CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM •^' lin^ 7 fro™ bottom, /or fimgiferentis read frugiferentis. „ 413, note I, add the words, 'Cicero also, in his letters to Cae addresses him as mi Rufe,' Ep. II. 9. 3, 1 2. 2. THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. CHAPTER I. GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. A GREAT fluctuation of opinion has taken place, among scholars and critics, in regard to the worth of Latin poetry. From the revival of learning till comparatively a recent period, the poets of ancient Rome, and especially those of the Augustan age, were esteemed the purest models of literary art, and were the most familiar exponents of the life and spirit of antiquity. Their works were the chief instruments of the higher education. They were studied, imitated, and translated by some of the greatest poets of modern Europe ; and they supplied their favourite text i and illustrations to moralists and humourists, from Mon- taigne to the famous English essayists who flourished during the last century. Up to a still later period, their words were habitually used by statesmen to add weight to their arguments or point to their invectives. Perhaps no other writers have, for so long a period, exercised so power- ful an influence, not only on literary style and taste, but on the character and understanding, of educated men in the leading nations of the modern world. It was natural that this excessive deference to their au- thority should be impaired both by the ampler recognition a THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. of the claims of modern poetry, and by a more intimate familiarity with Greek literature. They have suffered, in the estimation of literary critics, from the change in poetical taste which commenced about the beginning of the present century, and, in that of scholars, from the superior attrac- tions of the great epic, dramatic, and lyrical poets of Greece. They have thus, for some time, been exposed to undue disparagement rather than to undue admiration. The perception of the debt which they owed to their Greek masters, has led to some forgetfulness of their original merits. Their Roman character and Italian feeling have been partially obscured by the foreign forms and metres in which these are expressed. It is said, with some appear- ance of plausibility, that Roman poetry is not only much inferior in interest to the poetry of Greece, but that it is a work of cultivated imitation, not of creative art ; that other forms of literature were the true expression of the genius of the Roman people ; that their poets brought nothing new into the world ; that they have enriched the life of after times with no pure vein of native feeling, nor any impressive record of national experience. It is, indeed, impossible to claim for Roman poetry the unborrowed glory or the varied inspiration of the earlier art of Greece. To the genius of Greece alone can the words of the bard in the Odyssey be applied, avToSiSoHTOs 5* et;//, 9e&s Si fioi Iv (ppefflv oX^ms iravToias €v4(pv(rev^ Besides possessing the charm of poetical feeling and artistic form in unequalled measure, Greek poetry is to modern readers the immediate revelation of a new world of thought and action, in all its lights and shadows and moving life. Like their politics, the poetry of the Greeks sprang from many independent centres, and renewed itself in every epoch of the national civilisation. Roman poetry, on the other hand, has neither the same novelty nor variety of matter ; nor did it adapt itself to the changing phases of ' Horn. Od. xxii. 348. GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 3 human life in different generations and different States, like the epic, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poetry of Greece. But it may still be answered that the poets of Rome have another kind of value. There is a charm in their language and sentiment different from that which is found in any other literature of the world. Certain deep and abiding impressions are stamped upon their works, which have penetrated into the cultivated sentiment of modern times. If, as we read them, the imagination is not so powerfully stimulated by the revelation of a new world, yet, in the elevated tones of Roman poetry, there is felt to be a permanent affinity with the strength and dignity of man's moral nature ; and, in the finer and softer tones, a power to move the heart to sympathy with the beauty, the en- joyment, and the natural sorrows of a bygone life. If we are no longer moved by the eager hopes and buoyant fancies of the youthful prime of the ancient world, we seem to gather up, with a more sober sympathy, the fruits of its mature experience and mellowed reflexion. While the literature and civilisation of Greece were still unknown to them, the Romans had produced cer- tain rude kinds of metrical composition : they preserved some knowledge of their history in various kinds of chron- icles or annals: they must have been trained to some skill in oratory by the contests of public life, and by the practice of delivering commemorative speeches at the funerals of famous men. But they cannot be said to have produced spontaneously any works of literary art. Their oratory, history, poetry, and philosophy owed their first impulse to their intellectual contact with Greece. But while the form and expression of all Roman literature were moulded by the teaching of Greek masters and the study of Greek writings, it may be urged, with some show of trutli, that the debt incurred by the poetry and philo- sophy of Rome was much greater than that incurred by her oratory and history. The two latter assumed a more distinct type, and adapted themselves more naturally to the genius of the people and the circumstances of the B a 4 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. State. They were the work of men who took an activ( and prominent part in public affairs ; and they bore directl} on the practical wants of the times in which they wen cultivated. Even the structure of the Latin languag( i testifies to the oratorical force and ardour by which it wa; moulded into symmetry ; as the language of Greece betray: the plastic and harmonising power of her early poetry There is no improbability in the supposition that, if Greel literature had never existed, or had remained unknown t( the Romans, the political passions and necessities of th( Republic would have called forth a series of powerfu orators ; and that the national instinct, which clung witl , such strong tenacity to the past, would, with the advanc( of power and civilisation, have produced a type of history capable of giving adequate expression to the tradition; and continuous annals of the commonwealth. But their poetry, on the other hand, came to the Romans after their habits were fully formed', as an ornamenta addition to their power, — Ky\Ts'wv kox eyKaXkama-txa ttKovtov Unlike the poetry of Greece, it was hot addressed to th< popular ear, nor was it an immediate emanation from th( popular heart. The poets who commemorated the great' ness of Rome, or who sang of the passions and pursuits o private life, in the ages immediately before and after th< establishment of the Empire, were, for the most part, mer ^ born in the provinces of Italy, neither trained in the forma discipline of Rome, nor taking any active part in practica affairs. Their tastes and feelings are, in some respects rather Italian than purely Roman; their thoughts anc convictions are rather of a cosmopolitan type than mouldec on the national traditions. They drew the materials- o! their art as much from the stores of Greek poetry, as froir the life and action of their own times. Their art is thus a composite structure, in which old forms are combinec with altered conditions; in which the fancies of earliei ■ Cf. Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 2, 3. Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti ve recepti. At contra oratorem celeriter complexi sumns : nee eum primo erudi turn, aptum tamen ad dicendum. GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 5 times reappear in a new language, and the spirit of Greece is seen interpenetrating the grave temperament of Rome, ^ and the genial nature of Italy. But, although oratory and history may have been more essential to the national life of the Romans, and more adapted to their genius, their poetry still remains their most complete literary monument. Of the many famous orators of the Republic one only has left his speeches to modern times. The works of the two greatest Roman historians have reached us in a mutilated shape ; and the most important epochs in the later history of the Republic are not represented in what remains of the works of either writer. Tacitus records only the sombre and monotonous annals of the early Empire ; and the extant books of Livy contain the account of times and events from which he himself was separated by many generations. Roman / poetry, on the other hand, is the contemporary witness of several important eras in the history of the Republic and the Empire. It includes many authentic and characteristic fragments from the great times of the Scipios, — the com- plete works of the two poets of finest genius, who flo«rished in the last days of the Republic, — the masterpieces of the brilliant Augustan era ; — and, of the works of the Empire, more than are needed to exemplify the decay of natural feeling and of poetical inspiration under the deadening pressure of Imperialism. And, besides illustrating different eras, the Roman poets throw light on the most various ^ aspects of Roman life and character. They are the most authentic witnesses both of the national sentiment and ideas, and of the feelings and interests of private life. They stamp on the imagination the ideal of Roman majesty ; and they bring home to modern sympathies the charm and the pathos of human life, under conditions widely different from our own. Roman poetry was the living heir, not the lifeless re-V production of the genius of Greece. If it seems to have been a highly-trained accomplishment rather than the irrepressible outpouring of a natural faculty, still this 6 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. accomplishment was based upon original gifts of feeling an character, and was marked by its own peculiar feature The creative energy of the Greeks died out with Thee critus; but their learning and taste, surviving the deca of their political existence, passed into the education of kindred race, endowed, above all other races of antiquit; with the capacity of receiving and assimilating alie influences, and of producing, alike in action and in literatur great results through persistent purpose and concentrate industry. It was owing to their gifts of appreciation an their love of labour, that the Roman poets, in the era < the transition from the freedom and vigour of the Republi to the pomp ai>d order of the Empire, succeeded in pre ducing works which, in point of execution, are not muc inferior to the masterpieces of Greece. It was due to th spirit of a new race, — speaking a new language, livin among different scenes, acting their own part in the histor of the world, — that the ancient inspiration survived th extinction of Greek liberty, and reappeared, under altere conditions, in a fresh succession of powerful works, whic owe their long existence as much to the vivid feeling as t the artistic perfection by which they are characterised. From one point of view, therefore, Roman poetry ma be regarded as an imitative reproduction, from anothe as a new revelation of the human spirit. For the forn and for some part of the substance, of their works, tli Roman poets were indebted to Greece : the spirit an character, and much also of the substance of their poetr are native in their origin. They betray their want < inventiveness chiefly in the forms of composition and tli metres which they employed ; occasionally also in the ca; of their poetic diction, and in their conventional treatmer of foreign materials. But, in even the least original aspect of their art, they are still national. Although, with th exception of Satire and the poetic Epistle, they struck oi no new forms of poetic composition, yet those adopted b them assumed something of a new type, owing to th weight of their contents, the massive structure of th GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 7 Roman language, the fervour and gravity of the Roman temperament, and the practical bent and logical mould of the Roman understanding. They were not equally successful in all the forms which they attempted to reproduce. They were especially inferior^ to their masters in tragedy. They betray the inferiority of their dramatic genius also in other fields of literature, especially in epic and idyllic poetry, and in philosophical dialogues. They express passion and feeling either directly from their own hearts and experience, or in great rhetorical passages, attributed to the imaginary personages of their story — to Ariadne or Dido, to Turnus or Mezentius. But this occasional utterance of passion and sentiment is not united in them with a vivid delineation of the complex characters of men ; and it is only in their comic poetry that they are quite successful in reproducing the natural and lively interchange of speech. There is thus, as com- pared with Homer and Theocritus, a deficiency of personal interest in the epic, descriptive, and idyllic poetry of Virgil. The natural play of characters, acting and reacting upon one another, scarcely, if at allj enlivens the divinely- appointed action of the Aeneid, nor adds the charm of human associations to the poet's deep and quiet pictures of rural beauty, and to his graceful expression of pensive and tender feeling. The Romans, as a race, were wanting also in speculative capacity ; and thus their poetry does not rise, or rises only in Lucretius, to those imaginative heights from which the great lyrical and dramatic poets of Greece contemplated the wonder and solemnity of life. Yet both the epic and the lyrical poetry of Rome have a character and perfection of their own. The Aeneid, with many resemblances in points of detail to the poems of Homer, is yet, in design and execution, a true national monument. The lyrical poetry of Rome, if inferior to the choral poetry of Greece in range of thought and in ethereal grace of expression, and scarcely equalling the few fragments of the early Aeolic poetry in the force of passion, is yet an instrument of varied power, 8 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. capable of investing the lighter moods or more transien joys of life with an unfading charm, and rising into fulle and more commanding tones to express the national sen timent and moral dignity of Rome. Didactic poetry ob tained in Lucretius and Virgil ampler volume and pro founder meaning than in their Greek models, Empedocle and Hesiod. It was by the skill of the two great Latii poets that poetic art was made to embrace within its pro vince the treatment of a great philosophical argument, an( of a great practical pursuit. The Satires and Epistles c Horace showed, for the first time, how the didactic spiri could deal in poetry with the conduct and familiar experi ence of life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, whil borrowing the outward form of their compositions from th early poets of Ionia and the later writers at the court c Alexandria, have taken the substance of their poetry to ; great extent from their own lives and interests ; and hav treated their materials with a fluent brilliancy of style, an( often, with a graceful tenderness of feeling, unborrowe( from any foreign source. It may thus be generally affirme( that the Roman poets, although adding little to the grea discoveries or inventions in literature, and although no equally successful in all their adaptations of the invention of their predecessors, have yet left the stamp of their ow genius and character on some of the great forms whic poetry has hitherto assumed. ► The metres of Roman poetry are also seen to be adapt ations to the Latin language of the metre^s previously em ployed in the epic, lyrical, and dramatic poetry of Greec( The Italian race had, in earlier times, struck out a nativ measure, called the Saturnian, — of a rapid and irregula movement, — in which their religious emotions, their festiv and satiric raillery, and their commemora;tive instinct found a rude expression. But after this measure had bee rejected by Ennius, as unsuited to the gravity of his great est work, the Roman poets continued to imitate the metre of their Greek predecessors. But, in their hands, thes became characterised by a slower, more stately, and regula GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 9 movement, not only differing widely from the ring of the native Saturnian rhythm, but also, with every improvement in poetic accomplishment, receding further and further from the freedom and variety of the Greek measures. The comic and tragic measures, in which alone the Roman writers observed a less strict rule than their. models, never attained among them to any high metrical excellence. The rhythm of the Greek poets, owing in a great measure to the frequency of vowel sounds in their language, is more flowing, more varied, and more richly musical than that of Roman poetry. Thus, although their verse is constructed on the same metrical laws, there is the most marked con- trast between the rapidity and buoyancy of the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the stately and weighty march of the Aeneid. Notwithstanding their outward conformity to the canons of a foreign language, the most powerful and characteristic measures of Roman poetry, — such as the Lucretian and the Virgilian hexameter, and the Horatian alcaic, — are dis- tinguished by a grave, orderly, and commanding tone, sym- bolical of the genius and the majesty of Rome. In such cases, as the Horatian sapphic and the Ovidian elegiac, where the structure of the verse is too slight to produce this impressive effect, thei'e is still a remarkable divergence from the freedom and manifold harmony of the early Greek - poets to a uniform and monotonous cadence. The language, also, of Roman poetry betrays many traces of imitation. Some of the early Latin tragedies were literal translations from the works of the Athenian dramatists ; and fragments of the rude Roman copy may still be compared with the polished expression of the original. Some familiar passages of the Iliad may be traced among the rough-hewn fragments of the Annals of Ennius. Even Lucretius, whose diction, more than that of most poets, produces the impression of being the im- mediate creation of his own mind, has described outward objects, and clothed his thoughts, in language borrowed from Homer and Empedocles. The short volume of Catullus contains translations from Sappho and Calli- 10 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. machus, and frequent imitations of other Greek poets and, from the extant fragments of Alcaeus, Anacreon, anc others of the Greek lyric poets, it may be seen how fre quently Horace availed himself of some turn of thei expression to invest his own experience with old poeti( associations. Virgil, whose great success is, in no sligh measure, due to the skill and taste with which he usee the materials of earlier Greek and native writers, has re produced the heroic tones of Homer in his epic, and th( mellow cadences of Theocritus in his pastoral poems ; anc has blended something of the antique quaintness anc oracular sanctity of Hesiod with the golden perfection o his Georgics. But besides the direct debt which each Roman poe owed to the Greek author or authors whom he imitated it is difficult to estimate the extent to which the taste o the later Romans was formed by the familiar study of : foreign language so much superior to the rude speed spoken by their fathers. The habitual study of any foreigi language has an influence not on style only, but even oi the structure of thought and the development of emotion The Roman poets first learned, from the study of Greel poetry, to feel the graceful combinations and the musica power of expression, and were thus stimulated and trainee to elicit similar effects from their native language. It i for this gift, or power over language, that Lucretius pray in his invocation to the creative power of NaturCj — Quo magis aetemum da dictis, diva, leporem ; and it is this which Catullus claims as the characteristi excellence of his own poems. The Augustan poets attained a still greater success ii the variations of words and rhythm ; but this success wa gained with some loss of direct force and freshness in th expression of feeling. And it may be said generally tha the Latin language, in its adaptation to poetry, lost som of its powers as an immediate vehicle of thought. Ii Virgil and in Horace, words are combined in a less natura GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 1 1 order than in Homer and the Attic dramatists. Their language does not strike the mind with the spontaneous force of Greek poetry, nor does it seem equally capable of being rapidly followed by a popular audience. Catullus alone among the great Roman poets combines perfect grace with the happiest freedom and simplicity. Yet the studied and compact diction of Latin poetry, if wanting in fluency, ease, and directness, lays a strong hold upon the mind, by its power of marking with emphasis what is most essential and prominent in the ideas and objects presented to the imagination. The thought and sentiment of Rome have thus been engraved on her poetical literature, in deep and enduring characters. And, notwithstanding all mani- fest traces of imitation, the diction of the greatest Roman poets attests the presence of genuine creative power. A strong vital force is recognised in the direct and vigorous diction of Ennius and Lucretius ; and, though more latent, it is not less really present under the stateliness and chastened splendour of Virgil, and the subtle moderation of Horace. Roman poetry owes also a considerable part of its con- tents to Greek thought, art, and traditions. This is the chief explanation of that conventional character which detracts from the originality of some of the masterpieces of Roman genius. The old religious belief of Rome and Italy became merged in the poetical restoration of the Olympian Gods ; the story of the origin of Rome was in- separably connected with the personages of Greek poetry; the familiar manners of a late civilisation appear in un- natural association with the idealised features of the heroic age. Even the expression of personal feeling, experience, and convictions is often coloured by light reflected from earlier representations. Hence a great deal in Latin poetry appears to come less directly from the poet's heart, and to fit less closely to the facts of human life, than the best poetry both of Greece and of modern nations. This imi- tative and composite workmanship is more apparent in the later than in the earlier poets. The substance and thought 12 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. of Ennius, Lucretius, and Catullus, even when they repro duce Greek materials, appear to be more vivified by thei own feeling than the substance and thought of