EPIC POETRY. ENNIUS--FURIUS (200-100 B.C.)
We must now retrace our steps, and consider Ennius in the capacity of epic
poet. It was in this light that he acquired his chief contemporary renown,
that he accredits himself to posterity in his epitaph, and that he
obtained that commanding influence over subsequent poetic literature,
which, stereotyped in Virgil, was never afterwards lost. The merit of
discerning the most favourable subject for a Roman epic belongs to
Naevius; in this department Ennius did but borrow of him; it was in the
form in which he cast his poem that his originality was shown. The
legendary history of Rome, her supposed connection with the issues of the
Trojan war, and her subsequent military achievements in the sphere of
history, such was the groundwork both of Naevius's and Ennius's
conception. And, however unsuitable such a consecutive narrative might be
for a heroic poem, there was something in it that corresponded with the
national sentiment, and in a changed form it re-appears in the _Aeneid_.
Naevius had been contented with a single episode in Rome's career of
conquest. Ennius, with more ambition but less judgment, aspired to grasp
in an epic unity the entire history of the nation; and to achieve this, no
better method occurred to him than the time-honoured and prosaic system of
annals. The difficulty of recasting these in a poetic mould might well
have staggered a more accomplished master of song; but to the enthusiastic
and laborious bard the task did not seem too great. He lived to complete
his work in accordance with the plan he had proposed, and though, perhaps,
the _manus ultima_ may have been wanting, there is nothing to show that he
was dissatisfied with his results. We may perhaps smile at the vanity
which aspired to the title of Roman Homer, and still more at the
partiality which so willingly granted it; nevertheless, with all
deductions on the score of rude conception and ruder execution, the
fragments that remain incline us to concur with Scaliger in wishing that
fate had spared us the whole, and denied us Silius, Statius, Lucan, "et
tous ces garçons là." The whole was divided into eighteen books, of which
the first contained the introduction, the earliest traditions, the
foundation of Rome, and the deification of Romulus; the second and third
contained the regal period; the fourth began the history of the Republic
and carried it down to the burning of the city by the Gauls; the fifth
comprised the Samnite wars; the sixth, that with Pyrrhus; the seventh, the
first Punic war; the eighth and ninth, the war with Hannibal; the tenth
and eleventh, that with Macedonia; the twelfth, thirteenth, and
fourteenth, that with Syria; the fifteenth, the campaign of Fulvius
Nobilior in Aetolia, and ended apparently with the death of the great
Scipio. The work then received a new preface, and continued the history
down to the poet's last years, containing many personal notices, until it
was finally brought to a close in 172 B.C. after having occupied its
author eighteen years. [1] "The interest of this last book," says
Conington, [2] "must have centred, at least to us, in the discourse about
himself, in which the old bard seems to have indulged in closing this his
greatest poem. Even now we may read with sympathy his boastful allusion to
his late enrolment among the citizens of the conquering city; we may be
touched by the mention he appears to have made of the year of his age in
which he wrote, bordering closely on the appointed term of man's life; and
we may applaud as the curtain falls on his grand comparison of himself to
a victorious racer laden with Olympian honours, and now at last consigned
to repose:--
'Sicut fortis equus, spatio qui saepe supremo
Vicit Olimpia, nunc senio confectus quiescit.'"
He was thus nearly fifty when he began to write, a fact which strikes us
as remarkable. We are accustomed to associate the poetic gift with a
highly-strung nervous system, and unusual bodily conditions not favourable
to long life, as well as with a precocious special development which
proclaims unmistakably in the boy the future greatness of the man. None of
these conditions seem to have been present in the early Roman school.
Livius was a quiet schoolmaster, Naevius a vigorous soldier, Ennius a
self-indulgent but hard-working _litterateur_, Plautus an active man,
whose animal spirits not even the flour-mill could quench, Pacuvius a
steady but genial student, Accius and Terence finished men of the world;
and all, except Terence (and he probably met his early death through an
accident), enjoyed the full term of man's existence. Moreover, few of them
began life by being poets, and some, as Ennius and Plautus, did not apply
themselves to poetry until they had reached mature years. With these facts
the character of their genius as a rule agrees. We should not expect in
such men the fine inspiration of a Sophocles, a Goethe, or a Shelley, and
we do not find it. The poetic frenzy, so magnificently described in the
_Phaedrus_ of Plato, which caused the Greeks to regard the poet in his
moments of creation as actually possessed by the god, is nowhere manifest
among the early Romans; and if it claims to appear in their later
literature, we find it after all a spurious substitute, differing widely
from the emotion of creative genius. It is not mere accident that Rome is
as little productive in the sphere of speculative philosophy as she is in
that of the highest poetry, for the two endowments are closely allied. The
problem each sets before itself is the same; to arrest and embody in an
intelligible shape the idea that shall give light to the dark questionings
of the intellect, or the vague yearnings of the heart. To Rome it has not
been given to open a new sphere of truth, or to add one more to the mystic
voices of passion; her epic mission is the humbler but still not ignoble
one of bracing the mind by her masculine good sense, and linking together
golden chains of memory by the majestic music of her verse.
