[1] The grounds for this pronunciation will be found best stated in
Postgate, _How to pronounce Latin_ (1907), Arnold and Conway, _The
Restored Pronunciation of Greek and Latin_ (4th ed., Cambridge,
1908); and in the grammars enumerated in § 28 above, especially the
preface to vol. i. of _Roby's Grammar_. The chief points about _c_
may be briefly given as a specimen of the kind of evidence. (1) In
some words the letter following c varies in a manner which makes it
impossible to believe that the pronunciation of the _c_ depended upon
this, e.g. _decumus_ and _decimus_, _dic_ from Plaut. _dice_; (2) if
_c_ was pronounced before _e_ and _i_ otherwise than before _a_, _o_
and _u_, it is hard to see why _k_ should not have been retained for
the latter use; (3) no ancient writer gives any hint of a varying
pronunciation of _c_; (4) a Greek [kappa] is always transliterated by
_c_, and _c_ by [kappa]; (5) Latin words containing _c_ borrowed by
Gothic and early High German are always spelt with _k_; (6) the
varying pronunciations of _ce_, _ci_ in the Romance languages are
inexplicable except as derived independently from an original _ke_,
_ki_.
[2] The inscription was first published by Helbig and Dümmler in
_Mittheilungen des deutschen archaol. Inst. Rom._ ii. 40; since in
_C.I.L._ xiv. 4123 and Conway, _Italic Dial._ 280, where other
references will be found.
[3] This inscription was first published by Dressel, _Annali dell'
Inst. Archeol. Romano_ (1880), p. 158, and since then by a multitude
of commentators. The view of the inscription as a curse, translating
a Greek cursing-formula, which has been generally adopted, was first
put forward by R. S. Conway in the _American Journal of Philology_,
x. (1889), 453; see further his commentary _Italic Dialects_, p. 329,
and since then G. Hempl, _Trans. Amer. Philol. Assoc._ xxxiii.
(1902), 150, whose interpretation of _iouesat = iurat_ and _Opetoi
Tesiai_ has been here adopted, and who gives other references.
[4] The most important writings upon it are those of Domenico
Comparetti, _Iscriz. arcaica del Foro Romano_ (Florence-Rome, 1900);
Hülsen, _Berl. philolog. Wochenschrift_ (1899), No. 40; and
Thurneysen, _Rheinisches Museum_ (Neue Folge), iii. 2. Prof. G.
Tropea gives a _Cronaca della discussione_ in a series of very useful
articles in the _Rivista di storia antica_ (Messina, 1900 and 1901).
Skutsch's article already cited puts the trustworthy results in an
exceedingly brief compass.
[5] For further information see special articles on these authors,
and LATIN LITERATURE.
[6] Cicero also refers to certain _scripta dulcissima_ of the son of
Scipio Africanus Maior, which must have possessed some merits of
style.
[7] The study of the rhythm of the _Clausulae_, i.e. of the last
dozen (or half-dozen) syllables of a period in different Latin
authors, has been remarkably developed in the last three years, and
is of the highest importance for the criticism of Latin prose. It is
only possible to refer to Th. Zielinski's _Das Clauselgesetz in
Cicero's Reden_ (St. Petersburg, 1904), reviewed by A. C. Clark in
_Classical Review_, 1905, p. 164, and to F. Skutsch's important
comments in Vollmöller's _Jahresberichten über die Fortschritte der
romanischen Philologie_ (1905) and _Glotta_ (i. 1908, esp. p. 413),
also to A. C. Clark's _Fontes Prosae Numerosae_ (Oxford, 1909), _The
Cursus in Mediaeval and Vulgar Latin_ (ibid. 1910), and article
CICERO.
LATIN LITERATURE. The germs of an indigenous literature had existed at
an early period in Rome and in the country districts of Italy, and they
have an importance as indicating natural wants in the Italian race,
which were ultimately satisfied by regular literary forms. The art of
writing was first employed in the service of the state and of religion
for books of ritual, treaties with other states, the laws of the Twelve
Tables and the like. An approach to literature was made in the _Annales
Maximi_, records of private families, funeral orations and inscriptions
on busts and tombs such as those of the Scipios in the Appian Way. In
the satisfaction they afforded to the commemorative and patriotic
instincts they anticipated an office afterwards performed by the
national epics and the works of regular historians. A still nearer
approach to literature was probably made in oratory, as we learn from
Cicero that the famous speech delivered by Appius Claudius Caecus
against concluding peace with Pyrrhus (280 B.C.) was extant in his time.
Appius also published a collection of moral maxims and reflections in
verse. No other name associated with any form of literature belonging to
the pre-literary age has been preserved by tradition.
But it was rather in the chants and litanies of the ancient religion,
such as those of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales, and the dirges for
the dead (_neniae_), and in certain extemporaneous effusions, that some
germs of a native poetry might have been detected; and finally in the
use of Saturnian verse, a metre of pure native origin, which by its
rapid and lively movement gave expression to the vivacity and quick
apprehension of the Italian race. This metre was employed in ritual
hymns, which seem to have assumed definite shapes out of the
exclamations of a primitive priesthood engaged in a rude ceremonial
dance. It was also used by a class of bards or itinerant soothsayers
known by the name of _vates_, of whom the most famous was one Marcius,
and in the "Fescennine verses," as sung at harvest-homes and weddings,
which gave expression to the coarse gaiety of the people and to their
strong tendency to personal raillery and satiric comment. The metre was
also employed in commemorative poems, accompanied with music, which were
sung at funeral banquets in celebration of the exploits and virtues of
distinguished men. These had their origin in the same impulse which
ultimately found its full gratification in Roman history, Roman epic
poetry, and that form of Roman oratory known as _laudationes_, and in
some of the _Odes_ of Horace. The latest and probably the most important
of these rude and inchoate forms was that of dramatic _saturae_
(medleys), put together without any regular plot and consisting
apparently of contests of wit and satiric invective, and perhaps of
comments on current events, accompanied with music (Livy vii. 2). These
have a real bearing on the subsequent development of Latin literature.
