latin, due to fusion with kindred dialects, continued to grow till the days of the Social War. The Social War brought extinction for many of the separate Italic dialects. They left their chief traces in the local varieties of Latin. Thus Varro, who was a Sabine by birth, means apparently by Sabina lingua the Latin spoken among the Sabines. (3) 70 B.C. — 14 A.D. — the "Golden Age " of oratory and of the poets immediately pre- Augustan as well as Augustan. The Latin of literature now underwent its final shaping as an instrument of prose at the hands of Cicero and as an instru- ment of poetry at the hands of Virgil. The spoken Latin, the resultant of compromises between the old sermo rusticus of Latium and the local dialects on the lips of Umbrians, Faliscans, Marsians and others, was now the gerteral language of Italy. Men from the country speaking different dialects entered the Roman service and influenced the Roman tongue. Out of this blend grew the common speech of the imperial times. (4) 14 A.D. — 180 A.D. — :the "Silver Age" of the writers of the Early Empire. Marked by increasing artificiality, and a rhetorical straining after effect, much of the literature stands sharply divided from the vernacular ; but the commoner lan- guage forces itself into prominence, notably in the pages of Petronius. The vulgar Latin, which had for its base the old I provincial Latin of Italy, spread widely over the Empire. Despite its variety, it was a unity, and in some ways made approaches to the literary language under the influence of the official Latin employed for all purposes of administration. (5) 1 80 A.D. onwards to the break-up of spoken Latin into THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES 25 the Romance languages. As a literature, this " Late Latin " finds its typical, though not its only representatives in Christian writers. They hand it on to be the great medium of medieval learning. Though the literary Latin outlived the spoken Latin by many centuries, the latter died slowly. The decomposition of the vulgar imperial Latin was impossible so long as the Roman Empire remained a powerful unity. In fact, the history of popular Latin is throughout the history of the struggle of two opposing tendencies — on the one hand, a cen- trifugal tendency in the direction of local peculiarities and change ; on the otherj a centripetal, due to the influence of the written and official Latin, which imposed a certain con- ventional standard and hindered dissolution. The unity of imperial administration furthered the influence of the classical idiom and postponed the formation of separate Romance lan- guages.' Another factor contributing to the partial spread of the more literary Latin in the provinces was the establishment of schools, like those of Gaul.^ For a period, then, roughly extending from the first to the fourth century a.d., it was a case of the practical disappearance of the indigenous lan- guages of the provinces in favour of a Latin which was broadly one like the Empire itself. The main exceptions to this conquest of language were to be found in the East, where Greek especially maintained its hold. Finally, the trium- phant language itself split up. The troubles of the Empire removed the influences which had made for unity. The provinces were severed and developed different languages. 3 The cultured diction of the literature and the speech of the ' Mohl {op. cit., p. 268) is very emphatic on this. " Sans le latin classique, les idiomes romans seraient nes cinq ou six siecles plus tot." = In Britain the educational policy inaugurated by Agricola (Tac, Agric, xxi.) accounted for considerable culture, though subsequent cir- cumstances effectually prevented the development of a Romance language in the island. 3 Romance philology teems with questions to be solved only in the light of the spoken usage. E.g., why did Italian keep loro from gen. plur. iUoru(m), and not keep traces of such genitives plural in the nouns ? Because the vulgar Latin used preferably the old gen. plur. in -urn (Ind.- Eur. -om, Sansk. -sam) in preference to that in ^orum, which originally was special to pronouns. Cf. sestertium, Romanom (inscriptions), &c. 26 THE LATIN LANGUAGE common people {^iermo plebeius) were, of course, both descended from the ancient Latin language.^ Both were branches from the same stem and roots, and the structure of both had been really determined by those who originally spoke the Latin tongue. But the parting = came with the dawn of a partially exotic literature under Greek influence. Thereafter they developed in diflFerent surroundings. It is all a matter of gradation due to this difference in environment. They con- tinued to diverge, but they also reacted on each other. Learned words filtered down into the speech of the lower orders, making the accents less harsh and the phraseology less uncouth. Plebeian and servile words rose, chiefly through domestic contact, into the parlance of writers. It is reason- able, therefore, to believe that there were other grades 3 of the language more subtly distinguished — the sermo cotidianus, or daily speech of the cultured, in which, for instance, the narra- tive portions of Petronius's novel is written, would be more ofiF- hand than the literary style, but more classic than the sermo 'The history and features of both " Volkssprache " and "Schrift- sprache" are sketched by W. Meyer in a chapter contributed to Grober's Grund riss d . romanischen Philologie, Bd. I., pp. 351-382. With a due sen^^^he complexity of the problem, Mohl, Introd. h la Chronologic '^^^■0 vulgaire, ch. vi., recognises four periods of vulgar Latin ^^^^^L (1) Formatio^^^^^K;^ latino-italiques. (2) ConstitutM|^HP||||eral d'ltalie. (3) Unification amKi inyerial. (4) Decompositi(Sn|p latin vulgaire imperial. ' The distinction is fessential to the appreciation of Latin style. F. T. Cooper (Word-FormaUon in the Roman Sermo Plebeius, 1895, Introd., pp. xv-xvi) points out that there is no question of two separate languages' but of two kindred dialects, steadily diverging. Objections are made by Bonnet and SitU. The former (in Le Latin de Gregoire de Tours, 1890) declmes to consider vulgar Latin as a real language apart from Latin strictly so-called : "Le latin vulgaire ainsi compris n'a jamais existe que dans les cerveaux de quelques savants." The latter says : " Das Vulgar- latem, mit welchem die Latinisten operieren ist ein Phantasiegebilde " 3 See Cooper, op. cit, Introd., p. xx. The danger is that these grades of one language may be vievi^ed as separate entities. Thus between literary and vulgar Latm, Fuchs {Die roman. Sfrachen in ihr. Verhaitn. zum Lat pp 37 s??.) postulates a Volkslatein needlessly ; much as Jordan (ATnt tsche Beitr pp. 73 sqq.) fancies a municipal Latin-half official, half popular— between the literary and the rustic. CULTURED DICTION AND VERNACULAR 27 plebeius of Southern Italy, which Trimalchio and other freed- men in the book are represented as using ; more refined, too, than the sermo rusticus of outlying districts in Italy. There were, further, the local differences which multiplied as the vulgar Latin spread over the Empire. The settlement of colonists or veterans, the deportation of whole populations, movements of troops, and marriages of soldiers with pro- vincial women, spread and exchanged linguistic elements of the utmost complexity. Not only in the East, but in the coast-towns of Italy, Greek words worked their way into the spoken language, and added to the already large stock of loan- words introduced by writers from the days of Plautus. Even by the time of Cicero, Gallic ^ Latin had noticeable peculi- arities. In his speech for the poet Archias, Cicero remarks on an outlandish note of provincialism in the Spanish Latin even at such a centre as Corduba.2 To take instances nearer Rome, PoUio's reproach of "Patavinity" against Livy is only less notorious than the reproach of what we may call " Praenes- tinity " brought by Lucilius against Vectius, as Quintilian tells us.3 These charges refer to the use of words or phrases that smacked of the soil to purists of the capital. Hadrian, though born in Rome, made the Senate laugh wh^^^^first spoke in it.4 Septimius Severus never lost his AfrjJj^^^^nt,} and had to blush for his own sister's ignorance ol^^^^^^jPltere were, then, copious deviations from standyifl^HPP;ven in high places. If we pass to the fourth century ffoi, it is not for a moment to be thought that African Latin was identical with that spoken on the Rhine or the Danube. " The idioms of the separate Roman provinces represent a varying degree of archaism in the order of their dates of conquest." 7 Broadly, > Cooper, op. at., Introd., p. xxv. * Cic, Pro Arch., x. § 26 : " Cordubae natis poetis, pingue quiddam sonantibus atque peregrinum," 3 Quint., I. V. S6. \* Spartian., Hadr., iii. : "orationem imperatoris (i.e., Traiani) . . . agrestius pronuntians." s Spartian., SeMen, xix. : "Afrum quiddam usque ad senectutem sonans." * Spartian., Seuer,, xv. : " uix latine loquens." 7 Cooper, op. cit, Introd., p. xxvii. Mohl (op. cit, p. 12), holds with Grober that, outside Italy, in the provinces first colonised, there were 28 THE LATIN LANGUAGE however, what concerns us is that the language of literature and the dialect of popular speech were not the same. Between these the chasm widens markedly, even within the first century of the literature. To be convinced, one need only note how much more Greek Ennius is than Naevius, and how much more polished Terence is than Plautus. The homely phrases and homely accentuation of the earlier dramatist give way before an increase of refined diction and foreign principles of quantity favoured by the literary circle whose centre was the younger Scipio. It was natural that the great comic play- wright of the people should keep in touch with the ordinary speech, and be affected not only by everyday turns of ex- pression, but by the everyday pronunciation ready to slur final consonants and shorten unaccented long vowels,' It was equally natural that Epic, with elevated traditions based on Greek literature and in the hands of scholarly poets, should incline away from spoken Latin. Ennius, by setting the lan- guage to a new verse, the hexameter, displaced the national Saturnian, and was the real begetter of the severance between the speech of the learned and that of burgher and peasant. Plebeian Latin is important not merely for its influence on the Romance languages, but because it leaves traces of its presence in all periods of the literature. Its main character- istics were its free invention or adoption of new words and a marked preference for ponderous derivatives and compounds.' maintained the forms nearest to the old Latin of the Republic. Such Latin, planted as it were in good time, grew strong enough to resist many changes which affected the more unstable language of a crowded metro- polis and of Italy in general. But Sittl (Die lokalen Verschipdenheiten der lat. Sprache, 1882, p. 43) supports the opposite view that Latin altered more profoundly in the provinces than in Italy. One of several points against Sittl is the fact that under the Empire the inscriptions are more dialectal in Italy— the native soil of the old Italic dialects— than else- where (Mohl, op. cit., p. 46). ' This is well summarised by Cooper, op. cit., Introd., p. xliii : " The language was burdened with substantives in -bulum, -mentum and -monium, adjectives in -arius, -icius and -osus; cumbersome archaic suffixes here play a prominent part ; compare the abstract substantives in -ela and -tudo, adjectives in -bilis, -bundus and -lentus, all retained apparently for the sake of their length. Frequentative, inchoative, and desiderative verbs, diminutives and prepositional compounds, are, from PLEBEIAN ELEMENTS IN LITERATURE 29 Nothing is more interesting than its retention of this Indo- European inheritance, which the literary language putgrew — the primitive facility of compounding words. But it had its drawbacks. Long words seemed to be preferred for their length. Prefixes and suffixes were used carelessly, and with a vulgar passion for sesquipedalia uerba, as if exaggeration could screen the want of thought. Words in consequence lost their exact force. Frequentatives, whose value was forgotten, were either doubled like cantitare, or supplied with a saepe, just as diminutives were either doubled like homullulus or supplied with pleonastic epithets like paruus and paruolus. Another feature of plebeian Latin is its unbroken preservation of many archaisms which had dropped out of the literary language. This lowest grade, then, of Latin, spoken by soldiers, traders, and slaves, and corresponding in Rome to the sermo rusticus outside the city, was at once conservative in its adherence to old forms and progressive in its readiness to alter and innovate. The severance between the two styles, it has been remarked, was not; absolute. The earlier Roman writers employed diction near enough to the popular to be affected by the plebeian habits of word-formation. They used compounds which the classic literature almost entirely rejected. It is equally natural that spoken Latin should appear in satire, whether of the bitter order of lampoon and invective, or of the easy-tempered order of chatty persiflage. We meet without surprise , plebeian elements in Catullus, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, and in the epigrams of Martial. Writers on technical subjects admit vulgarisms — Vitruvius does, in writing on architecture, Columella on agriculture, Celsus on medicine. Even in the best period the spoken Latin is not without its witness. All was not gold in the Golden Age. Apart from the authors of the Bellum Jfricum and the Bellum Hispaniense, which at least possess the merit of being foils to the masterpieces of classical Latin in their own time, there is the distinctly conversational tone and slack usage which the earliest period, freely used in place of the simple word with little or no distinction of meaning." 30 THE LATIN LANGUAGE Cicero allows himself to adopt in many of his letters. In the next century the folk-speech appears not only in the wall- scribblings of Pompeii which are not literature, but very clearly in Petronius's novel, which is literature,^ Later still, not a little of the Latin of Apuleius and of Tertullian is due to the way in which people talked their Latin in Africa. Finally, the spoken language has left its most imperishable monuments in the Romance languages. Even in "Esper- anto," the latest artificial means of intercommunication by language, the living influence of Latin roots is manifest in the greater portion of the vocabulary. The literary Latin ran a course of its own. Its history, in spite of the occasional influence of the vernacular, was some- thing independent, and is writ large in the works of Roman authors. Cultivated and shaped by Hellenisers, it attained its Golden Age at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire. In the very period when spoken Latin had at length ousted the kindred dialects in Italy, the vigorous plebeian and rustic language is sharply severed from the polished urbanity of writers in the capital. The cadence of sentences and the value of vowel-sounds are studied by Cicero in a manner undreamt of by common employers of the language. The distance between ordinary speech and the art of Virgil, now venturing on some untried effect, now reviving some suggestive archaism, is still more immeasurable. With the Silver Age came a reaction against the classical standard. Trained in rhetoric, learned in literature, an author yearned to say something new, striking, piquant, and worthy of his individuality. Fresh collocations of words and subtle reminis- cences of past literature were the characteristics esteemed. So prose borrowed copiously the colour and phraseology of poetry, and poetry was deeply tinged with conceits and erudition. This tendency passed into the archaising move- ment of the second century a.d., when, with an enthusiasm ' As Mohl points out [pf. cit), for the study of vulgarisms, since Ullmann, Roman. Forsch., vii., 146 sq., Forster, Wiener Stud., xiv., 278 sq., no one can doubt the high importance of Trimalchio's conuiuium in Petronius, and of the Appendix Probi. LATIN AFTER CLASSICAL PERIOD 31 which sometimes outran discretion, but to which we owe knowledge otherwise unattainable, certain scholars turned to quote and imitate many of the writers before Cicero. The retrogressive fashion which arose in Hadrian's days had its outcome in the writings of Fronto, Gellius, and Apuleius. The final period in the history of the literary language of Rome is that in which it is best represented by the works of the Christian Fathers. The influence of the vulgar speech and of provincial varieties is evident. It is the eve of the disintegration of Latin into the Romance languages. The transmutation was wrought by the corruption and loss of grammatical endings, the appearance of auxiliary verbs and of articles definite and indefinite, as well as the intrusion of barbarous words. From about the ninth century ^ Latin ceased to be strictly a spoken language. It was replaced by Spanish, French, Italian, Roumanian, and other tongues ; and of these the nearest representative of the older Latin is, on the whole, Spanish, which traces its descent lineally from the language of the Roman soldiers, colonists, and traders of the second century B.c.2 But, if no longer spoken, Latin did not become a dead language. The literary language proved its vital power by its diffusion in the Middle Ages as the language of scholars and interna- tional statesmen. The theology and philosophy and law of the civilised world were conveyed in it. The Vulgate and rhyming hymns of the Church guaranteed its life. Virtu- ' The transition from Latin to French and the dropping of inflections may be well illustrated by the text of the famous Strasburg oath sworn in 842 A.-D. by " Lodhuvig " (Louis-le-Germanique), and couched in the Romana Lingua so as to be understood by the French subjects of his brother Charles (" Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament," &c.). For the full text see Cruttwell, Roman Literature, ed. 2, 1878, p. 22 ; Donaldson, Varronianus, ed. 3, i860, p. 535 ; or Bartsch, Chrestomathie de Vancien Frangais, 1873, p. 3. " Spanish affords an interesting example of the reaction of the provinces upon Rome. The men of the Legio VII. Galbiana brought to the capital by Galba in 69 a.d. were responsible for the first influx of " Hispanisms " into the speech of Rome. A ceaseless tide of strangers was bringing in other elements of change. 32 THE LATIN LANGUAGE ally, with the exception of Ireland from the fourth century to the Carlovingian period, all that Western Europe knew of Greek thought for centuries it knew through Latin books. Long after the revival of Greek studies, learning continued to express itself in Latin, whether it might be Bacon's trumpet-call to scientific observation and inquiry in the Novum Organum, or one of the great responses thereto, Newton's Principia. The lectures of the medieval Univer- sities were in Latin. In the seventeenth century England had still a Latin State Secretary in the person of Milton ; and it was only in the age of Louis XIV. that French supplanted Latin as the vehicle of diplomacy. The Peace of -Utrecht in 17 13 was drawn up in French. For the last two centuries the employment of Latin has been most marked in treatises on questions of scholarship, in com- mentaries on the classics, and in the services and pronounce- ments of the Church of Rome. A language which is so pre-eminently the language of liturgy and ceremonial cannot scientifically be called dead. The main natural qualities and features of Latin are evident in the remains of the earliest period. It is the language of record and regulation, of epitaph and ritual. Heavy and awkward at first, it posses?ed virtues equipping it to develop into an ideal language for history and law, for rhetoric and religion. Intrinsically, it was unpoetic, just as the people were inherently unromantic and com- paratively unimaginative. The contrast with Greek forces itself upon the mind. Latin is not so rich in purely poetic words. It has not the subtle and supple turns characteristic of the quick-witted and versatile Hellene. It has not the same variety or lightness of endings. It has not the wealth of particles or prepositional usages which import such fine shades of meaning into Greek sentences. Its grammatical forms are less varied ; for it lacks the aorist tense, and shows only scanty traces of an optative mood, a middle voice, and a dual number. It has not the Greek facility either in compounding words or in expressing abstractions. QUALITIES OF THE LANGUAGE 33 As a result, in point of meaning, Latin cannot be expected to exhibit equal niceties. In point of sound, Latin with its heavy terminations in -orum and -arum, -ham and -bo, must appear relatively clumsy. In point of expressing pure speculation, Latin, though distinctly adapted to ethical discussion, could never rival the metaphysical capacity of Greek philosophy. But the language has undoubted positive merits. Its very heaviness lends it a sonorous solemnity. Well managed, Latin is the best instrument ever devised in the world for clear, emphatic, dignified exposition. Free of a load of particles, it runs all the less danger of becoming prolix. It goes straight to the point. The language is the exact counterpart of the practical character of the people. There- fore it was fitted for Varro's didactic treatises and Lucretius's didactic poetry ; for condensing a moral precept of thesort ascribed to Publilius Syrus, for the utterance of a grave eulogium of the dead in the laudationes funebres, for formu- lating a decree by Senate or Emperor or magistrate beyond the possibility of cavil ; for Cicero's serious advocacy of a case before a jury or a measure among politicians ; for Virgil's impressive declaration of the mission of a great people and the glories of a great empire. In some ways Latin looks cumbrous, barren, and intractable in the earliest monuments. Even in Plautus, despite the famous saying that if the Muses were to speak Latin it would be in Plautine Latin, there seems scarcely a full promise of the gold of the Augustan Age. The verses of Ennius, as Quintilian ' remarks with penetration, impress one like fine old trees : they have majesty rather than beauty {non tantam habent speciem quantam religionem). But this very majesty is not sustained. Ennius can be greatly impressive in familiar lines like — Moribus antiquis stat res Romana uirisque, or — Nee cauponantes bellum sed belligerantes ; - X. i. 88. 