TENNEY FRANK
LIFE
AND
LITERATURE
IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 1957
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
Cambridge University Press
London, England
Copyright, 1930, by
The Regents of the University of California
Originally published as Volume Seven of the
Sather Classical Lectures
_Third printing_
(_First Paper-bound Edition, Second printing_)
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL FORCES 1
II. EARLY TRAGEDY AND EPIC 30
III. GREEK COMEDY ON THE ROMAN STAGE 65
IV. TERENCE AND HIS SUCCESSORS 99
V. THE PROSE OF THE ROMAN STATESMEN 130
VI. REPUBLICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LIVY 169
VII. CICERO’S RESPONSE TO EXPERIENCE 197
VIII. LUCRETIUS AND HIS READERS 225
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL FORCES
The story of intellectual pioneering, visualized with difficulty, has
not the thrill of a Marco Polo diary, but to the intelligent it has a
deeper fascination. Our records are, however, very brief, spanning a few
thousand out of many hundred thousand years. What we can review is a
small fraction of the whole story. If the human race is more than 300,000
years old, man’s artistic literature is less than 3000: our segment of
sure knowledge is less than one per cent of the amazing tale. If the
biologist is willing to pry into the strata of a hundred million years to
trace the evolution of plant and animal life, it is hardly conceivable
that the humanist should disregard any part of our pitifully meager
record of spiritual endeavor. This is my excuse for inviting attention to
the first efforts of the Romans to express themselves in literary form.
In attempting to tell a part of this story I have chosen to notice
especially how the writers of the period responded to their environment,
because this aspect of the theme has been somewhat neglected in recent
studies of Roman literature. This is of course not a novel method
of approach. Taine, for instance, drove the hobby of environmental
determinism at a gallop that ought to satisfy the most optimistic
behaviorist, and his immediate followers never checked the rein. The
method has since had its more deliberate devotees. English classicists
in particular, who have usually studied history and literature together,
have generally kept a sane and fruitful coordination of men and their
milieu. During the last three decades, however, there has been so strong
a trend toward deep and narrow specialization in our own universities
that here the literary historian has been tempted to neglect social,
political, and artistic history with unfortunate results. For instance,
the scholar who studies classical prose forms has often kept his eye so
intent upon the accumulation of rhetorical rules from Gorgias to Cicero
that he has given us a history of a futile scholastic mechanism and not
of an ever-vitalized prose which in fact re-created its appropriate
medium with every new generation. The scholastic critics of the Roman
lyric are sometimes so intent upon tracing external conventions through
the centuries that they miss the soul of the poetry that assumes
temporarily the mold of the convention. The same is true of all the
literary forms. “Sources and influences,” as traceable in words, phrases,
and literary customs, things which after all seldom explain creative
inspiration, are rather attractive game to men of good verbal memories
and are likely to entice them away from the larger work of penetrating
comprehension. Beethovan’s fifth symphony receives little illumination
from program notes pedantically informing us that the “fate motif” is a
borrowed phrase.
Here and there a reaction against an exaggerated reiteration of literary
influences has driven critics into the school of those who prefer to
approach literature as a “pure” art. Such critics seem to justify their
doctrine when they confine their analysis to the more transcendental
passages of Shakespeare or Keats, Catullus or Sophocles. When dealing,
however, with Dante, Goethe, Vergil, Milton, and in fact with most poets
of generous social sympathies, they give a very inadequate account of
the poetic product. Modern aesthetics have been teaching us how warm
with subjective interpretation is that thing we call beauty. Apparently
there is no such thing, even in poetry, as pure, objective, absolute art
uniformly sustained. In fact no school of criticism has as yet formulated
a doctrine wide enough to compass the broad ranges of artistic creation,
nor need we expect an adequate science of aesthetics unless psychology
can become scientific.
The protest on the part of one vociferous school of humanists that
literary criticism must disregard history and biography is beside the
mark so long as our prying minds insist on prying. Contemporaneous
literature, of course, deserves first of all to be approached with the
aesthetic perceptions all alert, and since the reader lives in the same
world as the writer the scant exegesis that may be necessary can be
absorbed unconsciously from the text itself. But any great literature of
the far past becomes to us, in so far as we are normal humans, something
besides art. It is also a body of documents that anyone at all interested
in the progress of art, of ideas, or of society in any of its groupings,
may find very precious, and he will persist in using it as documentary
despite all the protests of jealous literary criticism. For Greece
and Rome our documents are none too abundant in any case. It is a very
petty humanism that dares insist that no one may touch Vergil or Spenser
except and only for aesthetic delight and judgments. It is of course
wholly legitimate to read Dante for his haunting lines and his stupendous
imagery, but many of us insist on the added privilege of transporting
ourselves into his mysterious world of strange ideas if only to read him
as did his contemporaries. The true humanist in any case is interested
in more than artistic expression, and the humanist who deals with remote
literature must be, perforce.
