^jriia^atiaiwiwifemBiaAi-^^ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Barnes & Nohle, Inc., Fifth Ave. at I8th St., New York 3, N. Y. ] 799 Smith, K. F. Martial, the epigramma- tist; and other essays. 171pp. Ex-lib. copy. I Johns Hopkins, 1920. $1.50 | Cornell University Library PA 6047.S65 Martial, the epigrammatist, and other ess 3 1924 006 328 052 DATE DUE ^ ■^^'^-^^ mifJOHCf c ■J-'^'^, lUUUMBIHH^ ^■itaM^. ^^^ ^^ igjj2^jl isbw^^j^jS^hMI ^ 1 CAYLORD PRIHTEOIN U.S.A. Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924006328052 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST AND OTHER ESSAYS MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST AND OTHER ESSAYS BY KIRBY FLOWER SMITH Late Professor of Latin in the Johns Hopkins University BALTIMORE THE JOHNS HOPKINS PI^ESS 1920 PRESS OF THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY LANCASTER, PA. ■'•-'" •I'll, A ■i:0^fr^''. 0dl\350 PREFACE At the request of a number of his students and asso- ciates, I have collected a few of the less technical papers of my friend and colleague Kirby Flower Smith ; and now, thanks to the liberal policy of the Johns Hopkins Press, I am able to offer them to a wider circle of read- ers. As the two lectures on Ovid and Propertius may suggest. Professor Smith was especially interested in the Graeco-Roman Elegy. I am sorry that I could not in- clude here a somewhat similar study he had made of Tibullus. For this, I can only refer the reader to the introduction of his masterly edition of Tibullus (New York: American Book Co., 1913). Wilfred P. Mustard. The Johns Hopkins University, March 15, 1920. \^^^^ CONTENTS Page Martial, the Epigrammatist i The Poet Ovid 37 Propertius: a Modern Lover in the Augustan Age 75 Pupula Duplex loi The Classics and our Vernacular 117 The Future Place of the Humanities in Edu- cation 144 Some Boyhood Reminiscences of a Country Town 155 Original Verse and Translations 167 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST* About twenty miles to the west of. Saragossa, in that part of Spain now known as Aragon, there was in the first century after Christ a small country town which has since disappeared from the map. It was known as Bilbilis. The name is obviously un-Roman, and, as a matter of fact, the place was no doubt a Celtiberian fortress as far back as the days when the Phoenician adventurers swept the seas and Rome herself was noth- ing but a small village on the bank of the Tiber. As befitted its origin, Bilbilis was perched high up on the edge of beetling cliffs — acutis Pendentem scopulis, as the Christian poet Paulinus of Nola described it. At the foot of the precipice ran the small but bustling stream of the Salo, the water of which was supposed to impart a sovereign temper to steel. For that reason the prin- cipal industry of the town was the manufacture of hard- ware — for the most part, weapons of war. The inhabitants of the district were an amalgamation, more or less complete, of Roman settlers, generally mili- tary veterans, with the descendants of those Celtiberian troopers who, two hundred and fifty years before, had harried Italy from the Po to the Sicilian Straits, and had done no small part in rendering the name of " Han- nibal the Dread " a useful adjunct of nursery discipline until late in the Empire. The average denizen of Bil- * Printed in The Sewanee Review, 1918. 2 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST bilis still took an un-Roman delight in hunting and fish- ing, his inky locks were disposed to be stiff and rebellious after the manner of his forbears ; but those stormy days had long since passed away, the power of Rome was supreme, and the profound peace of distance and ob- scurity had reigned for generations in this remote corner of the world, where, perhaps, the only sound that inter- fered with the stillness of nature was the tinkling of anvils in the armories near by. The fame of such a place, if it ever becomes famous at all, is usually due to accident. Such was the fortune of Bilbilis. The renown of this little village rests en- tirely upon a single event — a strictly family matter — which took place there on the first of March in the year 39 or 40 of the Christian era. On that day Flaccilla presented her husband, Valerius Fronto, with a son. The boy was called Marcus Valerius, and to commemo- ra'te the month in which he was born the cognomen was added of Martialis. He was destined to become the greatest of Roman epigrammatists — indeed, if we may believe Lessing, the greatest epigrammatist the world has ever produced. Martial's parents belonged to the old Celtiberian stock, and were distinctly well-to-do for that neighborhood. He describes their house as plain and unconventional, but overflowing with rustic cheer. This home and the country round about, its forests of oak, its echoing gorges, its lonely mountain tarns, its icy streams and springs, its snow-capped sierras, to all of which the poet reverts again and again, were the setting of an unusually healthful and happy childhood, the golden memory of which never left him. After more than thirty years in .MARTIAL. THE EP'idRAMMATIST 3 the world's Capital he could still recite all the local in- dustries of Bilbilis with the characteristic pride of a small-townsman. He was as proud of his Celtiberian strain as any Virginian could be of the blood of Poca- hontas. He even loved to dwell upon the old barbarian place-names of his native land, those oddly uncouth words which, like our own ' Walla- Wallas ' and ' Popo- catepetls,' are the lonely monuments of an elder race ris- ing here and there in the midst of a newer civilization. It was only such surroundings as these that could have given Martial that fund of buoyancy and nerve- force, that strength and poise of mind and body, which amid the deadly routine of his long years in Rome was destined to keep him alive and human. Indeed, it would be hard to say how far the man's unerring yet sym- pathetic vision of the realities of life, how far his ability to steer clear of the various literary and social illusions, insincerities and artificialities so characteristic of his time — in short, how far his most striking qualities as a man and as an author were fostered and strengthened by this close contact with genuine nature and with the simple honest folk among whom his early life was passed. But although Bilbilis was remote from Rome, it was not remote from cultivation. At that time Spain was in the zenith of her influence at the Capital and of her pros- perous activity at home. Martial's province of Hispania Tarraconensis supported some of the finest schools in the Empire, and his parents saw to it that their son received the best education available. " Which was utter folly on their part," he remarks in an epigram written- nearly forty years later ; " What have I gained by consorting 4 MARTIAL. THE EPIGRAMMATIST with professors of literature and oratory in these days when an ex-shoemaker can become a millionaire?" One ought not to take an epigrammatist too seriously ; and at all events when the youth of twenty-three set out for Rome to seek his fortune he was undoubtedly filled with energy and enthusiasm. And few young provin- cials ever began a career in the great city under more favorable conditions or with fairer hopes for the future. In his position all depended on patronage. Here Martial was peculiarly fortunate. He could number among his patrons the great Spanish house of the Annzei, at that time represented by the three brothers, Seneca the phi- losopher, Junius Gallio, who as proconsul of Achaea pre- sided at the trial of Paul the apostle at Corinth, and lastly, Annseus Mela, father of Lucan the poet. Still another patron was Cn. Calpurnius, head of the famous patrician house of the Pisones. But at the very hour of Martial's arrival the shadow of imminent disaster had already fallen upon these men. In April, 65, the tragic discovery of the Pisonian Con- spiracy swept away not only all Martial's friends, but also many others among the best and greatest of the State. It was clearly a stunning blow to the young man just from the Provinces. His friends were gone, new friends had to be made, and his Spanish blood was no longer a passport. The next fifteen years were among the most eventful in Roman history. They contained the spectacular death of Nero, and with it the end of Caesar's line, the awful year of the three emperors, and the accession of the Flavian house. But so far as the life of Martial is con- cerned, this period is a complete blank. It may or may MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 5 not be significant that he himself makes no reference to it. Nevertheless, we know that our keen-eyed, quick- witted looker-on from the Spanish country-side was ac- quiring every day a perception of the sights and humors of the great Capital, and that he was rapidly losing his illusions, if he ever had any ; in short, that he was laying the foundation of his future career. In fact, we know that he actually made some essays in the department of epigram which years afterward, much to the poet's dismay, were republished as a speculation by Pollius Quintianus, an enterprising Macmillan of Domitian's time. For us, however, the first appearance of Martial as an author was in the year 80, when Titus dedicated the Coliseum with a brilliant series of games and entertain- ments. The so-called Liber Spectaculorum which now stands at the head of our modern editions was originally written by Martial for that occasion and addressed to the Emperor. Most of the epigrams in this collection are pot-boilers; but they brought their author to the notice of the Court, and such was in reality their principal object. Two honors came to the poet as a result. One was the ius trium Uherorum, that is to say, the special privi- leges granted by law to any Roman citizen who was the father of three children. The value of it to Martial was the fact that he was henceforth exempt from that law of Augustus which forced a bachelor into matrimony whether he liked it or not. The second honor was a titular position as a tribunus militum, by virtue of which the poet was raised to the rank of a Roman Knight. The principal advantage of it to Martial appears to have 6 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST been the fact that whenever he attended the theatre he now had the privilege of a seat in the first rows back of the orchestra. He never received any more substantial recognition than this from either Vespasian or Titus. Both emperors encouraged literature. But, unfortu- nately, Vespasian had a close fist, and Titus a short life. The so-called Xenia and Apophoreta were published four or five years later by Martial's bookseller Tryphon. They afterwards formed an appendix to the edition- definitive, and are now numbered as Books 13 and 14. Xenia were presents given to guests during the Satur- nalia. Apophoreta were the presents given to the guests at dinner parties, and, as the name implies, were in- tended to be taken home. It was usual to accompany these Christmas presents, Xenia, and these dinner sou- venirs, Apophoreta, by a verse or two. The two books of Martial supply the verses for appropriate presents on such occasions. It will be seen that they were designed to meet the wants of those who were not adepts in the polite art of turning a distich. Like the obituary poetry of the Baltimore Sun, these distichs of Martial could be kept on hand, and dealt out as needed. The fact that he ever bored himself with composing them suggests that one of his recurrent attacks of poverty was upon him. Indeed, as he himself says to his reader, "The Xenia in this slim little booklet can be bought for four nummi. You may have ' omnis turba,' the whole gang of them, for twenty cents. Is that too much? Well, Tryphon can afford to knock off fifty per cent. He would be making money at it even then. You can pre- sent these distichs to your guests instead of a gift — 'si tibi tarn rarus quam mihi nummus erit,' if pennies are as far apart with you as they are with me." MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 7 But a better time was now at hand. Books i and 2 appeared in 86, and from that time he published at the rate of about one book a year until his return to Spain. Book 12 appeared in 102, three years from that date. Shortly after came the poet's death, and then a second edition of Book 12, which is the one we now possess. During the fifteen years that followed the publication of Book I, Martial was one of the best-known men in the Empire. " The other day, Ruf us," he says in one of his epigrams, "a certain man looked me all over with the thoroughness of one who intended to buy me for a slave or train me for the prize-ring. After he had gazed at me and had even felt of me for some time, ' Can it be,' he cried, ' that you really are that famous Martial whose jests and lively sallies are known to everyone who does not possess a downright Dutchman's ear?' I smiled a little, and with a slight nod admitted that I was the person whom he had named. 'Why then do you wear such bad cloaks?' 'Because,' I replied, 'I am such a bad poet'" (vi, 82). At the time his third book was published Martial had retired to Forum Cornell in Cisalpine Gaul. "If any one asks you," he says, " why I went, tell him I was worn out with my empty round of duty calls at the houses of the great. If you are asked when I am coming back, you may say that I was a poet when I left, I shall return when I have learned how to play the guitar " (iii, 4). With the single exception of this one visit, which was not as long as he had expected, thirty-five continuous years of Martial's life were spent in Rome. Even sum- mer resorts were not to his liking. Among other things they were beyond the depth of his purse. He tried it 8 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST once at Baise (i, 59). "The baths," he says, "are ex- cellent. But man cannot live on the baths alone. My one dole a day [35 cents from his patron] was mere starvation down there. I prefer the suburbs with regu- lar meals and the natatorium." At the time his first book was published the poet had rooms in the third story of a house which faced the laurels in front of Agrippa's portico on the west side of the Quirinal. After 94, during the days when he was best off, he had a small house of his own near the temple of Quirinus. In spite of his various ups and downs he managed to keep his little country place at Nomentum until he finally left Rome. It was dry and unproductive. He once asked Domitian for permission to tap the aque- duct which ran near by, but was refused. Domitian liked his poetry, and once invited him to dinner, but it is somewhat to the poet's credit that he never received any substantial recognition from Domitian. Of course Martial's country place was expensive. Those who have watched the steady rise in prices during the last few years will not fail to see the point of the following epi- gram (viii, 61) : Charinus pines with envy, bursts with spite ; He weeps, he raves ; indeed, the rumor goes, When once he finds a branch of proper height, He means to hang himself and end his woes. Because my epigrams are said and sung From Thebes to Britain, Cadiz to Cathay? Because my book fares sumptuously among The thousand nations neath the Roman sway? MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 9 Oh no. My country place just out of town, The span of mules I own — Dame Rumor saith These be the things that cast Charinus down, These be the things that make him dream of death. What curse invoked repays such envy best? Severus, what's your judgment of the case? My own in just nine words may be expressed : I wish him this : my mules, my country place. Martial, however, spent his summers there, and as he himself tells us, it was at all times of the year his fre- quent haven of refuge from the bores and the noisy streets of Rome. With his universal fame and his numerous patrons he must have had a very comfortable income for several years. His references to his poverty are, no doubt, often exaggerated. The most of us are not in the habit of underestimating our poverty. Moreover, we must re- member that poverty had always been, and still is, a traditional theme of the epigram. When Catullus, for instance, who owned a yacht and a country place, tells us that " his purse is full of cobwebs," we do not take him too seriously. Poverty, however, is comparative; and doubtless Martial often found it something of a struggle to make both ends meet. Rome in the first century was quite as expensive as New York in the twentieth cen- tury. Martial also had many rich friends. But, above all, he was one of those men who are constitutionally unable to save anything. When he finally decided to re- turn to Spain, the younger Pliny, to whom he had once written a very pretty little poem, sent him his travelling expenses. It was characteristic of Martial that after 10 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST thirty-five years of hard work in Rome he really needed the money. This was in 98. The assisted death of Domitian had occurred in 96. His successor, the aged Nerva, a former patron of Martial's, had just passed away and the formal accession of Trajan had closed another volume of Roman history. It was the volume to which the best of the poet's life belonged. The Empire had had her last fling under Domitian. But she was already near the period of wrinkles and lithia tablets, and now- she entered upon her age devot under the care of such family physicians as Trajan and Hadrian, and of such family chaplains as Juvenal and Tacitus. At this juncture Martial was somewhat in the position of a playwright under the Commonwealth, or of a ' regular ' after one of our poli- tical cyclones. He may have made one or two faint attempts to swing into line. But his heart was not in it. The times had changed, and it is not easy to begin life anew at sixty. Moreover, the splendid vitality which had made him Martial had been sorely taxed. It is worth noting that the boredom of calls, the noisy streets, the inability to sleep, and those other inconveniences of urban life to which the third satire of Juvenal is devoted are, in Martial's case, confined for the most part to the last two or three books. For example, when he was asked by one of his rich friends why he retired so fre- quently to his country place. Martial replies in his own characteristic fashion (xii, 57) : " There is no place in Rome where a poor man can either think or rest. One cannot live for bakers' mills before daylight, school- masters at daylight, and brass foundries all day long. Here an idle money-changer rattles his pile of copper MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST n coins on his dirty counter, there a beater of Spanish gold belabors his stone with his polished mallet, the fanatic gang of Bellona's priests never cease from shouting, nor the clamorous sailor as he carries a piece of the ship upon which he says he was wrecked, nor the little Jew whose mother has taught him to beg, nor the blear-eyed vendor of matches. Many indeed are the murderers of sleep. 'Tis all well enough for you, Sparsus, in your palace, your rus in urhe, your country place within the city walls. But as for me, I am roused anon by the laughter of the passing throng. All Rome is at my bedroom door." The baker's mill has yielded to the trolley car, the priests of Bellona to the Salvation Army, but the de- scription has lost none of its force — especially for those who have ever had the opportunity to compare the rural stillness of London at eight in the morning with that insane clatter which in every Latin town begins promptly at dawn and never lets up until well into the small hours of the following night. But strongest of all, perhaps, was that longing for the old Spanish countryside which had always haunted him. Years before when his friend and countryman Quintilian was urging him to practise law — the profession for which his education had fitted him — Martial's characteristic reply had been : " No, let me really live while I may. No one is ever too soon in getting about it. What are wealth and station, if we must put off living until we acquire them? I am not ambitious. Give me — 'tis all I ask — A homely house, with ease the rule of life, A natural lawn, a spring not far away, A well-fed slave, a not too learned wife, Sound sleep by night, and never a quarrel by day." 12 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST We may be sure that more than one memory of his boy- hood home was suggested to Martial in these lines. In- deed, I suspect that the " not too learned wife," like the ideal helpmeet of many another incorrigible old bachelor, was, in reality, a replica of his mother. However that may be. Martial found friends and patrons in Bilbilis who made rest and retirement possible. Notable among them were Terentius Priscus and, especially, the lady Marcella, who gave him a small place upon which he was enabled to live as he had desired. Several epigrams in Book 12 show that, at first, he thoroughly enjoyed the change. But if he had cherished the illusion — as he actually appears to have done — ^that he would continue to enjoy it, he was soon to be unde- ceived. The golden memories of the past can always glorify the gray realities of the present ; but the horizon of youth is not the horizon of age, and the dial-hand of Time will not turn backward. Martial's awakening is seen in his preface to Book 12. The hurry, bustle, and activity of the city had wearied him ; but he had been in the midst of it for a generation and, after all, it was his life. Above all, he missed the intellectual stimulus of the great Capital, the libraries, the theatres, the social gatherings, the cultivated reading public. Epigram was the work of his life, and the possi- bilities of Bilbilis for epigram were soon exhausted. Moreover, he had little in common with the average denizen of Bilbilis. And it is easy to guess how the average denizen of Bilbilis looked upon Martial. Indeed, the poet himself complains of the " municipalium robigo dentium," as he calls it, " the backbiting that goes on in a country town." "What I get," he says, "is envy, not 1 i ! I ! ' i 1 1 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 13 genuine criticism — and in a little insignificant place one or two disagreeable people are a host. In the face of that sort of thing I find it hard to keep in a good humor every day." "Marcella," he acknowledges in another place (xii, 21), "is the only one who can give me back the city again." It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in this last book of MartiaFs very few of the epi- grams suggest Bilbilis. Most of them hark back to the home and the scenes of his prime. In a poem written on his fifty-seventh birthday (x, 24) he had expressed the hope of living until seventy- five. With the constitution and the temperament which nature appears to have given him he was justified in believing that he might live even longer than that. But it was not to be. The long tension and the high pressure of a metropolitan existence so like our own, the sudden relief from it in the afternoon of his day, the cessation of the paramount interests and occupations of a lifetime^ — all these things are peculiarily trying to the physique. It is not surprising, therefore, to learn that Martial died soon after the publication, in 102, of his last book. He was barely sixty-four. I know of no ancient writer whose personal char- acter has been more bitterly assailed by modern critics of a certain class. I know of few who have deserved it so little. We may say, at once, that all Martial's faults are on the surface. Otherwise, many of his critics never would have discerned them at all. The just and sym- pathetic appreciation of an ancient author demands a much larger background of knowledge and experience than seems to be generally supposed. It is, of course, obvious that, first of all, before attempting to criticize 14 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST an author one ought to read his entire works with care and understanding. In the case of a man Hke Martial, one must also be thoroughly acquainted with all of the conditions of his life and times; one must know all about the history of the antique epigram as a depart- ment, one must be able to realize the peculiarities of the Latin temperament as such, and make due allowance for them. For example, most prominent and most widely cir- culated — indeed, with many persons, the only association with the name of Martial — is the charge that both in subject and in language his epigrams are ofifensive to modern taste. To a certain extent this is true. We should add, however, that Martial himself cannot be held responsible for it. The conventional tradition of the epi- gram demanded that a certain portion of one's work should be of this character. That in Martial's case the peculiarity is more the result of this convention than of individual taste, is shown by the fact that it does not run through his entire text. On the contrary, it is confined to certain epigrams, and those epigrams do not represent his best and most characteristic work. Lastly, the pro- portion of these objectionable epigrams is by no means as large as the majority of people appear to suppose. The text of Martial contains 1555 epigrams. The Delphin edition of 1660 excluded 150 of this number. The standards of another age and a different nationality would probably exclude about 50 more. All told, hardly a seventh of the total. This leaves more than 1200 little poems into which anyone may dip without hesitation, and on this residuum Martial can easily support his claim to be called one of the wittiest, one of the most amusing. MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 15 and at the same time one of the most instructive, writers in any period of the world's history. Martial's flattery of Domitian is a charge easily dis- posed of. Flattery of the reigning emperor has been the rule since Augustus. By this time it was almost as con- ventional as our titles of nobility. What do these mean when we interpret them literally ? Moreover, Martial is outdone not only by his predecessors but, which is more to the point, by his graver contemporaries, Statiub and Quintilian. Still more to his credit is the fact that he did not revile the memory of Domitian after his death. Finally, we must remember that Martial was a Spaniard and a provincial. Why should he care about Domitian's vices or virtues, or about his moral fitness or unfitness to be a Roman emperor? The third and, on the face of it, the most serious charge against Martial is his relation to his patrons. To state the matter baldly as well as briefly, it is Martial's idea that his patrons owe him a living, and if he has reason to think that they are forgetting it, he does not hesitate to refresh their memories. For instance, he frequently reminds his readers in general, and his patrons in particular, that a poet is a person who needs money. Again, he makes pointed reference to the depleted con- dition of his wardrobe. Once, he reminds Stella that unless he is moved to send him some new tiles, the farmhouse at Nomentum will have to go on leaking as before. Now all this is unpleasant to us, but we must not forget that, as a matter of fact, Martial's patrons actually did owe him a living. Such were the habits and stan- dards of his time, the accepted and unavoidable condi- I6 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST tions of his life. That Hfe was the Hfe of a brilliant provincial who came to the city without an independent fortune and chose literature as his profession. Nowa- days, the most of us are familiar with the idea that an author is entitled to a share in the success of his book, that he draws his income for literary work from that source. But this idea was not generally entertained until the nineteenth century; and our recent experience with the law of international copyright shows that the idea is still rudimentary in many minds. In antiquity, therefore, unless an author possessed independent means, his only alternative was patronage ; and until 1800 patronage was the general rule of literature. The relation of client to patron was an ancient and honorable institution in Roman society. There was nothing to criticize in the relation of Vergil and Horace to Maecenas and Augustus. And at the time of his death Vergil possessed not less than half a million in our money. But whatever Vergil was worth, the bald fact remains that practically all of it was acquired by gift. It was only through the generosity of a patron that a poor author could secure the leisure for literary com- position. In return, he undertook to immortalize his patron in his works. He also attended him in public from time to time, he went to his regular morning recep- tions, and if his patron invited him to dinner, he made himself agreeable. In short, he made every return in his power for the favors he had received or hoped to receive. It will easily be seen that this relation — like the fee to the waiter — was peculiarly liable to abuse. The pages of Martial, Pliny, and Juvenal show how much it had MARTIAL. THE EPIGRAMMATIST 17 deteriorated by the time of Domitian. Both sides were to blame. Prices were outrageous, and wealth the stan- dard of life. The rich were largely the descendants of dishonest nobodies, and with habits, tastes, and views to match; the poor had lost their pride, their independ- ence, their spur of ambition. Each class despised the other, and each class was justified in it. Both Juvenal and Martial tell us that men of birth and education, men of high official position, even men with fortunes of their own, were not ashamed to take the sportula (originally the basket of food for the day, now the dole of money) given to those who had made the regular morning call. One is reminded of the retainers of a noble house in the Middle Ages, or of the poor courtiers under the old regime in France and England. Not pleasant, this custom; but it existed, and Martial in paying court to a patron was only following the uni- versal rule of his time. He had the further justification of necessity, and it is also clear that he made all the return for it in his power. Indeed, it was characteristic of the man, and, all things considered, rather to his credit, that he insisted upon the business aspect of it, and refused to pretend that it was anything else. So far, therefore, from severely criticizing Martial's relation to his patrons, it seems to me that in a situation which he could not avoid, and for which he was not responsible, he showed himself a better man than most of his con- temporaries would have done under the same conditions. It was a hard, uncertain, Bohemian sort of life in many respects. But to a certain degree Martial was himself a genuine Bohemian. The type is excessively rare in the annals of Roman literature. The one other strik- l8 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST ing example whom I now recall is that brilliant old reprobate Furius Bibaculus. Martial's combination of improvidence and gaiety is distinctly Bohemian. He also seems to have had the peculiarly attractive personality by which that temperament is sometimes accompanied. At any rate, his epigrams show not only that he knew every- body in Rome who was worth knowing, but that few men as great as he have at the same time been so uni- versally liked by their contemporaries. Some of Mar- tial's best epigrams are to his friends. In one of his last poems (xii, 34) — it is addressed to Julius Martialis, whom he had known and loved for four-and-thirty years — the poet closes by saying: "If you would avoid many griefs, and escape many a heartache, then make of no one too dear a friend You will have less joy, but you will also have less sorrow." This can only be the observation of a man who has had real friends, and has really loved them. Another attractive side of his nature was his evident devotion to little children. I content myself with a single illustration. This is his epitaph for Erotion, a little girl belonging to his household who died at the age of six. Martial, who was then a man of nearly fifty, was deeply affected by the loss of his little favorite. The poem, which is one of three devoted to her mem- ory, recommends the child to the care of his own parents, who had long been dead — a touchingly naive conception quite in harmony with antique methods of thought, but inspired with a simple and homely tenderness for which there are few parallels in the annals of literature (v, 34) : Dear father and dear mother : Let me crave Your loving kindness there beyond the grave MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 19 For my Erotion, the pretty maid Who bears these lines. Don't let her be afraid ! She's such a little lassie — only six — To toddle down that pathway to the Styx All by herself ! Black shadows haunt those steeps, And Cerberus the Dread who never sleeps. May she be comforted, and may she play About you merry as the livelong day, And in her childish prattle often tell Of that old master whom -she loved so well. Oh earth, bear lightly on her ! 'Tis her due ; The little girl so lightly bore on you. Lines like these help us to understand why under con- tinual provocation he could still be patient with a fussy, dictatorial, old slave who was utterly unable to realize that the boy he had spanked forty or fifty years before had now arrived at years of discretion. The only contemporary reference to Martial which has happened to survive is found in the passage of Pliny to which I have already alluded. He describes the poet whom he knew as "acutus, ingeniosus, acer" — clear- sighted, clever, shrewd. And, truly, as a keen observer of men and things, Martial has rarely been equalled. The world of Rome was an open book before him. He read the text, fathomed its import, and wrote his com- mentary upon it in brilliant and telling phrases, and in a literary form of which he was undoubtedly the master. But, after all, the mainspring of Martial's character and career, the real secret of his abiding greatness as an epigrammatist, is found as soon as we learn that he possessed the quality which Pliny calls candor. Candor means frankness, genuineness, sincerity. It was one of the highest tributes to character that a Roman could pay. 20 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST Here we have, according to Pliny's showing, a man who was witty, yet kindly, who was clear-sighted, yet tolerant, who was shrewd, yet sincere. This is the char- acter of one who is never blind to the true proportion of things. And, as a matter of fact, a sense of propor- tion, a conception of the realities as applied to life, con- duct, thought, art, literature, style, everything, is the leading trait of Martial's character, the universal solvent of his career and genius. All. is expressed in MrjSkv ayav — nil nimis—" avoid extremes," that phrase so character- istic of antiquity, the summary of its wisdom and experi- ence, its most valuable contribution to the conduct of life. So it was that in spite of his surroundings and asso- ciations Martial remained simple, genuine, and unafifected to the end. In an age of unutterable impurity he had no vices. In an age of cant, pedantry, affectation, and shams of every sort and description, he was still true to himself. In an age as notable for exaggeration as is our own. Martial knows that strength does not lie in super- latives. He tells us again and again in his own char- acteristic fashion that the secret of happiness has not been discovered by the voluptuary, nor the secret of virtue by the ascetic. The present is quite good enough for him ; to live it heartily and naturally as it comes, to find out what he is best fitted to do, and then to do it — this is the sum of his philosophy. It is true enough that most friendship is mere feigning. But there are real friends. Let us, therefore, bind them to us with bonds of steel. It is true that life is hard and bitter. But we have to live it. Let us, therefore, find the sunshine while we can. In v, 58, he says (Cowley's translation) : MARTIAL, TH£ EPIGRAMMATIST 21 To-morrow you will live, you always cry. In what far country does this ' morrow ' lie, That 'tis so mighty long ere it arrive? Beyond the Indies does this ' morrow ' live ? 