4 34 THE LATIN LANGUAGE and he attains to noble efiFects of rhythm and to skilful use of alliteration, of vowel sounds, and of liquid consonants. But his mastery is not sure. He drops into homeliness, and, lower still, into clumsiness, and, lowest of all, into a baldness intolerable in poetry. This material, then, as yet only half pliant, had to be wrought into a finished artistic product by the Roman will. The literary dialect gained flexibility only through persevering e;^periments made by writers who borrowed Greek idioms and metres, and, in the light of Greek models, shaped their own language. And this shaping by the writers was aided by the moulding of circumstances, for the language expanded as Rome's domains expanded. The contact with other peoples was vivifying. It was a challenge and a stimulus to the men of letters. Latin became a language of imperial dignity, or was made imperial chiefly by Virgil, because his mind and soul were responsive to Rome's imperial destiny. Possessed by a great idea, Virgil rose to his greatest achievement — complete artistic mastery over an obstinate medium. The Romans themselves recognised certain defects in their language. The poets, drawing comparisons with Greek, realised the heavier movement of Latin. Horace, in a well- known ode, confesses the danger of seeking to soar with Pindar. Lucretius felt the vocabulary of his native Latin too poverty-stricken to do justice to Greek scientific and philosophic terms. His avowal of the patrii sermonis egestas is cited with approval by Pliny the Younger.' Seneca shares these impressions.2 No one appreciated the fact better than Cicero. He knew what it was to seek in vain a Latin equiva- lent for a term in Greek philosophy. Yet he amuses his readers, and perhaps himself, in certain passagess where his ambition is ostensibly to contest with the Greeks their pre- eminence in language. Protesting the equality of Latin, he virtually acknowledges the supremacy of Greek. For the moment he is a lawyer holding a national brief. Else- where4 he explicitly owns that Greek is a more copious ' Efist, IV. 18. = Epist, 58. 3 De Fin., I. iii. 10 ; Tusc. Disp., III. viii. 16, III. x. 20. « A good example occurs in Tusc. Disp., II. xv. 35. There Cicero remarks THE MOULDING OF LATIN 35 language. This is his true conviction. Just as Lucretius had not fully succeeded in rendering Latin supple enough to convey gracefully the doctrines of Epicureanism and the transitions from one stage in his argument to another, so Cicero felt its awkwardness when confronted with the task of rendering Greek philosophy. Latin, in fact, during classical times never became an absolutely perfect instrument for the expression of philosophical ideas. This tends to show that the language had not kept pace with the thought of Rome ; at least, it could not overtake Greek thought. Certainly, philosophising was never so popular in Rome as it had been in Athens, and Cicero's philosophic works lag far behind Plato's in freshness and vigour. Yet justice demands that credit be given to both Cicero and Seneca for developing in their several ways the clear and logical qualities of Latin. It was greatly owing to them that Latin did in later times prove capable of expressing, with considerable nicety, abstract thought and subtle distinctions. Though it lost in literary grace, the language under the hands of the Christian Fathers and of the eminent schoolmen attained to great power of definition. The new theological writers had to treat of many things remote from the feelings, thought, and diction of classic Rome. When Tertullian, therefore, created ecclesiastical Latin, he created it at the expense of strict Latinity. To obtain a serviceable implement for his pur- pose he showed no regard for classic usage in word-formation ^ or phraseology. He allowed himself what purists denounce as enormities from the vulgar tongue and travesties of correct that for the two Latin words labor and dolor, Greek, though a richer language than Latin, has only one term (" Graeci illi, quorum copiosior est lingua quam nostra uno nomine appellant"). After the criticism "aliud est enim laborare, aliud dolere," Cicero patriotically remon- strates with Greece for pluming herself on her abundance of words, "O uerborum inops interdum, quibus abundare te semper putas Graecia ! " " For examples of his Latinity see Cooper's Word-Formation in the Roman Sermo Plebeius {passim), Reisig's Vorlesungen «. latein. Sprach- "wissetischaft, Bd. L, 1888, p. 65 ; J. Schmidt, De latinitate Tertulliani, Erlangen, 1870 ; Hauschild, Die GrundsUtze und Mittel der Woribildung bei Tertullian, Leipz., 1864. 36 THE LATIN LANGUAGE phraseology, such as potentator^ pigrissimus, uisualitas, mllifi- camen, multinubentia, diminaro for diminuo, inuxorus for uxore carens, libidinosus gloria for cupidus gloria. His free adaptation and invention of terms had, at any rate, the excuse of being a sign of life. They fitted Latin prose for Christian apologetics. Still, some of the old deficiencies were felt. Jerome long afterwards complained of the inadequacy of Latin to inter- pret ideas from Greek and Hebrew. He argues' that if Cicero met with difficulties in translating from Greek, an allied language, the case of Hebrew was much worse. Yet, maugre difficulties, Latin developed into a cosmopolitan instru- ment of expression. For a time it bid fair to fulfil its destiny as the universal medium of communication dreamed of by the humanists. The humanists, however, bore their share in defeating their own hopes. By insisting on ultra-classicism and preaching a return to Cicero they shut their eyes to the growth of the language since his day. A Latin with reactionary and highly literary tendencies could not hope to compete against the living force of the modern national languages. Yet among the things that might have been may be imagined a Latin with a place between the Ciceronianism of Erasmus and the monstrous barbarism of the monkish jargon so well satirised in the Epistolae Obscurorum f^irorum. Throughout its whole history the language maintained a certain severity, solidity, and dignity reminiscent of the character which marked the people themselves in simpler days. True to a kind of biological law, the Roman nation in ways of thought and speech preserved the marks of early habits. A sensible people with a keen eye for utility, and for having work done, will tolerate only a language that is clear, concise, forcible, and logical. By isolating such qualities in the language one but testifies to the qualities of sound sense, energy, and solidity in the Romans themselves. As we have seen, it was for littirateurs of artistic genius to superimpose refinements by which the sounds of Latin developed unex- pected music, and its native dignity rose to positive majesty. The wonder is not that Latin should be less varied than ' Hieron. in Galat. I., ad i. ii sq., quoted by Cooper, op. cit, p. xxxiii. MASTERY IN STYLE ATTAINED 37 Greek, but that it should have so much variety as it has. Among a people so conservative it was no easy task for men of letters, even at the prompting of art, to introduce bold experiments. Custom and convention ruled in the pro- vince of language as the mos maiorum ruled in the social sphere. This factor unmistakably hampered adventurous innovators. It was Caesar,^ daringly unconventional in other ways, who, as if he held literary shipwreck before an author's eyes, laid it down that "one should avoid an unexampled word as one would a rock." Horace, himself so well designated as uerbis felicissime audax, is more liberal. He contemplates cases arising to justify innovations. One could not tie the language down to what was femiliar to the old-feshioned Romans. His advice is, "Take a licence into your own hands : if you take it within reason, it will be allowed.''^ He contemplates also variation in the fashions of words. " Obsolete words," he says, " will be revived : words high in favour will become obsolete." The arbitra- ment of change he leaves with usus, the controller of " the law and standard of speech."3 It was on principles like Horace's rather than Caesar's that the Latin language made real progress. Upon the stubborn material were forced polish, ornament, new words, new beauties. The end at least was triumph.4 The great literary ' Gellius, Noct. Att, I. x. 4, quotes this from Caesar's first book De Analogia : " Habe semper in memoria atque in pectore, ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias inauditum atque insolens uerbum." Macrobius, Saturn., I. v. 2, quotes it,with slight verbal changes, including "infrequens" for " inauditum." ' Hor. A.P., 48-Si :— " Si forte necesse est Indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita rerum et Fingere cinctutis non exaudita Cethegis, Continget dabiturque licentia surapta pudenter." 3 Hor., A.P., 70-72 :— "Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque Quae nunc sunt in honore uocabula, si uolet usus, Quem penes arbitrium est et ius et norma loquendi." ♦ " La langue . . . merite bien aussi d'etre comptee, comme les pro- 38 THE LATIN LANGUAGE eiFects of Latin are secured by sheer genius after generations of painstaking experiment. The supreme mastery achieved was the work of the classical age. To see Latin at its lightest one must take Catullus and Horace, whose high-water mark only just falls short of the full tide of lyric poetry in Greece. For its most stately rhythm and music one must hear the Ciceronian period, constructed, almost architecturally, of parts admirably fitted and proportioned ; or one must divine the pathos and the grandeur of the Virgilian line. For the acme of neatness and brevity, one must read Tacitus with his gift of conveying brilliant pictures and profound reflections in marvellously few brief strokes, or Martial, who, in the shortest epigram, could leave the deepest sting. For the acme of rapidity one must think of the satiric exposures of social abuses and the scathing denunciations of vice which burst from Juvenal in his indignation. vinces de I'empire, parmi les conqaetes du genie romain " (Egger, Latini Sermonis Vetustioris Reliquiae Selectae, 1843, p. viii). CHAPTER IV THE ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION National character a continuity — Persistence of the Roman type — Littirateurs and proletariate — Traits of character — Order a practical and social quality — Moral qualities — Grauitas — Domestic virtues — Practical common-sense evolved from early rural times — ^The practical tempers Roman conservatism — Roman more practical than Greek or Kelt — The practical in Roman literature — Practical influence of Rome on later ages — Law preferred to art. Religion in relation to character : practical features in Roman religion — The making of gods — Romantic elements borrowed from Greek literature — Organisation of observances — Domestic and social elements intertwined — Tolerance — Reason- ableness and dignity of the literature. A SENTENCE wrfitten by Taine in his Histoire de la littirature anglaise to illustrate his method of literary investigation, recog- nises " une continuity aussi rigoureuse dans la vie d'un peuple que dans la vie d'un individu." A nation, he maintains, has life as the individual has. A nation has character, spirit, soul. These features, " visibles des I'enfance, se d^veloppent d'epoque en ^poque, et manifestent le meme fonds primitif depuis les origines jusqu'au d6clin." This phenomenon seemed to him true of the Greeks from Homer to the Byzantine Caesars, of the Germans from the Nibelungenlied to Goethe, of the French from the first chansons de geste and the oldest fabliaux up to B6ranger and Alfred de Musset. I do not remember that Taine seeks a parallel in Roman literature. But it seems to me a strong confirmation of his thesis. If English literature, notwithstanding Latin, French, Italian and Hellenic influences, 40 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION can be regarded as radically Teutonic,' it is easier to credit a continuity of spirit in the literature of Rome. Amid the powerful inrush of Greek influences the persistence of the Roman type must be affirmed. The Roman was not merely passive and impressionable. His masculine vigour strongly moulded the foreign elements. The Roman borrowed in a Roman way. He left his impress on the Hellenic material. Even a Roman copy of a Greek statue is a Roman thing.= Similarly a Roman elaboration of a Greek play, lyric, legend, is a Roman thing. How truly Roman this literature is can- not be better understood than by noting its invariably close relation to social environment — to movements of progress or reaction, to needs and aspirations, to the fashions, the fancies, and sometimes the follies of an age. Throughout, the Roman mark abides, modified, but never obliterated. This persistence of type is all the more wonderful because no nation has ever owed so much of its literature to outsiders and foreigners. There has been too common a tendency to estimate Hellenism at Rome in such a way as to discount the Roman character and to ignore the extent to which this character, inspiring the principles, tastes, and aims of Rome, pervades its total civilisation. " The more it changes, the more it is the same thing." Roman art, and therefore Roman literature, is full of this ineradicable character. An estimate of it must be attempted. , ' Taine's view, ingeniously and vivaciously illustrated in his Histoire, has at least the merit of being an external one. It does not, however, win universal acceptance. Dr. Courthope, for example, declares that between the poetry produced in England before the Norman Conquest and the poetry of Chaucer, " there is no link of connection " (A Hist, of Eng. Poetry, 189S, vol. i., p. 4). = But Roman art is no dull copy of the Hellenistic — it possesses native qualities, and often retains a specially Etruscan realism. Wickhoff has shown that it could secure new effects, among which he notes the " illusionism " of Augustan and the " impressionism " of Flavian art. There is nothing in Greek art to rob of their independence the Arch of Titus or the Column of Trajan. . A stand against the treatment of Roman art as a phase of Hellenistic art is made by F. Wickhoff, Roman Art (Eng. ed.), 1900, and by Mrs. Strong, Roman Sculpture from Augustus to Constantine, 1907. CONTINUITY OF CHARACTER 41 Always hard, it is often dangerous, to sum up a people under a few abstract terms. What is essential here is the character displayed in the literature. This literature was so largely divorced from a merely popular appeal, that one might think the common folk hardly fall to be portrayed in a history of Roman literature. Mainly, it looks as if it were only the Roman gentleman and the man in Roman polite society who mattered ; for they were the authors. Occasionally, no doubt, the bourgeoisie must be remembered. After all, to them Plautus made his appeal in his comedies. They were his audience, though he imfortunately did not describe them. Too few of the fragments of the togatae and tabernariae are left to show us the common folk who were characters in those plays. We have glimpses in Horace and Juvenal of the lower orders and of slaves. In Petronius, too, the common man who had worked his way up to riches remains the inimitable and charmingly vulgar hero of the " Banquet." When all is said, such exceptions and others leave Roman literature the most aristocratic in flavour and authorship of all literatures. The democratic spirit of Athens was absent. Yet Roman literature was no mere plaything of a leisured class. There was no lack of reality. It bore closely on the interests of society and the state. Virgil is remote enough in style and theme from the man of the Roman street, but his work is intimately bound up with the most vital concerns of con- temporary Rome. In any case, however elevated the literary works and the literary dialect, there was no essential difiFerence in ethos between high and low. The same Roman character — sublimated it might be — shows among litterateurs as among the proletariate. The same character fixed itself even on the stranger who settled in Rome and contributed to Latin literature. The Roman character was practical, deliberate, unromantic, industrious, god-fearing to the verge of superstition. These epithets imply the outstanding qualities. The type was inherited from simple rural times. It colours all the institu- tions of Rome. Though they grow complex, family, society, sute, religion, language, literature bear the ancient stamp. 