It is of course only fair to say that in calling attention to milieu we
would not deny that the innate endowment of each author is and must be
considered the prime factor in creative work, while admitting that it
may be the most elusive item to analyze. Modern biology insists upon the
reality of inheritance, though it also warns us that this inheritance is
so complex that it has hitherto escaped analysis and predetermination.
We all admit that the study of social or literary atmosphere or of
individual training will not explain the passionate force of Catullus,
the voluble humor of Plautus, or Cicero’s ear for harmony of sound.
However, like Horace in his _Ars Poetica_, we can do little but admit
the facts, recognize the qualities, and proceed to the study of the
provocative stimuli.
Moreover, there are special reasons for attempting to place Roman writers
in their environment. One is that the evidence regarding the status
of Roman society is so scant and so scattered that the casual reader
cannot be expected to have a correct understanding of it, and even the
specialist is apt to neglect the severe task of reconstructing the
social staging. As a result the literary history of the classics too
often leaves us with the incorrect feeling that we have there only cold
impersonal conventions.
Another is that the milieu is so different from our own that the
imagination when left unguarded is in danger of modernizing ancient life
and ancient expression to such an extent as to distort both scenery and
actors. This is not questioning the fact that the Greeks and Romans
were precisely like us. Their bodies had the same capacities, needs,
and passions as ours, their senses received impressions as ours, their
brains met problems by the same logical processes as ours, despite the
amusing claim of the pragmatists that they are just now teaching the
true art of “operational thinking.” In these respects the advanced races
seem to have reached full development very far back in prehistoric
times, many millenia before Homer. The pseudo-anthropology which a
few years ago assumed that the study of Hottentot psychology might be
useful to the student of Plato joked itself off the stage. The critics
who tried to persuade us that the romantic sentiment came into being
less than a thousand years ago seem equally ludicrous now. We need not
repeat the egregious error of Spengler in confounding mental capacities
with temporary conventions of expression that tried to respond to
environmental need.
But while granting that human nature was then what it is now, it is
important to comprehend the diversity of the customs, fashions,
traditions, conventions, and social needs which evoked an appropriate
artistic expression that consequently differs from our own. Love and
hate doubtless stirred very similar physical sensations in Catullus, in
Dante, and in Tennyson, but the words which these three poets used to
express those emotions in verses published for their own readers have
very different connotations, because the conventions of their respective
periods called for a different series of suppressions and revelations.
None of the three can be translated directly into the language of any of
the others without evoking erroneous impressions. The pagan directness
of Catullus’ lines, the Platonic connotations of the _Nuova Vita_, the
Christian romanticism of Tennyson are worlds apart, not because the
human being changes but because his environment does. The devotees of
nudity who know only the idiom of their own day may accuse Thackeray of
hypocrisy because they have not learned to translate him; but that is
not literary criticism. Those who miss in Latin poetry the delight in
the outburst of spring-time song and color common in medieval poetry
from north of the Alps have been prone to assume a temperamental lack in
the classical poet, whereas the simple explanation may be that in the
north spring brings a sense of release that is hardly realized in Latium
where roses linger on till January when the new crocuses and wind-flowers
start into blossom. The love of the sea was hardly to be expected till
seafaring became fairly safe; the discovery of the compass has a place in
the history of romanticism. The romantic enthusiasm for rugged mountain
landscape could hardly arise in poets who knew only the placid hills
of Italy and to whom the high Alps were known chiefly as the haunts of
barbaric bandits.
Accurate interpretation of any author of the past, therefore, implies a
complete migration into the time, the society, and the environment of
that author. And herein lies the necessity of attempting the difficult
task of placing the literary figures which we wish to discuss in their
setting. In this first chapter, therefore, I shall attempt to sketch in
outline the social changes that need to be kept in mind for the more
detailed study of some of the writers of the Republican period.
Rome’s beginnings in self-expression are not so fascinating as those of
Greece. The Greeks somehow outstripped all competitors. In mental vigor,
in imaginative creativeness, in sureness of taste, they seem to have
reached a point 2500 years ago that the more advanced of modern racial
groups are still hoping to attain. The sudden flowering of literature
as soon as the capacities of the recording art were realized can only
be comprehended on the assumption that singing, reciting, narrating,
and disputing had proceeded for ages among their ancestors before
the alphabet came into use. One may readily imagine that some of the
ancestors of the Greeks discussed the “idea of good” around the cavern
fire thousands of years before Plato. Brains of that capacity do not
suddenly pullulate. Language as supple and rich as Homer’s presupposes
ages of keen perceiving and precise talking. But what conclusions those
cavemen philosophers reached vanished with the smoke of the hearth fire
because no man recorded them. The tale of what the Greek imagination
accomplished after it could operate on accumulated records is one the
like of which we shall probably never hear again.