'Tis so far-fetched, this ' morrow,' that I fear, 'Twill be both very old and very dear. " To-morrow I will live," the fool does say ; To-day itself's too late — the wise lived yesterday. The sentiment is as characteristic of antiquity as it is of Martial. Not very elevated, perhaps, but Martial is not a reformer. Like most men of the world he is generally indiiferent on the subject of other people's vices. He is not an enthusiast, for he has no illusions. Nor is he a man of lofty ideals. But he is natural and sensible as he is witty and brilliant. Therefore he was in har- mony with his own days, and would have been equally in harmony with ours. For if Martial seems so intensely, modern, it is not because he has advanced beyond his own time. It is because he is universal. Martial is a cosmopolitan poet and, with the single exception of Menander, the most pronounced example of the type in all classical antiquity. The prose preface to Martial's first book indicates very clearly some of his views with regard to the sphere and character of the epigram. It also illustrates the man. " I trust," he says, " that the attitude I have maintained in these books of mine is such that no reasonable man can complain of them. They never make their fun at the expense of real people, even of the humblest station — a thing quite absent from the old epigrammatists. Those men not only attacked and vilified people by their real names, but also attacked people of consequence. I do 22 MARTIAL, THn EPIGRAMMATIST not care to buy fame at such a price. My witticisms con- tain no innuendoes. I want no malicious commentators who will undertake to rewrite my epigrams for me. It is unfair to be subtle in another man's book. For my free plainness of speech, that is, for the language of the epigram, I should apologize if the example were mine. But so Catullus writes, so Marsus, so Pedo, so Gsetulicus — so everyone who is read through. Still, if there is any- one so painfully Puritanical that in his eyes it is unholy to speak plain Latin in a book, he would better content himself with the preface or, better still, with the title. Epigrams are written for those who attend Flora's enter- tainments. Cato should not come into my theatre. But if he does come in, let him take his seat and look on with the rest." Perhaps I ought to add, by way of explanation, that the theatrical performances regularly given at the spring festival of the Floralia were proverbial for their gaiety and license. Once upon a time, the younger Cato, a proverb of Stoic virtue and gravity, went into the theatre during this festival, but finding that his presence put a damper on the occasion, he walked out again. The Stoics of the Empire were never weary of repeating this anecdote of their patron saint. We might expect a man of Martial's temperament to detect the essential ostentation of such a performance. Witness the closing words of his preface : Pray tell me, when you knew 'twas Flora's holiday, With all the license, all the sport expected then, Why, Cato, came you stalking in to see the play ? Or was it that you might go stalking out again ? Martial, the epigrammatist 23 So, too, referring to the theatrical way in which the con- temporary Stoics preached and practised their favorite doctrine of suicide, Martial says (i, 8, 5-6): "I care nothing for a man who buys fame with his blood — 'tis no task to let blood. Give me the man who can deserve praise without dying for it." That the ostentatiousness of the proceeding was the cause of his criticism, is shown by the fact that he yields to none in his admiration of real heroism where real heroism is needed. Ostenta- tion in vice is quite as repellent to him. "Tucca," he says, " is not satisfied to be a glutton, he must have the reputation of it." All this goes back to his doctrine of Nil nimis — tem- perance in the real meaning of the word. Neither virtue nor happiness is compatible with excess of any sort. Writing to his friend Julius Martialis, he says (x, 47, translated by Fanshawe) : The things that make a life to please, Sweetest Martial, they are these: Estate inherited, not got; A thankful field, hearth always hot; City seldom, lawsuits never; Equal friends, agreeing ever; Health of body, peace of mind; Sleeps that till the morning bind; Wise simplicity, plain fare; Not drunken nights, yet loos'd from care; A sober, not a sullen spouse; Clean strength, not such as his that plows; Wish only what thou art, to be ; Death neither wish, nor fear to see. It is extremely difficult to reproduce the exquisite poise and simplicity of Martial's style and thought. No one 24 MARTIAL, THE MPIGRAMMATIST knew better than he how hard it was to write good epi- grams. " Some of your tetrastichs," he says to one Sabellus (vii, 85), "are not so bad, a few of your distichs are well done. I congratulate you — but I am not overpowered. To write one good epigram is easy, to write a bookful is another matter." To those who insisted that no epigram should exceed the length of a distich, his characteristic reply was (viii, 29) : "If a man confines himself to distichs, his object, I suppose, is to please by brevity. But, pray tell me, what does their brevity amount to, when there is a whole bookful of them?" Everyone knows his famous judgment of his own work (i, 16) : Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura Quae legis hie : aliter non fit, Avite, liber. Good, fair, and bad May here be had. That's no surprise ! 'Twere vain to look For any book That's otherwise. So good a criticism of books in general, and of books of epigrams in particular, that one might almost be excused for overlooking the fact that Martial himself is really an exception to his own rule. At any rate, no one has written so many epigrams, and at the same time has contrived to produce so many good epigrams. It is clear that he was one of those rarest of men who have resolution enough to throw their bad work into the waste-basket. MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 25 So far as they illustrate the life of contemporary Rome, many of Martial's themes are also to be found in the letters of that literary Bostonian of antiquity, the Younger Pliny. They are, likewise, the same which Juvenal worked into his satires twenty years after — when Domitian was safely dead. Each of these three has pictured the situation from his own point of view. It was Martial who really saw it. So far as that situa- tion applies to our own life, much has always been familiar, some has grown familiar during the last decade, and the remainder will probably come home to us with the advancing years of the twentieth century. A marked feature of this age was the feverish produc- tion of literature. One may say without exaggeration that it was really the fashion to write books. In fact, the situation politically and socially was such that for an ambitious Roman of birth and education, literature was one of the few avenues to fame which was still open. No wonder Juvenal and Martial believed that neither literature nor learning was a paying investment. " There are quite too many persons of quality in the business," says Martial in one place, " and who ever knew an author who was interested in other people's books?" "Of course (x, 9), one may become famous through one's books. I myself, for example, am well known all over the Empire- — almost as well known, I may say, as An- draemon, the race-horse!" But although literature may bring fame, it never brings a large income. "I understand. Lupus," he says in another epigram (v, 56) , " that you are debating on the best training for your son. My advice is, avoid all pro- fessors of literature and oratory. The boy should have 26 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST nothing to do with the works of Vergil or Cicero. Let him leave old Professor Tutilius to his own glory. If he makes verses, disown the poet. If he wants to follow an occupation that will pay, let him learn the guitar or the flute. If he proves to be dull, make an auctioneer of him or an architect." The business of an auctioneer was despised, but it was proverbially lucrative. Hence" the point of the follow- ing epigram (vi; 8) : Two praetors, seven advocates, Four tribunes and ten laureates — Such was the formidable band Of suitors for a maiden's hand. All twenty-three approached her sire, All twenty-three breathed their desire. Father dismissed that deputation Without a moment's hesitation, And straight bestowed his daughter dear On Eulogus, the auctioneer. Of course, we hear a great deal about the deadly rccitatio and all its attendant horrors, such as the ama- teur poet, the Admirable Crichton in literature, etc., etc. The ostensible and legitimate object of the recitatio was to allow an author to read his work to his friends and get their criticisms of it. But this unfortunate inven- tion of Vergil's friend Asinius Pollio had become liter- ally pestiferous by the time of Domitian, and more especially for its inordinate length and intolerable fre- quency. Martial speaks in all seriousness of the entire days which politeness or policy often obliged him to waste on these things. Pliny attended them religiously. But Pliny performed all the functions of his life reli- MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 27 giously. Moreover, Pliny was himself an author. He was, therefore, as Horace said, an ' auditor et ultor ' — in a position to get even now and then by giving a reading himself. Martial is only too well acquainted with all the types. Here is Maximus (iii, 18) who begins his reading by saying that he has a bad cold. "Why then do you re- cite?" inquires Martial solicitously. "Gallicus," he says in another epigram (viii, 76), "you always say, 'tell me the exact truth about my poetry and my oratory. There is nothing which I would rather hear.' Well, Gallicus, listen then to the great truth of all. It is this : Gallicus, you do not like to hear the truth." "Mamercus," he says (ii, 88), "you wish to be con- sidered a poet, and yet you never recite. Be anything you like, Mamercus, provided you don't recite ! " Of course, the reader often gave a dinner to his hearers. But in Martial's opinion such dinners are quite too dear at the price. In iii, 45, he observes : " They say the Sun god turned backward that he might flee from the dinner of Thyestes. I don't know whether that is true or not. But I do know, Ligurinus, that I flee from yours. I don't deny that your dinners are sumptuous, and that the food you furnish is superb. But absolutely nothing pleases me so long as you recite. You need not set turbot and mullet before me ; I don't care for mush- rooms, I have no desire for oysters. Just be still." The most important and characteristic feature of Roman social life was the dinner party. Martial ac- cepted the invitations of his patrons as a matter of course; and it is inconceivable that a man of such un- 28 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST rivalled wit and social qualities could have failed to be in constant demand elsewhere. Between the two, he probably saw as much, if not more, of this side of life than any other man of his time. No wonder he did not live to be seventy-five, in spite of his temperate habits ! Nothing has been added to Roman experience in the methods of giving a dinner. Singing, for example, music, vaudeville, and the like, which some of our wealthy contemporaries are just beginning to discover, were already old when Martial began his career. His own opinion is (ix, yy) that "the best kind of a dinner is the dinner at which no flute-player is present." Doubt- less there are some in these days who will agree with him. But of all the persons one met at these large enter- tainments the best known and the most frequently men- tioned is the professional diner-out, the ' dinner-hunter.' One of Juvenal's best satires is devoted to this character. But not even Juvenal can surpass Martial's observation of this specific type of ' dead-beat.' " Some of these people carry off as much food as they can conceal in their napkins. The next day they either eat it themselves or sell it to someone else. They try to make you believe that they don't care to dine out, but this is false. Others, on the contrary, swear that they never dine at home, and this is true — for two reasons." But the Nemesis of the dinner-hunter is the stingy host. The stingy host has many ways of displaying his really remarkable ingenuity. He can blend good and bad wines, he can give a different wine to his guests from that which he drinks himself — though he sometimes tries MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 29 to conceal it by giving them poor wine in good bottles. He can allow his guests the privilege of watching him eat mushrooms. Or if he does give them something good, he may give them so little of it as to be merely an appetizer. Such, for example, is Mancinus, who set out one poor, little, unprotected boar for no less than sixty hungry men. Or the stingy host never invites a man except when he knows that he has a previous engage- ment. Again, he furnishes handsome decorations at the expense of the dinner, or he gives a poor dinner and tries to excuse himself by abusing the cook. You will observe, however, that these persons are only niggardly with other people. In their own pleasures they are extravagant enough. The strangest type, however, are those who are too stingy to do anything even for themselves. A curious anomaly, the miser. Here is Calenus, for example. Calenus never became stingy at all until he had inherited a fortune and could afford to be generous. The twin brother of the miser is the spendthrift, and they are both alike in their inability to realize the value of money. One of the most tedious duties of a client was the necessity of presenting himself at the daily receptions of his patrons. These took place regularly at daylight. On the whole, it was the heaviest burden of Martial's life in Rome. He often complained that his literary work was sadly interfered with by this duty. And there is no real affection in it, he says. Some patrons, for ' instance, insist upon having all their titles. Nor is there much profit in it. The only ones who get anything are the rich, or those persons who know too much about their patron. And as for the sportula, it is so small and so 30 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST pool For 14) O" — ' poor that foreign competition for it is quite discouraged. For example, there was my countryman Tuccius (iii, Poor Tuccius, quite starved at home, To seek his fortune here in Rome Came all the way from Spain. But when he reached the city gate, He heard about the dole — and straight Went posting back again. No one knows better than Martial all the possible varieties of the genus Millionaire. The type which we have recently named ' the migratory rich ' is nothing new to him, and his comment is, that "a man who lives every- where lives nowhere." He knows the sort who cherish a high temper, " because it is cheaper to fly into a passion than it is to give." Another one gives, but he never ceases to remind you of the fact. He knows the wealthy invalid and recommends, free of charge, one dose of real poverty. Nor does he fail to observe the rich upstart who is forever trying to steal a Knight's seat in the theatre, or who attempts to get into society by changing a too significant name. Mus is a small matter — as Horace says, " ridiculus mus." But observe what a dif- ference it makes between Cinnamus, the ex-slave, and Cinna, the patrician. Martial devotes more than one caustic epigram to that large class in Rome who lived beyond their means — " ambitiosa paupertate," as his friend Juvenal puts it — eking out what they lack by all sorts of shifts and hy- pocrisies, the mere counterfeit presentment of wealth in an age of high prices and vulgar ostentation. Most MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 31 hopeless of all is the semi-respectable person, too in- dolent to work, too self-indulgent to be independent. "You say you desire to be free (ii, 53). You lie, Maximus, you do not desire it. But if you should desire it, this is the way. Give up dining out. Be content with vin ordinaire. Learn to smile at dyspeptic Cinna's golden dinner service. Be satisfied with a toga like mine. Submit to lower your head when you enter your house. If you have such strength of mind as this, you may live more free than the Parthian king." Nor are the fortune-hunters forgotten (ii, 65) : "Why are you so sad ? " says Martial to his acquaintance Salei- anus. " Why, indeed ? I have just buried my wife." " Oh great crime of Destiny ! " Martial cries with ex- aggerated sympathy, " Oh heavy chance ! To think that Secundilla is dead — and so wealthy too — she left you a million sesterces, didn't she ? My broken-hearted friend, I cannot tell you "how much I regret that this has hap- pened to you." No new observations have been made on the various professions since Martial's day, and surely no classical scholar would venture to guess how long it has been since anything new has been contributed to the theme of lovely woman. "Diaulus (i, 30) began as a doctor. Then he be- came an undertaker. Really, a distinction without a difiference. In either case he laid us out." " In the evening Andragoras supped gaily with me. In the morning he was found dead. He must have dreamed that he saw Dr. Hermocrates ! " (vi, 53). "The artist (i, 102) who painted your Venus must have intended to flatter Minerva." The point of this 32 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST criticism is seen as soon as we recollect that the only time Minerva ever contended in a beauty-show was on that memorable occasion when Paris was umpire and gave the prize to Venus. Perhaps Martial was justified in his suspicion that if the severe and unapproachable goddess of wisdom was sufficiently human to enter such a con- test, she was also sufficiently human to enjoy seeing her victorious rival so dreadfully caricatured by the artist. " All of Fabulla's friends (viii, 79) among the women are old and ugly to the last degree. FabuUa thoroughly understands the value of background." To Catulla, fascinating but false, Martial says (viii, S3): So very fair ! And yet so very common ? Would you were plainer, or a better woman I Which is really far superior to Congreve's famous song which ends : Would thou couldst make of me a saint, Or I of thee a sinner! Many of Martial's best epigrams may be grouped under the head of character sketches. So many of these men are quite as familiar to us as they were to him eighteen centuries ago. Here is Cinna (i, 89) who takes you aside with a great air of mystery to tell you that " it is a warm day." Here is Laurus (ii, 64) who all his life has been in- tending to do something great, but has never been able to decide what it shall be. We all know Nsevolus (iv, 83). Nsevolus is never polite or affable except when he is in trouble. On the MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST 33 other hand, we also know Postumus (ii, 67). Postumus is the painfully civil person. If he saw you from a merry-go-round, he would say " how do you do ? " every time he passed. And which one of us has failed to meet Tucca (xii, 94), the Admirable Crichton, the Jack-of -all-trades, the man who knows it all ? Tucca always reminds me of the Welsh Giant in my old copy of Jack the Giant-killer. Whenever you have done anything, he at once lets you know that " Hur can do that hursel." Poor Tom Moore, among his titled friends, finds his prototype in Philomusus (vii, 76), of whom Martial says: Delectas, Philomuse, non amaris, — "You divert them, Philomusus; you are not an object of their regard." Another type is represented by Linus (vii, 95). Linus is the affectionate person with a long beard and a cold nose who never misses the chance of kissing you on a winter's day. "Pray put it off," Martial cries, "put it off, until April ! " These kissers, these ' basiatores,' as he calls them, were the poet's bete noire. " You cannot escape them," he complains (xi, 98), "you meet them' all the time and everywhere. I might return from Spain ; but the thought of the ' basiatores ' gives me pause." One other familiar type in Rome was also the poet's especial dislike. This was the ' bellus homo ' — the pretty man, the beau. " Pray tell me," he inquires of Cotilus in iii, 63, " what is a ' bellus homo ' anyhow ? " "A bellus homo," Cotilus 34 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST replies, " is one who curls his locks and lays them all in place; who always smells of balm, forever smells of cinnamon ; who hums the gay ditties of the Nile and the dance music of Cadiz; who throws his smooth arms in various attitudes; who idles the whole day long among the chairs of the ladies, and is always whispering in someone's ear; who reads little billets-doux from this quarter and from that, and writes them in return; who avoids ruffling his dress by contact with his neighbor's sleeve; he knows with whom everybody is in love; he flutters from entertainment to entertainment ; he can give you to the uttermost degree every ancestor of the latest race horse." "That, then, is a bellus homo? In that case, Cotilus, a bellus homo is a monstrously trifling affair.'' Sextus the money-lender (ii, 44) hates to say no, but has no intention of saying yes: Whenever he observes me purchasing A slave, a cloak, or any such like thing, Sextus the usurer — a man, you know. Who's been my friend for twenty years or so — In fear that I may ask him for a loan. Thus whispers, to himself, but in a tone Such as he knows I cannot choose but hear : " I owe Secundus twenty thousand clear, I owe Philetus thirty thousand more. And then there's Phoebus — that's another four — Besides, there's interest due on each amount, And not one farthing on my bank account ! " Oh stratagem profound of my old friend! 'Tis hard refusing when you're asked to lend ; But to refuse before you're asked displays Inventive genius worthy of the bays I MARTIAL. THE EPIGRAMMATIST 35 Of a fascinating but moody friend Martial says (xii, 47, translated by Addison) : In all thy humours whether grave or mellow Thou'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow, Hast so much wit and mirth and spleen about thee, There is no living with thee or without thee. i It is high time, however, for me to bring this imperfect sketch of Martial and his work to a close. I have said nothing of the history, form, and style of the antique epigram. One should be well acquainted with them in order really to understand and appreciate Martial. I have also said nothing of his supreme position in the later history of his department. His influence on the Eng- lish poets is a large chapter by itself. So, too, a few of his happy phrases still linger in cultivated speech. But, so far as I know, only one of his epigrams, as such, has penetrated our popular consciousness. This is i, 32 : Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare : Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te. An epigram which through a lawless Oxford under- graduate of the seventeenth century is responsible for the proverbial jingle: I do not love thee, Doctor Fell, The reason why I cannot tell; But this I know, and know full well, I do not love thee. Doctor Fell. I have also said nothing of Martial's occasional tender- ness, of his frequent touches of real poetry, and of many other important matters. I trust, however, that I have 36 MARTIAL, THE EPIGRAMMATIST succeeded in giving some idea of the scope and character of his genius. Not altogether a pleasant period, those evil days of Domitian. It is always saddening to watch the long senescence of a great nation. But after dwelling in the gloom of Tacitus, after being dazzled by the lightning of Juvenal's rhetoric, it is well for us that we can see that age in the broad sunlight of Martial's genius, that we can use the keen and penetrating yet just and kindly eyes of one who saw it as it really was. And bad as it may have been, there was at least a large reading public which was highly cultivated, and the great traditions of literary form and style were still intact. Patronage was un- pleasant enough, but I fancy that one could find authors in this age who would prefer the slavery of patronage to slavery to the modern descendant of Scott's "Gentle Reader." However that may be, the genius of Martial was the genius of one who knew how to write for time, and time has justified his methods. As he himself said, " his page has the true relish of human life." And in its essentials human life is unchangeable. Thus it was that the first and last great poet whom the Provinces gave to the literature of Imperial Rome could also take his place among the few who have written for all men and for all time. THE POET OVID* The forty-one years during which the destiny of the civihzed world was swayed by Caesar Augustus have always been a proverb of splendor, cultivation, and bril- liant achievement. An age of peace and stable govern- ment, an age of material prosperity such as the world had never seen before, it was also an age of men whose names are almost as familiar now as they were nineteen centuries ago. But among all those great Augustans who have won and deserved a permanent place in the Temple of Fame there is probably none who, whether we consider his work, his personality, or his romantic career, has as many claims upon our interest and attention as Publius Ovidius Naso. The last, the youngest and the most modern of those famous poets who saw the first edition of Vergil's Aeneid and of Horace's Odes was born on the 20th of March in the year 43 b. c. His birthplace was Sulmo, a small mountain town ninety miles due east from Rome, in the Abruzzi. It then belonged to the territory of the Paeligni. In the Social Wars of fifty years before, this hardy stock of Sabellian mountaineers had fought for their rights against the Senatorial party, but had been defeated. For that reason they were all the more dis- posed now to side with Octavianus in that great final struggle which, when Ovid was in the cradle, had already begun. * Printed in Studies in Philology, 1918. 37 38 THE POET OVID Sulmo still survives in. the modern Solmona. It is perched on an isolated plateau some 1600 feet above the level of the sea. In the background are the snow-capped peaks of the Apennines. The picturesque beauty of the place is accompanied by a cool, bracing climate, and enhanced by a number of cold and sparkling mountain streams to which the poet recurred again and again in after years with a delight in this particular aspect of nature which is eminently characteristic of the Roman temperament. In these charming surroundings the two children, Ovid and a brother who was his elder by just a year, passed what must have been an exceptionally healthy and happy boyhood. The family was evidently one in which vitality had been stored up for an indefinite period. Ovid says that his father lived to be ninety, and that his mother survived her venerable husband. To this invaluable in- heritance of health and ability were added the advan- tages of wealth and social position. The family had belonged to the equestrian order for generations, and it was fortunate enough to escape financial losses in that turmoil of proscription and confiscation which between the battles of Philippi and Actium brought to ruin so many of the country gentlemen of Italy. The elder Ovid decided to fit both his sons for the law, and in due time the two boys were sent down to Rome, where they acquired the usual rhetorical and legal educa- tion of that period. As it turned out, the elder son was the real lawyer of the family. Though he died at the early age of twenty, he had already gained distinction as an advocate. As for the younger son, every line of his works tells us that from the first he must have been THE POET OVID 39 deeply interested in the rhetorical side of the profession. The taste for poetry, however, was pronounced, even in early childhood. As he himself tells us in one amusing passage : " My father often said to me, ' why do you take up this pursuit? There's nothing in it. Why, Homer himself, the bard of bards, died without a penny ! ' I felt the force of his words, and I even tried again and again to write in prose, but always — Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos, Et quod temptabam scribere versus erat." A famous couplet, and the original of those well known lines of Pope — As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. At the same time Ovid was quite enough o.f a Roman to be the possessor of a good legal mind. He was ad- mitted to the bar, and without doubt could have become a distinguished lawyer if he had cared to exert himself in that direction. Moreover, the door to the highest honors in the Imperial administration stood open, and Augustus himself was most anxious to see young men of Ovid's position and training ambitious to take part in public affairs. As a matter of fact, the poet actually did fill, and with credit, a number of the regular civil and judicial offices under the new regime, and thus became . eligible to the Senate. This honor, however, he declined. He had no taste for the life-long round of official bore- dom which such a career would undoubtedly have forced upon him. Then, too, he must have seen clearly as 40 THE POET OVID Others did that since the fall of the old government the advantages of public life for any man, whether honest or dishonest, were more apparent than real. Finally, his naturally easy-going temperament was encouraged by good birth, a comfortable income, and a host of friends among the leaders of his time, especially among those who formed the famous literary circle of Messalla and afterwards that of Fabius Maximus. It is for this reason that the works of Ovid are now our principal source of information regarding the literature of the late Augustan Age. It was in company with Aemilius Macer, a famous poet in his day, that the young Ovid, following a fashion of the time which had been set by Catullus, Cicero, and others, paid a visit to Greece and Asia Minor. In a letter written to Macer from Pontus many years after- wards (2, 10) Ovid recalls the impressions of that jour- ney, and especially of a year spent in Sicily, a country which seems to have had the same fascination for him that it had for Lucretius and Vergil. It is eminently characteristic of Ovid that he should have retained a more vivid and lasting impression of the flowers on Hymettus than of the lectures on philosophy in the Uni- versity of Athens, and of the long hours of conversation with his friend than of the archaeological remains at Syracuse. But to a man of Ovid's temperament there was no place like Rome. Every impression found him alert and sympathetic, but after all he cared more for people than for things, more for humanity than for nature. Here in Rome, his sunny disposition and his intense vitality, his inexhaustible memory and his cultivated taste, his bril- THE POET OVID 41 liant wit and later his universal fame as a poet, made him a welcome and a prominent member of that brilliant society which had sprung up at the Capital under the new regime. In that circle the mere pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, which in the days of Sulla and Catullus, two generations before, still showed a certain amount of crudity, was now refined and directed to no small degree by the fact that at no other period in Roman history was the average man so well-read, the average woman so accomplished, and polite society as a whole so cultivated in its tastes. Unfortunately, however, it tolerated every vice but dulness. We inevitably think of periods like the French Regency, or the later days of Louis XV, especially when we learn that one of the most characteristic peculiarities of the situation was the almost total emancipation of woman from the conventionalities, her disregard of those proprieties of conduct which are generally supposed to mark the difference between position and the lack of position. The difficulty of drawing a distinction on the old lines was further increased by the fact that at this time neither beauty, grace, wit, cultivation, nor any of those advantages which we usually associate with birth and breeding, were by any means the sole prerogative of the woman whose marriage was a question to be dis- cussed and settled in family conclave. On the contrary, they were quite as likely to be found in a woman who looked upon any marriage as a remote and immaterial event. The result was that between the salon of Julia on the Palatine and the salon of Cynthia in the Subura the difference was more a matter of externals than of essentials. 