the Augustai poets. The beautiful and stately forms of Greek legend which lived a second life in the young imagination o Catullus, were becoming trite and conventional to Virgil :- Cetera, quae vacuas tenuissent cannina mentes, Omnia jam vulgata. The ideal aspect of the golden morning of the world ha been seized with a truer feeling in the Epithalamium o Peleus and Thetis than in the episode of the 'Pasto Aristaeus ' in the Georgics. Not only are the main feature in the story of the Aeneid of foreign origin, but the treat ment of the story betrays some want of vital sympath; with the heterogeneous elements out of which it is com posed. The poem is a religious as well as a great hationa work ; but the religious creed which is expressed in it i a composite result of Greek mythology, of Roman sen timent, and of ideas derived from an eclectic philosophj; The manners represented in the poem are a medley of th Augustan and of the Homeric age, as seen in vague pre portions, through the mists of antiquarian learning. I must, indeed, be remembered that Greek traditions ha' penetrated into the life of the whole civilised world, ani that the belief in the connexion of Rome with Troy ha rooted itself in the Roman mind for two centuries befor the time of Virgil. Still, the tale of the settlement c Aeneas in Latium, as told in the great Roman epic, beai the mark of the artificial construction of a late and prosai era, not of the spontaneous growth of imaginative legen( in a lively and creative age. So^ also, in another sphei of poetry, while there are genuine touches of nature in a the odes of Horace, yet the mythological accessories < some of those which celebrate the praises of a god, or tt charms of a mistress, seem to stand in no vital relatio with the genuine convictions of the poet. Roman poetry, from this point of view, appears to t GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 13 the old Greek art reappearing under new conditions : or rather the new art of the civih'sed world, after it had been thoroughly leavened by Greek thought, taste, and education. The poetry of Rome was, however, a living power, after the creative energy of Greece had disappeared, so that, were it nothing more,' that literature would still be valuable as the fruit of the later summer of antiquity. As in Homer, the earliest poet of the ancient world, there is a kind of promise of the great life that' was to be ; so, in the Augustan poets, there is a retrospective contemplation of the life, the religion, and the art of the past, — a gathering up of ' the long results of time.' But the Roman poets had also a strong vein of original character and feeling, and many phases of national and 'personal experience to reveal. They had to give a permanent expression to the idea of Rome, and to perpetuate the charm of the land and life of Italy. In their highest tones, they give utter- ance to the patriotic spirit, the dignified and commanding attributes, and the moral strength of the Imperial Republic. But other elements in their art proclaim their large in- heritance of the receptive and emotional nature which, in ancient as in modern times, has characterised the Southern nations. As the patrician and plebeian orders were united in the imperial greatness of the commonwealth, as the energy of Rome and of the other Italian communities was welded together to form a mighty national life, so these apparently antagonistic elements combined to create the majesty and beauty of Roman poetry. Either of these elements would by itself have been unproductive and in- complete. The pure Roman temperament was too austere, too unsympathetic, too restrained and formal, to create and foster a luxuriant growth of poetry: the genial nature of the south, when dissociated from the control of manlier instincts and the elevation of higher ideas, tended to de- generate into licentious effeminacy, both in life and literature. The fragments of the earlier tragic and epic poets indicate the predominance of the gravity and the masculine strength inherent in the Roman temper, almost 14 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. to the exclusion of the other element. Roman comedy on the other hand, gave full play to Italian vivacity anc sensuousness with only slight restraint from the highei instincts inherited from ancient discipline. In Lucretius Virgil, and Horace, moral energy and dignity of charactei are most happily combined with susceptibility to the charn and the power of Nature. Catullus and the elegiac poets o the Augustan age abandoned themselves to the passionat( enjoyment of their lives, under little restraint either fron the pride or the virtue of their forefathers. Their vices and still more their weaknesses, are of a type apparentlj most opposed to the tendencies of the higher Romar character. Yet even these may be looked upon as a kinc of indirect testimony to the ancient vigour of the race Catullus, in his very coarseness, betrays the grain of tha strong nature, out of which, in a better time, the freedon and energy of the Republic had been developed. Ovid even in his libertinism, displays his vigorous and arden vitality. The effeminacy of TibuUus looks like the re action of a nature, enervated by the circumstances of hi: age, from the high standard of manliness, which a sterne time had maintained. Among the most truly Roman characteristics of Latii poetry, national and patriotic sentiment is promirientlj conspicuous. Among the poets of the Republic, Naeviu and Lucilius were animated by strong political as well a national feeling. The chief work of Ennius was devotee to the commemoration of the ancient traditions, the augus institutions, the advancing power, and the great characte of the Roman State. In the works of the Augustan age the fine episodes of the Georgics, the whole plan anc many of the details of the Aeneid, show the spell exercisec over the mind of Virgil by the ancient memories and th great destiny of his country, and bear witness to his dee] love of Italy, and his pride in her natural beauty and he strong breed of men. Horace rises above his irony an( epicureanism, to celebrate the imperial majesty of Rome and to bear witness to the purity of the Sabine households GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 15 and to the virtues exhibited in the best types of Roman character. The Fasti of Ovid, also, is a national poem, owing its existence to the strong interest which was felt by the Romans in their mythical and early story, so long as any living memory of their political life remained. The poets of the latest age of the Republic alone ex- press little sympathy with national or public interests. The time in which they flourished was not favourable to the pride of patriotism or to political enthusiasm. The contemplative genius of Lucretius separated him from the pursuits of active life; and his philosophy taught the lesson that to acquiesce in any government was better than to engage in the strife of personal ambition ; — Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum Quam regere imperio res velle et regna tenere. Catullus, while eagerly enjoying his life, seems, in regard to all the grave public questions of his time, to 'daff the world aside, and bid it pass' : yet there is, as has been well said ', a rough republican flavour in his careless satire ; and he retained to the last, and boldly asserted, what was the earliest, as well as the latest, instinct of ancient liberty — the spirit of resistance to the arbitrary rule of any single man. Roman poetry is pervaded also by a peculiar vein of imaginative emotion. There is no feeling so characteristic of the works of Roman genius as the sense of majesty. This feeling is called forth by the idea or outward mani- festation of strength, stability, vastness, and order; by whatever impresses the imagination as the symbol of power and authority, whether in the aspect of Nature, or in the works, actions, and institutions of man. It is in their most serious and elevated writings, and chiefly in their epic and didactic poetry, that the Romans show their peculiar susceptibility to this grave and dignified emotion. Even the plain and rude diction of Ennius rises into rugged grandeur when he is moved by the vastness or massive strength of outward things, by ' the pomp and circum- ' Smith's Diet, of Greek and Roman Biography, Art. Catullus. i6 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. stance' of war, or by the august forms and symbols ( government. The majestic tones of Lucretius seem to giv a voice to the deep feeling of the order and immensity ( the universe, which possessed him. The sustained dignit of the Aeneid, and the splendour of some of its fine; passages— such for instance as that which brings before u the solemn and magnificent spectacle of the fall of Tro —attest how the imagination of Virgil was moved t sympathy with the attributes of ancient and powerfi X- sovereignty i. Further, in the fervour and dignity of their moral feeling the Roman poets are true exponents of the genius c Rome. Their spirit is more authoritative, and less specu lative than that of Greek poetry. They speak rather fron the will and conscience than from the wisdom that ha searched and understood the ways of life. Greek poetr stre"ngthens the will or purifies the heart indirectly, by it truthful representation of the tragic situations in humai life ; Roman poetry appeals directly to the manlier in 1^ stincts and more magnanimous impulses of our nature This glow of moral emotion pervades not the poetry onl} but the oratory, history, and philosophy of Rome. It ha cast "a kind of religious solemnity around the fragments c the early epic, tragic, and satiric poetry : it has given ai intenser fervour to the stern consistency and desperat fortitude of Lucretius : it has added the element o strength to the pathos and fine humanity in the .^Eneid It is by his moral, as well as his national enthusiasm, tha Horace reveals the Roman gravity that tempered hi genial nature. The language of Lucan, Persius, am Juvenal still breathed the same spirit in the deadeninj atmosphere of the Empire. Of all the great poets o ' The following lines might be quoted as a specimen of the majesty of th Aeneid : — Haec finis Priami fatorum; hie exitus ilium Sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa videntem Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum Regnatorem Asiae. — Aen. ii. 554-7. GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 17 Rome, Catullus alone shows little trace of this grave ^ ardour of feeling, the more usual accompaniment of the firm temper of manhood than of the prodigal genius of youth. There" are, however, as was said above, other feelings expressed in Roman poetry, which are, perhaps, more akin to modern sympathies. In no other branch of ancient ' literature is so much prominence given to the enjoyment of! Nature, the passion of love, and the joys, sorrows, tastes, and pursuits of the individual. The gravity and austerity of the old Roman life, and the predominance of public over private ' intetests in the best days of the Republic, tended to repress, rather than to fositer, the birth of these new modes of emotion. They are like the flower of that more luxuriant but less stately Italian life which spread itself abroad under the shadow of Roman institutions, and came to a rapid maturity after her conquests had brought to Rome the accumulated treasures of the world, and left to her more fortunate sons ample leisure to enjoy them. The love of natural scenery and of country life is cer- ) tainly more prominently expressed in Roman than in Greek poetry. Homer, indeed, among all the poets of antiquity, presents the most vivid and true descrifStion of the out- ward world ; and the imagination of Pindar and the Attic dramatists appears to have been strongly, though indi- rectly, affected both by the immediate aspect and by the invisible power of Nature. Thucydides and Aristophanes testify to the enjoyment which the Athenians found in the ease and abundance of their country life, and to the affection with which they clung to the old religious customs and associations connected with it. The conscious enjoyment of Nature as a prominent motive of poetry first appears in the Alexandrian era. The great poets of earlier times were too deeply penetrated by the thought of the mystery and the grandeur in human life, to dwell much on the spectacle of the outward world. Though their delicate sense of beauty was unconsciously cherished and refined by the air c l8 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. which they breathed, and the scenes by which they w( surrounded, yet they do not, hke the Roman poets, yi« to the passive pleasures derived from contemplating t aspect of the natural world; nor do they express t happiness of passing out of the tumult of the city into t peaceful security of the country. The difference betwe the two nations in social temper and customs is connect with this difference in their aesthetic susceptibility. T spirit in which a Greek enjoyed his leisure, was one pha of his sociability, his communicativeness, his consta passion for hearing and telling something new, — a dispo tion which made the AeVx'7 a favourite resort so early the time of Homer, and which is seen still characterisi: the most typical representatives of the race in the days St. Paul. The Roman statesman, on the other har prized his otiuni as the healthy repose after strenuo exertion. The chief relaxation to his proud and se dependent temper consisted in being alone, or at ease wi his household and his intimate friends. This desire f rest and retirement was one great element in the Rom: taste for country life ; — a taste which was manifesti among the foremost public men, such as the Scipios ai Laelius, long before any trace of it is betrayed in Rom; poetry. But, as the practice of spending the unhealtl months of autumn away from Rome became general amoi the wealthier classes, and as new modes of sentiment we fostered by greater leisure and finer cultivation, a genui: love of Nature, — taking the form either of attachment particular places, or of enjoyment in the life and beautii forms of the outward world, — was gradually awakened the more susceptible minds of the Italian race. The poetry of the Augustan age and of that immediate preceding it is deeply pervaded by this new emotic Each of the great poets manifests the feeling in his o\ way. Lucretius, while contemplating the majesty Nature's laws, and the immensity of her range, is, at t same time, powerfully moved to sympathy with her ev( varying life. He feels the charm of simply living in fi GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 19 weather, and looking on the common aspects of the world, — such as the sea-shore, fresh pastures and full- flowing rivers, or the new loveliness of the early morning. He represents the punishment of the Danaides as a symbol of the incapacity of the human spirit to enjoy the natural charm of the recurring seasons of the year. Catullus, too, although his active social temper did not respond to the spell which Nature exercised over the contemplative and pensive spirits of Lucretius and Virgil, has many fine images from the outward world in his poems. He delights in comparing the grace and the passion of youth with the bloom of flowers and the stateliness of trees ; he associates the beauty of Sirmio with his bright picture of the happi- ness of home ; he feels the return of the genial breezes of spring as enhancing his delight in leaving the dull plains of Phrygia, and in hastening to visit the famous cities of Asia. Virgil's early art was characterised by his friend and brother poet in the lines, — Molle atque facetum Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure camenae'. The love of natural, and especially of Italian, beauty blends with all his patriotic memories, and with the charm which he has cast around the common operations of rustic industry. The freedom and peace of his country life, among the Sabine hills, kept the heart of Horace fresh and simple, in spite of all the pleasures and flatteries to which he was exposed ; and enabled him, till the end of his course, to mingle the clear fountain of native poetry, — 'ingeni benigna vena,' — with the stiller current of his meditative wisdom. The passion of love was a favourite theme both of the early lyrical poets of Greece, and of the courtly writers of Alexandria ; but the works of the former have reached us only in inconsiderable fragments ; and the latter, with the exception of Theocritus, are much inferior to the Roman poets who made them their models. It is in Latin litera- ' Horace, Sat. i. 10. 45. C % 30 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. ture that we are brought most near to the power of this passion in the ancient world. Few among the poets who have recorded their own experience of love, in any age, have expressed a feeling so true or so intense as Catullus. He has all the ardent, self-forgetful devotion, if he wants the chivalry and purity, of modern sentiment. He has painted the love of others, also, with graceful fidelity. He has shown the finest sense in discerning, and the finest power in delineating the charm of youthful passion, when first awakening into life, or first unfolding into true affec- tion.* It is by his deHneation of the agony of Dido that Virgil has imparted the chief personal interest to the story of the Aeneid. If he has failed to embody any complex type of character, he has described the agitation and pathos of this particular passion at least with a powerful hand. Horace is the poet of the lighter and gayer moods of love. Without ever becoming a slave to it, he experienced enough of its pains and pleasures, to enable him to paint the fascination or the waywardness of a mistress with the equable feeling of an epicurean, but, at the same time, with the refined observation of a poet. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, making pleasure the chief pursuit of their lives, have made the more ignoble .and transient phases of this passion the predominant motive of their poetry. Yet the effeminacy of Tibullus is redeemed by real tenderness of heart ; there is ardent emotion expressed by Propertius for his living mistress, and true affection in the lines in which he recalls her memory after death ; the profligacy of Ovid is, if not redeemed, at least relieved, by his buoyant wit and his brilliant fancy. Roman poetry is also interesting as the revelation of personal experience and character. The biographies of ancient authors are, for the most part, meagre and un- trustworthy ; and thus it is chiefly through the conscious or unconscious self-portraiture in their writings that the actual men of antiquity are brought into close contact with the modern world. Few men of any age or country are so well known to us as Horace; and it is from his own GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. %\ writings, exclusively, that this intimate knowledge has been obtained. The lines in which he describes Lucilius are more applicable to himself than to any extant writer of Greece or Romej — Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris ; neque si male cesserat, unquam Decurrens alio, neque si bene : quo fit, ut omnis Votiva pateat veluti descripla tabella Vita senis'. He has described himself, his tastes and pursuits, his thoughts and convictions, with perfect frankness and candour, and without any of the triviality or affectation of literary egotism. Catullus, although sometimes wanting in proper reticence, and altogether devoid of that meditative art with which Horace transmutes his own experience into the common experience of human nature, is known also as a familiar friend, from the force of feeling with which he realised, and the transparent sincerity with which he re- corded, all the pain and the pleasure of his life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age have written, neither from so strong a heart as that of Catullus, nor with the good taste and self-respect of Horace ; but yet one of the chief sources of interest in their poetry, as of that of Martial in a later age, arises from their strong realisation of life, their unreserved communicativeness, and the light they thus throw on one phase of personal and social manners in ancient times. Nor are these indications of individual character con- fined to the poets who profess to communicate their own feelings, and to record their own fortunes. All the works of Roman poetry bear emphatically the impress of their authors. While the finest Greek poetry seems like an almost impersonal emanation of genius, Roman poetry is, to a much greater extent, the expression of character. The great Roman writers manifest that kind of self- ' ' He used from time to time to intrust all his secret thoughts to his books, as to trusty friends ; it was to them only he turned in evil fortune or in good ; and thus it is, that the whole life of the old poet lies before our eyes, as if it were portrayed oa a votive picture.' — Sat. ii. i. 30. 