42 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION The history of each is the history of sensible and gradual adaptation of means to ends. Foreign influences acted on each ; but each remained Roman. The prevailing attributes are sound sense and a feeling for order. Organisation was the soul of Rome. The insistence on order is but one side of the practical turn. To have a thing done in workmanlike fashion, the essential need is system. This is a fundamental trait. Under it come the discipline and the deliberation of the Roman. Order requires unques- tioning obedience, the efFacement of the individual, the imper- sonal execution of instructions. Order in the state was to the average Roman mind more likely to result from adherence to tried principles than from novel experiments. Whether regal city, aristocratic republic, or world-empire, Rome was an incarnation of disciplined will-power. Ordered unity made the strength of the city-state among the many separate peoples of Italy, and was the secret of Rome's success. In policy she invariably knew her own mind and held to her purpose. The systematic subordination of burgher to the commonwealth was the result of an almost Spartan strictness in training. At every turn the Roman of the early times had encountered rules and restrictions. The present was constantly in bondage to the past. Precedent in the shape of the mos maiorum proved frequently a trammelling tyranny over the individual. Where the respublica was concerned, the citizen had to be impersonal. Free play for individuality was not deemed desirable. It might beget selfishness. Environment, therefore, made the Roman a less original being than the Athenian. The lad who in excess o£ bravery fought against his father's orders must, even though he slew the enemy of Rome, pay the penalty for contumacy. The Laws of the Twelve Tables, learned so scrupulously in the schools, with their commands and prohibitions, read to us like a glorified system of tribal tabu. They sank deep into the temperament of a Roman, and made him an obedient and cautious citizen, loyal to the state and to all superior society, reverential towards rules of conduct or ritual, innocent of questioning analysis, and chary of initiation. MORAL TRAITS 43 In this unromantic character the moral qualities mainly developed are naturally staid and respectable. Largely, at the outset, a pastoral and agricultural people, the Romans for centuries esteemed the elemental virtues originally called into play by the struggle with enemies or nature, by the relation- ships of domestic and social life, by the need of the protection of the gods. The simple " manliness " of the tribesman was the trait which gave rise to the term uirtus, used by Roman writers in an increasingly complex sense, as society grew heterogeneous. The sense of duty to kinsfolk and to gods was expressed by pietas, the quality in Virgil's hero which covers a multitude of what must strike a purely modern taste as unchivalrous blemishes. The greater difficulties of life in early times engendered a serious bearing and sober mien, a somewhat solemn view of things — the famous grauitas ingrained in the Roman character and accounting at once for its heaviness and its dignity. To emphasise grauitas with its combined nuance of dignity and severity, is not to claim for every Roman that " portentous gravity " which Addison facetiously ascribed to his mysterious Spectator. We must reckon with the varied Italian tempera- ment — its rebounds into sadness or merriment, its alternate deliberation and impulsiveness, tenderness and cruelty. It is the same in the Italy of to-day. One sees faces with a depth of pathos born of the battle with poverty here or malaria there ; one notes light merriment regardless of the passage of time, recalling Sidney's shepherd-boy in Arcadia " piping as though he should never be old." The literature of such a people will exhibit both the well-weighed word due to deliberate thought and the quick repartee and cutting banter flashed out by a genius for impromptu farce. The grauitas of Caesar's Commentaries, of Cicero's Orations, of Virgil's Aeneid, is too obvious to need elaborate mention ; but we are not allowed to forget it for long in Roman drama, satire, and lyric — not even in love-poetry, the composition of which to a Roman mind was playing and trifling {ludere). The moral qualities valued were those on which family and state depended for their stability. Recognising the family as 44 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION the kernel of the state, Roman society and Roman writers set great store by the domestic virtues. Contrasting Rome and Greece in the opening chapter of the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero claims that, whatever the originality of Greece, his own compatriots were superior in the conduct of everyday life and of the home, and in aiairs of state and law. In war, even greater than their bravery was their trained obedience {dis- ciplina). In learning and intellect, he yields the palm to Greece ; but in character Rome can hold her own. The traits on which he lays emphasis are thoroughly representa- tive : — Where among any people has been found a dignity of manners, a firmness, a greatness of soul, uprightness, good faith, or outstanding virtue of every kind, comparable to the qualities of our forefathers ? " It was in the domestic circle that the foundations of Roman civic virtue were laid. The family was the state in miniature. The unity of the household was really felt. There was intense devotion, in fact, a religious devotion, to the hearth ; and intense loyalty to the paterfamilias as head. Representa- tive of a line of ancestors, he was regarded as the expounder of the mos maiorum. The discipline of the home was in keeping with the discipline of the old burgher army and of the state at large. It inculcated the ideal dignity and self-control. The authority of the father {patria potestas), supreme within the household, and derived from patriarchal Aryan days, was a grave moral responsibility. It was enough to sober any right- minded man to realise his power of life and death within the area of the family. His boys, too, had to be trained bodily and mentally to take part in the work of the state. Everythi^ tended to encourage a high sense of duty. This businesslike disposition in the Romans, this primeval inheritance, survived throughout the ages. A thrifty and ' " Quae enim tanta grauitas, quae tanta constantia, magnitudo animi, probitas, fides, quae tarn excellens in omni genere uirtus in uUis fuit, ut sit cum maioribus nostris comparanda ? " — Cic, Tusc. Disp., I. i. RUSTIC SHREWDNESS 45 frugal rustic folk by origin, they objected to waste ot time or substance. The landowner of early days could plough with his slaves,^: and his wife spin like her women. We come perhaps nearest of all to the matter-of-fact primitive Roman in the writers on Agriculture. Cato especially is practical. He sets himself to show 2 how time might be saved in bad weather, when field-work was stopped, by attention to sundry things in the way of cleansing or mending at the farmstead ; he shows how slaves should be fed, and certainly not overfed ; and by suggested economies and severities betrays part of the mean and unlovely side of the Roman character. To meet the requirements of such farmers as Cato has in view, the early calendars were drawn up in Latin, containing information about the work and the sacrifices suitable to each month. For religion, no less than work, was practical. The portion appli- cable to May from a calendar of the sort mentioned is a good example : — The month of May. Thirty-one days. Nones on the seventh. Day has fourteen and a half hours. Night has nine and a half hours. The sun is in Taurus. The month is under Apollo's protection. Corn is weeded. Wool is washed. Young steers are broken in. The vetch of the meadows is cut. The lustration of the crops is made. Sacrifices to Mercury and Flora.3 Cato shrewdly advises the farm-bailiff against sacrificial observances at a distance from the farm. That would involve too great an expenditure of time. The serviceable gods should be honoured by the fireside, or at the nearest cross- roads.4 The absence of sentiment is everywhere conspicuous. ' The most handsome praise at one time in Rome was to be reckoned a good ploughman and a good farmer. " Virum bonum cum laudabant, ita laudabant — bonum agricolam bonumque colonum. Amplissime laudari existimabatur qui ita laudabatur." — Cato, De Re Rust, Praefat. 2. " Cato, De Re Rust., xxxix. 3 Corp. Inscripi. Lat, vol. vi., 637 — Latin also given in Duruy's Hist, of Rome (Eng. tr.), chap. v. The inscription is on a marble cube giving on its four sides the duties and festivals for each month. * Cato, De Re Rust., v., " Rem diuinam nisi compitalibus, in compito aut in foco, ne facial." 46 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION Why ? Because sentiment is not useful. The hedges and ditches of the uilla must be kept in good order : they are barriers to strangers. So much the better, argues Cato ; for hospitality is expensive. If a slave fall ill, the rations have been too liberal ; therefore reduce them. If a slave grows old or diseased, he must be sold precisely like old oxen or an old cart. The head of an establishment ought to have the faculty of selling rather than buying.' Elsewhere » Cato lucidly recognises that lending, like Polonius's borrowing, " dulls the edge of husbandry." Outside the field of family, society, and everyday life there are several ways of illustrating this deep-seated, practical ingredient within the Roman mind. It is visible in its power of modifying other traits, in its differentiation of Roman from Greek or Kelt, in its effect upon the course of literature, in its contribution to the influence Rome has exercised upon later ages, in its determination of much of the Roman religion. Other traits yielded to this overmastering one. Conser- vatism was ingrained in the Roman, but the practical over- came it. Let a Roman be convinced that a new thing was a good thing and he accepted it. This is clearly stated in the speech which Sallust 3 reports Caesar to have delivered during the debate on the punishment of the Catilinarian conspirators. Remarking that the Romans had taken military inventions from the Samnites and magisterial costume from the Etruscans, " in fact," he proceeds, " anything serviceable noticed among allies or enemies was followed up at Rome with the utmost eagerness — they preferred to copy rather than envy good ideas." Face to face with other nations, the Roman betrayed his practical nature by contrast. He instinctively distrusted the versatility of the Greek as something hazardous ; his steadiness • Cato, He Re Rust, ii., " Cum serui aegrotarint, cibaria tanta dari non oportuisse. . . . Vendat boues uetulos . . . plostrum uetus, ferramenta uetera, seruom senem, seruom morbosum . . . Patrem familias uendacem non emacem esse oportet." = Cato, De Re Rust., v. 3 Sallust, Catilina, ch. li. 38, "postremo quod ubique apud socios aut hostis idoneum uidebatur cum summo studio domi exequebantur, imitari quam inuidere bonis malebant." ROMAN CAUTION 47 was amazed at the mutability of the Kelt. Strictly practical, he could not appreciate the manysidedness which Greeks so often acquired as the fruit of an inborn endowment of curiosity. The Roman was cautious where the Greek took risks. The Greek was more adventurous, whether in dealings with his fellow-men or in literary creation. This is the clue to his originality. It is the spirit which leads to great and often sudden progress in history and to great achievements in litera- ture. It is also the spirit which leads to great disasters. Ultimately it is the same reckless abandon in the Athenian temperament which rendered possible the wild expedition to Sicily and the extravagant burlesque in parts of Aristophanes's comedies. Roman history has its disasters, but they do not come of Quixotic dreams bewitching the nation or of chimerical ambition overleaping itself. So there is nothing in Roman history to parallel the Sicilian catastrophe ; just as there is nothing in Roman literature to parallel the most laughable situations in plays like The Knights, The Frogs, or The Birds. So deliberately, as a rule, did the Roman official mind move that a temptation presents itself to think of the Romans as rather having empire thrust upon them. Yet, of course, their own efforts achieved it, only it was in that careful, practical manner which ensures success by foreseeing, recog- nising, and using opportunities. The advice of Augustus in favour of imperial consolidation rather than aggrandisement was scarcely needed by such of his successors as were normally minded. It was diflFerent with Pericles's advice dissuading the Athenian democracy from schemes of adventure : the success of their maritime empire had already turned the heads of many of those variable Greeks. They lost sight of the practical policy. Though still nearer kinsmen of the Romans, the Kelts also serve as a foil to this practical bent. When Caesar pauses in his Commentaries^ to touch on the indefatigable curiosity of the Gauls, their ceaseless questioning of travellers, their desire for novelties, their inability to hold to one line of policy, their general fickleness, he draws a picture which forms an antithesis ' De Bell. Gall, IV. v. 2. 48 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION to Roman doggedness and perseverance. In spite of the notoriously vexed question regarding the precise proportion of Keltic blood in Gaul, w^e may feel sure that certain traits of Gallic character emphasised by Caesar were essentially Keltic. We may feel equally sure that no stronger contrast to the practical spirit of Rome can be found than the dreamy, mystical, unconventional element in Keltic legend, folklore, and poetry treasured by workers in the modern Irish literary movement. The practical largely determines the course and themes of Roman literature. The businesslike Roman character ex- plains why Latin literary works have a more intimate bearing on contemporary circumstances than Greek literary works have. So far as causes can be assigned for literary achievement, the causes are more surely traceable in the case of Latin writers. Genius is not to be accounted for. But there is a sense in which Virgil is more explicable than Homer ; Plautus and the Roman dramatists, serious or comic, than Aeschylus and Aristophanes ; Catullus and Horace than Alcaeus and Sappho. Some of the best Greek literature rose divinely from individual inspiration. It shone forth with a radiance mira- culous, because unborrowed, in the fresh youth of European literature, v Most Roman writers answered some definite demand of their day. They seem less instinct with subtly incalculable forces. Before their experiments comes not merely the suggestion of a want to be met, but also, as a stimulating model, the successful achievement of the Greeks. This is apt to make Roman literature appear by comparison unoriginal. From the same root springs the prominence of didactic prose and poetry at Rome. In no literature do we find such ability to raise the utile to the level of the duke ^ — the work with a serviceable aim into a work of art. It is true that many Latin books belong to the " literature of knowledge " rather than to the " literature of power." There are handbooks on agricul- ture, on architecture, on camp-measurement. There is a ■ Horace, A.P., 343, " Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci." ATTITUDE TOWARDS KNOWLEDGE 49 massive corpui of treatises on grammar ; and though these latter, at least, are enlivened by priceless quotations from ancient writers throwring light on the history of literature, yet they do not themselves constitute literature. On the other hand, much that had a definitely useful end to serve, much that was avowedly meant to teach, became literature. Lucretius in the De Rerum Natura, Virgil in the Georgics^ and, to a less extent, Horace in the Jrs Poetica, elevated didactic into poetry. Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian showed how Latin prose could instruct and yet be beautiful. The truth is that a Roman's attitude towards knowledge was affected by his practical outlook. There was far less desire in Rome than in Athens to know for the sake of knowing. There was none of the boundless and insatiable Hellenic curiosity. This limited the Roman horizon. A typical Roman would not have sympathised with Plato's distinction in the Republic between an ideal arithmetic and that arithmetic of the baser sort which is learned for the purposes of trading (roi Kain\Kivuv evcKa). Knowledge, to be worth knowing, must be turned to account. Purely specula- tive philosophy could never have flourished at Rome. There never was a " mob of gentlemen " in Rome such as there was at Athens to love inquiry for its own sake. A Roman gentle- man might maintain a Greek philosopher, but the latter was expected to make his philosophy practical, to advise his patron in cases of diflSculty, and to be the keeper of his conscience. Moral philosophy did appeal to a Roman, for it had a bearing on conduct. Horace clearly grasps the deadening effect of the narrow preference for things which paid. It is a cumbersome and disquieting folly, he feels, to act on the maxim, "My countrymen, money is the first thing to be sought for ; good- ness comes second to cash." ^ This lust of filthy lucre Horace attacks not only for sapping virtue and banishing contentment from the mind, but for its ruinous effect on belles lettres. As a man of letters he insists on the incompatibility of tempera- ' Horace, Efist, I. i. S3— " O dues, ciues, quaerenda pecunia primum, Virtus post nummos." 5 so ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION ment between money-making and poetry. A few lines in the An Poetica flash the light upon a class of Roman schoolboys. The master is examining orally in arithmetic — easy subtrac- tion and addition. Correct answers delight him — and why ? Because the boy will grow up able to look after his property {rem poteris seruare tuam). It is hard for literature to thrive in such an atmosphere. Horace's objection is not to the teaching of arithmetic as such, but to the grossly utilitarian spirit in education, defeating the objects aimed at in the best " Grammar " schools, namely, to give in mathematics, music, astronomy, mythology, and other subjects a training which should enable and stimulate the pupil to understand literature.' The want of the ideal in Roman education depresses Horace, and his comment is a question : — Ah ! when this copper-rust, this greed for slavish saving, has once dyed the soul, do we expect poems can be composed worth embalming with cedar oil, or worth preserving in smooth cypress case?' No more fertile, no more solid way of summarily reviewing the character of a nation is to be found than by isolating the ideas and principles which it has caused to live in later ages of civilisation. The strongest elements of a nation's character constitute the permanent portion in that nation's contribution to the future. With her artistic passions Greece has bequeathed chiefly ideas of beauty. With her practical tendencies Rome has bequeathed chiefly ideas of order. Patristic study illustrates the persistence of the passion for order in a new sphere. Bequeathed to the Catholic Church as an heirloom from the past, the supremacy of regulation is traceable from the sub- apostolic age onwards — from the epistles of Clement of Rome • M. Boissier indicates the large circle of human knowledge logically comprised by the Roman education under "grammar" in its best and widest sense (La Fin du Paganisnte, i., chap. i.). = Horace, A.P., 330 :— "An, haec aerugo et cura peculi Cum semel imbuerit, speramus carmina fingi Posse linenda cedro, et leui seruanda cupresso ? INSTINCT FOR ORGANISATION 51 to the writings of Cardinal Newman. Broadly, Rome stands out as the great ancient example of an organised constitution, of codified enactments, of method in working an army and governing an empire. So quite apart from the survival of a portion of her religious and methodical spirit in the Church of Rome, apart from the entrance, through the language, of her literary spirit into the memory and imagination of the Middle Ages, apart, too, from the literally magical associations of the name of Virgil and the play of his style upon the Divina Commedia of Dante, Rome has impressed the world deeply through her mastery of the principles and application of law. Rome had the merits and the defects of being systematic. The same quality that taught her, and, through her, later civilisations, how to rule the peoples of the earth diminished her chances of being romantic. The same quality that taught her how to pass on a subject like rhetoric in handy form, fit for use in law-court or public meeting, diminished her feeling for art and her contribution to the world's poetry. It is the old contrast so well described by Virgil : — More deftly some will mould the bronze to breathe, I grant ; from marble draw the looks of life ; Plead cases better ; and with compass map The heavenly paths, and name the rising stars. Roman, take thought, with Empire rule the World ! These be thine arts — to set the law of peace. To spare the vanquished, and to quell the proud.' It was primarily as governors of the world, not as artists, that the Romans realised their destiny. Before their dominions extended, there was no natural taste for art. The Curii and Fabricii were content with a rude statue of the garden-god. ' Aen. vi. 848 sqq. — " Excudent alii spirantia moUius aera, Credo equidem, uiuos ducent de marmore uoltus ; Orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dlcent. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento ; Hae tibi erunt artes : pacisque imponere morem, Parcere subiectis et debellare soperbos." S2 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION The art of painting was so exceptional that the Fabius who adorned the walls of the temple of Salus bequeathed in con- sequence "Pictor" as a family name.i Though the Roman attained considerable skill in painting, more particularly as an art capable of beautifying the houses of the well-to-do, the lack of fostering patronage was a discouragement. Cicero observes pointedly that if Fabius's power of painting had been considered a credit to him, there would have been more great artists in Rome.