Infestam miseris faciebant sæpe quietem;
Ejecteique domo, fugiebant saxea tecta
Setigeri suis adventu, validique leonis;
Atque intempestâ cedebant nocte, paventes,
Hospitibus sævis instrata cubilia fronde.”—V. 980.
One is naturally led to compare the whole of Lucretius’ description of
primeval society, and the origin of man, with Ovid’s _Four Ages of the
World_, which commence his _Metamorphoses_, and which, philosophically
considered, certainly exhibit the most wonderful of all metamorphoses. In
his sketch of the Golden Age, he has selected the favourable circumstances
alluded to by Lucretius—exemption from war and sea voyages, and
spontaneous production of fruits by the earth. There is also a beautiful
view of early life and manners in one of the elegies of Tibullus(454); and
Thomson, in his picture of what he calls the “prime of days,” has combined
the descriptions of Ovid and the elegiac bard. Most of the poets, however,
who have painted the Golden Age, and Ovid in particular, have represented
mankind as growing more vicious and unhappy with advance of
time—Lucretius, more philosophically, as constantly improving. He has
fixed on connubial love as the first great softener of the human breast;
and neither Thomson nor Milton has described with more tenderness, truth,
and purity, the joys of domestic union. He follows the progressive
improvement of mankind occasioned by their subjection to the bonds of
civil society and government; and the book concludes with an account of
the origin of the fine arts, particularly music, in the course of which
many impressive descriptions occur, and many delicious scenes are
unfolded:
“At liquidas avium voces imitarier ore
Ante fuit multo, quam lævia carmina cantu
Concelebrare homines possent, aureisque juvare.
Et zephyri, cava per calamorum, sibila primum
Agrestes docuere cavas inflare cicutas.
Inde minutatim dulces didicere querelas
Tibia quas fundit, digitis pulsata canentûm,
Avia per nemora ac sylvas saltusque reperta,
Per loca pastorum deserta, atque otia dia.”—V. 1378.
In consequence of their ignorance and superstitions, the Roman people were
rendered perpetual slaves of the most idle and unfounded terrors. In order
to counteract these popular prejudices, and to heal the constant
disquietudes that accompanied them, Lucretius proceeds, in the sixth book,
to account for a variety of extraordinary phænomena both in the heavens
and on the earth, which, at first view, seemed to deviate from the usual
laws of nature:—
“Sunt tempestates et fulmina clara canenda.”
Having discussed the various theories formed to account for electricity,
water-spouts, hurricanes, the rainbow, and volcanoes, he lastly considers
the origin of pestilential and endemic disorders. This introduces the
celebrated account of the plague, which ravaged Athens during the
Peloponnesian war, with which Lucretius concludes this book, and his
magnificent poem. “In this narrative,” says a late translator of
Lucretius, “the true genius of poetry is perhaps more powerfully and
triumphantly exhibited than in any other poem that was ever written.
Lucretius has ventured upon one of the most uncouth and repressing
subjects to the muses that can possibly be brought forward—the history and
symptoms of a disease, and this disease accompanied with circumstances
naturally the most nauseating and indelicate. It was a subject altogether
new to numerical composition; and he had to strive with all the pedantry
of technical terms, and all the abstruseness of a science in which he does
not appear to have been professionally initiated. He strove, however, and
he conquered. In language the most captivating and nervous, and with ideas
the most precise and appropriate, he has given us the entire history of
this tremendous pestilence. There is not, perhaps, a symptom omitted, yet
there is not a verse with which the most scrupulous can be offended. The
description of the symptoms, and also the various circumstances of horror
and distress attending this dreadful scourge, have been derived from
Thucydides, who furnished the facts with great accuracy, having been
himself a spectator and a sufferer under this calamity. His narrative is
esteemed an elaborate and complete performance; and to the faithful yet
elegant detail of the Greek historian, the Roman bard has added all that
was necessary to convert the description into poetry.”
In the whole history of Roman taste and criticism, nothing appears to us
so extraordinary as the slight mention that is made of Lucretius by
succeeding Latin authors; and, when mentioned, the coldness with which he
is spoken of by all Roman critics and poets, with the exception of Ovid.