Rome’s story is less startling, must perforce be, since like ours, it was
subsequent. One does not discover the North Pole or Betelgeuse twice.
When the Romans reached the stage of self-consciousness, when they felt
the desire to express themselves they found in well-nigh perfect mold
the natural forms of expression, developed with sure taste by the Greeks
out of song, dance, march-hymn, devotional prayer, dirge, entertaining
narrative, or mimic representation. Song, drama, and dialogue are
inevitable forms, given human nature, and the forms were at hand and
were taken over by the Latins, as they were once more by the Italians at
the end of medieval days, when learning disclosed the worth of Rome’s
literature.
Rome’s literature made generous use of that of Greece. How much time
it saved by entering into such an inheritance we do not know. How much
vigor and realism it lost by yielding to the overwhelming persuasion
of Greek writers we cannot say. Dante and Petrarch drank from Latin to
the point of quickening creation, too many others to the point of dazed
intoxication. There were times when the Latin authors also drank too
deeply. But what was important was that just when the first contact
was made the Romans had reached the mental maturity and developed the
capacity to comprehend and use. There were many other peoples of the
same period on whom Greek culture was wholly lost because they were
incapable of appreciating it. The Phrygians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians,
Galatians, Armenians, half a dozen Thracian tribes, Syrians, Egyptians,
Sicilians, Carthaginians, Oscans, Umbrians, Etruscans, Celts, Iberians,
and a score of other tribes contemporaneous with the Romans, and in
outward appearances of about the same stage of culture, came into
direct contact with the Greeks, some for a much longer period and more
intimately than the Latins, and yet they remained unfruitful in literary
production. The Romans in fact were the only folk of the scores of
neighbors of Greece that as a nation assimilated and worthily carried on
the new-found culture.
What were the Romans like at that time—at the beginning of contact with
the older Greeks in the middle of the third century B.C.? They were a
small group of a few hundred thousand souls, one group of several that
had emerged from barbarous central Europe and pushed their way into Italy
in search for land, and they had long plodded on in silence at the dull
task of making the soil provide food. For a while they had been subdued
by the Etruscans, but taught by their conquerors to use arms in strong
masses, they had applied this lesson by driving off their oppressors
and re-establishing their old independent town meetings, returning
again to the tilling of the soil. A prolific and puritanic folk with
a strict social morality they outgrew their boundaries and began to
expand. In the contests that resulted the Romans came off the victors.
In organizing the adjacent tribes into a federal union they revealed
a peculiar liberalism—unmatched anywhere among the barbarians of that
day—by abstaining from the exaction of tribute; they also betrayed an
imagination of high quality in the invention of cooperative leagues, and
unusual capacity for legal logic in the shaping of municipal and civic
forms. The inventiveness of the barbarian federation-builders of the last
fifty years of the fourth century B.C. still commands the admiration
of historians, even though all this work was done silently and with
so little consciousness of its high quality that no one even thought
of keeping a record of it. One does well not to call such a people
unimaginative.
To be sure the Latins apparently had few myths or fairy tales, such as
have arisen to aid literary effort in certain other regions. Perhaps a
penchant for silent doing, a respect for logic and fact may be posited to
explain this lack—though such an explanation merely begs the question. We
still do not know what is meant by the inheritance of mental qualities.
What “myth-making” is we also do not know.
In Greece, where myths grew everywhere to clothe poetic invention, we
know at least that the migrant tribes had come in and inherited from the
peoples of the Aegean world scores of anthropomorphic deities and heroes
that in time aggregated into cycles of more or less related groups.
Hittite heroes emerge as Greek gods and Cretan gods as Greek heroes.
I do not mean to imply that accident explains all of Greek mythology,
for the Greeks enjoyed tales and preserved them. But where the early
contacts of the Greeks were fortunate, those of the Romans were not. The
Romans on their arrival in central Italy knew no deities in personal
form about which tales could gather, and when anthropomorphism came it
was imposed by the Etruscans in connection with deities that were never
wholly assimilated. The Romans stepped almost from primitive animism to
sophistication, and presently to skepticism, and that experience denied
them the poetic pabulum which has always been the most envigorating in
early art.
Of primitive vocal expression in artistic form at Rome we know but
little. It was as thoroughly obliterated by the onrush of Greek as was
the native English epic and lyric by the Norman conquest; indeed more,
since, not being written, it vanished, while the old English material
survived at least in part in dusty archives. Old Romans later said they
remembered having heard heroic ballads, and we believe them because the
first Hellenizers found a native ballad meter (the Saturnian) which was
so well established that they could use it for a translation of the
Odyssey and for a native epic. Non-Romans like Livius and Naevius[1]
would not have employed the Saturnian verse unless the popular ear had
been accustomed to it and demanded it. There were also religious songs
accompanied by dancing. A fragment of one of these songs in honor of
Mars has survived in a late copy of an early ritual. In Greece a similar
ritualistic song had the good fortune of being addressed to Dionysus, a
more genial deity, and it seems to have developed into the dithyramb and
ultimately gave rise to the drama. On Mars, however, poetry was wasted.