= In the plastic arts, Romans were chiefly copiers or employers of Greek skill. To most of them there was little to envy in the fame of a Phidias. The very fact that craft in fashioning marble or bronze so eminently belonged to the Greeks, whom they had conquered, tended to make it seem unworthy of Roman hands. If in sculpture they did depart from the imitation of Greek subjects, it was usually to repre- sent some actual person, some historical event, some bit of realism, some instructive allegory. So later ages admire chiefly among the works of Roman hands, not their sculpture, though sculpture too had its Augustan triumphs, but those solid creations which reflect the national spirit — their basilicae, amphitheatres, aqueducts, and roads. In handiwork the Romans were greater engineers than artists. In yet another field it is instructive to study the domination of the practical. Much of Roman religion was determined by it. Religion in turn enters so largely into the literature as to prove its prominent part in the environment of the author and his circle. It is impossible to read Livy without being con- stantly reminded of the stress the Roman laid upon prodigy and atonement, upon the attitude of the gods, and the due observance of ritual by men. It is impossible to understand Virgil if the deeply religious basis of the Aeneid is overlooked. The practical aspect of the religion confronts one everywhere — in its origins, its development, its application to home and state, its elaboration, and its tolerance of new cults. In its beginnings, the religion of the Romans was practical rather than spiritual. Its roots strike far back into primeval ' Plin., IJat. Hist,, xxxv. 4. ' Tusc. Disp., I. ii. THE GODS OF LATlUM S3 and savage magic. Wrapt up with a mass of primitive beliefs in the powers of nature, spirit-worship, tree-worship, dreams, divination and sorcery, it strove to solve the riddle of the universe in the best interests of man. In the comparative simplicity and childishness of its rural origin, it made a strong contrast to the piebald crowd of inconsistent notions and superstitions which had appeared in Rome by the first century of the Christian era. The old Latin theogony was built up after the pattern of the early family and the pastoral life. Lacking the instinctive idealism by which Greeks refined their anthropomorphic gods, the Latin farmers thought of their gods under the concept most intelligible to them, of a heavenly family, wherein Jove was paterfamilias and Juno his dame. Originally many of the deities were powers of nature, like Jupiter, god of the sky, Janus (Dianus), god of sunlight, Diana, his feminine counterpart, goddess of the moon ; but the plain matter-of-fact Latin seems to have, wherever pos- sible, made his gods over again in order to correlate them with his everyday life, and so render them more present aids in time of trouble. He distributed among the gods special spheres and functions, great or small, to preside over ; he made them useful, even if he limited and vulgarised them. It is charac- teristic that these gods with definite functions often remained vague in form and in name. Generations passed during which the Latin gods had no images and no temples. The wor- shipper sometimes knew no more than that he addressed a spirit of power, a numen^ of whose very name and sex he might be ignorant ; and so the crude animism of primitive days survives in prayers or dedications to a deity " whether god or goddess " {siue deo siue deae). All at the bidding of common-sense, as progress multiplied needs, the Latin pantheon grew into a well ordered society of gods interested in the life and work of man and state. The twelve great gods (Di Consentes), six male and six female, formed a heavenly council.' But these were ' Their names are arranged in two lines of Ennius : — " luno, Vesta, Minerua, Ceres, Diana, Venus, Mars, Mercorius, loni', Neptunus, Volcanus, Apollo." {Fragmenta Poet. Rom., ed. Bahrens, 1886, p. 72. 54 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION for the high concerns of life.^ With what resembles an eye to the main chance, as if this celestial senate might not deign to listen to trivial petitions, the Latins created a group of lesser divinities writh restricted powrers, relieving the supreme gods of responsibility in minor affairs. It was not enough to inherit deities of time-honoured Aryan descent; they were sometimes assigned new duties ; they were still oftener as- signed new colleagues. Thus, alongside of genuine house- hold deities like Vesta (the primeval fire-goddess at the hearth), the Lares (the ancestral spirits of the home) ^ and the Penates (presiding over the store-closet), there appeared in domestic guise such a nature-god as Janus, originally the Day-spring. As a god of beginnings he was set by the door (ianua) ; and three assistant porters were found for him — Cardea or Carda, for hinge {cardo) ; Forculus for leaves {fores) ; Limentinus for threshold {limen). In this thoroughly prosaic manner, religious conceptions were shaped by the work of the carpenter. Then for rural needs there were Tellus, deity of earth, Ceres of crops. Ops of plenty, Saturnus of seed, Pales of pastures, Epona of horse-breeding, and even Sterculius or Stercutius of the manure-heap, with a host of others represent- ing the bounty and beauty of earth, woods, and seasons — Liber and Libera, Faunus, Silvanus, Vertumnus, Flora, Pomona. Hercules, it has been argued, may have been a farm-yard divinity, the spirit of the enclosure {herctum).3 If so, he is as truly Latin as Heracles is Greek. It is significant that his ' Varro (De Re Rust., I. i. 4) illustrates the Roman adaptation of gods to circumstances. Beginning his treatise on Agriculture, he feels that the appropriate invocation is not one to the Muses in the manner of Homer and Ennius, nor even to all the Di Consentes " whose gilded images stand all about the forum," but to the farmer's special guides, whom he names in six pairs : , Jove and Tellus, Sol and Luna, Ceres and Liber, Robigus and Flora, Minerva and Venus, Lympha and Bonus Eventus. They are the personifications of Heaven and Earth, Sun and Moon, Corn and Wine, Mildew and Blossom, Skill and Fertility (respectively the olive-goddess and the garden-goddess), Moisture and Good Success. It is a serviceable, orderly, and unromantic list. ' The other theory of the Lares is that they are originally agricultural— the spirits of the family fields. 3 See Granger, The Worship of the Romans, p. 128. Others consider him and his worship importations from Greece. UTILITY AND FANCY IN MYTH 55 altar was near the cattle-market. Rivers and springs were believed to have their guardian spirits, who were not so much creations of poetic fancy as guarantors of abundance of water. Juturna is a fair representative.' M. Anatole France, in 5«r la Pierre Blanche, writes engagingly about the romantic possi- bilities of her story ; how, gifted by Jupiter with immortality, Juturna could not die, as she fain would, along with her be- loved brother Turnus, when Aeneas slew him, and how she threw herself into the Tiber. There is certainly a fascinating ring about the legend of this living and plaintive Rutulian nymph in the depths of the stream, of whom the villagers might fancy they caught glimpses under the moonlit waters. M. France says the Romans did not develop the idea along the lines of romance : the heroine of such misfortunes was not left to her poetic melancholy ; she had a serious occupation entrusted to her — the Romans gave her charge of their wells. " lis en firent," he remarks, " une d^esse municipale." Is it certain, however, that Juturna was a romantic creation spoiled ? Possibly the romance came later than the notion of the goddess of wells. The strange beauty of the story is just as likely to be due to Virgil's poetic sympathy. Fairness, of course, must concede to the Romans considerable native gifts in myth- making ; but, as a rule, it was the more romantic Greek mythology that threw a certain glamour and literary charm over the workaday theology of Latium. Similar protectors for childhood were credited with interest in weaning an infant, in stimulating it to drink, eat, sleep, grow : they presided over its cradle, and its first essays in speech.® To Tertullian's and Augustine's quotations 3 from Varro's ' The well and altar of Juturna have been recently excavated close under the Palatine hillside and hard by the Temple of Castor. A brief account of the Fons yuturnae is given in E. Burton-Brown's Recent Excavations in the Roman Forum, iSgS-igo^, chap. ii. ° Even the unborn child was under the guardianship of Alemona, Nona, and Decitna, whose functions apparently would be resigned to the powers presiding over birth, Partula and Lucina (Tertullian, De Anima, xxxvii.). 3 Tertullian, Ad Nationes, II. xi. ; De Anima, xxxvii. and xxxix. Augus- tine, De Ciuit. Dei, IV. viii., xi. and xxi. ; VI. ix. ; VII. xxiii. In VI. ix. Augustine especially attacks the absurd multiplication of heathen divini- ties. He asks, for example, with regard to the marriage-gods, "Quid 56 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION Antiquitates Rerum D'tuinarum we owe much of our knowledge of this wealth of practical invention which created divine powers like Potina, Educa, Cunina, Ossipaga, Statanus or StatilinuSji Cuba, Adeona, Fabulinus. For other ages like- wise, and other acts of life, within and without the home, there were divinities ; so, too, for the self, all through life, there was the indwelling genius, scrupulously honoured and indulged by the Roman, especially on anniversaries of his birth. Evil powers, too, had to be reckoned with — a spirit of blight {Rebigus) or a spirit of malaria {Febris). The hostile spirits of the dead had to be averted at the Lemuria every May : but there is little resembling devil- worship or demon-worship in Latium. Here sound sense revolted from the monsters of ignorance and fear figured by Etruscan imagination in the sepulchral chambers at Corneto and elsewhere. Here the god-making was workmanlike. The Latin would trust or dread only gods whom he might under- stand through effects which they could produce or prevent. And this type of religious sentiment is still largely unaltered in Italy. It is an admirable instance of continuity from Roman times. Peasants nowadays expect from the Madonna and the saints the same sort of blessings as their far-off predecessors expected from gods and genii. There are saints for the vineyard, for cereals, for cattle, for bodily ailments. Heaven is repeopled with an army of helpful beings. Out of Jewish monotheism has arisen a new polytheism.^ Rustics exact miracles from their holy protectors, and cover them with foul- mouthed invective if the miracles fail.3 impletiu- cubiculum turba numinum, quando et paranymphi inde des- cedunt ? " * " Statilinum et Statanum praesides puerilitatis deos apud Nonium ex Varrone legimus," Aug., De Ciuit. Dei, IV. xxi. " The more ignorant Italian rustic does not feel it enough to have recourse to God and the Virgin Mary. A hierarchy of saints is required to serve various emergencies. This was well illustrated in April, 1906, when the eruption of Vesuvius was at its worst. Crowds of terrified peasants put their trust in statues of San Giuseppe and San Antonio. In case of disaster, prayers were often exchanged for curses. 3 This commercial rather than spiritual attitude between god and worshipper is in keeping with the legal nature of the Roman mind. The PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF RELIGION 57 The same shrewd character appears in the forms of worship. The early observances had the practical aim of winning the favour or averting the anger of a god. Sacrifice and prayers had not the moral quality attached to them in later times. The right ritual, the right victims, the right formula, the right epithet of a deity, became all-important. Appeals were made after the nature of incantations. Prayer was a magical expedient. Hence the value of the indigitamenta, or lists con- taining names of spirits in charge of the acts and risks of human life. Generations of experience made the Romans past- masters in the organisation of religion. All is orderly in the instructions for prayer and sacrifice, in the traditional lore (disciplina) of the augurs, in the duties assigned to pontiSs and flamens and vestals. The religious guilds {collegia) with their archives are as completely systematised as the boards of magistrates, Roman religion was eminently practical, too, in the moral efiects aimed at. It was a guarantee for sound social virtue. The gods required from men the kind of duties on which the fabric of the family and the community depended. They were just such simple virtues as the paterfamilias or tribal chieftain would inculcate — obedience ; reverence for father and fore- fathers, for the elders of the state, for the laws ; bravery ; good faith ; decency ; diligence. Nothing illustrates this better than the Roman tendency to deify abstractions. As time went on, temples were built and sacrifices offered to Virtus, Honos, Fides, Pudor, Pavor, Fama, Concordia, Spes, Pax, and similar concepts. About all this there was no lustre of romance.' But this prisca uirtus was the stuff which made Roman literature what it was and which made Rome mistress of the world. One of the greatest forces in Roman life was the feeling that religion was a serious concern, with elements of domestic, social, and national value inextricably intertwined.^ The notion of a contract as applied to religion is illustrated in The Religion of Ancient Rome, by C. Bailey, 1907, pp. 18-22. ' "Among the ancient Gentile cults there is none so respectable, none so prosaic, as the Roman." — Bigg, The Church's Task under the Empire, 1905. ' Domestic observances and deities often had public analogues. The 58 ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION pietas of the home, the unity of the clan or gens, and patriotism in the state received each its sanction from a ritual which could be shared. No day could pass in a Roman home without reminders of the divine. The gods had their portion of the daily food. An omen might at any moment alter human plans. Though mainly formal and but scantily spiritual, Roman religion, by an unfailing testimony to the nearness of the Unseen, afiFected character profoundly. Composite from early times, and never unified into anything like a creed, Roman religion became an intricate patchwork added to from age to age. In particular, it was profoundly modified by the Greek mythology. Yet, long before Greek influence operated, the indigenous religion was an amalgam of ancient worships descended from different peoples. There were Latin gods and Sabine gods. There were gods perhaps belonging to non-Aryan natives conquered by the Italic in- vaders. That the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline, the religious centre of Rome, should be shared with Juno and Minerva may find an explanation in the mingling of the worship of different stocks. The god Terminus, whose chapel was within the same holy precincts, may have been a stone deity of the aborigines. In time, Etruria and Greece made their great contributions to Roman religion. Rome was on the whole tolerant. Literary men were drawn to the poetic mythology of Greece. Their beliefs were eclectic. They drew freely from new religious systems. No bigot, the ordinary Roman was usually content to let Judaism, the Isis-cult, the Mithra-cult, extend side by side with traditional observances. There was no one national religion for the great Empire with its motley population of courtiers and proletariate, Greek and Scythian, bond and free. The one thing that approached to state-religion — Caesar-worship — was only formally imperial. The authorities demanded outward conformity to it from citizens professing the most varied systems of belief. This spirit of tolerance state had— corresponding to deities of the home — its Vesta, its " Lares Praestites," and its "Penates Publici" (perhaps identified with the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux). TOLERANCE AND PERSECUTION S9 was another illustration of the practical. If old religious usages were found wanting, why not try new ? In any case, why unnecessarily run the risk of oflFending foreign gods ? It was also another proof of the parallelism between domestic and civic religion that, just as an individual resorted to fresh magical rites if ordinary means failed, so the state resorted to new forms when, in days of disaster, the ordinary observances failed. Hence the welcome accorded at different periods to the Sibylline books and to novel practices from Etruria, Greece, Egypt, and the East. The persecutions for which Rome was responsible were not caused by bigotry. The hostility to the early Christians was due mainly to two aspects of Roman religion already emphasised — its relationship with the state and its practical nature. Pliny's famous letter ^ to Trajan shows that to the official mind the offence of the Christians was not their creed or their practices, but their apparently disloyal refusal to join in the public sacrifices. The average practical Roman would also be prejudiced against a religion so visionary as Christianity. While its aloofness from political concerns would strike him as bad citizenship, the more ideal aspects of the Christian faith would be beyond his ken. He could not appreciate its self-sacrificing altruism, its resignation to heavenly appointment, its disdain of earthly happiness, any more than he could imagine the more abiding Ciuitas Dei towards which the Christian believed his journey lay. The national character, examined here from several stand- points, inspires all Roman work. What it was in family, in state, in religion, it was in feats of engineering and in written compositions. Serious, practical, dignified, it engraved itself upon the literature, which exhibits the same ultimate qualities as a Roman law, a Roman road, a Roman triumphal arch, an aqueduct across the Campagna, the Pont du Gard near Nimes, the Wall from Tyne to Solway. There is the same solidity, the same steadfast purpose, the same gift of execution. The undeviating line of a Roman uallum or • Pliny, Epist, X. xcvi. 6o ROMAN CHARACTER AND RELIGION aqueduct is no more typical of fixity of purpose than the straightforward enumeration of a magistrate's cursus honorum in an inscription, than Roman victories won by tenacious perseverance despite of failure, or than the definite aim, often a strong didactic aim, which characterises so much of the best that was written in Latin. The literature, like all the products of Roman skill, has a reasonableness and dignity which command the reverence of the ages. THE EARLIER LITERATURE OF THE REPUBLIC From the Origins to 70 b.c. CHAPTER I THE EARLIEST LATIN The written remains of the first five centuries of the city — Their literary interest subordinate to their linguistic and historic interest — The remains as reflexions of environment and re- sponses to practical needs — Religious, festal, patriotic, political, social, and domestic features — Scarcity of genuine archaic texts — Modernisations and false archaisms — Destruction of records in 390 B.C. — The oldest specimens of Latin — The Praenestine brooch— The oldest official document — The Duenos bowl — Epitaphs of the Scipios. Archaic Latin from a literary standpoint — The native poetry — Prejudice against artes leuiores — Absolute denial of native literary power unjust to the Roman genius — Niebuhr's theory — Saturnian verse — Why so called — An Indo-European inheri- tance — Its structure accentual not quantitative — Rival theories — Carmina Saliaria — Carmen Aruale — Verses popular and his- torical — Native drama — Versus Fescennini — Satura — Atellana. The foundation of prose — Inchoate history — Priestly records — Records official and private — Law — The Twelve Tables — Their influence — Spread of le^l knowledge and rise of jurists — Oratory — Appius Claudius Caecus — The action of the earlier upon the later literature. The remnants of Latin belonging to the first five centuries of the city are not primarily interesting as literature. It is unfair and narrow to declare absolutely that there was no literature before the middle of the third century B.C. ; but the actual monuments possess a value in which the linguistic, the epi- graphic, the historic and the social elements outweigh the purely literary. The remains are not beautiful in thought or form ; but they have an importance in literary history by way 63 64 THE EARLIEST LATIN of contrast with and preparation for what was to follow. They mark the stage of Latin style reached up to the period when authors, acting under the stimulus of Greece, raised its power of expression, and secured for it, by manifold experiment, a suppleness and grace far beyond the apparent promise of the origins. It is not enough, however, to regard the archaic fragments merely as specimens of the language in the making ; or to adduce them as proving how essential to the birth and growth of ideas of beauty at Rome was her contact with foreign influence. Justice must also be done to their historic aspect. Everything written at Rome, whether on stone, metal, or more perishable material, bears the impress of environment ; and these fragments are indexes to certain social, practical, and religious features of Roman life. The early monuments are simple, rough, solemn, practical, like the folk of the city-state, who, during centuries of political struggle inside Rome, and continuous warfare throughout the length and breadth of Italy, had scant time left them for art. What, in spite of absorbing national preoccupations, the early Romans did principally achieve was the regulation of worship by ritual and liturgy, the commemoration of the past in song, and recreation for the passing hour in mumming and rude banter. Were it possible to obtain more examples of those old songs and dramas, it is very probable that the ordinary estimate of the Latin genius would be heightened.^ On the lowest estimate, that genius must^^^be credited with the pro- duction of elements capable of high artistic development after Greek models became available. Less imaginative than the Greek, the Roman runs the risk of being allowed no imagin- ation at all. It may be said at once that the vital and en- thralling stories of early Roman history cannot all be referred to Greek inventiveness. The Roman could at least create a • " To speak of the early Italians as having no original gift for literary creation is wholly misleading ; as if the imaginative impulse could be implanted where it did not exist, or the gift of the Muses be borrowed like money."