42 THE POET OVID Like Horace and a few others of the older and sterner generation, Augustus saw the approaching storm and feared it. But, if he had hoped that his various re- pressive measures were destined to prove effective, he was soon to have a bitter awakening in his own house- hold. For some years the acknowledged leader of this social world was a woman in whose character and career its virtues and vices, and to a certain extent its ultimate fate, were reflected and prefigured. This was Julia, the only daughter of Augustus. And she was so distinctly her father's daughter that it was one of the most serious mistakes of his life not to have known her any better. At the age of fourteen she was married to her cousin Marcellus. Two years later she was a widow. At the age of eighteen she was given to Agrippa. At Agrippa's death she was twenty-seven. One year later Augustus forced her upon his stepson Tiberius. She was an un- willing bride, and he a most unwilling bridegroom. It will be seen that from first to last this brilliant and beautiful woman had been used by her own father merely as a trump card in his desperate and prolonged game with Destiny. Marcellus was a man whom she could love, Agrippa was a man whom she at least knew better than to trifle with, even if she had been so disposed ; but Tiberius, the dark, the silent, the slow of speech, her father's butt as well as her own, the man whose awful possibilities were as little realized by her father as by herself ! At this point she rebelled, and launched into a career which for the next few years was marked by a reckless disregard of publicity or of possible conse- quences. Perhaps she presumed on her father's known THE POET OVID 43 dislike of the man, perhaps she overestimated her own importance, perhaps she was not altogether sane. How- ever that may be, in b. c. 2, about the time Ovid pub- lished his Ars Amatoria, the bolt fell. She was disin- herited, banished to a small island in the Mediterranean, kept there almost without the necessities of life; and at her death, in a. d. 14, she was denied the right of burial in the family tomb. For a time society was staggered. But in such a circle the deepest impressions are not lasting, and lessons of prudence, however severe, are rarely laid to heart. Her daughter, the Younger Julia, had now reached maturity, and was surrounded by a society in no way improved by its numerous recruits from the younger generation. Her sorry history is soon told. She proved to be a second edition of the unfortunate mother — neither revised nor improved. She followed the same career, and in a. d. 8 she met with the same punishment. Ovid was now in the plenitude of his powers, and the first poet of his time. For fifty years he had been in every respect the spoiled child of Fortune. But Fortune is fickle, and the famous lines of Sophocles warn us (0. R., 1528-30), To reckon no man happy till ye witness The closing day ; until he pass the border Which severs life from death, unscathed by sorrow. Not far from the time of the Younger Julia's disgrace he paid a visit to his friend Maximus Cotta in the Island of Elba. While here he learned that by an Imperial edict he had been sentenced to banishment. He was allowed to retain his citizenship and his property, but 44 THE POET OVID was ordered to leave Rome at a given date and take up his residence at Tomi, a small town now called Kus- tendje, which is situated on the west coast of the Black Sea, a few miles below the mouth of the Danube. The banishment of Ovid is one of the most famous puzzles in history. What could he have done to call down upon his head that Imperial bolt from the blue which blasted his career as a poet and utterly ruined his life as a man? The traditional explanation is that Ovid was himself a lover of the Elder Julia. This appears as early as the fifth century, and has always been a favorite with the numerous poets and novelists who have dealt with the subject. The explanation is impossible in itself. It is also well attested that Augustus did not punish the known lover of either Julia with anything approaching such severity. It is even suggested that Ovid was a lover of the Younger Julia. A somewhat elderly Adonis, if this were true! The charge falls to the ground of itself. Our only source of information is the poet in person. His own statement is that there were two reasons for his banishment. The first was, because he had written the Ars Amatoria. Now this question has been much discussed, and the result of it all is that there is nothing about the poem as a whole to justify, or even to cause, such a punishment of its writer. It is infinitely more decent, for example, than the fourth elegy of Tibullus' first book, not to mention the only verses which have come down to us under the name of Augustus. If, therefore, the poem really did stir to wrath the Lord's Anointed, it must have been for some cause (perhaps some particular passage) the contemporary significance THE POET OVID 45 of which has long since been forgotten. Otherwise we are forced to conclude that the Ars Amatoria as a cause of Ovid's banishment was merely a pretext. And that this was actually the case is suggested, if not strongly supported, by the fact that the event did not occur until ten years after the book was published. The second cause of Ovid's banishment, if it really was a second cause, is never stated definitely. But Ovid insists that it was an error not a crimen, a ' mistake ' not a ' crime.' That it nearly concerned Avigustus himself is suggested by the fact that through his wife Fabia, who was a friend of the Empress, Ovid had had for some years more or less of an entree to the Imperial circle. In the case of a man like Ovid, we need not pause to imagine anything like a political plot. Nothing was farther from his thoughts, nor more alien to his temperament. On the other hand, the fact that the punishment of the Younger Julia so nearly coincides in time with his own suggests that perhaps the unfortunate poet may have blundered across the path of some one of her numerous intrigues. But why, even then? If it were worth while to add another guess to the long list already current, I might suggest that Ovid's second reason, though Ovid himself was quite unaware of it, was just as much of a pretext on the part of Augustus as the first one was. In that case, we should have to suppose that the real reason was too flimsy for a man in the position of Augustus to impart to Ovid himself, much less to publish to the world. At this point, the advice of a once famous character of the Elder Dumas would have been ' cherches la femme.' Certainly, experience has shown that when women dabble in the affairs ot an 46 THE POET OVID imperial government as much as the Empress Livia is ever known to have done,* a man may be destroyed for a very trifling offence. We know, for example, that the political ruin of the famous Maurepas was entirely due to nothing but one indiscreet witticism at the expense of La Pompadour. Perhaps something of this sort may have been the real difficulty in Ovid's case. If so, the chief reason why we have never discovered a sufficient and satisfactory cause for Ovid's banishment is because there really never was one. We should also understand why Augustus, who in those later years was very much under his wife's influence, failed to exhibit his own char- acteristic clemency in such cases, and also why, still later, Tiberius, who was entirely in his mother's confidence, made no move to rescind the decree passed upon the poet by his predecessor. However that may be, no reprieve was granted now, and no appeal allowed. One of the most touching of Ovid's poems (Tristia, i, 3) is the one in which he tells us of his last night in Rome. Few things are so depress- ing anyhow as the atmosphere and general appearance of a house during the hours just preceding the departure of some member of the family. The mere sight of trunks and boxes loitering about waiting to be removed, the litter and disorder caused by hurried packing, are trying enough in themselves, even when the contemplated journey is likely to be a happy one. But this journey seemed to sound the knell of hope. This was the last night, and he was to leave at dawn. But the man was stunned, he evidently sat like one in a dream with neither the time nor the ability to make the necessary practical preparations (7-10) : THE POET OVID 47 Nee spatium fuerat, nee mens satis apta parandi : ' Torpuerant longa peetora nostra mora. Non mihi servorum, comites non eura legend!, Non aptae profugo vestis opisve fuit. All the household were in tears (21-24) • Quocumque aspiceres, luetus gemitusque sonabant, Formaque non taciti funeris intus erat. Femina virque meo, pueri quoque, f unere maerent : Inque domo lacrimas angulus omnis habet. It all reminds him, he adds apologetically, of the fall of Troy. The literary allusion at such a time was entirely characteristic, and it is quite compatible with the deepest and most genuine feeling. Julius Caesar is not the only man who at the greatest crisis of his life has contented himself with a mere quotation. Some of the once large circle of friends called in to say good-bye — but not many (15-16) : Adloquor extremum maestos abiturus amicos, Qui modo de multis unus et alter erant, as he says, without further comment. Ovid was rarely bitter, even in his darkest hours, partly perhaps because, after all, he possessed that abiding sense of the realities which is one of the birthrights of his race. His daughter and only child was far away in Africa. The only one of his family with him was his wife Fabia. Fabia seems to have exhibited her sorrow in all the different ways recommended by the usage of the best families. She flung herself before the household gods from time to time, she hung about her husband's neck and wept copi- 48 THE POET OVID ously, she appears even to have fainted at intervals. Indeed, at the last moment she clung to him and even threatened to go with him into exile. But she did not go; and Ovid himself was doubtless well aware of the fact that she never would go. Poor Fabia! Criticism of her has usually been such as that suggested by the tone of the previous paragraph. Is it justified? " Secutse maritos in exilia coniuges," says Tacitus {H. i, 3), citing some of the "bona ex- empla" of the dreadful year of the three emperors. Apparently these women were of sterner stuff than was Fabia. On the other hand, they belonged to the the- atrical period of Stoicism, and it is possible that, however stern their stuff may have been, they illustrate the almost habitual tendency of Stoic fortitude and the spotlight to appear at the same time and place. At any rate, let us not be unjust to Fabia. After all she chose the harder part — to stay behind, safeguard her husband's interests and, if possible, secure a mitigation if not a reversal of his sentence. The sensible and practical but inglorious role of maintaining an energetic, efficient, and persistent struggle to retrieve disaster is always the harder part. How energetic, wise, and persistent Fabia really was, we shall never know. Such struggles, no matter how desperate they may be, rarely get into the spotlight. But even to the very end Ovid never so much as hints that she had failed to do her best. Those who in the stillness of midnight have had the privilege af gazing upon the Eternal City, glorified and almost unearthly in the light of a summer moon, cannot but be touched by Ovid's description of the last time he was ever to look upon that wonderful picture (27-34) : THE POET OVID 49 lamque quiescebant voces hominumque canumque, Lunaque nocturnos alta regebat equos. Hanc ego suspiciens et ab hac Capitolia cernens, Quae nostro frustra iuncta fuere Lari, ' Numina vicinis habitantia sedibus,' inquam, ' lamque oculis numquam templa videnda meis, Dique relinquendi, quos urbs habet alta Quirini, Este salutati tempus in omne mihi ! ' The first two lines echo a passage in the Argonautica of Varro Atacinus: Desierant latrare canes urbesque silebant : Omnia noctis erant placida composta quiete. One wonders whether Ovid remembered that happy day when he and his friends had discussed those very lines. A young Spaniard by the name of Seneca was present at the time, who long years afterwards recalled the discus- sion, and recorded it in the recollections of his school- days (Controversiae, 16.27, p. 313 k). In December of a. d. 8 he was upon the Adriatic, but owing to various stops and delays he did not reach Tomi until more than a year later. He found it more dreary and desolate, more sordid, barbarous, and forbidding, if that were possible, than even Kustendje is today. The remainder of his life is known to us now only from those various letters to friends and acquaintances in Rome which form the collections known as the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto. They do not add anything to his fame as a poet. It would be unreasonable to expect it. As compared with his earlier work they are like champagne which has become flat. It is only now and then that a passing observation recalls, like a momen- 50 THE POET OVID tary gleam of winter sunshine, the joyous brightness and sparkle of other days. It has often been said that one wearies of the monotonous recurrence of complaints and appeals and is disposed to accuse the man of weakness and lack of dignity. We revise that criticism of him upon a second reading — and still more upon a third. It was not his fault that he had never been trained in the school of adversity; nor should we forget that the capacity for intense enjoyment is accompanied by an equal capacity for intense sufifering. Moreover, it re- quires reflection as well as sympathy to realize fully the constantly multiplying discomforts of his situation. As a mountaineer he hated the interminable plains about him ; as a Roman he dreaded the terrible Russian winter, a winter, too, which in his case was not alleviated by many of the simplest comforts of civilization. To these things were added growing infirmity, the pestilential activity of enemies at home, and, towards the end, the unaccustomed burden of poverty. Furthermore, the situation was one of daily peril. Tomi was on the frontiers of the Empire, and was sur- rounded by all sorts of barbarians and freebooters. In the summer the river was open, and afforded protection from the north. "But even then," says Ovid, "the shepherds wear their helmets, and no ploughman dares to leave his bow and quiver behind him." In the winter as soon as the river was closed the northern savages came across on the ice, and kept the town in a state of siege until spring. Not that the townsmen themselves showed any striking superiority to their neighbors. They were mostly Goths and Sarmatians guiltless of any language but their own, THE POET OVID 5 1 mere barbarians who, as Ovid remarks with utter scorn, " wear trousers and ride their horses through the streets." How times have changed! Ten or fifteen years ago one of our small politicians then consul at some Oriental port was dutifully- quoted by some of our papers as re- marking that " it had been fifty years since the British had fought with anybody who wore trousers." The point of the remark, so far as it had any, was evidently derived from the assumption that, when it comes to the higher civilization, there is no such outward and visible sign of the inner and spiritual grace as this useful but inartistic article of masculine apparel. Meanwhile, he could not give up writing. It was his only way of keeping before the world ; and his sole hope of ultimate pardon and recall depended upon being re- membered. It was, also, the habit of a lifetime, and now, in the absence of books and companions, his only way of occupying the long hours of loneliness. But he tells us himself that the inspiration was gone, and that what he wrote was generally thrown in the fire at the end of the day. It was the irony of fate that one who was both by nature and by training a fluent talker and had always derived so much pleasure and inspiration from contact with his fellows should be condemned to a place in which apparently not one man could understand a word he said. " When I speak Latin," he says, " these stupid Goths stand and laugh at me." It was eminently characteristic of the man, however, that he made every efifort to bear up. Like the genuine Roman that after all he was, he played his desperate game to the bitter end, and made every card in his hand count for its full value. He endeared himself to the 52 THE POET OVID barbarous folk by whom he was surrounded, he went out and fought with them in their battles, he even learned Gothic, and wrote a poem in it. It was hard to wreck the vitality and crush the spirit which he had inherited from those old Sabellian mountaineers. But little by little the toils closed about him. Augustus died in a. d. 14, and with him perished the last faint hope of recall. Ovid knew well enough that Tiberius never forgot and never forgave anything. The poet begged that he might be transferred to some other place or, at least, that he might be buried among his own people. Neither request was granted. The last letter of the Epistulae ex Ponto (iv, 16) — the date of it is about A. D. 17 — is addressed to some wretch in Rome who was trying to rob him of the only thing he had left, his fame as a poet. In the concluding lines Ovid says: For me all things are lost : even life itself remains To huddle ills on ills and make me feel their pains. Already I am dying ; why stab me o'er and o'er ? My wounds are now so many no place is left for more. These might well have been the last lines that Ovid ever wrote, and, so far as we know, they actually were. Omnia perdidimus, ' for me all things are lost ' — ^they are the words of one whose spirit was crushed, whose heart was broken. Three centuries and a half later, in the chronicle of St. Jerome, we find the following notice under the year a. d. 18 — " Ovidius the poet died in exile, and was buried near the town of Tomi." I shall make no attempt in this article to mention many very important points suggested by the study of one THE POET OVID 53 who was not only the most brilliant, the most versatile, and one of the most widely read of the Augustan poets, but one also whose surviving work, from the point of view of bulk alone, is a matter of nearly twenty-five thousand lines. In spirit, content, or form, nearly all of it is more or less clearly related to the Elegy. Ovid's first publica- tion was a contribution to this department. It consisted of five books of elegies to which he gave the title of Amores. At that time he may have been about twenty- five. Several years later, he revised the collection, and cut it down to three books. This he tells us himself in the introductory epigram. Doubtless the revision was distinctly an improvement. At any rate, as the three books inform us with their author's characteristic humor : Ut iam nulla tibi nos sit legisse voluptas, At levior demptis poena duobus erit. The Amores give Ovid the indisputable right to be called one of the four great elegiac poets of Rome. A few of these elegies which are in his earliest manner, and are doubtless a small residuum from the first edi- tion, are addressed to a woman whom he calls Corinna. It is quite likely that she is a mere lay figure, although for centuries she was identified with Julia, the daughter of Augustus. Most of the remaining elegies were probably written between the first and second edition, and show how soon he began to develop the traditional type upon his own lines. Two of the most important things by which this development was fostered and directed were his temper- 54 THE POET OVID ament and the fact that he had been a trained rhetorician before he began to write poetry. Ovid's keen and vivid imagination was interested in the Elegy as a department. It is not for him a vehicle of strong personal emotion, of sentiment, or of passion. This is one of the principal reasons why in theme, treat- ment, and point of view, the Amoves are so conspicu- ously Alexandrian. The lightness, the gayety, the deli- cate irony, the gilded mockery, are all distinctively Ovidian ; but in these respects he is most akin to the best Alexandrian poets. For example (i, 2), while discoursing on the power of Cupid over gods and men, the poet says (23fif.) : Go, crown your brows with myrtle, let Mother's doves be joined, Stepfather Mars shall give you a chariot to your mind ; Thence drive your winged coursers, and as you pass along, ' Hail to the conquering hero,' shall echo from the throng. To grace your glorious pageant shall captive maids and swains March two by two before you — and everyone in chains ! I, too, your latest captive, in all my humbled pride, Must march in strange new fetters, with wounds I cannot hide. Good Sense, and Shame, and Wisdom, and whatsoever may Oppose the schemes of Cupid, shall walk in gyves that day; Aye, everything shall fear you, and all the surging crowd Shall wave their hands to Cupid, and cheer him long and loud. And Flatteries, and Folly, and Madness shall ride there, Your body-guard and escort, ready to do and dare. Nor gods nor men withstand them, they follow where you lead; Were you to lose those troopers, you would be poor indeed ! Your mother from Olympus shall watch her glorious boy. Shall shower him with red roses, and clap her hands for joy. With wings begemmed and tresses blazing with gems untold, And all in golden armour, you'll ride on wheels of gold. Your shafts will fly then even — you cannot stay their flight. THE POET OVID 55 Your fires will burn — I know you — aye, in your own despite ; The innocent bystanders will, every way you turn. Be stricken with your arrows and with your torches burn. Here is a genuine Roman picture entitled, "The Tri- umph of Cupid." It is also a Hellenistic fresco of the best period. This happy combination of Roman and Greek art is highly characteristic of Ovid's methods and genius. Equally characteristic and at the same time showing plain tfaces of his practical training as a rhetorician is i, 13. In fact, the piece seems to be nothing more nor less than a rhetorical expansion of material already dealt with in Greek epigrams of the Hellenistic period. A few of these epigrams still survive in the Greek Anthol- ogy. The theme is the Parting of Lovers at Dawn, a theme which in the Mediaeval 'Tagelieder' and in those charming poems of the Troubadours known as 'Albas' grew to the dignity of an entire department of literature. On the English side the type is echoed more or less dis- tantly by the old ballad of 'Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard.'^ In the ballad, however, the lovers tarried too long, and this element of tragedy does not seem to be characteristic of the Alba. It might appear at first sight that the Alba was a genuine modern production. But in the way of literary types nothing is modern. Athe- naeus (15, 697 b), writing in the third century of our era, quotes a Locrian Alba. Scholars are doubtless right in their contention that this song is neither old nor popular in the strict sense of the words. But at all events, it is older than the Troubadours by a thousand years, and the mere existence of it is enough in itself to 1 Chaucer, Troilus iii, 1450 ff., is reminiscent of Ovid himself. 56 THE POET OVID suggest that even in ancient Greece there were popular prototypes of those epigrams of the second and third century b. c, which Ovid had before him. The metre of the Locrian song cannot be reproduced in English, but both metre and language indicate that the speaker, a woman — or rather, the woman — is nearly inarticulate with fright and excitement: Oh gods ! what do you ? rise with speed ! Before he comes, or ever you betray Yourself and me ! indeed, indeed, I am so frightened ! go, oh go, I pray ! Look at the window! see, 'tis light, 'tis day! By way of comparison, I subjoin what seems to me one of the best of the Troubadour Albas : Quan lo rossinhols escria Ab sa par la nueg e'l dia Yeu suy ab ma bell' amia los la flor, Tro la gaita de la tor Escria : ' drutz, al levar I Qu'ieu vey I'alba e'l iorn clar.' Whilst the nightingale is crying To his mate, and night is flying, Then my love and I are lying In her bower. Till the watch cries from his tower : ' Up, thou lover, and away ! Lo, the Dawn ! 'twill soon be day ! ' It will be said perhaps that the Locrian Alba sounds much more modern than does the Troubadour Alba. This is not the fault of my translation ; it is because, as a THE POET OVID 57 matter of fact, we are in many ways much nearer the ancients than were our ancestors of five hundred and a thousand years ago. Let us now see how this theme sounds when subjected to rhetorical expansion, and presented as an elegy by the greatest master of the art in Roman literature: The old man's fair-haired consort, whose dewy axle-tree Brings morning to us mortals, now rises from the Sea. I pray you, stay, Aurora; and to your Memnon's shade A sacrifice — I vow it — shall every year be made. 'Tis now my love is by me, her lips are mine to kiss, Her arms are twined about me — is any hour like this? 'Tis cool, and one is sleepy, and from their slender throats The little feathered songsters pour forth their liquid notes. Now prithee. Rosy Fingers, why take such parlous pains To hurry? No one wants you! Then stay those dewy reins. Ere you arrive, the sailor can watch his stars and keep His course, nor wander blindly amid the vasty deep; With you, the weary traveller must rise and hie away, Must rise the cruel soldier and arm him for the fray; The hind resumes his mattock and grubs the stubborn soil. The slow and patient oxen begin their day of toil ; Schoolboys you cheat of slumber, to go at your commands Where pedagogues are waiting to smack their tender hands; You summon to the courthouse the bailsmen, where they taste The pain of paying dearly for one word said in haste. The lawyers find you hateful, i'faith, and always will; You wake them every morning to new contention still. That girls cease toiling sometimes, 'twere surely fair to ask; But no, you rouse the spinners each to her daily task. All else I might put up with ; but who was ever known To make the girls rise early, who had one of his own ? How oft I've prayed that Darkness refuse to give you place, How oft, that Stars might brave you, nor flee before your face ; How oft I've prayed some whirlwind an axle-tree might twist, Or that a courser stumble and stick in some thick mist ! 58 THE POET OVID Why hurry, spiteful goddess? I see it now, alack, Why Memnon was so swarthy — his mother's heart was black! I wish poor old Tithonus had power to testify To what he knows — 'twould make you the scandal of the sky I Your spouse is old and feeble ; that's why you leave your bower And mount your hateful chariot at such an early hour ! If Cephalus replaced him, you know you'd clasp him tight, And cry out, ' Pray, go slowly, ye coursers of the Night 1 ' Why pester me, a lover? Your spouse is all but dead; But did I urge him on you, or ever bid you wed? How oft, the while he slumbers, our sovereign Lady Moon — And she more fair than you are — comes to Endymion ! Jove joined two nights in one; I dare swear the tale is true. For Jove was then a lover — and tired of seeing you ! You'd know Aurora heard me — she turned so rosy red; The day though came no later, in spite of all I said. It will be seen that there is no hint of tragedy here, and in fact there was no reason to expect it. In this respect, as well as in his general attitude to the theme, our poet is a genuine precursor of the Albas of the Troubadours, as well as a successor to the spirit of the Hellenistic epigrams dealing with this subject. It may be observed in passing that Ovid treats Aurora here quite as though she were a social leader in con- temporary life, and that he does not hesitate to give a humorous turn to the old tale of Alcmena and the father of gods and men. The attitude is eminently character- istic of Ovid. It indicates, of course, that neither he nor his circle of friends really believed in the Graeco- Roman gods any more than we do. But, as we shall see when we come to the Heroides, the attitude also reflects an important principle of conscious poetic art. A moment ago I mentioned the fact that this elegy was merely the rhetorical expansion of an old theme. THE POET OVID 59 One of the earmarks of rhetoric is the list of examples of people who have to rise betimes. They are all con- ventional, and come straight from the rhetorical schools. Moreover, this elegy is itself merely a suasoria. It is not, however, so deliberately and so manifestly a suasoria as i, 9, the famous ' Militat omnis amans et habet sua castra Cupido.' . First of all the orator with mock solemnity formally states his theme : All lovers are campaigners, and Cupid has his wars ; Yes, Atticus, all lovers are genuine sons of Mars. Then follow in regular succession the proofs — a series of parallels taken for the most part from the motives fami- liar to elegiac poetry in general : Your soldier must be youthful, your lover be the same ; Old soldiers are a pity, old lovers are a shame. Your general chooses soldiers ready to do and dare, Your pretty girl a lover with strength and pluck to spare. Both spend all night on duty; the soldier stands before The quarters of his general, the lover guards her door. The soldier makes long marches, but whereso'er you send A girl, be sure her lover will track her to the end. No mountain peak can stop him, he'll find a way to go Through roaring winter torrents, through sleet and drifting snow. Although he be no sailor, you'll never hear him say, ' I see a storm is coming ; 'tis quite too rough today.' A lover or a soldier — what others would you find Unmoved by cold and darkness, by driving sleet or wind ? Who think of Love as slothful will find 'tis otherwise ; Love is the soul of action, the soul of enterprise. Having proved this assertion by a number of parallels, including one from his own experience, the orator closes 6o THE POET OVID the case for the affirmative with the usual Quod erat demonstrandum. The rhetorical schools were the literary and social clubs of antiquity. The Elder Seneca, who nearly sixty years later wrote of his school days in Rome, tells us that Ovid and his friends used to meet in these schools and discuss all manner of subjects for hours at a time. The Amores still echo with more than one of these dis- cussions. In ii, lo, for example, Ovid says, "You as- sured me, Graecinus, that it was utterly impossible for one man to love two women at once. I thought you knew what you were talking about, and I believed you. The result is that I am now fully equipped to sustain the negative." By the time we have reached the end of these elegies we find that the orderly and methodical Ovid has touched upon practically every phase of his subject. Throughout them all speaks the polished man of the world, the whimsical and humorous observer of the grande passion. It was but a step to the Ars Amatoria. But, meanwhile, the dramatic possibilities of the suasoria had led him to his second great work, the Heroides. From this point of view they are really an offshoot of his own elegy. As the name indicates, the Heroides are a collection of letters supposedly written by famous women of poetry or mythology to their husbands or lovers. In three cases (Paris to Helen, Leander to Hero, Acontius to Cydippe) we have the man's letter to the woman and her reply. The Heroides fully deserved the enthusiasm with which they were greeted. Here for the first time we meet with one of the most striking features of Ovid's THE POET OVID 6 1 maturer genius. This is his marvellous ability to ana- lyze, understand, and sympathize with all the subtler phases and cross-currents of feminine character and im- pulse, and his consummate skill in bringing them home to the reader through the woman herself. The Heroides have always been popular, and to this day have lost but little of their intrinsic interest. They were a favorite with Boccaccio, the main source of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, the model of Dray- ton's Heroical Epistles. The much disputed letter of Sappho to Phaon, which lives for us in the translation of Pope, is — perhaps for that very reason — the best known. One of the most striking characteristics of these women of the Heroic Age is their modernity. The effect is deliberate on the part of Ovid, and the results are a sufficient vindication of his artistic insight. Phaedra, for instance — and her letter is a suasoria so skilful as all but to blind the reader to the real issue — is a mature and beautiful woman of the Augustan Age who, having struggled desperately but vainly with her passion, now sets to work deliberately to gain her end at any cost. Penelope, the devoted wife, but as fully alive to the seamy side of her husband's character as devoted wives are likely to be, is certainly quite at home in any period. Paris and Helen might easily be aristocratic members of the contemporary smart set in Rome with which Ovid was himself acquainted. They know every rule in the game of intrigue a la mode, and beneath their courtly rhetoric and polished exterior they are corrupt to the core. One can hardly believe that the author who gives us 62 THE POET OVID these Arcades ambo, this precious pair, is the same one who has also given us the immortal priestess of Sestos writing her long letter from her lonely tower by the Hellespont, as any charming and cultivated Roman girl might have done, loving her lover with all her heart, and telling him so with innocent frankness, meanwhile pausing to describe in the most natural way, and even with an endearing touch of humor, all the little happen- ings of her life. For instance, after describing the usual events of the day. Hero says (32 ff.) : So when the day is over and kindlier night draws nigh, And stars in twinkling radiance are glittering in the sky, We haste to light the beacon, the flare of which is wont To guide your long, long journey across the Hellespont. Then come those hours of waiting, and womanlike the while We turn our hands to spinning, and so the time beguile. ' Meanwhile what do I talk of,' you ask ; well, if you heard. You'd say that one ' Leander ' came every second word. ' Dear Nurse, think you he's left yet? or that he is afraid Lest all are not yet sleeping, and thus has been delayed ? ' Poor Nurse ! she goes on nodding, but when I take a peep, I fear she's not assenting — but merely dead with sleep! Some moments pass in silence : ' He must be swimming now, His arms in rhythmic cadence straight through the waters plough.' Some lengths of yarn are finished, and then again I say, 'Think you perhaps by this time he may have come halfway?' And then I mount my watch-tower and frightened breathe a prayer. If any breezes find you, that they may blow you fair. At every wind that whispers my heart is stirred anew, And every sound that greets me, I hope, is made by you. And so the night drags onward with hours that scarcely creep, Until, worn out with watching, at last I fall asleep. Ovid's next great work both in quality, purpose, and point of view was a complete contrast to the Heroides. THE POET OVID 63 Nevertheless, this also grew out of the Amores, and here, too, the growth was largely facilitated by practical rhetoric. This was the Ars Amatoria, published b. c. 2, a humor- ously didactic treatise on the principles and practice of love-making. All the causes celebres, all the conven- tional and unconventional situations in any possible love affair, had long ago been furnished by the Comedy, and the Epigram, as well as by the Elegy. The relation of the Ars Amatoria to these three departments is very much the same as that of a digest to the complete set of reports from which it has been compiled. A cleverer satire on the whole subject has never been written. Everyone will have noticed that meticulous elaboration of details, that serious, I had almost said that reverential, feeling which all experts — for example, all gastronomic experts from Archestratos to Delmonico — have shown in dealing with their subject. Ovid caught this tone to perfection, as, of course, he intended to do, and unites it with the dogmatic attitude of the university professor. The point of view is indicated, first of all, by the exaggerated precision with which he arranges and develops his topics according to the formal rules of rhetoric. In all things, he says, there is nothing so important as systematic method. Having proved the assertion by a number of purposely familiar and commonplace illustra- tions, he then states that this treatise will be divided into three parts: First: Where girls are to be found. At Rome, of course. For girls of all sorts, kinds, and descriptions, there is certainly no place like Rome. Under this head 64 THE POET OVID we may consider in detail — ^the promenades, the theatre, the circus, the temples, the public festivals, the watering places, etc., etc. Second : How the girl you have selected is to be won. Under this head, the author dilates upon the value of confidence and aplomb — ' faint heart never won fair lady ' — of making one's self popular with the servants, of taste in dress and care of one's personal appearance. Of course, here as elsewhere, tact is invaluable. One's speech should always be cultivated and refined, but never obtrusively so. Remember that oratorical periods have no place in polite conversation, and that no poet in his right mind would dream of reading his verses to a girl. Above all, do not forget the petits soins: Parva levis capiunt animos : fuit utile multis Pulvinum facili conposuisse manu: Profuit et tenui vento movisse tabellam Et cava sub tenerum scamna dedisse pedem. Light minds are caught by trifles ; merely a taking way Of shifting sofa-pillows has often won the day; A happy knack of handling a fan, or when 'tis meet, Of pushing up an ottoman beneath those pretty feet. Third, and most important: How the girl you have found and won is to be kept. Here the discussion is largely based upon the emi- nently sound general principle that if you expect to retain a girl's affections, you must not allow the methods by which you won them to lapse into innocuous desuetude. Of course, Ovid is not blind to the value of beauty. At the same time, he is keenly alive to the fact that it cannot last. For the time, however, he has assumed the didactic THE POET OVID 65 attitude, and, like every good teacher, he is well aware that pessimism is never instructive. And then, too, his nature — he was married (three times — was inherently buoyant and hopeful. He, therefore, gives the following excellent advice to his class of young men (ii, 99) : Try no Thessalian potions, give no hippomanes ; 'Tis labor lost for suitors to turn to aids like these. Not all the magic simples Medea's self could give, Not all the Marsian ditties, can make a passion live. The Colchian had kept Jason, the Wanderer's willing arms Had still encircled Circe — were love the thrall of charms. Eschew them all ! For philtres are worse than merely vain ; They hurt the understanding, they drive a girl insane. If you would charm, be charming — a thing which, be assured, No face, no form, unaided, has ever yet procured. Though you be fair as Nireus, whom Homer loved to sing, Or Hylas, whom the Naiads hid in their woodland spring, If you would keep your sweetheart, nor wake amazed to find Some morning she has left you — you must improve your mind ! A fragile thing is beauty, and with increasing years It must, perforce, diminish — until it disappears. The violet and lily are soon enough outworn, The fairest rose will wither — and leave an ugly thorn ; And you, my handsome fellow, your hair will soon be gray, And seams and hateful wrinkles — they, too, are on the way. Build up your mind; for beauty some solid prop requires. And that alone stands by you until your funeral fires. Take pains to be accomplished; a gentleman will find Both languages are needful to cultivate the mind. Ulysses was not handsome, and yet 'tis evident That goddesses adored him — the man was eloquent! How oft when he was leaving, Calypso prophesied A sea too rough and stormy for any boat to ride ; How oft she craved his story, how oft he told the tale. Yet with such art he told it, it never once grew stale. Once on a time she asked him— as many times before— 66 THE POET OVID To tell the death of Rhesus. They stood upon the shore. So, with a stick — he held one, it happened, in his hand — He pictured out his story upon the hard wet sand. 