Of a primitive drama we have a vigorous tradition. Simple comic farces
were in existence in the village festivals both north and south of
Rome—and likely enough at Rome too, though the city preferred to forget
its primitive amusements as it grew into a metropolis. Unfortunately the
tradition regarding the early Latin drama was vitiated by some early
quasi-scholar—apparently Accius—who mingled futile hearsay with a line or
two of an early record about Etruscan dancers and with the Aristotelian
theory of how Greek drama grew up.[2] He mis-called this putative drama
by the name _satura_. His story unfortunately became orthodox and
displaced what might otherwise have survived of a truer tradition. The
story is attributed to the year 364 B.C., a time at which no historical
records were kept except for the dates and occasions of official priestly
sacrifices. That is to say, the story is not worth repeating because it
is attributed to a date when no records were kept of such events. All we
know is that towns not far from Rome—and therefore presumably Rome as
well—had simple drama before Livius began to translate Greek plays.
Such were the germs of the lyric, epic, and drama, vital and capable
of growth when and if the times should be favorable. But what is a
favorable time? Why, for instance, had not literature come to life among
others of the countless tribes about the Mediterranean except the Greeks
and Hebrews? I ask, not to answer, but to emphasize the riddle. At Rome
a few individuals were emerging from the group, the group was itself
breaking out of its boundaries, but experiences were still modest. The
citizens were chiefly quiet hard-working farmers who owned and tilled
their plots; there was no seafaring commerce that brought tales of
adventure from foreign lands, no colonizing beyond the seas, no traveling
to foreign parts to bring the Latins a sense of awareness of their own
place in the world. Society, as in any democracy where customs of the
ruling clique are accepted by the rest, was passing through no strenuous
changes, and no religious teacher from beyond the border was entering to
shake tradition.
Then, in the third century B.C., came a very remarkable experience: the
first great war with Carthage, fought for twenty-three years in Sicily,
the victories of which compelled the whole civilized world of the day to
recognize the existence of this hitherto unknown people and to invent
plausible pedigrees for it. The construction of the first fleet and the
sudden defeat of the greatest navy on the seas must have aroused the
Romans to self-consciousness, as the Crusades aroused the French and the
defeat of the Spanish Armada awakened Elizabethan England. This discovery
of the Romans that they existed—that they were being watched and
discussed—stirred them into a critical attitude about themselves. They
saw that importance in the eyes of others implied expectations. And they
discovered that, by the definition of the Greeks, they were barbarians
and that the designation was deserved. They set about to learn avidly and
to enter into the cultural occupations of the more advanced Greeks.
The first Messala, who had liberated Messana in the second year of the
war, imported a painter to depict his victories on the walls of the
senate house at Rome. Duilius who had defeated the Punic Armada was voted
an honorary column with a long inscription modeled on the most verbose
Sicilian laudations. But these are only some of the superficial effects
of the new contacts. The Roman youth serving in Sicily was learning much
more. Since the war lasted twenty-three years and since it required the
services of practically all the able-bodied young men of Rome, these
youths, who encamped some six years each in and about the Greek towns of
Sicily, carried home an abundance of impressions that meant much for the
future of Rome. There can be little doubt that the tragedies of Euripides
and the comedies of Menander were still being played at Syracuse and even
in the smaller towns. Indeed Sicily had dramatic writers for many years
after Athens had ceased to produce them. Mimes had long been a specialty
of Sicily, and Theocritus was still writing them. Rhinton, for a while
residing at Syracuse, was producing his farcical parodies of tragedies.
Songs, too, tragical, comical, and sentimental were being sung with
gestures, with dance and musical accompaniment on the variety stage of
Sicilian towns. It was doubtless to satisfy the desires of soldiers who
had seen these things that Roman officials immediately after the war
introduced the production of Greek tragedies and comedies as a regular
feature of the Roman festival. That all important date for Roman and
world literature is 240 B.C.
With the war and pride in victory came also the need to write the
nation’s history in enduring form. In Sicily the Romans had discovered
that they had become the object of wide observation. The Greeks,
not knowing how to explain the amazing power of this small group of
barbarians, had invented the legend that they must be a remnant of the
Trojans. That legend had already found a place in the history of the
Sicilian Timaeus, and the Sicilian city of Segesta, which claimed a
similar pedigree, had made haste to assert cousinship with Rome, thus
winning a favorable alliance with the victors. A pedigree at once so
flattering to the Romans and so useful could hardly be disregarded. In
less than a generation it came to be the accepted story at Rome—and
Naevius, comprehending its literary purport, set out to write the epic
of Rome with this legend as his preface. Rome had become conscious and
expressive, the third of the western peoples to begin literary creation.
