It is easy to form a general conception of the aspect which under

such economic conditions the social relations must have assumed;

but to follow out in detail the increase of luxury, of prices, of

fastidiousness and frivolity is neither pleasant nor instructive.

Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed the main object with

all, among the parvenus as well as among the Licinii and Metelli;

not the polished luxury which is the acme of civilization, but

that sort of luxury which had developed itself amidst the decaying

Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded

everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration

and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise

punctiliousness, rendering it equally nauseous to the man of fresh

feeling as to the man of fresh intellect. As to the popular

festivals, the importation of transmarine wild beasts prohibited

in the time of Cato(48) was, apparently about the middle of this

century, formally permitted anew by a decree of the burgesses

proposed by Gnaeus Aufidius; the effect of which was, that animal-

hunts came into enthusiastic favour and formed a chief feature of

the burgess-festivals. Several lions first appeared in the Roman

arena about 651, the first elephants about 655; Sulla when praetor

exhibited a hundred lions in 661. The same holds true of

gladiatorial games. If the forefathers had publicly exhibited

representations of great battles, their grandchildren began to

do the same with their gladiatorial games, and by means of such

leading or state performances of the age to make themselves a

laughing-stock to their descendants. What sums were spent on these

and on funeral solemnities generally, may be inferred from the

testament of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (consul in 567, 579; 602);

he gave orders to his children, forasmuch as the true last honours

consisted not in empty pomp but in the remembrance of personal

and ancestral services, to expend on his funeral not more than

1,000,000 -asses- (4000 pounds). Luxury was on the increase also

as respected buildings and gardens; the splendid town house of the

orator Crassus (663), famous especially for the old trees of its

garden, was valued with the trees at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000

pounds), without them at the half; while the value of an ordinary

dwelling-house in Rome may be estimated perhaps at 60,000 sesterces

(600 pounds).(49) How quickly the prices of ornamental estates

increased, is shown by the instance of the Misenian villa, for

which Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, paid 75,000 sesterces

(750 pounds), and Lucius Lucullus, consul in 680, thirty-three

times that price. The villas and the luxurious rural and sea-

bathing life rendered Baiae and generally the district around the

Bay of Naples the El Dorado of noble idleness. Games of hazard,

in which the stake was no longer as in the Italian dice-playing a

trifle, became common, and as early as 639 a censorial edict was

issued against them. Gauze fabrics, which displayed rather than

concealed the figure, and silken clothing began to displace the old

woollen dresses among women and even among men. Against the insane

extravagance in the employment of foreign perfumery the sumptuary

laws interfered in vain.

But the real focus in which the brilliance of this genteel life was

concentrated was the table. Extravagant prices--as much as 100,000

sesterces (1000 pounds)--were paid for an exquisite cook. Houses

were constructed with special reference to this object, and the

villas in particular along the coast were provided with salt-water

tanks of their own, in order that they might furnish marine fishes

and oysters at any time fresh to the table. A dinner was already

described as poor, at which the fowls were served up to the guests

entire and not merely the choice portions, and at which the guests

were expected to eat of the several dishes and not simply to taste

them. They procured at a great expense foreign delicacies and

Greek wine, which had to be sent round at least once at every

respectable repast. At banquets above all the Romans displayed

their hosts of slaves ministering to luxury, their bands of

musicians, their dancing-girls, their elegant furniture, their

carpets glittering with gold or pictorially embroidered, their

purple hangings, their antique bronzes, their rich silver plate.

Against such displays the sumptuary laws were primarily directed,

which were issued more frequently (593, 639, 665, 673) and in

greater detail than ever; a number of delicacies and wines were

therein totally prohibited, for others a maximum in weight and

price was fixed; the quantity of silver plate was likewise

restricted by law, and lastly general maximum rates were prescribed

for the expenses of ordinary and festal meals; these, for example,

were fixed in 593 at 10 and 100 sesterces (2 shillings and 1 pound)

in 673 at 30 and 300 sesterces (6 shillings and 3 pounds)

respectively. Unfortunately truth requires us to add that, of all

the Romans of rank, not more than three--and these not including

the legislators themselves--are said to have complied with these

imposing laws; and in the case of these three it was the law of the

Stoa, and not that of the state, that curtailed the bill of fare.

It is worth while to dwell for a moment on the luxury that went

on increasing in defiance of these laws, as respects silver plate.

In the sixth century silver plate for the table was, with the

exception of the traditionary silver salt-dish, a rarity; the

Carthaginian ambassadors jested over the circumstance, that at

every house to which they were invited they had encountered the

same silver plate.(50) Scipio Aemilianus possessed not more than

32 pounds (120 pounds) in wrought silver; his nephew Quintus Fabius

(consul in 633) first brought his plate up to 1000 pounds (4000

pounds), Marcus Drusus (tribune of the people in 663) reached

10,000 pounds (40,000 pounds); in Sulla's time there were already

counted in the capital about 150 silver state-dishes weighing 100

pounds each, several of which brought their possessors into the

lists of proscription. To judge of the sums expended on these,

we must recollect that the workmanship also was paid for at enormous

rates; for instance Gaius Gracchus paid for choice articles of

silver fifteen times, and Lucius Crassus, consul in 659, eighteen

times the value of the metal, and the latter gave for a pair of

cups by a noted silversmith 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds).

So it was in proportion everywhere.

How it fared with marriage and the rearing of children, is shown

by the Gracchan agrarian laws, which first placed a premium on

these.(51) Divorce, formerly in Rome almost unheard of, was now an

everyday occurrence; while in the oldest Roman marriage the husband

had purchased his wife, it might have been proposed to the Romans

of quality in the present times that, with the view of bringing

the name into accordance with the reality, they should introduce

marriage for hire. Even a man like Metellus Macedonicus, who for

his honourable domestic life and his numerous host of children was

the admiration of his contemporaries, when censor in 623 enforced

the obligation of the burgesses to live in a state of matrimony by

describing it as an oppressive public burden, which patriots ought

nevertheless to undertake from a sense of duty.(52)

There were, certainly, exceptions. The circles of the rural towns,

and particularly those of the larger landholders, had preserved

more faithfully the old honourable habits of the Latin nation.

In the capital, however, the Catonian opposition had become a mere

form of words; the modern tendency bore sovereign sway, and though

individuals of firm and refined organization, such as Scipio

Aemilianus, knew the art of combining Roman manners with Attic

culture, Hellenism was among the great multitude synonymous with

intellectual and moral corruption. We must never lose sight of

the reaction exercised by these social evils on political life,

if we would understand the Roman revolution. It was no matter

of indifference, that of the two men of rank, who in 662 acted

as supreme masters of morals to the community, the one publicly

reproached the other with having shed tears over the death of a

-muraena- the pride of his fishpond, and the latter retaliated on

the former that he had buried three wives and had shed tears over

none of them. It was no matter of indifference, that in 593 an

orator could make sport in the open Forum with the following

description of a senatorial civil juryman, whom the time fixed

for the cause finds amidst the circle of his boon-companions.

"They play at hazard, delicately perfumed, surrounded by their

mistresses. As the afternoon advances, they summon the servant

and bid him make enquiries on the Comitium, as to what has occurred

in the Forum, who has spoken in favour of or against the new project

of law, what tribes have voted for and what against it. At length

they go themselves to the judgment-seat, just early enough not to

bring the process down on their own neck. On the way there is no

opportunity in any retired alley which they do not avail themselves

of, for they have gorged themselves with wine. Reluctantly they

come to the tribunal and give audience to the parties. Those who

are concerned bring forward their cause. The juryman orders the

witnesses to come forward; he himself steps aside. When he returns,

he declares that he has heard everything, and asks for the documents.

He looks into the writings; he can hardly keep his eyes open for wine.

When he thereupon withdraws to consider his sentence, he says to his

boon-companions, 'What concern have I with these tiresome people?

why should we not rather go to drink a cup of mulse mixed with Greek wine,

and accompany it with a fat fieldfare and a good fish, a veritable pike

from the Tiber island?' Those who heard the orator laughed; but was it

not a very serious matter, that such things were subjects for laughter?"

CHAPTER XII

Nationality, Religion, and Education

Paramount Ascendency of Latinism and Hellenism

In the great struggle of the nationalities within the wide circuit

of the Roman empire, the secondary nations seem at this period on

the wane or disappearing. The most important of them all, the

Phoenician, received through the destruction of Carthage a mortal

wound from which it slowly bled to death. The districts of Italy

which had hitherto preserved their old language and manners,

Etruria and Samnium, were not only visited by the heaviest blows

of the Sullan reaction, but were compelled also by the political

levelling of Italy to adopt the Latin language and customs in

public intercourse, so that the old native languages were reduced

to popular dialects rapidly decaying. There no longer appears

throughout the bounds of the Roman state any nationality entitled

even to compete with the Roman and the Greek.

Latinism

On the other hand the Latin nationality was, as respected both

the extent of its diffusion and the depth of its hold, in the most

decided ascendant. As after the Social war any portion of Italian

soil might belong to any Italian in full Roman ownership, and any

god of an Italian temple might receive Roman gifts; as in all

Italy, with the exception of the region beyond the Po, the Roman

law thenceforth had exclusive authority, superseding all other

civic and local laws; so the Roman language at that time became

the universal language of business, and soon likewise the universal

language of cultivated intercourse, in the whole peninsula from the

Alps to the Sicilian Straits. But it no longer restricted itself

to these natural limits. The mass of capital accumulating in

Italy, the riches of its products, the intelligence of its

agriculturists, the versatility of its merchants, found no adequate

scope in the peninsula; these circumstances and the public service

carried the Italians in great numbers to the provinces.(1) Their

privileged position there rendered the Roman language and the Roman

law privileged also, even where Romans were not merely transacting

business with each other.(2) Everywhere the Italians kept together

as compact and organized masses, the soldiers in their legions, the

merchants of every larger town as special corporations, the Roman

burgesses domiciled or sojourning in the particular provincial

court-district as "circuits" (-conventus civium Romanorum-) with

their own list of jurymen and in some measure with a communal

constitution; and, though these provincial Romans ordinarily

returned sooner or later to Italy, they nevertheless gradually

laid the foundations of a fixed population in the provinces,

partly Roman, partly mixed, attaching itself to the Roman settlers.

We have already mentioned that it was in Spain, where the Roman army

first became a standing one, that distinct provincial towns with

Italian constitution were first organized--Carteia in 583,(3)

Valentia in 616,(4) and at a later date Palma and Pollentia.(5)

Although the interior was still far from civilized,--the territory

of the Vaccaeans, for instance, being still mentioned long after

this time as one of the rudest and most repulsive places of abode

for the cultivated Italian--authors and inscriptions attest that as

early as the middle of the seventh century the Latin language was

in common use around New Carthage and elsewhere along the coast.

Gracchus first distinctly developed the idea of colonizing, or in

other words of Romanizing, the provinces of the Roman state by

Italian emigration, and endeavoured to carry it out; and, although

the conservative opposition resisted the bold project, destroyed

for the most part its attempted beginnings, and prevented its

continuation, yet the colony of Narbo was preserved, important even

of itself as extending the domain of the Latin tongue, and far more

important still as the landmark of a great idea, the foundation-

stone of a mighty structure to come. The ancient Gallic, and in

fact the modern French, type of character, sprang out of that

settlement, and are in their ultimate origin creations of Gaius

Gracchus. But the Latin nationality not only filled the bounds

of Italy and began to pass beyond them; it came also to acquire

intrinsically a deeper intellectual basis. We find it in the

course of creating a classical literature, and a higher instruction

of its own; and, though in comparison with the Hellenic classics

and Hellenic culture we may feel ourselves tempted to attach little

value to the feeble hothouse products of Italy, yet, so far as its

historical development was primarily concerned, the quality of

the Latin classical literature and the Latin culture was of far

less moment than the fact that they subsisted side by side with

the Greek; and, sunken as were the contemporary Hellenes in a

literary point of view, one might well apply in this case also

the saying of the poet, that the living day-labourer is better

than the dead Achilles.