'Now here was Troy,' he told her, and traced the walls, 'and where You see this line, the Simois. My camp was over there. Here was the field ' — he drew it — ' where Dolon and his host Guarded the Thracian horses; we slew them at their post. And there, the tents of Rhesus ; and this would be the track I followed with his horses that night, when I came back.' Here, while he still was drawing, a billow by mishap Smote city, camp, and Rhesus — and wiped them off the map! ' Now look you,' cried the goddess, ' how can you hope the sea That whelms such names as those are, will let you go scot-free?' So, lovers, 'tis with beauty; and, hence, I bid you seek For things of greater value than just a fine physique. Another important point : don't be harsh and disagree- able. Love is tender. It thrives best in an atmosphere of pleasant words. Be generous, too, and thoughtful. For instance, if you play chess with her, let her win the game. Or, if she happens to fall ill, be sure and take care of her yourself. But not if she is too ill. In that case, she is unattractive, and she knows it. The question of presents is, I confess, a delicate matter. They must not be forgotten. At the same time they should never be too expensive. It is a bad prece- dent, and likely to spoil her. Besides, if you are a poet, you can't afford it. Some send verses. But, personally, I don't advise it. The fact is, poetry doesn't count for much in these days. There are, however, two classes of girls who are ex- ceptions to this rule. The first consists of the girls who really have literary cultivation — a rarissima turha — very few and very far between! The second consists of those who are not cultivated, but who would like to be. THE POET OVID 67 If the girl belongs to either one of these classes, you can send her a poem. The poem, however, should be ad- dressed to her personally, and must be entirely con- cerned with herself. In that case, she may possibly be willing to accept it in lieu of a small gift. Never ask a woman her age, especially if she is past her first youth. Above all, keep her thoroughly con- vinced that you are utterly dazzled by her beauty and dumbfounded by her accomplishments. To cite a single example: Always observe what she happens to have on, and always find it most admirable. Be assured that the lover of Medusa herself, so long as he observes this golden rule, need never be afraid of being turned to stone 1 In the third book, which is addressed to the women, the same rhetorical division of topics is repeated. I should add, perhaps, that here as in the Elegy generally, the woman addressed is always a freedwoman, or her social equivalent. According to the famous ironclad law of Augustus, De Maritandis Ordinibus, she could not contract a legal marriage with any man above a certain class. The Ars Ainatoria has been called the most immoral poem ever written. In my opinion, the criticism is emi- nently unjust. As a matter of fact, it is like an old folk- tale, more unmoral than immoral. The men and the women of the Ars Amatoria are like the characters of the Restoration Drama. They live in a world of their own. If this ' jewel of frivolity,' as Ribbeck well termed it, had been clouded or flawed by the slightest trace of sentiment, it undoubtedly would have been demoralizing. As it is, I am sure that no one was ever seriously harmed 68 THE POET OVID by reading it. On the contrary, more than one great author in the past has been distinctly stimulated by it. The book is filled with brilliant passages and quotable lines. Those who enjoy cultivated wit of a high order for its own sake can always return to the Ars Amatoria with renewed pleasure. The Remedia Amoris was published after the Ars Amatoria, and is a sort of palinode. The reader who has been instructed by the Ars Amatoria how to fall in love is supposed to leam from this work how to fall out again. We now reach the second period of Ovid's literary development. ' Despite the brilliancy of his earlier works, his greatest gift — that of story-telling — was still unknown and unrealized. It was not until the Ars Ama- toria that he himself appears to have recognized it. From then until his banishment, the period of the Meta- morphoses and the Fasti, he gave full play to this aspect of his genius. The Metamorphoses were looked upon by Ovid as his masterpiece, and of all his surviving works they are the most familiar to modern times. In plan, in atmos- phere, and in general character, the poem may be briefly described as the Arabian Nights of the Roman World. Like the Arabian Nights, it is a collection of stories set in a framework. The one thread of connection is the fact that in every story is found the change, the meta- morphosis, of some character to another form. For this reason the atmosphere of the marvellous, also inherent in the Arabian Nights, is never absent. Each story is set with the appropriate surroundings of natural scenery, woods and mountains, valleys and streams, sea and shore THE POET OVID 69 — somewhat conventionalized perhaps, as compared with some of our modern poets who have yet to learn the proper function of a back -ground — but never inharmonious, and always charming. The scenery of the Metamorphoses lives again on the pages of Ariosto and in the paintings of the Renaissance. The transitions from story to story are managed with such consummate skill as almost to produce the effect of a continuous poem. Ovid's enormous acquaintance with the literature of Hellenism was never used to better advantage. Not only various adventures of gods and goddesses which are already familiar to us in the great poets, but also fireside legends from books of which we have never heard, romantic tales from that immense Alexandrian literature which has long since completely disappeared — all the famous love stories of old are here. They are each and every one told with the same vividness and simplicity, the same rapidity and dramatic effect, the same marvellous command of all the resources of rhetoric, and, that which reminds us so much of Ariosto at his best, the same endearing touch of irony and whim- sical fancy. He is the true story-teller. Whoever the character may be, he understands his motives, sym- pathizes with them, at least for the time being, and knows how to bring them out. Hence it comes that whether he relates the charming folk-tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, or the horrid passion of a Myrrha or a Byblis, we find the same sympathy, the same gusto, the same truth to nature. I know of no other long poem except the Odyssey in which the interest so seldom flags. The Fasti, or Calendar, is a poem on the various feast and fast days of the Roman year, their origin, signifi- 70 THE POET OVID cance, the legends connected with them, etc. Except for the few stories it contains, the interest of the Fasti for a modern reader is largely archaeological. The last six of the original twelve books have disappeared. The poems of Ovid's exile, in so far as they still survive, must be briefly dismissed. The Ibis is a cursing poem of 650 lines, doubtless modelled on the famous Ibis of Callimachus, now lost. It is of more interest to the student of folk-lore and of literary types than to the general reader. We also have the fragment of a Halieutica, a poem describing different kinds of fishes. It was probably no worse than others of the same sort. He had also written another quasi-scientific poem in his youth, of which a fragment still remains, a curious symp- tom of the prominence of woman in the Augustan Age, and of Ovid's interest in everything concerning her. This is the De M edicamine Faciei, ' On the Care of the Complexion.' The principal productions of the exile, the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, have already been mentioned. Some pathetic signs of failing power are occasionally visible. Among the works that have not survived the most deplorable loss is the tragedy of Medea, which the best critics of antiquity called his masterpiece. Ovid has often been called the " Bard of Love." But as we ponder upon his work, nothing becomes more evi- dent than the fact that, from the beginning to the end of his career, Ovid was always the poet who wrote about love, never the lover who wrote in poetry. To all ap- pearance, Tibullus spent his short life loving one woman after another, and writing of each. Propertius never loved but one, and spent a lifetime exploring every nook THE POET OVID 7 1 and corner of her soul. Ovid was like neither of these men. Ovid was never a lover of women, he was always a lover of woman. He observed her ways and her methods, he studied her character and her emotions ; and few have ever understood her better. This is one of several reasons why he was also one of the great story- tellers of the world's literature. As a metrical artist also he takes his place among the great poets of the world. In this respect he did for Roman poetry what Cicero had already done for Roman prose. He found it more or less local, and left it capable of universal use for an indefinite period. With the ex- ception of the Metamorphoses, the bulk of his work is in the Elegiac Distich. He developed this famous verse in his own way, used it with dazzling effect and porten- tous dexterity ; and as he left it, so it has ever since remained. So, too, the hexameter in which he wrote the Metamorphoses was a special development of his own — light, graceful, nimble, a carrier of narrative, in other words, a story-teller's verse, not a poet's verse like Vergil's. It was often imitated, but it was never equalled again. The general effect of his work was in one way not less important than its form. As Mr. Mackail well says, "he fixed a certain ideal of civilized manners for the Latin Empire and for Modern Europe." And it is not alone the afternoon of that long Augustan day of which he was himself the one great representative poet, but also that realm peopled by the Grseco-Roman fancy with so many exquisite forms of youth and love and beauty, that live for us, now as then, in the brilliant pages of Ovid. In considering the work of Ovid as a whole, it is 72 THE POET OVID curious as well as significant to observe that the base upon which it stands, the trunk from which it all spreads like so many branches of a great tree, is the Amoves. Not only the germ, the idea, of what he afterwards did in the matter of literary forms is traceable in the Amoves, but most of the ideas and a large proportion of the situa- tions reappear with variations, some of them again and again, in his later productions. One of the most notable characteristics of Ovid is his inveterate habit, especially in his later work, of imitating himself. This is one of the reasons why, except when he is telling a story, Ovid, like Heine, should not be taken in too large doses. How and why the branches of Ovid's work grew from the main trunk of the Amoves, is practically explained, if we bear in mind that he was first, last, and always, a rhetorician; and in addition to this, that he had certain strongly marked tastes in the field of rhetoric itself. The Elder Seneca, who knew him personally, says that Ovid hated argument, and therefore that he never de- claimed contvoversiae in the school, unless they were ethicae, i. e., questions of conduct. It is added, however, that he was especially fond of suasoviae. Now we have already seen that some of the most notable pieces in the Amoves are really suasoviae, that the Hevoides are noth- ing more nor less than so many suasoviae in epistolary form, that the Avs Amatovia is one long lesson in the art of suasion. I may add that in the Metamovphoses many of the finest passages are suasorial, and that all those passages painting the conflict of warring impulses in the human breast — and here Ovid is excelled by none ■ — are really so many adaptations of the contvovevsia ethica. I need not mention the Tvistia and the Epistulae ex Ponto. They are all suasoviae. THE POET OVID 73 But irrespective of his tendency to repeat himself, there is also another reason why, except when he is tell- ing a story, Ovid becomes tiresome, if we take him in too long stretches. This is the fact that he is prone, espe- cially in his earlier poems, to throw up too many fire- works, to give too many examples, to dally with his thought. In a word, he is too diffuse. And at times, we are irritated by the conviction that, fine as he is, he could have been much finer, if he had chosen to be. That this was actually true, we learn from Seneca's famous story of the three verses, which is evidently the foundation of Quintilian's well-known criticism that Ovid was nimium amator ingenii sui. Further down Quintilian adds, ' In my opinion, the Medea shows how eminent Ovid might have been, if he had chosen to dis- cipline his genius instead of indulging it.' But despite his faults — and, after all, they are a small matter as compared with his virtues — Ovid not only com- mands our admiration as one of the world's great poets, but also wins and holds our affections as a man. His personality is peculiarly winning. His very whimsicality and his humor appeal to us. Of all Romans, Ovid is the most distinctly humorous. And when we consider his kindliness, his generous appreciation of other people's work, his frankness and utter freedom from meaner motives, we are ready to insist that he was in every respect far better than the circle in which he lived. Right or wrong, we resent the sentence that broke his heart and brought him down to death, a stranger in a strange land, disgraced, despoiled, and deserted. How much it would have meant to him in those last dark hours, if he had been vouchsafed a vision of the 74 THE POET OVID far future. It would have shown him that all was not lost; it would have shown him a unique and wonder- ful literary tradition in which he was to be the central figure. Strangest of all — indeed one wonders whether he himself would have been able to believe it — it would have shown him that long after the great empire which crushed him had ceased to be, it would be the children's children of those same barbarians "who wore trousers and rode their horses through the streets " that would vie with his own people in studying his works, cherishing his memory, and continuing his fame. PROPERTIUS: A MODERN LOVER IN THE AUGUSTAN AGE* It seems to be the popular impression that in this uni- verse of growth and change the one thing always new and yet eternally the same is love. Ages have gone by, but the love of Hector and Andromache is still the love that makes the world go round ; empires have fallen, but the divorce courts are still as busy as they were in the days of Caesar Augustus. But love is not always the same. Shall we believe that the legions serving under Cupid make no progress, that they never annex new provinces, that, like the Bourbons, they learn nothing and forget nothing ? It was said by the ancient Greeks — and I know of no higher authority — that Love is the oldest of the gods. If so, we may assume, as did the Greeks, that he has developed with age — or rather, with the ages; for the gods are always young. Of course, evolution is not necessarily improvement. The hero of a psychological novel is generally more interesting in a book than in a household. And certainly this person is not Homeric; rather is he in himself an epitome of the greater complexity, the more pronounced self-conscious- ness of modern life. Here, however, as elsewhere, the rule holds good that that which is characteristic of a given period of evolution is not necessarily confined to it. On the contrary, the type is usually heralded far in ad- vance by an occasional sport. Just such a sport is to be * Printed in The Sewanee Review, 1917. 7.S 76 PROPERTIUS found in that great repository of antique sentiment, that day-book of Cupid's doings nineteen centuries ago, the Roman Elegy of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Tradition demanded that in this product and reflec- tion of an age of intellectual refinement and cultivated leisure the personal note should be dominant. The elegiac poet is, therefore, expected to be — As true a lover As ever sigh'd upon a midnight pillow, and his verses are supposed to chronicle his parlous state. But these idle singers of an empty day are not expected to be intense. The conventional love affair of the Elegy follows simple lines. In fact, the beaten paths of modern as well as of antique sentiment do not mount to the lonely peaks of contemplation and the wider outlooks of the spirit. Tibullus and Ovid, each in his own way, are standard representatives of this attitude. Not so Propertius. He has none of the reserve of Tibullus, and very little of the humorous objectivity of Ovid. In an atmosphere of half-ironical sentiment and cultivated persiflage, he is for the most part passionately serious and desperately sincere. As a poet he is a proverb of abruptness, irregu- larity, startling contrasts, and obscurity. He did not — nay, he could not — think as others have thought. His emotional insight, -his bizarre and powerful imagination, strain at the leash of the distich and tax every resource of his native tongue. And the lover, like the poet, is a bundle of apparent paradoxes and inconsistencies. He was never old in years ; yet, matured early as he was in the fierce sun of an absorbing passion, he was never PROPERTIUS 77 really young in spirit. Hence, as Frederic Plessis says, his poetry has a touch of harshness, the suspicion, as it were, of a bitter after-taste, reminding one of fruit that has ripened without sunlight, of hearts that have loved without happiness. His keen analytical mind and irreso- lute will, the purity of his home-training and the essential depravity of contemporary love in idleness, the serious strain of his Umbrian sires and the vagaries of his artis- tic temperament, are never reconciled, never at peace, within him. His soul is instinct with high ideals, his mind can give them definite shape ; but his feelings, like some delicately tuned ^olian harp, are swayed by im- pulses and responsive to passing breezes of emotion un- felt and unheard by the average man. In his life, as in his poetry, he lacks self-control. He is restless, self- conscious, emotional, almost neurotic. He is analytical and introspective, he explores the highways and byways of his affair; indeed, his emotional insight sometimes guides him into what at that time were the untrodden wilds of Cupid's domain. Like all such men, he is at times frankly, even ostentatiously, brutal. Nevertheless, his passion is complicated with ideals and aspirations, with mental and spiritual motives, unguessed or disre- garded by his fellow-sufiferers. In brief, Propertius is an amatory sport, a modern lover bom into the world more than sixty generations before his time. The poet was a native of Assisi, and the last scion of a long line of Umbrian mountaineers. He tells us ex- pressly that they had never attained any high official distinction in Rome. It is clear, however, that he was a Roman Knight, and that his people were of consider- able importance in their own neighborhood. 78 PROPERTIUS His boyhood was filled with disaster. In earliest infancy he lost his father. Only a little later the large family property was swept away by the well-known con- fiscation of lands after Philippi for the veterans of Octa- vianus. Fortunately, enough was either saved, or at some later time recovered, to insure the poet and his mother a comfortable income. Meanwhile, however, the measure of Octavianus was deeply resented by the Um- brian countryside — to this day the best fighting blood in Italy — and the conflict that ensued was one of the most sanguinary episodes of the Civil Wars. Only twelve miles from home was Perugia, in those days an almost impregnable stronghold. The rebels, among the rest one Gallus, the boy's maternal uncle, took refuge there; and the siege which followed was perhaps the most horrible of all the many sieges endured by that famous old city. It was finally taken and sacked in the year 40. During the uproar Gallus managed to get by the lines of Octa- vianus, but on the way home was set upon by freebooters and left for dead. The news was brought to the family by a wounded soldier who had found Gallus in a dying condition, and had promised to convey his last farewell to his sister. The two fragmentary elegies at the close of the poet's first book, written years afterward, show how deeply his childish mind had been impressed by the event. Curiously enough, the abruptness and obscurity of these pieces, their lack of transitions and gradations, exactly reproduce that unreal reality, that strange sense of remoteness, of silence, which always characterize the shifting series of pictures, vivid but disconnected and only visual, that constitute the memories of childhood. Soon afterwards Propertius, then a boy of eight or PROPERTIUS 79 ten, was taken to Rome by his mother; she appears to have remained with him there until her death, which occurred when he was about twenty. The legal pro- fession, for which she had had him educated, was for young men of his position the open door to distinction. But nature never intended Propertius for an advocate; and at fifteen or sixteen, in other words, as soon as he became of age, he turned definitely and finally to poetry. He had already written considerable verse, and doubtless he wrote a great deal more during the next two or three years. Meanwhile, too, and from the first, he must have been an ardent and omnivorous reader of the Alex- andrian literature. Of this period of studious home-life, varied no doubt by a certain amount of social distraction, no definite record remains. It was only preparatory, and was soon invaded by the woman whom he calls Cynthia. The ensuing love affair inspired so large a proportion of his surviving poetry that henceforth the story of Cynthia and the story of Propertius are one. They cannot be separated. Of course, we have no right to expect a definite and detailed narrative. A series of elegies so constructed would be at variance with an artistic canon of the type as evident as it is important. Moreover, a poet, even when he assumes the attitude of a biographer, is not obliged to be one. " Od's life ! " says Prior to his Chloe, "must one swear to the truth of a song?" He has a perfect right to combine fact and fiction, actual events and merely literary motives. In a general way, Propertius is no exception to this rule. What he gives us is for the most part "a mere 8o PROPERTIUS alternation," as Sellar observes, "of passionate moods." These, however, indicate the general trend of events. He is also full of literary allusions. But this, too, is no proof of unreality. A man thinks as he has been in the habit of thinking. An acquired style may, and often does, become a second nature. Indeed, at the greatest crisis of their lives men have been known to resort to a mere quotation, even to a quotation in a foreign tongue; 'Aveppi0a> Kvfioi, 'the die is cast,' as it is (incorrectly) translated, were Caesar's words at the Rubicon. The phrase, says Plutarch, is a quotation from Menander. Now and then, too, Propertius works out a theme which already has a long literary tradition. Even here we must not forget that the main situations in every love affair are few, and that they are repeated in every generation. But perhaps the essential verity of the poet's story is best shown by the fact that the psychology of it is at once too consistent in itself and too much at variance with literary conventionalities to be the invention of any poet in the Augustan Age. In fact, I doubt whether it could be accounted for by literary motives alone in any age. Thanks to her own dominant personality and the skill of the artist by whom she is painted, Cynthia is the most real and the most interesting of the elegiac heroines. She is an individual, and there is no one like her in antique poetry. Her social position, or better, perhaps, her position before the law, cannot be determined with certainty. As a rule the heroine of the Elegy is a hetaira, and in Rome this class was largely represented by the libertince, or freedwomen. We learn, however, from Propertius that Cynthia was the granddaughter of a famous poet, and PROPERTIUS 8l from Apuleius 150 years afterwards that her real name was Hostia. Her grandfather, then, must have been that Hostius near the beginning of the first century B. C, who wrote a poem on the Istrian War. If so, she was hardly a f reedwoman, but rather a declassee, a type only too common in the brilliant but lax society of the Au- gustan period. The minuteness with which Propertius describes her perfections is as modern as it is unclassical. In this respect the lover of Cynthia is a striking contrast to the lover of Lesbia. Both men are sensitive, sensuous, luxurious. Both men reacted keenly and instantly to the beautiful. But Propertius was analytical and reflective. He could not attain the joyous wisdom of Catullus's im- mortal youth. Propertius never covild have destroyed the tally of his raptures — " Conturbabimus ilia, ne scia- mus," as Catullus said of his Lesbia's kisses. On the contrary, he must needs count, weigh, and appraise them one by one. Her eyes were large, dark and brilliantly expressive : Twin torches they to set my heart on fire, Twin stars to guide me through life's trackless sea. Her hair was fulvus, presumably the tawny red of Titian. Her complexion is 'white lilies,' 'the first flush of Dawn,' ' rose-leaves floating in milk ' ; apparently what he means is the delicate skin, the delicate pink and white suggestive of sweet-peas, which not infrequently goes with such hair. Her hands were slim and delicate, her fingers long and shapely. Even when she is trying to scratch out his eyes, he thinks of her nails as formosce. 82 PROPERTIUS Doubtless he would have said, as did the lover in the old play: Her lips made swearings sound of piety; So sweet and prettily they came from her. She walks like the goddesses. Once, indeed, he insists that she is more beautiful than Venus and several other Olympian ladies of quality, whom he enumerates in the succeeding lines. She was maxima toto corpore, he says. Maxima is not big and bony, and not ample, spatiosa, as Ovid says expressively of Andromache — Cynthia was too sensitive and high-strung for that — but rather stately and impressive. Tall she may have been, but I suspect she seemed taller to him than she really was — partly because of her carriage, partly because of her dominant will. To the last he stood a little in awe of her. It is possible that what we have here was somethmg very like the Italian type immortalized by Titian. If so, it was probably modified by more intellect, and perhaps by more irregularity of feature, than is usual in Titian's women. Cynthia was not alone beautiful; she was fascinating, witty, a fine conversationalist, an accom- plished musician, an adept in the mysteries of the loom, a first-class literary critic. Nay she was a poetess — a poetess, too, whose verses, says Propertius, are quite the equal of Corinna's. Sometimes, indeed, he confides to us that he cares less for her beauty than for these other attractions. In the light of his cool and analytical, yet aspiring and idealiz- ing, mind, he is telling the truth. But alas for his weak and passionate heart ! It was her beauty, not her accom- pROPkRfW^ 83 plishments, that dragged him back to her again and again, even in his own despite. Quamvis dura, tamen rara puella fuit, is his own reluctant admission, even while nursing his wrongs after a mortal quarrel. Such, if we make due allowance for the enthusiasm of a lover, was the woman whom Propertius met at the turning-point of his career. He could not have been much over eighteen; precocious and erratically brilliant, filled with his book-learning, fired with his Alexandrian poets, but scarcely more than the child he had just ceased to be. Cynthia, on the contrary, as we might guess, was several years older — probably not less than twenty-four or twenty-five — and well-versed in the art of subjugation. Not, however, that such a woman needed any special training to subjugate this innocent and ardent, shy and passionate boy. The difficulty would be to get such a boy to declare his love. The stormy and impetuous Cynthia, however, realizing that she was dealing not with a theory but with a condition, took the matter into her own hands and made the declaration herself. Of course, he was swept off his feet. It is easy to see why he loved Cynthia. He himself gives us a number of excellent reasons. But why did Cynthia love him ? Propertius gives us two reasons — his verse and his fidelity. No doubt he had her own word for it, and he seems really to have believed it. But these were not her reasons; otherwise she would not have given them. Moreover, in affairs of the heart poetry is of no demonstrable value. His friend Ovid could have 84 PROPERTIUS told him that. And even fideHty, though infinitely superior to the brand supplied by Propertius, is not always as important as it ought to be. I am reminded of the old man who while riding home from his wife's funeral remarked to a friend: "Well, she was a good wife ; the meals were always on time, the stockings were always darned, and everything was all right ; I lived with her for forty years — and I never did like her ! " The words are such a revelation of our poor human nature that one hardly knows whether to laugh or cry. We might imagine the novelty of reversed conditions, the attraction of youth and inexperience, and so forth — in short, the usual stock in trade of the modern psycho- logical novelist. But these are passing. We must look deeper to explain a feeling which, whatever its original basis was, lasted through everything and until her dying day. Perhaps she herself never paused to inquire. Cynthia, however, after every possible deduction, was not an ordinary woman. She had a strong mind; her character, though passionate and ill-regulated, was gen- erous, and above all, she could idealize. Her lover was young and inexperienced, but he was a poet and an idealist. In spite of her previous experience — nay, for that very reason — the first love of this home-bred boy must have been a revelation to her. He was not the type she had met, and, alas, was still to meet. May we not assume that in those days she was often touched to the quick by a delicacy and consideration to which she was not accustomed, aroused by traits and opinions new in her experience, pleased and inspired by the unques- tioning attribution to herself of virtues and ideals which other men had never discovered? PROPERTIUS 85 Of these first hours of unclouded happiness we have no record except that the lovers met out of doors and at night. On those occasions, when they pledged eternal fidelity under the stars, when she was carried away not only by their mutual passion, but by his infectious ideal- ism, when she sat by his side and gazed upon the bright vision of their future called up by his wonderful imagina- tion, who knows how often even she may have dreamed of the impossible? Not until the last do we hear of those happy hours, and, what is significant of the essen- tial truth of our deduction, it is Cynthia, not Propertius, who speaks of them. Of course, they were both very human, and, as usual, the fact was emphasized in their later companionship. The artistic temperament is full of moods and fancies. And they both had it. Propertius was a born self-tor- mentor, and not an easy man to live with under any circumstances. And Cynthia herself was anything but an equable person. The barometer of her moods never stood at "set fair.' She was undisciplined, full of ex- tremes, a woman of fire and ice, proud, imperious, sensi- tive, quick to resent and slow to forgive. There were halcyon hours of capricious fondness, when he felt him- self all but translated; there were whirlwinds of tem- pestuous rage, when he was all but in danger of his life ; there were dead calms of glacial indifiference, when all he could do was to shiver and wait. Between her cruelty and her kindness, her furious abuse and her furious tenderness, he scarcely knew whether he was most happy in his misery or most miserable in his happiness. After all, however, these variations were nothing very serious. The lovers were still extremely happy in their g6 PROPERTIUS own stormy fashion. Propertius was urged by his friend Tullus to accompany him on an extended tour in the East. The offer was tempting, but was