22 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. consciousness which accompanies resolute and successful effort ; while the Greeks enjoy that happy self-forgetful- ness which attends the unimpeded exercise of a natural gift. The epitaphs composed for themselves by Naevius Plautus, Ennius, and Pacuvius, and the assertion of theii own originality and of their hopes of fame, which occurs in the poetry of Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, were dictated by a strong sense of their own personality, and of the im- portance of the task on which they were engaged. Catullus although he is much preoccupied with, and most frank in communicating his feelings and pursuits, has much less of the consciousness of genius, is much more humble in his aspirations, and more modest in his estimate of him- self. In this, as in other respects, he approaches nearer to the type of Greek art than any of his brother-poets of Rome. It is a common remark that the very greatest poets are those about whose personal characteristics least is known. It is impossible in their case to determine where they have expressed their real sympathies or convictions. They rise above the prejudices of their country and the accidents oi their time, and can see the good and evil inseparably mixed in all human action. No criticism can throw any trustworthy light on the personal position, the pursuits and aims, the outward and inward experience of Homer. It cannot even be determined with certainty how much of the poetry which bears his name is the creation of one, seem- ingly, inexhaustible genius ; and how much is the ' divine voice ' of earlier singers still ' floating around him.' Such inquiries are ever attracting and ever baffling a high curi- osity. They leave the mind perplexed with the doubt whether it is discerning, in the far distance, the outline oi solid mountain-land, or only the transient shapes of the clouds. Hesiod, on the other hand, a poet of perhaps equal antiquity, but of an infinitely lower order of genius, has left his own likeness graphically delineated on his remains. There is much to interest a reader in the old didactic poem, • The Works and Days,' but it is not the GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 23 interest of studying a work of art or of creative genius. The charm of the book consists partly in its power of calling up the ideas of a remote antiquity and of human life in its most elemental conditions ; partly in the distinct impression which it bears of a character of an antique and primitive and yet not unfamiliar type;— a character of deep natural piety and righteousness, but with a quaint intermixture of other qualities, homespun sagacity and worldly wisdom ; — genuine thrift, and horror of idleness, of war, of seafaring enterprise ; — sardonic dislike of the airs and vices of women, and a grim discontent with his own con- dition, and with the poor soil which it was his lot to till ^. It is through his want of those gifts of genius which have made Homer immortal as a poet, and a mere name as a man, that Hesiod has left so distinct a picture of himself to the latest times. In like manner Roman poetry, while never rising to the heights of creative and impersonal genius, from this very defect, is a truer revelation of the poets themselves. The Aeneid supplies ample materials for understanding the affections and convictions of Virgil. Lucretius makes his personal presence felt through the whole march of his argument, and supports every position of his system not with his logic only, but with the whole force of his nature. The fragments of Ennius and of Lucilius afford ample evidence by which we may judge what kind of men they were. It thus appears that, over and above their higher and finer excellencies, the Roman poets have this additional source of interest, that, more than any other authors in the vigorous times of antiquity, they satisfy the modern curi- osity in regard to personal character and experience. " These poets have themselves left the most trustworthy record of their happiest hours and most real interests ; of their standard of conduct, their personal worth, and their strength of affection ; of the studies and the occupations • The parallel which Mr. Ruskin draws (Modem Painters, vol iii. p. 194), between an ancient Greek and 'a good, conscientious, but illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer of a century or two back,' becomes intelligible if we regard Hesiod as a normal type of the Greek mind. 54 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. in which they passed their lives, arid of the spirit in which they awaited the certainty of their end. It remains to say a few words in regard to the historical progress of this branch of literature. The history of Roman poetry may be divided into four great periods : — I. The age of Naevius, Ennius, Lucihus, etc., extending from about B.C. 240 till about B.C. 100 : II. The age of Lucretius and Catullus, whose active poetical career belongs to the last age of the Republic, the decennium before the outbreak of the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey : III. The Augustan age : IV. The whole period of the Empire after the time of Augustus. The poetry of each of these periods is distinctly marked in form, style, and character. There is evidently a great progress in artistic accomplishment and in poetical feeling, from the rude cyclopean remains of the anrials of Ennius to the stately proportions and elaborate workmanship of the Aeneid. Yet this advance was attended with some loss as well as gain. With infinitely less accomplishment and less variety, the older writers show signs of a robuster life and a more vigorous understanding than some at least of those who adorn the Augustan era. They endeavoured to work in the spirit of the great masters, who had made the most heroic passions and most serious interests of men the subject of their art. They were men also of the same fibre as the chief actors on the stage of public affairs, living with them in familiar friendship, while at the same time maintaining a close sympathy with popular feeling and the national life. Their fragments are thus, apart from their intrinsic merits, especially valuable as the contempo^ rary language of that great time, and as giving some expression to the strength, the dignity, and the freedom which were stamped upon the old Republic. For more than a generation after the death of Accius and Lucilius, no new poet of any eminence appeared at ' GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 25 Rome. The vivid enjoyment of life^ and the sense of security which usually accompany and foster the successful cultivation of art, had been rudely interrupted by the con- vulsions of the State. A new birth of Roman poetry took place during the brief lull between the storms of the first and second civil wars. The new poets arose independently of the old literature. They appealed not to popular favour, but to the tastes of the few and the educated ; they gave expression not to any public or national sentiment, but to their individual thought and feeling. Their works reflect the restless agitation of a time of revolution ; but they show also all the vigour and sincerity of republican freedom. While greatly superior to the fragments of the older poetry in refinement of style, and in depth and variety of poetical feeling, they want the simple strength of moral conviction, and the interest in great practical affairs, which charac- terised their predecessors. They are inferior to the poets of the Augustan age in artistic skill ; but they show more force of thought, or more intensity of passion, a stronger and livelier inspiration, a bolder and more independent character. The short interval between the death of Catullus and the appearance of the Bucolics of Virgil marks the begin- ning of a new era in literature and in history : Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. Catullus, dying only a few years before the extinction of popular freedom, is, in every nerve and fibre, the poet of a republic. Virgil, even before the final success of Augustus, proclaimed the advent of the new Empire ; and he became the sincere admirer and interpreter of its order and magnificence. Most of the other poets of that age, though born before the overthrow of the Republic, show the influence of their time, not only by sympathy with or acquiescence in the new order of things, but by a perceptible lowering in the higher energies of life. Still, the poetry of the Augustan age, if inferior in natural force to that of the Republic, is the culmination of all the 26 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. previous efforts of Roman art ; and is, at the same time, the most complete and elaborate representation of Roman and Italian life. The chief interest of Roman poetry, considered as the work of men of natural genius and cultivated taste, and as the expression of great national ideas or of individual thought and impulse, ceases with the end of the Augustan age. Under the continued pressure of the Empire, true poetical inspiration and pure feeling for art were lost. One certain test of this decay is the absence of musical power and sweetness from the verse of the later poets. Yet some of the poets of the Empire have their own peculiar great- ness. Lucan and Juvenal recall in their vigorous rhetoric the masculine tone and fervid feeling of the old Roman character, liberalised by the progress of thought and education. In the Satires of Persius, there is an atmo- sphere of purer morality than in any earlier Roman writer, with the exception of Cicero. There is much vigour, sense, wit, and keen appreciation of life, intermingled with the coarseness of Martial. Yet it is owing rather to their rhetorical or their intellectual ability and to their historical value, than to their poetical genius, that these writers are still read and admired. The artificial epics of Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus may be occasionally read in the interests of learning ; but it is hardly probable that they will, or desirable that they should, ever be perma- nently restored from the neglect and oblivion into which they have long been sinking. This review of Roman poetry will bring before us the origin and progressive growth of a branch of literature, moulded, indeed, on the forms of a foreign art, but exe- cuted with native energy, and expressive of native character. In this poetry not the genius only, but the inner nature and sympathies of some of the more in- teresting men of antiquity are displayed. It throws light on the impulses of thought and feeling which influenced the action of different epochs in Roman history. The great qualities of Rome are seen to mould and animate her GENERAL CHARACTER OF ROMAN POETRY. 27 Detry. These qualities are found in harmonious union ith the spirit of enjoyment and the sense of exuberant fe, fostered by the genial air of Italy ; and with a refine- lent of taste drawn from the purest source of human .ilture which the world has ever enjoyed. After all de- uctions have been made for their want of inventiveness, it :ill remains true, that the Roman poets of the last days of le Republic and of the Augustan age have added to the lasterpieces of literature some great works of native ;eling as well as of finished execution. CHAPTER II. VESTIGES OF EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY IN ROME AND ANCIENT ITALY. The Romans themselves traced the origin of their poetry, as of all their literary culture, to their contact with the mind of Greece. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes Intulit agresti Latio. The first productive literary impulse was communicated to the Roman mind by the Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who, in the year B.C. 340 — one year after the end of the First Punic War — brought out, before a Roman audience, a drama translated or imitated from the Greek. From this time Roman poetry advanced along the various channels which the creative energy of Greek genius had formed. / But it has been maintained, in recent times, that this was but the second birth of Roman poetry, and that a golden age of native minstrelsy had preceded this historical development of literature. The most distinguished sup- porters of this theory were Niebuhr and Macaulay. In the preface to his Lays of Rome, Macaulay says that 'this early literature abounded with metrical romances, such as are found in every country where there is much curiosity and intelligence, but little reading and writing.' Niebuhi went so far as to assert that the Romans in early times possessed epic poems^ ' which in power and brilliance oi imagination leave everything produced by the Romans in later times far behind them.' He held that the flourishing EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 29 ■iod of this native poetry was the fifth century after the ndation of the city. He supposed that the early lays re of plebeian origin, strongly animated by plebeian timent, and familiarly known among the mass of the )ple ; that they disappeared after the ascendency of the V literature, chiefly through the influence of Ennius ; 1 that his immediate predecessor, Naevius, was the last the genuine native minstrels. He professed to find ar traces of these ballads and epic poems in the fine ends of early Roman history. His theory was sup- ■ted by arguments founded on the testimony of ancient iters, on indications of the early recognition of poetry by ; Roman State (as, for instance, the worship of the menae), on the poetical character of early Roman story, J on the analogy of other nations. Although there may be no more ground for believing a golden age of early Roman poetry than in a golden ; of innocence and happiness, yet the question raised Niebuhr deserves attention, not only on account of the ebrity which it obtained, but also as opening up an [uiry into the nature and value of the rude germs of ;rature which the Latin soil spontaneously produced, lough there is no substantial evidence of the existence long the Romans of anything corresponding to the idem ballad or the early epic of Greece, yet certain ids of metrical composition did spring up and flourish long the Italians, previous to and independent of their owledge of Greek literature. It is worth while to ascer- n what these kinds of composition were, as they throw ht on some natural tendencies of the race, which ulti- ,tely obtained their adequate expression, and helped to part a native and original character to Latin literature, tt was observed in the former chapter that while the :tres of all the great Roman poets were founded on the •lier metres of Greece, there was a native Italian metre, led the Saturnian, which was employed apparently in ■ious kinds of composition, and was quite different in iracter from the heroic and lyric measures adopted by 30 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. the cultivated poets of a later age. This metre was used not only in rude extemporaneous effusions, but also in the long poem of Naevius, on the First Punic War. Horace indicates his sense of the roughness and barbarism of the metre, in the lines, Sic horridus ille Defluxit Humerus Saturnius, et grave virus Munditiae pepulere'. Ennius speaks contemptuously of the verse of Naevius, as that employed by the old prophetic bards, before any of the gifts of poetry had been received or cultivated — Quum neque musarum scopulos quisquam superarat Nee dicti studiosus erat. The irregularity of the metre may be inferred from a saying of an ancient grammarian, that, in the long epic of Naevius he could find no single line to serve as a normal specimen of its structure. From the few Saturnian lines remaining, it may be inferred that the verse had an irregular trochaic movement ; and it seems first to have come into use as an accompaniment to the beating of the foot in a primitive rustic dance. The name, con- nected with Saturnus, the old Land-God of Italy, points to the rustic origin of the metre. It was known also by the name of Faunian, derived from another of the Divini- ties worshipped in the rural districts of Italy. It seems first to have been employed in ritual prayers and thanks- giving for the fruits of the earth, and in the grotesque raillery accompanying the merriment and license of the harvest-home. It is of the Saturnian verse that Virgil speaks in the lines of the second Georgic — Nee non Ausonii, Troja gens missa, coloni Versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto*. As the long roll of the hexameter and the stately march of the alcaic were expressive of the gravity and majesty of the Roman State, so the ring and flow of the Saturnian ■ Epist. ii. 1. 157. 2 Georg. ii. 385. EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 31 verse may be regarded as indicative of the freedom and genial enjoyment of life, characterising the old Italian peasantry. The most important kinds of compositions produced in this metre, under purely native influences, may be classed as, I. Hymns or ritual verses. 3. Prophetic verses. 3. Festive and satiric verses, uttered in dialogue or in rude mimetic drama. 4. Short gnomic or didactic verses. 5. Commemorative odes sung or recited at banquets and funerals. I. The earliest extant specimen of the Latin language is a fragment of the hymn of the Fratres Arvales, a priestly brotherhood, who offered, on every 15th of May, public sacrifices for the fertility of the fields. This fragment is variously written and interpreted, but there can be no doubt that it is the expression of a prayer, for protection against pestilence, addressed to the Lares and the god Mars, and that it was uttered with the accompaniment of dancing. The following is the reading of the fragment, as given by Mommsen : — Enos, Lases, juvate. Ne veluerve, Marmar, sins incurrere in pleores. Satur fu, fere Mars. Limen sali. Sta barber. Semunis alternis advocapit conctos. Enos, Marmar, juvato. Triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe" The address to Mars ' Satur fu,' or, according to another reading, ' Satur furere,' ' be satisfied or done with raging,' ' It is thus interpreted by the same author: — Nos, lares, juvate. Ne malam luem, Mamers, sinas incurrere in plures. Satur esto, fere Mars. In limen insili. Pesiste \erberare (limen) ! Semones altemi advocate cunctos. Nos, Mamers, juvato. Tripudia. ' Help us, Lares. Suffer not, Mamers, pestilence to fall on the people. Be satisfied, fierce Mars. Leap on the threshold. Cease beating it. Call, in turn, on all the demigods. Help us, Mamers.' — Mommsen, Rom. Geschichte, vol. i. ch. XV. 32 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. probably refers to the severity of the winter and early spring 1. The words have reference to the attributes of the God in the old Italian religion, in which the powers of Nature were deified and worshipped long before Mars was identified, with the Greek Ares. The other expres- sions in the prayer appear to be, either directions given to the dancers, or the sounds uttered as the dance pro- ceeded. Another short fragment has been preserved from the hymn of the Salii, also an ancient priesthood, supposed to date from the times of the early kings. The hymn is characterised by Horace, among other specimens of ancient literature, as equally unintelligible to himself and to its affected admirers ^- From the extreme antiquity of these ceremonial chants it may be inferred that metrical expression among the Romans, as among the Greeks and other ancient nations, owed its origin to a primitive religious worship. But while the early Greek hymns or chants in honour of the Gods soon assumed the forms of pleasant tales of human adventure, or tragic tales of human suffering, the Roman hymns retained their formal and ritual character unchanged among all the changes of creed and language. In the lines just quoted there is no trace of creative fancy, nor any germ of devotional feeling, which might have matured into lyrical or contemplative poetry. They sound like the words of a rude incantation. They are the obscure me- morial of a primitive, agricultural people, living in a blind sense of dependence on their gods, and restrained by a superstitious formalism from all activity of thought or fancy. Such compositions cannot be attributed to the inspiration or skill of any early poet, but seem to have been copied from the uncouth and spontaneous shouts of a simple, unsophisticated priesthood, engaged in a rude ceremonial dance. If these hymns stand in any relation to Latin Ifterature, they may perhaps be regarded as spring- ' Such is the interpretation of Corssen, Origines Poesis Romanae. " Epist ii. I. 86. EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 33 ig from the same vein of public sentiment, as called forth le hymn composed by Livius Andronicus during the econd Punic War, and as rude precursors of those com- osed by Catullus and Horace, and chanted by a chorus f youths and maidens in honour of the protecting Deities f Rome. a. The verses of the Fauns and Vates spoken of by En- ius, with allusion to the poem of Naevius, in the lines, Scripsere alii rem, Versibu' quos olim Fauni vatesque canebant, 'ere probably as far removed from poetry as the ritual hants of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Fauni 'ere the woodland gods of Italy, and were, besides their ther functions, supposed to be endowed with prophetic ower^. The word Vates, a word of Celtic origin, originally leaits not a poet, but a soothsayer. The Camenae or 'asmenae (another form of which word appears in Car- lenta, the prophetic mother of Evander) were worshipped, ot as the inspirers of poetry, but as the foretellers of ature events^. Both Greeks and Romans sought to obtain knowledge of the future, either through the interpretation f omens, or through the voice of persons supposed to be ivinely endowed with foresight. But the Greeks, even in lie regard which they paid to auguries and oracles, were ifluenced, for the most part, by their lively imagination ; fhile the Romans, from the earliest to the latest eras of beir history^ in all their relations to the supernatural rarld, adhered to a scrupulous and unimaginative cere- lonialism. The notices in Latin literature of the functions f these early Vates — as, for instance, the counsel of the Ltrurian seer to drain the Alban Lake during the war :ith Veii, and the prophecy of Marcius uttered during the iecond Punic War, Amnem Trojugena Cannam Romane fuge, etc.', ' Cf. Virg. Aen. vii. 81, 82 : — At rex sollicitus monstris, oracula Fauni, Fatidici genitoris adit. ' Cf. Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. 24, note i. ^ Livy xxv. 12. D 34 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. suggest no more idea of poetical inspiration than the occasional notices, in Latin authors, of the oracles of the Sibylline books. The -language of prophecy naturally assumes a metrical or rhythmical form, partly as an aid to the memory, partly, perhaps, as a means of giving to the words uttered the effect of a more solemn intonation. In Greece, the oracles of the Delphian priestess, and the predictions of soothsayers, collected in books or circulating orally among the people, were expressed in hexameter verse and in the traditional diction of epic poetry ; but they were never ranked under any form of poetic art. The verses of the Vates, so far as any inference can be formed as to their nature, appear to have been products and proofs of unimaginative superstition, rather than of any imagina- tive inspiration among the early inhabitants of Latium. 