Perhaps the spirit of free-thinking which pervaded his writings, rendered
it unsuitable or unsafe to extol even his poetical talents. There was a
time, when, in this country, it was thought scarcely decorous or becoming
to express high admiration of the genius of Rousseau or Voltaire.
The doctrines of Lucretius, particularly that which impugns the
superintending care of Providence, were first formally opposed by the
Stoic Manilius in his Astronomic poem. In modern times, his whole
philosophical system has been refuted in the long and elaborate poem of
the Cardinal Polignac, entitled, _Anti-Lucretius, sive de Deo et Natura_.
This enormous work, though incomplete, consists of nine books, of about
1300 lines each, and the whole is addressed to Quintius, an atheist, who
corresponds to the Lorenzo of the _Night Thoughts_. Descartes is the
Epicurus of the poem, and the subject of many heavy panegyrics. In the
philosophical part of his subject, the Cardinal has sometimes refuted, at
too great length, propositions which are manifestly absurd—at others, he
has impugned demonstrated truths—and the moral system of Lucretius he
throughout has grossly misunderstood. But he has rendered ample justice to
his poetical merit; and, in giving a compendium of the subject of his
great antagonist’s poem, he has caught some share of the poetical spirit
with which his predecessor was inspired:—
“Hic agitare velit Cytheriam inglorius artem:
Hic myrtum floresque legat, quos tinxit Adonis
Sanguine, dilectus Veneri puer; aut Heliconem,
Et colles Baccho, partim, Phœboque sacratos
Incolat. Hic, placidi latebris in mollibus antri,
Silenum recubantem, et amico nectare venas
Inflatum stupeat titubanti voce canentem;
Et juvenum cæcos ignes, et vulnera dicat,
Et vacuæ, pulsis terroribus, otia vitæ,
Fœcundosque greges, et amæni gaudia ruris:
Hæc et plura canens, avidè bibat ore diserto
Pegaseos latices; et nomen grande Poetæ,
Non Sapientis, amet. Lauro insignire poetam
Quis dubitet? Primus viridanteis ipse coronas
Imponam capiti, et meritas pro carmine laudes
Ante alios dicam.” ——(455)
Entertaining this just admiration of his opponent, the Cardinal has been
studious, while refuting his principles, to imitate as closely as possible
the poetic style of Lucretius; and, accordingly, we find many noble and
beautiful passages interspersed amid the dry discussions of the
_Anti-Lucretius_. In the first book, there is an elegant comparison,
something like that by Wolsey in _Henry VIII._, of a man who had wantoned
in the sunshine of prosperity, and was unprepared for the storms of
adversity, to the tender buds of the fruit-tree blighted by the
north-wind. The whole poem, indeed, is full of many beautiful and
appropriate similes. I have not room to transcribe them, but may refer the
reader to those in the first book, of a sick man turning to every side for
rest, to a traveller following an _ignis fatuus_; in the second, motes
dancing in the sun-beam to the atoms of Epicurus floating in the immensity
of space; in the third, the whole philosophy of Epicurus to the infinite
variety of splendid but fallacious appearances produced by the shifting of
scenery in our theatres, (line 90,) and the identity of matter amid the
various shapes it assumes, to the transformations of _Proteus_. The fourth
book commences with a beautiful image of a traveller on a steep, looking
back on his journey; immediately followed by a fine picture of the
unhallowed triumph of Epicurus, and Religion weeping during the festival
of youths to his honour. In the same book, there is a noble description of
the river Anio, (line 1459,) and a comparison of the rising of sap in
trees during spring to a fountain playing and falling back on itself
(780–845). We have in the fifth book a beautiful argument, that the soul
is not to be thought material, because affected by the body, illustrated
by musical instruments (745). In the sixth book there occurs a charming
description of the sensitive plant; and, finally, of a bird singing to his
mate, to solace her while brooding over her young:—
“Haud secus in sylvis, ac frondes inter opacas,
Ingenitum carmen modulatur musicus ales,” &c.
Almost all modern didactic poems, whether treating of theology or physics,
are composed in obvious imitation of the style and manner of Lucretius.
The poem of Aonius Palearius, _De Animi Immortalitate_, though written in
contradiction to the system of Lucretius, concerning the mortality of the
soul, is almost a _cento_ made up from lines or half lines of the Roman
bard; and the same may be said of that extensive class of Latin poems, in
which the French Jesuits of the seventeenth century have illustrated the
various phænomena of nature(456).