They prepared the mind of the people for the reception of regular
comedy. They may have contributed to the formation of the style of
comedy which appears at the very outset much more mature than that of
serious poetry, tragic or epic. They gave the name and some of the
characteristics to that special literary product of the Roman soil, the
_satura_, addressed to readers, not to spectators, which ultimately was
developed into pure poetic satire in Lucilius, Horace, Persius and
Juvenal, into the prose and verse miscellany of Varro, and into
something approaching the prose novel in Petronius.
_First Period: from 240 to about 80 B.C._
Livius Andronicus.
The historical event which brought about the greatest change in the
intellectual condition of the Romans, and thereby exercised a decisive
influence on the whole course of human culture, was the capture of
Tarentum in 272. After the capture many Greek slaves were brought to
Rome, and among them the young Livius Andronicus (c. 284-204), who was
employed in teaching Greek in the family of his master, a member of the
Livian gens. From that time to learn Greek became a regular part of the
education of a Roman noble. The capture of Tarentum was followed by the
complete Romanizing of all southern Italy. Soon after came the first
Punic war, the principal scene of which was Sicily, where, from common
hostility to the Carthaginian, Greek and Roman were brought into
friendly relations, and the Roman armies must have become familiar with
the spectacles and performances of the Greek theatre. In the year after
the war (240), when the armies had returned and the people were at
leisure to enjoy the fruits of victory, Livius Andronicus substituted at
one of the public festivals a regular drama, translated or adapted from
the Greek, for the musical medleys (_saturae_) hitherto in use. From
this time dramatic performances became a regular accompaniment of the
public games, and came more and more to encroach on the older kinds of
amusement, such as the chariot races. The dramatic work of Livius was
mainly of educative value. The same may be said of his translation of
the _Odyssey_, which was still used as a school-book in the days of
Horace, and the religious hymn which he was called upon to compose in
207 had no high literary pretensions. He was, however, the first to
familiarize the Romans with the forms of the Greek drama and the Greek
epic, and thus to determine the main lines which Latin literature
followed for more than a century afterwards.
Naevius.
His immediate successor, Cn. Naevius (d. c. 200 B.C.), was not, like
Livius, a Greek, but either a Roman citizen or, more probably, a
Campanian who enjoyed the limited citizenship of a Latin and who had
served in the Roman army in the first Punic war. His first appearance as
a dramatic author was in 235. He adapted both tragedies and comedies
from the Greek, but the bent of his genius, the tastes of his audience,
and the condition of the language developed through the active
intercourse and business of life, gave a greater impulse to comedy than
to tragedy. Naevius tried to use the theatre, as it had been used by the
writers of the Old Comedy of Athens, for the purposes of political
warfare, and thus seems to have anticipated by a century the part played
by Lucilius. But his attacks upon the Roman aristocracy, especially the
Metelli, were resented by their objects; and Naevius, after being
imprisoned, had to retire in his old age into banishment. He was not
only the first in point of time, and according to ancient testimony one
of the first in point of merit, among the comic poets of Rome, and in
spirit, though not in form, the earliest of the line of Roman satirists,
but he was also the oldest of the national poets. Besides celebrating
the success of M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 over the Gauls in a play
called _Clastidium_, he gave the first specimen of the _fabula
praetexta_ in his _Alimonium Romuli et Remi_, based on the most national
of all Roman traditions. Still more important service was rendered by
him in his long Saturnian poem on the first Punic war, in which he not
only told the story of contemporary events but gave shape to the legend
of the settlement of Aeneas in Latium,--the theme ultimately adopted for
the great national epic of Rome.
Plautus.
His younger contemporary T. Maccius Plautus (c. 254-184) was the
greatest comic dramatist of Rome. He lived and wrote only to amuse his
contemporaries, and thus, although more popular in his lifetime and more
fortunate than any of the older authors in the ultimate survival of a
large number of his works, he is less than any of the great writers of
Rome in sympathy with either the serious or the caustic spirit in Latin
literature. Yet he is the one extant witness to the humour and vivacity
of the Italian temperament at a stage between its early rudeness and
rigidity and its subsequent degeneracy.
Ennius.
Thus far Latin literature, of which the predominant characteristics are
dignity, gravity and fervour of feeling, seemed likely to become a mere
vehicle of amusement adapted to all classes of the people in their
holiday mood. But a new spirit, which henceforth became predominant,
appeared in the time of Plautus. Latin literature ceased to be in close
sympathy with the popular spirit, either politically or as a form of
amusement, but became the expression of the ideas, sentiment and culture
of the aristocratic governing class. It was by Q. Ennius (239-169) of
Rudiae in Messapia, that a new direction was given to Latin literature.
