applied to it the principles of art. The Sanskrit language has revealed
the ancient literature of the Hindus, which is chiefly confined to
mystical religious poetry, and which has already been mentioned in the
chapter on "Ancient Religions." There was no history worthy the name in
India. The Egyptians and Babylonians recorded the triumphs of warriors
and domestic events, but those were mere annals without literary value.
It is true that the literary remains of Egypt show a reading and writing
people as early as three thousand years before Christ, and in their
various styles of pen-language reveal a remarkable variety of
departments and topics treated,--books of religion, of theology, of
ethics, of medicine, of astronomy, of magic, of mythic poetry, of
fiction, of personal correspondence, etc. The difficulties of
deciphering them, however, and their many peculiarities and formalisms
of style, render them rather of curious historical and archaeological
than of literary interest. The Chinese annals also extend back to a
remote period, for Confucius wrote history as well as ethics; but
Chinese literature has comparatively little interest for us, as also
that of all Oriental nations, except the Hindu Vedas and the Persian
Zend-Avesta, and a few other poems showing great fertility of the
imagination, with a peculiar tenderness and pathos.
Accordingly, as I wish to show chiefly the triumphs of ancient genius
when directed to literature generally, and especially such as has had a
direct influence upon our modern literature, I confine myself to that of
Greece and Rome. Even our present civilization delights in the
masterpieces of the classical poets, historians, orators, and essayists,
and seeks to rival them. Long before Christianity became a power the
great literary artists of Greece had reached perfection in style and
language, especially in Athens, to which city youths were sent to be
educated, as to a sort of university town where the highest culture was
known. Educated Romans were as familiar with the Greek classics as they
were with those of their own country, and could talk Greek as the modern
cultivated Germans talk French. Without the aid of Greece, Rome could
never have reached the civilization to which she attained.
How rich in poetry was classical antiquity, whether sung in the Greek
or Latin language! In all those qualities which give immortality
classical poetry has never been surpassed, whether in simplicity, in
passion, in fervor, in fidelity to nature, in wit, or in imagination. It
existed from the early times of Greek civilization, and continued to
within a brief period of the fall of the Roman empire. With the rich
accumulation of ages the Romans were familiar. They knew nothing indeed
of the solitary grandeur of the Jewish muse, or the Nature-myths of the
ante-Homeric singers; but they possessed the Iliad and the Odyssey, with
their wonderful truthfulness, their clear portraiture of character,
their absence of all affectation, their serenity and cheerfulness, their
good sense and healthful sentiments, withal so original that the germ of
almost every character which has since figured in epic poetry can be
found in them.
We see in Homer a poet of the first class, holding the same place in
literature that Plato holds in philosophy or Newton in science, and
exercising a mighty influence on all the ages which have succeeded him.
He was born, probably, at Smyrna, an Ionian city; the dates attributed
to him range from the seventh to the twelfth century before Christ.
Herodotus puts him at 850 B.C. For nearly three thousand years his
immortal creations have been the delight and the inspiration of men of
genius; and they are as marvellous to us as they were to the Athenians,
since they are exponents of the learning as well as of the consecrated
sentiments of the heroic ages. We find in them no pomp of words, no
far-fetched thoughts, no theatrical turgidity, no ambitious
speculations, no indefinite longings; but we see the manners and customs
of the primitive nations, the sights and wonders of the external world,
the marvellously interesting traits of human nature as it was and is;
and with these we have lessons of moral wisdom,--all recorded with
singular simplicity yet astonishing artistic skill. We find in the
Homeric narrative accuracy, delicacy, naturalness, with grandeur,
sentiment, and beauty, such as Phidias represented in his statues of
Zeus. No poems have ever been more popular, and none have extorted
greater admiration from critics. Like Shakspeare, Homer is a kind of
Bible to both the learned and unlearned among all peoples and ages,
--one of the prodigies of the world. His poems form the basis of Greek
literature, and are the best understood and the most widely popular of
all Grecian compositions. The unconscious simplicity of the Homeric
narrative, its high moral tone, its vivid pictures, its graphic details,
and its religious spirit create an enthusiasm such as few works of
genius can claim. Moreover it presents a painting of society, with its
simplicity and ferocity, its good and evil passions, its tenderness and
its fierceness, such as no other poem affords. Its influence on the
popular mythology of the Greeks has been already alluded to. If Homer
did not create the Grecian theogony, he gave form and fascination to it.