3. Another class of metrical compositions, of native origin, but of a totally opposite character, was known by the name of the ' Fescennine verses.' These arose out of a very different class of feelings and circumstances. Horace attributes their origin to the festive meetings and exube- rant mirth of the harvest-home among a primitive, strong, and cheerful race of husbandmen. He points out how this rustic raillery gradually assumed the character of fierce lampoons, and had to be restrained by law : — Fescennina per hunc inventa licentia morem Versibus altemis opprobria rustica fudit; Libertasque recurrentes accepta per annos Lusit amabiliter, donee jam saevus apertam In rabiem coepit verti jocus et per honestas Ire domos impune minax. Doluere cruento Dente lacessiti ; fuit intactis quoque cura Conditione super communi ; quin etiam lex Poenaque lata, malo quae noUet carmine quemquam Describi ; vertere modum, formidine fustis Ad bene dicendum delectandumque redacti '- ' ' The Fescennine raillery in this way, arose and poured forth its rustic banter in responsive strains; the spirit of freedom, made welcome, as the season came round, first played a kindly part ; but soon the jests grew cruel, then changed into sheer fury, and began, with impunity, to threaten and assail honourable households. Men smarted under the sharp edge of its cruel tooth : even those who were unassailed felt concern for the common weal. A law was EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 35 The change in character, here described, from coarse and good-humoured bantering to libellous scurrility, may be conjectured to have taken place when the Fescennine freedom passed from villages and country districts to the active social and political life within the city. That this change had taken place in Rome at an early period, is proved by the fact that libellous verses were forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables K The original Fescennine verse appears, from the testimony of Horace, to have been in metrical dialogue. This rude amusement, in which a coarse kind of banter was interchanged during their festive gatherings, was in early times characteristic of the rural populations of Greece and Sicily, as well as Italy, and was one of the original elements out of which Greek comedy and Greek pastoral poetry were developed. These verses had a kindred origin with that of the Phallic Odes among the Greeks. They both appear to have sprung out of the rudest rites and the grossest symbolism of rustic paganism. The Fescennine raillery long retained traces of this original character. Catullus mentions the ' procax Fescennina locutio' among the accompaniments of marriage festivals ; and the songs of the soldiers, in the extravagant license of the triumphal procession, betrayed unmistakably this primitive coarseness. These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum ^, were the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which also was familiar to passed, and a penalty enforced, forbidding any one to be branded in libellous verses. Thus they changed their style, and were brought back to a kindly and pleasant tone, under fear of a beating.' — Epist. ii. i. 144-55. ' Sei quis ocentasit, casmenue condisit, quod infamiam faxsit flacitiomque alterei, fuste feritor. ' Teuffel quotes from Festus : Fescennini versus qui canebantur in nuptiis, ex urbe Fescennina dicuntur allati, sive ideo dicti quia fascinum putabantur arcere. It seems more natural to connect the name of these verses, which were espe- cially characteristic of the Latian peasantry, with fascinum (the phallic symbol) than with any particular town of Etruria, though the name of that town may probably have the same origin. D % ^(S THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. the Romans before they became acquainted with Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more probable etymology ^ of the word satura connects it in origin with the satura lanx, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian /«rj«^, and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing, differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy^ to the representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous character ; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined with music {saturas impletas modis), even after the intro- duction of the regular drama. These scenic saturae, which, from Livy's notice, appear to have been accompanied with good-humoured hilarity rather than with scurrilous raillery, prepared the way for the recep- tion of the regular drama among the Romans, and will, to some extent, account for its early popularity among them. The later Roman satire long retained traces of a connexion with this primitive and indigenous satura, evinced both by the miscellaneous character of its topics, and by its frequent employment of dramatic dialogue. 4. The didactic tendency which is so conspicuous in the cultivated literature of Rome manifested itself also in the indigenous compositions of Italy. The popular maxims > Mommsen's explanation, ' the masque of the full men ' (' saturi '), does not seem to meet with general acceptance. * Cf. Teuffel, vi, a. s yjj_ j. EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 37 and precepts preserved by the old agricultural writers and afterwards embodied by Virgil in his Georgics^ were handed down from generation to generation in the Saturnian rhythm. But, apparently, the first metrical composition committed to writing was a poem of an ethical or didactic character, written two generations before the first dramatic representation of Livius Andronicus, by Appius Claudius Caecus, who is also the earliest known to us in the long line of Roman orators^. 5. But it was not from any of these sources that Niebuhr supposed the poetical character of early Roman history to be derived. Nor is there any analogy between the religious hymns, or the Fescennine verses of Italy, and the modern ballad. But there is evidence of the existence, at one time, of other metrical compositions of which scarcely anything is definitely ascertained, except that they were sung at banquets, to the accompaniment of the flute, in celebration of the praises of great men. There is no direct evidence of the time when these compositions, some of which were believed by Niebuhr to have attained the dimensions of Epic poems, existed, or when they fell into disuse. Cato, as quoted by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, and in the Brutus^, is our earliest authority on the subject. His testimony is to the effect that many generations before his time, the guests at banquets were in the habit of singing, in succession, the praises of great men, to the music of the flute. Cicero, in the Brutus, expresses a wish that these songs still existed in his own day ; ' utinam exstarent ilia carmina, quae multis saeculis ante suam aetatem in epulis esse cantitata a singulis convivis de clarorum virorum laudibus in Originibus scriptum reliquit Cato.' Varro again is quoted, to the effect, that boys used to be present at banquets, for the purpose of singing 'ancient poems,' celebrating the praises of their ancestors. Valerius Maxi- mus mentions 'that the older men used at banquets to celebrate in song the illustrious deeds of their ancestors, ' Cf. Teuffel, Wagner's Translation, p. 102 * Tusc. Disp. iv. 2 ; Brutus, 19. 38 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. in order to stimulate the youth to imitate them.' Passages are quoted also from Horace, from Dionysius, and from Tacitus, implying a belief in the ancient existence of these compositions. Besides the odes sung or recited at banquets, there were certain funeral poems, called Naeniae, originally chanted by the female relatives of the deceased, but afterwards by hired women. As the practice of public speaking advanced, these gradually passed into a mere form, and were super- seded by funeral orations. The facts ascertained about these commemorative poems amount to no more than thisj — that they were sung at banquets and the funerals of great men, — that they were of such length as to admit of several being sung in suc- cession, — and that they fell into disuse some generations before the age of Cato. The inferences that may fairly be drawn from these statements are opposed to some of the conclusions of Niebuhr. The evidence is all in favour of their having been short lyrical pieces, and not long narrative poems. As they were sung at great banquets and funerals, it seems probable that, like the custom of exhibiting the ancestral images on the same occasions, they owed their origin to the patrician pride of family, and were not likely to have been animated by strong plebeian sentiment. If they had been preserved at all, they were thus more likely to have been preserved by members of the great houses living within the city walls, than by the peasantry living among the outlying hills and country districts. If ever there were any golden age of eariy Roman poetry, it had passed away long before the time of Ennius and- Cato. The fact, however, remains, that the Romans did possess, in early times, some kind of native minstrelsy, in which they honoured the memory and the exploits of their great men. And this impulse of hero-worship became in later times an important factor in their epic poetry. But is there any reason to suppose that these compositions were of the nature and importance assigned to them by Niebuhr, and EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 39 had any value in respect of invention and execution? It is difficult to believe that such a native force of feeling and imagination, pouring itself forth in stirring ballads and continuous epic poems^ could have been frozen so near its source ; or that a rich, popular poetry, not scattered through thinly-peopled districts, but the possession of a great commonwealth — one most tenacious of every national memorial — could have entirely disappeared, under any foreign influence, in the course of one or two generations. But even on the supposition that a great national poetry might have passed from the memory of men — as, possibly, the poems existing before the time of Homer may have been lost or merged in the greater glories of the Iliad and the Odyssey — this early poetry could not have perished with- out leaving permanent influence on the Roman language. The growth of poetical language necessarily accompanies the growth of poetical feeling and inspiration. The sensuous, passionate, and musical force by which a language is first moulded into poetry is transmitted from one generation of poets to another. The language of Homer, by its natural and musical flow, by its accumulated wealth of meaning, by the use of traditional epithets and modes of expression, that penetrate far back into the belief, the feelings, and the life of an earlier time, implies the existence of a long line of poets who preceded him. On the other hand, the diction of the fragments of Ennius, in its strength and in its rude- ness, is evidently, in great measure, the creation of his own time and his own mind. He has no true discernment of the characteristic difference between the language of prose and of poetry. The materials of his art had not been smoothed and polished by any long, continuous stream of national melody, but were rough-hewn and adapted by his own energy to the rugged structure of his poem. While, therefore, it appears that the actual notices of the early commemorative poems do not imply that they were the products of imagination or poetical feeling, or that they excited much popular enthusiasm, and were an important element in the early State, their entire disappearance 40 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. among a people so tenacious of all their gains, and, still more, the unformed and prosaic condition of the language and rhythm used by Naevius, Ennius, and the other early poets, lead to the presumption, that they were not much valued by the Romans at any time, and that they were not the creations of poetic genius and art. This presump- tion is further strengthened by such indications as there are of the recognition, or rather the non-recognition, of poets or of the poetic character at Rome in early times. The worship of the Camenae was indeed an old and genuine part of the Roman or Italian religion ; but, as was said before, their original function was to predict future events, and to communicate the knowledge of divination ; not like that of the Greek Muses, to imagine bright stories of divine and human adventure, — KrjajxoaivTjv re naKuiv cifziravfid re fiepiJLTjp&tuv. Even the names by which two of the Camenae were known — Postvorta and Antevorta — suggest the prosaic and practical functions which they were supposed, to fulfil. The Romans had no native word equivalent to the Greek word aoibos, denoting the primary and most essential of all poetical gifts, the power to awaken the music of lan- guage. The word vates, as was seen, denoted a prophet The title of scriba was applied to Livius Andronicus ; and Naevius, who has by some been regarded as the last of the old race of Roman bards, applies to himself the Greek name of poeta, — Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam. The commemorative odes appear to have been recited or sung at banquets, not by poets or rhapsodists, but by boys or guests. There is one notice, indeed, of a class of men who practised the profession of - minstrelsy. This passage, which is quoted by Aulus Gelliiis from the writings of Cato, implies the very lowest estimation of the position and character of the poet, and points more naturally to the composers of the libellous verses forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables, than to the authors of heroic and EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 41 lational lays : — ' Poetry was not held in honour ; if anyone levoted himself to it, or went about to banquets, he was ailed a vagabond \' It appears that, on this ground also, there is no reason or believing in the existence of any golden age of Roman )oetry before the time of Ennius, or in the theory that the egendary tales of Roman history were created and shaped )y native minstrels. To what cause, then, can we attribute heir origin ? These tales have a strong human interest, .nd represent marked and original types of antique leroism. They have the elements of true tragic pathos ind moral grandeur. They could neither have arisen lor been preserved except among a people endowed with itrong capacities of feeling and action. But the strength )f the Roman mind consisted more in retentive capacity han in creative energy. Their art and their religion, their amily and national customs, aimed at preserving the actual nemory of men and of their actions : not like the arts, reremonies, and customs of the Greeks, which aimed at ifting the mind out of reality into an ideal world. As )ne of the chief difficulties of the Homeric controversy irises from our ignorance of the power of the memory luring an age when poetry and song were in the fullest ife, but the use of letters was either unknown, or extremely imited ; so there is a parallel difficulty in all attempts to ;xplain the origin of early Roman history, from our gnorance of the power of oral tradition in a time of long istablished order, but yet unacquainted with any of the brms of literature. The ' indifference of barbarous tribes o their past history can prove little or nothing as to :he tenacity of the national memory among a people far idvanced towards civilisation like the Romans after the ;stablishment of their Republican form of government. Mor can the analogy of early Greek traditions be fairly ipplied to those of Rome, owing to the great difference n the circumstances and the genius of the two nations. ' Noct. Att. XI. 2. A similar character at one time attached to minstrels in icotland, 43 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. Many real impressions of the past might fix themselves indelibly in the grave and solid temperament of the Romans, which would have been lost amid the inexhaustible wealth of fancy that had been lavished upon the Greeks. The strict family life and discipline of the Romans, the con- tinuity of their religious colleges, the unity of a single state as the common centre of all their interests, the slow and steady growth of their institutions, their strong regard for precedent, were all conditions more favourable to the preservation of tradition than the lively social life, the numerous centres of political organization, and the rapid growth and vicissitudes of the Greek Republics. It cannot, indeed, be disputed that although the legen- dary tales of Roman history may have drawn more of their colour from life than from imagination, yet there is no criterion by which the amount of fact contained in them can be separated from the other elements of which they, were composed. Oral tradition among the Romans, as among other nations, was founded on impressions originally received without any careful sifting of evidence ; and these first impressions would naturally be modified in accordance with the feelings and opinions of each generation, through which they were transmitted. Aetiological myths, or the attempt to explain some institution or memorial by some concrete fact, and the systematic reconstruction of forgotten events, have also entered largely into the composition of Roman history. But these admissions do not lead to the conclusion that the art or fancy of any class of early poets was added to the unconscious operation of popular feeling in moulding the impressive tales of early heroism, partly out of the memory of real events and personages, partly out of the ideal of character, latent in the national mind. It has been remarked by Sir G. C. Lewis that many even of the Greek myths, abounding ' in striking, pathetic, and interest- ing events,' existed as prose legends, and were handed down in the common speech of the people. In like manner, such tales as those of Lucretia and Virginia, of Horatius and the Fabii, of Cincinnatus, Coriolanus, and EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 43 imillus, which stand out prominently in the twilight Roman history, may have been preserved in the fama Igaris, or among the family traditions of the great uses, till they were gathered into the poem of Ennius d the prose narratives of the early annalists ^ In so far they are shaped or coloured by imagination, they do t bear traces of the conscious art of a poet, but rather an unconscious conformity to the national ideal of cha- :ter. The most impressive of these legendary stories ustrate the primitive virtues of the Roman character, ch as chastity, frugality, fortitude, and self-devotion ; or e national characteristics of patrician pride and a stern :ercise of parental authority. There is certainly no in- rnal evidence that any of them originated in a pure letic impulse, or gave birth to any work of poetic art ;serving a permanent existence in literature. _ The analogy of other nations might suggest the infer- ice that a race which in its maturity produced a genuine )etic literature must, in the early stages of its history, ive given some proof of poetic inspiration. It is natural associate the idea of poetry with youth both in nations id individuals. Yet the evidence of their language, of eir religion, and of their customs, leads to the conclusion at the Romans, while prematurely great in action and )vernment, were, in the earlier stages of their national e, little moved by any kind of poetical imagination. The ate of religious feeling or belief which gives birth to or i-exists with primitive poetry has left no trace of itself )on the early Roman annals. It is generally found that fanciful mythology, of a bright, gloomy, or grotesque laracter, in accordance with the outward circumstances id latent spirit or humour of the particular race among hom it originates, precedes and for a time accompanies ' Some of these tales may have been originally aetiological, but the human :erest even in these was probably drawn originally from actual incidents and rsonages of the Early Republic. Some of the aetiological myths, such as at of Altus Navius the augur, have no human interest, though they have an itorical interest in connexion with early Roman religion or institutions. 44 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC, the poetry of. romantic action. The creative faculty pro- duces strange forms and conditions of supernatural life out of its own mysterious sympathy with Nature, before it learns to invent tales of heroic action and of tragic calamity out of its sympathy with human energy and passion, and its interest in marking the course of destiny, and the vicissitudes of life. The development of the Roman re- ligion betrays the absence, or at least the weaker influence of that imaginative power which shaped the great mytho- logies of different races out of the primeval worship of nature. The later element introduced into Roman religion was due not to imagination but to reflection. The worship of Fides, Concordia, Pudicitia, and the like, marks a great progress from the early adoration of the sun, the earth, the vault of heaven, and the productive power of nature ; but it is a progress in understanding and moral consciousness, not in poetical feeling nor imaginative power. It shows that Roman civilisation advanced without this vivifying influence, that the mind of the race early reached the maturity of manhood, without passing through the dreams of childhood or the buoyant fancies of youth. The circumstances of the Romans, in early times, were also different from those by which the growth of a romantic poetry has usually been accompanied. Though, like all races born to a great destiny, they had much latent imagi- native ardour of feeling, this was employed by them, uncon- sciously, in elevating and purifying the ideal of the State and the family, as actually realised in experience. Their orderly organisation, — the early establishment of their civic forms, — the strict discipline of family life among them, — the formal and ceremonial character of their national religion, — and their strong interest in practical affairs, — were not calculated either to kindle the glow of individual genius, or to dispose the mass of the people to listen to the charm of musical verse. The wars of the young Republic, carried on by a well-trained militia, for the acquisition of new ter- ritory, formed the character to solid strength and steady discipline^ but could not act upon the fancy in the same EARLY INDIGENOUS POETRY. 45 way as the distant enterprise, the long struggles for national independence, or the daring forays, which have thrown the light of romance around the warlike youth of other races. The tillage of the soil, in which the brief intervals between their wars were passed, was a tame and monotonous pursuit compared with the maritime adventure which awoke the energies of Greece, or with the wild and lonely, half- pastoral, half-marauding life, out of which a true ballad poetry arose in modern times. Some traces of a wilder life, or some faint memories of their Sabine forefathers, may be dimly discerned in the earliest traditions of the Roman people ; but their youth was essentially practical, — great and strong in the virtues of temperance, gravity, fortitude, reverence for law and the majesty of the State, combined with a strong love of liberty and sturdy resistance to wrong. These qualities are the foundations of a power- ful and orderly State, not the root nor the sap by which a great national poetry is nourished ^. If the pure Roman intellect and discipline had spon- taneously produced any kind of literature, it would have been more likely to have taken the form of history or oratory than of national song or ballad. It was from men of the Italian provinces, and not from her own sons, that Rome received her poetry. The men of the most genuinely Roman type and character long resisted all literary pro- gress. The patrons and friends of the early poets were the more liberal members of the aristocracy, in whom the austerity of the national character and narrowness of the national mind had yielded to new ideas and a wider ex- perience. The art of Greece was communicated to ' rude Latium,' through the medium of those kindred races who had come into earlier contact with the Greek language and civilisation. With less native strength, but with greater flexibility, these races were more readily moulded by foreign influences ; and, leading a life of greater ease and freedom, they were more susceptible to all the impulses of Nature. While they were thus more readily prepared to ' Cf. Schwegler, Rom. Gesch. i. i. 24. 