But progress in art is slow. In Greece there was a long silence after
Homer. In England there were vast wastes with a few narrow garden spots
in the five centuries between _Beowulf_ and Chaucer. Rome had a scanty
population of hard-working citizens constantly being recruited for war.
After the First Punic War there were frequent conflicts with Ligurians,
Celts, and Illyrians. Then in 218 B.C. came the dreaded invasion of
Hannibal. Every able-bodied man took up arms. The devastation of crops,
the neglect of fields, the burden of taxes, the distressing gloom brought
by a succession of defeats precluded all progress in literature. Only the
theater continued to give one or two performances a year to grace the
religious festivals.
In the middle of this war, in order to keep the Macedonian king from
aiding Hannibal, Rome had entered a Greek coalition of states which
were at enmity with Philip of Macedonia, and had thus come into close
contact with Athens. When, therefore, the Greek states later appealed
for aid to save democracy, a strong “philhellenism,” aroused by such
contacts and no less by the influence of Euripides and Menander on the
Roman stage, brought about Rome’s entrance into the Second Macedonian
War.[3] Several men at Rome began (doubtless with the aid of secretaries)
to write Roman histories in the Greek language. This does not mean
that many Romans could read Greek with ease. It expressed, in a way, a
desire that the cultured world should have some knowledge of what this
“barbaric” state was accomplishing, and it was a gesture of deference to
the one literature then known in the civilized world. Ennius also began
to introduce such Greek prose works as he thought the people were ready
for, the saws of “Epicharmus” and the cynical theology of Euhemerus.
The directest result of philhellenism on literature was the demand for
a closer approach to Greek models in the drama. Ennius’ tragedies seem
to have restored the Greek chorus, while in comedy men like Luscius
and Terence presently vied with each other in claiming to be faithful
translators of the Greeks.
In the early decades of the second century it appeared to some observers
that Greek literature was about to overwhelm Rome. The younger nobility,
led by Scipio Africanus, Flamininus, and their friends, was willing to
employ all of Rome’s man power and resources for the liberation of the
Greeks from Macedonian rule, and when the Seleucid kingdom began to take
advantage of the defeat of Philip and to subjugate the Greek cities of
the Anatolian coast, these Romans challenged the great king with the
ultimatum: “No Greek shall ever again anywhere be subject to foreign
rule.” Never has sentimentalism gone farther in foreign politics. It
would not be an overstatement to find in the plays of Euripides produced
in translation on the Roman stage the chief factor in this unreasonable
wave of enthusiasm for a foreign cause.
But this love of things Greek—which resembles the English enthusiasm for
French culture in the Restoration—overshot its mark. The armies that
served in Greece and in Asia Minor learned foreign ways too rapidly and
brought back too much. Livy (39.6), in a passage which accomplishes its
purpose by a sarcastic juxtaposition of incongruous items, tells of the
loaded trucks that the returning armies brought home.
There were couches with bronze frames, precious spreads,
tapestries and other textiles, and whatever rare furniture
could be found; tables with single supports and marble
sideboards. Then it was that the Romans began to employ girls
who danced and played bagpipes, and posturing houris to
entertain guests at dinner. And the dinners were given with
delicate care and expense. Cooks, who had formerly been the
cheapest of servants, now gave way to expensive chefs, and a
slave’s task came to be considered an art.
We have no remains of houses of this period at Rome, but at Pompeii,
which went through the same transformation because that seaport town
profited by the commerce which Roman armies opened up in the east, we
still may see the effects on architectural decoration initiated by this
new reverence for things Greek. The lofty atrium of the houses of “Pansa”
and “Sallust,” roofed on splendid columns, the Basilica, the theater,
and several temples about the Pompeian forum show what that contact
with Greece meant to Italian architecture in the second century. Fresco
painting had not yet come in, and it is likely that few houses used
for wall decoration the oriental hangings mentioned by Livy. But the
exquisite Alexander mosaic found in the “House of Pansa” reveals what
domestic decoration could be, and the best furniture that has been found
at Pompeii is made on patterns introduced from the Hellenized east at
that time. In general, though not in all details, we can draw upon the
second-century houses of Pompeii for a picture of a few at least of the
new Hellenistic palaces that must have been erected at Rome after the
Macedonian wars.
To complete the sketch we must also recall that this philhellenism was
at first favorable toward eastern cults. The mystic cult of Bacchus, for
instance, which apparently had its origin among the slaves brought to
Rome from Tarentum and Locri during the last days of the Second Punic
War,[4] was for several years allowed to spread undisturbed because so
many of Rome’s citizens had become accustomed to such things in Greece
and Asia. With all these changes came also a laxity in manners and
customs. Young men began to keep companions openly in the Greek manner.