There were two important elements introduced into the mechanism of the
story by Ennius; the Olympic Pantheon, and the presentation of the Roman
worthies as heroes analogous to those of Greece. The latter innovation was
only possible within narrow limits, for the idea formed by the Romans even
of their greatest heroes, as Romulus, Numa, or Camillus was different in
kind from that of the Greek hero-worshipper. Thus we see that Virgil
abstains from applying the name to any of his Italian characters,
confining it to such as are mentioned in Homer, or are connected with the
Homeric legends. Still we find at a later period Julius Caesar publicly
professing his descent on both sides from a superhuman ancestor, for such
he practically admits Ancus Martius to be. [3] And in the epic of Silius
Italicus the Roman generals occupy quite the conventional position of the
hero-leader.
The admission of the Olympic deities as a kind of divine machinery for
diversifying and explaining the narrative was much more pregnant with
consequences. Outwardly, it is simply adopted from Homer, but the spirit
which animates it is altogether different. The Greek, in spite of his
intellectual scepticism, retained an aesthetic and emotional belief in his
national gods, and at any rate it was natural that he should celebrate
them in his verse; but the Roman poet claimed to utilize the Greek
Pantheon for artistic purposes alone. He professed no belief in the beings
he depicted. They were merely an ornamental, supernatural element, either
introduced at will, as in Horace, or regulated according to traditional
conceptions, as in Ennius and Virgil. Apollo, Minerva, and Bacchus, were
probably no more to him than they are to us. They were names, consecrated
by genius and convenient for art, under which could be combined the
maximum of beautiful associations with the minimum of trouble to the poet.
The custom, which perpetuated itself in Latin poetry, revived again with
the rise of Italian art; and under a modified form its influence may be
seen in the grand conceptions of Milton. The true nature of romantic
poetry is, however, alien to any such mechanical employment of the
supernatural, and its comparative infrequency in the highest English and
German poetry, stamps these as products of the modern spirit. Had the
Romans left Olympus to itself, and occupied themselves only with the
rhetorical delineation of human action and feeling, they would have chosen
a less ambitious but certainly more original path. Lucretius struggles
against the prevailing tendency; but so unable were the Romans to invest
their finer fancies with any other shape, that even while he is blaming
the custom he unawares falls into it.
It was in the metrical treatment that Ennius's greatest achievement lay.
For the first time in any consecutive way he introduced the hexameter into
Latin poetry. It is true that Plautus had composed his epitaph in that
measure, if we may trust Varro's judgment on its genuineness. [4] And the
Marcian oracles, though their rhythm has been disputed, were in all
probability written in the same. [5] But these last were translations, and
were in no sense an epoch in literature. Ennius compelled the intractable
forms of Latin speech to accommodate themselves to the dactylic rhythm.
Difficulties of two kinds met him, those of accent and those of quantity.
The former had been partially surmounted by the comic writers, and it only
required a careful extension of their method to render the deviations from
the familiar emphasis of daily life harmonious and acceptable. In respect
of quantity the problem was more complex. Plautus had disregarded it in
numerous instances (_e.g. dari_), and in others had been content to
recognize the natural length or shortness of a vowel (_e.g. senex ipse_),
neglecting the subordinate laws of position, &c. This custom had, as far
as we know, guided Ennius himself in his dramatic poems; but for the epos
he adopted a different principle. Taking advantage of the tendency to
shorten final vowels, he fixed almost every doubtful case as short, _e.g.
musa, patre, dare, omnibus, amaveris, pater_, only leaving the long
syllable where the metre required it, as _condiderit_. By this means he
gave a dactylic direction to Latin prosody which it afterwards, though
only slightly, extended. At the same time he observed carefully the Greek
laws of position and the doubled letters. He admitted hiatus, but not to
any great extent, and chiefly in the caesura. The lengthening of a short
vowel by the ictus occurs occasionally in his verses, but almost always in
words where it was originally by nature long. In such words the
lengthening may take place even in the thesis of the foot, as in--
"non enim rumores ponebat ante salutem."
Elision played a prominent part in his system. This was natural,
since with all his changes many long or intractable terminations
remained, _e.g. enim, quidem, omnium_, &c. These were generally
elided, sometimes shortened as in the line quoted, sometimes
lengthened as in the comedians,--
"inimicitiam agitantes."