Nor is it necessary to speak of any other Grecian epic, when the Iliad
and the Odyssey attest the perfection which was attained one hundred and
twenty years before Hesiod was born. Grote thinks that the Iliad and the
Odyssey were produced at some period between 850 B.C. and 776 B.C.
In lyrical poetry the Greeks were no less remarkable; indeed they
attained to what may be called absolute perfection, owing to the
intimate connection between poetry and music, and the wonderful
elasticity and adaptiveness of their language. Who has surpassed Pindar
in artistic skill? His triumphal odes are paeans, in which piety breaks
out in expressions of the deepest awe and the most elevated sentiments
of moral wisdom. They alone of all his writings have descended to us,
but these, made up as they are of odic fragments, songs, dirges, and
panegyrics, show the great excellence to which he attained. He was so
celebrated that he was employed by the different States and princes of
Greece to compose choral songs for special occasions, especially for the
public games. Although a Theban, he was held in the highest estimation
by the Athenians, and was courted by kings and princes. Born in Thebes
522 B.C., he died probably in his eightieth year, being contemporary
with Aeschylus and the battle of Marathon. We possess also fragments of
Sappho, Simonides, Anacreon, and others, enough to show that could the
lyrical poetry of Greece be recovered, we should probably possess the
richest collection that the world has produced.
Greek dramatic poetry was still more varied and remarkable. Even the
great masterpieces of Sophocles and Euripides now extant were regarded
by their contemporaries as inferior to many other Greek tragedies
utterly unknown to us. The great creator of the Greek drama was
Aeschylus, born at Eleusis 525 B.C. It was not till the age of forty-one
that he gained his first prize. Sixteen years afterward, defeated by
Sophocles, he quitted Athens in disgust and went to the court of Hiero,
king of Syracuse. But he was always held, even at Athens, in the highest
honor, and his pieces were frequently reproduced upon the stage. It was
not so much the object of Aeschylus to amuse an audience as to instruct
and elevate it. He combined religious feeling with lofty moral
sentiment, and had unrivalled power over the realm of astonishment and
terror. "At his summons," says Sir Walter Scott, "the mysterious and
tremendous volume of destiny, in which is inscribed the doom of gods
and men, seemed to display its leaves of iron before the appalled
spectators; the more than mortal voices of Deities, Titans, and departed
heroes were heard in awful conference; heaven bowed, and its divinities
descended; earth yawned, and gave up the pale spectres of the dead and
yet more undefined and ghastly forms of those infernal deities who
struck horror into the gods themselves." His imagination dwells in the
loftiest regions of the old mythology of Greece; his tone is always pure
and moral, though stern and harsh; he appeals to the most violent
passions, and is full of the boldest metaphors. In sublimity Aeschylus
has never been surpassed. He was in poetry what Phidias and Michael
Angelo were in art. The critics say that his sublimity of diction is
sometimes carried to an extreme, so that his language becomes inflated.
His characters, like his sentiments, were sublime,--they were gods and
heroes of colossal magnitude. His religious views were Homeric, and he
sought to animate his countrymen to deeds of glory, as it became one of
the generals who fought at Marathon to do. He was an unconscious genius,
and worked like Homer without a knowledge of artistic laws. He was proud
and impatient, and his poetry was religious rather than moral. He wrote
seventy plays, of which only seven are extant; but these are immortal,
among the greatest creations of human genius, like the dramas of
Shakspeare. He died in Sicily, in the sixty-ninth year of his age.