46 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. catch the spirit of Greek culture, they had learned, throug long years of war and subsequent dependence, to unde stand and respect the imperial State in which the own nationality had been merged. It is important 1 remember that the time in which Roman literature aros was not only that of the first active intercourse betwee Greeks and Romans, but also that in which a great wa against the most powerful State outside of Italy, ha awakened the sense of an Italian nationality, of whic Rome was the centre. The great Republic derived h< education and literature from the accumulated stores ( Greek thought and feeling ; but these were made availabl to her through the willing service of poets who, thoug born in other parts of Italy, looked to Rome as the hea and representative of their common country. CHAPTER III. THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE — LIVIUS ANDRO- NICUS — CN. NAEVIUS, B.C. 240-202. The historical event which first brought the Romans into famiHar contact with the Greeks, was the war with Pyrrhus and with Tarentum, the most powerful and flourish- ing among the famous Greek colonies in lower Italy. In earlier times, indeed, through their occasional communi- cation with the Greeks of Cuniae, and the other colonies in Italy, they had obtained a vague knowledge of some of the legends of Greek poetry. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced at Rome from Epidaurus in B.C. 293, and the oracle of Delphi had been consulted by the Romans in still earlier times. As the Sibylline verses appear to have been composed in Greek, their interpreters must have been either Greeks or men acquainted with that language^. The identification of the Greek with the Roman mythology had probably commenced before Greek literature was known to the Romans, although the works of Naevius and Ennius must have had an influence in completing this process. Greek civilisation had come, however, at an earlier period into close relation with the south of Italy; and the natives of that district, such as Ennius and Pacuvius, who first settled at Rome, were spoken of by the Romans as ' Semi Graeci.' But, until after the fall of Tarentum, there ap- pears to have, been no familiar intercourse between the two great representatives of ancient civilisation. Till the war with Pyrrhus, the knowledge that the two nations had of ' Cf. Lewis, Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i. chap. ii. 14. 48 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. one another was slight and vague. But, immediately aftei that time, the affairs of Rome began to attract the atten- tion of Greek historians^ and the Romans, though very slowly, began to obtain some acquaintance with the lan- guage and literature of Greece. Tarentum was taken in B.C. 272, but more than thirty years elapsed before Livius Andronicus f^presented his first drama before a Roman audience. Twenty years oi this intervening period, from B.C. a6i to B.C. 241, were occupied with the First Punic War; and it was not til) the successful close of that war, and the commencement of the following years of peace, that this new kind ol recreation and instruction was made familiar to the Romans. Serus enim Graecis admovit acumina chartis ; Et post Punica bella quietus, quaerere coepit Quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent^. Two circumstances, however, must in the meantime have prepared the minds of the Romans for the reception of the new literature. Sicily had been the chief battle-field oi the contending powers. In their intercourse with the Sicilian Greeks, the Romans had great facihties for be- coming acquainted With the Greek language, and frequeni opportunities of being present at dramatic representations Many Greeks also had been brought to Rome as slave: after the capture of Tarentum, and were employed ir educating the young among the higher classes. Thus many Roman citizens were prepared, by their circumstance; and education, to take interest in the legends and in the dramatic form of literature introduced from Greece ; while the previous existence of the saturae, and other scenic eX' hibitions at Rome, tended to make the new drama accept' able to the great mass of the population. The earliest period of Roman poetry extends from th( close of the First Punic War till the beginning of the firs > Cf. Lewis, Credibility of Early Rorran History, vol. i. chap. ii. ij, 15. " Horace, Epist. ii. i. 161-3. THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 49 century B.C. During this period of about a century and a half, in which Roman oratory, history, and comedy, were also actively cultivated, we hear only of five or six names as eminent in different kinds of serious poetry. The whole labour of introducing and of keeping alive, imong an un- lettered people, some taste for the graver forms of litera- ture thus devolved upon a few men of ardent temperament, vigorous understanding, and great productive energy; but with little sense of art, and endowed with faculties seemingly more adapted to the practical business of life than to the idealising efforts of genius. They had to struggle against the difficulties incidental to the first be- ginnings of art and to the rudeness of the Latin language. They were exposed, also, to other disadvantages, arising from the natural indifference of the mass of the people to all works of imagination, and from the preference of the educated class for the more finished works already existing in Greek literature. Yet this long period, in which poetry, with so much difficulty and such scanty resources, struggled into exist- ence at Rome, is connected with the age of Cicero by an unbroken line of literary continuity. Naevius, the younger contemporary of Livius, and the first native poet, was actively engaged in the composition of his poems till the time of his death ; about which period his greater successor first appeared at Rome. For about thirty years, Ennius shone alone in epic and tragic poetry. The poetic suc- cessor of Ennius was his nephew, Pacuvius. He, in the later years of his life, lived in friendly intercourse with his younger rival Accius, who, again, in his old age, had fre- quently conversed with Cicero^. The torch, which was first lighted by Livius Andronicus from the decaying fires of Greece, was thus handed down by these few men, through this long period, until it was extinguished during the stormy times which fell in the youth of the great orator and prose writer of the Republic. The forms of serious poetry, prevailing during this ' Cic. Brutus, ch. 28. E 50 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. period, were the tragic drama, the annalistic epic, an satire. Tragedy was earliest introduced, was received wit most favour, and was cultivated by all the poets of th period, with the exception of Lucilius and the comic writer The epic poetry of the age was the work of Naevius an Ennius. It has greater claims to originality and nations spirit, both in form and substance, and it exercised a moi powerful influence on the later poetry of Rome, than eithe the tragedy or comedy of the time. The invention of satin the most purely original of the three, is generally attribute to Lucilius ; but the satiric spirit was shown earlier in som of the dramas of Naevius ; and the first modification of th primitive satura to a literary shape was the work of Enniu: who was followed in the same style by his nephew Pacu vius. No complete work of any of these poets has been pre served to modern times. Our knowledge of the epi( tragic, and satiric poetry of this long period is derive partly from ancient testimony, but chiefly from the exan: ination of numerous fragments. Most of these have bee preserved, not by critics on account of their beauty an worth, but by grammarians on account of the obsolet words and forms of speech contained in them, — a fac which probably leads us to attribute to the earlier literatui a more abnormal and ruder style than that which reall belonged to it. A few of the longest and most interestin fragments have come down in the works of the admirers ( those ancient poets, especially of Cicero and Aulus Gelliu The notion that can be formed of the early Roman lite ature must thus, of necessity, be incomplete. Yet the; fragments are sufficient to produce a consisteat impressio of certain prevailing characteristics of thought and sent ment. Many of them are valuable from their own ii trinsic worth ; others again from the grave associatioi connected with their antiquity, and from the authent evidence they afford of the moral and intellectual qualitic the prevailing ideas and sympathies of the strongest ra( of the ancient world, about, or shortly after, the tin THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 51 hen they attained the acme of their moral and political eatness. The two earliest authors who fill a period of forty years the literary history of Rome, extending from the end of le First to the end of the Second Punic War, are Livius ndronicus and Cn. Naevius. Of the first very little is lown. The fragments of his works are scanty and limportant, and have been preserved by grammarians lerely as illustrative of old forms of the language. The Imirers of Naevius and Ennius, in ancient times, awarded ily scanty honours to the older dramatist. Cicero, for iStance, says of his plays ' that they are not worth reading second time^' There is no ground for believing that ivius was a man of original genius. The importance- hich attaches to him consists in his being the accidental ledium through which literary art was first introduced to le Romans. He was a Greek, and, as is generally sup- ased, a native of Tarentum. If he was among the cap- ves taken after the fall of that city, he must have resided lirty years at Rome before he ventured to reproduce a reek drama in the Latin language. He educated the )ns of his master, M. Livius Salinator, from whom he "terwards received his freedom. The last thirty years F his life were devoted to literature, and chiefly to the :production of the Greek drama in a Latin dress. His agedies appear all to have been founded on Greek sub- cts ; most of them, probably, were translations. Among le titles, we hear of the Aegis thus, Ajax, Equus Trojanus, ^ereus, Hermione, etc. — all of them subjects which con- nued to be popular with the later tragedians of Rome, o fragment is preserved sufficient to give any idea of is treatment of the subjects, or of his general mode of lought and feeling. Little can be gathered from the ;anty remains of his works, except some idea of the irshness and inelegance of his diction. In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey ito Saturnian verse. This work long retained its place as ' Brutus, 18. E 3 5a THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. a school-book, and is spoken of by Horace as forming par of his own early lessons under the rod of Orbilius ^ On or two lines of the translation still remain, and exemplif; its bald and prosaic diction, and the extreme irregularit; of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey 2, ov yoip eyoyyi ri (prjfu /cau^repov d\\o OaK&afffrjs avSpa ye avyxeSai, el Kai iui\a Kaprtplis fit) ; are thus rendered : — Namque nilum pejus Macerat hemonem, quamde mare saevom, viris quoi Sunt magnae, topper confringent importunae undae. He was appointed also, on one occasion, near the end o the Second Punic War, to compose a hymn to be sung bj 'virgines ter novenae,' which is described by Livy, th( historian, as rugged and unpolished ^. Livius was the schoolmaster of the Roman people rathe than the father of their literature. To accomplish what h( did required no original genius, but only the industry, know ledge, and tastes of an educated man. If his long residenc( among his grave and stern masters, and the hardships anc constraint of slavery, had subdued in him the levity anc gaiety of a Tarentine Greek, they did not extinguish hii love of his native literature and the intellectual cultivatioi peculiar to his race. In spite of the disadvantage of writ ing in a foreign language, atfd of addressing an unletterec people, he was able to give the direction which Romat poetry long followed, and to awaken a new interest in th( legends and heroes of his race. It was necessary that th( Romans should be educated before they could either pro duce or appreciate an original poet. Livius performed i useful, if not a brilliant service, by directing those wh( followed him to the study and imitation of the grea masters who combined, with an unattainable grace anc art, a masculine strength and heroism of sentiment con genial to the better side of Roman character. Cn. Naevius is really the first in the line of Romai ' Epist. ii. I. 71. 2 viii. 138. a xxvii. 17. THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 53 ets, and the first writer in the Latin language whose igments give indication of original power. He is be- ved to have been a Campanian by birth, on the authority Aulus Gellius, who characterised his famous epitaph as ilenum superbiae Campanae.' Though the arrogance of impania may have been proverbial, yet the expression uld scarcely with propriety have been applied, except a native of that district. If not a Roman by birth, he least belonged to a district which had become thoroughly atinised long before his time, and he showed himself to be, ce his successor Ennius, thoroughly Roman in his sym- ithies. He served as a soldier in the First Punic War, and corded his services in his epic poem on that subject. The irliest drama of Naevius was brought out in B.C. 235, five ears after the first representation of Livius Andronicus. he number of dramas which he is known to have composed ifords proof of great industry and activity, from that me till the time of his banishment from Rome. He was lore successful in comedy than in tragedy, and he used te stage, as it had been used by the writers of the old ttic comedy, as an arena of popular invective and political arfare. A keen partisan of the commonalty, he attacked ith vehemence some of the chiefs of the great senatorian irty. A line, which had passed into a proverb in the me of Cicero, is attributed to him, — Fato Metelli Romae fiunt consules ; ) which the Metelli are said to have replied in the pithy aturnian, Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetae. : is, however, doubted whether the first of these lines was ;ally written by Naevius, as the Metelli did not enjoy leir rapid succession of consulships till nearly a century Fter his death ; but even at the time of the Second Punic /ar they were powerful enough to procure the imprison- lent of the poet, in consequence of some offence which he ad given them. Plautus ^ alludes to this event, in one of ' Miles Gloriosus, ii. 2. 27. 54 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from th conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actui circumstances of the time. While in prison, he compose two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained son retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberate through the interference of the Tribunes of the Common Being afterwards banished, he took up his residence £ Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority ( ancient records, to have died, in B.C. 204 \ though the sam author adds that Varro, ' diligentissimus investigator ant quitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time aft« that date ^. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero ^ tha his poem on the First Punic War was composed in h: old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when rt moved from the sphere of his active literary efforts. A he served in that war, some time between B.C. 361 and B.( 341, he must have been well advanced in years at the tim of his death. The best known of all the fragments of Naevius, and th most favourable specimen of his style, is his epitaph :— Mortales immortales flere si foret fas, rierent divae Camenae Naefium poetam, Itaque p6stquaih est Orcino traditus thesauro, Obliti sunt Romae loquier Latina liiig'ua. It has been supposed that this epitaph was written as dying protest against the Hellenising influence of Ennius but as Ennius came to Rome for the first time about B.( 304, it is not likely, even if the life of Naevius was prolonge somewhat beyond that date, that the fame and influence c his younger rival could have spread so rapidly as to distur the peace of the old poet in his exile. It might as fairl be regarded as proceeding from a jealousy of the merits c Plautus, as from hostility to the innovating tendency c Ennius. The words of the epitaph are simply expre; ' Brutus, 15. * Mommsen remarks that he could not have retired to Utica till after it ff into the possession of the Romans. ' De Senectute, 14. THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 55 ive of the strong self-assertion and independence which laevius maintained till the end of his active and somewhat urbulent career. He wrote a few tragedies, of which scarcely anything is :nown except the titles, — such as the Andromache, Equiis ^rojanus. Hector Proficiscens, Lycurgus, — the last founded m the same subject as the Bacchae of Euripides. The titles if nearly all these plays, as well as of the plays of Livius, mply the prevailing interest taken in the Homeric poems, ind in all the events connected with the Trojan War. The bllowing passage from the Lycurgus has some value as lontaining the germs of poetical diction : — Vos, qui regalis corporis custodias Agitatis, ite actutum in frundiferos locos, Ingenio arbusta ubi nata sunt, non obsita'. He composed a number of comedies, and also some jriginal plays, founded on events in Roman history, — 3ne of them called Romulus, or Alimonia Romuli et Remi. The longest of the fragments attributed to him is a passage from a comedy, which has been, with less probability, ittributed to Ennius. It is a description of a coquette, and shows considerable power of close satiric observation : — Quasi pila In chovo ludens dadatim dat se, et communem facit: Alii adnutat, alii adnictat, alium amat, alium tenet; Alibi manus est occupata, alii percellit pedem; Alii spectandum dat annulum ; a labris alium invocat ; Cum alio cantat, attamen dat alii digito literas^ The chief characteristic illustrated by the scanty fragments of his dramas is the political spirit with which they were ' 'Ye who keep watch over the person of the king, hasten straightway to the leafy places, where the copsewood is of nature's growth, not planted by man.' ' ' Like one playing at ball in a ring, she tosses about from one to another, and is at home with all. To one she nods, to another winks ; she makes love to one, clings to another. Her hand is busy here, her foot there. To one she gives a ring to look at, to another blows a kiss ; with one she sings, with another corresponds by signs.' The reading of the passage here adopted is that given by Munk. 56 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. animated. Thus Cicero' refers to a passage in one of his plays (ut est in Naevii ludo) where, to the question, 'Who had, within so short a time, destroyed your great common- wealth?' the pregnant answer is given, Proveniebant oratores novi, stulti adolescentuli'. The nobles, whose enmity he provoked, were probably attacked by him in his comedies. One passage is quoted by Aulus Gellius, in which a failing of the great Scipio is exposed 1. Other fragments are found indicative of his freedom of speech and bold independence of character : — Quae ego in theatro hie meis probavi plausibus, Ea nunc audere quemqiiam regem rumpere? Quanto libertatem hanc hie superat servitus'? and this also * : — Semper pluris feci potioremque ego Libertatem habui multo quam pecuniam. He is placed in the canon of Volcatius Sedigitus im- mediately after Plautus in the rank of comic poets. He has more of the stamp of Lucilius than of his immediate successor Ennius. By his censorious and aggressive vehemence, by boldness and freedom of speech, and by his strong political feeling, Naevius in his dramas repre- sents the spirit of Roman satire rather than of Roman tragedy. He holds the same place in Roman literature as the Tribune of the Commons in Roman politics. He expressed the vigorous independence of spirit that sup- ported the Commons in their long struggle with the patricians, while Ennius may be regarded as expressing ' De Senectute, 6. '^ Etiam qui res magnas manu saepe gessit gloriose, Cujus facta viva nunc vigent, qui apud gentes solus praestat, Eum suus pater cum pallio ab arnica abduxit uno. " ' What I in the theatre here have made good by the applause given to me, to think that any of these great people should now dare to interfere with 1 How much better thing is the slavery here' {i.e. represented in this play), ' than the liberty we actually enjoy ? ' • I have always held liberty to be of more value and a better thing than money.' The reading is that given by Munk. THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 57 e majesty and authority with which the Roman Senate led the world. But the work on which his fame as a national and iginal poet chiefly rested was his epic or historical poem 1 the First Punic War. The poem was originally one intinuous work, written in the Saturnian metre ; though, a later time, it was divided into seven books. The irHer part of the work dealt with the mythical origin of ome and of Carthage, the flight of Aeneas from Troy, his ijourn at the court of Dido, and his settlement in Latium. he mythical background of the poem afforded scope for laginative treatment and invention. Its main substance, awever, appears to have been composed in the spirit and me of a contemporary chronicle. The few fragments that :main from the longer and later portion of the work, /idently express a bare and literal adherence to fact, ithout any poetical colouring or romantic representation. Ennius and Virgil are both known to have borrowed luch from this poem of Naevius. There are many pas- iges in the Aeneid in which Virgil followed, with slight eviations, the track of the older poet. Naevius (as quoted Y Servius) introduced the wives of Aeneas and of Anchises, aving Troy in the night-time, — Amborum Uxores noctu Troiade exibant capitibus Opertis, flentes abeuntes lacrimis cum multis. [e represents Aeneas as having only one ship, built by [ercury, — a limitation which did not suit Virgil's account ■ the scale on which the war was carried on, after the nding in Italy. The account of the storm in the first .eneid, of Aeneas consoling his followers, of Venus com- laining to Jupiter, and of his comforting her with the romise of the future greatness of Rome (one of the car- inal passages in Virgil's epic), were all taken from the old aturnian poem of Naevius. He speaks also of Anna and lido, as daughters of Agenor, though there is no direct /idence that he anticipated Virgil in telling the tale of •ido's unhappy love. He mentioned also the Italian 58 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. Sibyl and the worship of the Penates— materials whic Virgil fused into his great national and religious poen Ennius followed Naevius in representing Romulus as tl: grandson of Aeneas. The exigencies of his chronolog compelled Virgil to fill a blank space of three hundre years with the shadowy forms of a line of Alban kings. Whatever may have been the origin of the belief in th connexion of Rome with Troy, it certainly prevailed befoi the poem of Naevius was composed, as at the beginning c the First Punic War the inhabitants of Egesta opene their gates to Rome, in acknowledgment of their commo descent from Troy. But the story of the old connexion c Aeneas and Dido, symbolising the former league and th later enmity between Romans and Carthaginians, mos probably first assumed shape in the time of the Puni Wars. The belief, as shadowed forth in Naevius, that th triumph of Rome had been decreed from of old by Jupitei and promised to the mythical ancestress of Aeneas, prove that the Romans were possessed already with the idea c their national destiny. How much of the tale of Aenea and Dido is due to the imagination of Naevius it is im possible to say ; but his treatment of the mythical part c his story, — his introduction of the storm, the complain of Venus, etc., — merits the praise of happy and suggestiv invention, and of a real adaptation to his main subjecl There was more meaning in the mythical foreshadowing o the deadly strife between Romans and Carthaginiafls, at ; time when the two nations were fighting for their ver existence, and for the ultimate prize of the empire of thi world, than in the age of Virgil, when the power of Car thage was only a memory of the past, and the immediat danger from which Rome had escaped had arisen not si much from any foreign enemy, as from the fierce passion of her own sons. The mythical part of the poem was a prelude to thi main subject, the events of the First Punic War. Naeviu; and Ennius, like others among the Roman poets of a late date, allowed the provinces of poetry and of history to rui THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 59 ito one another. They composed poetical chronicles ithout any attempt to adhere to the principles and ractice of the Greek epic. The work of Naevius differed om that of Ennius in this respect, that it treated of one articular portion of Roman history, and did not profess ) unfold the whole annals of the State. The slight and :anty fragments that remain from the latter part of the oem, are expressed with all the bareness, and, ap- arently, with the fidelity of a chronicle. They have the lerit of being direct and vigorous, but are entirely without oetic grace and ornament. Rapid and graphic conden- ition is their chief merit. There is a dash of impetuosity I some of them, suggestive of the bold, impatient, and lergetic temperament of the poet ; as for instance in the nes Transit Melitam Rolnanus exercitus, insulam integram Urit, populatur, vastat, rem hostium concinnat^. But the fragments of the poem are really too unimpor- mt to afford ground for a true estimate of its general lerit. They supply some evidence in regard to the irregu- irity of the metre in which it was written. The uncertainty 'Inch prevails as to its structure may be inferred from the ict that different conjectural readings of every fragment re proposed by different commentators. A saying of an Id grammarian, Atilius Fortunatianus, is quoted to the ffect that he could not adduce from the whole poem of [aevius any single line, as a normal specimen of the pure aturnian verse. Cicero bears strong testimony to the lerits of the poem in point of style. He says in one place, the Punic War delights us like a work of Myron ^.' In le dialogue ' De Oratore,' he represents Crassus as com- aring the idiomatic purity which distinguished the con- ersation of his mother-in-law, Laelia, and other ladies of ink, with the style of Plautus and Naevius. ' Equidem uum audio socrum meam Laeliam (facilius enim mulieres * Mommsen remarks that, in the fragments of this poem, the action is ;nerally represented in the present tense. ' Brutus, 19. 