finally declined. Cynthia, too, was hotly pressed by a certain rich suitor to accompany him to Illyria, but she finally refused. The decision says much for the real depth of her affection, for when we consider the uncertainty of her position, as well as of her income, she sacrificed far more than did Propertius. It was one of the happiest hours of the poet's life. " I walk among the highest stars," he cries, " for Cynthia, the peerless Cynthia, is always mine ! " Perhaps the most refreshing, and certainly the most unusual, aspect of this affair is the almost complete ab- sence of those complaints of greed and extravagance which recur with such wearisome regularity in the ama- tory literature of antiquity. Cynthia was not mercenary. Her lover aifirms it more than once, and in so many words. She did love finery — as any woman should, and generally does. And finery is expensive. But he never criticizes her love of finery on the score of expense, much less on the score of expense to him. Adverse criti- cism of her attire is always for some other reason, and, what is especially characteristic of Propertius, the reason put in the foreground is never the real reason. " Why, dear heart," he ventures to expostulate in the famous elegy devoted to this theme, " do you care to go out and join the parade, your hair adorned with jewels, and to sway within the transparent folds of Coan vest- ments? Why to drench your locks with myrrh of the Orontes, and to put yourself on the market with endow- ments not your own ? Why will you mar the beauty of nature with embellishments bought with a price, instead PROPERTIUS 87 of allowing your real self to shine resplendent in its own advantages ? Believe me, not anything you take for that fair form can make it more fair. Cupid himself is naked; he is no lover of the artifices of beauty. See what colors the beautiful earth puts forth, how the ivy twines better of its own sweet will, how the arbute rears itself the more lovely in lonely glens, how the brook has skill to run on ways untaught. The strand adorned with its native pebbles has a winning charm, and the winged folk sing the sweeter that they sing untrained." "The heroines of old" — and he pauses to name and describe several of them — " owed nothing to artifice. Their helper was beauty unadorned. They had no de- sire to go forth and gather up lovers from the passing crowd." " Not that I am afraid now," he says at once, beginning to hedge, " that I am cheaper in your eyes than those other men. It's only that if a girl dresses to please one person, she dresses enough — especially in your case." And he closes with a rapturous tribute to her beauty and accomplishments. Now, the ostensible theme here is the old one of Na- ture against Art. But Propertius never wrote this elegy to discourage Cynthia's habit of gilding the lily. He had no objection to her ' Coan vestments,' her dress of chiffon silk. On the contrary, he referred to it several times again in later years. It was not how she dressed that troubled him; it was why she dressed. Not, however, that he had any real grounds for his distrust as yet. Indeed, of the two it was she, not he, who had the better right to complain. The cruel law of such afifairs as theirs is that the new relation which had stayed and, at least for the time being, had uplifted the 88 PROPERTIUS one, had an inevitable tendency to unbalance and de- moralize the other. He accepted too many invitations to dinner parties, and imbibed from the flowing bowl much oftener and more deeply than was good for him. Cyn- thia was hurt by his neglect, and was temperamentally prone to believe the worst. This lamentable stage of the affair is clearly to be seen in the famous third elegy of the first book : As on that shore the Cretan relaxed in slumber lay, While Theseus' traitorous galley was speeding fast away. Or like old Cepheus' daughter, when first she sank to sleep. Freed from the flinty crag, and that horror of the deep, Or as some fair bacchante, with furious dancing spent, Rests by the Thracian torrent in sweet abandonment — E'en such the dainty slumber- my Cynthia seemed to breathe, Her lovely head half propped by the yielding arms beneath, When, trailing fuddled footsteps long past the midnight hour And lighted by my link-boys, I staggered to her bower. While still some sense was left me, I tried, but vainly tried. Reclining very softly, to stretch out by her side. But though a double madness, one from the God of wine And one from Love — both mighty — ^burned in this heart of mine, Though each of them was urging, on that side and on this: " Nay, throw your arms around her and wake her with a kiss," I did not dare to trouble my mistress's repose, I feared her bitter chidings, I feared as one who knows ! And so I stuck there staring, like Argus in amaze When first the horns of lo met his astonished gaze. At times, I loosed the garlands my throbbing temples bare. And set them on your tresses to breathe their fragrance there; Anon, I shaped some ringlet disturbed amid your sleep. Or stealthily fair apples I gave your hands to keep. But slumber still was thankless, and all my gifts were vain; Each time your lap refused them, and down they rolled again. And always when you nestled exquisitely and sighed, Aghast at my own fancies, methought that signified PROPERTIUS 89 Your dreams, perhaps, were haunted by some uncanny dread, Or else, an uncouth monster seemed drawing near your bed. At last, the Moon that sped by the casements on her way — The busy Moon, whose torches were fain to bid her stay — Smote softly Cynthia's eyes with her airy shafts. She woke. And, propped upon one elbow, thus chidingly she spoke : " Now that she wearies of you, and you are forced to flee. Because her door ejects you, you turn — at last — to me! You said you'd come ! Where were you ? The long, long hours are gone, And now, at last, I see you — limp with debauch — at dawn ! Oh heartless, faithless Sextus, I would, indeed, that you Were forced to pass such nights as you make me linger through ! At times, to cheat my slumbers, I span, or was inspired To turn awhile to music; but I was very tired. And to myself, deserted, I softly made my moan : ' 'Tis often thus when lovers no longer love their own.' And then, as I seemed falling, sweet winged Sleep was fain To waft me on to Dreamland — and I forgot my pain." The elegy is an excellent example of the poet's inveter- ate habit of thinking in terms of literary allusions. When he sees Cynthia asleep in the moonlight, he is reminded of the Sleeping Ariadne, that famous work of art of which the Ariadne of the Vatican is undoubtedly a copy. Every line of the elegy itself is instinct with suggestions of Hellenic poetry, Hellenic art, Hellenic life. Yet noth- ing could be more real, nothing more convincingly per- sonal, than is that same sleeping figure. In our mind, the very moonlight seems real and Latin — the summer moon as he saw it when nineteen centuries ago it shone through the casement and gave unearthly beauty to the upturned face of Cynthia asleep. This process of quarrelling and ' making up ' — as in the elegy just quoted — went on for two years or more. go PROPERTIUS Then came an unfortunate sea-voyage, which he either had to take or chose to take. Cynthia was furious with him. However, he went — and was shipwrecked for his pains. Then when he returned, he was furious with her for not being sympathetic. " I have often expected some cruel blow from your fickleness, Cynthia," he says (i, 15, i), "but never such cruelty as this!" All of which is at once pathetic and amusing. Then he wanted to make up. His wrath never lasted as long as did hers. But this time the ice would not melt. She invited him to stay away for an indefinite period. It was really a crushing blow to him. In about a year's time, not far from 28 b. c, appeared the Cynthia Monobiblos, now the first book of his collected works. Those who know the first elegy of this series may well ask themselves whether any other man has ever intro- duced a volume of amatory poems in a mood of such utter despair. The book was dedicated to Cynthia, and was either the cause or the result of a reconciliation. And the lasting fp.me of Propertius was at once assured. He was imme- diately taken up by Augustus and Maecenas, and became one of the brilliant circle by which they were surrounded. His house on the Esquiline, of which he speaks in the third book, was probably near that of Maecenas, and, indeed, may have been a present from him. Doubtless the reunited lovers were very happy for a time. But his record of this period, in the second and third books, indicates here and there that his point of view towards her and towards the world at large was chang- ing. The influence of Maecenas, an awakening sense of responsibility, the sobering — also the hardening — effect PROPERTIUS 91 of his own life are all visible. He can think seriously now of going to Athens for the absent treatment, he can look forward, as do Horace and Vergil, to graver and more exalted themes. It is signiiicant that, as compared with the first book, there is a marked increase in the number of poems not concerned with Cynthia. But this is not all. The same story is told by the elegies addressed to Cynthia herself. When, for ex- ample, in the introduction of his second book, he pictures himself as being asked why he can write so often of love, he replies that it is because his theme and his in- spiration are always Cynthia. If she goes forth arrayed in Coan vestments, the result is a whole volume all about those Coan vestments. A truant lock, her nimble fingers as she plays upon the lyre, her lovely eyes when they droop in slumber — these are a thousand themes for a poet — and as for her caresses, they are an Iliad. What- ever she says or does straightway becomes a long and most important classic, sprung from nothing. All this is a fresh and delightful variation on an amatory com- monplace, but it is not necessarily as accurate a statement of his own feelings as it once was. The examples he gives were deliberately intended to recall the elegies of the previous book; and after all we cannot be sure that the whole poem is anything more than a graceful way of declining Maecenas's pressing invitation to contribute to the already overstocked library of Augustan epics. Once, upon her birthday — poor Cynthia, her birth- days were beginning to grow unwelcome — he begs her to " put on the dress she was wearing the first time he met her." Someone has called this "a curiously feminine trait." On the contrary, Propertius was never less f emi- 92 PROPERTIUS nine than here. Otherwise he would have described the dress accurately and in detail. It is true, of course, that antique fashions were less changeable than ours, yet who, pray, except one whose only recollection of a dress was the fact that the wearer was entrancingly beautiful in it — in other words, who but a man, would dream of asking any woman to show herself in a dress five years behind the style ? Nevertheless, the request is pathetic. It shows that his memories, and doubtless hers too, were sweeter than present experience. Again, he can at times examine his own symptoms with a certain amount of objective, semi-professional interest. Now and then he even betrays a sense of humor. For example, on one occasion he is moved to observe that in this particular distemper known as love prescriptions are worth nothing, charms have no force, magic potions are absolutely useless. Moreover, you can't see anything, there are no pathological symptoms, no acute attacks. Where all the trouble comes from, is an utter mystery. The patient doesn't need a doctor, he doesn't have to take to his bed, he is not affected by any kind of weather, no particular season of the year seems to be bad for him. Ambulat, et subito mirantur funus amici ! — "he walks about — and all of a sudden his friends are amazed to see his corpse on the way to the grave ! " A variation on the old theme that love is incurable, that might have come straight from the Comedy. And yet they were lovers still, in spite of themselves, in spite of each other, and in the same tempestuous way. But we can no longer smile at their antics. The causes PROPERTIUS 93 of them have ceased to be slight or purely imaginary. The lovers were both unfaithful. Propertius was the slave of his temperament. Cynthia had taken a char- acteristic revenge. And they were both very miserable. Yet it is significant of the essentially generous nature of the man that he occasionally rises to heights never at- tained in his happier days. There are bursts of un- selfish — I had almost said, remorseful — tenderness, the depth of which has rarely been matched in antique litera- ture. Never, too, even in the glorious hours of their first love, did he pay such homage to beauty as once in these later days when she was desperately ill, and he begged Pluto and Proserpina, with the touching naivete of the ancient faith, not to take her from him (2, 28, 49) : Sunt apud infernos tot milia formosarum ; Pulchra sit in superis, si licet, una locis. So many thousand thousand fair women are fordone. And throng the Halls of Hades, can ye not spare this one? One thinks of Mimnermos. The haunting melody of the lines seems in itself to echo the regret of the poet — nay, to echo the regret of the ages — for the passing of youth and beauty. But there are also occasions when his mood is harder and more bitter than ever before. And it was in this mood that he wrote the last elegy of the third book : I was a joke at dinners; aye, any would-be wit Might use me for a target, and I must stomach it. Five years I could be loyal ; but now, you'll often mourn. Biting your nails for anguish, the faith at last outworn. Nay, weeping will not touch me — I know that trick of old; 94 FROPERTIUS You always weep from ambush, I cannot be cajoled. I shall depart in tears, but my wrongs will check their flow; Ours was a team well sorted — you could not leave it so. So now, my mistress' threshold, where oft my tear-drops fell, And thou, the door I haunted, I bid ye both farewell. May age afflict you, Cynthia, with ill-dissembled years. And may you see the wrinkles your fading beauty fears. And when your glass flings at you the ruin pictured there. Go curse them, every wrinkle, and every whitening hair. Be you in turn excluded, and suffer proud disdain. And all you did to others be done to you again. So fate shall soon avenge me — my page bids you give ear — Your beauty waits this ending. Woman, believe — and fear ! Not very chivalrous words, perhaps. But even in pieces with so long a pedigree of literary convention as this, the ancients were nearer to nature and not so afraid of the verities of life as are we. We are now not very far from 22 b. c. The fourth and last book, as we learn from a reference in the closing elegy, must have been published after the year 15. How long after, and whether published by the author or post- humously, it is impossible to say. The fact, however, that we hear no more of Propertius suggests that he must have died not far from that date; and the miscel- laneous character of the eleven elegies of the book leads one to guess that they are merely what was left of his unpublished work. For purposes of this inquiry our interest is confined to two elegies — the seventh and eighth. Verse technique shows that, like the rest of the book, they were certainly written somewhat later than the last of the previous col- lection. In view of their character and contents it is important to keep this fact in mind. PROPERTIUS 95 The second of the two gives us our last ghmpse of Cynthia in this Hfe. She is the same passionate Cynthia, and in one of her fits of wild rage. The scene is one that might have come straight from a roaring farce of the Restoration. It does not present the poet in an enviable light, and the hardening, even vulgarizing, effect of his conduct, not only upon him but also upon her, is only too evident. But the born self-tormentor for once forgets his metier and tells us the story with a rollicking, reckless humor that reveals an entirely new aspect of his remarkable genius. One might assert that what we have here is merely the recollection in later years of an occur- rence belonging to the old days of the previous book — the cool, detached, reminiscent vein, so to speak, prompted by an affair long since dead and buried. If so, how shall we explain the companion piece? Here we learn, if we learn anything, that the lovers did not part at the end of the third book; on the contrary, that they were parted only by death; further, that Cynthia was probably poisoned by one of her own slaves, and that she asked to be buried on the road to Tivoli. So Cynthia says herself, when, immediately after her funeral, she appears to Propertius in a dream. This, then, is the real epilogue of our story, and it carries it beyond the grave. The epilogue is spoken by the woman. It is a review of their life together, and a justification of herself. The spell of her beauty abode with him to the last. The awful change of death was there ; but, he says, " she had the self-same hair and the self-same eyes as when they bore her forth." These, then, the cruel fire had spared ; these he could not forget. He knows it is Cynthia still. Is he merely artistic here ? 96 PROPERTIUS Or is it that even when Cupid's cup of honey and gall has been drained to the last drop, he cannot bear the thought of such beauty in corruption? But this is not all. The sordid realism of the Subura, so strangely commingled with the realm beyond the grave; the dying scene; the slaves to be tried by fire; the fleeting glimpse of the wild irregular life of the poet ; the emergence of those superstitions of the Roman under- world from which Propertius himself was never quite free — the awful idea, fof instance, that the gates of Hell stand open all night and that the monstrous shape of Cerberus himself (the great vampire, the infernal wer- wolf) and in his wake all the questing spirits of the dead prowl through the darkness at will until cockcrow — the gruesome lines that bear witness to the undying fire of Cynthia's passion for her lover, even in the land of dust and shadow — these and other motives unite under the spell of the poet's bizarre and powerful imagination to make this piece unique : Beyond the grave lies something, not all of us expires; There is a ghastly phantom that 'scapes the funeral fires. For lo, I dreamed that Cynthia, then resting with the dead Beside the noisy roadway, was bending o'er my bed. 'Twas when my sleep seemed filled with the funeral of my dear. My heart seemed very heavy, my couch was cold and drear. She had the self-same tresses, her eyes were still the same, As when the bearers raised her; but on her side the flame Had gnawed away the vestment, nor had it paused to spare Her beryl ring — 'twas melted, the ring she used to wear. Her features, too, had flattened — the Stream that flows for aye, The River of Oblivion, was fretting them away. The thoughts, the living passion, were Cynthia's very own ; Her breathing self was echoed in every word and tone. She smote her hands ; the gesture was Cynthia yet, when stirred ; PROPERTIVS 97 Poor hands, so dead and brittle — only the thumbs were heard. " You traitor ! who shall trust you ? you have no power to keep Your faith with any woman. So soon, and you can sleep? So soon you have forgotten how many nights we met, The while Subura waketh? So soon could you forget The rope, my dizzy casement, and how you stood below. Until you felt my kisses, those nights so long ago? And how we paused at corners, and loitered in the street? We loved each other dearly — and stolen love is sweet! But all those secret vows, as we tarried side by side. Only the wild winds heard them — and flung them far and wide ! When all grew dark before me, none called to me ' Oh stay ! Come back ! ' If you had called me, I should have gained one day. No watcher shook a rattle where I was lying dead; The tiles were old and broken, the rain beat on my head. And last of all, who saw you grief -stricken by my bier? Who saw you clad in mourning? Who saw you shed one tear? And though beyond the city it irked you to proceed, You might have told ray bearers from thence to use less speed. You never cast on perfumes, nor prayed the winds to fan My fires ; no flowers you offered. Oh faithless, thankless man ! Mere hyacinths, costing nothing — not even those you gave, Not even a humble potsherd to mark my lonely grave! " Burn Lygdamus ! The slave ! Heat the metal plates white hot ! My wine hid death; I drank it, and sensed too late the plot. Seize Nomas' charm of spittle ; she 'scaped the former time ; Now, when the live coals wrap them, her hands will tell their crime ! " That cheap, bedizened street-wench, whom any man in Rome Might mate with for a trifle, is mistress of our home; And, quite the high-born lady, in skirts that sweep the ground. All over gold-embroidered, if any slave be found Who dares to laud my beauty, will pounce upon her prey. And make her rue her boldness with doubled tasks that day. My Petale laid roses upon my monument; A block and chain rewarded the faithful innocent! Some slight request ' for my sake ' poor Lalage once urged ; The girl was stripped, ' for my sake,' hung by the hair, and scourged I That vampire melts my likeness — you never once complain ; 98 PROPERTIUS That she might get a dowry, you let me die — again. ■■ And yet I'll not upbraid you, despite my bitter wrongs ; My reign was long, Propertius, as mistress of your songs. And by the three weird Sisters — so may he greet me fair, That triple Dog of Hades — I kept my faith, I swear ! If not, let crawling vipers consort where I lie dead; My tomb shall hear their hissing, my bones shall be their bed. For on that loathly Stream, two abodes diverse are placed ; Some to the one are sailing, some to the other haste. In one barge Clytaemestra, with her the Cretan dame. And eke the wooden portent wherein she hid her shame. But lo, a crowned pinnacle — its happy burden sees Elysian roses yielding their fragrance to the breeze. There lutes, and Phrygian cymbals, and Lydian lyres resound. And turbaned dancers foot it in one delightful round. We see fair Hypermestra, Andromeda, too, those wives Of stainless faith; they tell us the story of their lives. One swears to us the arms which her mother's gyves abused Were guiltless as the fingers the cold, hard rocks had bruised; And then the other tells us how she could not commit The crime her sisters compassed — she had no heart for it. So with the tears of death all the loves of life are healed; But half of your offences I never have revealed. " And now a charge I give you, if I can touch you yet. If, spite of Doris' philtres, you cannot quite forget: Don't let my nurse go hungry, when she is weak and old ; Although she might have done it, she never sought your gold. And my beloved Latris, I would not have her stand Before a second mistress, my mirror in her hand. And all the verse you wrote me in other, happier days Belongs to me — go burn it, and cease to keep my praise! And guard my grave from ivy; the tendrils grow amain, And wind around my bones in an ever-tightening chain. And where 'gainst shady hillsides the Anio rests his streams. And in Alcides' temple that wondrous ivory gleams, There carve upon a column a poem, such as I Deserved, but short, that passers may read it as they fly: ' Here lieth Golden Cynthia in Tibur's fair demesne ; This added fame, O Anio, thy famous banks have seen.' PROPBRTIUS 99 " Think not those dreams are false that Elysium sends to you ; When good dreams come, as I have, you may believe them true. By night, the ghosts flit earthward, the sullen Gates of Doom Swing wide, and even Cerberus goes prowling through the gloom. At cockcrow, all the vagrants troop back to Acheron; The Boatman keeps strict tally, and notes us one by one. For now, let others have thee ; ere long shalt be all mine ; We two shall lie together, my bones shall cling to thine." She spoke; and in that instant, ere yet I was aware, The shape my arms were clasping had vanished in thin air. Here the curtain falls on the drama of Propertius and Cynthia. It was by turn an idyl, a Romantic comedy, a problem play, a comic opera, a tragedy, and finally, a mystery. It is fitting that the epilogue should be given to Cynthia. For, after all, Cynthia is the real lover of the two. Erring, passionate, undisciplined, wilful, way- ward, sinned against and sinning — in spite of everything, she had never ceased to love him. And from first to last her love had been deeper and more genuine than his. This is what he means by making her swear so solemnly that she has always been faithful, but that he has not. As he looks back over the story of their life together, he realizes, and, with his essential generosity acknowl- edges, that after all he was more to blame than was she for the wreck of their happiness. Yet the lovers were only too much alike, both in their strength and in their weakness ; and they owed their joy and their sorrow to the one as much as to the other. His intellectual and moral ideals were high ; his impulses were kindly, generous, even chivalrous. But he had one fatal fault. His will was weak. He could not withstand the call of mere indulgence. Cynthia, too, was passionate and intellectual, and, in spite of her faults, was essen- 100 PROPERTIUS tially generous and able to idealize. But she had a high temper, and acted on impulse, not reflection. With his better part — and in those earlier days only his better part was known to her, or even to himself — he had dreamed of making her a friend, a companion, and an equal; something no seasoned man of the world would have thought of. The appeal was made to Cynthia's better part, and she responded instantly to the demand as best she could; and loved him to her dying day because he had once made it. But he could not set her the example in his own life, and she could not rise superior to her disappointment. Moreover, their position towards the world was an essentially false and unstable basis for the realization of his generous but chimerical ideal. They were both bound hand and foot — as we all are — ^by the conditions in which they lived. Three hundred years later, like Thais, like Pelagia, she might have become, as Plessis says, "a Christian or a saint." But Cynthia belonged to the Au- gustan Age, and Propertius had only wanted to make her an honest woman. Alas, that was impossible. PUPULA DUPLEX A Comment on Ovid, Amores, i, 8, 15* In his Address to the Lena, a conventional theme of the elegiac poet, Ovid says of her: oculis quoque pupula duplex fulminat, et gemino lumen ab orbe venit. This statement occurs in the usual list of magic feats which all lenae were supposed to perform; for everyone knows that the business of this indispensable adjunct of an antique love-affair included, as a matter of course, the brewing of love-potions and the practice of necrom- ancy in all its branches. Of course, it is Ovid's implication that his ' Dipsas,' as he expressively calls her, has the Evil Eye. But what would have been his definition of a pupula duplex, a ' double pupil ' ? And why was this peculiarity, whatever it may be, esteemed a sign of the Evil Eye ? Commenta- tors have added nothing of any value to the solution of these questions since the time of Burmann. Of the parallels cited by them Pliny, vii, 16 and a passage from Ptolemaios Chennos are all that have any bearing upon the point. Pliny, vii, 2, 16, says that " In this same Africa, ac- cording to Isigonus and Nymphodorus, are certain fami- * From Studies in Honor of Basil Lanneau Gilderslceve, Balti- more, 1902. 102 PUPULA DUPLEX lies of people possessing the Evil Eye who cause cattle to die, trees to wither up, babies to perish, simply by com- mending them. Isigonus adds that persons of the same sort are found among the Triballi and lUyri. These, also, especially if they are angry, charm and kill by their gaze whomsoever they look upon for any length of time. Youths who have just reached maturity are most easily injured by them. More notable still, says Isigonus, is the fact that they have double pupils in each eye. Ac- cording to Apollonides there are also women of this sort in Scythia. They are called Bitiae. Phylarchus says that in Pontus there is a race called Thibii and many others who have the same powers. As peculiarities of these people he notes that they have in one eye a double pupil, in the other, the figure of a horse. Even when their garments are soaked through they cannot be made to sink in water. Cicero also, among us, is authority for the statement that all women everywhere with double pupils possess the Evil Eye." Pliny refers again to this passage at xi, 142, and Gellius, ix, 4, 7, gives the substance of it. No other references to the superstition are quoted from Roman authors. It may be observed too that except Cicero, all the authorities cited by Pliny are Greek. The eldest, Phylarchos and Nymphodoros, belong to the early Alexr andrian period. The time of Isigonos must have been later, as is shown by his use of Nymphodoros. The most recent is Apollonides. He lived in the period of the Mithradatic Wars. All belong to that class of marvel- mongers familiar to everyone who has followed the ro- mantic and novellistic literature of later Greece. This type of popular historian and paradoxographos was PUPULA DUPLEX 103 much read throughout the entire Roman period, and perhaps may be said — at any rate in the case of Pliny, who lacked the training, not the temperament, of a scien- tist — to have taken the place of that which, under dif- ferent circumstances, might have ripened into more profitable investigation. The passage which Pliny quoted from Cicero is not to be found in any work of his now extant. But Baiter and Kayser are undoubtedly right in ascribing it to the Admiranda. Pliny used the work ; indeed, he quotes it by name at xxxi, 12 and 51, for notices similar in char- acter to this. The title of the Admiranda and, as far as we know them, its contents, are so suggestive of Apista, Paradoxa, Thaumasta, and similar names given to the books of the Hellenistic romancers that we may well believe Cicero's work to have been based directly upon the sources used by Pliny. In fact, it is not impossible that, in this particular statement, Cicero merely general- ized where Pliny, more accurate — or more painstaking — ■ gave his authorities in detail. Finally, if we turn back to our passage from Ovid, reminding ourselves of his extraordinary acquaintance with the light literature of later Hellenism, we may suspect that he, too, drew from a source similar to that used by Pliny and Cicero. It would be dangerous, however, to conclude that this superstition was not Italic, although with the Latin authors mentioned it has all the air of being the result of reading rather than the personal observation of a commonplace superstition near home. It is true, more- over, that Pliny's Greek sources agree in placing all actual examples of the double pupil in a remote country. But just as the testimonial of a patent medicine seems 104 PUPULA DUPLEX to flourish best in a town remarkable for its distance or obscurity, so the Land of Marvels is generally well out- side the limits of the known world. In both cases the suggestion is very likely to have originated in the home of the reporter. For our purpose, therefore, it is quite unnecessary to discuss the identity of the "Thibii" and " Bitiae " or why and how this idea of a double pupil became connected with the various remote and obscure peoples mentioned in Pliny's catalogue. We should note, however, the curious statement of Phylarchos that his " Thibii and many others in Pontus " have ■' in altero oculo geminam pupillam, in altero equi effigiem." In his edition of Pliny, Lyons, 1587, Dale- camp suggested that Pliny had made the mistake of taking the word hippos in its literal sense, whereas, in fact, it was the regular name given by Phylarchos to a peculiar disease of the eye, the most prominent symp- tom of which, as we are told by Hippokrates, was a con- stant trembling and winking of the lids. Dalecamp's explanation was very reasonably questioned by later editors of Pliny, Hardouin in particular, but was again adopted, without reference to Dalecamp, by Otto Jahn. But, as Hardouin saw, we could hardly expect Phy- larchos to couple a simple everyday eye-disease on one side of the Thibian and Pontic nose with a miraculous double pupil on the other. Moreover, as Riess, A. J. P. xviii, 195, has well observed, this theory, like Miiller's mythological " disease of language " in a kindred field, really reverses the order of things. " The very name of the sickness proves that its presence was ascribed to a horse-shaped demon." It is evident, therefore, that in his desire of making us quake again Phylarchos has fol- PUPULA DUPLEX 105 lowed a method not infrequently observed in writers of his class. He has furnished his " Thibii and many others in Pontus " with a double share of horrific signs for the Evil Eye. We may now turn to an interesting passage from Ptolemaios Chennos who, according to Suidas, would be a younger contemporary of Pliny the Elder. His Kaine Historia, which consisted of seven books and is fortu- nately preserved for us in the abstract of Photios, at once stamps him as a mythographer of the semi-novel- listic type. In this work, according to Photios, Chennos told " that the wife of Kandaules, whose name Herodotus does not mention, was called Nysia; that, according to report, she was dikoros (i. e., had a double pupil), and extremely sharp of sight, being in possession of the stone drakon- tites, and on this account perceived Gyges passing out of the door." At first sight we might suspect that this passage is merely a piece of Alexandrian embroidery on the famous story of Herodotus, i, 8-12. !But in his life of Apollonios of Tyana, Philostratos, in the course of a long digression on Indian dragons, observes that the wonderful stone in their heads (i. e., the drakontites) is "invincible even against the ring which, they say, was possessed by Gyges." This shows that in the version to which Chennos refers, and which is that of neither Plato nor Herodotus, Gyges was not put behind the door, as Hero- dotus tells the story, but, probably without the connivance of Kandaules, was depending upon his ring — as old Henslowe used to describe certain of his theatrical prop- erties — " for to goo invisibell." But against the dragon- I06 PUPULA DUPLEX stone which, according to a world-wide superstition re- garding serpents, makes its possessor all-seeing and all-knowing, even this famous ring was as powerless as the hypnotism of the Hindoo juggler in the presence of the kodak. Chennos is our only authority for the statement that Nysia, as he calls her, possessed a double pupil as well as the dragon-stone. Moreover, it is to be observed that he uses the idea of the double pupil in a new sense. The Evil Eye is not the point here, though it may be implied. Nysia derives the same power from her double pupil that she already derived from her dragon-stone in infinite measure — supernatural sharpness of vision. In other words Chennos, like Phylarchos, has doubled his signs of the same thing. So far as I am acquainted with the commentators on this subject, we have now reached the end of our re- sources. As we pause to review the situation, it becomes clear that we are hardly wiser than when we started. The two questions proposed for solution are still un- answered. To