Hellenism

But, however rapidly and vigorously the Latin language and

nationality gain ground, they at the same time recognize the

Hellenic nationality as having an entirely equal, indeed an earlier

and better title, and enter everywhere into the closest alliance

with it or become intermingled with it in a joint development.

The Italian revolution, which otherwise levelled all the non-Latin

nationalities in the peninsula, did not disturb the Greek cities of

Tarentum, Rhegium, Neapolis, Locri.(6) In like manner Massilia,

although now enclosed by Roman territory, remained continuously

a Greek city and, just as such, firmly connected with Rome. With

the complete Latinizing of Italy the growth of Hellenizing went hand

in hand. In the higher circles of Italian society Greek training

became an integral element of their native culture. The consul of 623,

the -pontifex maximus- Publius Crassus, excited the astonishment even

of the native Greeks, when as governor of Asia he delivered his judicial

decisions, as the case required, sometimes in ordinary Greek, sometimes

in one of the four dialects which had become written languages. And if

the Italian literature and art for long looked steadily towards the east,

Hellenic literature and art now began to look towards the west. Not only

did the Greek cities in Italy continue to maintain an active intellectual

intercourse with Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, and confer on the

Greek poets and actors who had acquired celebrity there the like

recognition and the like honours among themselves; in Rome also,

after the example set by the destroyer of Corinth at his triumph

in 608, the gymnastic and aesthetic recreations of the Greeks--

competitions in wrestling as well as in music, acting, reciting,

and declaiming--came into vogue.(7) Greek men of letters even thus

early struck root in the noble society of Rome, especially in the

Scipionic circle, the most prominent Greek members of which--the

historian Polybius and the philosopher Panaetius--belong rather to

the history of Roman than of Greek development. But even in other

less illustrious circles similar relations occur; we may mention

another contemporary of Scipio, the philosopher Clitomachus,

because his life at the same time presents a vivid view of the

great intermingling of nations at this epoch. A native of

Carthage, then a disciple of Carneades at Athens, and afterwards

his successor in his professorship, Clitomachus held intercourse

from Athens with the most cultivated men of Italy, the historian

Aulus Albinus and the poet Lucilius, and dedicated on the one hand

a scientific work to Lucius Censorinus the Roman consul who opened

the siege of Carthage, and on the other hand a philosophic

consolatory treatise to his fellow-citizens who were conveyed to

Italy as slaves. While Greek literary men of note had hitherto

taken up their abode temporarily in Rome as ambassadors, exiles,

or otherwise, they now began to settle there; for instance, the

already-mentioned Panaetius lived in the house of Scipio, and

the hexameter-maker Archias of Antioch settled at Rome in 652 and

supported himself respectably by the art of improvising and by epic

poems on Roman consulars. Even Gaius Marius, who hardly understood

a line of his -carmen- and was altogether as ill adapted as

possible for a Maecenas, could not avoid patronizing the artist

in verse. While intellectual and literary life thus brought the

more genteel, if not the purer, elements of the two nations into

connection with each other, on the other hand the arrival of troops

of slaves from Asia Minor and Syria and the mercantile immigration

from the Greek and half-Greek east brought the coarsest strata of

Hellenism--largely alloyed with Oriental and generally barbaric

ingredients--into contact with the Italian proletariate, and gave

to that also a Hellenic colouring. The remark of Cicero, that new

phrases and new fashions first make their appearance in maritime

towns, probably had a primary reference to the semi-Hellenic

character of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium, where with foreign

wares foreign manners also first found admission and became thence

more widely diffused.

Mixture of Peoples

The immediate result of this complete revolution in the relations

of nationality was certainly far from pleasing. Italy swarmed with

Greeks, Syrians, Phoenicians, Jews, Egyptians, while the provinces

swarmed with Romans; sharply defined national peculiarities

everywhere came into mutual contact, and were visibly worn off; it

seemed as if nothing was to be left behind but the general impress

of utilitarianism. What the Latin character gained in diffusion

it lost in freshness; especially in Rome itself, where the middle

class disappeared the soonest and most entirely, and nothing was

left but the grandees and the beggars, both in like measure

cosmopolitan. Cicero assures us that about 660 the general culture

in the Latin towns stood higher than in Rome; and this is confirmed

by the literature of this period, whose most pleasing, healthiest,

and most characteristic products, such as the national comedy and

the Lucilian satire, are with greater justice described as Latin,

than as Roman. That the Italian Hellenism of the lower orders was

in reality nothing but a repulsive cosmopolitanism tainted at once

with all the extravagances of culture and with a superficially

whitewashed barbarism, is self-evident; but even in the case of

the better society the fine taste of the Scipionic circle did not

remain the permanent standard. The more the mass of society began

to take interest in Greek life, the more decidedly it resorted not

to the classical literature, but to the most modern and frivolous

productions of the Greek mind; instead of moulding the Roman

character in the Hellenic spirit, they contented themselves with

borrowing that sort of pastime which set their own intellect to

work as little as possible. In this sense the Arpinate landlord

Marcus Cicero, the father of the orator, said that among the

Romans, just as among Syrian slaves, each was the less worth,

the more he understood Greek.

National Decomposition

This national decomposition is, like the whole age, far from

pleasing, but also like that age significant and momentous.

The circle of peoples, which we are accustomed to call the ancient

world, advances from an outward union under the authority of Rome

to an inward union under the sway of the modern culture resting

essentially on Hellenic elements. Over the ruins of peoples of the

second rank the great historical compromise between the two ruling

nations is silently completed; the Greek and Latin nationalities

conclude mutual peace. The Greeks renounce exclusive claims for

their language in the field of culture, as do the Romans for theirs

in the field of politics; in instruction Latin is allowed to stand

on a footing of equality--restricted, it is true, and imperfect--

with Greek; on the other hand Sulla first allows foreign ambassadors

to speak Greek before the Roman senate without an interpreter.

The time heralds its approach, when the Roman commonwealth will

pass into a bilingual state and the true heir of the throne and

the ideas of Alexander the Great will arise in the west, at once

a Roman and a Greek.

The suppression of the secondary, and the mutual interpenetration

of the two primary nationalities, which are thus apparent on a

general survey of national relations, now fall to be more precisely

exhibited in detail in the several fields of religion, national

education, literature, and art.

Religion

The Roman religion was so intimately interwoven with the Roman

commonwealth and the Roman household--so thoroughly in fact the

pious reflection of the Roman burgess-world--that the political

and social revolution necessarily overturned also the fabric of

religion. The ancient Italian popular faith fell to the ground;

over its ruins rose--like the oligarchy and the -tyrannis- rising

over the ruins of the political commonwealth--on the one side

unbelief, state-religion, Hellenism, and on the other side

superstition, sectarianism, the religion of the Orientals, The

germs certainly of both, as indeed the germs of the politico-social

revolution also, may be traced back to the previous epoch (iii.

109-117). Even then the Hellenic culture of the higher circles was

secretly undermining their ancestral faith; Ennius introduced the

allegorizing and historical versions of the Hellenic religion into

Italy; the senate, which subdued Hannibal, had to sanction the

transference of the worship of Cybele from Asia Minor to Rome,

and to take the most serious steps against other still worse

superstitions, particularly the Bacchanalian scandal. But, as

during the preceding period the revolution generally was rather

preparing its way in men's minds than assuming outward shape, so

the religious revolution was in substance, at any rate, the work

only of the Gracchan and Sullan age.

Greek Philosophy

Let us endeavour first to trace the tendency associating itself

with Hellenism. The Hellenic nation, which bloomed and faded far

earlier than the Italian, had long ago passed the epoch of faith

and thenceforth moved exclusively in the sphere of speculation and

reflection; for long there had been no religion there--nothing but

philosophy. But even the philosophic activity of the Hellenic mind

had, when it began to exert influence on Rome, already left the

epoch of productive speculation far behind it, and had arrived at

the stage at which there is not only no origination of truly new

systems, but even the power of apprehending the more perfect of

the older systems begins to wane and men restrict themselves to the

repetition, soon passing into the scholastic tradition, of the less

complete dogmas of their predecessors; at that stage, accordingly,

when philosophy, instead of giving greater depth and freedom to

the mind, rather renders it shallow and imposes on it the worst of

all chains--chains of its own forging. The enchanted draught of

speculation, always dangerous, is, when diluted and stale, certain

poison. The contemporary Greeks presented it thus flat and diluted

to the Romans, and these had not the judgment either to refuse it

or to go back from the living schoolmasters to the dead masters.

Plato and Aristotle, to say nothing of the sages before Socrates,

remained without material influence on the Roman culture, although

their illustrious names were freely used, and their more easily

understood writings were probably read and translated. Accordingly

the Romans became in philosophy simply inferior scholars of bad

teachers.

Leading Schools

Newer Academy

Epicurus and Zeno

Besides the historico-rationalistic conception of religion, which

resolved the myths into biographies of various benefactors of the

human race living in the grey dawn of early times whom superstition

had transformed into gods, or Euhemerism as it was called,(8) there

were chiefly three philosophical schools that came to be of

importance for Italy; viz. the two dogmatic schools of Epicurus

(484) and Zeno (491) and the sceptical school of Arcesilaus (513)

and Carneades (541-625), or, to use the school-names, Epicureanism,

the Stoa, and the newer Academy. The last of these schools, which

started from the impossibility of assured knowledge and in its

stead conceded as possible only a provisional opinion sufficient

for practical needs, presented mainly a polemical aspect, seeing

that it caught every proposition of positive faith or of

philosophic dogmatism in the meshes of its dilemmas. So far it

stands nearly on a parallel with the older method of the sophists;

except that, as may be conceived, the sophists made war more

against the popular faith, Carneades and his disciples more against

their philosophical colleagues. On the other hand Epicurus and

Zeno agreed both in their aim of rationally explaining the nature

of things, and in their physiological method, which set out from

the conception of matter. They diverged, in so far as Epicurus,

following the atomic theory of Democritus, conceived the first

principle as rigid matter, and evolved the manifoldness of things

out of this matter merely by mechanical variations; whereas Zeno,

forming his views after the Ephesian Heraclitus, introduces even

into his primordial matter a dynamic antagonism and a movement

of fluctuation up and down. From this are derived the further

distinctions--that in the Epicurean system the gods as it were did

not exist or were at the most a dream of dreams, while the Stoical

gods formed the ever-active soul of the world, and were as spirit,

as sun, as God powerful over the body, the earth, and nature; that

Epicurus did not, while Zeno did, recognize a government of the

world and a personal immortality of the soul; that the proper

object of human aspiration was according to Epicurus an absolute

equilibrium disturbed neither by bodily desire nor by mental

conflict, while it was according to Zeno a manly activity always

increased by the constant antagonistic efforts of the mind and

body, and striving after a harmony with nature perpetually in

conflict and perpetually at peace. But in one point all these

schools were agreed with reference to religion, that faith as such

was nothing, and had necessarily to be supplemented by reflection--

whether this reflection might consciously despair of attaining any

result, as did the Academy; or might reject the conceptions of

the popular faith, as did the school of Epicurus; or might partly

retain them with explanation of the reasons for doing so, and

partly modify them, as did the Stoics.

Carneades at Rome

It was accordingly only a natural result, that the first contact of

Hellenic philosophy with the Roman nation equally firm in faith and

adverse to speculation should be of a thoroughly hostile character.