6o THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod, multorum sermonis expertes, ea tenent semper, quae prima didi- cerunt) ; sed cam sic audio, ut Plautum mihi aut Naevium videar audire. Sono ipso vocis ita recto et simplici est, ut nihil ostentationis aut imitationis afferre videatur ; ex quo sic locutum ejus patrem judico, sic majores^' Expressions from his plays were, from their weight and compact brevity, quoted familiarly in the days of Cicero ; and one of them 'laudari a laudato viro,' like so many other pithy Latin sayings, is still in use to express a distinction that could not be characterised in happier or shorter terms. It is to be remarked also that the merit, which he assumes to him- self in his epitaph, is the purity with which he wrote the Latin language. Our knowledge of Naevius is thus, of necessity, very limited and fragmentary. From the testimony of later authors it may, however, be gathered that he was a re- markable and original man. He represented the boldness, freedom, and energy, which formed one side of the Roman character. Like some of our own early dramatists, he had served as a soldier before becoming an author. He was ardent in his national feeling; and, both in his life and in his writings, he manifested a strong spirit of political partisanship. As an author, he showed great productive energy, which continued unabated through a long and vigorous lifetime. His high self-confident spirit and impe- tuous temper have left their impress on the few fragments of his dramas and of his epic poem. Probably his most important service to Roman literature consisted in the vigour and purity with which he used the Latin language. But the conception of his epic poem seems to imply some * ' I, for my part, as I listen to my mother-in-law, Laelia (for women more easily preserve the pure idiom of antiquity, because, from their limited intercourse with the world, they retain always their earlier impressions), in listening, I say to her, I fancy that I am listening to Plautus or Naevius. The very tones of her voice are so natural and simple, that she seems ah- solutely free from affectation or imitation ; from this I gather that her father spoke, and her ancestors all spoke, in the very same way.' — Cicero, De Oratore iii 12. THE BEGINNING OF ROMAN LITERATURE. 6 1 re of the higher gift of poetical invention. He stands at head of the line of Roman poets, distinguished by that ;e of speech and vehemence of temper, which appeared ,in in Lucilius, Catullus, and Juvenal ; distinguished also that national spirit which moved Ennius and, after him, ■gil, to employ their poetical faculty in raising a monu- nt to commemorate the power and glory of Rome. CHAPTER IV. ENNIUS. The impulse given to Latin literature by Naevius was mainly in two directions, that of comedy and of a rude epic poetry, drawing its subjects from Roman traditions and contemporary history. In comedy the work begun by him was carried on with great vigour and success by his younger contemporary Plautus : and, in a strictly chrono- logical history of Roman literature, his plays would have to be examined next in order. But it will be more con- venient to defer the consideration of Roman comedy, as a whole, till a later chapter, and for the present to direct attention to the results produced by the immediate suc- cessor of Naevius in epic poetry, Q. Ennius. The fragments of Ennius will repay a more minute examination than those of any author belonging to the first period of Roman , literature. They are of more in- trinsic value, and they throw more light on the spirit of the age in which they were written. Jt was to hini, not- to Naevius or to Plautus, ^that the Romans looked as the father of^heir_literature. He did more than any other man to make the Roman language a vehicle of elevated feeling, by forcing it to conform to the metrical conditions of Greek poetry; and he was the first fully to elicit the deeper veins of sentiment latent in the national imagina- tion. The versatility of his powers, his large acquaintance with Greek literature, his sympathy with the practical interests of his time, the serious purpose and the intellectual vigour with which he carried out his work, enabled him to be in letters, what Scipio was in action, the most vital ENNIUS. 63 representative of his epoch. It has happened too that the fragments from his writings and the testimonies concerning him are more expressive and characteristic than in the case of any other among the early writers. There are none of his contemporaries, playing their part in war or politics, and not many among the writers of later times, of whom we can form so distinct an image. I. LIFE, TIMES, AND PERSONAL TRAITS. I. He was born at Rudiae, a town of Calabria, in B. C. 239, the year after the first representation of a drama on the Roman stage. He first entered Rome in B. c. 204, in the train of Cato, who, when acting as quaestor in Sardinia, found the poet in that island serving, with the rank of centurion, in the Roman army. In the poem of Silius Italicus, he is fancifully represented as distinguishing him- self in personal combat like one of the heroes of the Iliad. After this time he resided at Rome, 'living,' according to the statement of Jerome, 'very plainly, on the Aventine' (the Plebeian quarter of the city), ' attended only by a single maid-servant \' and supporting himself by teaching Greek and by his writings. He accompanied M. Fulvius Nobilior in his Aetolian campaign. Through the influence of his son, he obtained the honour of Roman citizenship, probably at the time when the colony of Pisaurum was planted in B.C. 184. This distinction Ennius has himself recorded in a line of the Annals : — Nos sumu' Romani, qui fuvimus ante Rudini. He lived on terms of intimacy with influential members of the noblest families in Rome, and became the familiar friend of the great Scipio. When he died at the age of seventy, his bust was beHeved to be placed in the tomb of the Scipios, between those of the conqueror of Hannibal and of the conqueror of Antiochus. He died in the year B. c. 169. The most famous of his works were his Tragedies and the Annals, a long historical poem written in eighteen ' Parco admodum sumptu contentus et imius ancillae ministerio. I 64 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. books. But, in addition to these, he composed several miscellaneous works, of which only very scanty fragments have been preserved. Among the circumstances which prepared him to be the creator of a national literature, his birthplace and origin, the kind of education available to him in his early years, and the experience which awaited him when first entering on life, had a strong determining influence. His birthplace, Rudiae, is called by Strabo ' a Greek city ; ' but it was not a Greek colony, like Tarentum and the other cities oi Magna Graecia, but an old Italian town, (the epithet vetustae is applied to it by Silius) which had been partially Hellenised, but still retained its native traditions and the use of the Oscan language. Ennius is thus spoken of as ' Semi-Graecus.' He laid claim to be descended from the old Messapian kings, a claim which Virgil is supposed to acknowledge in the introduction of Messapus leading his followers in the gathering of the Italian races, Ibant aequati numero regemque canebant. This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the better class of families in his native district ; and the consciousness of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies. He bore witness to his nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius ^ that ' in the possession of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he pos- sessed three hearts.' Of these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire for the purposes of litera- ture or of social intercourse, was most likely to have, been his inherited tongue. Rudiae, from its Italian nationality, from its neighbourhood to the tities of Magna Graecia, and from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-placCi not only of three different languages, — that of common ' xvii. I 'J, ENNIUS. 6^ life, that of culture and education, that of military service — but of the three different spirits or tendencies which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas — referred to in a line of the Annals,— Ad patrios monies et ad incunabula nostra — in the expression of Ovid, — Calabris in montibus ortus — and in the phrase of Silius, — Hispida tellus Miserunt Calabri; Rudiae genuere vetustae the poet owed the 'Italian heart' the virtue of a race still uncorrupted and unsophisticated, the buoyant energy and freshness of feeling which enabled him to apprehend all the novelty and the greatness of the momentous age through which he lived. The South of Italy afforded, at this time, means of education, which were denied to Rome or Latium ; and the peace enjoyed by his native district for the first twenty years of the life of Ennius granted leisure to avail himself of these means, which he could not have enjoyed had he been born a few years later. In the short account of his life in Jerome's continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, it is stated that he was born at Tarentum. Though this is clearly an error, it seems probable that the poet may have spent the years of his education there. Though Tarentum had lost its political importance since its capture by the Romans, it still continued to be a centre of Greek culture and of social pleasure. Dramatic repre- sentations had been especially popular among a people who had drifted far away 'ex Spartana dura ilia et horrida disciplina ^ ' of their ancestors. From the intimate know- ledge of the Attic tragedians displayed by Ennius in his later career it is likely that he had witnessed representations of their works on a Greek stage, before he began, in middle life, to direct his own genius to dramatic composition. The knowledge and admiration of Homer which stimulated him to the composition of his greatest work, might have ' Livy xxxviii. 1 7. F 66 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. been acquired in any centre of Greek culture. But th intellectual interests indicated in some of his miscellaneoi writings have a kind of local character, distinguishing thei alike from the older philosophies of Athens and from th more recent science of Alexandria. His acceptance of th doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the physici fancies expressed in some of the fragments of the Epichai mus probably came to him from the teaching of the Nee Pythagoreans, who were widely spread among the Greei of Southern Italy. The rationalistic speculations of Euh( merus, which appear in strange union with the 'somni Pythagorea' of the Annals, were of Sicilian origin. Th gastronomic treatise, which Ennius afterwards translate into Latin, was the work of Archestratus of Gela. Th class of persons for whom such a work would originally b written was likely to be found among the luxurious livei of Sicily and Magna Graecia. Thus while the seriou poetry of Ennius was inspired by the older and noble works of Greek genius, the influence of a more vulgar an prosaic class of teachers, transmitted by him to Roma thought and literature, was probably derived from th place of his early education. His Italian spirit, and the Greek culture acquired b him in early youth, were two of the conditions out of whic the new literature was destined to arise. The third con dition was his steadfast and ardent Roman patriotisn: Born more than a generation after his native district hai ceased to be at war with Rome, he grew up to manhooi during the years of peace between the first and second Cai thaginian wars, when the supremacy of Rome was loyall; accepted. Between early manhood and middle life he wa a witness of and an actor in the protracted and long doubi ful struggle between the two great Imperial States, on th issue of which hung the future destinies of the world : — Omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu Hqrrida contremuere sub altis aetheris oris; In dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum Omnibus humanis esset terraque manque'. ^ ' When the Carthaginians were coming from all sides to the conflict, ai EN N I us. 61 Though during that struggle the loyalty of some of the Italian communities was shaken, yet the aristocratic party in every city, and the Greek States generally, were true to the Roman alliance i. Thus his political sympathies, asV well as his Greek education, would incline Ennius to identify himself with the cause of Rome, and his ardent imagination apprehended the grandeur and majesty with which she played her part in the contest. It was in the Second Punic War that the ideal of what was greatest in the character and institutions of Rome was most fully realised. Her good fortune supplied from among the contingent furnished to the war by her Messapian allies a man of a nature so sympathetic with her own and an imagination so vivid as to gain for the ideal thus created a permanent realization. Of the share which Ennius had in the war we know only that he served in Sardinia with the rank of centurion. That he had become a man of some note in that capacity is suggested by the fact that he attracted the attention of the Roman quaestor Cato, and accompanied him to Rome. A certain dramatic interest attaches to this first meeting of the typical representative of Roman manners and traditions and great enemy of foreign innovations, with the man by whom, more than by any one else, the mind of Rome was enlarged and liberalised, and many of her most cherished convictions were most seriously undermined. This actual service in a great war left its impress on the work done by Ennius. Fragments both of his tragedies and his Annals prove how thoroughly he understood and appre- ciated the best qualities of the soldierly character. This fellowship in hardship and danger fitted him to become the national poet of a race of soldiers. He has drawn from his own observation an image of the fortitude and discipline of the Roman armies, and of the patriotic devotion and resolution of the men by whom these armies were led. all things, beneath high heaven, confounded by the hurry and tumult of war, shook with alarm : and men were in doubt to which of the two the empire of the whole world, by land and sea, should fall.' — Lucret. iii. 833-7. ' Mommsen, book iii. ch. 5. F 2 68 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. There is a strong realism in the expression of martial sentiment in Ennius, marking him out as a man familiar with the life of the camp and the battle-field, and quite distinct from the idealising enthusiasm of Livy and Virgil i. Ennius entered on his career as a writer at a time when the long strain of a great struggle was giving place to the confidence and security of a great triumph. He lived for thirty-five years longer, witnessing the rapid advance of Roman conquest in Greece and Asia, and over the bar- barous tribes of the West. He died one year before the crowning victory of Pydna. During all his later life his sanguine spirit and patriotic enthusiasm were buoyed up by the success of the Roman and Italian arms abroad ; while his political sympathies were in thorough accord with the dominant influences in the government of the State. At no other period of Roman history was the ascendency of the Senate and of the great houses more undisputed, or, on the whole, more wisely and ably exercised. In the lists of those who successively fill the great curule magis- tracies, we find almost exclusively the names of members of the old patrician or of the more recent plebeian nobility. At no other period does the tribunician opposition to the senatorian direction of affairs and to the authority of the magistrate appear weaker or more intermittent. It was not till a generation after the death of Ennius that the moral corruption and political and social disorganisation — the ultimate results of the great military successes gained under the absolute ascendency of the Senate, — became fully manifest. It is difficult to say how far the aristocratic and antipopu'lar bias of all Roman literature may have been determined by the political conditions of the time in which that literature received the most powerful impulse, and by the personal relations and peculiar stamp of character of the man by whom that impulse was given. Along with the military and political activity of the ' The author of Caesar's Spanish War quotes Ennius in his account of the critical moment in the Battle of Munda : — ' Hie, ut ait Ennius, " pes pede premitur, armis teruntur anna." ' Bell. Hisp. xxxi. ENNIUS. 69 time, during which Ennius lived in Rome, the stirring of a new intellectual life was apparent. Even, during the war ' dramatic representations continued to take place, and the most active part of the career of Naevius, and a considerable part of that of Plautus, belong to the years during which Hannibal was still in Italy. After the cessation of the war, we note in the pages of Livy that much greater pro- minence is given to the celebration of public games, of which at this time dramatic representations formed the chief part. The regular holidays for which the. Aediles provided these, entertainments became more numerous ; and the art of the dramatist was employed to enhance the pomp of the spectacle on the occasion. of a great triumph, or of the funeral of an illustrious man.. The death of Livius Andronicus and the banishment of Naevius, which must have happened about the time that Ennius arrived at Rome, had deprived the Roman stage of the only writers of any name, who had attempted to introduce upon it the works of the Greek tragedians. Ennius had, indeed, rather to create than. to revive the taste for tragedy. The pro- logue to the Amphitryo ^ shows how much more congenial the reproduction of the ordinary life of the- Greeks was to the uneducated audiences of Rome than the higher effort to familiarise them with the personages and adven- , tures of the heroic age. The great era of Roman comedy was coincident with the literary career of Ennius. It was then that the best extant plays of Plautus were, produced, and that Caecilius Statius, whom ancient critics ranked as his superior, flourished. The quality attributed to the latter in the line of Horace, Vincere Caecilius gravitate, Terentius arte, indicates a closer affinity with the spirit of Ennius, than the moral and political indifference of the older dramatist. The aim of Ennius was to raise literature from being a mere popular recreation, and to bring it into accord with ' Amphit. 52-3 - Quid contraxistis frontem, quia tragoediam Dixi futuram banc? 70 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. the higher mood of the nation ; to use it as a medium both of elevation and enlightenment. In carrying out this aim he appealed to the temper and to the newly awakened interests of members of the aristocratic class, who were coming into close contact with educated Greeks, and were beginning to appreciate the treasures of art and literature now opened up to them. The career of Q. Fabius Pictor, the first historian of Rome, and the first who made a name for himself in painting, who lived at this time, attests this twofold attraction. The friendly relations which Roman generals, such as T. Quintius Flamininus, established with the famous Greek cities, in which they appeared as liberators rather than conquerors, were the result of intellectual enthusiasm as much as of a definite policy. With the wars of Pyrrhus and the capture of Tarentum, the first stage of the process described in the lines of Horace tegan ^ : the end of the Second Punic War was the second stage in the process. It is to this period, rather than to the progress of the war, that the words of the Grammarian, Porcius Licinus, most truly apply, Poenico bello secundo Musa pinnato gradu Intulit se bellicosam in Romuli gentem feram. The more frequent and closer contact with the mind of Greece not only refined the taste and enlarged the in- telligence of those capable of feeling its influence, but produced at the same time a change in men's deepest convictions. Though the definite tenets of Stoicism and Epicureanism did not acquire ascendency till a later time, the dissolving force of Greek speculative thought and Greek views of life forced its way into Rome through various channels, — especially through the adaptations of the tragedies of Euripides and of the comedy of Menander. All these tendencies of the time acted on Ennius, stimu- lating his mental activity in various directions. His natural temperament and his acquired culture brought him into harmony with the spirit of his age without raising him too much above it. A poet of more delicacy of taste and ^ Giaecia capta ferum victorem cepit, &c. ENNIUS. 