The Greek tutors engaged to teach young men Greek literature, rhetoric,
and philosophy did not always inculcate respect for old Roman customs.
In the Roman family, where woman enjoyed a freedom not known in Greece,
new ideas of morality began to affect women as well as men, and since
marriage was a contract and not a religious sacrament, bonds were easily
loosened and divorces came to be of frequent occurrence. The reflection
of these experiences we may observe faintly in the later plays of Plautus
and abundantly in the earlier togatae.
All this resulted of course in a severe reaction not unlike the puritanic
wave that swept over England after the catalysis of Elizabethan
prosperity. Cato supported by many of the conservative nobles undertook
to lead the revolt against philhellenism on every possible score. He
attacked the foreign policy of the Scipios, which in his opinion wasted
Rome’s youth and resources without compensation for a sentimental cause,
and the Scipionic group was accordingly stripped of political power.
He attacked the returning generals for permitting the soldiers to be
debauched by Greek vices; he directed an attack against the Bacchanalian
cult till the senate passed a bill inflicting the death penalty upon
those who persisted in furthering the cult; he used all the power of his
censorship to degrade senators who had yielded to new customs and to
conduct a rigid examination of the plate, furniture, and table expenses
of his opponents.
Of course this drastic reform movement could not stop the cultural
changes that were bound to come. Skepticism and sophistication can hardly
be banished by legislation and law courts; but the outward signs of the
new culture were for a season obscured. There is no doubt that Greek
literature became less popular in the latter days of Cato. Such books
as the “Sacred History” of Euhemerus were not again translated for a
long time. Those who wished to read Greek poetry and philosophy had to
confine themselves for many years to the originals; to put those things
into Latin, to translate, paraphrase, or to write similar things in
Latin, was not encouraged. Greek rhetoric might still be taught for the
comprehension of Greek authors, but to put the Greek rules of rhetoric
into Latin for general use was frowned upon. Greek tragedy in Roman
adaptations—by Ennius and Pacuvius—had been established at the festivals
so long that they remained, and, as adapted to the moral tone of the
Romans by those dramatists, there could be little objection to them.
But the efforts begun by Scipio Africanus to encourage such plays by
making them as inviting as possible to senators bore little fruit. The
permanent theater, for which a contract had been let by the censors ten
years after Cato’s crusade, was not completed, and when another effort
was made to complete it twenty years later the senate had it torn down.
Translated Greek comedies were still permitted at the festivals, but it
was necessary to indicate that the scene was Greek and not Roman. Latin
comedies, togatae—from our point of view not a whit better in morals—then
came into fashion. To draw the crowd the authors were permitted a certain
freedom of expression but here at least the vices were Roman and hence
pardonable.
Such were the effects of the puritanic, anti-Greek reaction supported
by Cato. It doubtless did some harm to the drama by precluding the
official recognition that might have encouraged better workmanship; it
cast a shadow of disapproval over the more delicate forms of literature
which were associated in thought with Greece; it must bear some of the
blame for the fact that the century after Cato is a period of prosaic
nationalistic literature in which no man of real genius appears.
Direct contact with the decadent Greeks of the day soon destroyed the
sentimental respect that the great literature of classical Greece had
created.
Meanwhile, however, a social change was in progress which eventually
affected literary production and the literary market at many points,
and particularly the drama and prose. I refer especially to the silent
movement which before the end of the second century had largely
eliminated the free middle classes, substituting for them a slave
economy of unusual proportions. When the Second Punic War began, though
there were not a few rich nobles who lived in the city enjoying the
fruits of country estates, the majority of the citizens were land-owning,
working farmers of the type that we have known so well in our central
and western states. At that time there was much free farm labor. Slave
labor was also used to some extent, but since these slaves were usually
of Italic race and thinly distributed they were well treated, indeed
they were regarded as members of the family, as was customary with farm
hands among the pioneers of our west. Such slaves usually were put in the
way of some property with which they could buy their freedom; and with
freedom came full citizenship.
The Second Punic War was the beginning of the end of this simple economy.
Many small farmers went to the wall, farm labor became scarce because
of the heavy casualties in the war. Hence investors often combined many
small farms into large estates. At the end of the war, also, commissions
were appointed by the State to draw in vast tracts that had been
recovered from the Punic occupation in the south, and as colonists did
not suffice for the settlement of these tracts much remained public land
to be rented out in large estates for grazing. At the end of the war and
during the next fifty years, hordes of war captives were brought to the
block at Rome: Carthaginians, Iberians of Spain, Sardinians, Celts of the
Po Valley, Macedonians, Illyrians, and Asiatics, and also many slaves
that Greek owners were glad to sell on an expanding western market.
These were bought cheaply, placed on the large estates and on ranches.