— H. NetUeship, The Earliest Italian Lit, in Journal of Philol., vol. xi., reprinted in Lects. and Essays, 1885, p. 46. REFLEXIONS OF ENVIRONMENT 65 legend. He had the gift of adaptation too. As the horizon of Rome widened in Italy and beyond Italy, with the re- sponsibility of controlling new nations, there set in a tendency towards the complex, the aesthetic, and finally the luxurious, which was destined more and more to influence thought and habits, language and literature. This was merely a con- tinuance of the principle by which the Roman adapted himself to contemporary needs. The simple life so feasible in primitive days was impossible and impracticable for conquerors of the world. There is no break in the annals of Latin literature, any more than there is a break in the Roman character. " The Latin literature breathes, from first to last, the sense of a continually developing national life." ^ As might be expected, the monuments of the first five centuries entirely illustrate practical aims. They may be grouped according to their objects. Some of them served the uses of religion — either as litanies (axamenta) in Saturnian measure, like the chants of the Salian priests or the Arval brotherhood, or as the archives of priestly colleges containing lists of divine names and directions for worship {indigitamenta). Some, in the shape of rude dramas, served uses which in primitive society are uniformly associated with religion — those of festivity and merrymaking. Some, again, served as records of the past, and whether oflScial or private, whether annals kept by pontifices or tales chiefly intended to satisfy family pride by the glorification of ancestors, formed founda- tions, but not always very sound foundations, for later history. The uses of government were served by laws, treaties, and other official documents, just as the uses of politics soon called into prominence the power of effective public speaking, and so advanced the language in the direction of oratory. Uses social and domestic 2 were served by proverbs and pithy scraps of worldly wisdom, no less than by such tangible objects as mirrors, or the famous brooch {fibula) from Praeneste, which " H. Nettleship, Earliest Italian Lit., in Leds. and Essays, p. 46. ' Vessels bearing such inscriptions as Lauernai pocolom (Lauernae pocu- lum) were not domestic, but sacred temple utensils ; see F. D. Allen, Remnants of Early Latin, 1897, pp. 16-17. 6 66 THE EARLIEST LATIN by the inscriptions upon them have added much to our knowledge of archaic Latin. Though our concern is not with the phonetic and inflexional peculiarities i of archaic Latin, nor with the evolution of the Latin alphabet and system of writing," some review of the main examples of the language prior to the classical period is imperative. A difficulty confronts us at the outset. Few of the surviving pieces of archaic Latin — if we except inscriptions — can claim to be perfect specimens of the language at the period from which they come. A process of modernisation, age after age, has often altered the original form almost beyond recognition. Just as the old Northumbrian literature of England was transformed by West-Saxon scribes, so monu- ments like the Twelve Tables^ originating in the fifth century B.C., are known to us under the shape given them in later generations. Genuine archaic grammatical forms survive alongside of novel accretions ; and — to increase the con- fusion — the sham antique has sometimes been foisted into the text by archaising scribes of a subsequent period. The student of the early literature and language also labours under the same disadvantage as the student of the early history — the scarcity of written documents before the Gallic capture and devastation of Rome in 390 B.C. Livy virtually throws doubt on the authenticity of the sources of his own first five books by emphasising the remoteness of their times ani the wide destruction of archives, private and public, in the conflagration .3 But the destruction, though widespread, was not total. Roman history claims that the Capitol with its archives escaped the Gauls. Besides, in recent years, archaeology has unearthed monuments of the language from still earlier times. ' For a convenient summary of these see F. D. Allen, Remnants of Early Latin, pp. S-12. Cf. W. M. Lindsay, Handbk. of Latin Inscripts., 1897, pp. 1-13. = For a sketch of the history and morphology of the Latin alphabet (with bibliography) see J. C. Egbert, Introd. to the Study of Lat. Inscripts., 1896, pp. 17-71, and R. Cagnat, Cours d'Epigraphie laline, 2me. ed., 1890, pp. 1-34- 3 Livy, VL i. : " . . . etiamsi quae in commentariis pontificum aliisque publicis priuatisque erant monumentis incensa urbe pleraeque interiere." OLDEST SPECIMENS 67 Of the Latin of the kingly period there is no accredited representative. The fragments of the so-called legei regiae, known to us chiefly from Festus, descend from formulae of high antiquity, originally in verse-form (carmen), but modern- ised in time. Their collected form {ius Papirianum) is of uncertain date. So writh the Twelve Tables,^ as already noted : had they remained unaltered, they wrould have been inestimable specimens of the Latin of the fifth century B.C. How mudh of the Carmen Aruale, and how much of the Salian fragments are genuine archaic Latin, how much corrupt, it is impossible to decide. What is commonly reckoned the oldest Latin inscription is that on the fraenestine fibula, a brooch found at Palestrina. It is usually ascribed to the fifth century b.c.^ It runs, in a very ancient style of writing, from right to left : Manias med fhefhaked Niimasioi, i.e., Manias me fecit Numerio, " Manius made me for Numer- ius." Linguistically it is most instructive. At this period, the strong stress accent would fall on the first syllable of each word, but the vowel-weakening in syllables following the accent has not set in. So we have Manias, not yet Manius ; fhefhaked, not yet fe/eked (a reduplicated form older than fecit) ; and Numasioi, not yet Numesioi, which in classical Latin had changed its intervocalic s to r — Numerio. The accusative med has the -d typical of the ablative in archaic Latin. The sound / is conveyed by FH,. that is, the Greek digamma with the sign for h. What is regarded by a body of expert opinion as the oldest official Latin document known is an inscription on four sides md one of the bevelled edges of a broken pillar found in 1899 It the north-west corner of the Forum Romanum. It is usually judged to be older — perhaps a century older — than the Gallic invasion of 390 B.C., but not so old as the Praenestine ■ The best critical text is that by R. SchoU (Leipzig), 1866. = C.I.L., xiv. 4123. Stolz gives it as " aus dem sechsten vorchristlichen fahrhundert" in his Einleitung in d. latein. Grammatik (I. Miiller's tandbk. d. klass. Altertumswissenschaft, ii., pp. 239-248). 68 THE EARLIEST LATIN fibula. Among the few words left entire, or nearly so, upon the stele are sacros {sacer), regei {regi), kalatorem {calaterem), iouxmmta {i iumenta),^ and iouestod (possibly an old ablative corresponding to iusto). The occurrence of regei, accepted as a dative rather than as an infinitive, is taken by some to apply to a political king," by others to the rex sacrorum, whose magisterial office continued at Rome till the period of the Samnite Wars.3 The latter view would regard the inscription as in some sense religious.4 A passing allusion may be made to another of the most ancient monuments of the language, the inscription on the "Duenos bowl." The triple earthen vase found in 1880 on the Quirinal is known by this name because its difficult and much disputed legend contains the words Duenos med feced {Benus me fecit).S ■ Mommsen in Hermes, xxxviii., 1903, pp. 151-153, declines to accept iouxmenta as the older form of iumenta. "Diese Annahme ist unzulassig . . . lumentum heisst nicht Jochthier sondern Hiilfsthier." He derives it from iuuare. ' Mommsen, in the article cited, has no doubt about it. He concludes " dass die iouxmenta des Cippus ebenso dunkel sind wie alle iibrigen in demselben enthaltenen Worter. Eine Ausnahme durfte hochstens regei machen, wodurch, wie ich mit Thurneysen glaube, die Inschrift in die Konigszeit hinaufgeriickt wird." Cf. Thurneysen in Rhein. Mus. , Iv., p. 484. Professor Ettore Pais scouts the idea that the cippus can be so old as the fifth cent. — far less the regal period. He argues it bears on ceremonies in honour of the god of the dead — Soranus (Ancient Legends of Roman Hist, 1906, ch. ii.). 3 E. Pais, op. cit., p. 282. * For references to the literature discussing the inscription, see E. Pais, op. cit, p. 280, and P. Giles, Short Manual o/Compar. Philol., 1901, p. 579. Among its linguistic peculiarities should be noted esed (erit), as showing intervocalic s not yet rhotacised, and the unaccented e of -ed not yet weakened to i. In addition to Comparetti's large facsimile (Iscrizione Arcaica del Foro Romano, 1900), smaller and more easily accessible ones are given by Giles, op. cit, facing p. 579, and Pais, op. cit., p. 16. A facsimile is also given as Tafel I. in F. Steffens's Latein. Palaeographie, Abteil. I., ed. 2, 1907, with mention of leading literature on subject in Italian and German. The date there assigned is sixth or fifth cent. B.C. 5 The extensive and rather inconclusive literature on its inscription and purpose is referred to by Egbert, Introd. to Study of Lat Inscripts., p. 346. He gives a facsimile on p. 16. Cf. Lindsay, Handbk. of Lat Inscripts., pp. 19-23. EPITAPHS OF THE SCIPIOS 69 Belonging to a later period is the Latin of the oldest coins, dating from about 350 B.C. As an example of Latin presumably older than the Second Punic War may be cited — M. Fourio C. f. tribunos militare de praidad Maurte dedet, i.e., M. Furius Gai filius tribunus militaris de praeda Marti dedit, marking that frequent disappearance of final -s which plays a considerable part in the scansion of early writers like Plautus. To much the same period may be referred the well-known epitaphs of the Scipios in Saturnian verse, though it cannot be maintained that they date in each case from the decease of the man commemorated. For instance, the following epitaphs of the Scipio who was consul in 259 b.c, and fought in the first Punic War, are older than those of his father, who was consul in 298 b.c. : — (a) L. Comelio L. f. Scipio aidiles cosol cesor,' (b) Hone oino ploirume cosentioni Rlpntai"] {fRomane) Duonoro opiumo fuise uiro Luciom Scipione. Filios Barbati Consol censor aidilis hie fuel a [pud mos] : Hec cepit Corsica Aleriague urbe; Dedet Tempestatebus aide meretod.' Less archaic in its forms (e.g.y nominatives in -us) is the epitaph of his father : — Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaiuod paire prognatus, fortis uir sapiensque, ' I.e., in Classical Latin : L. Cornelius Luci filius Scipio aedilis consul censor. C.I.L., i., 31 ; Allen, op. cit, p. 23 ; Lindsay, op. cit., p. 39. = I.e. — " Hunc unum plurimi consentiunt Romae Bonorum optimum fuisse uirum Lucium Scipionem. Filius Barbati, Consul, censor, aedilis hie fuit apud uos : Hie cepit Corsicam Aleriamque urbem : Dedit TempestaHbus aedem merito." C.l.t., i., 32 ; Allen, op. cit., p. 23 ; Lindsay, op. cit., p. 39. 70 THE EARLIEST LATIN Quoius forma uirtutei farisuma fuit, Consol censor aidilis quei fuit apud uos ; Taurasia Cisauna Samnio cepit, Subigit omne Loucanam opsidesque ahdoucit.' The inscription on the Columna Rostrata erected in the Forum to C. Duilius in honour of his victorious sea-fight against the Carthaginians in 260 b.c. is in prose, and may be a modernised copy of the original, or possibly a composition after the antique by some ingenious antiquary under the Emperor Claudius, Approaching the subject of archaic Latin from a literary standpoint, we may review it under the heads of Poetry and Prose. To what extent did a native poetry exist ? The actual remains are notoriously slight ; the Romans possessed limited imagination. Can it be claimed that they possessed any poetry before the infiltration of Hellenism ? Poetry, it will be allowed, came slowly to them. They were not a stock to breed inspired singers in the youth of their nation. The earliest versifiers must have felt heart-searchings in tenta- tive essays at metrical composition ; and listeners probably felt equal heart-searchings in accepting them. It would go hard with verses that possessed no demonstrable utility, and had their only justification in an author's love of beauty and impulse to sing. The uncompromising^ words of M. Porcius Cato ring like a death-knell to poetry in its infancy : — Poeticae artis hones non erat : si quis ei re studebat aut sese ad conuiuia adplicabat, crassator (? grassaior) uocabaiur." ' /.e. — "Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaeo patre prognatus, fortis uir sapiensque, Cuius forma uirtuti parissima fuit, Consul, censor, aedilis qui fuit apud uos ; Taurasiam, Cisaunam, Samnium cepit, Subigit omnem Lucanam obsidesque abducit." C.I.L., i., 30 ; Allen, op. cit., p. 22 ; Lindsay, op. cit, p. 41. ' From Cato's book inscribed Carmen de moribus apud Gell., Nod. Att., XI. ii. 5 ; also cited in Bahrens, Frag. Poet. Rom., 1886, p. 57. The reading "in ea re ludebat" probably arose from mistaking the dative " re " for the ablative ; cf. L. MuUer, Q. Ennius, p. 24. NATIVE POETRY 71 Thus the staid Roman would reckon the poet to be the peer of the man of riotous living, and his sportive lays only so much misspent ingenuity, if not downright roguery. The term " grassator " which is almost certainly the right reading, dubs him a vagabond and footpad, a harbinger of Francois " Villon." The Bohemian would not have readily found toleration in pre-Hellenic Rome. The attitude is of a piece with the inborn prejudice against every occupation not directly useful. Singing, dancing, acting were all artes leuiores.^ It was only in Greece that such pursuits could be considered honourable.^ Yet there is a danger that these deficiencies may blind one to the existence, prior to the direct action of Hellenism, of a native literature in touch with the development of national life. Without the idealism^ inspiration, and glamour of Greek poetry, there were Latin verses responding to social needs. The mere joy in life might never make a Roman sing ; 3 but his heart could throb in sympathy with great deeds done by great men, and in admiration of firmness in facing danger. Occasions for songs were afforded by the death of a member of some family which had deserved well of the state, or by the banquets which at once honoured the gods and gladdened men. In the former case the nenia, or funeral dirge, de- veloped ; in the latter the heroic lay. In both the basis was professedly historical. In other songs the gods were solemnly invoked for material aid or present protection. Imagination was not free to soar. But, if there was no fine frenzy and no Sapphic rapture, it was something even to exaggerate ancestral prowess and to invent new ancestors performing unheard-of • See illustrative quotations in Teuffel, Hist. Rom. Lit., Pt. I., i. ; e.g. the younger Africanus quoted by Macrobius, " eunt in ludum histrionum, discunt cantare, quae maiores nostri ingenuis probro ducier uoluerunt." ' Tac, Dial., x. 7, " Si in Graecia natus esses, ubi ludicras quoque artes exercere honestum est." 3 Quintilian, taking the Salian hymn to date from Numa's reign, argues that there was at least some interest in music among the early and warlike Romans : " Veterum quoque Romanorum epulis fides ac tibias adhibere moris fuit. Versus quoque Saliorum habent carmen. Quae cum omnia sint a Numa rege instituta, faciunt manifestum, ne illis quidem, qui rudes ac bellicosi uidentur, curam musices, quantum ilia recipiebat aetas, defuisse" (Quint., I. x. 20). 72 THE EARLIEST LATIN exploits. It was something to picture the nearness of the divine to human life. It was also something to initiate a drama in which merry quip and banter were more conspicuous than plot. The not uncommon refusal to recognise any native literary power in the un-Hellenised Roman is partly due to a reaction against the adventurous extravagance of Niebuhr's theory. He averred that Rome had once possessed, but lost, a massive body of popular epic, whereof the songs once customary at banquets and the legends adorning the earlier books of Livy were distant echoes. All that was really beautiful in Roman story arose, he held, out of complete epics covering the period from Romulus to the battle of Regillus. Niebuhr's theory of a vanished ipopk, warmly welcomed at first in many parts of Europe, especially by scholars interested in primitive popular poetry, responsible, too, for inspiring Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, has long ago been exploded. It received a lively refutation at the hands of Taine,i and, indeed, is incredible in the absence of a single surviving fragment or single ancient mention of such epic creation. But certain of Niebuhr's contentions are of permanent value. In addition to reiterating the scepticism of De Beaufort in the eighteenth century as to the trustworthiness of what passed for the early history of Rome, Niebuhr had the merit of empha- sising the distinct testimony borne by ancient writers to the Roman habit of circulating heroic ballads. " If passages," he argued, "like that of Cicero's,^ in which he states from Cato ' Essai sur Tite Live, I. iii., § 2, " Selon la coutume des novateurs, il pousse la verite jusqu'a I'erreur." = Cic, Tusc, IV. ii., " Grauissimus auctor in Originibus dixit Cato, morem apud maiores hunc epularum fuisse, ut deinceps, qui accubarent, canerent ad tibiam clarorum uirorum laudes atque uirtutes." Cf. Cic, Brutus, ch. xix. 75, " Utinam exstarent ilia cannina quae multis saeculis ante suam aetatem in epulis esse cantitata a singulis conuiuis de clarorum uirorum laudibus in Originibus scriptum reliquit Cato." Varro (quoted by Nonius Marcellus, p. 76, assa uoce pro sola), " In conuiuiis pueri modesti ut cantarent carmina antiqua in quibus laudes erant maiorum, et assa uoce et cum tibicine" (i.e., with or without accompaniment on the flute). Valerius Maximus, II. i. 10, " Maiores natu in conuiuiis ad tibias egregia superiorum opera carmine comprehensa pangebant, quo ad ea imitanda SATURNIAN VERSE 73 that 'among the ancient Romans it was the custom at banquets for the praises of great men to be sung to the flute,' have no authority, I really do not know what have any."i Yet one may fully admit such authority without conceding that it logically implies the existence of what Niebuhr calls " complete and true epic poems." Stories like those of Coriolanus, of Curtius, and of the Horatii were not necessarily, as alleged, the subjects of previous epic treatment. The "verses" so easily detected in Livy's text by Niebuhr were less evident to his critics. Niebuhr, in short, confounded poetic material with poetic achievement. The products, then, of early Latin imagination, supported by positive evidence, may be summed up as including the themes, religious and secular, expressed in the Saturnian measure common to most Italic tribes; the Sdtura ; the Fescennine plays ; and, later, under Campanian influence, the At^Uane plays. The Versus Saturnius, a metrical scheme of primeval origin, received its name of "Saturnian" from subsequent poets, acquainted with Greek models, in order to refer it to a mythical past, the golden age of Saturn. The grammarian Marius Victorinus,^ writing in the fourth century of our era, says it was called Saturnius or Faunius to denote it as native to Italy. Varro3 records the tradition that the "fauns" of the woods used to foretell events in Saturnian lines.4 Ennius, iuuentutem alacriorem redderent. Quid hoc splendidius, quid etiam utilius certamine ! " ; then in a patriotic outburst he exclaims, " Quas Athenas, quam scholam, quae alienigena studia huic domesticae praetu- lerim ? Inde oriebantur Camilli, Scipiones, Fabricii, Marcelli, Fabii." " Niebuhr, Lectures on the Hist, of Rome, ed. Schmitz, 1849, vol. ii., p. 13. ' Keil, Gramm. Lat, vol. vi. (1874), p. 138 (Dc Saturnio Versu), " Prisca apud Latium aetas tanquam Italo et indigenae Saturnio siue Faunio nomen dedit." 3 Varro, Ling. Lat, vii. 36 (ed. Nisard, 1883), " Fauni dei Latinorum, ita ut Faunus et Fauna sit ; hos uersibus, quos uocant Saturnios, in siluestribus locis traditum est solitos fan futura." * Nettleship {Earliest Lat. Lit.), accepting the root-idea of faunus as being " speech " rather than " light " or " favour," remarks, " The fauni, from being the seers of the early rustic communities, become unreal beings, speaking with unearthly voices in the recesses of mountain and forest." Before they were Graecised into iraveg and adrvpoi they might appropriately employ the native Saturnian. 