Deriving from his birthplace the culture, literary and philosophical, of
Magna Graecia, and having gained the friendship of the greatest of the
Romans living in that great age, he was of all the early writers most
fitted to be the medium of conciliation between the serious genius of
ancient Greece and the serious genius of Rome. Alone among the older
writers he was endowed with the gifts of a poetical imagination and
animated with enthusiasm for a great ideal.
First among his special services to Latin literature was the fresh
impulse which he gave to tragedy. He turned the eyes of his
contemporaries from the commonplace social humours of later Greek life
to the contemplation of the heroic age. But he did not thereby
denationalize the Roman drama. He animated the heroes of early Greece
with the martial spirit of Roman soldiers and the ideal magnanimity and
sagacity of Roman senators, and imparted weight and dignity to the
language and verse in which their sentiments and thoughts were
expressed. Although Rome wanted creative force to add a great series of
tragic dramas to the literature of the world, yet the spirit of
elevation and moral authority breathed into tragedy by Ennius passed
into the ethical and didactic writings and the oratory of a later time.
Another work was the _Saturae_, written in various metres, but chiefly
in the trochaic tetrameter. He thus became the inventor of a new form of
literature; and, if in his hands the _satura_ was rude and indeterminate
in its scope, it became a vehicle by which to address a reading public
on matters of the day, or on the materials of his wide reading, in a
style not far removed from the language of common life. His greatest
work, which made the Romans regard him as the father of their
literature, was his epic poem, in eighteen books, the _Annales_, in
which the record of the whole career of Rome was unrolled with
idealizing enthusiasm and realistic detail. The idea which inspired
Ennius was ultimately realized in both the national epic of Virgil and
the national history of Livy. And the metrical vehicle which he
conceived as the only one adequate to his great theme was a rude
experiment, which was ultimately developed into the stately Virgilian
hexameter. Even as a grammarian he performed an important service to the
literary language of Rome, by fixing its prosody and arresting the
tendency to decay in its final syllables. Although of his writings only
fragments remain, these fragments are enough, along with what we know of
him from ancient testimony, to justify us in regarding him as the most
important among the makers of Latin literature before the age of Cicero.
Cato.
There is still one other name belonging partly to this, partly to the
next generation, to be added to those of the men of original force of
mind and character who created Latin literature, that of M. Porcius Cato
the Censor (234-149), the younger contemporary of Ennius, whom he
brought to Rome. More than Naevius and Plautus he represented the pure
native element in that literature, the mind and character of Latium, the
plebeian pugnacity, which was one of the great forces in the Roman
state. His lack of imagination and his narrow patriotism made him the
natural leader of the reaction against the new Hellenic culture. He
strove to make literature ancillary to politics and to objects of
practical utility, and thus started prose literature on the chief lines
that it afterwards followed. Through his industry and vigorous
understanding he gave a great impulse to the creation of Roman oratory,
history and systematic didactic writing. He was one of the first to
publish his speeches and thus to bring them into the domain of
literature. Cicero, who speaks of 150 of these speeches as extant in his
day, praises them for their acuteness, their wit, their conciseness. He
speaks with emphasis of the impressiveness of Cato's eulogy and the
satiric bitterness of his invective.
Cato was the first historical writer of Rome to use his native tongue.
His _Origines_, the work of his old age, was written with that
thoroughly Roman conception of history which regarded actions and events
solely as they affected the continuous and progressive life of a state.
Cato felt that the record of Roman glory could not be isolated from the
story of the other Italian communities, which, after fighting against
Rome for their own independence, shared with her the task of conquering
the world. To the wider national sympathies which stimulated the
researches of the old censor into the legendary history of the Italian
towns we owe some of the most truly national parts of Virgil's _Aeneid_.
Terence.
Lucilius.
In Naevius, Plautus, Ennius and Cato are represented the contending
forces which strove for ascendancy in determining what was to be the
character of the new literature. The work, begun by them, was carried on
by younger contemporaries and successors; by Statius Caecilius (c.
220-168), an Insubrian Gaul, in comedy; in tragedy by M. Pacuvius (c.
220-132), the nephew of Ennius, called by Cicero the greatest of Roman
tragedians; and, in the following generation, by L. Accius (c. 170-86),
who was more usually placed in this position. The impulse given to
oratory by Cato, Ser. Sulpicius Galba and others, and along with it the
development of prose composition, went on with increased momentum till
the age of Cicero. But the interval between the death of Ennius (169)
and the beginning of Cicero's career, while one of progressive advance
in the appreciation of literary form and style, was much less
distinguished by original force than the time immediately before and
after the end of the second Punic war. The one complete survival of the
generation after the death of Ennius, the comedy of P. Terentius Afer or
Terence (c. 185-159), exemplifies the gain in literary accomplishment
and the loss in literary freedom. Terence has nothing Roman or Italian
except his pure and idiomatic Latinity. His Athenian elegance affords
the strongest contrast to the Italian rudeness of Cato's _De Re
Rustica_. By looking at them together we understand how much the comedy
of Terence was able to do to refine and humanize the manners of Rome,
but at the same time what a solvent it was of the discipline and ideas
of the old republic. What makes Terence an important witness of the
culture of his time is that he wrote from the centre of the Scipionic
circle, in which what was most humane and liberal in Roman statesmanship
was combined with the appreciation of what was most vital in the Greek
thought and literature of the time. The comedies of Terence may
therefore be held to give some indication of the tastes of Scipio,
Laelius and their friends in their youth. The influence of Panaetius and
Polybius was more adapted to their maturity, when they led the state in
war, statesmanship and oratory, and when the humaner teaching of
Stoicism began to enlarge the sympathies of Roman jurists. But in the
last years during which this circle kept together a new spirit appeared
in Roman politics and a new power in Roman literature,--the
revolutionary spirit evoked by the Gracchi in opposition to the
long-continued ascendancy of the senate, and the new power of Roman
satire, which was exercised impartially and unsparingly against both the
excesses of the revolutionary spirit and the arrogance and incompetence
of the extreme party among the nobles. Roman satire, though in form a
legitimate development of the indigenous dramatic _satura_ through the
written _satura_ of Ennius and Pacuvius, is really a birth of this time,
and its author was the youngest of those admitted into the intimacy of
the Scipionic circle, C. Lucilius of Suessa Aurunca (c. 180-103). Among
the writers before the age of Cicero he alone deserves to be named with
Naevius, Plautus Ennius and Cato as a great originative force in
literature. For about thirty years the most important event in Roman
literature was the production of the satires of Lucilius, in which the
politics, morals, society and letters of the time were criticized with
the utmost freedom and pungency, and his own personality was brought
immediately and familiarly before his contemporaries. The years that
intervened between his death and the beginning of the Ciceronian age are
singularly barren in works of original value. But in one direction there
was some novelty. The tragic writers had occasionally taken their
subjects from Roman life (_fabulae praetextae_), and in comedy we find
the corresponding _togatae_ of Lucius Afranius and others, in which
comedy, while assuming a Roman dress, did not assume the virtue of a
Roman matron.