show how far they have been from an answer, let me quote the only two persons who, to my knowledge, have ever expressed any opinion on a pupula duplex. The first comes from no less a person than Cuvier. He was an associate editor of the Lemaire Pliny, Paris, 1827. At the passage already quoted he observes: " Unde haec de pupula duplici pervagata opinio, equidem nescio; neque crediderim tales unquam in humanitate, etiam monstrosa, oculos visos." The second comes from E. Miiller, Philologus, vii, the main object of whose article was to prove that Plato's PUPULA DUPLEX 107 story of Gyges and his Ring originated in a volcanic myth. Commenting on the word dikoros in the passage from Chennos, Miiller makes the naive suggestion (p. 254, n. 40) that the wife of Kandaules " verschieden- artige, wie es scheint, nach ganz verschiedener richtung blickende pupillen gehabt habe." The old legend of Venus Paeta — if one must turn to the books to settle a question like this — makes it clear that any Dream of Fair Women is incomplete unless it includes at least one with a cast in her eye. But "nach ganz verschiedener richtung blickende pupillen " ! Add this touch of de- scription, if you please, to that figure of gleaming white which, seen and yet unseen, stands amid the flickering- perfumed shadows of the doomed king's chamber. We have all gazed, with Gyges, upon its perilous beauty ; we have all shared his mingled emotions of rage and fear shame and delight. But, to leave Miiller's theory for the present, we have, at least, discovered that the Greek word for one possess- ing a pupula duplex is dikoros. It is not found in Liddell and Scott ; but the Thesaurus gives us three examples — none of which, curiously enough, seems to have ever been connected with the discussion of the double pupil. These passages tell us that a dikoros is a person whose eyes are of different colors. Sometimes the difiference of colors may be found in one eye. More frequently, to judge by modern experience, one eye differs in color from the other. This new association for dikoros, pupula duplex, lets in a flood of light. It removes it from that which, to one accustomed to deal with prob- lems of folklore, might well seem a curiously contracted sphere, and takes it into the domain of a world-wide I08 PUPULA DUPLEX superstition — one might cite the single example of Here- ward, " last of the English " — according to which all persons who show a difference of color in the eyes are credited with the power of fascinatio. But what has pupula duplex, dikoros, to do with color? How does it happen that two ideas, apparently quite foreign, should be associated ? Finally, what is a pupula duplex? Before attempting to answer these questions it may be well to observe briefly some aspects of the primaeval and universal superstition with which they are connected. The Evil Eye may be the cause of every ill in mind, body or estate that flesh is heir to ; briefly, of misfortunes which in modern times are covered by insurance, at- tributed to the weather, or for which the remedy is sought by recourse to a lawyer, a physician or a gun, according to the temperament of the loser. Above all, the Evil Eye is responsible for those slow, wasting diseases and nervous or mental disorders for which the untutored mind can find no explanation in the circum- stances of the person afflicted. Anyone may be blighted by it, babies in the cradle especially. The possessor of it simply has to cast a glance — la gettatura, as the Neapoli- tans expressively term it — upon his chosen victim at some unguarded moment. The etymology and historical usage of words like invidere, baskainein and their parallels in other languages show that, in the popular conception, envy was the principal motive for using the Evil Eye. Nevertheless there are some unfortunates born with the Evil Eye who involuntarily blast all that they look upon. This was the pathos of Gautier's well-known story. The ability to detect the Evil Eye is an acquisition of obvious PUPULA DUPLEX 109 value. There are many rules for it, and most of them are common to all folklore. Persons with a piercing eye who look at you steadily are to be avoided. Persons who are cross-eyed, " wall-eyed," one-eyed, or have any other marked peculiarity of the eye have always been dreaded. Witches, werwolves, vampires — the three are often united in the same person — ^possess and use the Evil Eye as a matter of course. Indeed, it should be observed that the Evil Eye is very frequently accompanied by other powers of an uncanny nature. An inquiry into the origin and philosophy of this wide- spread superstition — which was, of course, derived in the first instance from the primaeval explanation, what- ever it was, of vision — may safely begin with the general axiom of folklore that the primitive man, whose beliefs survive in our superstitions, conceived of no manifesta- tion of natural forces or organic life except as due to a personality. To him, the causes of all effects are never things of law, but always persons. Those well-known lines of Pope, Lo, the poor Indian ! whose untutored mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, are not only truer, but they must be taken in a more literal and homelier sense, than their author had ever supposed. Without pausing to mention many other ideas of a similar nature, the "poor Indian" is also one of those who see in the eclipse a monster proceeding to gulp down quick the god of day, and is much relieved when his strenuous efforts in the way of shouting, beat- ing of drums, archery-practice and such like, have averted the threatened calamity. He also knows that the no PUPULA DUPLEX real cause of his chills and fever is a devil ; that another one of a dififerent sort gives him the small-pox. In short, after his own peculiar fashion he believes in mi- crobes. Hence the medicine-man prescribes an allopathic dose of tom-toms over his patient's bed, while the Chinese practitioner, more advanced, pierces the diseased mem- ber with needles. The object in both cases is to oust the demon. The primitive man of all nations accounted for the phenomenon of sight and explained the functions of the eye after a similar fashion. Nor do we need to consult the lore of the modern savage here. Traces of it are clearly visible in the traditional discussion of optics found in the earliest Greek and Roman thinkers, the Church Fathers and various mediaeval doctors and theologians, from the dawn of Hellenic thought to the middle of the seventeenth century. A detailed review of this long dis- cussion, interesting and curious as it is, would be un- necessary and, moreover, is impossible in the space at my disposal. A few points, however, may be noted. We shall go far towards understanding the primitive theory of sight among the Greeks and Romans if we begin by giving a perfectly literal interpretation to the old saying that ' the eye is the window of the soul.' The expression has been traced to Herakleitos, but it is repeated or implied in all languages and all periods. The same thought is found, for example, in a famous verse of Epicharmos, "'Tis the mind that sees, the mind that hears ; all else is deaf and blind," a verse which was the emphatic expression of a philosophical dogma and, for ages, the text of a philosophical dispute regarding the nature of vision. It is evident moreover, that, in the PUPULA DUPLEX III strictly popular conception, the eye was more than the window, it was literally the door of the soul. Still another step back brings us face to face with the belief that the soul actually resides in the eye itself, ' pro- fecto in oculis animus habitat,' to give a literal turn to Pliny's words (xi, 145), and may be seen there in the form of a mannikin. This view explains a number of superstitions. It becomes clear, too, that such designa- tions of the pupil as kore, pupa, pupula, pupilla, i. e., the little lass, the mannikin, das mdnnlein, though easily explained by a different theory in the wisdom of a later age, undoubtedly go back to the time when they were applied in a literal sense to the soul which was seen in the man's eye. I would suggest that this theory is the origin, for example, of the old Norse superstition that the werwolf when in his bestial form may always be de- tected by his eyes. The eye is the one thing that remains unchanged. When one dies, the mannikin, i. e., the soul itself, leaves the eye. Hence the origin of that immemorial custom of closing the open eyes of the dead — closing the door, as it were, upon the departed guest, and insur- ing against the possible return of an occupant no longer welcome. Conversely, though a man be never so ill, there is no immediate danger of death as long as the mannikin may be seen. "Augurium ex homine ipso est non timendi mortem in aegritudine, quamdiu oculorum pupillae im- aginem reddant" (Pliny, xxviii, 64). On the other hand, in the very midst of health and prosperity, the mannikin may disappear. This is a sure sign of impending doom. Capitolinus says of the un- 112 PUPULA DUPLEX fortunate Pertinax (14, 2) : "Et ea die, qua occisus est, negabant in oculis eius pupulas cum imaginibus, quas reddunt spectantibus, visas." But even before death and without being a premonition of it, the mannikin, in exceptional circumstances, may- leave the eye and return again. In this connection a story told by P'u Sung-ling, a famous Chinese author and scholar of the seventeenth century, deserves our attention. Fang Tung was a good scholar, but an unprincipled rake who followed up and spoke to every woman he saw. One time he caught sight of a beautiful girl going by in a carriage and followed it for a long distance, staring at her. Finally, the girl's maid, taking a handful of dust, threw it at him and blinded him. Upon examination the doctor found on the pupils a small film which, in a few days, became as thick as a cash. On the right pupil there came a kind of spiral, and no medicine was of any avail. Mr. Fang then be- took himself to repentance and religious meditation. At the end of a year, being now in a state of perfect calm, he heard a small voice, about as loud as a fly's, calling out from his left eye : " It's horridly dark in here." To this he heard a reply from the right eye, saying, " Let us go out for a stroll, and cheer ourselves up a bit." Then he felt a wriggling in his nose — as if something was going out each of the nostrils ; and after a while he felt it again, as if going the other way. Afterwards he heard a voice from one eye say, " I hadn't seen the garden for a long time," etc. Mr. Fang related the matter to his wife, and she con- cealed herself in the room. She then observed two tiny PVPVLA DUPLEX 113 people, no bigger than a bean, come down from her hus- band's nose and run out of the door. ... In a little while they came back and flew up to his face. . . . After some days Mr. Fang heard from the left eye, "This round- about road is not at all convenient. It would be as well for us to make a door." To this the right eye answered, " My wall is too thick ; it wouldn't be at all an easy job." " I'll try and open mine," said the left eye, " and then it will do for both of us." Whereupon Mr. Fang felt a pain in his left eye as if something was being split, and in a moment he found he could see. His wife examined his eye and discovered an opening in the film, through which she could see the black pupil shining out beneath, the eye-ball itself looking like a cracked pepper-corn. By next morning the film had disappeared, and when his eye was closely examined it was observed to contain two pupils. The spiral on the right eye remained as before; and then they knew that the two pupils had taken up their abode in one eye. Further, although Mr. Fang was still blind of one eye, the sight of the other was better than that of the two together had formerly been. H. A. Giles, the translator of this tale (" Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio," London, La Rue, 1880, vol. I, p. 8) , adds in a note : " The belief that the human eye contains a tiny being of the human shape is universal in China." It will be seen that in this story the idea of the man- nikin is further extended. It is itself the sight of the eye, and has an entity separate from that of the man. We also have here an instance of the double pupil and the Chinese explanation of it. In the Occident, at least so far as we are now concerned, the absence or obscura- 114 PVPULA DUPLEX tion of the mannikin during a man's lifetime has a differ- ent meaning, and is best taken up in another connection. The soul, the real self, that dynamic part of every person which is of kin with the dangerous and unmeas- ured forces of the other world, dwells in the eye. Other- wise how could we see ? Here, in fact, it may actually be observed by any one in the form of an homunculus. Naturally, then, any influence, at all events, any spiritual influence, exerted by the individual must necessarily come from the same source. Nor should we forget that this idea received ample support from the primaeval observa- tion of certain natural phenomena, for example, the power of the serpent to charm its chosen victims, the hypnotic power of the human eye, etc., etc. The light which this primitive theory of vision appears to shed upon the doctrine of fascinatio is in itself a strong proof that the two are closely connected. Once granted, for example — and, certainly, such was the theory of primitive man — that the homunculus, the real personality, dwells in the eye, it was inevitable to suppose that the appearance of that dwelling should betray and reflect the character of its occupant. This will explain why it is that among all nations every marked peculiarity or defect of the eyes is thought to be a proof of the Evil Eye. Having reached this point we find ourselves face to face with the doctrine of possession. Any part of a man may be possessed, especially the part that aches, but if the real man, the director, has been possessed — or dis- possessed — we must, of course, expect to find the evi- dence of it in the eye, if anywhere, because the eye is his abode. In such cases, the Evil Eye and the defect which marks it are both caused by the fact that the pos- PupVla buPLkx tie, sessor is himself possessed. Thus we at once understand that large class of apparently anomalous cases in which the possessor of the Evil Eye inflicts damage quite against his will and, indeed, may even suffer from it himself as well as those about him. The homunculus, except at death or the premonition of it, does not leave the eye unless driven out by the in- trusion of a superior power which usually takes his place. Hence in German folklore (Grimm, D. M.,p. 898) : "Ein mensch, in den holden gezaubert sind, ist erkennbar daran, dass man in seinen augen kein mannlein oder kindlein {kore, pupa) sieht, oder nur ganz triibe." In other words the man himself is really absent or, at least, under a charm. So of Pliny's horse-demon, and the frog's foot observed by Pierre de I'Ancre. In short, any peculiarity of the eye may be traceable to the same cause. The pupula duplex can now speak for itself. The dikoros is a person who has two mannikins instead of one. In such cases, the demon-mannikin — and the case of Nysia shows that at least one of them was a demon — does not oust the legitimate occupant, but the two live side by side either in the same eye or in different eyes. The presence of the uncanny intruder is betrayed by the difference in color. If, therefore, dikoros means two colors in the same pair of eyes it is only because the word contains what was originally the popular explanation of that peculiarity. Moreover, we can now explain why the dikoros should have supernatural powers of vision. Gyges might, indeed, escape the notice of Nysia herself, but no one would venture to assert that her demon-kore could be deceived by a ring of darkness. He, or — who knows ? — possibly she, could " perceive Gyges passing out Ii6 PUPVLA DUPLEX of the door" and immediately reported the matter to headquarters. Whether " dikoria," if not too pronounced, is a blemish to beauty I leave to the more extensive experience of my readers. Certainly Ptolemaios Chennos never meant to imply it and, for one's own part, it is not unpleasant to feel that, whatever else they may have inherited, the Mermnadae were in no danger of inheriting eyes of " ganz verschiedene richtung " from one who is not only the central figure in a masterpiece of the great story- teller, but who, we are convinced, still deserves the place among those tot milia formosarum which has been given her by every reader of the tale of Kandaules. Last of all, turning back to Ovid's lines quoted at the beginning of this paper, we may assert that the diction- aries are mistaken in telling us that his word orhe means the eye. It means the pupil. Moreover, if my explana- tion of dikoros is correct, the indefiniteness of Ovid's orbe is of such a character, the Roman references to a double pupil are of such rarity and from a sphere so limited, literary, and foreign, as almost to make one suspect that their authors had simply translated dikoros by pupula duplex and set it down as another wonder of the world, without knowing what the word really meant, and possibly without connecting it in any way with that familiar phenomenon which dikoros itself in no way suggested, but of which it had once been the explanation. THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR* The value of the Classics for educational purposes is a theme as well-worn as it is important. It is a theme, however, which would have been treated, possibly with less frequency, certainly with more profit, if in every case the disputants had prefaced their discussion by a clear statement of what they meant by education and of the reasons why they valued it. If the one object of education were to produce results capable of being transmuted into the maximum of coin in the minimum of time — a rigidly practical training which is, obviously, all that most people have either the capacity, the opportunity, or the ambition to acquire — why, then, the Classics might find it difficult to justify their importance; above all, in an age which ofifers daily hecatombs to the great goddess of Commerce. On the other hand, if in the rush and turmoil of our modern life a trained mind and a sane judgment are worth hav- ing, merely for their own sake, if good taste and in- stincts of reserve and proportion won by familiarity with the highest existing standards are a joy to their possessor and, through him, beneficial to a world the besetting sins of which are due in no small degree to the lack of those qualities, if a just appreciation of language, literature and the progress of civilization makes us rich indeed even though it may add nothing to our bank account ; in short, if it is true, after all, that the best in life can not be * Printed in Queen's Quarterly, 1905. 117 118 THB CLASSICS ANb OVR VERMACULAR bought, stolen nor acquired by legislation, and men realize that there is a training by means of which one may hope to acquire some part of these priceless possessions — why, then, we have nothing to fear for the great Classics of Greece and Rome. In such a system of education their value is beyond disproof ; their place can not be filled by any substitute or number of substitutes. It is true that this education is not for all. At the same time, it is open to all. Its acquisition is not a matter of social privilege ; in these days of growing gen- erosity in endowment even poverty has ceased to be such a serious hindrance as it once was. A recent economic writer, discussing the non-essentials in the best training for modern life, relegates the Classics to what he calls "the education of the leisure classes." I object to such a definition of education. To a large extent, it is false and misleading. Furthermore, so far, at least, as this country is concerned, there is really no such thing as a leisure class. Above all, even if the definition I have quoted were tenable, we could not consign to that sphere a branch of learning which has been, practically, the chief intellectual stimulus, not of wealthy idlers and dilettanti, but of the men who represent the highwater mark of effort and accomplishment, the best, the brightest, and, withal, the busiest, for the last five hundred years. It is not to my purpose, however, to dilate at large upon the merits of the Classics. I prefer, rather, to touch upon one aspect of the question. My reason for doing so is not because I expect to contribute anything new to the discussion, nor, yet, because this aspect, itself, is new — on the contrary, it is one of the oldest — and, certainly, not because it is the only aspect of importance — THB CLASSICS AMD OVR VEkMACULAk ng I refuse to yield one iota of the claims which have, been made for the subject to which my life is devoted — but, simply, because in our country and at this particular time it seems worthy of renewed emphasis. I refer to the question of the Classics and our vernacular. In other words, does the English which we write and speak need attention ? Have the Classics any value for this purpose, and, if so, how shall we enhance their value? I hardly need to add that this discussion rests on the assumption that the ability to speak and write one's own language correctly is not only desirable but of paramount im- portance. Language is the vehicle of thought. What- ever a man's ideas may be, his training has been culpably deficient if he does not or can not express them, at least, correctly. Of course, all languages have a natural growth. Time itself is an inevitable cause of change. But change is also a matter of culture, of political and social condi- tions. Moreover, there are certain crucial periods of contact with such conditions during which change pro- ceeds at a more rapid rate and the danger of serious and permanent deterioration is imminent. One of the most trying situations of this sort is when a language, and, above all, a cultivated language which has already had a long and brilliant career, is suddenly called upon to follow in the wake of political conquest, extension, or assimila- tion. Such a crisis came to Greek when it was called upon to follow the conquests of Alexander. The like came to Latin when it was called upon to tramp after the Rotnan legionaries to every part of the world rich enough to suggest the desirability of "benevolent assimilation." So far as the mere matter of extension was concerned, 120 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR neither the Greek nor the Latin tongue had ever had such a briUiant period. The conquered races vied with each other in their efforts to learn them. It is almost literal truth that the grandsons of men who had known Alexander the Great lived to see Syrians, Jews and what-not contributing books which were widely read to the current Greek literature of the day. So, a century and a half after the campaigns of Cassar, campaigns dur- ing which the use of interpreters was not infrequently necessary, Juvenal could say, in his characteristic fashion, that all the world had yielded to Greek and Roman culture : Nunc totus Graias nostrasque habet orbis Athenas, Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos, De conducendo loquitur iam rhetore Thule. It would seem as if in this country the English lan- guage were now passing through a similar experience. It is truly a magnificent instrument of thought which has been developed, diversified and strengthened by many a previous struggle; but a situation like the present one has no parallel in its history. For, at least, a generation the nations — and for the most part, too, nations speaking either a mere dialect of English or else an utterly foreign tongue — ^have been flocking to our shores at a rate which is now not far from a million a year. We shall better understand what this means when we realize that here, one may say, is an invasion of barbarians beside which, so far as its size is concerned, those other invasions when the hordes of Attila and the hosts of the Goth, the Vandal and the Lombard poured down upon the Western Em- pire were nothing but a mere corporal's guard. THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 121 As it was in those other days of Greece and Rome, so is it now with us. Our aliens, too, are wonderfully adaptable. They vie with each other in acquiring the language. But how often is their model not only un- cultivated and imperfect, but even debased. At all events the result is bound to be something of a compromise. Our streets, our comic papers, the stories we tell, the books we read — everything seems to be full of dialects. But as utterly weary of them as one often becomes, one never feels the burden of them so much as when one's children come trooping home from wherever they have been with a choice assortment to be painfully eradicated. And the worst of it is, how few children there are who have a standard at home to which they may return. Is this constant pressure from every side destined finally to reduce our English to a sort of a common denominator like Hellenistic Greek, like the Latin of the later Empire? I am not concerned here with the answer to this question. Nevertheless it should be clearly under- stood that, if such is to be the fate of our American English, we should have absolutely no right whatever to fasten the blame for it upon that portion of our barbar- ians which happens to be composed of aliens. Alien influence is, of course, a factor of linguistic disintegra- tion and decay, but it is one which grows in power only as our native defences are weakened or neglected. For example, when Greek and Latin were summoned to meet their hour of trial, the vigor of the nations themselves had long since begun to fail. Perhaps this element of weakness is one which we Americans do not need to consider — at all events, not at present. There are others, however, which do demand our most serious considera- 122 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR tion. Important among these are what Professor Gilder- sleeve has termed " the depressing tendencies of modern civilization, and especially those of American civiliza- tion." "The aims," he continues, "of most cultivated people are, when examined, no more exalted than those of their uneducated neighbors. Material well-being in more or less refined forms is more or less consciously the main object.." These words were written more than thirty years ago. Do I need to enquire whether, since then, the tendencies they describe have shown any disposition to decrease? Setting aside all other factors of deterioration, does the existence of such an ideal of life, does its influence on intellectual growth, on the average point of view regard- ing the uses and aims of education, offer much en- couragement to the overworked instructor of English? Has he received any notable help from educational nos- trums and "cure-alls"? The answer would appear to be No; at least, if we are to judge by the English we hear about us, as well as by ,the English we read in an astonishingly large proportion of what is published from day to day — "American briskness of speech," as Pro- fessor Cappon describes it. The ability to speak cor- rectly or even clearly, to read aloud as one should or write a presentable letter, the knowledge of orthography, the bare knowledge of the order of letters in the alphabet, without which one cannot use an ordinary dictionary — what has been happening to these and similar branches of elementary training ? And, perhaps, the worst feature of the situation is not simply ignorance alone. It is the astonishing prevalence of an impression that such things as these are really of no consequence. If the much THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 123 abused boy were the only culprit, we might, perhaps, correct such an impression. If the only ones to blame were mature persons whose advantages had been small, we might pardon it. But what shall we say of those many sinners who, though they have had every educa- tional advantage in the land, though some of them ac- tually teach the Humanities in our higher institutions of learning, nevertheless speak like ploughmen and write like untrained boys? The examination of our contemporary literature is hardly less discouraging. It is no exaggeration to say that, with a lamentably small proportion of exceptions, there appears to be no clear idea of the immutable stan- dards of taste and literary art, no knowledge of those great primary laws of criticism by which alone the merits of a literary work may be justly weighed and tested, by which alone a genius may lift himself to that higher level over which runs the only path that can lead him to Olympus. And the worst of it is, that perverted style, neglect or ignorance of literary and critical standards, is a disease which feeds upon and propagates itself. It cultivates and encourages perverted tastes and unhealthy appetites. The editor of Harper's Monthly claims that the " quintessential virtues of prose " are wholly of to-day. Granting for the sake of argument that this assertion is even in the remotest degree justifiable, we should still be obliged to add that the average man of to-day is not likely to reap the advantage of such prose. It is literally true that almost his sole literary pabulum is the " latest success " in novels and the less valuable of the current magazines. Both the novel and the maga- zine are rapidly adopting the aims, the methods and the 124 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR " American briskness of speech " of his favorite source of amusement and instruction, the Sunday paper. What he learns from such sources is far more likely to be not the quintessential virtues but the quintessential vices of prose. What, for example, shall we say of an author — of some ability, too, in the construction of a plot — in whose " American briskness of speech " the narrative tenses are regularly usurped by the historical present? Of course his own ear ought to have told him better. If not, five minutes with a competent English or Classical instructor might have informed him that outside of certain definite and narrow limitations the historical present is either a Gallicism or else belongs to a sphere of English in which the favorite examples of its use are " sez I " and " sez he." When such a stylist can count his readers by myriads, we may well look with distrust upon the " latest success." But what shall we say when editors, Supposedly men of cultivation, put into reading-books for the instruction of our children long selections in which we find again and again the same intolerable vice of style, and that, too, in company with usage which the veriest tyro should have been able to detect at once as clumsy, foreign or simply incorrect? I do not believe I have magnified what seems to me to be a serious situation. In any case, I know my readers will all agree that it is one which deserves our attention. It is not for me to consider the question of remedies in general. Nevertheless, it should be clearly understood that if we ever make any headway against the tendencies to which I have referred help must come from every THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 125 possible direction. There is no one remedy, no panacea. It would be folly to claim that the more or less perverted English of a nation will ever be cured by the Classics alone. The question is, whether the Classics are useful for this purpose. To that question my unqualified answer would be, They are more than useful, they are indispensable. Indeed, I would go farther than that. I would reiterate and maintain with renewed vigor the old thesis that to study them with this end in view is not alone profitable to English ; it lays the best possible foundation for a really competent, fruitful and inspiring knowledge of the Classics themselves. I shall not attempt to consider in detail many excellent reasons for studying the Classics, even in this connection. Moreover, it is unnecessary here to strengthen the old lines of defence. No man who is really educated — cer- tainly no teacher of the Humanities — no teacher of the language and literature of any European nation should need to be reminded why the Classics cannot be dispensed with. He knows that we cannot master the present until we have learned the past. He knows that, for us, all roads lead back to Rome and Athens. He would be ignorant indeed if he did not realize that our civilization is their civilization, that the most desperate and deter- mined of radicals could never hope to break asunder the myriad vital filaments which connect our days with those days. Above all, whatever else they may or may not have accomplished, he ought to be aware that in the con- ception of language as an art, in the development of language as an instrument of thought, in every thing that pertains to literary form and literary style, the ancients stand supreme. It is here we find the great exemplars 126 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR of whatever is best in the subsequent Hterature of Europe. Moreover, the message they convey, the lesson they teach, can come from them alone, and will never be outworn. The principles by which the composition of these masterpieces was directed, and which the study of them discloses, are eternal. And if the history of literature tells us anything, it tells us that no man has ever neglected these laws with impunity. He may pos- sibly gain some temporary popularity by neglecting them ; but this particular sort of transgression is one which posterity never forgets, and never forgives. Not only are the laws of logic and rhetoric which govern and direct the development of language and style best illustrated by the Classics, but they are the immutable laws of all time. But I pass over these and similar relations between the Classics and the higher spheres of English, and will con- sider the question merely so far as it directly applies to that same average boy whom we all love, and who is, really, our hope for the future. I refer to such matters as correct speech, or, at least, an effort to attain it, founded upon respect for language itself as an art, and cultivated by the habit of inquiring into the proper use and the real meaning of words. It may be contended that he can acquire all these things just as well in his English courses. The principal difficulty is that unless a boy is very young he is apt to labor under the impression that he knows English already. Details are dry to him, and it is far from easy to make him realize their import- ance and give them the requisite amount of attention. No criticism of our EngHsh courses is implied or in- tended. I only hope I may live long enough to see them broadened and strengthened at the expense of several THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 127 Other branches which I consider to be of infinitely less importance in preparatory training. I simply contend that no English course, whatever it may be, can find an ally to be compared with the Classics. They are an ad- junct for which there is no substitute of anything like the same value. It may also be said that the language of the average Classical student, despite his supposed advantages, is really no better than that of his class-mate in other lines. Indeed, it has been claimed that in the matter of English composition he is often the inferior. I should be the last to deny that, even setting aside dififerences in ability or home training, this criticism is, to a certain extent, well founded. There are boys, and boys of some native ability, too, whose acquaintance with the Classics, if we may call it acquaintance, has not improved their prac- tical mastery of English composition. But is this the fault of the Classics? Assuredly not. After making due allowance for those inevitable dififerences in ability or home training which I have just mentioned, the fault is not due to the Classics, but to the methods by which the Classics are taught. This point is certainly obvious enough, and it has been referred to time and again. Nevertheless, it would ap- pear that it can not be emphasized too much, or too often. Who, for example, would deny — and yet how few, after all, seem to realize it clearly — that nothing of educational value can be derived from lifeless, inelegant, inaccurate, slipshod translation. Not even an adequate idea of the bare subject matter of the Classics is possible under such circumstances; much less, an adequate con- ception of their spirit and form. What sensible man 128 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR could expect anything from a few listless, perfunctory exercises in prose-composition ? What shall we say, too, of an inaccurate, perverted pronunciation ? Is it a matter of no real consequence, as some would have us believe? Or, is a hopeless tangle in the matter of verse one of its boon companions? Such methods of study and instruc- tion as these are, of course, no benefit to a boy's English. Moreover, they work incalculable harm to the reputation as well as to the efficiency of the Classics themselves as a branch of culture. Worse than both, the natural result of such methods is to engender or encourage habits of mind which must surely react unfavorably upon the vic- tim's entire career. There can be no doubt that, whether we happen to be considering the Classics, or, for that matter, any other study, whatever it may be, the worst blow that can be given to the claims of education, the most deadly thrust that can be aimed at the value and efficiency of education itself, comes now, as it always has come, from partial, inaccurate, careless, ill-consideied methods of instruction. Who is to blame for this ? I believe that I know some- thing of the host of difficulties and discouragements by which a teacher is confronted. At all events, I have had nearly fifteen years of experience — -quite enough to bring home the fact that a teacher's troubles are not confined to the world without. They loom large in the world within himself. When, therefore, it becomes necessary to fix the blame for the situation to which I have alluded, it is we, after all, who must reply, Nos consules desumus. We are the guardians of the shrine, we are the interpre- ters of the higher life. Ne quid detrimentl is our com- mission, and we may not evade our trust nor shift our responsibility. THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 129 Let us consider the value of this principle as applied, for instance, to the question of Latin pronunciation, more especially to the question of long and short vowels. I am sure no one's feelings will be hurt if I venture to state my belief that with a very few brilliant exceptions — ' may they live long and prosper ! ' — we are all sinners in this respect, and, as such, the legitimate product of the more or less lax training which has prevailed ever since the time of Erasmus. 