The Roman religion was entirely right in disdaining alike the

assaults and the reasoned support of these philosophical systems,

both of which did away with its proper character. The Roman state,

which instinctively felt itself assailed when religion was

attacked, reasonably assumed towards the philosophers the attitude

which a fortress assumes towards the spies of the army advancing

to besiege it, and as early as 593 dismissed the Greek philosophers

along with the rhetoricians from Rome. In fact the very first

debut of philosophy on a great scale in Rome was a formal

declaration of war against faith and morals. It was occasioned

by the occupation of Oropus by the Athenians, a step which they

commissioned three of the most esteemed professors of philosophy,

including Carneades the master of the modern sophistical school,

to justify before the senate (599). The selection was so far

appropriate, as the utterly scandalous transaction defied any

justification in common sense; whereas it was quite in keeping with

the circumstances of the case, when Carneades proved by thesis and

counter-thesis that exactly as many and as cogent reasons might be

adduced in praise of injustice as in praise of justice, and when

he showed in the best logical form that with equal propriety the

Athenians might be required to surrender Oropus and the Romans

to confine themselves once more to their old straw huts on the

Palatine. The young men who were masters of the Greek language

were attracted in crowds by the scandal as well as by the rapid and

emphatic delivery of the celebrated man; but on this occasion at

least Cato could not be found fault with, when he not only bluntly

enough compared the dialectic arguments of the philosophers to

the tedious dirges of the wailing-women, but also insisted on the

senate dismissing a man who understood the art of making right

wrong and wrong right, and whose defence was in fact nothing but

a shameless and almost insulting confession of wrong. But such

dismissals had no great effect, more especially as the Roman youth

could not be prevented from hearing philosophic discourses at

Rhodes and Athens. Men became accustomed first to tolerate

philosophy at least as a necessary evil, and ere long to seek for

the Roman religion, which in its simplicity was no longer tenable,

a support in foreign philosophy--a support which no doubt ruined

it as faith, but in return at any rate allowed the man of culture

decorously to retain in some measure the names and forms of the

popular creed. But this support could neither be Euhemerism, nor

the system of Carneades or of Epicurus.

Euhemerism Not an Adequate Support

The historical version of the myths came far too rudely into

collision with the popular faith, when it declared the gods

directly to be men; Carneades called even their existence in

question, and Epicurus denied to them at least any influence on

the destinies of men. Between these systems and the Roman religion

no alliance was possible; they were proscribed and remained so.

Even in the writings of Cicero it is declared the duty of a citizen

to resist Euhemerism as prejudicial to religious worship; and if the

Academic and the Epicurean appear in his dialogues, the former has

to plead the excuse that, while as a philosopher he is a disciple

of Carneades, as a citizen and -pontifex- he is an orthodox

confessor of the Capitoline Jupiter, and the Epicurean has even

ultimately to surrender and be converted. No one of these three

systems became in any proper sense popular. The plain intelligible

character of Euhemerism exerted doubtless a certain power of

attraction over the Romans, and in particular produced only too

deep an effect on the conventional history of Rome with its at

once childish and senile conversion of fable into history; but it

remained without material influence on the Roman religion, because

the latter from the first dealt only in allegory and not in fable,

and it was not possible in Rome as in Hellas to write biographies

of Zeus the first, second, and third. The modern sophistry could

only succeed where, as in Athens, clever volubility was indigenous,

and where, moreover, the long series of philosophical systems that

had come and gone had accumulated huge piles of intellectual

rubbish. Against the Epicurean quietism, in fine, everything

revolted that was sound and honest in the Roman character so

thoroughly addressing itself to action. Yet it found more

partisans than Euhemerism and the sophistic school, and this was

probably the reason why the police continued to wage war against

it longest and most seriously. But this Roman Epicureanism was not

so much a philosophic system as a sort of philosophic mask, under

which--very much against the design of its strictly moral founder--

thoughtless sensual enjoyment disguised itself for good society;

one of the earliest adherents of this sect, for instance, Titus

Albucius, figures in the poems of Lucilius as the prototype of

a Roman Hellenizing to bad purpose.

Roman Stoa

Far different were the position and influence of the Stoic

philosophy in Italy. In direct contrast to these schools it

attached itself to the religion of the land as closely as science

can at all accommodate itself to faith. To the popular faith with

its gods and oracles the Stoic adhered on principle, in so far as

he recognized in it an instinctive knowledge, to which scientific

knowledge was bound to have regard and even in doubtful cases

to subordinate itself. He believed in a different way from

the people rather than in different objects; the essentially true

and supreme God was in his view doubtless the world-soul, but every

manifestation of the primitive God was in its turn divine, the

stars above all, but also the earth, the vine, the soul of the

illustrious mortal whom the people honoured as a hero, and in fact

every departed spirit of a former man. This philosophy was really

better adapted for Rome than for the land where it first arose.

The objection of the pious believer, that the god of the Stoic had

neither sex nor age nor corporeality and was converted from a

person into a conception, had a meaning in Greece, but not in

Rome. The coarse allegorizing and moral purification, which were

characteristic of the Stoical doctrine of the gods, destroyed the

very marrow of the Hellenic mythology; but the plastic power of the

Romans, scanty even in their epoch of simplicity, had produced no

more than a light veil enveloping the original intuition or the

original conception, out of which the divinity had arisen--a veil

that might be stripped off without special damage. Pallas Athene

might be indignant, when she found herself suddenly transmuted into

the conception of memory: Minerva had hitherto been in reality not

much more. The supernatural Stoic, and the allegoric Roman,

theology coincided on the whole in their result. But, even if

the philosopher was obliged to designate individual propositions

of the priestly lore as doubtful or as erroneous--as when the Stoics,

for example, rejecting the doctrine of apotheosis, saw in Hercules,

Castor, and Pollux nothing but the spirits of distinguished men, or

as when they could not allow the images of the gods to be regarded

as representations of divinity--it was at least not the habit of

the adherents of Zeno to make war on these erroneous doctrines

and to overthrow the false gods; on the contrary, they everywhere

evinced respect and reverence for the religion of the land even

in its weaknesses. The inclination also of the Stoa towards a

casuistic morality and towards a systematic treatment of the

professional sciences was quite to the mind of the Romans,

especially of the Romans of this period, who no longer like their

fathers practised in unsophisticated fashion self-government and

good morals, but resolved the simple morality of their ancestors

into a catechism of allowable and non-allowable actions; whose

grammar and jurisprudence, moreover, urgently demanded a methodical

treatment, without possessing the ability to develop such a

treatment of themselves.

Wide Influence of Stoicism

Panaetius

So this philosophy thoroughly incorporated itself, as a plant

borrowed no doubt from abroad but acclimatized on Italian soil,

with the Roman national economy, and we meet its traces in the

most diversified spheres of action. Its earliest appearance beyond

doubt goes further back; but the Stoa was first raised to full

influence in the higher ranks of Roman society by means of the

group which gathered round Scipio Aemilianus. Panaetius of Rhodes,

the instructor of Scipio and of all Scipio's intimate friends in

the Stoic philosophy, who was constantly in his train and usually

attended him even on journeys, knew how to adapt the system to

clever men of the world, to keep its speculative side in the

background, and to modify in some measure the dryness of the

terminology and the insipidity of its moral catechism, more

particularly by calling in the aid of the earlier philosophers,

among whom Scipio himself had an especial predilection for the

Socrates of Xenophon. Thenceforth the most noted statesmen and

scholars professed the Stoic philosophy--among others Stilo and

Quintus Scaevola, the founders of scientific philology and of

scientific jurisprudence. The scholastic formality of system,

which thenceforth prevails at least externally in these

professional sciences and is especially associated with a fanciful,

charade-like, insipid method of etymologizing, descends from the

Stoa. But infinitely more important was the new state-philosophy

and state-religion, which emanated from the blending of the Stoic

philosophy and the Roman religion. The speculative element, from

the first impressed with but little energy on the system of Zeno,

and still further weakened when that system found admission to

Rome--after the Greek schoolmasters had already for a century been

busied in driving this philosophy into boys' heads and thereby

driving the spirit out of it--fell completely into the shade in

Rome, where nobody speculated but the money-changers; little more

was said as to the ideal development of the God ruling in the soul

of man, or of the divine world-law. The Stoic philosophers showed

themselves not insensible to the very lucrative distinction of

seeing their system raised into the semi-official Roman state-

philosophy, and proved altogether more pliant than from their

rigorous principles we should have expected. Their doctrine as to

the gods and the state soon exhibited a singular family resemblance

to the actual institutions of those who gave them bread; instead of

illustrating the cosmopolitan state of the philosopher, they made

their meditations turn on the wise arrangement of the Roman

magistracies; and while the more refined Stoics such as Panaetius

had left the question of divine revelation by wonders and signs

open as a thing conceivable but uncertain, and had decidedly

rejected astrology, his immediate successors contended for that

doctrine of revelation or, in other words, for the Roman augural

discipline as rigidly and firmly as for any other maxim of the

school, and made extremely unphilosophical concessions even to

astrology. The leading feature of the system came more and more

to be its casuistic doctrine of duties. It suited itself to the

hollow pride of virtue, in which the Romans of this period sought

their compensation amidst the various humbling circumstances of

their contact with the Greeks; and it put into formal shape a

befitting dogmatism of morality, which, like every well-bred system

of morals, combined with the most rigid precision as a whole the

most complaisant indulgence in the details.(9) Its practical

results can hardly be estimated as much more than that, as

we have said, two or three families of rank ate poor fare

to please the Stoa.

State-Religion

Closely allied to this new state-philosophy--or, strictly speaking,

its other side--was the new state-religion; the essential

characteristic of which was the conscious retention, for reasons of

outward convenience, of the principles of the popular faith, which

were recognized as irrational. One of the most prominent men of

the Scipionic circle, the Greek Polybius, candidly declares that

the strange and ponderous ceremonial of Roman religion was invented

solely on account of the multitude, which, as reason had no power

over it, required to be ruled by signs and wonders, while people of

intelligence had certainly no need of religion. Beyond doubt the

Roman friends of Polybius substantially shared these sentiments,

although they did not oppose science and religion to each other

in so gross and downright a fashion. Neither Laelius nor Scipio

Aemilianus can have looked on the augural discipline, which

Polybius has primarily in view, as anything else than a political

institution; yet the national spirit in them was too strong and

their sense of decorum too delicate to have permitted their coming

forward in public with such hazardous explanations. But even in

the following generation the -pontifex maximus- Quintus Scaevola

(consul in 659;(10)) set forth at least in his oral instructions in

law without hesitation the propositions, that there were two sorts

of religion--one philosophic, adapted to the intellect, and one

traditional, not so adapted; that the former was not fitted for

the religion of the state, as it contained various things which

it was useless or even injurious for the people to know; and that

accordingly the traditional religion of the state ought to remain

as it stood. The theology of Varro, in which the Roman religion

is treated throughout as a state institution, is merely a further

development of the same principle. The state, according to his

teaching, was older than the gods of the state as the painter is

older than the picture; if the question related to making the gods

anew, it would certainly be well to make and to name them after a

manner more befitting and more in theoretic accordance with the

parts of the world-soul, and to lay aside the images of the gods

which only excited erroneous ideas,(11) and the mistaken system of

sacrifice; but, since these institutions had been once established,

every good citizen ought to own and follow them and do his part,

that the "common man" might learn rather to set a higher value on,

than to contemn, the gods. That the common man, for whose benefit

the grandees thus surrendered their judgment, now despised this

faith and sought his remedy elsewhere, was a matter of course and

will be seen in the sequel. Thus then the Roman "high church"

was ready, a sanctimonious body of priests and Levites, and an

unbelieving people. The more openly the religion of the land was

declared a political institution, the more decidedly the political

parties regarded the field of the state-church as an arena for

attack and defence; which was especially, in a daily-increasing

measure, the case with augural science and with the elections to

the priestly colleges. The old and natural practice of dismissing

the burgess-assembly, when a thunderstorm came on, had in the hands

of the Roman augurs grown into a prolix system of various celestial

omens and rules of conduct associated therewith; in the earlier

portion of this period it was even directly enacted by the Aelian

and Fufian law, that every popular assembly should be compelled

to disperse if it should occur to any of the higher magistrates

to look for signs of a thunderstorm in the sky; and the Roman

oligarchy was proud of the cunning device which enabled them

thenceforth by a single pious fraud to impress the stamp of

invalidity on any decree of the people.