The fame of Sophocles is scarcely less than that of Aeschylus. He was
twenty-seven years of age when he publicly appeared as a poet. He was
born in Colonus, in the suburbs of Athens, 495 B.C., and was the
contemporary of Herodotus, of Pericles, of Pindar, of Phidias, of
Socrates, of Cimon, of Euripides,--the era of great men, the period of
the Peloponnesian War, when everything that was elegant and intellectual
culminated at Athens. Sophocles had every element of character and
person to fascinate the Greeks,--beauty of face, symmetry of form,
skill in gymnastics, calmness and dignity of manner, a cheerful and
amiable temper, a ready wit, a meditative piety, a spontaneity of
genius, an affectionate admiration for talent, and patriotic devotion to
his country. His tragedies, by the universal consent of the best
critics, are the perfection of the Greek drama; and they moreover
maintain that he has no rival, Aeschylus and Shakspeare alone excepted,
in the whole realm of dramatic poetry. It was the peculiarity of
Sophocles to excite emotions of sorrow and compassion. He loved to paint
forlorn heroes. He was human in all his sympathies, perhaps not so
religious as Aeschylus, but as severely ethical; not so sublime, but
more perfect in art. His sufferers are not the victims of an inexorable
destiny, but of their own follies. Nor does he even excite emotion apart
from a moral end. He lived to be ninety years old, and produced the most
beautiful of his tragedies in his eightieth year, the "Oedipus at
Colonus." Sophocles wrote the astonishing number of one hundred and
thirty plays, and carried off the first prize twenty-four times. His
"Antigone" was written when he was forty-five, and when Euripides had
already gained a prize. Only seven of his tragedies have survived, but
these are priceless treasures.
Euripides, the last of the great triumvirate of the Greek tragic poets,
was born at Athens, 485 B.C. He had not the sublimity of Aeschylus, nor
the touching pathos of Sophocles, nor the stern simplicity of either,
but in seductive beauty and successful appeal to passion was superior to
both. In his tragedies the passion of love predominates, but it does not
breathe the purity of sentiment which marked the tragedies of Aeschylus
and Sophocles; it approaches rather to the tone of the modern drama. He
paints the weakness and corruptions of society, and brings his subjects
to the level of common life. He was the pet of the Sophists, and was
pantheistic in his views. He does not attempt to show ideal excellence,
and his characters represent men not as they ought to be, but as they
are, especially in corrupt states of society. Euripides wrote
ninety-five plays, of which eighteen are extant. Whatever objection may
be urged to his dramas on the score of morality, nobody can question
their transcendent art or their great originality.
With the exception of Shakspeare, all succeeding dramatists have copied
the three great Greek tragic poets whom we have just named,--especially
Racine, who took Sophocles for his model,--even as the great epic poets
of all ages have been indebted to Homer.
The Greeks were no less distinguished for comedy than for tragedy. Both
tragedy and comedy sprang from feasts in honor of Bacchus; and as the
jests and frolics were found misplaced when introduced into grave
scenes, a separate province of the drama was formed, and comedy arose.
At first it did not derogate from the religious purposes which were at
the foundation of the Greek drama; it turned upon parodies in which the
adventures of the gods were introduced by way of sport,--as in
describing the appetite of Hercules or the cowardice of Bacchus. The
comic authors entertained spectators by fantastic and gross displays, by
the exhibition of buffoonery and pantomime. But the taste of the
Athenians was too severe to relish such entertainments, and comedy
passed into ridicule of public men and measures and the fashions of the
day. The people loved to see their great men brought down to their own
level. Comedy, however, did not flourish until the morals of society
were degenerated, and ridicule had become the most effective weapon
wherewith to assail prevailing follies. In modern times, comedy reached
its culminating point when society was both the most corrupt and the
most intellectual,--as in France, when Molière pointed his envenomed
shafts against popular vices. In Greece it flourished in the age of
Socrates and the Sophists, when there was great bitterness in political
parties and an irrepressible desire for novelties. Comedy first made
itself felt as a great power in Cratinus, who espoused the side of Cimon
against Pericles with great bitterness and vehemence.