1, myself, was trained in a New England public school under the personal supervision of one of the best and most inspiring preparatory teachers of his time — a man who had had more than fifty years of experience. The Latin forms were graven upon my heart in letters of fire. When it became necessary to ' scan and prove ' the hexameters of Vergil, the rules of prosody were administered to me in the same determined fashion. But not until afterwards did it penetrate my consciousness that these rules actually affected the pro- nunciation of vowels, even in poetry, much less in prose. The reticence of the teacher as well as the obtuseness of the pupil in this case were certainly encouraged by the fact that the pernicious English pronunciation is only partially capable of bringing out the value of vowel sounds. Now, of course, the proper pronunciation of Latin is a vital question. It is just as vital as the proper pro- nunciation of French or Italian or of any other modern language, and for the same reason, although, in the case of the modern languages, even the dullest are reminded of it whenever they talk with a native and fail to make themselves understood. The importance of pronuncia- tion is shown by the fact that the improvement in the I30 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR study of Latin from this point of view has, in the last twenty years, brought to light at least one most important aspect of artistic prose which had been practically for- gotten since the time of the Humanists. I refer to the use of rhythm and the laws by which it was governed, more especially at the close of the oratorical period. But, after all, the importance of correct pronunciation does not need to be supported by an enumeration of its advantages. A teacher's position with regard to it" is governed by one of the simplest rules of Hfe. There is a right way, and a wrong way. If a man knows which is which, and acts at all, there is only one logical, only one safe and profitable choice for him to make. It is true, of course, that the exact quality of Latin accent is still a debatable question, though far less de- batable than it once was. It is also true that the quantity of some vowels is not determined, that the quantity of some others undergoes revision from time to time, that the pronunciation of some consonants is not certain. Professor Lindsay, for instance, has just cited further proofs to show that gn (as in ignominia) was probably pronounced somewhat as the same combination is pro- nounced in modern Italian. Everyone is aware of the fact that we have not yet solved all the problems of Latin pronunciation. It is possible that a few of them never will be settled beyond dispute. Surely, however, this is no reason for deploring the fact that we ever tried to teach the proper pronunciation of the language at all. Nevertheless, this very reason has just been urged by a well known Classical scholar. In reply, I content my- self with observing that if imperfect knowledge of the subject is a sufficient reason for deploring the study of THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 131 Latin pronunciation, we must deplore the acquisition of all learning which is progressive, in other words, of all learning worthy of the name. If we listened to such an argument, what, pray, would become of history, of as- tronomy, of chemistry, of physics, of biology, of geology, of all those branches of learning in which the theories of yesterday are continually revised, if not utterly de- molished, by the discoveries of to-day? A second objection put forward by the same scholar is to the effect that anything like a perfect command in practice is impossible. I thoroughly understand his feel- ings, and I sympathize with them. But we must not allow temporary discouragement, heart-breaking as it sometimes is, to obscure our vision. I know he would never have made this objection if he had paused to ob- serve that it was really tantamount to saying, "If we cannot realize our ideals, we had better give them up. It is better never to follow the right path at all than to follow it and yet fall short of the ultimate goal." If his objection is valid, we might as well resign our efforts to acquire the correct pronunciation of our own language, we might as well give up trying to lead a Christian life, in short, we might as well forsake everything which human frailty has looked up to and striven to attain. Not many years ago another well-known Classical scholar — one, too, who has made an unusually careful study of the subject — stated, in substance, his conviction that the correct pronunciation of Latin is so difficult to acquire that it might as well be given up. It is true that his idea of correct pronunciation is afifected by a theory of Latin accent not generally accepted in philological circles. But this in no way alters the fact that if we 132 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR followed such a principle to its logical consequence, our lives would yield us very little worth having. Effort is in the very essence of education. And to what are we led by such counsels of retreat and surrender? Moreover, is the pronunciation of Latin as difficult as his statement would lead us to suppose ? It is not likely that he would advise us to neglect the native pronunciation of French or German or Italian for any such reason. We all know, however, that a foreigner without an accent to betray him is indeed a rara avis. Some seem unable in prac- tice to reproduce the sounds of a foreign tongue. The majority, however, can come reasonably near it; but I should not expect a close approximation from one who studied a language, let us say, for seven years and neglected the pronunciation of it for the first six. The pronunciation of any foreign language is governed by rules, and it saves time to learn these rules. We all know, however, that in the long run it is really learned by listening to correct models until the ear itself becomes a competent guide, and by imitating them until one's tongue, as it were, may be trusted to reproduce them automatically. Have we any reason to suppose that the pronunciation of French or German could be acquired by methods which are only too prevalent in the teaching of Latin? How, then, can we say that the pronunciation of it is so difficult that it might as well be given up ? On the contrary, have we not the best reasons for asserting that if a boy of intelligence and tolerable industry begins with a competent teacher, the proper pronunciation of Latin, so far from being insurmountable, will naturally assume its proper place in his knowledge of the language? The responsibility, therefore, for Latin pronunciation THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 133 rests entirely with the teacher. The tendency to forget this point, or the failure to see it, which is indicated by the opinions I have quoted, is more serious than might appear at first sight. Indeed it is full of peril for the whole subject of the Classics. I happen to know that both of the men I have mentioned have always been unusually thorough and conscientious in practice. They are teachers of deserved reputation. I must believe, therefore, that they do not realize how joyously their precepts will be entertained by their semi-prepared and weak-kneed brethren, how soon similar views regard- ing other lines of intellectual effort will be encouraged to appear. Under any' circumstances the path of achieve- ment is toilsome enough. But we shall never find that path at all if we give ear to the Siren song which would lure us aside with the comfortable doctrine that this thing or that thing is so difficult that it might as well be given up. Educational problems, to say nothing of other problems, are not solved by resignation or compromise. They are solved, if they are solved at all, by thorough and competent teaching, not at one stage alone of a student's career, but all along the line from the ABC to the Ph.D., from the Primary School to the University. This is especially true of two aspects of Classical train- ing which have a most important bearing upon the sub- ject of this paper. These are translation and its com- panion-piece, its application and proof, prose-composi- tion. The man who has really mastered these two things has laid a foundation which is indispensable to genuine and fruitful scholarship in the Classics themselves. But this is not all. He has, at the same time, acquired a knowledge, an appreciation of his own language, such as no other training can give. 134 ^^^ CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR It goes without saying that the kind of translation which will produce these beneficent results is not the slip- shod type. We all know that this is deadly. Nor can we endure the so-called 'literal' translation which ap- pears so frequently in our matriculation examinations. If this caricature of both languages is taught, as it usually is taught, in good faith, it shows either a distrust of the examiner's scholarship or else a lamentable ignorance of the first principles of translation. Not less pernicious — indeed, more pernicious because it comes to so many in the guise of a virtue — is paraphrase, the besetting sin of our commentators. This vice shows a peculiar aptitude for ensnaring the ready-tongued but easy-going, and should never be allowed to stand for translation. That the Classics lose much and English gains nothing by this treatment, is the least we can say against it. But, of course, it is much easier to point out the faults than it is to define the virtues of translation. It is quite as important, however, to know what we should cultivate as to know what we must avoid. The ideal translation, I take it, is the perfect mirror of its original. It is a version which in content, form and style produces the same effect upon the English reader as the original pro- duced upon the native reader. No such translation will ever be seen in this sublunary sphere. Nevertheless, this and no other must be our standard, the goal of our efforts. " ' Nothing imperfect is the measure of any- thing,' says the Prince of Idealists." Everyone acknowledges that a translation must, of course, be idiomatic. But the veriest tyro soon discovers that idiom is not a matter of words and phrases alone. To cite one obvious and familiar example, he learns. THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 135 almost at the threshold of prose-conjposition, that in a Latin sentence the grouping of ideas follows a different principle, that the transitions between sentence and sen- tence are more clearly marked, that a Latin paragraph is, so to speak, more closely knit than is natural to idio- matic English. The distinction is, of course, elementary enough. Nevertheless, it illustrates the value of careful translation and thorough prose-composition, for without a knowledge of it English ears would entirely miss, for instance, the point of Caligula's famous observation that the style of Seneca was harena sine calce. Stylistically, too, as well as in content and ideas, a translation should reflect its original, and this really means the vices of the original quite as much as its virtues. From this point of view the Authorized Ver- sion enjoys the rare distinction of being so much better than the original — better, at all events, than the original Greek — that it is really not a good translation. The original Greek should have been something approaching the standard and the style of Herodotus. So, too, to cite another example, Ridley's version of Lucan is pleas- ant reading, and an excellent book in itself. But I get little idea from it of the frenzied rhetoric, the feverish unrest, the intense exaggeration of the Neronian age, all of which one feels so forcibly in every line of the original poem. On the other hand, the salient features of the greatness of Euripides are successfully concealed in the correct and conventional verses of Robert Potter. It is Arthur Way who for the first time has really brought home to English readers some idea of the variety, the flexibility, the passionate fervour, the intense human sympathy of the last of the great tragic poets of 136 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR Hellas. In a few rare instances Time, himself, takes a hand in the improvement of a translation. The touch of antique naivete in Herodotus is admirably mirrored for readers of French in the version of Amyot. But that which in the original was due to conscious art is due in the translation not to Amyot himself but to three cen- turies of growth in the French language. It is not for me, however, to discuss at length the merits and demerits of translation in this connection, although it is obvious that every teacher is bound to make himself acquainted with all the points of a good transla- tion. He will learn something from the numerous essays on this subject, something more from perusing such classics of translation as Munro's Lucretius, Jebb's Sophocles, Way's Euripides, Butcher and Lang's Homer, Conington's prose version of Vergil. The translation or imitation of one great poet or prose writer by another is always instructive. Our literature has been enriched in this way by many a golden phrase or felicitous turn. These and similar matters are all useful helps in the exercise and improvement of one's ability to translate. But after making himself acquainted in theory and by practice with all the points of a good translation, a teacher's only hope of impressing them upon his students is to be tireless in bringing them home in every way and from every point of view. His ideal of attainment must never be lowered ; he must demand its realization within the limits of possibility from those whom he instructs. Nor should be forget himself. Precept is illuminated by example, suggestion by illustration. Moreover, we must have this sort of a teacher and this sort of teaching from the beginning to the end of a student's career. I know THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 137 that such teachers are not easily found. It seems to be the prevailing impression that anybody can teach; and the natural consequence is that, little as they get, a great many teachers are over-paid. Only a few realize that great teachers are almost as rare as great scholars; still fewer learn that great scholars are as rare as great literary men. Nevertheless, it is certain that our teach- ers and our teaching can be improved. It follows, there- fore, that improvement is obligatory. Many despair, under existing conditions and in our present surroundings, of producing students who com- bine a tolerable pronunciation with some real and in- spiring mastery of translation and prose-composition. And I should be one of the first to sympathize with a feel- ing which has darkened many a day of my own experi- ence. The way of the teacher is hard. But, in teaching as in other things, the way of the transgressor is harder. Let us take courage then. These things have been done again and again. Therefore, they can be done. As to ways and means, much has been said which must appeal to everyone. Other views have been promulgated — and these are often very much in evidence — about which a reasonable difference of opinion may be allowed. In the long run, however, every man has to work out these problems for himself ; and it is best that he should. I can not refrain, however, from mentioning one detail in the way of method, not because it is new, but because it is not as generally adopted as it might be, and because my own experience has shown its efficacy and usefulness. The most sanguine of idealists would be forced to admit that, even under the most favorable conditions, mere oral translation in the class-room has its limita- 138 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR tions. Indeed, I believe that not a few of our troubles can be traced to the fact that we have allowed it to assume a greater burden than it can bear. If a student is allowed to translate unchecked, we might as well drop the subjects of Latin and Greek from our curriculum. If he is corrected only up to a certain point, the worst vices of translation grow apace, the real object of the work is defeated. If we correct him beyond that point, many of us run the danger of killing his interest in the subject. We take up so much time with details that we sacrifice two very important things. These are the con- tinuity of the subject and the mastery of enough text to give the student anything like an adequate and inspiring knowledge of the author. On that account an adjunct to the oral translation of the class-room, which, for my own part, I can not recommend too highly, is to require students to hand in at regular intervals a written transla- tion of some given passage, which should then be thor- oughly criticized and discussed. I am only too well aware that this is not a time-saving device. But I am not dealing here with time-saving devices. No one who has ever tried this exercise of written translation upon himself needs to be convinced of its value to every grade of scholarship from the youngest of students to the most learned of learned Thebans. I wish our teachers did more of it. Indeed, among the many good points made by Professor Rolfe in one of his recent articles should be reckoned his observation, with which I most heartily agree, that "If every editor of a Latin author would begin by writing a careful translation of him, we should, perhaps, have fewer text-books, but in those which we had the real difiiculties would less frequently be passed THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 139 over, in favor of superfluous and quasi-learned notes." If this exercise of written translation is conscientiously done under the influence of wise guidance and the spur of suggestion and inspiring criticism, it will not only force a student to examine, consider and weigh every resource of the English language at his command, but, better still, it will force him to extend that knowledge with all pos- sible rapidity. It constantly calls his attention to the real meaning of words, it makes him strive for accuracy and propriety in the expression of ideas, it leads him to con- sider correct idiomatic usage, to weigh and analyze the elements of style, the proprieties and improprieties of syntax, the rules of emphasis as dictated by the arrange- ment of words in a sentence, the sphere and limitations of figurative usage, and what-not. In short, he is obliged to examine, more or less thoroughly, according to his lights, every department of his own language, and that, too, in constant juxtaposition with an exemplar which is not only a model in itself, but has also had the closest and most manifold relations with the artistic develop- ment of his own tongue. "Translation," says James Russell Lowell — he is not thinking of ordinary oral translation — " compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a discrimination of sound, propriety, position and shade of meaning, that we . now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter as it should be set forth is not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and practice, but an affair of con- science as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best way, but that it is the 140 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR only way. Those who have tried it know too well how easy it is to grasp the verbal meaning of a sentence or of a word. That is the bird in the hand. The real mean- ing, the soul of it, that which makes it literature and not jargon, that is the bird in the bush which tantalizes and stimulates with the vanishing glimpses we catch of it as it flits from one to another lurking-place. It was these sly allurements and provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase, and made an original poet of him in the very act of translation." The first Lord Thring was fond of asserting that his elevation to the peerage was due to his knowledge of Greek. He meant that the immediate cause of his title, his incomparable skill as a parliamentary draughtsman, was really due to his schoolboy days at Shrewsbury, when he was regularly required to write translations of Thucydides, the great master of terse, concise expression, under the direction of Dr. Kennedy. The indispensable complement of this exercise of translation is prose-composition. When taught in the same thorough way, it is, for the same reasons, quite as important and valuable a training in both languages. Moreover, when properly taught and in company with the sort of translation I have described, prose-composi- tion loses much of its traditional tedium for intelligent students. No amount of training can make a boy creative unless the power of creation is in him. But as far as transla- tion and prose-composition are concerned, it is by the sort I have been trying to describe, and only by that sort, that a boy's mind is ripened and trained to receive and THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR HI interpret the message of the Classics, to realize and ap- preciate some part of their beauty and power, and to apply the lessons they have taught him to the use and development of his own tongue. It is undeniable that real training in the resources of language is far more successful than many have imagined in arousing a genuine interest in the subject. It en- genders respect for language itself as an art. Mean- while, the student has, necessarily, gained some knowl- edge through actual practice, and at first hand, of those laws by which the cultivation of language as an art must proceed. Respect for language as an art, practical knowledge of the laws by which the cultivation of a language as an art must proceed; these certainly are our most efficient weapons against the deterioration of contemporary speech, against the stylistic degeneration of contempor- ary literature. These weapons are forged and put in our hands, now as they always have been, by the Classics. But, again, I repeat it, if the Qassics are to fulfil this object, they must be well taught; indeed, they must be well taught if they are to be heard at all in the roar and bustle of this materialistic age, if they are to save them- selves from being knocked down and trampled into insen- sibility by that pushing, elbowing throng of rival inter- ests which absorb our modern life. What I have said in the preceding pages shows that, in common with many others, I feel that the integrity, the idiomatic flavor and power of our vernacular is in serious danger of permanent injury. I have failed, how- ever, to make myself understood, if I have given the impression that I consider the situation hopeless. On the 142 THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR contrary, I am the last one to despair of the State. Teachers have no right to despair. Indeed, in this country they have no real reason for despairing. No one who really knows the North Americans has failed to be impressed with their immense reserve-force, their amazing versatility and power of adaptation. It is emi- nently characteristic of them, as was noted by the recent Mosely Commission, that, one and all, they take a keen interest in everything pertaining to education. All the Americans I have ever met have opinions on the subject, and it is rare to find one who is not ready and willing to discuss them. Their enthusiasm for education some- times leads them astray. This is partly due to the fact that their characteristic admiration of a positive man is such that they not infrequently labor under the delusion that, because a man has positive views, he must, neces- sarily, know what he is talking about. Now, of all posi- tive people, one of the most positive is the person who is pushing some new educational fad. It is partly for this reason, perhaps, that we Americans have allowed so many educational heresies to be foisted upon our defence- less children. And the worst of it is, that the penalty for educational mistakes is paid by the next generation. But we are really willing, nay, anxious to learn. I doubt whether there is a country on earth where a really first-rate teacher will find so many bright faces in his class-room, so many intelligent, responsive minds eager to receive what he can impart and quick to understand and apply it. But whatever else a boy may be, I have yet to meet one who was either blind to class-room shams or tolerant of them. And if he knows that he is being improperly taught, he rarely fails to resent it. THE CLASSICS AND OUR VERNACULAR 143 It is for us, therefore, who are teachers, to recognize our responsibihty, and to improve our methods by every means within our power. The field is ours, the oppor- tunity is still within our grasp. But fields are not de- fended by ill-trained, indifferent soldiers ; opportunities can not be held by nerveless hands. THE FUTURE PLACE OF THE HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION* On the nth of November, 191 8, we witnessed the official termination of the most appalling war in all his- tory ; we are now facing a peace the possibilities of which are, if anything, more appalling. To see to it that such a war never occurs again is only one of a number of problems, which, if we ever solve them at all, can be solved only by men of extraordinary ability, character, and training; not only that, but the public behind those men must be more largely endowed with these same ad- vantages than ever before. Ability is inborn, character is to a certain extent in- herited. But both ability and character are directly and powerfully afifected by training. And training comes from without. Of course, no one imagines that the one and only instrument of training is the school. But apart from experience — which is overworked, and notoriously dear — it is the most efficient and powerful instrument we have. It would seem, therefore, that of all the prob- lems now before us, the most vitally important in the long run is the problem of education. What system of education can best equip the coming generation to meet and conquer the difficulties by which it is certain to be faced? What branches of study, for example, shall be ♦Address delivered before the Association of American Uni- versities, at Cambridge, Mass., December S, 1918. 144 THE HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 145 included in that system, for what purpose shall they be studied, how much proportionally, and in what way? The question is far from easy to answer. Be sure, however, that the moment it is asked a number of eager hands will go up in the class of what the " head-liner " is fond of terming " Eminent Educators." One assures us that we must give the public just what the public wants. We might reply that we have just seen an illustration of that principle in Germany. The German public got the education it wanted; then it got the war it wanted. And now — Another would abolish history ; the past, he tells us, is of no value to the present. Another — he has just joined the class — wants to abolish German. In other words, he would have us believe that the best protection against a powerful and resourceful foe is to know as little about him as possible. In short, every subject in the curriculum has a would- be assassin on its trail. If we listened to them all, educa- tion would cease to trouble by ceasing to be. Another has been assured by some " psychologaster " that the training and knowledge acquired in one line of study have no bearing on the training and knowledge to be acquired in any other line of study; the party-wall between them is air-tight, sound-proof, bomb-proof. He would, therefore, abandon all disciplinary studies and retain only those which have a direct, concrete, practical bearing on the student's proposed vocation in life. We need strong men to grapple with the problems before us ; for them Flexnerized education is as inappropriate as Fletcher ized food. Last of all and most dangerous of all — for he always 146 THE HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION has a huge following — is the man who honestly believes that some one particular branch of education, some one special field of mental activity, can arm us against most of the ills that flesh and spirit are heir to, and bring us as near the millennium as we can ever hope to be in this life. The fallacy of this idea has been demonstrated several times in the last two thousand years. The latest and most impressive demonstration was inaugurated on the 1st of August, 1914. On that day there appeared on the frontiers of higher civilization a mighty people, trained by forty-odd years of preparation to the highest degree of efficiency, equipped with every engine of destruction that science could devise, and united to a, man in an utterly hellish determination to conquer, pillage, and en- slave the world. One of the first things we realized was the astounding fact that even at this day a nation might possess every secret that science can wrest from an unwilling universe and yet remain as completely barbarous at heart as Ario- vistus himself ; that the most noticeable effect of German education was merely to enable its possessors to become more efficient in their barbarism. It behooves us, there- fore, to inquire into the kind of training to which that nation had been subjected. Now it is safe to say that for more than a generation the most obvious and striking characteristic of German education was that, apart from being highly organized and relentlessly thorough, it has been more exclusively scientific and technical than any system of education has ever been in any part of the world. Not content with its own proper domain, science and the scientific attitude had THk HUMANITIES IN UDUCATIO^ i^'f sought and found a " place in the sun " in practically every department of human activity. The Humanities undertook to save themselves by protective assimilation ; but the final result of the effort was that at the out- break of the war there was hardly a handful of classical scholars subject to the draft who could ever hope to command or deserve the recognition given to their illus- trious predecessors. Are we to conclude then that science and the mental attitude engendered by science not only make no appre- ciable headway against the dominant impulses of a savage, but, worse than that, that they can actually be enslaved, chained down to the one and only task of furnishing a cynically brutal materialism with the claws and teeth to mangle and devour everything in its way? If so, the cataclysm through which we have just passed is the most awful arraignment that any branch of educa- tion has ever received. As a matter of fact, this conclusion is not warranted. The arraignment, so far as it applies to education at all, is not of a system in which science has its place, but of a system in which science reigns supreme. Nor — and this is the important point — is this an indictment of any sys- tem except in so far as some one branch therein is so powerful that it has either exterminated all the rest or reduced them to vassalage. The branch cannot do duty for the tree, the part for the whole. If it does, the result is a mental and spiritual deformity that courts and meets disaster. It seems to me, therefore, that whatever the new system proves to be, we must see to it that more than one type of traiur ing is not only represented but adequately represented; 148 THE HUMANITIES W EDUCATION that its interpreters shall be highly trained, wise, and honorable scholars and men ; and last but far from least, that its message shall be its own message, delivered in its own way and primarily for its own sake — not in some other way, and not as a side-issue to something else. How many types are desirable, is not my concern here, although I do venture to say in passing that Ou polla alia poly is an old pedagogical maxim, the truth of which is not impaired by time. Reorganization in the coming hours of stress may decree that some industries in the educational field are unessential and had best be retired to private life. But whatever else is done, there are at least