74 THE EARLIEST LATIN proud of the Parnassian excellence of his Hellenic hexameter, sneered at Naevius's rugged Saturnians — Which whilome sylvan elves and warlocks crooned, When no man yet had climbed the Muses' crags, Or craved for style.' This association writh prehistoric antiquity is in accordance with modern research. Scholars like Bartsch and Westphal = have investigated the similarity between the early Italian and the early Teutonic ballad metres. The result is to establish the Saturnian metre as an Indo-European inheritance, and to suggest that its structure is not quantitative but accentual. Servius seems to have been the only ancient grammarian who had a glimmering of the right idea.3 The attempts made by most of the others to explain what is really " folk's poesy" on the analogy of Greek metrical principles were as futile as the attempts of the older school of English critics to appreciate Chaucer's melody without a scientific knowledge of the final -e. Though Saturnian verse may eventually, when used by poets familiar with Greek literature, have been partially affected by Hellenic methods of quantitative scansion, its primitive and essential form cannot be understood by viewing its syllables as longs or shorts. It is misleading to introduce in its analysis ' Quoted Cic, Bru,t., xviii. 71 : — " Quos olim Fauni uatesque canebant Cum neque Musarum scopulos quisquam superarat, Nee dicti studiosus erat." I have borrowed the word " warlocks " from the translation of Joachim's Rom. hit. " K. Bartsch, Z). Saturn. Vers u. d, altdeutsche Langzeile, 1867 ; R. Westphal, D. altesteForm d. rOm. Poesie, 1852: cf. his Metr. d. Griech. For the theory of the revival of this primeval prosody in popular songs of later times, see R.Thurneysen, DerSaturnier u.s. Verhaltnissz. spdterenr&m. Volksverse, 1885. For supporters of the quantitative theory, see Teuffel, Hist. Rom. Lit., § 62, 3. L. Miiller, in particular, objects to treating Satuftiians on metrical principles other than those borrowed from Greek : see his Enni Carminum Reliquiae, 1884 (Quaest. Naeuianae, pp. xxxii sqq., " de Versu Satumio "), and D. Saturn. Vers u.s. Denkmaler, 1885. 3 Ad Virg. Georg., II. 385, "Saturnio metro . . . quod ad rhythmum solum uulgares componere solebant." PRIMITIVE ACCENTUAL SCANSION 75 any principle of quantity, even to the limited extent to which Nettleship, like Wordsworth ^ before him, applied it — namely, " the arithmetical equality of one long syllable to two shorts." = Unaccented syllables practically did not count. They might be dropped or increased at pleasure. To say that the metre " allows the shortening of a long syllable when unaccented {dtuictis) " is tantamount to admitting that " length " is mean- ingless. So " length " is. It is a term intruded from later principles of verse and inapplicable to the Saturnian. Two rival views about the structure of the line hold the field. According to the first, the scheme, if *■ denotes any syllable, is : — X i X i X A X I i X i X i X i.e.y applied to the time-honoured example : — DaMnt malAm MeUlli | Naiuid poitae. Thus, each hemistich or colon normally contains three 3 accented syllables, and each ends in an unaccented syllable. The basic principle being accent, several unaccented syllables, or none at all, may come between accented syllables. It will be noted that the ictus of the metre corresponds with the natural accent of the word in the first and penultimate syllables " Fragments and Specimens of Early Latin, 1874, pp. 396-397. Words- worth regarded the regular scheme of the Saturnian as a double set of three trochees, preceded by an anacrusis or base to start the line. The anacrusis and the thesis at the end of each half-line could not be sup- pressed. Substitutions of two shorts for one long, and of a long for a short in the thesis were freely admitted. With the admitted licences he arranged the full scheme as : — "I (")i (")i " r )r"(-)b: - = Nettleship, Earliest Ital. Lit., op. cit, p. 56. 3 It has been argued (Allen, in Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprack- forschung, 1879) that these half-lines with three beats are curtailed de- scendants of lines which originally had four beats. There may thus be a primeval identity of origin for the Homeric hexameter and the Saturnian. 76 THE EARLIEST LATIN of the second colon (Naiuie poitae), and in the penultimate syllable of the first {Metilli). According to the other view, the scheme, if *• denotes any syllable, is of two chief types : — (a) i X Ji X X i X I i x x x li x ddbunt mdlum Metilli \ Naiuio poitae; (6) less usual, X X X X X X X I X i X X i X prim(fl) incidit Cireris I Prosirpina ptier; a variety of the second hemistich of the a type being XX i X ix {adlochtus siimmi) and a variety of the second hemistich of the b type being x ii x i x {fulsse ulrum). On this hypothesis,' the Saturnian metre, like Romance poetry, reckoned — with permissible variations — a definite number of syllables to the line, seven to the first hemistich, six to the second. The first hemistich had three accents, main or secondary ; the second had two. The first syllable of the line was invariably accented. One observable ffeature about this plausible view is that it makes the scansion consistent with the ordinary and natural word-stress. It scans ddbunt, not dabUnt. Thus, although the theory renders obsolete Macaulay's^ famous example of a perfect Saturnian — "The queen was in her parlour | eating bread and honey," yet it gets rid of many anomalies in previous explanations and fits scientifically into our knowledge of archaic Latin. The themes treated in Saturnian verse were mainly religious or heroic or popular. Ancient allusions, as well as the nature of the case, suggest that this verse was fostered at the outset by religion. We have seen that, in the plain Latin mind, a stigma might easily attach to poetry too spontaneous, too un- ' W. M. Lindsay, Lat. Lang., 1894, p. 128 ; cf. his contribution toAmer. youm. PhiloU, vol. xlv., 1893. Otto Ribbecli dissents, Geschichte der rSm. Dichtung, 2te Aufl., 1894, i., p. 349, "Den neueren Theorieen von Westphal bis Lindsay vermag ich nicht beizustimmen." = In a footnote to the Preface to his Lays of Ancient Rome. SATURNIAN LITANIES 77 accountable, too remote from obvious needs. It was different when verse was consecrated to holy uses. The poet was then the priest or seer {uates), belonging to a class of depositaries ' of a sacred literature in which religious songs and prophecies bulked largely. Striking instances of such verses are the axamenta, litanies in Saturnian measure, annually chanted by the Salian priests of Mars, as in his month of March they bore his sacred shields round the town. Among the very oldest extant specimens of Latin are a few fragments quoted by grammarians from these Carmina Saliaria, which were bequeathed from one generation to another till they became, Quintilian^ tells us, too old-fashioned to be understood even by the reciting priests. All are very doubtful in text to begin with, and still more doubtful in restoration. In illustration I cite one report 3 of the text of Scaurus and one restoration : cuifie ponas leucesiae praetexere monti quotibet etinei de is cum tonarem {cod, Bernensis). This has been at least plausibly restored : — Cume tonas, Leucesie, I prae tet tremonti Quom tibei cunei, I dextumum tonaront. When thou thunderest, Light-god, before thee they tremble, Sith thy bolts have thundered on the right. Another venerable monument is the Carmen Aruale inscribed ■ Lamarre, Histoire d. I. LitUr. Latine, 1901, tome i., p. 49, " L'ancien sacerdoce italique n'avait point meconnu le pouvoirqu'exercent la musique et la poesie sur I'ame humaine. II eut ete difficile dans I'antiquite d'elever la voix au nom des dieux sans tenter de recourir a un parler plus qu'humain, et de la le langage rhythmique dont se servaient les pretres devins, les sibylles et les legislateurs de la religion." " Inst. Orat, I. vi. 40, " Saliorum carmina uix sacerdotibus suis satis intellecta." Horace implies the same difficulty in grasping their meaning iyiEjdsU, II. i. 86-7:— " lam Saliare Numae carmen qui laudat et illud Quod mecum ignorat solus uolt scire uideri." 3 From M. Ring, Altlateinische Studien, 1882, p. 51, where the other fragments are given. For a different version see Bahrens, Frag. Poet. Rom., 1886, p. 29. A most serviceable examination of the manifold con- jectures, with a reconstructed text, is contained in Maurenbrecher's Carminum Saliarium Reliquiae, 1894. 78 THE EARLIEST LATIN on a tablet among the records belonging to the Arval brother- hood I in 218 A.D., and found at Rome in 1778. It is, then, an imperial copy of an ancient prayer deformed through a long process of oral tradition and the blunders of the workman who carved it. The Fratres Aruales were a body of twelve whose pre-eminent function was the observance of the agricul- tural festivals of May. Just as the primitive farmer sought to avert evil by the lustration of his lands, so the Arval brethren, with ceremonial dance (tripudium) and the amplest sacrifice of pig, sheep, and ox [suouetaurilia), and with holy litanies, performed the solemn lustration of the boundaries of the state.^ As a state cult it was a replica of the worship conducted by a rustic household in the fields, and the invocation of Mars in this early fragment suggests his primitive connexion with vegetation before the needs of the rural community had created him a protecting power in its conflicts with neigh- bours. The text of the find is substantially this in rude Saturnians : — Enos Loses iuuate (thrice). Neue lue rue Marmar sins ikcurrere in pleores. (thrice) Saturfu,fere Mars: limen sali, sta berber. (thrice) Semunis alternei aduocapit conctos. (thrice) Enos Marmor iuuato. (thrice) Triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, iriumpe I and approximately the translation is : — Help us, ye Lares. Let not blight and ruin, O Mars, haste upon the multitude. Be satiate, fierce Mars : leap the threshold, stay thy scourge. Summon ye 3 in turn all the gods of sowing. Help us, O Mars. Huzza ! Huzza ! Huzza ! &c. ■ The most exhaustive work on the records and worship of the brother- hood is Henzen's Acta Fratrum Arualium, Berlin, 1874. = The festival of the Ambarualia is portrayed with fine imagination in the opening chapter of Pater's Marius the Epicurean. 3 Aduocapit may = classical aduocabite or aduocabit. In the latter case translate "The god will summon all in turn." FOLK POESY 79 Of broadly similar type are the old prayers quoted in Cato's De Re Rustica, prophecies lilce that quoted by Livy' on the draining of the Alban lake, and forms to be used by heralds in solemnly demanding redress or declaring war. To the borderland where religion most naturally touches popular imagination belong spells and incantations descended from primitive magic. These charms sung to cure maladies and wounds form a parallel in metre and spirit to Anglo-Saxon charms considered efficacious for sudden pains, although in the jargon^ into which the Latin has degenerated we find no poetic suggestions of folklore and elf-shooting as in the Old English. Popular verses must have existed early. Saturnians served for lullabies,3 saws,')- lampoons, and for triumphal greetings till displaced by the trochaic tetrameter, which became a favourite with soldiers in moods of mischief and rejoicing. Other metres, not quite Saturnian, embodied weather-lore : — Hibemo fuluere, uerno luio, Grandia farra, camille, metes. A winter of dust and a spring of rain Mean, my lad, bushels of harvest grain. Others enshrined utterances by the Merlin of early Latin, the half-legendary bard Marcius, whose prophecy about Cannae was in circulation at the time of the Hannibalic war, and to whom was attributed a golden rule of silence : — Posiremus loquaris, primus taceas. ' V. xvi. ' Not much is to be made of Cato's charm for a sprain :— " Huat hanat huat ; ista pista sista ; Domiabo damna ustra." Varro's cure for pain in the foot is more intelligible : " Terra pestem teneto : salus hie maneto." Bahrens, op. cit, p. 34. 3 "Lalla lalla lalla : i aut dormi aut lacta."— Bahrens, ibid. * The later popular poetry naturally is much more considerable. See Edelestand du Meril, Podsies Populaires Latines Anterieures au douaieme Slide, 1843, where only a few pages are devoted to pre-Christian poems. 8o THE EARLIEST LATIN The great mass of these popular verses has perished. Perhaps its most distinct traces were left in the military skits cited by Suetonius, in which, with a sort of Saturnalian licence, mummers plainly reminded a victorious general of his failings. More historical content characterised the dirges chanted by praeficae at funerals, the epitaphs on distinguished men, and the already mentioned heroic lays sung at banquets. Apparently this latter fashion resembled the usage of the Old English mead-hall, which in Caedmon's days required, as Bede tells us, that the harp should pass from hand to hand so that all guests should sing in turn. The significance of this has been treated in connexion with Niebuhr's theory. The beginnings of popular drama are to be found in the Versus Fescennini, the Satura, and the Atellana. The most primitive stage traceable in the old Italian drama is that of verses of the Fescennine type — merry, impromptu rustic banter, out of which in time dialogue might be developed. Such outbursts of licence, originating in harvest and vintage festivals,^ were fancied to avert the evil eye or envy of the gods on signal occasions of good fortune. Fescennine verses therefore remained long in vogue at marriages and triumphs,* where there was alternate rivalry in singing abusive indecencies with corresponding gestures. The custom of linking jests and gibes to the carmina triumphalia was a very ancient one : Livy mentions a case in connection with the victory celebrated over the Aequi in 4563 b.c. When metrical at all, the Fescennini seem to have been originally in Saturnians, but those which remain to us, in the shape of soldiers' ribald verses sung • Horace (Ejiist., II. i. 139-146) connects the Fescennine ribaldry with the jollity of an Italian harvest-home (condita post frumenta) : he also emphasises the elements of repartee : — " Fescennina per hunc inuenta licentia morem Versibus alternis opprobria rustica fudit." = Pliny, N.H., XIX. viii. 41, § 144, says of Caesar's soldiers at his triumph: "alternis quippe uersibus exprobrauere lapsana [i.e., meagre vegetarian diet] se uixisse apud Dyrrhachium." 3 Livy, III. xxix, " epulantesque cum carmine triumphali ct soUennibus iocis, comissantium modo, currum secuti sunt." FESCENNINI AND SATURA 8i at Caesar's Gallic triumph, are in trochaic metre.' It is a moot question whether this trochaic was borrowed from Greek example through the medium of the stage and adapted to the Latin accent, or was a development of native Latin metre. One thing is clear — the Fescennine verses and tomfoolery were essentially popular, and never reached the theatre. Livy contrasts the performances of professional actors {histriones) with the unpolished and offhand Fescennine verse.^ The origin of the word Fescennini has been much debated. The derivation from the Faliscan town of Fescennium in Etruria, and that from faicinum^ the symbol of procreative power, are both as old as Festus. Philologically, the connexion with Fescennium is simpler, and it has a parallel in the usually accepted connexion of the Atellane plays with the town of Atella. The next stage is SaturaA The most satisfactory derivation of this name, which had so great a career in literature, regards it as equivalent to satura lanx, the full platter of first-fruits offered to Ceres and Bacchus.s It is therefore essentially " E.g., Suet., yul., 51— " Urbani, seruate uxores, moechum caluom adducimus." See also ch. 49. = Livy, VII. ii., "(histriones) qui non sicut ante Fescennino uersu similem incompositum teraere ac rudem alternis iaciebant." 3 Munro, Criticisms and Elucidations of Catullus, pp. 76 sqq., supports this. As the base of the adjective Fescenninus we may postulate a word fescennus, meaning a- charmer, one with power to avert a curse or evil. This may possibly be the word glossed by Paulus, p. 86, "fescemnoe dicti qui depellere fascinum putabanlur." Ribbeck objects to the derivation from Fescennium, on the ground that these jesting songs belonged to primitive elements in the life of the people and were not imported like the Oscan farce {Geschichte der Ram. Dicht, 1894, i., p. 349). * The following may be consulted : Nettleship, The Roman Satura, 1878, and Earliest Lat. Lit, in Lectures and Essays, 1885 ; Mirmont, Etudes sur Vancienne poisie latine, 1903, pp. 349-358. 5 Practically all the ancient Latin scholars suggest that its original sense is a dish of mixed ingredients, a basket of various fruits, a forced meat of different materials, e.g., Diomedes (Keil, Gramm. Lat, i., 1857, p. 485) in addition to the fanciful derivation from " the Satyrs " (" quod similiter in hoc carmine rldiculae res pudendaeque dicuntur ") gives also the derivation " satura a lance quae referta uariis multisque primitiis in sacris apud priscos dis inferebatur et a copia ac saturitate rei satura uocabatur " : 7 82 THE EARLIEST LATIN a medley, and the name was transferred from the rural basket or dish of various ingredients to a performance that was a blend of various materials. As to its original form, it seems to have been a slightly more developed type of drama than the Fescennine. The peasants in their impromptus assailed their fellows and added some homely acting. The locus classicus on the history of the early satura is Livy, VII. ii. Livy there tells us that in connexion with religious ceremonies intended to avert a plague, in the consulship of Sulpicius and Stolo ( 389 B.C.), Etruscan performers were introduced into Rome to dance to flute music. Their performances he calls saturae, complete with musical accompaniment {modis impletae). He contrasts them with the old and less regular Fescennine dialogue. Etruria, it will be noted, made the great contribution of music to the early satura. Livy proceeds to say that " Livius " (Andronicus) was the first to give up these saturae and venture upon a play with connected plot of the Greek type.' We see, therefore, that Greek influence, embodied in drama of a more regular type, was destined to drive satura off the stage. As a primitive dramatic performance, then, satura may be inferred to have been a rough and ready piece of mumming resembling, but not identical with, the Fescennine ribaldries, and to have possessed dialogue but little or no plot. Plot was impossible with contents so miscellaneous and unrehearsed ; but a vigorous performance was attainable through the personation of various characters by the mummers. The failure to hold the stage was a blessing in disguise. It secured for satura an unexpected future. When, owing to the paramount influence of Hellenising poets, it ceased to be acted, it became a literary work with an imaginary and far more inspiring stage. The satura developed into " satire," and its cf. Isidorus, Orig., XX. ii. 8. Herein it resembles /arce, lit. "stuffing" (L. farcire) of jests into comedy. Nettleship prefers not to supply a noun, but to compare nouns formed from feminine adjectives, e.g., noxia, a fault ; dira, a curse ; so satura, a medley. Mommsen's view that it was the masque of the full men {saturi), or revellers, has not been widely accepted. ' " Liuius post aliquot annos qui ab saturis ausus est primus argumento fabulam serere." Satura is in sharp contrast to fabula, which implies a connected plot. ATELLAN PLAYS 83 stage, widened at first to Roman society, became finally co- extensive with the world. Roman satire always bore certain marks of its early miscellaneous and dramatic elements. Developing into a composition in various metres, it later still, as Menippean satire, admitted prose side by side with verse. From it, says Professor Tyrrell,' "was developed in one direction Latin Comedy through the Atellane farce and the mime ; in the other, that medley of topics and metres with which Lucilius lashed the town in those open letters to the public, which were very similar in scope to the modern weeicly press." It is a long way from the primitive Italian saturae to Horace and Juvenal, longer still to Dryden and Pope, Scarrori' and Voltaire ; yet it is one continuous road through the realms of mockery, sometimes genial, but oftener mordant. The fabulae Atellanae were almost certainly Campanian, and named from the town of Atella, though Mommsen denies this. They probably did not affect Roman taste till about the third century b.c. Once introduced, they were felt to be so thoroughly congenial that they were acted at Rome enthu- siastically by amateurs. Those respectable young men, Livy is careful to inform us, did not suffer the usual political disabilities under which the despised actor laboured in Rome.