71 fection of execution would have been unintelligible to contemporaries. A more systematic thinker would re been out of harmony with the conditions of life by ich he was surrounded. Breadth, vigour, a spirit clinging what was most vital in the old state of things, and yet idily adapting itself to what was new, were the qualities ;ded to establish a literature true to the genius of Rome the second century B.C., and containing the promise of : more perfect accomplishment of a later age. And :se qualities belonged to Ennius by natural gifts and : experience and culture of his earlier years. There is no reason to believe that he had obtained any linence in literature before he settled in middle age at )me. His genius was of that robust order which grows her and livelier with advancing years. The Annals was-/ e work of his old age, — the ripe fruit of a strong and ergetic manhood, prolonged to the last in hopeful tivity. Cicero speaks of ' the cheerfulness with which he ire the two evils of old age and poverty^.' Wherever e poet speaks of himself, his words reveal a sanguine -~ ,d contented spirit; as, in that fine simile, where he mpares himself, at the close of his active and successful reer, to a brave horse which has often won the prize at e Olympian games, and in old age obtains his well- ;served repose : — Sicut fortis equns, spatio qui saepe supremo Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectu' qulescit. In none of his fragments is there any trace of that elancholy after-thought which pervades the poetry of s greatest successors, Lucretius and Virgil. From the imorous exaggeration of Horace, Ennius ipse pater nunquam, nisi potus, ad anna Prosiluit dicenda; id from the poet's own confession, Nunquam poetor, nisi si podager, may be inferred that he belonged to the class of poets ' De Senectute, 5. 7a THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. of a lusty and social nature, of which Dryden is a type ir modern times, who enjoyed the pleasures of wine and gooc fellowship. The well-known anecdote, told by Cicero of the interchange of visits between Scipio Nasica znt Ennrus S though not a brilliant specimen of Roman wit, is interesting from the light which it throws on the easj terms of intimacy in which the poet lived with the members of the most eminent Roman families. Such testimonies and traits of personal character make us think of Ennius as a man of genial and social" temper, as well as of 'an intense and glowing mind.'' It was probably through his position as a teacher of Greek that Ennius first became known to the leading men of Rome. If this position was at first one of dependence, similar to that in which in earlier times the client stood to his patron, it soon changed into one of mutual esteem and admiration, We can best understand the relation in which he stood to men eminent in, the. state and" in the camp, from a passage from the seventh book of the Annals quoted by Aulus Gellius. In that passage the poet is stated, on the authority of L. Aelius Stilo ^ (an early grammarian, a friend of Lucilius, and one of Cicero's teachers), to have drawn his own portrait, under an imaginary description of a confidential friend' of the Roman general, Servilius Ge- minus. The portrait has the air of being drawn from the life, with a rapid^ and forcible hand, and with a minuteness of detail significant of close personal' observation : — Haece locutu' vocat quocum beiie saepe libenter Mensam sennonesque suos rerumque suarum Congeriem partitj magnam cum lassu' diei Partem fuisset de summis rebu' rqgendig Consilio, indu foro lato sanctoque senatu : Cui res audacter magnas parvasque jocumque Eloqueretur, cuncta simul malaque et bona dictu Evomeret, si qui vellet, tutoque locaret. ' De Oratore, ii. 68. ^ ' L. Aelium Stilonem dicere 'solitum ferunt Q. Emiium de semet ipso haec scripsisse, picturamque istam morum et, ingenii ipsius Q. Ennii factam (;dse.' — Gell. xii. 4. ENNIUS. 73 Quocum multa volup ac gaudia clamque palamque : Ingenium. cui nulla malum, sententia suadet Ut faceret facitius levis aut malu', doctu', fidelis, Suavis homo, facundu', suo contentu', beatus, Scitu,' secunda loquens in tempore, commodu', verbum Paucum, multa tenens antiqua sepulta, vetustas Quem fecit mores veteresque novosque tenentem, Multorum veterum leges divumque hominumque; Prudenter qui dicta loquive tacereve possit. Hunc inter pugnas Servilius sic compellat'. lere are many touches in this picture, which suggest i kind of intimacy in which Ennius may have lived with Ivius Nobilior when accompanying, him in his Aetolian Tipaign, or his bearing when taking part in the Hght or ious talk of the Scipios. The learning and power of ;ech, the knowledge of antiquity and of the manners the day, attributed to this friend of Servilius, were gifts lich we may attribute to the poet both on ancient testi- )ny and on the evidence afforded by the fragments of his itings. The good sense, tact, and knowledge of the irld, the cheerfulness in life and conversation, the honour d integrity of character represented in the same passage, ; among the personal qualities which, in all ages, form bond of union between men eminent in great practical airs and men eminent in literature. Such were the alities which, according to his own account, recommended Drace to the intimate friendship of Maecenas. Many pressive fragments from, the lost poetry of Ennius give iurance that he was a man in whom learning and the ' He finished : and summons to him one with whom often, and right gladly, shared his table, his talk, and the whole weight of his business, when weary h debate, throughout the day, on high affairs of state, within the wide Forum the august Senate, — one to whom he could frankly speak out serious ;ters, trifles, and jest ; to whom he could pour forth and safely confide, if he ited to confide in any one, all that he cared to utter, good or bad ; with )m, in private and in, public, he had much entertainment and enjoyment, — an of that nature which no thought ever prompts to baseness through levity malice : a learned, honest, pleasant man, eloquent, contented, and cheerful, auch tact, speaking well in season ; courteous and of fey words ; with much buried lore ; whom length of years had made versed in old and recent s ; in the laws of many ancients, divine and human ; one who knew :n to speak and when to be silent. Him, during the battle, Servilius thus resses.' 74 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. ardent temperament of genius were happily united with the worth and sense described in this nameless portrait. By his personal merit he broke through the strongest barriers ever raised by national and family pride, and made the name of poet, instead of a reproach, a name of honour with the ruling class at Rome. The favourable impression which he produced on the ' primitive virtue ' of Cato, by whom he was first brought to Rome, was more probably due to his force of character and social qualities than to his genius and literary accomplishment, — qualities seem- ingly little valued by his earliest patron, who, in one of his speeches, reproached Fulvius Nobilior with allowing himself to be accompanied by a poet in his campaign. But the strongest proof of the worth and the wisdom of Ennius is his intimate friendship with the greatest Roman of the age, and the conqueror of the greatest soldier of antiquity. It is honourable to the friendship of generous natures, that- the poet neither sought nor gained wealth from this intimacy, but continued to live plainly and con- tentedly on the Aventine. Yet after death it was believed that the two friends were not divided ; and the bust of the provincial poet found a place among the remains of that time-honoured family, the record of whose grandeur has been preserved, even to the present day, in the august simplicity of their monumental inscriptions. The elder Africanus may have been attracted to Ennius not only by his passion for Greek culture, but by a certain community of nature. The mystical enthusiasm, the high self-confidence, the direct simplicity combined with majesty of character, impressed on the language of the poet were equally impressed on the action and bearing of the soldier. The feeling which Ennius in his turn entertained for Scipio was one of enthusiastic admiration. While paying due honour to the merits and services of other famous men, even of such as Cato and Fabius, who were most opposed to his idol, of Scipio he said that Homer alone could worthily have uttered his praises ^ ' 2«i7riWo f^p ^lm> koX iiti fik-^a. rbv dvSpa k(a.pai 0ov\6tiievos (ptjol fdvov of ENNIUS. 75 1 addition to the part which he assigned to him in the th Book of the Annals, he devoted a separate poem to imemorate his achievements. He has left also two short riptions, written in elegiac verse, in which he proclaims ivords of burning enthusiasm the momentous services transcendent superiority of the 'great world's victor's or'— Hie est ille situs cui nemo civi' neque hostis Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretlum ' ; this also, A sole exoiiente supra Maeoti' paludes Nemo est qui factis me aequiperare queat. Si fas endo plagas coelestium ascendere cuiquam est, Mi soli caeli maxima porta patef. Vith many marked differences, which distinguish a man ictive, social, and national sympathies from a student of ture and a thinker on human life, there is a certain nity of character and genius between Ennius and Lu- tius. Enthusiastic admiration of personal greatness is I prominent feature in which they resemble one another. t while Lucretius is the ardent admirer of contemplative [ imaginative greatness, it is greatness in action and .racter which moves the admiration of Ennius. They emble each other also in their strong consciousness of lius and their high estimate of its function and value. ;ero mentions that Ennius applied the epithet sanctus poets. Lucretius applies the same epithet to the old losophic poets, as in the lines of strong affection and erence which he dedicates to Empedocles, Nil tamen hoc habuisse viro praeclarius in se, Nee sanctum magis, et mirum earumque videtur'. ipov kna^iovs iiraivovi (IweTv 'Zicnr'uayos. — Aelian, as quoted by Suidas, vol. i. 258. Ed. Gaisford. Cf. Vahlen. ' Here is he laid, to whom no one, either countryman or enemy, has been : to pay a due meed for his services.' ' From the utmost east, beyond the Maeotian marsh, there is no one who ctions can vie with me. If it is lawful for any one to ascend to the realms fie gods, to me alone the vast gate of heaven is opened ! ' 'Yet nothing more glorious than this man doth it (the island of Sicily) n to have contained, nor aught more holy, nor more wonderful and )ved.' 76 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. The inscription which Ennius composed for his own bust directly expresses his sense of the greatness of his work, and his confident assurance of fame, and of the lasting sympathy of his countrymen — Aspicite, O cives, senis Enni imagini' formam, Hie vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum. Nemo me lacrimis decoret nee funera fletu Faxit. Cur? Volito vivu' per ora virum'. Two lines from one of his satires — Enni poeta salve qui mortalibus Versus propinas flammeos medullitus ', indicate in still stronger terms his. burning consciousness of power. Some of the greatest of modern poets, such as Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth, have manifested a feeling similar to that expressed by Ennius and Lucretius. Although appearing in strange contrast with the self-suppression of the highest creative art (as seen in Homer, in Sophocles, and in Shakspeare), this proud self-confidence, 'disdainful of help or hindrance,' is the usual accompaniment of an intense nature and of a, genius exercised with some serious moral, religious, or political purpose. The least pleasing side of the feeling, even in men of generous nature, is the scorn, — not of envy, but of imperfect sympathy, — which they are apt to entertain towards rival genius or antagonistic convictions. Something of this spirit appears in the dis- paraging allusion of Ennius to his predecessor Naevius :-^ Scripsere alii rem Versibu', quos olim Fauni vatesqne. eanebapt, Quum neque Musarum scopulos- quisquam superarat. Nee dicti studiosus erat*. * ' Behold, my countrymen, the bust of the old man, Ennius. He penned the record of your fathers' mighty deeds. . Let no, one pay to me the meed of tears, nor weep at my funeral. And why ? because I still live, as I speed to and fro, through the mouths of men.' ' 'Hail, poet Ennius, who pledgest to mortals thy fiery verse .from thy inmost marrow.' * ' Others have treated the subject in the verses, which in days of old the Fauns and bards used to sing, before any one had climbed the cliffs of the Muses, or gave any care to style.' ENNIUS. 77 contempt here expressed for the metre employed by- older poet seems to be the counterpart of his own tation in being the first to introduce what he called long verses ' into Latin literature, aother point in which there is some affinity between ius and Lucretius is their religious temper and con- 3ns. There is indeed no trace in Ennius of the rigid lectual consistency of Lucretius, nor in Lucretius any m of the mysticism which Ennius inherited from the ulations of Pythagoras. But in both deep feelings of and reverence are combined with a scornful disbelief le superstition of their time. They both apply the prin- :s of Euhemerism to resolve the bright creations of the mythology into their original elements. Ennius, like retius, seems to deny the providence of the gods. He es one of the personages of his dramas give expression le thought which perplexed the minds of Thucydides Tacitus — the thought, namely, of the apparent discon- on between prosperity and goodness, as affording proof le divine indifference to human well-being — Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum, Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus ; Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest ' : he exposed, with caustic sense, the false pretences of irs, prophets, and astrologers. His translation of the ■ed Chronicle of Euhemerus exercised a permanent lence on the religious convictions of his countrymen, while led to these conclusions by the spirit of his age, by the study of the later speculations of Greece, he :ved in the soul's independence of the body, and of its inued existence, under other conditions, after death, declared that the spirit of Homer, after many changes, ; one time having animated a peacock ^, again, having I have always said and will say that the gods of heaven exist, but I think ;hey heed not the conduct of mankind ; for, if they did, it would be well the good and ill with the bad ; and it is not so now.' ' Cor jubet hoc Enni, postquam destertuit esse Maeonides, Quintus pavone ex Pythagoreo. Persius, vi. lo (Ed. Jahn). 78 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. been incarnate in the sage of Crotona, — had finally passei into his own body: and he told how the shade — whicl he regards as distinct from the soul or spirit — of hi great prototype had appeared to him from the invisibl world, — Qiao neque pennaneant animae neque corpora nostra Sed quaedam simulacra modis pallentia miris, and explained to him the whole plan of nature. Thesi dreams of the imagination may not have been withou effect in enabling Ennius to escape from the gloom whicl * eclipsed the brightness of the world ' to Lucretius. Thi light in which the world appeared to the older poet wai that of common sense strangely blended with imaginatiw mysticism. He thus seems to stand midway between th( spiritual aspirations of Empedocles and the negation o Lucretius. Born in the vigorous prime of Italian civilisa tion he came into the inheritance of the bold fancies o: the earlier Greeks and of the dull rationalism of their latei speculation. His ideas on what transcends experience appear thus to have been without the unity arising from an unreflecting acceptance of tradition, or from the basis of philosophical consistency. , II. HIS WORKS.— (l) MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. . IL (i) In laying the foundations of Roman literature, Ennius displayed not only the fervent sympathies and active faculty of genius, but also great energy and industry, and a many-sided learning. The composition of his tragedies sf and of the Annals, while making most demand on his original gifts, implied also a diligent study of Homer and of the Greek tragedians, and a large acquaintance with the traditions and antiquities of Rome. But besides the works on which his highest poetical faculty was employed, other writings, of a philosophical, didactic, and miscellaneous character, gave evidence of the versatility of his powers \J and interests. It does not appear that he was the author of any prose writing. His version, of the Sacred Chronicle ENNIUS. 79 )f Euhemerus was more probably a poetical adaptation ban a literal prose translation of that work. The work of iuhemerus was conceived in that spirit of vulgar rational- sm, which is condemned by Plato in the Phaedrus. He ;xplained away the fables of mythology, by representing :hem as a supernatural account of historical events. Several :xtracts of the work quoted by Lactantius, as from the :ranslation of Ennius, look as if they had been reduced Tom a form originally metrical into the prose of a later :ra^ There is thus no evidence, direct or indirect, to prove that Ennius had any share in forming the style of Latin prose. But if verse was the sole instrument which be used, this was certainly not due to the poetical character 3f all the topics which he treated, but, more likely, to the fact that his acquired aptitude, and the state of the Latin language in his time, made metrical writing more natural md easy than prose composition. One of his works in verse was a treatise on good living, called Hedyphagetica, founded on the gastronomic re- searches of Archestratus of Gela, — a sage who is said to have devoted his life to the study of everything that con- tributed to the pleasures of the table, and to have recorded his varied experience and research with the grave dignity of epic verse. A few lines from this translation or adapta- tion of Ennius, giving an account of the coasts on which the best fish are to be found, have been preserved by Apuleius. The lines are curious as' exemplifying that tone of half- serious enthusiasm, which all who treat, either in prose or verse, of the pleasures of eating seem naturally to adopt ^. The language in which the scarus, a fish unhappily lost to the modern epicure, is described as ' the brain almost of almighty Jove,' fits cdl the requirements of gastronomic rapture : — Quid turdum, merulam, melanurum umbramque marinam Praeterii, atque scanim, cerebrum Jovi' paene supremi ? Nestoris ad patriam hie capitur magnusque bonusque '. ' Vahlen. ' E.g. Horace, Sat. ii. 4. 8b TtlE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. I He wrote also a philosophical poem in trochaic septenarian verse, called Epicharmus, founded on writings attributed to the old Sicilian poet, whidh appear to have resolved the gods of the Greek mythology into natural substances \ A few slight fragments have been preserved from this poem. They speak of the four elements or principles of the universe as ' water, earth, air, the sun ' ; of ' the blending of heat with cold, dryness with moisture'; of 'the earth bearing and supporting all nations and receiving them again back into herself.' The following is the longest fragment from the poem : — Istic est is Jupiter quem dico, quem Graeci vocant Aerem : qui ventus est et nubes ; imber postea Atque ex imbre frigus : ventus post fit, aer denuo, Haece propter Jupiter sunt ista quae dico tibi, Quoniam mortalis atque urbes beluasque omnis juvat^. These fragments and a passage from the opening lines of the Annals, where the shade of Homer was introduced as discoursing to Ennius (like the shade of Anchises to Aeneas), on ' the nature of things,' are specimens of that vague curiosity about the facts and laws of Nature, which, in ancient times, supplied the absence of scientific know- ledge. Such physical speculations possessed a great at- traction for the Roman poets. The spirit of the Epichar- mus, as well as of the Sacred Chronicle of Euhemerus, reappears in the poem of Lucretius. Ennius was the first among his countrymen who expressed that curiosity as to the ultimate facts of Nature and that sense of the mysterious life of the universe, which acted as the most ' ' The poetical philosophy, which the later Pythagoreans had extracted from the writings of the old Sicilian comedian, Epicharmus of Megara, or rather had, at least for the most part, circulated under cover of his name, regarded the Greek gods as natural substances, Zeus as the atmosphere, the soul as a particle of Sun-dust, and so forth.' — Mommsen's Hist, of Rome, Book iii. ch. 15. (Dickson's Translation.) ^ 'This is that Jupiter which I speak of, which the Greeks call the air; it is first wind and clouds ; afterwards rain, and after rain, cold ; next it becomes wind, then air again. All those things which I inention to you are Jupiter, because it is he who supports mortals and cities and all animals.' ENNTUS, 81 owerful intellectual impulse on the mind of Lucretius, and hich fascinated the imagination of Virgil. Another of his miscellaneous works, probably of a moral nd didactic character, was known by the name of Pro- ■eptica. It is possible that all of these works \ as well as le Scipio, formed part of the Saturae, or Miscellanies, nder which title Ennius composed four, or, according to nother authority, six books. The Romans looked upon .ucilius as the inventor of satire in the later sense of that rord^; — ^he having been the first to impress upon the satura tie character of censorious criticism, which it has borne ince his time. But there was another kind of satura, of /hich Ennius and Pacuvius in early times, and Varro at somewhat later time, were regarded as the principal uthors. This was really a miscellany treating of various ubjects, in various metres, and, as employed by Varro, was i^ritten partly in prose, partly in verse. This kind of com- )osition, as well as the Lucilian satire, arose out of the old ndigenous satura or dramatic medley, familiar to the lomans before the introduction of Greek literature. When he scenic element in the original satura was superseded by he new comedy introduced from Greece, the old name was irst applied to a miscellaneous kind of composition, in vhich ordinary topics were treated in a serious but ap- parently desultory wayj and even as employed by Lucilius md Horace the satura retained much of its original cha- acter. The satires of Ennius were written in various netcps, iambic, trochaic, and hexameter, and treated of various topics of personal and public interest. The few passages which ancient authorities quote as fragments from :hem are not of much value in themselves, but when taken n connexion with the testimonies as to their character, :hey are of some interest as showing that this kind of com- position was a form intermediate between the old dramatic satura and the satire of Lucilius and Horace. It is re- :orded that in one of these pieces, Ennius introduced a ' Mommsen. ° ' Inventore minor.' — Horace. V 83 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. dialogue between Life and Death ; — thus transmitting in the use of dialogue (which appears very frequently in Horace and Persius) some vestige of the original scenic medley. Ennius also appears, like Lucilius and Horace, to have communicated in his satires his own personal feelings and experience, as in the fragment already quoted : — Nunquam poetor, nisi si podager. Further satire, in the hands of its chief masters, aimed at practical moral teaching, not only by precept, ridicule, and invective, and by portraiture of individuals and classes, but also by the use of anecdotes and fables. This last mode of combining amusement with instruction is common in Horace. It appears, however, to have been first used by Ennius. Aulus GelHus mentions that Aesop's fable of the field-lark and the husbandman 'is very skilfully and gracefully told by Ennius in his satires ' ; and he quotes the advice, appended to the fable, ' Never to expect your friends to do for you what you can do for yourself:' Hoc erit tibi argumentum semper in promptu situm : Nequid expectes amicos, quod tute agere possies'. These miscellaneous works of Ennius were the fruits of his learning and literary industry, rather than of his genius. Such works might have been written in prose, if the art of prose composition had been as familiar as that of verse. It is in the fragments of his dramas, and still more of the Annals, that his poetic power is most apparent, and that the influence which he exercised over the Roman mind and literature is discerned. ' Another passage, ascribed to Ennius, descriptive of the greed of a parasite, occupies the ground common to Roman comedy and to Roman satire : — Quippe sine cura laetus lautus cum advenis Insertis malis, expedito bracchio Alacer, celsus, lupino expectans impetu, Mox cum alterius obligurias bona, Quid censes domino esse animi? pro divum fidemi llle tristis cibum dum servat, tu ridens voras. ENNIUS. 