General results from 130 to 80.
The general results of the last fifty years of the first period (130 to
80) may be thus summed up. In poetry we have the satires of Lucilius,
the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman
aristocracy, who thus exemplified the affinity of the Roman stage to
Roman oratory; various annalistic poems intended to serve as
continuations of the great poem of Ennius; minor poems of an
epigrammatic and erotic character, unimportant anticipations of the
Alexandrian tendency operative in the following period; works of
criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming
part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the
first accompanied the creative movement in Latin literature, and which
may be regarded as rude precursors of the didactic epistles that Horace
devoted to literary criticism.
Oratory.
The only extant prose work which may be assigned to the end of this
period is the treatise on rhetoric known by the title _Ad Herennium_ (c.
84) a work indicative of the attention bestowed on prose style and
rhetorical studies during the last century of the republic, and which
may be regarded as a precursor of the oratorical treatises of Cicero and
of the work of Quintilian. But the great literary product of this period
was oratory, developed indeed with the aid of these rhetorical studies,
but itself the immediate outcome of the imperial interests, the legal
conflicts, and the political passions of that time of agitation. The
speakers and writers of a later age looked back on Scipio and Laelius,
the Gracchi and their contemporaries, L. Crassus and M. Antonius, as
masters of their art.
History.
In history, regarded as a great branch of prose literature, it is not
probable that much was accomplished, although, with the advance of
oratory and grammatical studies, there must have been not only greater
fluency of composition but the beginning of a richer and more ornate
style. Yet Cicero denies to Rome the existence, before his own time, of
any adequate historical literature. Nevertheless it was by the work of a
number of Roman chroniclers during this period that the materials of
early Roman history were systematized, and the record of the state, as
it was finally given to the world in the artistic work of Livy, was
extracted from the early annals, state documents and private memorials,
combined into a coherent unity, and supplemented by invention and
reflection. Amongst these chroniclers may be mentioned L. Calpurnius
Piso Frugi (consul 133, censor 108), C. Sempronius Tuditanus (consul
129), Cn. Gellius, C. Fannius (consul 122), L. Coelius Antipater, who
wrote a narrative of the second Punic war about 120, and Sempronius
Asellio, who wrote a history of his own times, have a better claim to be
considered historians. There were also special works on antiquities and
contemporary memoirs, and autobiographies such as those of M. Aemilius
Scaurus, the elder, Q. Lutatius Catulus (consul 102 B.C.), and P.
Rutilius Rufus, which formed the sources of future historians. (See
further ANNALES; and ROME: _History_, _Ancient_, § "Authorities.")
Summary of the period.
Although the artistic product of the first period of Latin literature
which has reached us in a complete shape is limited to the comedies of
Plautus and Terence, the influence of the lost literature in determining
the spirit, form and style of the eras of more perfect accomplishment
which followed is unmistakable. While humour and vivacity characterize
the earlier, and urbanity of tone the later development of comedy, the
tendency of serious literature had been in the main practical, ethical,
commemorative and satirical. The higher poetical imagination had
appeared only in Ennius, and had been called forth in him by sympathy
with the grandeur of the national life and the great personal qualities
of its representative men. Some of the chief motives of the later
poetry, e.g. the pleasures and sorrows of private life, had as yet found
scarcely any expression in Latin literature. The fittest metrical
vehicle for epic, didactic, and satiric poetry had been discovered, but
its movement was as yet rude and inharmonious. The idiom of ordinary
life and social intercourse and the more fervid and elevated diction of
oratorical prose had made great progress, but the language of
imagination and poetical feeling was, if vivid and impressive in
isolated expressions, still incapable of being wrought into consecutive
passages of artistic composition. The influences of Greek literature to
which Latin literature owed its birth had not as yet spread beyond Rome
and Latium. The Sabellian races of central and eastern Italy and the
Italo-Celtic and Venetian races of the north, in whom the poetic
susceptibility of Italy was most manifest two generations later, were
not, until after the Social war, sufficiently in sympathy with Rome, and
were probably not as yet sufficiently educated to induce them to
contribute their share to the national literature. Hence the end of the
Social war, and of the Civil war, which arose out of it, is most clearly
a determining factor in Roman literature, and may most appropriately be
taken as marking the end of one period and the beginning of another.