Many were the comic writers of that age of wickedness and genius, but
all yielded precedence to Aristophanes, of whose writings only his plays
have reached us. Never were libels on persons of authority and influence
uttered with such terrible license. He attacked the gods, the
politicians, the philosophers, and the poets of Athens; even private
citizens did not escape from his shafts, and women were the subjects of
his irony. Socrates was made the butt of his ridicule when most revered,
Cleon in the height of his power, and Euripides when he had gained the
highest prizes. Aristophanes has furnished jests for Rabelais, hints to
Swift, and humor for Molière. In satire, in derision, in invective, and
bitter scorn he has never been surpassed. No modern capital would
tolerate such unbounded license; yet no plays in their day were ever
more popular, or more fully exposed follies which could not otherwise be
reached. Aristophanes is called the Father of Comedy, and his comedies
are of great historical importance, although his descriptions are
doubtless caricatures. He was patriotic in his intentions, even setting
up as a reformer. His peculiar genius shines out in his "Clouds," the
greatest of his pieces, in which he attacks the Sophists. He wrote
fifty-four plays. He was born 444 B.C., and died 380 B.C.
Thus it would appear that in the three great departments of poetry,--the
epic, the lyric, and the dramatic,--the old Greeks were great masters,
and have been the teachers of all subsequent nations and ages.
The Romans in these departments were not the equals of the Greeks, but
they were very successful copyists, and will bear comparison with modern
nations. If the Romans did not produce a Homer, they can boast of a
Virgil; if they had no Pindar, they furnished a Horace; and in satire
they transcended the Greeks.
The Romans produced no poetry worthy of notice until the Greek language
and literature were introduced among them. It was not till the fall of
Tarentum that we read of a Roman poet. Livius Andronicus, a Greek
slave, 240 B.C., rudely translated the Odyssey into Latin, and was the
author of various plays, all of which have perished, and none of which,
according to Cicero, were worth a second perusal. Still, Andronicus was
the first to substitute the Greek drama for the old lyrical stage
poetry. One year after the first Punic War, he exhibited the first Roman
play. As the creator of the drama he deserves historical notice, though
he has no claim to originality, but, like a schoolmaster as he was,
pedantically labored to imitate the culture of the Greeks. His plays
formed the commencement of Roman translation-literature, and naturalized
the Greek metres in Latium, even though they were curiosities rather
than works of art.
Naevius, 235 B.C., produced a play at Rome, and wrote both epic and
dramatic poetry, but so little has survived that no judgment can be
formed of his merits. He was banished for his invectives against the
aristocracy, who did not relish severity of comedy. Mommsen regards
Naevius as the first of the Romans who deserves to be ranked among the
poets. His language was free from stiffness and affectation, and his
verses had a graceful flow. In metres he closely adhered to Andronicus.
Plautus was perhaps the first great dramatic poet whom the Romans
produced, and his comedies are still admired by critics as both original
and fresh. He was born in Umbria, 257 B.C., and was contemporaneous
with Publius and Cneius Scipio. He died 184 B.C. The first development
of Roman genius in the field of poetry seems to have been the dramatic,
in which still the Greek authors were copied. Plautus might be mistaken
for a Greek, were it not for the painting of Roman manners, for his garb
is essentially Greek. Plautus wrote one hundred and thirty plays, not
always for the stage, but for the reading public. He lived about the
time of the second Punic War, before the theatre was fairly established
at Rome. His characters, although founded on Greek models, act, speak,
and joke like Romans. He enjoyed great popularity down to the latest
times of the empire, while the purity of his language, as well as the
felicity of his wit, was celebrated by the ancient critics. Cicero
places his wit on a par with the old Attic comedy; while Jerome spent
much time in reading his comedies, even though they afterward cost him
tears of bitter regret. Modern dramatists owe much to Plautus. Molière
has imitated him in his "Avare," and Shakspeare in his "Comedy of
Errors." Lessing pronounces the "Captivi" to be the finest comedy ever
brought upon the stage; he translated this play into German, and it has
also been admirably translated into English. The great excellence of
Plautus was the masterly handling of language, and the adjusting the
parts for dramatic effect. His humor, broad and fresh, produced
irresistible comic effects. No one ever surpassed him in his vocabulary
of nicknames and his happy jokes. Hence he maintained his popularity in
spite of his vulgarity.