83 (a) DRAMAS, (a) Before the time of Ennius, the Roman drama, both tragic and comic, had established itself at Rome, in close imitation of the tragedy and the new comedy of Athens. The latter had been most successfully cultivated by Naevius and his younger contemporary, Plautus. The advance- ment of tragedy to an equal share of popular favour was ^ due to the severer genius of Ennius. He appears however to have tried, though without much success, to adapt him- self to the popular taste in favour of comedy. The names of two of his comedies, viz. Cupuncula and Pancratiastae, have come down to us ; but their fragments are too insig- nificant to justify the formation of any opinion on their merits. His admirers in ancient times nowhere advance in his favour any claim to comic genius. Volcatius Sedigitus, an early critic, who wrote a work De Poetis, and who has already been referred to as assigning the third rank in the list of comic poets to Naevius, mentions Ennius as tenth and last, solely ' antiquitatis causa.' Any inference that might be drawn from the character exhibited in the other fragments of Ennius, would accord both with the negative and positive evidence of antiquity, as to his deficiency in comic power. He has nothing in common with that versatile and dramatic genius, in which occasionally the highest imagination has been united with the most abundant humour. The real bent of his mind, as revealed in his higher poetry, is grave and intense, like that of Lucretius or Milton. Many of the conceits, strained effects, and play on words, found in his fragments, imply want of humour as well as an imperfect poetic taste. Thus, in the following fragment from one of his satires, the meaning of the passage is more obscured than pointed by the forced iteration and play upon the word frustra : — Nam qui lepide postulat alterum frustrari, Quom frustrast, frustra ilium dicit frustra esse. Nam qui se frustrari quem frustra sentit, Qui fntstratur frustrast, si ille non est frustra'. ' The meaning of the passage amounts to no more than this, that the man who tries to ' sell ' another, and fails, is himself ' sold." G 2 84 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. The love of alliteration and assonance, which is con- spicuous also in Plautus and in the fragments of Pacuvius and Accius, and which seems to have been the natural accompaniment of the new formative energy imparted to the Latin language by the earliest poets and orators, appears in its most exaggerated form in such lines as the O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tiranne tulisti, quoted from the Annals. Many of his fragments show indeed that he possessed the caustic spirit of a satirist ; but ^ it was in the light of common sense, not of humour, that he viewed the follies of the world. The general character of Roman tragedy, so far as it can be ascertained from ancient testimony and the extant fragments of the early tragedians, will be examined in the following chapter. It is not possible to determine what i dramatic power Ennius may have displayed in the evolution ' of his plots or the delineation of his characters. 'His peculiar genius is more distinctly stamped on his epic than on his dramatic fragments. Still many of the latter, in their boldness of conception and expression, and in their strong and fervid morality, are expressive of the original force of the poet, and of the Roman temper of his mind. Some of them will be brought forward in the sequel, along with passages from the Annals, as important contributions to our estimate of the poet's genius and intellect. It was certainly due to Ennius that Roman tragedy was first raised to that pitch of popular favour which it enjoyed till the age of Cicero. While actively employed in many other fields of literature, he carried on the cora- -position of his tragedies till the latest period of his life. Cicero records that the Thyestes was represented at the celebration of the Ludi Apollinares, shortly before the poet's death ^. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known, and a few fragments remain from all of them. About one half of these bear the titles of the heroes and heroines connected with the Trojan cycle of ' Brutus, 20. ENNIUS. 85 events, such as the Achilles, Achilles Aristarchi, Ajax, Alexander, Andromache Aechmalotis, Hectoris Luira, Hecuba, Iphigenia, Phoenix, Telamo. One at least of his tragedies, the Medea, was literally translated from the i Greek of Euripides, whom he seems to have made his model, in preference to the older Attic dramatists. Cicero * speaks of it, along with the Antiope of Pacuvius, as being translated word for word from the Greek ; and a com- parison of the fragments of the Latin with the passages in the Medea of Euripides shows how closely Ennius followed his original. In one place he has mistranslated his author, — the passage (Eur. Med. 3i5), ol8a 7^^ ■BoWovs 0poT&v (T€iivovs 7€7WTas, Toils ix^v biJLii&TOJV dtro Toiis b* kv QvpaiOiSj being thus rendered in Latin, — Multi suam rem bene gessere et publicam patria procul. The opening lines of the Medea of Ennius may be quoted as probably a fair specimen of the degree of faithfulness with which the early Roman tragedians translated from their originals. There is some nervous force, but little either of poetical grace or musical flow in the language : — Utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus Caesa cecidisset abiegna ad terrain trabes. Neve inde navis inchoandae exordium Coepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine Argo, quia Argivi in ea dilecti viri Vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum ; Nam nunquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia". ' De Fin. i. 2. ■' Cf. Eur. Med. 1-8 :— Eifl' uitf>(\' Apyovt iii) SianraaSat CKcupos KSKxoiv is cJiy Kvaj/ias Sv/iTrKriyaSas, fir]S' iv vairaiffi UtjKiov neffeiv nore TfiriBfiffa TrtvKTi, jxriS (ptTiuicrai X'V"' avSpSiv apidTiaiv, ot rh irdyxp'xyov Sepos Il(\t(f nirT)K6ov ov 7^/) hv Siavoiv' kiitj MriSeia niipyovs 7^$ iirheva' 'ItuKicias IpaiTi Sv/iby kKir\ayei'men, in his Annals he repre- sented them. He set before them an image of what was most real in themselves ; — an image combining the strength and commanding features of his own time, with the proud memories and traditional traits of the past. As it is by sympathy with what is most vital and of deepest mean- ing in actual experience that a great poet forms his ideal 94 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. of what transcends experience, so it is by a vivid appi hension of the present, that he is able to re-animate t: past. Dante and Milton gained their vision of oth worlds through their intense feeling of the spiritual mea ing of this life ; and, in another sphere of art, Scott w enabled to immortalise the romance and humour of pa ages, partly through the chivalrous and adventurous spii which he inherited from them, partly through the stroi interest and enjoyment with which he entered into t] actual life and pursuits of his contemporaries. It is ages of transition, such as were the ages of Sophocles, Shakspeare, and of Scott, in which the traditions of tl past seem to blend with and colour the activity ar enjoyment of a new time in which great issues are i: volved, that representative works of genius are produce Living in such an era, deeply moved by all the memorie the hopes, and the impulses which acted upon his coi temporaries, living his own life happily and vigorously : the chief centre of the world's activity, Ennius was ei abled to gather the life of centuries into one representatio and to tell the story of Rome, if without the accomplishe art, yet with something of the native force and spirit i early Greece ; to fix in language the patriotic traditioi which had hitherto been kept alive by the statues, men; ments, and commemorative ceremonies of earlier times to uphold the standard of national character with a fervei enthusiasm ; and to address the understanding of his coi temporaries with a practical wisdom like their own, an a large knowledge both of ' books and men : ' — Vetustas Quem fecit mores veteresque novosque ienentem. The manifest defects, as well as the peculiar power ( the poem, show how widely it departed from the standai of the Greek epic which it professed to imitate. Its vai dimensions and solid structure are proofs of that capacit of long labour and concentrated interest on one gre; object, which was the secret of Roman success in oth( spheres of action. So large a mass of materials held i ENNIUS. 95 inion only by a pervading national enthusiasm would have )een utterly repugnant to Greek taste, intolerant above all hings of monotony, and most exacting in its demands of irtistic unity and completeness. The fragments of the Doem give no idea of careful finish ; they produce the ^ mpression of massiveness and energy, strength and uni- brmity of structure, unaccompanied by beauty, grace, or jymmetry. The creation of an untutored age may be 'ecognised in the rudeness of design, — of a Roman mind fn the national spirit, the colossal proportions, and the strong workmanship of the poem. The originality of the Roman epic will be still more apparent if we compare the fragments of the Annals, in some points of detail, with the complete works of the poet, whom Ennius regarded as hi^ prototype. There was, in the first place, a marked difference between Homer and the Roman poet in their modes of representing human life and character. The personages of the Iliad and of the Odyssey are living and forcible types of individual character. In Achilles, in Hector, and in Odysseus, — in Helen, Andro- mache, and Nausicaa, we recognise embodiments the most real, yet the most transcendent, of the grandeur, the heroism, the courage, and strong affection of manhood, and of the grace, the gentleness, and the sweet vivacity of woman. The work of Ennius, on the other hand, instead of pre- senting varied types of human nature, appears to have unfolded a long gallery of national portraits. The frag- ments of the poem still afford glimpses of the 'good Ancus'; ' of the man of the great heart, the wise Aelius Sextus ' ; ' of the sweet speaking orator,' Cethegus, ' the marrow of persuasion.' The stamp of magnanimous fortitude is impressed on the fragmentary words of Appius Claudius Caecus ; and sagacity and resolution are depicted in the lines which have handed down the fame of Fabius Maximus. This idea of the poem, as unfolding the heroes of Roman story in regular series, may be gathered also from the language of Cicero : ' Cato, the ancestor of our present Cato, is extolled by him to the skies ; the honour of the g6 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. Roman people is thereby enhanced : finally all tho Maximi, Fulvii, Marcelll, are celebrated with a glory which we all participate'.' This portraiture of the kin and heroes of the early time, of the orators, soldiers, ai statesmen of the Republic, could not have exhibited t] variety, the energy, the passion, and all the comph human attributes of Homer's personages. The men wl stand prominently out in the annals of Rome were of more uniform type. They were men of one common aii — the advancement of Rome ; animated with one sentimei — devotion to the State. All that was purely personal them seems merged in the traditional pictures which expre only the fortitude, dignity, and sagacity of the Republic. Ennius also followed Homer in introducing the eleme of supernatural agency into his poem. The action of tl Annals, as well as of the Iliad, was made partially depende on a divine interference with human affairs, though exe cised less directly, and, as it were, from a greater distanc Yet how great is the difference between the life-like r presentation of the eager, capricious, and passionate deiti of Homer's Olympus and that outline which may still 1 traced in Ennius, and which is seen filled up in Virgil ai Horace, of the gods assembled, like a grave council state, to deliberate on the destiny of Rome. In one fra ment, containing the familiar line, — Unus erit quem tu toUes in caemla caeli Templa, — they are introduced as debating, 'tectis bipatentibus,' ( the admission of Romulus into heaven. Again, in ti account of the Second Punic War, Jupiter is introduo as promising to the Romans the destruction of Carthag and Juno abandons her resentment against the descendan of the Trojans, — Romanis coepit Juno placata favere. It may be remarked, as a strong proof of the hold whi their mythology had on the minds of the ancients, th ' Cicero, Arch. 9. ENNIUS. 97 men so sincere as Ennius and Lucretius, while openly- expressing opposition to that system of religious belief,- cannot separate themselves from its influence and asso- ciations in their poetry. But it is not to be supposed that Ennius, in the passages just referred to, was merely using an artificial machinery to which he attached no meaning. In this representation of the Councils of the gods, he em- bodies that faith in the Roman destiny, which was at the root of the most serious convictions of the Romans, in the most sceptical as well as the most believing ages of their history. This, too, is the real belief, which gives meaning to the supernatural agency in the Aeneid. Aeneas is little more than a passive instrument in the hands of Fate ; Jupiter merely foreknows and pronounces its decrees ; the parts assigned to Juno and Venus, in thwarting and ad- vancing these decrees, seem to be an artistic addition to this original conception, suggested perhaps as much by the experience of female influence and intrigue in the poet's own age as by the memories of the Iliad. Homer makes his personages known to us in speech as well as in action. Among epic poets he alone possessed the finest dramatic genius. But over and above the natural dialogue or soliloquy, in which every feeling of his various personages is revealed, he has invested his heroes with the charm of fluent and powerful oratory, in the council of chiefs and before the assembled people. The words of his speakers pour on, as he says of the words of Odysseus, — VKpdSeffffiv eoixoTa x^'/^^P^P^tj in the rapid vehemence of passion or the subtle fluency of persuasion. The fragments of Ennius, on the other hand, scarcely aff"ord sufficient ground for attributing to 1 him a genuine dramatic faculty. But, as the citizen of a republic in which action was first matured in council, and living in the age when public speech first became a re- cognised power in the State, it was incumbent on him to embody in 'his abstract and chronicle of the time' the speech of the orator no less than the achievement of the soldier. In his estimate of character this power of speech H 98 THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. is honoured as the fitting accompaniment of the wisdon the statesman. In the following lines, for instance, laments the substitution of military for civil prepondera in public aiifairs. Pellitur e medio sapientia, vi geritnr res: Spernitur orator bonus, horridu' miles amatur : Haut doctis dictis certantes, sed maledictis Miscent inter sese inimicitiam agitantes ; Non ex jure manu consertum, sed magi' ferro Rem repetunt, regnumque petunt, vadunt solida vi.' Many lines of the Annals are evidently fragments speeches. The most remarkable of these passages is ( from a speech of Pyrrhus, and is characterised by Cicerc expressing ' sentiments truly regal and worthy of the r of the Aeacidae^.' This fragment, although evinc nothing of the fluency, the passion, or the argumentat subtlety of debate, yet suggests the power of a gr orator by its grave authoritative appeal to the mc ^ dignity of man : — Nee mi anrum posco, nee mi pretium dederitis : Non cauponantes bellum, sed belligerantes, Ferro non auro vitam cemamus utrique. Vosne velit an me regnare era quidve ferat Fors, Virtute experiamur. Et hoc simul aceipe dictum : Quorum virtutei belli fortuna pepercit, Eorundem libertati me parcere certum est. Dono ducite, doque volentibu' eum magnis dis.' Of the same severe and lofty tone is that appeal of Apf Claudius, blind and in extreme old age, to the Sen; ' ' Wisdom is banished from amongst us, violence rules the day : the g orator is despised, the rough soldier loved ; striving, not with words of lean but with words of hate, they get embroiled in feuds, and stir up enmity with another. The battle is fought, not according to law, but with the sv they demand their rights, assail the sovereign power, advance by sheer fore = Cie. De Off. i. 1 2. '' ' Neither do I ask gold for myself, nor offer ye to me a ransom. L< wage the war, not like hucksters, but like soldiers— with the sword, not gold, putting our lives to the issue. Whether our mistress Fortune, wills you or I should reign, or what her purpose be, let us prove by valour, hearken too to this saying,— The brave men, whom the fortune of battle sp their liberty I have resolved to spare. Take my offer, as I grant it, under fa of the great gods.' ENNIUS. 99 when wavering in its resolution, and inclined to make peace with Pyrrhus — Quo vobis mentes rectae quae stare solebant Antehac, dementes sese flexere viai.' As Milton, in his representation of the great debate in Pandemonium, idealised and glorified the stately and serious speech of his own time, so Ennius, in his graphic delineation of the age in which he lived, gave expression to that high magnanimous mood in accordance with which the acts of Roman statesmen were assailed or vindicated, and the policy of the State was shaped before Senate and people — indu foro lato sanctoque senatu — The great poets of human action and passion are for the most part to be ranked among the great poets of the outward world. If they do not seem to have penetrated with so much personal sympathy into the inner secret of the life of Nature, as the great contemplative poets of ancient and modern times, yet they show, in different ways, that their sense and imagination were powerfully affected both by her outward beauty and by her manifold energy. Homer, not so much by direct description of the scenes in which the action of his poems is laid, as by many indirect touches, by vivid imagery and picturesque epithets, reveals the openness of his mind to every im- pression from the outward world, and the fresh delight with which his imagination reproduced the impressions immediately received from the 'world of eye and ear.' If he has left any personal characteristic stamped upon his poetry, it is the trace of adventure and keen enjoyment in the open air, among the most stirring sights and sounds and forces of Nature. The imagery of Virgil is of a more peaceful cast. It seems rather to be 'the harvest of a quiet eye,' gathered in the conscious contemplation of rural beauty, and stored up for after use along with the ' ' Whither have your minds, which heretofore were wont to stand firm, madly swerved from the straight course ? ' H a lOO THE ROMAN POETS OF THE REPUBLIC. products of his study and meditation. The fragments Ennius, on the other hand, afford few indications either active toil and unconscious enjoyment 'among the solitud of Nature, or of the luxurious and pensive susceptibili to beauty by which the poetry of Virgil is pervaded, \ was the poet, not of the woods and rivers, but, essential] of the city and the camp. No sentiment could appear le appropriate to him than that of Virgil's modest prayer,— Flumina amem silvasque inglorius. Yet both in his illustrative imagery and in his narrative, ] occasionally reproduces with lively force, if not with mui poetical ornament, some aspects of the outward world, well as many real scenes from the world of action. His imagery is sometimes borrowed from that of Home as, for instance, the following simile, which is also imitat( by Virgil : — Et turn sic ut equus, qui de praesepibu' fartus, Vincla suis magnis animis abnipit, et inde Fert sese campi per caerula laetaque piata Celso pectore, saepe jubam quassat simul altam, Spiritus ex anima calida spumas agit albas.', Other illustrations are taken from circumstances likely have been familiar to the men of his own time, but witho any apparent intention of adding poetical beauty to tl object he is representing. Thus the silent expectatic ' A comparison with the original passage (Iliad, vi. 506), will show tl Ennius, while reproducing much, though not all, of the force and life of Home iniage, has added also some touches of his own : — & S' 2t€ tis (TTaTos iVjTOS, &,KO(jjT\aai tTtX (pdrvg dcfffibv diTopp^^as Oeiri TrcSiOiO /cpoaivoaVf ciaiSciJS Ko^effGai evppews TTOTafioio, Kvhi6o3V vipov Se K&ptj ex*'» a^ipl S^ xatrai w/iois ataaovTaf 6 5' dyKoiricpi irewoMs, fiipupa I yovva