_Second Period: from 80 to 42 B.C._
The last age of the republic coincides with the first half of the Golden
age of Roman literature. It is generally known as the Ciceronian age
from the name of its greatest literary representative, whose activity as
a speaker and writer was unremitting during nearly the whole period. It
is the age of purest excellence in prose, and of a new birth of poetry,
characterized rather by great original force and artistic promise than
by perfect accomplishment. The five chief representatives of this age
who still hold their rank among the great classical writers are Cicero,
Caesar and Sallust in prose, Lucretius and Catullus in verse. The works
of other prose writers, Varro and Cornelius Nepos, have been partially
preserved; but these writers have no claim to rank with those already
mentioned as creators and masters of literary style. Although literature
had not as yet become a trade or profession, an educated reading public
already existed, and books and intellectual intercourse filled a large
part of the leisure of men actively engaged in affairs. Even oratory was
intended quite as much for readers as for the audiences to which it was
immediately addressed; and some of the greatest speeches which have come
down from that great age of orators were never delivered at all, but
were published as manifestoes after the event with the view of
influencing educated opinion, and as works of art with the view of
giving pleasure to educated taste.
Cicero.
Thus the speeches of M. Tullius Cicero (106-43) belong to the domain of
literature quite as much as to that of forensic or political oratory.
And, although Demosthenes is a master of style unrivalled even by
Cicero, the literary interest of most of Cicero's speeches is stronger
than that of the great mass of Greek oratory. It is urged with justice
that the greater part of Cicero's _Defence of Archias_ was irrelevant to
the issue and would not have been listened to by a Greek court of
justice or a modern jury. But it was fortunate for the interests of
literature that a court of educated Romans could be influenced by the
considerations there submitted to them. In this way a question of the
most temporary interest, concerning an individual of no particular
eminence or importance, has produced one of the most impressive
vindications of literature ever spoken or written. Oratory at Rome
assumed a new type from being cultivated as an art which endeavoured to
produce persuasion not so much by intellectual conviction, as by appeal
to general human sympathies. In oratory, as in every other intellectual
province, the Greeks had a truer sense of the limits and conditions of
their art. But command over form is only one element in the making of an
orator or poet. The largeness and dignity of the matter with which he
has to deal are at least as important. The Roman oratory of the law
courts had to deal not with petty questions of disputed property, of
fraud, or violence, but with great imperial questions, with matters
affecting the well-being of large provinces and the honour and safety of
the republic; and no man ever lived who, in these respects, was better
fitted than Cicero to be the representative of the type of oratory
demanded by the condition of the later republic. To his great artistic
accomplishment, perfected by practice and elaborate study, to the power
of his patriotic, his moral, and personal sympathies, and his passionate
emotional nature, must be added his vivid imagination and the rich and
copious stream of his language, in which he had no rival among Roman
writers or speakers. It has been said that Roman poetry has produced
few, if any, great types of character. But the Verres, Catiline, Antony
of Cicero are living and permanent types. The story told in the _Pro
Cluentio_ may be true or false, but the picture of provincial crime
which it presents is vividly dramatic. Had we only known Cicero in his
speeches we should have ranked him with Demosthenes as one who had
realized the highest literary ideal. We should think of him also as the
creator and master of Latin style--and, moreover, not only as a great
orator but as a just and appreciative critic of oratory. But to his
services to Roman oratory we have to add his services not indeed to
philosophy but to the literature of philosophy. Though not a philosopher
he is an admirable interpreter of those branches of philosophy which are
fitted for practical application, and he presents us with the results of
Greek reflection vivified by his own human sympathies and his large
experience of men. In giving a model of the style in which human
interest can best be imparted to abstract discussions, he used his great
oratorical gift and art to persuade the world to accept the most hopeful
opinions on human destiny and the principles of conduct most conducive
to elevation and integrity of character.
The _Letters_ of Cicero are thoroughly natural--_colloquia absentium
amicorum_, to use his own phrase. Cicero's letters to Atticus, and to
the friends with whom he was completely at his ease, are the most
sincere and immediate expression of the thought and feeling of the
moment. They let us into the secret of his most serious thoughts and
cares, and they give a natural outlet to his vivacity of observation,
his wit and humour, his kindliness of nature. It shows how flexible an
instrument Latin prose had become in his hand, when it could do justice
at once to the ample and vehement volume of his oratory, to the calmer
and more rhythmical movement of his philosophical meditation, and to the
natural interchange of thought and feeling in the everyday intercourse
of life.
Caesar.
Among the many rival orators of the age the most eminent were Quintus
Hortensius Ortalus and C. Julius Caesar. The former was the leading
representative of the Asiatic or florid style of oratory, and, like
other members of the aristocracy, such as C. Memmius and L. Manlius
Torquatus, and like Q. Catulus in the preceding generation, was a kind
of dilettante poet and a precursor of the poetry of pleasure, which
attained such prominence in the elegiac poets of the Augustan age. Of C.