Very rarely does he improperly shorten a naturally long vowel, _e.g.
contra_ (twice); terminations in _o_ he invariably retains, except _ego_
and _modo_. The final _s_ is generally elided before a consonant when in
the thesis of the foot, but often remains in the arsis (_e.g. plenu'
fidei, Isque dies_). The two chief blots on his versification are his
barbarous examples of tmesis,--_saxo cere comminuit brum: Massili portant
invenes ad litora tanas_ (= cerebrum, Massilitanas), and his quaint
apocope, _cael, gau, do_ (_caelum, gaudium, domum_), probably reflected
from the Homeric _do, kri_, in which Lucilius imitates him, _e.g. nol._
(for _nolueris_). The caesura, which forms the chief feature in each
verse, was not understood by Ennius. Several of his lines have no caesura
at all; and that delicate alternation of its many varieties which charms
us in Homer and Virgil, is foreign to the conception, as it would have
been unattainable by the efforts, of the rugged epic bard. Nevertheless
his labour achieved a great result. He stamped for centuries the character
and almost the details of subsequent versification. [6] If we study the
effect of his passages, we shall observe far greater power in single lines
or sentences than in a continuous description. The solemn grandeur of some
of his verses is unsurpassable, and, enshrined in the Aeneid, their
dignity seems enhanced by their surroundings. Such are--
"Tuque pater Tiberine tuo cum ilumino sancto."
"Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem."
"Quae neque Dardaniis campis potuere perire
Nec quom capta capi, nec quom combusta cremari,
Augusto augurio postquam incluta condita Roma est."
On the other hand he sometimes falls into pure prose;
"Cives Romani tum facti sunt Campani,"
and the like, are scarcely metre, certainly not poetry. Later epicists in
their desire to avoid this fault over elaborate their commonplace
passages. Ennius tries, however clumsily, to copy Homer in dismissing them
without ornament. The one or two similes that are preserved are among his
least happy efforts. [7] Among battle scenes he is more at home, and these
he paints with reality and strength. There are three passages of
considerable length, which the reader who desires to judge of his
narrative power should study. They are the dream of Ilia and the auspices
of Romulus in the first book, and the description of the friend of
Servilius in the seventh. This last is generally thought to be a picture
of the poet himself, and to intimate in the most pleasing language his
relations to his great patron. For a singularly appreciative criticism of
these fragments the student is referred to Sellar's _Poets of the
Republic_. The massive Roman vigour of treatment which shone forth in the
_Annals_ and made them as it were a rock-hewn monument of Rome's glory,
secured to Ennius a far greater posthumous renown than that of any of the
other early poets. Cicero extols him, and has no words too contemptuous
for those who despise him, Lucretius praises him in the well known words--
"Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus amoeno
Detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam,
Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret." [8]
Virgil, it is true, never mentions him, but he imitates him continually.
Ovid, with generous appreciation, allows the greatness of his talent,
though he denies him art; [9] and the later imperial writers are even
affected in their admiration of him. He continued to be read through the
Middle Ages, and was only lost as late as the thirteenth century.
Ennius produced a few scattered imitators, but not until upwards of two
generations after his death, if we except the doubtful case of Accius. The
first is MATIUS, who translated the Iliad into hexameters. This may be
more properly considered as the sequel to Livius, but the few fragments
remaining show that his versification was based on that of Ennius.
Gellius, with his partiality for all that was archaic, warmly praises this
work.
HOSTIUS wrote the _Bellum Istricum_ in three books. This was no doubt a
continuation of the great master's _Annales_. What the war was is not
quite certain. Some fix it at 178 B.C.; others as late as 129 B.C. The
earlier date is the more probable. We then have to ask when Hostius
himself lived. Teuffel inclines to place him before Accius; but most
commentators assign him a later date. A few lines are preserved in
Macrobius, [10] which seem to point to an early period, _e.g._
"non si mihi linguae
Centum atque ora sient totidem vocesque liquatae,"
and again,
"Dia Minerva, semol autem tu invictus Apollo
Arquitenens Latonius."
His object in quoting these is to show that they were copied by Virgil. A
passage in Propertius has been supposed to refer to him, [11]
"Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo,"
where he would presumably be the grandfather of that Hostia whom under the
name of Cynthia so many of Propertius's poems celebrate. Another poet of
whom a few lines are preserved in Gellius and Macrobius is A. FURIUS of
Antium, which little town produced more than one well-known writer. His
work was entitled _Annals_. Specimens of his versification are--
"Interea Oceani linquens Aurora cubile."
"Quod genus hoc hominum Saturno sancte create?"
"Pressatur pede pes, mucro mucrone, viro vir." [12]