^ The pieces were distinguished by the constant exhibition of the conventional characters of a country town, and are com- parable with the Italian Pulcinello comedy and the time- honoured Punch and Judy. The stock figures were Maccus, the fool ; Pappus, the greybeard to be tricked like a pantaloon ; Manducus, the guzzler ; Dossennus, the hunchback ; Bucco, fetchaps, an embryonic Falstaff. These were introduced in ludicrous situations, as we may judge from the titles 3 of' Atellanae in the later and more literary form given them by Pomponius and^ J^ovius_ : e.g,^ Maccus Miles, the Fool as Soldier ; Maccus Virgo, the Fool as Maid ; Maccus Copo, the ' Latin Poetry, 1858, p. 217. " Livy, VII. ii. 12, " quod genus ludorum ab Oscis acceptum tenuit iuuentus, nee ab histrionibus pollui passa est ; eo institutum manet ut actores Atellanarum nee tribu moueantur," &c. 3 For a list of recorded titles of Atellanae, see O. Ribbeck, Comicorum Rom. Frag., and ed., p. 503 (ist ed., p. 411). 84 THE EARLIEST LATIN Fool as Mine Host ; Verres Aegrotus, Verres Sick ; Verres Saluos, Verres Well Again, Another characteristic seems to have consisted of riddles'^ asked in the play. These tricae Atellanae were familiar means of raising a laugh, and are attested by Varro, Suetonius, and Arnobius. The career of this type of popular farce was a chequered one. Raised to a higher artistic level by receiving a fully written plot, the Atellan play became a kind of comic burlesque. It could even be Hellenised enough to become a travesty of the myths ; that is what titles like Ariadne, Atalanta, Marsya, Phoenissae, Sisyphus in the Atellan list must signify. Popular for a period as after-plays, they had a brief renascence in imperial times, but eventually succumbed before the superior attractions of pantomime. It is a truism in literary history that prose is a product of later development than verse. Peoples sing before they write or speak artistically. If the verse during these early ages reached at Rome no pinnacle in the Palace of Art, it is not to be expected that the prose should attain a lofty degree of finish. Yet the foundations of a great prose were undoubtedly laid in the three departments of history, law, and eloquence. In each case the products sprang from national requirements. Religion in particular was the cradle of prose, as it was of verse. It was for the archives of the priestly colleges that prose books on ritual were composed, with a directory of worship and holy names ; it was always with religious formality, and in language largely borrowed from religion, that early treaties such as those recorded = with Latin tribes or ' Quintil., VI. iii. 47, " ilia obscura (if that is the reading and not obscena) quae Atellani e more captant." ' Horace, Epist., II. i.2S, mentions the enthusiast for the ancient inspired style of Latin seen in the Twelve Tables (originally Ten), the kingly treaties, the priests' books, and time-honoured prophecies : " Sic fautor ueterum ut tabulas peccare uetantis Quas bis quinque uiri sanxerunt, foecHra regum Vel Gabiis uel cum rigidis aequaia Sabinis, Pontificum libros, annosa uolumina uatum Dictitet Albano Musas in monte locutas." C/. treaties in republican period cum Latinis populis (Livy, ii. 33), cum PRIESTLY LITERATURE 85 with the Carthaginian power were concluded ; and the early ius ciuile coincided with the ius sacrum. The priestly literature included Libri Pontificum, Commentarii Pontificum, Fasti, and Annates. Originally forming an advisory body to be consulted by the king on matters of ritual, the pontifices became the depositaries of sacred tradition and the authorities charged with organising the whole state religion. They were not mediators between the worshipper and his deity, but interpreters of lore and counsellors in puzzling questions of prayer and atonement. Their influence doubt- less moulded the so-called leges regiae'^ and commentarii.regum, as records of precedent and guides of conduct. The pontifical libri gave the order of ceremonial and their commentarii con- tained rulings on disputed or difficult points. Their fasti at first meant a list of days on which law might be administered by the praetors. Later, by amplifying the enumeration of holy days and market days with anniversaries of disasters, and notes on constellations, the fasti developed into a calendar combining sacred, legal, historical, and astronomical informa- tion. The brief references to events probably made these records no less dry than our Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : in any case their appeal was in early times limited ; for the public had no access to them until Cn. Flavius published the calendar of religious festivals in 304 B.C. On the other hand, the Annales Pontificum or Annales Maximi, as they were styled later to distinguish them from briefer chronicles, were intended to appeal to the public. It was an old custom for the pontifex maximus to exhibit annually a white table mentioning names of magistrates, memorable events, and prodigies. This infor- mation we owe to Servius, who declares that when collected, as they were by the pontifex Scaevola in 120 B.C., they made Ardeatibus (Livy, iv. 7), and Polybius's record of the first maritime treaty with Carthage, supposed to date from 509 B.C., and difficult of interpreta- tion for even the best scholars in his time, 2nd cent. B.C. (Polyb., iii. 22, Hart roiiQ avveTuirdTovg Ivta /iSKis i^ iiriaTaaeinQ SuvKpiviiv). ' The fragments deal with points like pollution of an altar, burial of a victim of lightning, rewards for captors of spoils. Assault on a father is dealt with in these terms ■- " si parentem puer uerberit, ast oUe plorassit, puer diuis parentum sacer esto." 86 THE EARLIEST LATIN eighty books. Although the custom of keeping such records went far back into history, yet the oldest portions were repeatedly destroyed by fire in the Regia, the official residence of the pontifex maximus. Early history also received contributions from the civic officials. The Commentarii Magistratuum and Libri Magistra- tuum recorded magisterial acts and names. Some of the latter were written on one of the most ancient materials, linen : these were the lihri lintei preserved on the Capitol in the Temple of the goddess of Memory (^Moneta), Besides official documents there were private ones prompted by the desire partly to record the past, but chiefly in the form of family chronicles to gratify patrician pride by panegyrics on ancestors. Pedigrees {stemmata), inscriptions (tituli, elogia) beneath the ancestral busts, and funeral eulogies {laudationes fiinebres) may have contained a grain of truth in a bushel of praise, but they fostered the use of both language and imagination.^ The love of tracing ancestors into the legendary past was ingrained in the Roman. It found its ideal utterance in Virgil's elaboraf tion of the descent of the Julian house, and is illustrated in the books which Atticus wrote on the Junian family, the Marcelli, Fabii and Aemilii.^ In the early stages of law, that wonderful fabric which is one of the noblest monuments of the Roman mind, far the most prominent place is held by the Twelve Tables. They form the most influential work in archaic prose. The Tables were the issue of half a century of political struggle following the expulsion of the kings, A position of legal insecurity and ignorance of the unwritten law of custom jealously kept in patrician hands, drove the plebeians to demand a definite codi- fication. In 452 B.C. a committee of three is said to have • Livy and Cicero both comment on the untrustworthiness of family funeral orations. Livy, VIII. xl., " uitiatam memoriam funebribus laudibus reor." Cic, Brut, xvi. 62, " his laudationibus historia rerum nostrarum est facta mendosior." ' Corn, Nep., Att., 18. Atticus also wrote verses of a biographical and laudatory kind to be attached to busts (" ita ut sub singulorum imaginibus facta magistratusque eorum non amplius quaternis quinisue uersibus descripserit "). THE TWELVE TABLES 87 returned from Greece after studying the laws of Solon.» Next year the Decemvirs, specially appointed to register the laws, began their work, with the elder Appius Claudius as the mainspring of the undertaking. This Board of Ten, accord- ing to one account, received assistance from the Greek philo- sopher Hermodorus of Ephesus, the friend of the celebrated Heracleitus. The Greek influence, however, thus alleged to have acted on Roman law in the middle of the fifth century B.C., was too restricted to interfere with the national character of the codification. The Ten Tables of 451 b.c. were increased by two next year, and afterwards graven on bronze and exhibited in public.^ It is doubtful whether these originals escaped destruction by the Gauls in 390 B.C., but it is certain that the existing fragments have undergone much modification. Those we possess deal with such subjects as court procedure (postponement, compromise, and debating of lawsuits, summoning of witnesses, treatment of debtors), pro- perty (its transmission by will or otherwise, its protection by the state as in case of an owner's insanity), crimes, rights, damage, relation of patron and client, and disposal of the dead. There are provisions against bewitching crops (y«z fruges ex- cantassit) and against incantations (qui malum carmen incantassit). Another declares the killing of a burglar to be justifiable homi- cide («' nox furtum faxsit, si im occisit, iure caesus esto). The code was not merely of immense social value as a declaration of rights and definition of offences, " the well of all public and private law," as Livy says in a famous phrase.3 It was also of the highest educational value. Learned by heart in school till the time of Cicero, it wielded a potent influence on thought and phraseology. There is an interesting discus- sion on its style recorded by Aulus Gellius in the second ^ century a.d. He introduces into one of his Jitic Nights Favorinus, the philosopher, and Sextus Caecilius, the lawyer, ' Gibbon long ago showed the great improbability of this tale. It is rejected by authorities like Ihne for good reasons. ' Livy, III. Ivii., " leges decemuirales qaibus Tabulis Duodecim est nomen, in aes incisas, in publico proposuerunt " (446 B.C.). 3 III. xxxiv., "fons omnis publici priuatique iuris." 88 THE EARLIEST LATIN who, while waiting to pay their respects to the Emperor in area Palatina, talk about the Twelve Tables. The philo- sopher declares he perused the Tables with no less avidity than he had the ten books of Plato on Laws ; and when the lawyer praises their elegant brevity, the philosopher quite agrees, with the farther remark that there were also portions either very difHcult or very harsh.^ The plebeian triumph in forcing the codification was con- siderably lessened by the continued patrician monopoly of the legis actiones. Only patricians knew the rules for applying the laws and the forms of law-suits. This hardship was remedied in 304 B.C., when Cn. Flavius, actuated by Appius Claudius, a descendant of the noted decemvir, published the forms of pleading [ius Flauianum), as we have seen he did the calendar." fienceforth law could not be exclusively under patrician con- trol. Legal knowledge was put within the reach of all when Tiberius Coruncanius, the first plebeian pontifex maximus, ofiiered to teach law to any applicant. He was consul in 280, and from him, as the first professor of law in Rome, sprang a school of jurists who founded legal science. Oratory arose out of state afFairs. The power of speaking before a senatorial or a popular audience was necessarily deve- loped and esteemed in a community so keenly political ; but it was late before the Romans were masters of culture and taste enough to produce a polished type of eloquence. Their early efforts would be of the direct and forcible kind suggested by the homely fable of The Belly and the Members related by Menenius Agrippa for the edification of the plebeians who seceded to the Mons Sacer.3 If we accept the tradition of Roman literary criticism, we must refer the first artistic Latin prose to a much later date.4 Appius Claudius Caecus, censor of 314 B.C., consul in 307 B.C., and again a decade later, was a broad-minded re- ' Nod. AH., XX. i. 4, "eleganti atque absoluta breuitate uerborum scriptae . . . quaedam obscurissima aut durissima." ' Livy, IX. xlvi. 3 Livy, II. xxxii. * Isidor., Orig., I. xxxvii. 2, "apud Romanos Appius Caecus aduersus Pyrrhum solutam orationem primus exercuit ; iam exhinc ceteri prosae eloquentiam condiderunt." ORATORY OF APPIUS CLAUDIUS 89 former so versatile of genius and vigorous of action that he well deserved his ancient epithet of " the hundred-handed " {centemmanus). On land-laws and finance, aqueducts and roads, jurisprudence and grammar, even on poetry,' he left his mark ; but perhaps his memory was kept fresh not more by his Appian Way than by the stand he made before his fellow senators in 280 B.C., when, old and blind, seventeen years after his second consulship, he delivered his famous speech against granting terms of peace to King Pyrrhus of Epirus so long as that monarch remained on Italian soil. We can hardly judge of this speech from the Greek summary given by Plutarch ; " for Plutarch's version seems to owe at least as much to that historian's knowledge of Greek affairs as to any copy of the Latin speech to which he might have had access. The sur- viving Roman testimonies, however, show that Appius was regarded as representative of a powerful but obsolete fashion of speaking. Cicero, with the speech still extant,3 considered it rude compared with the oratory of Marcus Porcius Cato (B.C. 234-149). Tacitus, commenting on changes in oratorical style, and passing strictures on cranks who invariably upheld the old-fashioned, is prepared to meet with people who would admire Appius in preference to Cato.4 Seneca writes of faddists for whom the style of the Gracchan age (second cen- tury B.C.) was too polished and fresh — they had to go right back to Appius and Coruncanius.5 The influence of this earlier literature upon the later must ■ His carmina were of a sententious cast, such as " Every man is the fashioner of his own fortune" {"Appius ait fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae" Pseudo-Sallust ad Caes. de Rep., I. i. 2), and " Forget your woes in the face of a friend " {"Amicum cum uides, obliuiscere miserias," a Saturnian quoted by Priscian, see Bahrens, Frag. Poet. Rom., p. 36). » Life of Pyrrhus, ch. xix. 3 Cic, De Senect., xvi., " Ipsius Appi exstat oratio." 4 Tac, Dial., xviii., " Num dubitamus inuentosquiprae Catone Appium Claudium magis mirarentur ? " s Sen., Ep,, 114 : " Multi ex alieno saeculo petunt uerba ; Duodecim Tabulas loquuntur ; Gracchus illis et Crassus et Curio nimis culti et recentes sunt ; ad Appium usque et ad Coruncanium redeunt." This quotation is most interesting as showing the influence exercised by the archaic period on certain readers of the first century a.d. 90 THE EARLIEST LATIN justify the attention drawn to it. The main survivals may be briefly noted. The Saturnian metre still had a career ; we shall be struck with the acceptance of the old metre by Livius and Naevius, who were both acquainted with Greek models. The composition of a long Italian epic like Naevius's Punic War in Saturnians was a straight testimony to the author's belief in the power of appeal inherent in the national verse. The persistence of alliteration, an entirely un-Greek artifice, but one which the Saturnian metre shares with the ancient ballads chanted by the Teutonic sdp^ is another proof of vitality. Not merely earlier poets like Naevius thus " hunt the letter," but the device is taken over into the hexameter by Ennius, and, in imitation of him, employed by Virgil with Swinburnian deftness. There are Fescennine echoes in popular trochaics, as we h^ve seen, and in wedding songs from Catullus down to Claudian. The native drama, indeed, might have had a great life before it, but it was strangled in infancy by the dread of outspoken criticism felt among the nobility : ' there was no chance for an Aristophanes in Rome. Yet the Fescennine masque was not barren. It was the lineal ancestor of Latin Comedy, of pastoral amoebean verses like those in Virgil's Eclogues^ and of some elements in satire. The old satura itself, which the discerning criticism of Quintilian ^ marked out as genuinely Roman, handed on to later literature certain of its dramatic features and its olla podrida of material. Finally, as far as drama is concerned, the Atellane farce be- queathed, especially to the literary satire of subsequent times, that habit of mocking provincial oddities which crops out in Horace when he chuckles over the airs given himself by a petty magistrate at Fundi, and in Juvenal when he pictures the ragged aedile who has to smash up short weights and measures in deadly dull Ulubrae.3 As for the prose of the period, its influence was deepest in the province of law, owing to the prominent part played by the Twelve Tables in the educational system. ' E.g., " Dabunt malum Metelli Naeuio poetae." " Inst. Oral., X. i. 93, " Satura quidem tota nostra est." 3 Hor., Sat, I. v. 34 ; Juv. x. 101-2. SUMMARY OF QUALITIES 91 This native literaturp, then, is often cumbersome, and as yet lacks the highest distinction of style and grace, but is no less often solemn and dignified — it is always masculine. However powerful and brilliant the incoming Hellenic influence, these pre-Hellenic products of Rome must not be disdained as feeble and disconnected with the literature that was to follow. Im- potence cannot create, and this early work had issue. It con- tained the germs of later success. Genius cannot be borrowed : it can be modified and developed. Above all, it can borrow, and make the loan its own. That was the case with Rome. CHAPTER II THE INVASION OF HELLENISM The period from 240 to 70 B.C. — External history — Internal politics — Social conditions — Wealth and luxury — Degeneracy alongside of refinement — Traits which defied Hellenism — Sketch of con- tact with Greek colonies — Contact with the Greek mother- country — Spoils and art collections — Books — The Greek invaders— Causes of opposition — Dangerous versatility and unsettling theories — Variations in Roman attitude towards Hellenism — The victor vanquished — Positive contributions to Roman thought — Literary education under Greek auspices — Crates from Pergamum — Greek rhetoric — Greek philosophy — Polybius and Scipio Aemilianus — Carneades and his colleagues — Cato's vain protest in the cause of morals — Welcome to poets like Archias — Greek foundation of the later " Trivium " — Cicero's early training as a type. Outline of the period from a literary standpoint — National movements in the literature — Chief Hellenic aspects. From the end of the first Punic Wa;- (241 b.c.) to the first consulship of Pompey (70 B.C.), one hundred and seventy years elapsed. For Rome they constituted a period of manifold change in external relations, in internal politics, in social con- ditions, in intellectual and artistic progress. Every aspect of change told upon the native genius, but none so powerfully for literary development as the intellectual movements. The national rise into a virorld-power, the democratic inroad upon the ancient primacy of the senate, the increase of wealth and luxury, brought scores of new responsibilities and problems. These all stimulated the Roman mind ; but it was Hellenism which fertilised it. ROMAN EXPANSION 93 When this period of less than six generations opens, Rome has in Sicily gained her first province outside Italy ; before it closes, she has added Sardinia and Corsica, the Spains, Gaul in part, lUyricum, Macedonia, Achaea, and, in the official sense, Africa and Asia. She has established a protectorate over Egypt ; she is on the eve of definitely organising the East. When the period opens, she could not count on the loyalty of all the subject tribes even in Italy : wrhen it closes, the Italian allies have at last wrung from her the privilege of citizenship. Already Rome stands for civilisation in repelling the barbarians on her Macedonian frontier and in checking, by means of Marius's military genius in Gaul, Germanic hordes of the wild type destined ultimately to overwhelm the Empire. Rome's success during this period makes a climax in the history of the world. For centuries to come, peoples widely difiFering in blood, civilisation, and language were to own the suzerainty of one national will and one code of law. The imperial system was present in fact, though not yet in name. Internally, the development of politics during a century and three-quarters was no less marked. Though the commons had their legislative power affirmed as early as 449 B.C., and in theory fully established in 287 B.C. under the Hortensian law, yet their authority was overshadowed by the senate, especially during the hundred years of rapidly added foreign conquests from 240. Until past the middle of the second century B.C., circumstances played into senatorial hands. The senate was inevitably predominant, as the body controlling foreign policy, provincial administration, and