Julius Caesar (102-44) as an orator we can judge only by his reputation
and by the testimony of his great rival and adversary Cicero; but we are
able to appreciate the special praise of perfect taste in the use of
language attributed to him.[1] In his _Commentaries_, by laying aside
the ornaments of oratory, he created the most admirable style of prose
narrative, the style which presents interesting events in their sequence
of time and dependence on the will of the actor, rapidly and vividly,
with scarcely any colouring of personal or moral feeling, any oratorical
passion, any pictorial illustration. While he shows the persuasive art
of an orator by presenting the subjugation of Gaul and his own action in
the Civil War in the light most favourable to his claim to rule the
Roman world, he is entirely free from the Roman fashion of
self-laudation or disparagement of an adversary. The character of the
man reveals itself especially in a perfect simplicity of style, the
result of the clearest intelligence and the strongest sense of personal
dignity. He avoids not only every unusual but every superfluous word;
and, although no writing can be more free from rhetorical colouring, yet
there may from time to time be detected a glow of sympathy, like the
glow of generous passion in Thucydides, the more effective from the
reserve with which it betrays itself whenever he is called on to record
any act of personal heroism or of devotion to military duty.
Sallust.
In the simplicity of his style, the directness of his narrative, the
entire absence of any didactic tendency, Caesar presents a marked
contrast to another prose writer of that age--the historian C.
Sallustius Crispus or Sallust (c. 87-36). Like Varro, he survived Cicero
by some years, but the tone and spirit in which his works are written
assign him to the republican era. He was the first of the purely
artistic historians, as distinct from the annalists and the writers of
personal memoirs. He imitated the Greek historians in taking particular
actions--the _Jugurthan War_ and the _Catilinarian Conspiracy_--as the
subjects of artistic treatment. He wrote also a continuous work,
_Historiae_, treating of the events of the twelve years following the
death of Sulla, of which only fragments are preserved. His two extant
works are more valuable as artistic studies of the rival parties in the
state and of personal character than as trustworthy narratives of facts.
His style aims at effectiveness by pregnant expression, sententiousness,
archaism. He produces the impression of caring more for the manner of
saying a thing than for its truth. Yet he has great value as a painter
of historical portraits, some of them those of his contemporaries, and
as an author who had been a political partisan and had taken some part
in making history before undertaking to write it; and he gives us, from
the popular side, the views of a contemporary on the politics of the
time. Of the other historians, or rather annalists, who belong to this
period, such as Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, Q. Valerius Antias, and C.
Licinius Macer, the father of Calvus, we have only fragments remaining.
Varro.
The period was also remarkable for the production of works which we
should class as technical or scientific rather than literary. The
activity of one of these writers was so great that he is entitled to a
separate mention. This was M. Terentius Varro, the most learned not only
of the Romans but of the Greeks, as he has been called. The list of
Varro's writings includes over seventy treatises and more than six
hundred books dealing with topics of every conceivable kind. His
_Menippeae Saturae_, miscellanies in prose and verse, of which
unfortunately only fragments are left, was a work of singular literary
interest.
Lucretius.
Since the _Annals_ of Ennius no great and original poem had appeared.
The powerful poetical force which for half a century continued to be the
strongest force in literature, and which created masterpieces of art and
genius, first revealed itself in the latter part of the Ciceronian age.
The conditions which enabled the poetic genius of Italy to come to
maturity in the person of T. Lucretius Carus (96-55) were entire
seclusion from public life and absorption in the ideal pleasures of
contemplation and artistic production. This isolation from the familiar
ways of his contemporaries, while it was, according to tradition and the
internal evidence of his poem, destructive to his spirit's health,
resulted in a work of genius, unique in character, which still stands
forth as the greatest philosophical poem in any language. In the form of
his poem he followed a Greek original; and the stuff out of which the
texture of his philosophical argument is framed was derived from Greek
science; but all that is of deep human and poetical meaning in the poem
is his own. While we recognize in the _De Rerum Natura_ some of the most
powerful poetry in any language and feel that few poets have penetrated
with such passionate sincerity and courage into the secret of nature and
some of the deeper truths of human life, we must acknowledge that, as
compared with the great didactic poem of Virgil, it is crude and
unformed in artistic design, and often rough and unequal in artistic
execution. Yet, apart altogether from its independent value, by his
speculative power and enthusiasm, by his revelation of the life and
spectacle of nature, by the fresh creativeness of his diction and the
elevated movement of his rhythm, Lucretius exercised a more powerful
influence than any other on the art of his more perfect successors.
Catullus.
While the imaginative and emotional side of Roman poetry was so
powerfully represented by Lucretius, attention was directed to its
artistic side by a younger generation, who moulded themselves in a great
degree on Alexandrian models. Such were Valerius Cato also a
distinguished literary critic, and C. Licinius Calvus, an eminent
orator. Of this small group of poets one only has survived, fortunately
the man of most genius among them, the bosom-friend of Calvus, C.
Valerius Catullus (84-54). He too was a new force in Roman literature.
He was a provincial by birth, although early brought into intimate
relations with members of the great Roman families. The subjects of his
best art are taken immediately from his own life--his loves, his
friendships, his travels, his animosities, personal and political. His
most original contribution to the substance of Roman literature was that
he first shaped into poetry the experience of his own heart, as it had
been shaped by Alcaeus and Sappho in the early days of Greek poetry. No
poet has surpassed him in the power of vitally reproducing the pleasure
and pain of the passing hour, not recalled by idealizing reflection as
in Horace, nor overlaid with mythological ornament as in Propertius, but
in all the keenness of immediate impression. He also introduced into
Roman literature that personal as distinct from political or social
satire which appears later in the _Epodes_ of Horace and the _Epigrams_
of Martial. He anticipated Ovid in recalling the stories of Greek
mythology to a second poetical life. His greatest contribution to poetic
art consisted in the perfection which he attained in the phalaecian, the
pure iambic, and the scazon metres, and in the ease and grace with which
he used the language of familiar intercourse, as distinct from that of
the creative imagination, of the _rostra_, and of the schools, to give
at once a lifelike and an artistic expression to his feelings. He has
the interest of being the last poet of the free republic. In his life
and in his art he was the precursor of those poets who used their genius
as the interpreter and minister of pleasure; but he rises above them in
the spirit of personal independence, in his affection for his friends,
in his keen enjoyment of natural and simple pleasures, and in his power
of giving vital expression to these feelings.