Others have attempted to explain the philosophy of Newton in Latin verse;
but the Newtonian system is better calculated to be demonstrated than
sung—
“Ornari res ipsa negat—contenta doceri.”
It is a philosophy founded on the most sublime calculations; and it is in
other lines and numbers than those of poetry, that the book of nature must
now be written. If we attempt to express arithmetical or algebraical
figures in verse, circumlocution is always required; more frequently they
cannot be expressed at all; and if they could, the lines would have no
advantage over prose: nay, would have considerable disadvantage, from
obscurity and prolixity. All this is fully confirmed by an examination of
the writings of those who have attempted to embellish the sublime system
of Newton with the charms of poetry. If we look, for example, into the
poem of Boscovich on Eclipses, or still more, into the work of Benedict
Stay, we shall see, notwithstanding the advantage they possessed of
writing in a language so flexible as the Latin, and so capable of
inversion,
“The shifts and turns,
The expedients and inventions multiform,
To which the mind resorts in search of terms(457).”
The latter of these writers employs 36 lines in expressing the law of
Kepler, “that the squares of the periodical times of the revolutions of
the planets, are as the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.” These
lines, too, which are considered by Stay himself, and by Boscovich, his
annotator, as the triumph of the philosophic muse, are so obscure as to
need a long commentary. Indeed, the poems of both these eminent men
consist of a string of enigmas, whereas the principal and almost only
ornament of philosophy is perspicuity. After all, only what are called the
round numbers can be expressed in verse, and this is necessarily done in a
manner so obscure and perplexed as ever to need a prose explanation.
With Lucretius and his subject it was totally the reverse. From the
incorrectness of his philosophical views, or rather those of his age, much
of his labour has been employed, so to speak, in embodying straws in
amber. Yet, with all its defects, this ancient philosophy, if it deserve
the name, had the advantage, that its indefinite nature rendered it highly
susceptible of an embellishment, which can never be bestowed on a more
precise and accurate system. Hence, perhaps, it may be safely foretold,
that the philosophical poem of Lucretius will remain unrivalled; and also,
that the prediction of Ovid concerning it will be verified—
“Carmina sublimis, tunc sunt peritura Lucretî
Exitio terras cum dabit una dies.”
The refutations and imitations of Lucretius, contained in modern didactic
poems, have led me away from what may be considered as my proper subject,
and I therefore return to those poets who were coeval with that author,
with whose works we have been so long occupied. Of these the most
distinguished was
CAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS,
who was nearly contemporary with Lucretius, having come into the world a
few years after him, and having survived him but a short period.
In every part of our survey of Latin Literature, we have had occasion to
remark the imitative spirit of Roman poetry, and the constant analogy and
resemblance of all the productions of the Latian muse to some Greek
original. None of his poetical predecessors was more versed in Greek
literature than Catullus; and his extensive knowledge of its beauties
procured for him the appellation of _Doctus_(458). He translated many of
the shorter and more delicate pieces of the Greeks; an attempt which
hitherto had been thought impossible, though the broad humour of their
comedies, the vehement pathos of their tragedies, and the romantic
interest of the Odyssey, had stood the transformation. His stay in
Bithynia, though little advantageous to his fortune, rendered him better
acquainted than he might otherwise have been with the productions of
Greece, and he was therefore, in a great degree, indebted to this
expedition (on which he always appears to have looked back with
mortification and disappointment) for those felicitous turns of
expression, that grace, simplicity, and purity, which are the
characteristics of his poems, and of which hitherto Greece alone had
afforded models. Indeed, in all his verses, whether elegiac or heroic, we
perceive his imitation of the Greeks, and it must be admitted that he has
drawn from them his choicest stores. His Hellenisms are frequent—his
images, similes, metaphors, and addresses to himself, are all Greek; and
even in the versification of his odes we see visible traces of their
origin. Nevertheless, he was the founder of a new school of _Latin_
poetry; and as he was the first who used such variety of measures, and
perhaps himself invented some(459), he was amply entitled to call the
poetical volume which he presented to Cornelius Nepos, _Lepidum Novum
Libellum_. The beautiful expressions, too, and idioms of the Greek
language, which he has so carefully selected, are woven with such art into
the texture of his composition, and so aptly figure the impassioned ideas
of his amorous muse, that they have all the fresh and untarnished hues of
originality.