With cheap labor it was possible to go into olive and vine culture and
extensive cattle-raising. And with this capitalistic exploiting the small
farmers found it difficult to compete. Many gave up the contest and moved
to Cisalpine Gaul or overseas. The middle class of free folk began to
dwindle. The few who knew how to adapt themselves to the new conditions
acquired estates and lived in luxury. Naturally the hordes of slaves
increased rapidly. In the cities also the slaves were increasing and
driving out free labor, and they were slaves of foreign stock. Trained
up to hard labor and an easy unconcern for morals, these slaves when
they gained their freedom got the petty industries and shops in their
control, and the citizen poor found it difficult to survive. This was a
thoroughgoing social change that progressed silently and steadily through
the second century and caused the Gracchi to launch a revolution in their
vain attempt to bring back the conditions of a century before.
These changes—which in some respects remind us of conditions in our
southern states before 1860—necessarily affected artistic production.
At dramatic performances on Roman holidays the audience was of course
gradually changing in type and quality and by no means for the better.
The audiences to which public speeches were addressed—the speeches that
had so much to do with shaping Latin prose style—were not the same in
Caesar’s day as in Cato’s. And in view of the dwindling of the middle
class, the class which usually provides the larger number of authors,
we cannot be surprised if the dilettante production of the aristocratic
writers and the hack work of servile producers fill a considerable space
in the history of the late Republic. It is generally recognized, I think,
that in our southern states between 1800 and 1860 literature fared badly,
despite the orthodox argument that the existence of slave drudges gave
leisure to genius to develop the nobler arts. Parasitic leisure has
seldom employed its talents in artistic production.
This is one side of the social picture of the second century B.C.—the
cheapening of the theatrical audiences at Rome which compelled a
cheapening of the spectacles produced for them. At the same time,
however, there was a rapid expanding beyond Rome of a reading public that
spread with the gradual advance of the Latin language throughout Italy.
For while in Cato’s lifetime Latin was read only in Latium and in a few
colonies, in Sulla’s day the language was understood and used in almost
every part of Italy from the Alps to the Greek cities of the southern
coast. Hence while dramatic production was deteriorating in the theater
at Rome, the non-dramatic literature of published books was winning an
ever larger circle of readers. Furthermore, there was at the same time
a deepening of cultural interests in the ruling class; for the nobles
were becoming aware of their responsibilities as participants in world
affairs, were finding a sounder education for their sons, were acquiring
libraries and beginning to encourage literary effort. And since the
nobles were constantly engaged in public service, their influence told
especially in the field of history and forensic prose. This was in fact
the period in which Rome’s prose expression developed into a magnificent
art.
This is a very brief sketch of the social changes that especially concern
the student of republican literature, the details of which we shall
try to notice more adequately when we reach the precise problems of
each period. To the direct literary influence of specific Greek authors
we need only refer at present, for that is less intangible and has
frequently been discussed. That influence must not be minimized, for the
Romans were generally as devoted to their predecessors as the Italians of
the Renaissance were to the Romans, and the English Elizabethans were to
the Italians, and they were as frank in acknowledging their debt. If this
were a full history of Republican literature, we should have to give very
many of its pages to an estimate of the Greek influences.
On the large question of what is called the racial character that is
supposed to emerge in Rome’s literature, I am convinced that it is too
early to speak. Roman political, social, and religious behavior seem
at times to justify the assumption of a certain homogeneity of mental
and emotional traits in the Romans. Archaeology does not refute this
assumption, for it sustains the view that the ancestral tribes invaded
Italy in compact groups that may well have preserved inherited characters
for a long period. Again the very fact that the Latin language had fairly
well retained its very fragile declensional endings—which Latin lost
quickly in the folk-mixture of the middle ages—would lend support to the
theory that those tribes had long lived in groups relatively compact.
Finally, anthropology seems ready to assume that in the later stone ages,
before Europe was thickly settled by agrarians and before the arts of
agriculture induced folk-movements in search of land, there was a slow
emergence of several diverse peoples in different regions of Europe who,
by processes of elimination and adaptation, had attained to what may
fairly be called distinct racial peculiarities.[5] It is, therefore,
scientific enough to assume the possibility of Latin or Italic traits
of character, as distinguished, for instance, from Hellenic, Iberic, or
Celtic.
During the Republic there is a certain similarity between the Catos,
Fabii, Claudii, Metelli, Scipios, and the rest. From such men we expect
prudence rather than speed of thought, a respect for courage rather than
dash, for puritanic conduct rather than for unconventionality. We know
them as generals who stuck at a campaign “if it took all summer,” or many
summers, as soldiers who refused to acknowledge defeat, as administrators
who were sympathetic and patient with provincials but merciless to the
disobedient, as lawmakers gifted with the knack of seeing the vital point
at issue and reaching it in blunt phrases. They could be counted upon for
sanity, stability, patience, and thoroughness. They expressed themselves
better in architecture than in sculpture or painting; their lyricists and
musicians were not numerous. They enjoyed comedy but it must be quick
and pointed rather than subtle. They were peculiarly fond of tragedy
but the theme must have dignity and purpose. Above all they loved good
sound prose, in the histories of their nation told in periods worthy of
the subject or in the long roll of the organ-voiced orator in the senate
house.