_Third Period: Augustan Age, 42 B.C. to A.D. 17._
Influence of imperial institutions.
The poetic impulse and culture communicated to Roman literature in the
last years of the republic passed on without any break of continuity
into the literature of the succeeding age. One or two of the circle of
Catullus survived into that age; but an entirely new spirit came over
the literature of the new period, and it is by new men, educated indeed
under the same literary influences, but living in an altered world and
belonging originally to a different order in the state, that the new
spirit was expressed. The literature of the later republic reflects the
sympathies and prejudices of an aristocratic class, sharing in the
conduct of national affairs and living on terms of equality with one
another; that of the Augustan age, first in its early serious
enthusiasm, and then in the licence and levity of its later development,
represents the hopes and aspirations with which the new monarchy was
ushered into the world, and the pursuit of pleasure and amusement, which
becomes the chief interest of a class cut off from the higher energies
of practical life, and moving in the refining and enervating atmosphere
of an imperial court. The great inspiring influence of the new
literature was the enthusiasm produced first by the hope and afterwards
by the fulfilment of the restoration of peace, order, national glory,
under the rule of Augustus. All that the age longed for seemed to be
embodied in a man who had both in his own person and by inheritance the
natural spell which sways the imagination of the world. The sentiment of
hero-worship was at all times strong in the Romans, and no one was ever
the object of more sincere as well as simulated hero-worship than
Augustus. It was not, however, by his equals in station that the first
feeling was likely to be entertained. The earliest to give expression to
it was Virgil; but the spell was soon acknowledged by the colder and
more worldly-wise Horace. The disgust aroused by the anti-national
policy of Antony, and the danger to the empire which was averted by the
result of the battle of Actium, combined with the confidence inspired by
the new ruler to reconcile the great families as well as the great body
of the people to the new order of things.
While the establishment of the empire produced a revival of national and
imperial feeling, it suppressed all independent political thought and
action. Hence the two great forms of prose literature which drew their
nourishment from the struggles of political life, oratory and
contemporary history, were arrested in their development. The main
course of literature was thus for a time diverted into poetry. That
poetry in its most elevated form aimed at being the organ of the new
empire and of realizing the national ideals of life and character under
its auspices; and in carrying out this aim it sought to recall the great
memories of the past. It became also the organ of the pleasures and
interests of private life, the chief motives of which were the love of
nature and the passion of love. It sought also to make the art and
poetry of Greece live a new artistic life. Satire, debarred from comment
on political action, turned to social and individual life, and combined
with the newly-developed taste for ethical analysis and reflection
introduced by Cicero. One great work had still to be done in prose--a
retrospect of the past history of the state from an idealizing and
romanticizing point of view. For that work the Augustan age, as the end
of one great cycle of events and the beginning of another, was eminently
suited, and a writer who, by his gifts of imagination and sympathy, was
perhaps better fitted than any other man of antiquity for the task, and
who through the whole of this period lived a life of literary leisure,
was found to do justice to the subject.
Although the age did not afford free scope and stimulus to individual
energy and enterprise, it furnished more material and social advantages
for the peaceful cultivation of letters. The new influence of patronage,
which in other times has chilled the genial current of literature,
become, in the person of Maecenas, the medium through which literature
and the imperial policy were brought into union. Poetry thus acquired
the tone of the world, kept in close connexion with the chief source of
national life, while it was cultivated to the highest pitch of artistic
perfection under the most favourable conditions of leisure and freedom
from the distractions and anxieties of life.
Virgil.
The earliest in the order of time of the poets who adorn this age--P.
Vergilius Maro or Virgil (70-19)--is also the greatest in genius, the
most richly cultivated, and the most perfect in art. He is the
idealizing poet of the hopes and aspirations and of the purer and
happier life of which the age seemed to contain the promise. He elevates
the present by associating it with the past and future of the world, and
sanctifies it by seeing in it the fulfilment of a divine purpose. Virgil
is the true representative poet of Rome and Italy, of national glory and
of the beauty of nature, the artist in whom all the efforts of the past
were made perfect, and the unapproachable standard of excellence to
future times. While more richly endowed with sensibility to all native
influences, he was more deeply imbued than any of his contemporaries
with the poetry, the thought and the learning of Greece. The earliest
efforts of his art (the _Eclogues_) reproduce the cadences, the diction
and the pastoral fancies of Theocritus; but even in these imitative
poems of his youth Virgil shows a perfect mastery of his materials. The
Latin hexameter, which in Ennius and Lucretius was the organ of the more
dignified and majestic emotions, became in his hands the most perfect
measure in which the softer and more luxurious sentiment of nature has
been expressed. The sentiment of Italian scenery and the love which the
Italian peasant has for the familiar sights and sounds of his home found
a voice which never can pass away.