two types which no effective and adequate system can afford to curtail, much less, to abolish. One of these is Science, in its larger sense; the other is Language, also in its larger sense — the practical medium of communication of thought between man and man, and literature, which comprises those artistic master- pieces which poets, philosophers, historians, all the great thinkers and masters of form, have bequeathed to posterity. No reasonable man, then, as it seems to me, will deny the importance of acquiring as deep and thorough a knowledge of language and literature as possible. If so, the supreme value of a real knowledge of the Humani- ties is for at least three reasons beyond argument. The first is that in practically every department of creative literature the primacy of the masterpieces be- queathed by Greece and Rome cannot be successfully challenged. Is it worth while to study literary master- pieces? If so, shall we neglect the greatest of them, or, worse than that, shall we deliberately shut the door to THE HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 149 them in the face of students who might otherwise learn to know and appreciate them? The second is derived from the fact that the entire civilization of the Occident in practically every depart- ment is little else than the preservation and development of the legacy left us by Greece and Rom6. The im- portance of the Humanities is more than aesthetic; it is also genetic and historical. The language and literature of Greece and Rome, both in form and content, have dictated and permeated all the languages and literatures of the Western World. To such an extent is this the case, that a knowledge of the Humanities is the universal solvent of most of the difficulties which one would other- wise encounter in comprehending the great classics of the last three centuries. Indeed, without such a back- ground the tradition of those classics will probably cease to be a living force. The third is the value of studying the classical lan- guages merely as such. Nothing so classifies and dis- closes the syntactical and logical relations of language itself, or so clarifies one's conceptions of language as an art, as a thorough grounding in Greek and Latin. I pass over the fact that for the classical scholar and for him alone a good share of the enormous technical vocab- ulary now in use and constantly increasing is compre- hensible at a glance. I might also elaborate on the fact that, other things being equal, a good knowledge of Latin ought to enable its possessor to acquire French, Italian, and Spanish in the same length of time that would otherwise be necessary to acquire French, Italian or Spanish alone. But I leave this and several other points that might be 150 Tun HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION mentioned, and content myself with considering one purely practical way in which the study of Greek or Latin is at once a complement of and a check on the training supplied by technical and scientific courses. The function of science is to consider the objective phenomena in the domain of science and to register the results. It is interested in the discovery and succinct statement of laws and formulas. This eminent virtue furnishes, as is usually the case, an open door to its eminent vice. Scientists and technical experts deal with formulas until in many cases, as my colleague Professor Tilden puts it, they are " hypnotized by formulas." They deal with figures and exact statements so exclusively that they grow to believe that in any given thing figures and exact statements are the last word ; that the whole truth is presented by figures, because they are detailed, and recorded in statements, because they are exact. And if we have the whole truth so stated, why question it any further? The statement itself is final and all sufficient. Now as a matter of fact there are very few things in the world of action or in the world of thought about which either figures or exact statements can be taken at their face value. Nothing is so deadly to a man as to allow himself to be hypnotized by formulas. The whole German nation from the Kaiser down had hypno- tized themselves with a few formulas. Apparently they are still appealing to them, even now. A formula is a working hypothesis ; it is not neces- sarily the absolute truth, it is not necessarily the truth at all. The study of language, especially of Latin and Greek, is peculiarly fitted to keep a man's mind flexible, to keep him alive to the fact that formulas are seldom THE HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 151 final; that on the contrary they are for the most part merely working hypotheses drawn from more or less imperfect evidence. The student learns that there are some things about language which are fixed ; and that is a most useful lesson. On the other hand, he also learns that within certain limits such a thing as fixity does not exist. This characteristic aspect of the study of lan- guage corrects the tendency to formalize. Formalizing is a labor-saving device ; and, as such, it is a besetting sin of the human mind. The majority of men put whatever it has required an effort to think of into a formula, lay it away, and from that time on whenever the subject comes up again they consult the formula instead of the subject. By the time they reach forty they have collected enough formulas to live on; and this is the chief reason why so many men practically cease to do any real thinking after that age. I content myself with this one illustration of the value of the unique mental discipline supplied by Latin and Greek. The fact is, too, that every specialist needs a mental background ; otherwise the picture he gets of life gives him no idea of the proportion of things. I once saw a snapshot containing three or four lengths of rail fence, through and about which was coiled a fearsome creature that looked like a sea-serpent, and was appar- ently about 150 feet long. There was no background, nothing else in the picture. It turned out upon inquiry that the rail fence was made of match stems, and that the sea-serpent was merely a peaceful and innocent worm. Exemplum doceat. The mental discipline afforded by the Humanities is enough in itself to warrant their retention in any scheme 152 THE HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION of liberal education. But, after all, mental discipline is an incidental result, not the essential reason for studying these things. I admire mental discipline; and as a student of Latin and Greek I have not been able alto- gether to escape from mental discipline. But I should no more think of studying those languages purely for mental discipline than of marrying a wife purely for character-building and the development of Stoic fortitude. So history, law, politics, art, economics, philosophy, the technical arts — every department of human endeavor goes back to Greece and Rome ; and no man now or in the future will ever be so gifted that he can afiford to ignore what the great thinkers of those days accomplished in his own line. But all these again are incidental results, not essential reasons for studying the Humanities. The purpose of this study is not primarily to furnish any other department with material for investigation. The real message of the Humanities, the message which gives them, and always will give them, their abid- ing value to posterity is spiritual and aesthetic. It is the message of those great masterpieces in which the greatest geniuses of the world have presented what they have to say in matchless and imperishable form. This, I repeat, is the real message ; and the more clearly and completely an instructor can interpret that message to his students, the more certain it is that the Humanities will continue to exert in the future all that vital and beneficent influence which is their due. History, syntax, archaeology, anything that helps to make us familiar with the language and life of a period at once so remote and so important as was classical an- THE HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 153 tiquity, is not only desirable but necessary. But for an undergraduate they should all be ancillary to the one object of interpreting and vitalizing the spiritual and aesthetic message of our masterpieces. Of course, a professor has to engage in all kinds of lengthy and minute investigations; but, so far as his undergraduate students are concerned, only for the purpose of increas- ing his value as an interpreter of that message. To use a masterpiece in the class-room merely as a basis for dis- quisitions on syntax or archaeology or sources or what- not, is to destroy or obscure its real and abiding value. What would become of Hamlet or Paradise Lost as living forces in the world, if we taught them as many have been teaching the Agamemnon or the Aeneid? Many preachers warn us — especially vocational ex- perts and other advocates of a single-type education — that the race of life is too swift and too strenuous to allow of any dawdling. Those who pause by the way- side, even to pick up golden apples, are likely, as was Atalanta, to be out-distanced in the race. Well, it is not recorded that Atalanta was disappointed in her apples; and nothing in her subsequent history leads us to suppose that she ever regretted sacrificing for Milanion either her record as a long-distance runner or her reputation as a virgin huntress. As a matter of fact, if we followed the advice of these vocational experts, . we should be making exactly the same mistake that the Germans did. Like some poor bewildered horse, shall we run back into the burning barn from which we have just barely escaped with our lives ? The reference to dawdling, and especially to Atalanta, 154 ^^^ HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION brings me to my final point. At all times, above all in the coming years, the problem of leisure is almost as appalling as the problem of work. It is only the occa- sional genius like Edison who can find all his pleasure, all his interest, all his development, in his own particular task. Most of us need something else. What is better fitted to supply that need than the Humanities? A man trained in the Humanities can even dawdle to advantage. I close with a confession and a hope. There was a time perhaps when I should have hesitated to make the one or entertain the other. But not since this war began. In my time I have stopped more than once to pick up a golden apple by life's highway. Sometimes the golden apple proved to be unsatisfactory. But not often. And even if I fail to reach the goal for which I set out in the morning of life, when the wild roses by the wayside still sparkled with dew, I trust that, after all, like Atalanta, I shall have won something infinitely better. SOME BOYHOOD REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN* The contour and physical characteristics of the State of Vermont are largely determined by the Green Moun- tains, which, in the form of a Y, appropriate most of the space available, and finally fade out in the Berkshire Hills. In her grim moods she is awesome, but on the whole she has more of the grace and friendliness of youth about her than her elder sister across the Con- necticut. To be sure, her features are seamed and puck- ered to a remarkable degree — perhaps because she has had to face the blasts of rude Boreas for so large a part of her existence. But when the spring comes, as it finally does, that which we took for a scowl melts into a broad rippling smile, the charm of which can be fully appreciated only by those who have lived in the light of it. Speaking in general, the whole country is a succession of hills and dales of all shapes and sizes. It is as pictur- esque as it can be made by an infinite variety of forest and plain, of green fields and sunny hillsides, of steep, gloomy defiles and rugged glens, of clear woodland brooks that dance and gurgle as they follow their devious ways. Over all is a sky that in summer rivals that of Italy. And that sky looks down upon a scene that a Vergil or a Theocritus would have loved and sung. Numberless country roads connect the many villages * Printed in The Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine, 1917. I.';.'! 156 REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN which, at short distances apart, are tucked away in various nooks and corners all over the State. Such is the influence of early association, that when I picture that wonderful youth in the fairy tale who goes forth to seek his fortune, I still think of him as following one of those familiar country roads as it winds hither and thither, up hill and down, now resting at a cool spring, under a great beech or sugar-maple, now squeezing around a jutting cliff which all but shoulders it into the gorge on the other hand, whence comes faintly up through the tree-tops the sound of echoing waters, now toiling up over the " thankee-moms " to the top of the next rise. Here, perhaps, it stops a moment to view the steeples of the next village, plunges headlong into the valley below, crosses a talkative brook that runs dimpling on, flecked with sunshine, then finally, widening and straightening, it proceeds decorously between rows of elms or maples into the Village Street, past the "hotel," the " store," the old houses with their cool, green lawns, and so out and on again as before. Whichever way you turn are mountains, and always wooded to their summits. The scarred and rugged majesty of the Titans of the Alps fills one with awe. They are like so many gods with their heads in the clouds, taking no keep of the mites at their feet. But these shaggy, good-natured monsters are kindly and human. They smile down upon their children. Apart from the small mercantile and professional classes in the various towns, the life among these hills and dales is perhaps more distinctly pastoral than in any other part of the Union. Signs of it are constantly ap- pearing along the country roads — in the "creameries," REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 157 in the array of barns of all degrees, but especially in the cattle everywhere in evidence. There are cattle grazing in the distance, cows that stand and gaze at you over the wall as you pass, with that entire absence of emotion of which only a cow is capable, calves that canter along fitfully inside their fence, following you until the limit of their field is reached. To the same category belong the horses, for which the State has long been noted. The average Vermonter can " talk horse " with you for hours at a time. Even in these degenerate days of the motor car, he generally owns a good horse, and, in driving about the country, it is rare to meet a man who does not glance at you and then at your horse's feet, in that indescribable way peculiar to those who know all about a good horse when they see it. The inspection, though brief and perhaps unconscious, is always to a certain extent dis- concerting. If you are not yourself a past master in the intricacies of a horse-trade, you at once assume a depre- catory attitude of defense and explanation. The population is small. In character and habits it is in many ways surprisingly like that Italian population of small land-owners in the days of Republican Rome. In- deed, in a general way, there is no more characteristic Vermonter in ancient literature than Cato the Elder. The people are, of course, conservative, tenacious of their traditions and respecters of them. As a rule, there is a keen sense of the ludicrous, coupled with a faculty of instant repartee — doubtless fostered by the unremitting banter that goes on from morning till night in any and all of these small towns and is partly responsible for a certain piquancy of expression, an oddity of rhetorical figure, as unexpected as it is amusingly appropriate. At 158 REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN the same time there often appears in this temperament a distinct tendency to the imaginative, and even the mystic, as one might expect of men who Hve a Hfe of comparative solitude in the solemn shadow of those eternal hills, whose forests and streams are hardly differ- ent from what they were in the days of Columbus. Of all the traits of Memory, none is more lovable than that she insists upon softening and glorifying the reced- ing vista of our past, resting, like the sunset, with pecu- liar radiance upon those far-off hills that stand between us and the Dreamland of unremembered childhood. Hence it is, perhaps, that the old-world beauty of certain idyls of Theocritus always brings back to me the scenes and impressions of a certain Vermont town, as it used to be in my boyhood days. At that time our village num- bered a little less than ten thousand inhabitants, and I have not yet forgotten with what pride we used to affirm that it was the largest place in the State. It stands in the valley of Otter Creek, which flows northward to Lake Champlain. At the west and south are the Green Moun- tains. A break through the one leads to "York State," a pass over the other to the valley of the Connecticut. Toward the north are the hills that block the way to Canada, and, far down toward the south, the blue peaks that shut us off from Massachusetts. We lived upon " Main Street," — that thoroughfare which is found in nearly every New England village, and, as in our case, is usually the oldest, and involves much of the traditional lore of the place. It runs directly north and south for several miles, and is a portion of the old military road carried through the forest from Boston to Montreal in 1759- REMINISCENCES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 159 Before the day of railways it was the regular stage route between those two cities. In tlie midst of the street once stood the old stockade, the original nucleus of the place. The spring that supplied it with water is now twelve or fifteen feet below the surface. On the one hand of it was the " Franklin Hotel," the Court- house, and two or three old stores, all burned down in my earliest childhood, and on the other the old Village Green, now a park. Here was where the " June trainings " used to be held, and here, in the month of February, 1814, on a day when the thermometer was something like 40° below zero, occurred the last public whipping in the State — -thirty-nine lashes upon the bare back, "well laid on," as the old writ grimly expressed it. The entire pro- gramme of this celebration was once given me by one who had been present and remembered all the particulars. The new town was down the hill, and had grown up since the coming of the railroad. Main Street is fully 300 feet wide, flanked on either side by rows of elms or maples, varied now and then by the locusts and poplars which were so fashionable in the landscape gardening of a century ago. Many of the houses, surrounded by great trees and sloping lawns, belong to the same period. In my boyhood our street still bore witness to the Revolution, and still echoed faintly with memories of it. This was partly due to the natural conservatism of the Vermonters, but largely to the advanced age of several of my neighbors. Every Vermont town seems to possess a goodly proportion of people of the most unusual age. Whether this is due to the preservative qualities of the climate or to the fact that those who can survive the l6o REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN Vermont weather beyond a certain period have every right to Hve as long as they please, I shall not attempt to decide. At any rate, when I was about twelve years old, I remember calculating that there were thirteen people on our street, within a distance of three miles, whose combined ages amounted to over eleven hundred years. It is a great pity that so many of those years were con- temporaneous. Otherwise I might have listened to some personal recollections of the days of Charlemagne and Alfred the Great. The last of the thirteen died in 1895. While in one sense " crabbed Age and Youth cannot live together," it is certainly true that, in others, nothing comes so near extreme youth, as extreme age. I know that some of the pleasantest memories of my small-boy days are of those same old people. Several of them lived on my way to school, and I counted them all as my good friends. The first and best was Madam Temple. She was seventy-five when I first remember her, and she lived to be more than ninety. Once she showed me a picture of herself painted in 181 6. It was the face of a beau- tiful woman, and, indeed, when I knew her, the burden of her many years rested upon her like the ermine of royalty. I use the word ' royalty ' advisedly, for both in disposition and presence she was distinctly imperial. No one ever dreamed of disputing the final authority of her rescripts. There was something in her erect carriage, which she kept to the last, in the proud poise of her head and the gleam of her steel-gray eyes (she never wore glasses) that to a small boy was awesome. Yet at the same time he was completely won by her, for though stern and uncompromising as the Draconian Code, she was the essence of kindliness and the impersonation of REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN i6l that punctilious, old-world courtesy which, next to the mature man or woman of the world, only the small boy can always be depended on to understand and appreciate. Her husband, who was several years older than her- self, had been a man of wealth and position, and she had had a gay youth. But at his death, which occurred early in the century, it was discovered that little was left for her outside of the old place. Here, for nearly sixty years, she lived a life of Signified retirement, and it was eminently characteristic of her that, during all that time, she probably never uttered a syllable referring to those days when the battle of Waterloo was amongst the latest foreign news. Her religious, social, and household duties — in fact, everything that she did — rested upon rules of procedure as invariable as the famous code of the Medes and Per- sians. She was the first person, as I well recollect, whom I ever had the honor of " seeing home," and it was some time before I ventured to take charge of anyone of less settled habits. At certain intervals she was in the habit of taking tea at our house. On such occasions she always made her appearance with one of those old- fashioned, rectangular tin lanterns with a peaked top such as Dogberry uses. There were no street lamps then in our part of the town. At exactly nine o'clock — and I am not at all sure that anything short of the Trump of Judgment would have altered the hour — the lantern was lighted, and I acted as her escort home. My conscious- ness of manly importance on those occasions was perhaps keener than it has ever been since, although, even then, it was doubtless affected by the certain knowledge that when I returned I should be without the lantern. l62 REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN As a special favor, I was sometimes allowed to play on her grounds; but within the bounds of decorum, and without companions. Over half-a-century of experience with small boys had taught Madam Temple the strategic importance of detaching the forces of the enemy. There were a great many fine old trees on her place, but as I well remember, my favorite was a horse-chestnut that stood by the walk. I have often observed that a boy's favorite trees are chosen from a strictly utilitarian point of view, and may be divided, though the division is by no means exclusive, into two classes : those which he can climb — an extremely large number — and those which bear something. Whether that something can be utilized or not, is a matter of minor importance. Horse-chest- nuts, for example, are beautiful, but even for a small boy, they are eminently useless. To be sure, we used to pierce them and attach a short string, the object being to toss them in the air. But, as a missile, this contrivance was justly despised — especially in a country where green apples are plentiful and a sharp stick can be found any- where within ten rods. Still, we used to gather them. Some years ago I came across a small boy doing the same thing. Thinking that perhaps the boys had discovered since my day some new and useful purpose for these nuts, I inquired with some interest what he intended to do with them. My mind was considerably relieved to find that the small boy is the same as he has always been. He stood silent a few moments, evidently in deep thought ; then, shifting uneasily to the other foot, " I dunno — I'm just a-gettin' 'em." So it is with all us col- lectors. Whether the object of the collection is stamps, coins, books, pictures, fame, or — horse-chestnuts, perhaps REMINISCENCES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 163 the keenest pleasure after all, in the words of this uncon- scious young philosopher, lies in "just a-gettin' 'em." Speaking of collecting stamps reminds me that that par- ticular distemper struck our town soon after the Franco- Prussian War. I had a severe attack of it, further ag- gravated by Madam Temple herself, whose son was an admiral in the Navy and wrote her weekly letters from all sorts of interesting foreign ports. The stamps all fell to me. Every Friday afternoon as I came home from school I usually found her waiting at her front gate, if it was not too cold. I never come across a stamp of Victor Emanuel or of the old French Republic with- out seeing once more in the autumn sunlight the lace cap and the erect, martial figure of my old friend, who had been a beauty in the days when Napoleon was still a name to conjure with. An equally picturesque place, on the other side of the street a little further down, was the home of Madam Williams. She was some years older than her particular friend. Madam Temple, but she died at the compara- tively early age of eighty-five. She was nearly, if not quite, six feet in height. I can still hear the majestic swish of her black silks as she moved about. She was very fond of flowers, and next to the street she had a large garden which was filled with all sorts of old- fashioned roses, pinks, hollyhocks, pansies, syringas, and, especially, the greatest profusion of lilacs. To this day, whenever I see the lilacs in bloom, the picture of Madam Williams taking her favorite walk in that old garden always comes back to me. Usually, when I caught sight of her there, I took care to move along in close proximity to the fence. I was fond of her, but I never should have 1 64 REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN thought of addressing her first. However, my some- what sidhng style of locomotion generally succeeded in attracting attention. I was then asked after my health — my health — and that of my parents, all in the softest tones, and with as much courtesy as though I had been the Prince Regent, instead of being a small boy, too short to look over the pickets. The interview usually closed with the presentation of a bunch of flowers, which I was to "take home to my mother." Further down the street was Captain Lowe. He was a veteran of 1812, and had followed the seas in his youth. He was nearly six-feet-four, straight as a cor- poral, and walked along with a measured tread that seemed to keep time to the drumbeats of memory. At one period my liveliest interest in him was due to the fact that he had visited St. Helena while Napoleon was there. It is a thousand pities that I cannot immortalize this number of the Alumni Magazine by recounting in it what must be the only personal memory of Napoleon as yet unpublished. But the truth must be told. After learning from Mr. Jacob Abbott a great deal that Napoleon was not — as I chanced to do at an early age — I rushed off to Captain Lowe, to hold an interview with him on the subject of his personal recollections. They were not altogether satisfactory. There was an introduction of indefinite length on the subject of sea- faring sixty years before. After it had become con- nected with this particular voyage, the fact was finally disclosed that Captain Lowe had once stopped at St. Helena for the purpose of procuring fresh water and potatoes. The story then always proceeded to describe in detail the loading of said water and potatoes, but by REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 165 dint of questioning I usually elicited the brief statement that he did see Napoleon walking in the distance, but that he was too busy about the potatoes to notice how the great man looked ; moreover, an American was not allowed to approach him. "And sir," he would always say in a tone of resentment, winding up his peroration with a resounding thwack of his stick upon the floor, "those potatoes were execrable. Yes, sir, more than half of them had to be thrown overboard." It is not surprising, perhaps, that one of my most vivid recollections of earliest school days — ^besides the fights that had to be attended to from time to time — should be the relief which we all felt whenever that low growling, which always seems to accompany the efforts of the young mind to acquire knowledge, was interrupted by the teacher's command to chant in concert the multi- plication table or the capitals of the States. This was done every morning and afternoon, and our principal source of pleasure in the ceremony was probably derived from the fact that we could exercise our lungs. In spite, however, of these mild forms of entertainment, we all justly felt, and at times with some resentment, that school, though very well in its place, was a decided inter- ruption to those more important duties with which our lives from daylight to dark were filled: such, for in- stance, as playing " Hare-away," " Circus," " Red In- dian," " Pirate King," and a thousand others, not to men- tion the chief occupation of summer, " going swimming," and, in winter, the skating and " sliding down hill." We knew the word "coasting," but spurned it as an affecta- tion of speech neither to be countenanced nor en- couraged. l66 REMINISCENCES OF A COUNTRY TOWN But of all the joys that came with the circling year there was nothing that could for an instant be compared with the halcyon days of the long vacation. This began in the height of midsummer, when the purple haze on the hills deepens into black at their bases, when the deep green of the fields is now and then blotted by the shadow of a cloud sailing by above, or is rippled by a passing breeze, when the hot hillside is fragrant of pennyroyal, and the breathless stillness of the summer noon is broken only by the occasional shrilling of a locust or the joyous melody of a bobolink swinging on a thistle top. To a small boy, a two-months vacation seems practically end- less. But, somehow, it does come to an end. So the seasons roll around, the years slip by, the changes that they bring are all adopted so gradually that we are startled when perhaps some trivial incident opens our eyes to the fact that the old town has already taken on the airs of a city, that the old faces we loved have, some- how, all slipped away, and with them much that they represented; in short, that the book of boyhood is finished, and the second volume of life begun. ORIGINAL VERSE AND TRANSLATIONS Autumn Sunshine Summer lies dead. In tattered brown and gold The trees are bowing o'er their lovely fere, And every leaf they drop upon the mould Falls like an offering cast upon his bier ; A solemn stillness rests upon the wold, The world is hushed — as though it paused to hear The fitful breeze that hovers overhead Sighing a requiem for the lovely dead. Summer lies dead. But see the azure skies ; What sunshine fills the bright pellucid air. What strange unearthly radiance glorifies His poor remains ! Methinks a light so rare Must be some part of that which mortal eyes Have hoped to see — that light not here but there, That other sunshine which, as Vergil guessed. Forever clothes Elysium the blest. The Old Age of Odysseus The sun was sinking in a purple haze. The waves broke softly on the strand. The lonely watcher turned a wistful gaze Far out beyond, as if to other days Of bold emprise by sea and land. My Ithacan, and what a past is there Beyond that far horizon line, Of joy and sorrow, of deeds to do and dare! Dost dream again of Helen passing fair, And that old fight by Troy divine? 169 170 ORIGINAL VERSE Alas, my doughty champion of yore, Those eyes of yours are growing dim, Your bark will ride the stormy seas no more, You stand alone upon your rock-girt shore. Famous and wise — but gray and grim. The wife you loved so well long long ago. The warring hosts your youth has known. Hero or weakling, friend or bitter foe. All save the Gods and you have gone below — And soon the Gods will be alone. > Those dusky Halls of Death are drear and cold. You know full well what shapes are there ! Do you remember? — still the tale is told — There was a Goddess once in days of old, A Goddess, wise and passing fair. And she was fond as any girl might be, And you, old friend, were in your prime. On that fair island in the summer sea She proffered youth and immortality And all her heart for endless time. You would not yield, she could not win you then By any arts that she might use. But you were young and strong, a man of men, Not old and worn. If now she sued again, Odysseus, would you still refuse? The Hostess Vergil's(?) Copa 'Twas at a smoke-stained tavern, and she, the hostess there- A wine-flushed Syrian damsel, a turban on her hair — Beat out a husky tempo from reeds in either hand. TRANSLATIONS 1 71 And danced — the dainty wanton — an Ionian saraband. " 'Tis hot," she sang, " and dusty; nay, travellers, whither bound? Bide here and tip a beaker — till all the world goes round ; Bide here and have for asking wine-pitchers, music, flowers, Green pergolas, fair gardens, cool coverts, leafy bowers. In our Arcadian grotto we have someone to play On Pan-pipes, shepherd fashion, sweet music all the day. We broached a cask but lately; our busy little stream Will gurgle softly near you the while you drink and dream. Chaplets of yellow violets a-plenty you shall find. And glorious crimson roses in garlands intertwined ; And baskets heaped with lilies the water nymph shall bring — White lihes that this morning were mirrored in her spring. Here's cheese new pressed in rushes for everyone who comes. And, lo, Pomona sends us her choicest golden plums. Red mulberries await you, late purple grapes withal. Dark melons cased in rushes against the garden wall, Brown chestnuts, ruddy apples. Divinities bide here. Fair Ceres, Cupid, Bacchus, those gods of all good cheer, Priapus too — quite harmless, though terrible to see — Our little hardwood warden with scythe of trusty tree. Ho, friar with the donkey, turn in and be our guest ! Your donkey — Vesta's darling — is weary; let him rest. In every tree the locusts their shrilling still renew, And cool beneath the brambles the lizard lies perdu. So test our summer-tankards, deep draughts for thirsty men ; Then fill our crystal goblets, and souse yourself again. Come, handsome boy, you're weary ! 'Twere best for you to twine Your heavy head with roses and rest beneath our vine, Where dainty arms expect you and fragrant lips invite ; Oh, hang the strait-laced model that plays the anchorite! Sweet garlands for cold ashes why should you care to save? Or would you rather keep them to lay upon your grave? Nay, drink and shake the dice-box. Tomorrow's care begone ! Death plucks your sleeve and whispers : ' Live now, I come anon.' "