Priestly Colleges

Conversely, the Roman opposition rebelled against the ancient

practice under which the four principal colleges of priests filled

up their own ranks when vacancies arose, and demanded the extension

of popular election to the stalls themselves, as it had been

previously introduced with reference to the presidents, of these

colleges.(12) This was certainly inconsistent with the spirit of

these corporations; but they had no right to complain of it, after

they had become themselves untrue to their spirit, and had played

into the hands of the government at its request by furnishing

religious pretexts for the annulling of political proceedings.

This affair became an apple of contention between the parties:

the senate beat off the first attack in 609, on which occasion the

Scipionic circle especially turned the scale for the rejection of

the proposal; on the other hand the project passed in 650 with the

proviso already made in reference to the election of the presidents

for the benefit of scrupulous consciences, that not the whole

burgesses but only the lesser half of the tribes should make

the election;(13) finally Sulla restored the right of co-optation

in its full extent.(14)

Practical Use Made of Religion

With this care on the part of the conservatives for the pure

national religion, it was of course quite compatible that the

circles of the highest rank should openly make a jest of it.

The practical side of the Roman priesthood was the priestly cuisine;

the augural and pontifical banquets were as it were the official

gala-days in the life of a Roman epicure, and several of them

formed epochs in the history of gastronomy: the banquet on the

accession of the augur Quintus Hortensius for instance brought

roast peacocks into vogue. Religion was also found very useful

in giving greater zest to scandal. It was a favourite recreation

of the youth of quality to disfigure or mutilate the images of the

gods in the streets by night.(15) Ordinary love affairs had for

long been common, and intrigues with married women began to become

so; but an amour with a Vestal virgin was as piquant as the

intrigues with nuns and the cloister-adventures in the world of

the Decamerone. The scandalous affair of 640 seq. is well known,

in which three Vestals, daughters of the noblest families, and their

paramours, young men likewise of the best houses, were brought to

trial for unchastity first before the pontifical college, and then,

when it sought to hush up the matter, before an extraordinary court

instituted by special decree of the people, and were all condemned

to death. Such scandals, it is true, sedate people could not

approve; but there was no objection to men finding positive

religion to be a folly in their familiar circle; the augurs might,

when one saw another performing his functions, smile in each

other's face without detriment to their religious duties. We learn

to look favourably on the modest hypocrisy of kindred tendencies,

when we compare with it the coarse shamelessness of the Roman

priests and Levites. The official religion was quite candidly

treated as a hollow framework, now serviceable only for political

machinists; in this respect with its numerous recesses and trapdoors

it might and did serve either party, as it happened. Most of

all certainly the oligarchy recognized its palladium in the state-

religion, and particularly in the augural discipline; but the

opposite party also made no resistance in point of principle to

an institute, which had now merely a semblance of life; they rather

regarded it, on the whole, as a bulwark which might pass from the

possession of the enemy into their own.

Oriental Religions in Italy

In sharp contrast to this ghost of religion which we have just

described stand the different foreign worships, which this epoch

cherished and fostered, and which were at least undeniably

possessed of a very decided vitality. They meet us everywhere,

among genteel ladies and lords as well as among the circles of

the slaves, in the general as in the trooper, in Italy as in the

provinces. It is incredible to what a height this superstition

already reached. When in the Cimbrian war a Syrian prophetess,

Martha, offered to furnish the senate with ways and means for the

vanquishing of the Germans, the senate dismissed her with contempt;

nevertheless the Roman matrons and Marius' own wife in particular

despatched her to his head-quarters, where the general readily

received her and carried her about with him till the Teutones were

defeated. The leaders of very different parties in the civil war,

Marius, Octavius, Sulla, coincided in believing omens and oracles.

During its course even the senate was under the necessity, in the

troubles of 667, of consenting to issue directions in accordance

with the fancies of a crazy prophetess. It is significant of

the ossification of the Romano-Hellenic religion as well as of

the increased craving of the multitude after stronger religious

stimulants, that superstition no longer, as in the Bacchic

mysteries, associates itself with the national religion; even

the Etruscan mysticism is already left behind; the worships matured

in the sultry regions of the east appear throughout in the foremost

rank. The copious introduction of elements from Asia Minor and

Syria into the population, partly by the import of slaves, partly

by the augmented traffic of Italy with the east, contributed very

greatly to this result.

The power of these foreign religions is very distinctly apparent

in the revolts of the Sicilian slaves, who for the most part were

natives of Syria. Eunus vomited fire, Athenion read the stars;

the plummets thrown by the slaves in these wars bear in great part

the names of gods, those of Zeus and Artemis, and especially that

of the mysterious Mother who had migrated from Crete to Sicily and

was zealously worshipped there. A similar effect was produced by

commercial intercourse, particularly after the wares of Berytus and

Alexandria were conveyed directly to the Italian ports; Ostia and

Puteoli became the great marts not only for Syrian unguents and

Egyptian linen, but also for the faith of the east. Everywhere

the mingling of religions was constantly on the increase along with

the mingling of nations. Of all allowed worships the most popular

was that of the Pessinuntine Mother of the Gods, which made a deep

impression on the multitude by its eunuch-celibacy, its banquets,

its music, its begging processions, and all its sensuous pomp; the

collections from house to house were already felt as an economic

burden. In the most dangerous time of the Cimbrian war Battaces

the high-priest of Pessinus appeared in person at Rome, in order

to defend the interests of the temple of his goddess there which

was alleged to have been profaned, addressed the Roman people by

the special orders of the Mother of the Gods, and performed also

various miracles. Men of sense were scandalized, but the women

and the great multitude were not to be debarred from escorting

the prophet at his departure in great crowds. Vows of pilgrimage

to the east were already no longer uncommon; Marius himself, for

instance, thus undertook a pilgrimage to Pessinus; in fact even

thus early (first in 653) Roman burgesses devoted themselves

to the eunuch-priesthood.

Secret Worships

But the unallowed and secret worships were naturally still more

popular. As early as Cato's time the Chaldean horoscope-caster had

begun to come into competition with the Etruscan -haruspex- and the

Marsian bird-seer;(16) star-gazing and astrology were soon as much

at home in Italy as in their dreamy native land. In 615 the Roman

-praetor peregrinus- directed all the Chaldeans to evacuate Rome

and Italy within ten days. The same fate at the same time befel

the Jews, who had admitted Italian proselytes to their sabbath.

In like manner Scipio had to clear the camp before Numantia from

soothsayers and pious impostors of every sort. Some forty years

afterwards (657) it was even found necessary to prohibit human

sacrifices. The wild worship of the Cappadocian Ma, or, as the

Romans called her, Bellona, to whom the priests in their festal

processions shed their own blood as a sacrifice, and the gloomy

Egyptian worships began to make their appearance; the former

Cappadocian goddess appeared in a dream to Sulla, and of the later

Roman communities of Isis and Osiris the oldest traced their origin

to the Sullan period. Men had become perplexed not merely as to

the old faith, but as to their very selves; the fearful crises of a

fifty years' revolution, the instinctive feeling that the civil war

was still far from being at an end, increased the anxious suspense,

the gloomy perplexity of the multitude. Restlessly the wandering

imagination climbed every height and fathomed every abyss, where it

fancied that it might discover new prospects or new light amidst

the fatalities impending, might gain fresh hopes in the desperate

struggle against destiny, or perhaps might find merely fresh

alarms. A portentous mysticism found in the general distraction--

political, economic, moral, religious--the soil which was adapted

for it, and grew with alarming rapidity; it was as if gigantic

trees had grown by night out of the earth, none knew whence

or whither, and this very marvellous rapidity of growth

worked new wonders and seized like an epidemic on all minds

not thoroughly fortified.

Education

Just as in the sphere of religion, the revolution begun in the

previous epoch was now completed also in the sphere of education

and culture. We have already shown how the fundamental idea of

the Roman system--civil equality--had already during the sixth

century begun to be undermined in this field also. Even in the

time of Pictor and Cato Greek culture was widely diffused in Rome,

and there was a native Roman culture; but neither of them had then

got beyond the initial stage. Cato's encyclopaedia shows tolerably

what was understood at this period by a Romano-Greek model

training;(16) it was little more than an embodiment of the

knowledge of the old Roman householder, and truly, when compared

with the Hellenic culture of the period, scanty enough. At how

low a stage the average instruction of youth in Rome still stood

at the beginning of the seventh century, may be inferred from

the expressions of Polybius, who in this one respect prominently

censures the criminal indifference of the Romans as compared

with the intelligent private and public care of his countrymen;

no Hellene, not even Polybius himself, could rightly enter

into the deeper idea of civil equality that lay at the root

of this indifference.

Now the case was altered. Just as the naive popular faith was

superseded by an enlightened Stoic supernaturalism, so in education

alongside of the simple popular instruction a special training, an

exclusive -humanitas-, developed itself and eradicated the last

remnants of the old social equality. It will not be superfluous

to cast a glance at the aspect assumed by the new instruction of

the young, both the Greek and the higher Latin.

Greek Instruction

It was a singular circumstance that the same man, who in a

political point of view definitively vanquished the Hellenic

nation, Lucius Aemilius Paullus, was at the same time the first or

one of the first who fully recognized the Hellenic civilization as--

what it has thenceforth continued to be beyond dispute--the

civilization of the ancient world. He was himself indeed an old

man before it was granted to him, with the Homeric poems in his

mind, to stand before the Zeus of Phidias; but his heart was young

enough to carry home the full sunshine of Hellenic beauty and the

unconquerable longing after the golden apples of the Hesperides

in his soul; poets and artists had found in the foreigner a more

earnest and cordial devotee than was any of the wise men of the

Greece of those days. He made no epigram on Homer or Phidias,

but he had his children introduced into the realms of intellect.

Without neglecting their national education, so far as there

was such, he made provision like the Greeks for the physical

development of his boys, not indeed by gymnastic exercises which

were according to Roman notions inadmissible, but by instruction in

the chase, which was among the Greeks developed almost like an art;

and he elevated their Greek instruction in such a way that the

language was no longer merely learned and practised for the sake

of speaking, but after the Greek fashion the whole subject-matter

of general higher culture was associated with the language and

developed out of it--embracing, first of all, the knowledge of

Greek literature with the mythological and historical information

necessary for understanding it, and then rhetoric and philosophy.

The library of king Perseus was the only portion of the Macedonian

spoil that Paullus took for himself, with the view of presenting it

to his sons. Even Greek painters and sculptors were found in his

train and completed the aesthetic training of his children. That

the time was past when men could in this field preserve a merely

repellent attitude as regarded Hellenism, had been felt even by

Cato; the better classes had probably now a presentiment that the

noble substance of Roman character was less endangered by Hellenism

as a whole, than by Hellenism mutilated and misshapen: the mass of

the upper society of Rome and Italy went along with the new mode.

There had been for long no want of Greek schoolmasters in Rome; now

they arrived in troops--and as teachers not merely of the language

but of literature and culture in general--at the newly-opened

lucrative market for the sale of their wisdom. Greek tutors and

teachers of philosophy, who, even if they were not slaves, were

as a rule accounted as servants,(17) were now permanent inmates

in the palaces of Rome; people speculated in them, and there is

a statement that 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds) were paid for

a Greek literary slave of the first rank. As early as 593 there

existed in the capital a number of special establishments for

the practice of Greek declamation. Several distinguished names

already occur among these Roman teachers; the philosopher Panaetius

has been already mentioned;(18) the esteemed grammarian Crates of

Mallus in Cilicia, the contemporary and equal rival of Aristarchus,

found about 585 at Rome an audience for the recitation and

illustration, language, and matter of the Homeric poems. It is

true that this new mode of juvenile instruction, revolutionary

and anti-national as it was, encountered partially the resistance

of the government; but the edict of dismissal, which the authorities

in 593 fulminated against rhetoricians and philosophers, remained

(chiefly owing to the constant change of the Roman chief

magistrates) like all similar commands without any result worth

mentioning, and after the death of old Cato there were still

doubtless frequent complaints in accordance with his views, but

there was no further action. The higher instruction in Greek and

in the sciences of Greek culture remained thenceforth recognized

as an essential part of Italian training.

Latin Instruction

Public Readings of Classical Works

But by its side there sprang up also a higher Latin instruction.

We have shown in the previous epoch how Latin elementary instruction

raised its character; how the place of the Twelve Tables was taken

by the Latin Odyssey as a sort of improved primer, and the Roman

boy was now trained to the knowledge and delivery of his mother-tongue

by means of this translation, as the Greek by means of the original:

how noted teachers of the Greek language and literature, Andronicus,

Ennius, and others, who already probably taught not children properly

so called, but boys growing up to maturity and young men, did not

disdain to give instruction in the mother-tongue along with the Greek.

These were the first steps towards a higher Latin instruction, but

they did not as yet form such an instruction itself. Instruction

in a language cannot go beyond the elementary stage, so long as it

lacks a literature. It was not until there were not merely Latin

schoolbooks but a Latin literature, and this literature already

somewhat rounded-off in the works of the classics of the sixth century,

that the mother-tongue and the native literature truly entered into

the circle of the elements of higher culture; and the emancipation

from the Greek schoolmasters was now not slow to follow. Stirred up

by the Homeric prelections of Crates, cultivated Romans began to read

the recitative works of their own literature, the Punic War of Naevius,

the Annals of Ennius, and subsequently also the Poems of Lucilius first

to a select circle, and then in public on set days and in presence of

a great concourse, and occasionally also to treat them critically after

the precedent of the Homeric grammarians. These literary prelections,

which cultivated -dilettanti- (-litterati-) held gratuitously, were not

formally a part of juvenile instruction, but were yet an essential means

of introducing the youth to the understanding and the discussion of

the classic Latin literature.

Rhetorical Exercises

The formation of Latin oratory took place in a similar way.

The Roman youth of rank, who were even at an early age incited

to come forward in public with panegyrics and forensic speeches,

can never have lacked exercises in oratory; but it was only at this

epoch, and in consequence of the new exclusive culture, that there

arose a rhetoric properly so called. Marcus Lepidus Porcina (consul

in 617) is mentioned as the first Roman advocate who technically

handled the language and subject-matter; the two famous advocates

of the Marian age, the masculine and vigorous Marcus Antonius (611-

667) and the polished and chaste orator Lucius Crassus (614-663)

were already complete rhetoricians. The exercises of the young men

in speaking increased naturally in extent and importance, but still

remained, just like the exercises in Latin literature, essentially

limited to the personal attendance of the beginner on the master of

the art so as to be trained by his example and his instructions.

Formal instruction both in Latin literature and in Latin rhetoric

was given first about 650 by Lucius Aelius Praeconinus of Lanuvium,

called the "penman" (-Stilo-), a distinguished Roman knight of

strict conservative views, who read Plautus and similar works with

a select circle of younger men--including Varro and Cicero--and

sometimes also went over outlines of speeches with the authors,

or put similar outlines into the hands of his friends. This was

instruction, but Stilo was not a professional schoolmaster; he

taught literature and rhetoric, just as jurisprudence was taught

at Rome, in the character of a senior friend of aspiring young men,

not of a man hired and holding himself at every one's command.

Course of Literature and Rhetoric

But about his time began also the scholastic higher instruction

in Latin, separated as well from elementary Latin as from Greek

instruction, and imparted in special establishments by paid

masters, ordinarily manumitted slaves. That its spirit and method

were throughout borrowed from the exercises in the Greek literature

and language, was a matter of course; and the scholars also consisted,

as at these exercises, of youths, and not of boys. This Latin

instruction was soon divided like the Greek into two courses;

in so far as the Latin literature was first the subject of

scientific lectures, and then a technical introduction was given

to the preparation of panegyrics, public, and forensic orations.

The first Roman school of literature was opened about Stilo's time

by Marcus Saevius Nicanor Postumus, the first separate school for

Latin rhetoric about 660 by Lucius Plotius Gallus; but ordinarily

instructions in rhetoric were also given in the Latin schools of

literature. This new Latin school-instruction was of the most

comprehensive importance. The introduction to the knowledge of

Latin literature and Latin oratory, such as had formerly been

imparted by connoisseurs and masters of high position, had

preserved a certain independence in relation to the Greeks.

The judges of language and the masters of oratory were doubtless

under the influence of Hellenism, but not absolutely under that of

the Greek school-grammar and school-rhetoric; the latter in particular

was decidedly an object of dread. The pride as well as the sound

common sense of the Romans demurred to the Greek assertion that

the ability to speak of things, which the orator understood and felt,

intelligibly and attractively to his peers in the mother-tongue

could be learned in the school by school-rules. To the solid

practical advocate the procedure of the Greek rhetoricians, so

totally estranged from life, could not but appear worse for the

beginner than no preparation at all; to the man of thorough culture

and matured by the experience of life, the Greek rhetoric seemed

shallow and repulsive; while the man of serious conservative views

did not fail to observe the close affinity between a professionally

developed rhetoric and the trade of the demagogue. Accordingly

the Scipionic circle had shown the most bitter hostility to the

rhetoricians, and, if Greek declamations before paid masters were

tolerated doubtless primarily as exercises in speaking Greek, Greek

rhetoric did not thereby find its way either into Latin oratory or

into Latin oratorical instruction. But in the new Latin rhetorical

schools the Roman youths were trained as men and public orators by

discussing in pairs rhetorical themes; they accused Ulysses, who

was found beside the corpse of Ajax with the latter's bloody sword,

of the murder of his comrade in arms, or upheld his innocence; they

charged Orestes with the murder of his mother, or undertook to

defend him; or perhaps they helped Hannibal with a supplementary

good advice as to the question whether he would do better to comply

with the invitation to Rome, or to remain in Carthage, or to take

flight. It was natural that the Catonian opposition should once

more bestir itself against these offensive and pernicious conflicts

of words. The censors of 662 issued a warning to teachers and

parents not to allow the young men to spend the whole day in

exercises, whereof their ancestors had known nothing; and the man,

from whom this warning came, was no less than the first forensic

orator of his age, Lucius Licinius Crassus. Of course the

Cassandra spoke in vain; declamatory exercises in Latin on the

current themes of the Greek schools became a permanent ingredient

in the education of Roman youth, and contributed their part to

educate the very boys as forensic and political players and to

stifle in the bud all earnest and true eloquence.

As the aggregate result of this modern Roman education there sprang

up the new idea of "humanity," as it was called, which consisted

partly of a more or less superficial appropriation of the aesthetic

culture of the Hellenes, partly of a privileged Latin culture as

an imitation or mutilated copy of the Greek. This new humanity,

as the very name indicates, renounced the specific characteristics

of Roman life, nay even came forward in opposition to them, and

combined in itself, just like our closely kindred "general

culture," a nationally cosmopolitan and socially exclusive

character. Here too we trace the revolution, which separated

classes and blended nations.

CHAPTER XIII

Literature and Art

Literary Reaction

The sixth century was, both in a political and a literary point of

view, a vigorous and great age. It is true that we do not find in

the field of authorship any more than in that of politics a man of

the first rank; Naevius, Ennius, Plautus, Cato, gifted and lively

authors of distinctly-marked individuality, were not in the highest

sense men of creative talent; nevertheless we perceive in the

soaring, stirring, bold strain of their dramatic, epic, and

historic attempts, that these rest on the gigantic struggles of

the Punic wars. Much is only artificially transplanted, there

are various faults in delineation and colouring, the form of art

and the language are deficient in purity of treatment, Greek and

national elements are quaintly conjoined; the whole performance

betrays the stamp of its scholastic origin and lacks independence

and completeness; yet there exists in the poets and authors of that

age, if not the full power to reach their high aim, at any rate

the courage to compete with and the hope of rivalling the Greeks.

It is otherwise in the epoch before us. The morning mists fell;

what had been begun in the fresh feeling of the national strength

hardened amidst war, with youthful want of insight into the

difficulty of the undertaking and into the measure of their own

talent, but also with youthful delight in and love to the work,

could not be carried farther now, when on the one hand the dull

sultriness of the approaching revolutionary storm began to fill

the air, and on the other hand the eyes of the more intelligent

were gradually opened to the incomparable glory of Greek poetry and

art and to the very modest artistic endowments of their own nation.

The literature of the sixth century had arisen from the influence

of Greek art on half-cultivated, but excited and susceptible minds.

The increased Hellenic culture of the seventh called forth a literary

reaction, which destroyed the germs of promise contained in those

simple imitative attempts by the winter-frost of reflection, and rooted

up the wheat and the tares of the older type of literature together.

Scipionic Circle

This reaction proceeded primarily and chiefly from the circle

which assembled around Scipio Aemilianus, and whose most prominent

members among the Roman world of quality were, in addition to

Scipio himself, his elder friend and counsellor Gaius Laelius

(consul in 614) and Scipio's younger companions, Lucius Furius

Philus (consul in 618) and Spurius Mummius, the brother of the

destroyer of Corinth, among the Roman and Greek literati the

comedian Terence, the satirist Lucilius, the historian Polybius,

and the philosopher Panaetius. Those who were familiar with the

Iliad, with Xenophon, and with Menander, could not be greatly

impressed by the Roman Homer, and still less by the bad

translations of the tragedies of Euripides which Ennius had

furnished and Pacuvius continued to furnish. While patriotic

considerations might set bounds to criticism in reference to the

native chronicles, Lucilius at any rate directed very pointed

shafts against "the dismal figures from the complicated expositions

of Pacuvius"; and similar severe, but not unjust criticisms of

Ennius, Plautus, Pacuvius--all those poets "who appeared to have a

licence to talk pompously and to reason illogically"--are found in

the polished author of the Rhetoric dedicated to Herennius, written

at the close of this period. People shrugged their shoulders at

the interpolations, with which the homely popular wit of Rome

had garnished the elegant comedies of Philemon and Diphilus.

Half smiling, half envious, they turned away from the inadequate

attempts of a dull age, which that circle probably regarded

somewhat as a mature man regards the poetical effusions of his

youth; despairing of the transplantation of the marvellous tree,

they allowed the higher species of art in poetry and prose

substantially to fall into abeyance, and restricted themselves

in these departments to an intelligent enjoyment of foreign

masterpieces. The productiveness of this epoch displayed itself

chiefly in the subordinate fields of the lighter comedy, the

poetical miscellany, the political pamphlet, and the professional

sciences. The literary cue was correctness, in the style of art

and especially in the language, which, as a more limited circle of

persons of culture became separated from the body of the people,

was in its turn divided into the classical Latin of higher society

and the vulgar Latin of the common people. The prologues of

Terence promise "pure Latin"; warfare against faults of language

forms a chief element of the Lucilian satire; and with this

circumstance is connected the fact, that composition in Greek among

the Romans now falls decidedly into the shade. In so far certainly

there is an improvement; inadequate efforts occur in this epoch far

less frequently; performances in their kind complete and thoroughly

pleasing occur far oftener than before or afterwards; in a

linguistic point of view Cicero calls the age of Laelius and Scipio

the golden age of pure unadulterated Latin. In like manner

literary activity gradually rises in public opinion from a trade

to an art. At the beginning of this period the preparation of

theatrical pieces at any rate, if not the publication of recitative

poems, was still regarded as not becoming for the Roman of quality;

Pacuvius and Terence lived by their pieces; the writing of dramas

was entirely a trade, and not one of golden produce. About the time

of Sulla the state of matters had entirely changed. The remuneration

given to actors at this time proves that even the favourite dramatic

poet might then lay claim to a payment, the high amount of which

removed the stigma. By this means composing for the stage was raised

into a liberal art; and we accordingly find men of the highest

aristocratic circles, such as Lucius Caesar (aedile in 664, 667),

engaged in writing for the Roman stage and proud of sitting in the Roman

"poet's club" by the side of the ancestorless Accius. Art gains in

sympathy and honour; but the enthusiasm has departed in life and in

literature. The fearless self-confidence, which makes the poet a poet,

and which is very decidedly apparent in Plautus especially, is found

in none of those that follow; the Epigoni of the men that fought with

Hannibal are correct, but feeble.

Tragedy

Pacuvius

Let us first glance at the Roman dramatic literature and the stage

itself. Tragedy has now for the first time her specialists; the

tragic poets of this epoch do not, like those of the preceding,

cultivate comedy and epos side by side. The appreciation of this

branch of art among the writing and reading circles was evidently

on the increase, but tragic poetry itself hardly improved. We now

meet with the national tragedy (-praetexta-), the creation of

Naevius, only in the hands of Pacuvius to be mentioned immediately--

an after-growth of the Ennian epoch. Among the probably numerous

poets who imitated Greek tragedies two alone acquired a

considerable name. Marcus Pacuvius from Brundisium (535-c. 625)

who in his earlier years earned his livelihood in Rome by painting

and only composed tragedies when advanced in life, belongs as

respects both his years and his style to the sixth rather than

the seventh century, although his poetical activity falls within

the latter. He composed on the whole after the manner of his

countryman, uncle, and master Ennius. Polishing more carefully and

aspiring to a higher strain than his predecessor, he was regarded

by favourable critics of art afterwards as a model of artistic

poetry and of rich style: in the fragments, however, that have

reached us proofs are not wanting to justify the censure of the

poet's language by Cicero and the censure of his taste by Lucilius;

his language appears more rugged than that of his predecessor, his

style of composition pompous and punctilious.(1) There are traces

that he like Ennius attached more value to philosophy than to

religion; but he did not at any rate, like the latter, prefer

dramas chiming in with neological views and preaching sensuous

passion or modern enlightenment, and drew without distinction from

Sophocles or from Euripides--of that poetry with a decided special

aim, which almost stamps Ennius with genius, there can have been

no vein in the younger poet.

Accius

More readable and adroit imitations of Greek tragedy were furnished

by Pacuvius' younger contemporary, Lucius Accius, son of a freedman

of Pisaurum (584-after 651), with the exception of Pacuvius the

only notable tragic poet of the seventh century. An active author

also in the field of literary history and grammar, he doubtless

laboured to introduce instead of the crude manner of his

predecessors greater purity of language and style into Latin

tragedy; yet even his inequality and incorrectness were

emphatically censured by men of strict observance like Lucilius.

Greek Comedy

Terence

Far greater activity and far more important results are apparent

in the field of comedy. At the very commencement of this period

a remarkable reaction set in against the sort of comedy hitherto

prevalent and popular. Its representative Terentius (558-595) is

one of the most interesting phenomena, in a historical point of

view, in Roman literature. Born in Phoenician Africa, brought in

early youth as a slave to Rome and there introduced to the Greek

culture of the day, he seemed from the very first destined for the

vocation of giving back to the new Attic comedy that cosmopolitan

character, which in its adaptation to the Roman public under the

rough hands of Naevius, Plautus, and their associates it had in

some measure lost. Even in the selection and employment of models

the contrast is apparent between him and that predecessor whom

alone we can now compare with him. Plautus chooses his pieces from

the whole range of the newer Attic comedy, and by no means disdains

the livelier and more popular comedians, such as Philemon; Terence

keeps almost exclusively to Menander, the most elegant, polished,

and chaste of all the poets of the newer comedy. The method of

working up several Greek pieces into one Latin is retained by

Terence, because in fact from the state of the case it could not be

avoided by the Roman editors; but it is handled with incomparably

more skill and carefulness. The Plautine dialogue beyond doubt

departed very frequently from its models; Terence boasts of the

verbal adherence of his imitations to the originals, by which

however we are not to understand a verbal translation in our sense.

The not unfrequently coarse, but always effective laying on of

Roman local tints over the Greek ground-work, which Plautus was

fond of, is completely and designedly banished from Terence;

not an allusion puts one in mind of Rome, not a proverb, hardly

a reminiscence;(2) even the Latin titles are replaced by Greek.

The same distinction shows itself in the artistic treatment. First

of all the players receive back their appropriate masks, and greater

care is observed as to the scenic arrangements, so that it is no

longer the case, as with Plautus, that everything needs to take

place on the street, whether belonging to it or not. Plautus ties

and unties the dramatic knot carelessly and loosely, but his plot

is droll and often striking; Terence, far less effective, keeps

everywhere account of probability, not unfrequently at the cost of

suspense, and wages emphatic war against the certainly somewhat

flat and insipid standing expedients of his predecessors, e. g.

against allegoric dreams.(3) Plautus paints his characters with

broad strokes, often after a stock-model, always with a view to

the gross effect from a distance and on the whole; Terence handles

the psychological development with a careful and often excellent

miniature-painting, as in the -Adelphi- for instance, where the

two old men--the easy bachelor enjoying life in town, and the sadly

harassed not at all refined country-landlord--form a masterly

contrast. The springs of action and the language of Plautus are

drawn from the tavern, those of Terence from the household of the

good citizen. The lazy Plautine hostelry, the very unconstrained

but very charming damsels with the hosts duly corresponding,

the sabre-rattling troopers, the menial world painted with an

altogether peculiar humour, whose heaven is the cellar, and whose

fate is the lash, have disappeared in Terence or at any rate

undergone improvement. In Plautus we find ourselves, on the whole,

among incipient or thorough rogues, in Terence again, as a rule,

among none but honest men; if occasionally a -leno- is plundered or

a young man taken to the brothel, it is done with a moral intent,

possibly out of brotherly love or to deter the boy from frequenting

improper haunts. The Plautine pieces are pervaded by the significant

antagonism of the tavern to the house; everywhere wives are

visited with abuse, to the delight of all husbands temporarily

emancipated and not quite sure of an amiable salutation at home.

The comedies of Terence are pervaded by a conception not more

moral, but doubtless more becoming, of the feminine nature and of

married life. As a rule, they end with a virtuous marriage, or,

if possible, with two--just as it was the glory of Menander that

he compensated for every seduction by a marriage. The eulogies of

a bachelor life, which are so frequent in Menander, are repeated by

his Roman remodeller only with characteristic shyness,(4) whereas

the lover in his agony, the tender husband at the -accouchement-,

the loving sister by the death-bed in the -Eunuchus- and the

-Andria- are very gracefully delineated; in the -Hecyra- there even

appears at the close as a delivering angel a virtuous courtesan,

likewise a genuine Menandrian figure, which the Roman public, it is

true, very properly hissed. In Plautus the fathers throughout only

exist for the purpose of being jeered and swindled by their sons;

with Terence in the -Heauton Timorumenos- the lost son is reformed

by his father's wisdom, and, as in general he is full of excellent

instructions as to education, so the point of the best of his

pieces, the -Adelphi-, turns on finding the right mean between the

too liberal training of the uncle and the too rigid training of the

father. Plautus writes for the great multitude and gives utterance

to profane and sarcastic speeches, so far as the censorship of the

stage at all allowed; Terence on the contrary describes it as his

aim to please the good and, like Menander, to offend nobody.

Plautus is fond of vigorous, often noisy dialogue, and his pieces

require a lively play of gesture in the actors; Terence confines

himself to "quiet conversation." The language of Plautus abounds in

burlesque turns and verbal witticisms, in alliterations, in comic

coinages of new terms, Aristophanic combinations of words, pithy

expressions of the day jestingly borrowed from the Greek. Terence

knows nothing of such caprices; his dialogue moves on with the

purest symmetry, and its points are elegant epigrammatic and

sententious turns. The comedy of Terence is not to be called an

improvement, as compared with that of Plautus, either in a poetical

or in a moral point of view. Originality cannot be affirmed of

either, but, if possible, there is less of it in Terence; and

the dubious praise of more correct copying is at least outweighed

by the circumstance that, while the younger poet reproduced the

agreeableness, he knew not how to reproduce the merriment of

Menander, so that the comedies of Plautus imitated from Menander,

such as the -Stichus-, the -Cistellaria-, the -Bacchides-, probably

preserve far more of the flowing charm of the original than the

comedies of the "-dimidiatus Menander-." And, while the aesthetic

critic cannot recognize an improvement in the transition from the

coarse to the dull, as little can the moralist in the transition

from the obscenity and indifference of Plautus to the accommodating

morality of Terence. But in point of language an improvement

certainly took place. Elegance of language was the pride of the

poet, and it was owing above all to its inimitable charm that the

most refined judges of art in aftertimes, such as Cicero, Caesar,

and Quinctilian, assigned the palm to him among all the Roman poets

of the republican age. In so far it is perhaps justifiable to date

a new era in Roman literature--the real essence of which lay not

in the development of Latin poetry, but in the development of

the Latin language--from the comedies of Terence as the first

artistically pure imitation of Hellenic works of art. The modern

comedy made its way amidst the most determined literary warfare.

The Plautine style of composing had taken root among the Roman

bourgeoisie; the comedies of Terence encountered the liveliest

opposition from the public, which found their "insipid language,"

their "feeble style," intolerable. The, apparently, pretty

sensitive poet replied in his prologues--which properly were not

intended for any such purpose--with counter-criticisms full of

defensive and offensive polemics; and appealed from the multitude,

which had twice run off from his -Hecyra- to witness a band of

gladiators and rope-dancers, to the cultivated circles of the

genteel world. He declared that he only aspired to the approval

of the "good"; in which doubtless there was not wanting a hint,

that it was not at all seemly to undervalue works of art which

had obtained the approval of the "few." He acquiesced in or even

favoured the report, that persons of quality aided him in composing

with their counsel or even with their cooperation.(5) In reality

he carried his point; even in literature the oligarchy prevailed,

and the artistic comedy of the exclusives supplanted the comedy

of the people: we find that about 620 the pieces of Plautus

disappeared from the set of stock plays. This is the more

significant, because after the early death of Terence no man of

conspicuous talent at all further occupied this field. Respecting

the comedies of Turpilius (651 at an advanced age) and other stop-

gaps wholly or almost wholly forgotten, a connoisseur already at

the close of this period gave it as his opinion, that the new

comedies were even much worse than the bad new pennies.(6)

National Comedy

Afranius

We have formerly shown(7) that in all probability already in the

course of the sixth century a national Roman comedy (-togata-) was

added to the Graeco-Roman (-palliata-), as a portraiture not of the

distinctive life of the capital, but of the ways and doings of the

Latin land. Of course the Terentian school rapidly took possession

of this species of comedy also; it was quite in accordance with

its spirit to naturalise Greek comedy in Italy on the one hand

by faithful translation, and on the other hand by pure Roman

imitation. The chief representative of this school was Lucius

Afranius (who flourished about 66). The fragments of his comedies

remaining give no distinct impression, but they are not

inconsistent with what the Roman critics of art remark regarding

him. His numerous national comedies were in their construction

thoroughly formed on the model of the Greek intrigue-piece; only,

as was natural in imitation, they were simpler and shorter. In the

details also he borrowed what pleased him partly from Menander,

partly from the older national literature. But of the Latin local

tints, which are so distinctly marked in Titinius the creator of

this species of art, we find not much in Afranius;(8) his subjects

retain a very general character, and may well have been throughout

imitations of particular Greek comedies with merely an alteration

of costume. A polished eclecticism and adroitness in composition--

literary allusions not unfrequently occur--are characteristic of

him as of Terence: the moral tendency too, in which his pieces

approximated to the drama, their inoffensive tenor in a police

point of view, their purity of language are common to him with the

latter. Afranius is sufficiently indicated as of a kindred spirit

with Menander and Terence by the judgment of posterity that he wore

the -toga- as Menander would have worn it had he been an Italian,

and by his own expression that to his mind Terence surpassed

all other poets.