In the _Georgics_ we are struck by the great advance in the originality
and self-dependence of the artist, in the mature perfection of his
workmanship, in the deepening and strengthening of all his sympathies
and convictions. His genius still works under forms prescribed by Greek
art, and under the disadvantage of having a practical and utilitarian
aim imposed on it. But he has ever in form so far surpassed his
originals that he alone has gained for the pure didactic poem a place
among the highest forms of serious poetry, while he has so transmuted
his material that, without violation of truth, he has made the whole
poem alive with poetic feeling. The homeliest details of the farmer's
work are transfigured through the poet's love of nature; through his
religious feeling and his pious sympathy with the sanctities of human
affection; through his patriotic sympathy with the national greatness;
and through the rich allusiveness of his art to everything in poetry and
legend which can illustrate and glorify his theme.
In the _Eclogues_ and _Georgics_ Virgil is the idealizing poet of the
old simple and hardy life of Italy, as the imagination could conceive of
it in an altered world. In the _Aeneid_ he is the idealizing poet of
national glory, as manifested in the person of Augustus. The epic of
national life, vividly conceived but rudely executed by Ennius, was
perfected in the years that followed the decisive victory at Actium. To
do justice to his idea Virgil enters into rivalry with a greater poet
than those whom he had equalled or surpassed in his previous works. And,
though he cannot unroll before us the page of heroic action with the
power and majesty of Homer, yet by the sympathy with which he realizes
the idea of Rome, and by the power with which he has used the details of
tradition, of local scenes, of religious usage, to embody it, he has
built up in the form of an epic poem the most enduring and the most
artistically constructed monument of national grandeur.
Horace.
The second great poet of the time--Q. Horatius Flaccus or Horace (68-8)
is both the realist and the idealist of his age. If we want to know the
actual lives, manners and ways of thinking of the Romans of the
generation succeeding the overthrow of the republic it is in the
_Satires_ and partially in the _Epistles_ of Horace that we shall find
them. If we ask what that time provided to stir the fancy and move the
mood of imaginative reflection, it is in the lyrical poems of Horace
that we shall find the most varied and trustworthy answer. His literary
activity extends over about thirty years and naturally divides itself
into three periods, each marked by a distinct character. The
first--extending from about 40 to 29--is that of the _Epodes_ and
_Satires_. In the former he imitates the Greek poet Archilochus, but
takes his subjects from the men, women and incidents of the day.
Personality is the essence of his _Epodes_; in the _Satires_ it is used
merely as illustrative of general tendencies. In the _Satires_ we find
realistic pictures of social life, and the conduct and opinions of the
world submitted to the standard of good feeling and common sense. The
style of the _Epodes_ is pointed and epigrammatic, that of the _Satires_
natural and familiar. The hexameter no longer, as in Lucilius, moves
awkwardly as if in fetters, but, like the language of Terence, of
Catullus in his lighter pieces, of Cicero in his letters to Atticus,
adapts itself to the everyday intercourse of life. The next period is
the meridian of his genius, the time of his greatest lyrical
inspiration, which he himself associates with the peace and leisure
secured to him by his Sabine farm. The life of pleasure which he had
lived in his youth comes back to him, not as it was in its actual
distractions and disappointments, but in the idealizing light of
meditative retrospect. He had not only become reconciled to the new
order of things, but was moved by his intimate friendship with Maecenas
to aid in raising the world to sympathy with the imperial rule through
the medium of his lyrical inspiration, as Virgil had through the glory
of his epic art. With the completion of the three books of _Odes_ he
cast aside for a time the office of the _vates_, and resumed that of the
critical spectator of human life, but in the spirit of a moralist rather
than a satirist. He feels the increasing languor of the time as well as
the languor of advancing years, and seeks to encourage younger men to
take up the rôle of lyrical poetry, while he devotes himself to the
contemplation of the true art of living. Self-culture rather than the
fulfilment of public or social duty, as in the moral teaching of Cicero,
is the aim of his teaching; and in this we recognize the influence of
the empire in throwing the individual back on himself. As Cicero tones
down his oratory in his moral treatises, so Horace tones down the
fervour of his lyrical utterances in his _Epistles_, and thus produces a
style combining the ease of the best epistolary style with the grace and
concentration of poetry--the style, as it has been called, of "idealized
common sense," that of the _urbanus_ and cultivated man of the world who
is also in his hours of inspiration a genuine poet. In the last ten
years of his life Horace resumed his lyrical function for a time, under
pressure of the imperial command, and produced some of the most
exquisite and mature products of his art. But his chief activity is
devoted to criticism. He first vindicates the claims of his own age to
literary pre-eminence, and then seeks to stimulate the younger writers
of the day to what he regarded as the manlier forms of poetry, and
especially to the tragic drama, which seemed for a short time to give
promise of an artistic revival.
But the poetry of the latter half of the Augustan age destined to
survive did not follow the lines either of lyrical or of dramatic art
marked out by Horace. The latest form of poetry adopted from Greece and
destined to gain and permanently to hold the ear of the world was the
_elegy_. From the time of Mimnermus this form seems to have presented
itself as the most natural vehicle for the poetry of pleasure in an age
of luxury, refinement and incipient decay. Its facile flow and rhythm
seem to adapt it to the expression and illustration of personal feeling.
It goes to the mind of the reader through a medium of sentiment rather
than of continuous thought or imaginative illustration. The greatest
masters of this kind of poetry are the elegiac poets of the Augustan
age--Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid.