"Here for a cent is a drink,
Two cents brings something still better.
Four cents in all, if you pay,
Wine of Falernum is yours."
It must have been a lineal descendant of one of the parasites of Plautus
who wrote:[75]
"A barbarian he is to me
At whose house I'm not asked to dine."
Here is a sentiment which sounds very modern:
"The common opinion is this:
That property should be divided."[76]
This touch of modernity reminds one of another group of verses which
brings antiquity into the closest possible touch with some present-day
practices. The Romans, like ourselves, were great travellers and
sightseers, and the marvels of Egypt in particular appealed to them, as
they do to us, with irresistible force. Above all, the great statue of
Memnon, which gave forth a strange sound when it was struck by the first
rays of the rising sun, drew travellers from far and near. Those of us who
know the Mammoth Cave, Niagara Falls, the Garden of the Gods, or some
other of our natural wonders, will recall how fond a certain class of
visitors are of immortalizing themselves by scratching their names or a
sentiment on the walls or the rocks which form these marvels. Such
inscriptions We find on the temple walls in Egypt--three of them appear
on the statue of Memnon, recording in verse the fact that the writers had
visited the statue and heard the voice of the god at sunrise. One of these
Egyptian travellers, a certain Roman lady journeying up the Nile, has
scratched these verses on a wall of the temple at Memphis:[77]
"The pyramids without thee have I seen,
My brother sweet, and yet, as tribute sad,
The bitter tears have poured adown my cheek,
And sadly mindful of thy absence now
I chisel here this melancholy note."
Then follow the name and titles of the absent brother, who is better known
to posterity from these scribbled lines of a Cook's tourist than from any
official records which have come down to us. All of these pieces of
popular poetry which we have been discussing thus far were engraved on
stone, bronze, stucco, or on some other durable material. A very few bits
of this kind of verse, from one to a half dozen lines in length, have come
down to us in literature. They have the unique distinction, too, of being
specimens of Roman folk poetry, and some of them are found in the most
unlikely places. Two of them are preserved by a learned commentator on
the Epistles of Horace. They carry us back to our school-boy days. When we
read
"The plague take him who's last to reach me,"[78]
we can see the Roman urchin standing in the market-place, chanting the
magic formula, and opposite him the row of youngsters on tiptoe, each one
waiting for the signal to run across the intervening space and be the
first to touch their comrade. What visions of early days come back to
us--days when we clasped hands in a circle and danced about one or two
children placed in the centre of the ring, and chanted in unison some
refrain, upon reading in the same commentator to Horace a ditty which
runs:[79]
"King shall you be
If you do well.
If you do ill
You shall not be."
The other bits of Roman folk poetry which we have are most of them
preserved by Suetonius, the gossipy biographer of the Cæsars. They recall
very different scenes. Cæsar has returned in triumph to Rome, bringing in
his train the trousered Gauls, to mingle on the street with the toga-clad
Romans. He has even had the audacity to enroll some of these strange
peoples in the Roman senate, that ancient body of dignity and convention,
and the people chant in the streets the ditty:[80]
"Cæsar leads the Gauls in triumph,
In the senate too he puts them.
Now they've donned the broad-striped toga
And have laid aside their breeches."
Such acts as these on Cæsar's part led some political versifier to write
on Cæsar's statue a couplet which contrasted his conduct with that of the
first great republican, Lucius Brutus:
"Brutus drove the kings from Rome,
And first consul thus became.
This man drove the consuls out,
And at last became the king."[81]
We may fancy that these verses played no small part in spurring on Marcus
Brutus to emulate his ancestor and join the conspiracy against the
tyrant. With one more bit of folk poetry, quoted by Suetonius, we may
bring our sketch to an end. Germanicus Cæsar, the flower of the imperial
family, the brilliant general and idol of the people, is suddenly stricken
with a mortal illness. The crowds throng the streets to hear the latest
news from the sick-chamber of their hero. Suddenly the rumor flies through
the streets that the crisis is past, that Germanicus will live, and the
crowds surge through the public squares chanting:
"Saved now is Rome,
Saved too the land,
Saved our Germanicus."[82]