This elegant poet was born of respectable parents, in the territory of
Verona, but whether at the town so called, or on the peninsula of Sirmio,
which projects into the Lake Benacus, has been a subject of much
controversy. The former opinion has been maintained by Maffei and
Bayle(460), and the latter by Gyraldus(461), Schoell(462), Fuhrmann(463),
and most modern writers.
The precise period, as well as place, of the birth of Catullus, is a topic
of debate and uncertainty. According to the Eusebian Chronicle, he was
born in 666, but, according to other authorities, in 667(464) or 668. In
consequence of an invitation from Manlius Torquatus, one of the noblest
patricians of the state, he proceeded in early youth to Rome, where he
appears to have kept but indifferent company, at least in point of moral
character. He impaired his fortune so much by extravagance, that he had no
one, as he complains,
“Fractum qui veteris pedem grabati
In collo sibi collocare possit.”
This, however, must partly have been written in jest, as his finances were
always sufficient to allow him to keep up a delicious villa, on the
peninsula of Sirmio, and an expensive residence at Tibur. With a view of
improving his pecuniary circumstances, he adopted the usual Roman mode of
re-establishing a diminished fortune, and accompanied Caius Memmius, the
celebrated patron of Lucretius, to Bithynia, when he was appointed Prætor
of that province. His situation, however, was but little meliorated by
this expedition, and, in the course of it, he lost a beloved brother, who
was along with him, and whose death he has lamented in verses never
surpassed in delicacy or pathos. He came back to Rome with a shattered
constitution, and a lacerated heart. From the period of his return to
Italy till his decease, his time appears to have been chiefly occupied
with the prosecution of licentious amours, in the capital or among the
solitudes of Sirmio. The Eusebian Chronicle places his death in 696, and
some writers fix it in 705. It is evident, however, that he must have
survived at least till 708, as Cicero, in his Letters, talks of his verses
against Cæsar and Mamurra as newly written, and first seen by Cæsar in
that year(465). The distracted and unhappy state of his country, and his
disgust at the treatment which he had received from Memmius, were perhaps
sufficient excuse for shunning political employments(466); but when we
consider his taste and genius, we cannot help regretting that he was
merely an idler, and a debauchee. He loved Clodia, (supposed to have been
the sister of the infamous Clodius,) a beautiful but shameless woman, whom
he has celebrated under the name of Lesbia(467), as comparing her to the
Lesbian Sappho, her prototype in total abandonment to guilty love. He also
numbered among his mistresses, Hypsithilla and Aufilena, ladies of Verona.
Among his friends, he ranked not only most men of pleasure and fashion in
Rome, but many of her eminent literary and political characters, as
Cornelius Nepos, Cicero, and Asinius Pollio. His enmities seem to have
been as numerous as his loves or friendships, and competition in poetry,
or rivalship in gallantry, appears always to have been a sufficient cause
for his dislike; and where an antipathy was once conceived, he was unable
to put any restraint on the expression of his hostile feelings. His poems
are chiefly employed in the indulgence and commemoration of these various
passions. They are now given to us without any order or attempt at
arrangement: They were distributed, indeed, by Petrus Crinitus, into three
classes, lyric, elegiac, and epigrammatic,—a division which has been
adopted in a few of the earlier editions; but there is no such separation
in the best MSS., nor is it probable that they were originally thus
classed by the author, as he calls his book _Libellum Singularem_; and
they cannot now be conveniently reduced under these heads, since several
poems, as the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, are written in hexameter
measure. To others, which may be termed occasional poems expressing to his
friends a simple idea, or relating the occurrences of the day, in iambic
or phalangian verse, it would be difficult to assign any place in a
systematic arrangement. Under what class, for instance, could we bring the
poem giving a detail of his visit to the house of the courtezan, and the
conversation which passed there concerning Bithynia? The order, therefore,
in which the poems have been arbitrarily placed by the latest editors and
commentators, however immethodical, is the only one which can be followed,
in giving an account of the miscellaneous productions of Catullus.