finance. The close oligarchic ring, it must be allowed, had done great things. It possessed noble traditions of dignity, bravery, and caution. To Cineas, the envoy of King Pyrrhus, it not unnaturally appeared to be " an assembly of kings," The change, however, came as the pres- sure of foreign imbroglios slackened and as home problems craved attention. Among the middle class {equites), a strong group of capitalists had thriven on the monopolies secured to them without risk of rivalry, thanks to the aristocratic disdain for trade. State competition in corn, on the other hand, was ruining the Italian peasant farmers, already reduced in numbers 94 THE INVASION OF HELLENISM owing to the growth of estates {latifundia) worked by wealthy owners of slave-gangs or turned into extensive pastures. It was a revival of the old grievance of the fourth century — the excessive holdings in public land possessed by privileged occupiers. Economic discontent prompted the agrarian agita- tion of the Gracchi brothers, and the fate of the two reformers reopened discussion on the position of the senate. But the question became a burning one in other ways. There were growing complaints of oppressed and misgoverned provincials against their extortionate governors, who were often little other than licensed senatorial plunderers whom senatorial juries would not convict. Things were worse still when the war in North Africa against Jugurtha was grossly mismanaged by scions of noble houses actually in the king's pay. It was Marius, a man risen from the ranks, a democratic nominee appointed to supreme command by the popular assembly in defiance of the senate, who brought the war to an end in 1 06 B.C. Even more than the revelations before the commis- sion which sat to inquire into the military scandals connected with the African campaigns, it was this assumption by the people of control over the army that accentuated the incompetence of the senate. A new epoch of revolution had dawned. The republic was moribund. All the problems out of which the imperial rigime sprang were pressing for settlement. Indir vidualism was the mark of the great politician and the sign of coming monarchy. Sulla's dictatorship was the last attempt to buttress by main force the power of the senate at the expense of the middle class and of the plebeians with their tribunes. Though his impress on law was permanent, ten years saw his political work undone ; and with the overthrow of Sulla's constitution by Pompey and Crassus, in 70 B.C., the days of senatorial ascendancy were numbered. Politics here chiefly interest us for the effect produced on literature. Amid such strenuousness of public life may be discovered the real explanation of increased attention to history and of growth in Roman oratory. Social environment altered more during a few generations WIDENED HORIZON OF ROME 95 after the defeat of Hannibal than during the five preceding centuries. Foreign imports, comforts, luxuries, tastes, ideas, and beliefs had henceforth to be set in a Roman framework. The Roman became more adventurous in thought as in action. The great wars disclosed realms of intellect and beauty un- dreamed of hitherto. The common burgher, tempted by prospects of Eastern plunder, could become a half-professional soldier ; the moneyed middle-class descried openings for lucra- tive speculation abroad ; members of the oligarchy could, as governors, rifle provinces of gold and art treasures, or, at their choice, master the domains of Greek philosophy. There could be no stagnation in such times. Even though a sense of national security after the final overthrow of Macedon and Carthage might have naturally lulled Roman minds into inaction, any such danger — quite apart from the harassing troubles of protracted guerilla in Spain and risings of armed slaves in Sicily and nearer home — was obviated by vexing problems of internal politics touching land-laws, franchise for the Italians, and other reforms, political, economic, and social. The education drawn from turmoil is as valuable as that drawn from imported ideas, and more vitally affects the national character. But the foreign factors in this period are more obvious, and are certainly not merely superficial. In the social ^ changes it is to be noted that while non-Greek influences were at work, the Greek influences were very marked : in matters of intellect, formal education, and literature, the Greek influences were decidedly predominant. The most concrete social feature of the times is the heightened standard of living due to the ubiquitous inpouring of wealth. Unmistakable signs are the rise in prices and rents, greater complexity in architecture of houses, more elaborate furnishings, multiplication of silver-plate and table- delicacies, and increase of slaves.' Amid the evidence for I "Prices were forced up to an incredible degree. An amphora of Falernian wine cost 100 denarii, a jar of Pontic salt-fish 400 ; a young Roman would often give a talent for a favourite, and boys who ranked in the highest class for beauty of face and elegance of form fetched even a higher price than this (Polyb.,xxxii. 11 ; Diodor., xxxvii. 3). Few could 96 THE INVASION OF HELLENISM extravagant purchase of town and country residences, Oriental purples, effeminately soft materials of dress, ornaments of unfamiliar name, music-girls, dancing-girls, and nuniberless other ministrants to the most varied demands of caprice and pleasure, it is very easy to overstate the bad effect on Roman morals. The growth of luxury was undeniable. Others besides the stern censor Cato recognised it. The authorities repeatedly took alarm, and to check the danger recourse was had sometimes to excessive rating for articles of value, some- times to sumptuary laws.i Enactments restricting the fowl at dinner to the domestic hen and the wines to native growths proved futile in their quest of a uniform simplicity, because they ignored the extremes of wealth and poverty now existing in the community. There were other ominous signs. Bribery and corruption were rife at elections in the second century as soon as Eastern riches became available. Plautus is acquainted with some law of ambitus^ — probably an early one in the long series devised to secure the purity of the electorate. A sure drift towards degeneracy had set in by the first century before our era. If the common people had not actually become the rabble with the two sole aims which Juvenal sums up as panem et circenses, it was perilously easy to be fed and amused in the midst of cheap or free corn- distributions, multiplied festivals, and organised games. But it is totally misleading to dismiss the age as one of unqualified degeneracy. The moody complaints of Sallust and Livy regarding moral decay in their own or in imme- have been inclined to contradict Cato wlien he said in the senate-house that Rome was the only city in the world where a jar of preserved fish from the Black Sea cost more than a yoke of oxen, and a boy-favourite fetched a higher price than a yeoman's farm." — Greenidge, A Hist, of Rome during later Repub. and Early Principate, vol. i., 1904, p. 18. The general characteristics of a great part of this period are admirably illustrated, op. cit., pp. l-ioo. ' For legislation regulating gold ornaments, numbers of guests at enter- tainments, expense of banquets, and even the viands and drinks, see Greenidge, op. cit, pp. 27-29. ' Amph. (prol.), 73-^ — " Sirempse legem . . . Quasi magistratum sibi alteriue ambiuerit." LUXURY AND REFINEMENT 97 diately preceding times must be considerably discounted as due to their exaggerated diagnosis of ailments in the body politic and their roseate painting of a vanished era of simple goodness. Signs of outward prosperity do not necessarily argue deterioration in morals. They are not to be con- demned wholesale as pernicious. Some of them, indeed, argue national activity and elevation of taste. The truth is that, with the loss of pristine simplicity, two tendencies set in and worked side by side for centuries — one in the direction of refinement, culture, and literary creation ; the other in the direction of vulgar enjoyment, effeminacy, and, it might be, vice. So it is quite intelligible why the period should have in men like Cato its opponents of Hellenism as a suspected agent of weakness and corruption, but also in Scipio and his circle convinced champions of the new cosmopolitan culture. Before illustrating the effects of Hellenism, which so many Roman patriots regarded as a peril from the East, it is well to note that though in some phases it acted on the national genius at once, the perfect fusion of the best of Greece with the best of Rome belongs rather to a later age than that under discussion. In many phases the action of Hellenism was necessarily slow — for example, it could not promptly turn Romans into philo- sophers or artists. And there were whole tracts of the Roman temperament which, as we should expect, never yielded to the more humane and refined influences of Greece. Both in the manners of Roman governors and in the amusements of the people, there was an ingrained hardness and barbarity of nature. Nothing could eclipse the cynical Machiavellianism of Rome's final brutality towards ruined Carthage ; her refusal to either try or release the thousand ditenus from Achaea summoned by the senate to Italy in 167 B.C. ; her decision against the claim of Demetrius to the crown of Syria, because it suited her designs to favour his cousin, a boy of nine ; or her arrangement between the quarrelling royal brothers in Egypt according to the dictates of sheer selfishness.' Nothing in Greek history is for cruelty comparable to the Roman manner ' These are instances reprobated by Polybius, enthusiastic admirer of the Romans though he is : see Polyb., xxxi. 8, 12, and 18. 8 98 THE INVASION OF HELLENISM of throwing upon the market slaves who were prisoners of war, or still more shamefully obtained by piratic kidnappers. It was only by degrees that the iron rigour of the lords of the world, for the most part contemptuous of educated and uneducated slaves alike, changed to intelligent, if not always sympathetic, despotism. The periodic revolts of slaves and the defection, in Sulla's time, of Greek states, Athens included, were so many protests against the overbearing and relentless .loman rule. Then, the popular spectacles were inherently coarse. It would have been well if Rome had been more fully Hellenised in this trait, so as to imitate the graceful athletics and contests in finer arts which marked the Greek games. The mortal combats of gladiatorial pairs at a funeral had originally a sacrificial meaning, but such displays were pre- served and extended from a lust for bloodshed long after their religious significance was lost. A typical occurrence inter- rupted the musical exhibition attempted at a triumph of 167 B.C. The audience forced the flute-players to imitate a sham fight and the chorus to hold a boxing match.' " The public " hunting " (uenatie) of wild beasts, dating from the display of lions and panthers by M. Fulvius in 186, after the Aetolian War, continued this savage ci'aving. It is a trait which we shall find producing a detrimental eiFect on the drama. Roman society was never permeated with culture comparably with the Athenian society which enjoyed the tragedies and comedies of the fifth century B.C. Yet it looks as if, at any rate in the time of Plautus, there was a wide- spread interest in plays and an audience of Elizabethan intelligence to appreciate his Greek tags and puns. For an interval, Rome seems to have caught a general enthusiasm for plays on Greek lines. Apparently the novelty wore off and this phase of Hellenism lost its hold on the populace. Low pantomimic exhibitions, and the gladiator or wild beast Butchered to make a Roman holiday, ' Polyb., XXX. 14. L. Miiller {Q. Ennius, Eine Enleitung, u.s.w., pp. 37-40) criticises the story severely. He insists that, as Greeks, Polybius, Strabo, and Dionysius often fail to appreciate Italian manners and taste. EARLY CONTACT WITH GREEKS 99 ousted from fevour the more psychological actor, in spite of the greater proportion of festivals devoted to ludi scenicij With the superior polish of Terence, artistic drama diverts its appeal to higher circles. When Greek influence began to operate on Rome, it is impossible exactly to determine. Italy and Sicily had their Greek colonies soon after the traditional date for the foundation of Rome. There may have been slight infiltrations of Greek influence in the regal period through Etruria — the Tarquins were, it is recorded by Livy, of Corinthian descent. Con- sultations of the Delphic oracle date back, in legend at least, to the time of the kings. It is fancifiil to picture Rome quickened by the theories emanating from Pythagoras and his brotherhood in Italy, and more than doubtful whether she was awakened to such interest in Greek law as would prompt the alleged despatch of commissioners to study the Solonian code at Athens in the fifth century B.C. Commerce must have occasioned the earliest important dealings with Greek-speaking peoples. The intercourse which sailors and traders from Rome had with the settlements of Magna Graecia was fraught with great issues. There was much to learn from those highly civilised states. The borrowing -of the alphabet from the Aeolic colonists at Cumae is a familiar fact.^ The conquest of Greek states in Campania, South Italy and Sicily made further steps in the same direction. Greek surnames and customs became familiar. The keepers of the Sibylline books were of necessity acquainted with Greek, and the influx of slaves and freedmen spread some knowledge of the language even among the humbler orders. The first contact between Romans and the Greeks of the mother-country dates from 332 B.C., when Alexander of Epirus, the uncle of Alexander the Great, crossed to help his ' See Teuffel, Hist. Rom. Lit., Eng. ed., 1900, p. 122. ' The discussion of the adoption of the Greel£ alphabet and its subse- quent modifications must be relegated to the science of language (e.g., Giles, Manual of Compar. Philol. ; Lindsay, Lat. Lang.). The Greek form of letters in early Roman inscriptions has been recently handled by Ettore Pais, op. cit., chap. ii. (on excavations). loo THE INVASION OF HELLENISM kinsmen of Tarentum against the Samnites, These early relations with Epirus are marked for all time by the Latin word for the Hellenes. After a tribal name (TiootKoO in Epirus, the Romans called them " Greeks " (Gram). Diplo- macy, as well as trade, came to realise the necessity of knowing the language. At Tarentum in 282 B.C., the .Roman representative, Postumius, could make a Greek \peech. Cineas, sent by Pyrrhus to treat with the senate a year later, does not seem to have needed an interpreter.' The defeat of his royal master was both a revelation of the un- suspected rise of a new fighting power in the shape of the republic, and a proof that the entire Hellenic civilisation in Italy must acknowledge the Roman sway. It is significant that the fall of Tarentum in 272 brought to Rome in the person of Andronicus her first literary interpreter of Greek drama and epic. The first Punic War (264-241) widened the area of contact ; for the Greek cities of Sicily, with their opulent and artistic civilisation, ranged themselves on the side of Rome against Carthage. Relations with the Greeks of the mother-country grew • still closer when in her first lUyrian War (229 B.C.), Rome put herself forward as a champion of the Greeks. She thereby initiated that pro- Hellenic policy which so favourably impressed the anti- Macedonian feeling among the Hellenes, when, in 196, with imposing ceremony, Flamininus proclaimed Greece free. Thus at the time when Plautus was producing his dramas, Rome liberated the Greeks, and half a century before she politically enslaved their country had herself fallen captive to the attractions of their literature. From the end of the third century B.C. Hellenism is an abidingly strong factor in Roman civilisation. Its strength may be illustrated by the impetus it gave to collections of art and books, and by its contribution to Roman thought through teachers, both bond and free. It was with signal ability and sometimes golden-mouthed eloquence that these teachers fascinated their hearers, as they introduced them to the literature, oratory, and philosophic systems of Greece. • Plut., Pyrrh., 14 and 18. SPOILS FROM GREECE loi Hellenism acted on Rome with marked effect through a long series of public spoils and private art collections from Greeic cities in Italy, Sicily, and the East. It might be argued that marly of the spoils bromght to Rome and paraded in triumph from the days of Pyrrhus onwards had presumably no more lasting effect on the proletariate than the exhibition of trophies won in Zululand or the Soudan could have had on a London crowd. But the veriest mob does not lack imagina- tion. They must have felt, as spectators of a pageant, some vague stirrings dimly conscious of Rome's strength and the greatness of her oversea dominions. And it must be remem- bered that masterpieces did not depend on a passing procession for their chance of proving impressive : set up in public places, they were a constant provocative to admiration. At all events, for the better trained their presence was full of meaning and stimulus. It is worth while observing how continuous was the stream of beauty. In 212 b.c. Marcellus brought from Syracuse to deck his triumph the choicest statues and pictures of that renowned artistic centre. In 211 the punitive denuda- tion of recaptured Capua augmented the store of the beautiful, though to a less extent than the rifling of Tarentum in 209 by Q. Fabius. From Tarentum came Lysippus's colossal Herakles to the Capitol.i Examples of similar acquisitions are the triumphs of Flamininus in 197 over Philip V. of Macedon — which meant that the harrying of the East had begun — of M. Fulvius over Aetolia in 187, of Mmnmius over Corinth in 145,2, And not only enemies were robbed. Roman officials could force friendly cities, like Chalcis in 170, to yield their toll, of artistic treasures. The art collections of travelled officials often consisted of booty seized in some vandal foray ' See Mahaffy, Greek World under Roman Sway, p. 105. » Sulla amassed similar collections. The cargo of marbles and bronzes discovered by sponge-divers off Cerigotto in 1901, and now housed in the National Museum at Athens, may have belonged to one of his ships which foundered on the way to Rome, containing, according to Lucian (Zeuxis, iii.), the original picture of a woman-centaur. From this cargo was recovered the fascinating bronze so suggestive of the marble Hermes by Praxiteles at Olympia (Joum. Hellen. Studies, vol. xxi., 1901, p. 205 ; vol. xxiii., 1903, p. 217). I02 THE INVASION OF HELLENISM upon the rightful owners and shipped to Rome with far less compunction and reverence than accompanied the Elgin marbles to the British Museum. Much of all this was a craze of semi-intelligent cupidity. One does not claim that Rome was trained in a day. Polybius ^ saw Roman legionaries in Corinth playing at draughts on the Dionysus of Aristides ; and there was a tell-tale clause inserted by Mummius in his contract with his carriers stipulating that any works of art damaged should be replaced by others equally good ! The Romans had still something to learn about masterpieces in 133, when the royal treasures of Pergamum fell by doubtful right into their hands. But by this time they were in touch with many parts of Greece and were not impervious to their best influences. To take a good example, any visitor to Delos since the excavations of M. HomoUe can realise its share in educating the Roman in the East. Already the Graeco-Roman civilisation had begun. In time the less sensuous influence of Greek books was felt. The fashion grew of collecting manuscripts as well as curios. When Aemilius Paulus brought back from Macedon in 167 B.C. the volumes which had belonged to King Perseus, he formed the first private library iii Rome.^ The event fittingly coincided with the victory which Polybius judged to mark the decisive establishment of Roman supremacy.3 Book- collecting at the point of the sword continued thenceforth. Sulla, who himself wrote twenty-eight books of memoirs, aided the advancement of learning by seizing the library of Apellicon, the Peripatetic philosopher of Teos. It was a collection reputed to have included the original manuscripts of Aristotle and Theophrastus.4 Like Sulla, an Eastern con- queror, Lucullus also furthered Hellenic influence by trans- porting the great collection of the kings of Pontus.s His ' Polyb., xxxix. 13. = Plut., Aem. Paul., 28 ; Isid., Orig., VI. v. i : " Romam primus librorum copiam aduexit Aemilius Paulus." 3 Polyb., iii. 4, ^ aiinnig Kai irpoKow)) rjje Pw/toiwj/ ivvaaniag InTeKuinTO. * Dr. Mahaffy accepts this story from Strabo, XIII. i. 54 (Gk. World under Roman Sway, 1890, p. 99) ; cf. Plut., Sulla, 26. 5 Plut., Luc, 42 (koI '6\