It would, however, be misleading to stress these facts, which are more
patent in public, social, and religious activity than in art. During the
republic at least the literature is experimental, and it reveals many
diverse tendencies, some of which did not survive in the Augustan day.
While tragedy sought to continue the traditions of the best classical
Greek work, it chose as its model the Euripidean tragedy with its more
modern humanism rather than the older drama whose problems seemed to
them archaic. Responding also to the social ideals of a more normal
domestic life than old Greece possessed, Roman tragedy was somewhat more
romantic in theme, and it broke up the Greek form in order to admit a
larger space for the newer music. Comedy on the other hand neglected the
Aristophanic type completely, building upon the social plays of Menander
and his contemporaries. Rome took patriotism too seriously to care to
have policies of state and august consuls ridiculed upon the stage. Yet
the delicate art of Menander was not the goal of writers like Naevius
and Plautus. His scrupulous respect for words, his fastidious striving
toward a quiet contemplative expression of emotion, his insistence
upon form, that directed its art toward the reader long after the first
performance was forgotten, had made him more genuinely classic in effect
than Aristophanes. The Roman dramatist wrote for a single performance,
where effects must be translucent and immediate to an audience that was
used to the robust fun of homemade plays. Plautus has no connections with
rigorously classical ideals. He cares for spontaneous, natural, paganly
human laughter.
The Roman lyric of the Republic also rejects classification. Before the
Greek lyric reached Rome the great singers of Greece had already been
forgotten by decadent Athens as thoroughly as seventeenth-century England
had forgotten Chaucer. When the Romans began to study lyrical forms they
apparently did not even hear the names of Sappho and Alcaeus; they were
told about the dainty epigrams of Alexandria, and they began to copy
these. Aedituus and Laevius might as well have lived at Samos. Catullus
at first fed on the same fare, but one stirring experience set him free.
Thereafter he wrote songs that no Greek could have claimed. They have
the lilt, beauty, and precision of his models, but a natural freedom, a
lucidity, and a convincing passion that make the epigrams of the Garland
seem lucubratory. They obviously spring out of a society that is less
artificial and out of a life that grows in a young world.
Lucretius again refuses to fall into a conventional pattern. He has
no standards, no proportions, no models. The early Greeks had staidly
versified science so that it might easily be memorized. That was not
Lucretius’ purpose. Alexandrians had versified science again because
the interest in the subject had become general. Lucretius wrote for a
public that had cared little for science, but he wrote with the zeal of
a prophet because he could not keep silent, and his voice was heard. His
work has no unity, no controlling plan or single mood. He hurls his bald
facts, his images, his logic, and his pleas indiscriminately. There is
nothing else in Greece or Rome like him. And so we might go on.
What are the Romans of the republic? When we read their political history
we feel a unity of spirit and are prone to say that we understand them.
This may be because of a certain racial trait or perhaps because a
certain limited aristocracy set the traditions early which became so
binding that political activity followed the _mos majorum_. But the men
who entered literature were not of one class nor did they express the
ideals of any one group. They came out of different strata of different
localities and spoke for different mores. Whatever we may say we must
admit that the really personal literature of the republic was neither
conformist nor monotonous, neither Greek nor classical in spirit. It was
frankly experimental, but it always proves to reflect some phase of Roman
life.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The tradition regarding early bards can be traced to the elder Cato.
It is therefore not contaminated by the scholastic traditions which later
vitiated the story of the drama.
[2] See Hendrickson, “A Pre-Varronian Chapter of Roman Literary History,”
_Am. Jour. Phil._, 1898, 285. Of the famous chapter in Livy (VII, 2) I
should attribute only a scanty line regarding the Etruscan ludii to the
_Annales Maximi_. The rest is unreliable reconstruction, since it refers
to a period that antedates historical records by over a century. Many
attempts have been made to enucleate the kernel of a dramatic history
from the passage, but no one who has dealt with the historical sources of
the fourth century can accept such attempts.
[3] Historians who read only Polybius and Livy persist in denying that
philhellenism was a factor in Roman politics. If they will but study the
fragments of early Roman poetry they will emend their histories.
[4] See _Class. Quarterly_, 1927, 128.
[5] History has nothing to do with racial types classified by cranial
measurements, for such typology deals with races that were mixed scores
of thousands of years ago. The so-called Mediterranean, Alpine, and
Nordic groups have for ages inherited the mixed nervous systems of
each and all. The typology that concerns the historians of the ancient
Mediterranean world is rather one of temperament and the various types
grew out of segregated groups that shaped themselves during the few
thousands of years that preceded the great European migrations of the
second millenium B.C.