1. Is a modest and not inelegant dedication, by the poet, of the whole
volume, to Cornelius Nepos, whom he compliments on having written a
general history, in three books, an undertaking which had not previously
been attempted by any Roman—
—— “Ausus es unus Italorum
Omne ævum tribus explicare chartis.”
2. _Ad Passerem Lesbiæ_. This address of Catullus to the favourite sparrow
of his mistress, Lesbia, is well known, and, has been always celebrated as
a model of grace and elegance. Politian(468), Turnebus, and others, have
discovered in this little poem an allegorical signification, which idea
has been founded on a line in an epigram of Martial, _Ad Romam et
Dindymum_—
“Quæ si tot fuerint, quot ille dixit,
_Donabo tibi passerem Catulli_(469).”
That by the _passer Catulli_, however, Martial meant nothing more than an
agreeable little epigram, in the style of Catullus, which he would address
to Dindymus as his reward, is evident from another epigram, where it is
obviously used in this sense—
“Sic forsan tener ausus est Catullus
Magno mittere passerem Maroni(470).”
and also from that in which he compares a favourite whelp of Publius to
the sparrow of Lesbia(471). That a real and _feathered_ sparrow was in the
view of Catullus, is also evinced by the following ode, in which he
laments the death of this favourite of his mistress. The erroneous notion
taken up by Politian, has been happily enough ridiculed by Sannazzarius,
in an epigram entitled _Ad Pulicianum_—
“At nescio quis Pulicianus,” &c.
and Muretus expresses his astonishment, that the most grave and learned
Benedictus Lampridius should have made this happy interpretation by
Politian the theme of his _constant_ conversation, “Hanc Politiani
sententiam in _omni_ sermone approbare solitum fuisse(472).” Why Lesbia
preferred a sparrow to other birds, I know not, unless it was for those
qualities which induced the widow of the Emperor Sigismond to esteem it
more than the turtle-dove(473), and which so much excited the envy of the
learned Scioppius, at Ingolstadt.
3. _Luctus in morte Passeris_. A lamentation for the death of the same
sparrow—
“Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum,
Illuc unde negant redire quemquam:
At vobis male sit, malæ tenebræ
Orci, quæ omnia bella devoratis.”
The idea in this last line was probably taken from Bion’s celebrated
_Idyllium_—the lamentation of Venus for the death of Adonis, where there
is a similar complaint of the unrelenting Orcus—
“Το δε παν καλον ἐς σε καταῥρει.”
This poem on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow has suggested many similar
productions. Ovid’s elegy, _In Mortem Psittaci_(474), where he extols and
laments the favourite parrot of his mistress, Corinna, is a production of
the same description; but it has not so much delicacy, lightness, and
felicity of expression. It differs from it too, by directing the attention
chiefly to the parrot, whereas Catullus fixes it more on the lady, who had
been deprived of her favourite. Statius also has a poem on the death of a
parrot, entitled _Psittacus Melioris_(475); and Lotichius, a celebrated
Latin poet, who flourished in Germany about the middle of the 16th
century, has, in his elegies, a similar production on the death of a
dolphin(476). Naugerius, _In Obitum Borgetti Catuli_, nearly copies the
poem of Catullus—
“Nunc raptus rapido maloque fato,
Ad manes abiit tenebricosas,” &c.
It has been imitated closely, and with application to a sparrow, by
Corrozet, Durant, and Monnoye, French poets of the 16th century—by Gacon
and Richer, in the beginning, and R. de Juvigny, in the end, of the 18th
century. In all these imitations, the idea of a departure to regions of
darkness, whence no one returns, is faithfully preserved. Most of them are
written with much grace and elegance; and this, indeed, is a sort of
poetry in which the French remarkably excel.
4. _Dedicatio Phaseli_. This is the consecration to Castor and Pollux, of
the vessel which brought the poet safe from Bithynia to the shores of
Italy. By a figure, daring even in verse, he represents the ship as
extolling its high services, and claiming its well-earned dedication to
Castor and Pollux, gods propitious to mariners. From this poem we may
trace the progress of Catullus’s voyage: It would appear that he had
embarked from Pontus, and having coasted Thrace, sailed through the
Archipelago, and then into the Adriatic, whence the vessel had been
brought probably up the course of the Po, and one of its branches, to the
vicinity of Sirmio.