Atellanae

The farce appeared afresh at this period in the field of Roman

literature. It was in itself very old:(9) long before Rome arose,

the merry youths of Latium may have improvised on festal occasions

in the masks once for all established for particular characters.

These pastimes obtained a fixed local background in the Latin

"asylum of fools," for which they selected the formerly Oscan

town of Atella, which was destroyed in the Hannibalic war and

was thereby handed over to comic use; thenceforth the name of

"Oscan plays" or "plays of Atella" was commonly used for these

exhibitions.(10) But these pleasantries had nothing to do with

the stage(11) and with literature; they were performed by amateurs

where and when they pleased, and the text was not written or at any

rate was not published. It was not until the present period that

the Atellan piece was handed over to actors properly so called,(12)

and was employed, like the Greek satyric drama, as an afterpiece

particularly after tragedies; a change which naturally suggested

the extension of literary activity to that field. Whether this

authorship developed itself altogether independently, or whether

possibly the art-farce of Lower Italy, in various respects of

kindred character, gave the impulse to this Roman farce,(13) can

no longer be determined; that the several pieces were uniformly

original works, is certain. The founder of this new species of

literature, Lucius Pomponius from the Latin colony of Bononia,

appeared in the first half of the seventh century;(14) and along

with his pieces those of another poet Novius soon became

favourites. So far as the few remains and the reports of the old

-litteratores- allow us to form an opinion, they were short farces,

ordinarily perhaps of one act, the charm of which depended less on

the preposterous and loosely constructed plot than on the drastic

portraiture of particular classes and situations. Festal days and

public acts were favourite subjects of comic delineation, such as

the "Marriage," the "First of March," "Harlequin Candidate";

so were also foreign nationalities--the Transalpine Gauls,

the Syrians; above all, the various trades frequently appear

on the boards. The sacristan, the soothsayer, the bird-seer,

the physician, the publican, the painter, fisherman, baker, pass

across the stage; the public criers were severely assailed and still

more the fullers, who seem to have played in the Roman fool-world

the part of our tailors. While the varied life of the city thus

received its due attention, the farmer with his joys and sorrows

was also represented in all aspects. The copiousness of this rural

repertory may be guessed from the numerous titles of that nature,

such as "the Cow," "the Ass," "the Kid," "the Sow," "the Swine,"

"the Sick Boar," "the Farmer," "the Countryman," "Harlequin

Countryman," "the Cattle-herd," "the Vinedresser," "the Fig-

gatherer," "Woodcutting," "Pruning," "the Poultry-yard." In these

pieces it was always the standing figures of the stupid and the

artful servant, the good old man, the wise man, that delighted

the public; the first in particular might never be wanting--

the -Pulcinello- of this farce--the gluttonous filthy -Maccus-,

hideously ugly and yet eternally in love, always on the point

of stumbling across his own path, set upon by all with jeers

and with blows and eventually at the close the regular scapegoat.

The titles "-Maccus Miles-," "-Maccus Copo-," "-Maccus Virgo-,"

"-Maccus Exul-," "-Macci Gemini-" may furnish the good-humoured

reader with some conception of the variety of entertainment in the

Roman masquerade. Although these farces, at least after they came

to be written, accommodated themselves to the general laws of

literature, and in their metres for instance followed the Greek

stage, they yet naturally retained a far more Latin and more

popular stamp than even the national comedy. The farce resorted

to the Greek world only under the form of travestied tragedy;(15)

and this style appears to have been cultivated first by Novius,

and not very frequently in any case. The farce of this poet moreover

ventured, if not to trespass on Olympus, at least to touch the most

human of the gods, Hercules: he wrote a -Hercules Auctionator-.

The tone, as a matter of course, was not the most refined; very

unambiguous ambiguities, coarse rustic obscenities, ghosts

frightening and occasionally devouring children, formed part of

the entertainment, and offensive personalities, even with the mention

of names, not unfrequently crept in. But there was no want also of

vivid delineation, of grotesque incidents, of telling jokes, and of

pithy sayings; and the harlequinade rapidly won for itself no

inconsiderable position in the theatrical life of the capital

and even in literature.

Dramatic Arrangements

Lastly as regards the development of dramatic arrangements we are

not in a position to set forth in detail--what is clear on the

whole--that the general interest in dramatic performances was

constantly on the increase, and that they became more and more

frequent and magnificent. Not only was there hardly any ordinary

or extraordinary popular festival that was now celebrated without

dramatic exhibitions; even in the country-towns and in private

houses representations by companies of hired actors were common.

It is true that, while probably various municipal towns already at

this time possessed theatres built of stone, the capital was still

without one; the building of a theatre, already contracted for,

had been again prohibited by the senate in 599 on the suggestion

of Publius Scipio Nasica. It was quite in the spirit of the

sanctimonious policy of this age, that the building of a permanent

theatre was prohibited out of respect for the customs of their

ancestors, but nevertheless theatrical entertainments were allowed

rapidly to increase, and enormous sums were expended annually

in erecting and decorating structures of boards for them.

The arrangements of the stage became visibly better. The improved

scenic arrangements and the reintroduction of masks about the time

of Terence are doubtless connected with the fact, that the erection

and maintenance of the stage and stage-apparatus were charged

in 580 on the public chest.(16) The plays which Lucius Mummius

produced after the capture of Corinth (609) formed an epoch in

the history of the theatre. It was probably then that a theatre

acoustically constructed after the Greek fashion and provided with

seats was first erected, and more care generally was expended on

the exhibitions.(17) Now also there is frequent mention of the

bestowal of a prize of victory--which implies the competition of

several pieces--of the audience taking a lively part for or against

the leading actors, of cliques and -claqueurs-. The decorations

and machinery were improved; moveable scenery artfully painted

and audible theatrical thunder made their appearance under the

aedileship of Gaius Claudius Pulcher in 655;(18) and twenty years

later (675) under the aedileship of the brothers Lucius and Marcus

Lucullus came the changing of the decorations by shifting the

scenes. To the close of this epoch belongs the greatest of Roman

actors, the freedman Quintus Roscius (d. about 692 at a great age),

throughout several generations the ornament and pride of the Roman

stage,(19) the friend and welcome boon-companion of Sulla--to whom

we shall have to recur in the sequel.

Satura

In recitative poetry the most surprising circumstance is the

insignificance of the Epos, which during the sixth century had

occupied decidedly the first place in the literature destined for

reading; it had numerous representatives in the seventh, but not a

single one who had even temporary success. From the present epoch

there is hardly anything to be reported save a number of rude

attempts to translate Homer, and some continuations of the Ennian

Annals, such as the "Istrian War" of Hostius and the "Annals

(perhaps) of the Gallic War" by Aulus Furius (about 650), which to

all appearance took up the narrative at the very point where Ennius

had broken off--the description of the Istrian war of 576 and 577.

In didactic and elegiac poetry no prominent name appears. The only

successes which the recitative poetry of this period has to show,

belong to the domain of what was called -Satura---a species of art,

which like the letter or the pamphlet allowed of any form and

admitted any sort of contents, and accordingly in default of all

proper generic characters derived its individual shape wholly from

the individuality of each poet, and occupied a position not merely

on the boundary between poetry and prose, but even more than half

beyond the bounds of literature proper. The humorous poetical

epistles, which one of the younger men of the Scipionic circle,

Spurius Mummius, the brother of the destroyer of Corinth, sent home

from the camp of Corinth to his friends, were still read with

pleasure a century afterwards; and numerous poetical pleasantries

of that sort not destined for publication probably proceeded at

that time from the rich social and intellectual life of the

better circles of Rome.

Lucilius

Its representative in literature is Gaius Lucilius (606-651) sprung

of a respectable family in the Latin colony of Suessa, and likewise

a member of the Scipionic circle. His poems are, as it were, open

letters to the public. Their contents, as a clever successor

gracefully says, embrace the whole life of a cultivated man of

independence, who looks upon the events passing on the political

stage from the pit and occasionally from the side-scenes; who

converses with the best of his epoch as his equals; who follows

literature and science with sympathy and intelligence without

wishing personally to pass for a poet or scholar; and who, in fine,

makes his pocket-book the confidential receptacle for everything

good and bad that he meets with, for his political experiences and

expectations, for grammatical remarks and criticisms on art, for

incidents of his own life, visits, dinners, journeys, as well as

for anecdotes which he has heard. Caustic, capricious, thoroughly

individual, the Lucilian poetry has yet the distinct stamp of an

oppositional and, so far, didactic aim in literature as well as in

morals and politics; there is in it something of the revolt of the

country against the capital; the Suessan's sense of his own purity

of speech and honesty of life asserts itself in antagonism to the

great Babel of mingled tongues and corrupt morals. The aspiration

of the Scipionic circle after literary correctness, especially in

point of language, finds critically its most finished and most

clever representative in Lucilius. He dedicated his very first

book to Lucius Stilo, the founder of Roman philology,(20) and

designated as the public for which he wrote not the cultivated

circles of pure and classical speech, but the Tarentines, the

Bruttians, the Siculi, or in other words the half-Greeks of Italy,

whose Latin certainly might well require a corrective. Whole books

of his poems are occupied with the settlement of Latin orthography

and prosody, with the combating of Praenestine, Sabine, Etruscan

provincialisms, with the exposure of current solecisms; along with

which, however, the poet by no means forgets to ridicule the

insipidly systematic Isocratean purism of words and phrases,(21)

and even to reproach his friend Scipio in right earnest jest

with the exclusive fineness of his language.(22) But the poet

inculcates purity of morals in public and private life far more

earnestly than he preaches pure and simple Latinity. For this

his position gave him peculiar advantages. Although by descent,

estate, and culture on a level with the genteel Romans of his time

and possessor of a handsome house in the capital, he was yet not a

Roman burgess, but a Latin; even his position towards Scipio, under

whom he had served in his early youth during the Numantine war, and

in whose house he was a frequent visitor, may be connected with the

fact, that Scipio stood in varied relations to the Latins and was

their patron in the political feuds of the time.(23) He was thus

precluded from a public life, and he disdained the career of a

speculator--he had no desire, as he once said, to "cease to be

Lucilius in order to become an Asiatic revenue-farmer." So he lived

in the sultry age of the Gracchan reforms and the agitations preceding

the Social war, frequenting the palaces and villas of the Roman

grandees and yet not exactly their client, at once in the midst

of the strife of political coteries and parties and yet not directly

taking part with one or another; in a way similar to Beranger,

of whom there is much that reminds us in the political and poetical

position of Lucilius. From this position he uttered his comments

on public life with a sound common sense that was not to be

shaken, with a good humour that was inexhaustible, and with

a wit perpetually gushing:

-Nunc vero a mane ad noctem, festo atque profesto

Toto itidem pariterque die populusque patresque

Iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam.

Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti;

Verba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose,

Blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se,

Insidias facere ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes-.

The illustrations of this inexhaustible text remorselessly, without

omitting his friends or even the poet himself, assailed the evils

of the age, the coterie-system, the endless Spanish war-service,

and the like; the very commencement of his Satires was a great

debate in the senate of the Olympian gods on the question, whether

Rome deserved to enjoy the continued protection of the celestials.

Corporations, classes, individuals, were everywhere severally

mentioned by name; the poetry of political polemics, shut out

from the Roman stage, was the true element and life-breath of

the Lucilian poems, which by the power of the most pungent wit

illustrated with the richest imagery--a power which still entrances

us even in the remains that survive--pierce and crush their

adversary "as by a drawn sword." In this--in the moral ascendency

and the proud sense of freedom of the poet of Suessa--lies the

reason why the refined Venusian, who in the Alexandrian age of

Roman poetry revived the Lucilian satire, in spite of all his

superiority in formal skill with true modesty yields to the earlier

poet as "his better." The language is that of a man of thorough

culture, Greek and Latin, who freely indulges his humour; a poet

like Lucilius, who is alleged to have made two hundred hexameters

before dinner and as many after it, is in far too great a hurry to

be nice; useless prolixity, slovenly repetition of the same turn,

culpable instances of carelessness frequently occur: the first

word, Latin or Greek, is always the best. The metres are similarly

treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose

the words--his clever imitator says--no man would observe that

he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of

effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24)

The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level

of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully

prepared and polished literary work has to a letter written on the

spur of the moment. But the incomparably higher intellectual gifts

and the freer view of life, which mark the knight of Suessa as

compared with the African slave, rendered his success as rapid

and brilliant as that of Terence had been laborious and doubtful;

Lucilius became immediately the favourite of the nation, and he

like Beranger could say of his poems that "they alone of all were

read by the people." The uncommon popularity of the Lucilian poem

is, in a historical point of view, a remarkable event; we see from

it that literature was already a power, and beyond doubt we should

fall in with various traces of its influence, if a thorough history

of this period had been preserved. Posterity has only confirmed

the judgment of contemporaries; the Roman judges of art who were

opposed to the Alexandrian school assigned to Lucilius the first

rank among all the Latin poets. So far as satire can be regarded

as a distinct form of art at all, Lucilius created it; and in it

created the only species of art which was peculiar to the Romans

and was bequeathed by them to posterity.

Of poetry attaching itself to the Alexandrian school nothing

occurs in Rome at this epoch except minor poems translated from or

modelled on Alexandrian epigrams, which deserve notice not on their

own account, but as the first harbingers of the later epoch of

Roman literature. Leaving out of account some poets little known

and whose dates cannot be fixed with certainty, there belong to

this category Quintus Catulus, consul in 652(25) and Lucius

Manlius, an esteemed senator, who wrote in 657. The latter seems

to have been the first to circulate among the Romans various

geographical tales current among the Greeks, such as the Delian

legend of Latona, the fables of Europa and of the marvellous bird

Phoenix; as it was likewise reserved for him on his travels to

discover at Dodona and to copy that remarkable tripod, on which

might be read the oracle imparted to the Pelasgians before their

migration into the land of the Siceli and Aborigines--a discovery

which the Roman annals did not neglect devoutly to register.

Historical Composition

Polybius

In historical composition this epoch is especially marked by the

emergence of an author who did not belong to Italy either by birth

or in respect of his intellectual and literary standpoint, but who

first or rather alone brought literary appreciation and description

to bear on Rome's place in the world, and to whom all subsequent

generations, and we too, owe the best part of our knowledge of

the Roman development. Polybius (c. 546-c. 627) of Megalopolis in

the Peloponnesus, son of the Achaean statesman Lycortas, took part

apparently as early as 565 in the expedition of the Romans against

the Celts of Asia Minor, and was afterwards on various occasions,

especially during the third Macedonian war, employed by his

countrymen in military and diplomatic affairs. After the crisis

occasioned by that war in Hellas he was carried off along with the

other Achaean hostages to Italy,(26) where he lived in exile for

seventeen years (587-604) and was introduced by the sons of Paullus

to the genteel circles of the capital. By the sending back of

the Achaean hostages(27) he was restored to his home, where he

thenceforth acted as permanent mediator between his confederacy

and the Romans. He was present at the destruction of Carthage

and of Corinth (608). He seemed educated, as it were, by destiny

to comprehend the historical position of Rome more clearly than

the Romans of that day could themselves. From the place which

he occupied, a Greek statesman and a Roman prisoner, esteemed and

occasionally envied for his Hellenic culture by Scipio Aemilianus

and the first men of Rome generally, he saw the streams, which had

so long flowed separately, meet together in the same channel and

the history of the states of the Mediterranean resolve itself into

the hegemony of Roman power and Greek culture. Thus Polybius

became the first Greek of note, who embraced with serious

conviction the comprehensive view of the Scipionic circle, and

recognized the superiority of Hellenism in the sphere of intellect

and of the Roman character in the sphere of politics as facts,

regarding which history had given her final decision, and to which

people on both sides were entitled and bound to submit. In this

spirit he acted as a practical statesman, and wrote his history.

If in his youth he had done homage to the honourable but

impracticable local patriotism of the Achaeans, during his later

years, with a clear discernment of inevitable necessity, he

advocated in the community to which he belonged the policy of the

closest adherence to Rome. It was a policy in the highest degree

judicious and beyond doubt well-intentioned, but it was far from

being high-spirited or proud. Nor was Polybius able wholly to

disengage himself from the vanity and paltriness of the Hellenic

statesmanship of the time. He was hardly released from exile,

when he proposed to the senate that it should formally secure to

the released their former rank in their several homes; whereupon

Cato aptly remarked, that this looked to him as if Ulysses were to

return to the cave of Polyphemus to request from the giant his hat

and girdle. He often made use of his relations with the great

men in Rome to benefit his countrymen; but the way in which he

submitted to, and boasted of, the illustrious protection somewhat

approaches fawning servility. His literary activity breathes

throughout the same spirit as his practical action. It was

the task of his life to write the history of the union of the

Mediterranean states under the hegemony of Rome. From the first

Punic war down to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth his work

embraces the fortunes of all the civilized states--namely Greece,

Macedonia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and Italy--and

exhibits in causal connection the mode in which they came under

the Roman protectorate; in so far he describes it as his object to

demonstrate the fitness and reasonableness of the Roman hegemony.

In design as in execution, this history stands in clear and

distinct contrast with the contemporary Roman as well as with the

contemporary Greek historiography. In Rome history still remained

wholly at the stage of chronicle; there existed doubtless important

historical materials, but what was called historical composition

was restricted--with the exception of the very respectable but

purely individual writings of Cato, which at any rate did not reach

beyond the rudiments of research and narration--partly to nursery

tales, partly to collections of notices. The Greeks had certainly

exhibited historical research and had written history; but the

conceptions of nation and state had been so completely lost amidst

the distracted times of the Diadochi, that none of the numerous

historians succeeded in following the steps of the great Attic

masters in spirit and in truth, or in treating from a general

point of view the matter of world-wide interest in the history

of the times.

Their histories were either purely outward records, or they were

pervaded by the verbiage and sophistries of Attic rhetoric and only

too often by the venality and vulgarity, the sycophancy and the

bitterness of the age. Among the Romans as among the Greeks there

was nothing but histories of cities or of tribes. Polybius,

a Peloponnesian, as has been justly remarked, and holding

intellectually a position at least as far aloof from the Attics

as from the Romans, first stepped beyond these miserable limits,

treated the Roman materials with mature Hellenic criticism, and

furnished a history, which was not indeed universal, but which was

at any rate dissociated from the mere local states and laid hold of

the Romano-Greek state in the course of formation. Never perhaps

has any historian united within himself all the advantages of an

author drawing from original sources so completely as Polybius.

The compass of his task is completely clear and present to him

at every moment; and his eye is fixed throughout on the real

historical connection of events. The legend, the anecdote,

the mass of worthless chronicle-notices are thrown aside; the

description of countries and peoples, the representation of

political and mercantile relations--all the facts of so infinite

importance, which escape the annalist because they do not admit of

being nailed to a particular year--are put into possession of their

long-suspended rights. In the procuring of historic materials

Polybius shows a caution and perseverance such as are not perhaps

paralleled in antiquity; he avails himself of documents, gives

comprehensive attention to the literature of different nations,

makes the most extensive use of his favourable position for

collecting the accounts of actors and eye-witnesses, and, in fine,

methodically travels over the whole domain of the Mediterranean

states and part of the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.(28)

Truthfulness is his nature. In all great matters he has no

interest for one state or against another, for this man or against

that, but is singly and solely interested in the essential

connection of events, to present which in their true relation of

causes and effects seems to him not merely the first but the sole

task of the historian. Lastly, the narrative is a model of

completeness, simplicity, and clearness. Still all these uncommon

advantages by no means constitute a historian of the first rank.

Polybius grasps his literary task, as he grasped his practical,

with great understanding, but with the understanding alone.

History, the struggle of necessity and liberty, is a moral problem;

Polybius treats it as if it were a mechanical one. The whole alone

has value for him, in nature as in the state; the particular event,

the individual man, however wonderful they may appear, are yet

properly mere single elements, insignificant wheels in the highly

artificial mechanism which is named the state. So far Polybius was

certainly qualified as no other was to narrate the history of the

Roman people, which actually solved the marvellous problem of

raising itself to unparalleled internal and external greatness

without producing a single statesman of genius in the highest

sense, and which resting on its simple foundations developed itself

with wonderful almost mathematical consistency. But the element of

moral freedom bears sway in the history of every people, and it was

not neglected by Polybius in the history of Rome with impunity.

His treatment of all questions, in which right, honour, religion

are involved, is not merely shallow, but radically false. The same

holds true wherever a genetic construction is required; the purely

mechanical attempts at explanation, which Polybius substitutes,

are sometimes altogether desperate; there is hardly, for instance,

a more foolish political speculation than that which derives

the excellent constitution of Rome from a judicious mixture of

monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, and deduces

the successes of Rome from the excellence of her constitution.

His conception of relations is everywhere dreadfully jejune and

destitute of imagination: his contemptuous and over-wise mode of

treating religious matters is altogether offensive. The narrative,

preserving throughout an intentional contrast to the usual Greek

historiography with its artistic style, is doubtless correct and

clear, but flat and languid, digressing with undue frequency into

polemical discussions or into biographical, not seldom very self-

sufficient, description of his own experiences. A controversial

vein pervades the whole work; the author destined his treatise

primarily for the Romans, and yet found among them only a very

small circle that understood him; he felt that he remained in the

eyes of the Romans a foreigner, in the eyes of his countrymen a

renegade, and that with his grand conception of his subject he

belonged more to the future than to the present Accordingly he was

not exempt from a certain ill-humour and personal bitterness, which

frequently appear after a quarrelsome and paltry fashion in his

attacks upon the superficial or even venal Greek and the uncritical

Roman historians, so that he degenerates from the tone of the

historian to that of the reviewer. Polybius is not an attractive

author; but as truth and truthfulness are of more value than all

ornament and elegance, no other author of antiquity perhaps can

be named to whom we are indebted for so much real instruction.

His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; at the point

where they begin the veil of mist which still envelops the Samnite

and Pyrrhic wars is raised, and at the point where they end a new

and, if possible, still more vexatious twilight begins.

Roman Chroniclers