Terence shares with Plautus the throne of Roman comedy. He was a
Carthaginian slave, born 185 B.C., but was educated by a wealthy Roman
into whose hands he fell, and ever after associated with the best
society and travelled extensively in Greece. He was greatly inferior to
Plautus in originality, and has not exerted a like lasting influence;
but he wrote comedies characterized by great purity of diction, which
have been translated into all modern languages. Terence, whom Mommsen
regards as the most polished, elegant, and chaste of all the poets of
the newer comedy, closely copied the Greek Menander. Unlike Plautus, he
drew his characters from good society, and his comedies, if not moral,
were decent. Plautus wrote for the multitude, Terence for the few;
Plautus delighted in noisy dialogue and slang expressions; Terence
confined himself to quiet conversation and elegant expressions, for
which he was admired by Cicero and Quintilian and other great critics.
He aspired to the approval of the cultivated, rather than the applause
of the vulgar; and it is a remarkable fact that his comedies supplanted
the more original productions of Plautus in the later years of the
republic, showing that the literature of the aristocracy was more
prized than that of the people, even in a degenerate age.
The "Thyestes" of Varius was regarded in its day as equal to Greek
tragedies. Ennius composed tragedies in a vigorous style, and was
regarded by the Romans as the parent of their literature, although most
of his works have perished. Virgil borrowed many of his thoughts, and
was regarded as the prince of Roman song in the time of Cicero. The
Latin language is greatly indebted to him. Pacuvius imitated Aeschylus
in the loftiness of his style. From the times before the Augustan age no
tragic production has reached us, although Quintilian speaks highly of
Accius, especially of the vigor of his style; but he merely imitated the
Greeks. The only tragedy of the Romans which has reached us was written
by Seneca the philosopher.
In epic poetry the Romans accomplished more, though even here they are
still inferior to the Greeks. The Aeneid of Virgil has certainly
survived the material glories of Rome. It may not have come up to the
exalted ideal of its author; it may be defaced by political flatteries;
it may not have the force and originality of the Iliad,--but it is
superior in art, and delineates the passion of love with more delicacy
than can be found in any Greek author. In soundness of judgment, in
tenderness of feeling, in chastened fancy, in picturesque description,
in delineation of character, in matchless beauty of diction, and in
splendor of versification, it has never been surpassed by any poem in
any language, and proudly takes its place among the imperishable works
of genius. Henry Thompson, in his "History of Roman Literature," says:--
"Availing himself of the pride and superstition of the Roman people, the
poet traces the origin and establishment of the 'Eternal City' to those
heroes and actions which had enough in them of what was human and
ordinary to excite the sympathies of his countrymen, intermingled with
persons and circumstances of an extraordinary and superhuman character
to awaken their admiration and awe. No subject could have been more
happily chosen. It has been admired also for its perfect unity of
action; for while the episodes command the richest variety of
description, they are always subordinate to the main object of the poem,
which is to impress the divine authority under which Aeneas first
settled in Italy. The wrath of Juno, upon which the whole fate of Aeneas
seems to turn, is at once that of a woman and a goddess; the passion of
Dido and her general character bring us nearer to the present
world,--but the poet is continually introducing higher and more
effectual influences, until, by the intervention of gods and men, the
Trojan name is to be continued in the Roman, and thus heaven and earth
are appeased."
Probably no one work of man has had such a wide and profound influence
as this poem of Virgil,--a textbook in all schools since the revival of
learning, the model of the Carlovingian poets, the guide of Dante, the
oracle of Tasso. Virgil was born seventy years before Christ, and was
seven years older than Augustus. His parentage was humble, but his
facilities of education were great. He was a most fortunate man,
enjoying the friendship of Augustus and Maecenas, fame in his own
lifetime, leisure to prosecute his studies, and ample rewards for his
labors. He died at Brundusium at the age of fifty.