Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art
State Religion
In the development of religion and philosophy no new element
appeared during this epoch. The Romano-Hellenic state-religion
and the Stoic state-philosophy inseparably combined with it
were for every government--oligarchy, democracy or monarchy--not merely
a convenient instrument, but quite indispensable for the very reason
that it was just as impossible to construct the state wholly without
religious elements as to discover any new state-religion fitted
to take the place of the old. So the besom of revolution swept doubtless
at times very roughly through the cobwebs of the augural bird-lore;(1)
nevertheless the rotten machine creaking at every joint
survived the earthquake which swallowed up the republic itself,
and preserved its insipidity and its arrogance without diminution
for transference to the new monarchy. As a matter of course,
it fell more and more into disfavour with all those who preserved
their freedom of judgment. Towards the state-religion indeed
public opinion maintained an attitude essentially indifferent;
it was on all sides recognized as an institution of political convenience,
and no one specially troubled himself about it with the exception
of political and antiquarian literati. But towards its philosophical
sister there gradually sprang up among the unprejudiced public
that hostility, which the empty and yet perfidious hypocrisy of set phrases
never fails in the long run to awaken. That a presentiment of its own
worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt
artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way
of syncretism. Antiochus of Ascalon (flourishing about 675), who professed
to have patched together the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian systems
into one organic unity, in reality so far succeeded that his misshapen
doctrine became the fashionable philosophy of the conservatives
of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti
and literati of Rome. Every one who displayed any intellectual vigour,
opposed the Stoa or ignored it. It was principally antipathy
towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless
with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life
in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch
the extension of the system of Epicurus to a larger circle
and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy of Diogenes in Rome.
However stale and poor in thought the former might be, a philosophy,
which did not seek the way to wisdom through an alteration
of traditional terms but contented itself with those in existence,
and throughout recognized only the perceptions of sense as true,
was always better than the terminological jingle and the hollow
conceptions of the Stoic wisdom; and the Cynic philosophy
was of all the philosophical systems of the times in so far
by much the best, as its system was confined to the having
no system at all and sneering at all systems and all systematizers.
In both fields war was waged against the Stoa with zeal and success;
for serious men, the Epicurean Lucretius preached with the full accents
of heartfelt conviction and of holy zeal against the Stoical faith
in the gods and providence and the Stoical doctrine of the immortality
of the soul; for the great public ready to laugh, the Cynic Varro
hit the mark still more sharply with the flying darts of his extensively-
read satires. While thus the ablest men of the older generation
made war on the Stoa, the younger generation again, such as Catullus,
stood in no inward relation to it at all, and passed a far sharper
censure on it by completely ignoring it.
The Oriental Religions
But, if in the present instance a faith no longer believed in
was maintained out of political convenience, they amply made up
for this in other respects. Unbelief and superstition, different hues
of the same historical phenomenon, went in the Roman world
of that day hand in hand, and there was no lack of individuals
who in themselves combined both--who denied the gods with Epicurus,
and yet prayed and sacrificed before every shrine. Of course only
the gods that came from the east were still in vogue, and, as the men
continued to flock from the Greek lands to Italy, so the gods
of the east migrated in ever-increasing numbers to the west.
The importance of the Phrygian cultus at that time in Rome is shown
both by the polemical tone of the older men such as Varro and Lucretius,
and by the poetical glorification of it in the fashionable Catullus,
which concludes with the characteristic request that the goddess
may deign to turn the heads of others only, and not that
of the poet himself.
Worship of Mithra
A fresh addition was the Persian worship, which is said
to have first reached the Occidental through the medium of the pirates
who met on the Mediterranean from the east and from the west;
the oldest seat of this cultus in the west is stated to have been
Mount Olympus in Lycia. That in the adoption of Oriental worships
in the west such higher speculative and moral elements as they contained
were generally allowed to drop, is strikingly evinced by the fact
that Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the pure doctrine of Zarathustra,
remained virtually unknown in the west, and adoration there
was especially directed to that god who had occupied the first place
in the old Persian national religion and had been transferred
by Zarathustra to the second--the sun-god Mithra.
Worship of Isis
But the brighter and gentler celestial forms of the Persian religion
did not so rapidly gain a footing in Rome as the wearisome mystical host
of the grotesque divinities of Egypt--Isis the mother of nature
with her whole train, the constantly dying and constantly reviving
Osiris, the gloomy Sarapis, the taciturn and grave Harpocrates,
the dog-headed Anubis. In the year when Clodius emancipated
the clubs and conventicles (696), and doubtless in consequence
of this very emancipation of the populace, that host even prepared
to make its entry into the old stronghold of the Roman Jupiter
in the Capitol, and it was with difficulty that the invasion
was prevented and the inevitable temples were banished
at least to the suburbs of Rome. No worship was equally popular
among the lower orders of the population in the capital: when the senate
ordered the temples of Isis constructed within the ring-wall
to be pulled down, no labourer ventured to lay the first hand on them,
and the consul Lucius Paullus was himself obliged to apply
the first stroke of the axe(704); a wager might be laid,
that the more loose any woman was, the more piously she worshipped Isis.
That the casting of lots, the interpretation of dreams, and similar
liberal arts supported their professors, was a matter of course.
The casting of horoscopes was already a scientific pursuit;
Lucius Tarutius of Firmum, a respectable and in his own way learned man,
a friend of Varro and Cicero, with all gravity cast the nativity
of kings Romulus and Numa and of the city of Rome itself,
and for the edification of the credulous on either side confirmed
by means of his Chaldaean and Egyptian wisdom the accounts
of the Roman annals.
The New Pythagoreanism
Nigidius Figulus
But by far the most remarkable phenomenon in this domain
was the first attempt to mingle crude faith with speculative thought,
the first appearance of those tendencies, which we are accustomed
to describe as Neo-Platonic, in the Roman world. Their oldest apostle
there was Publius Nigidius Figulus, a Roman of rank belonging
to the strictest section of the aristocracy, who filled
the praetorship in 696 and died in 709 as a political exile
beyond the bounds of Italy. With astonishing copiousness of learning
and still more astonishing strength of faith he created
out of the most dissimilar elements a philosophico-religious structure,
the singular outline of which he probably developed still more
in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings.
In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current
systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain
of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought
had still presented itself with sensuous vividness. The researches
of physical science--which, suitably treated, afford even now
so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand,
and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws
lent themselves still more easily to such objects--played in this case,
as may readily be conceived, a considerable part. His theology
was based essentially on that strange medley, in which Greeks
of a kindred spirit had intermingled Orphic and other very old
or very new indigenous wisdom with Persian, Chaldaean,
and Egyptian secret doctrines, and with which Figulus incorporated
the quasi-results of the Tuscan investigation into nothingness
and of the indigenous lore touching the flight of birds,
so as to produce further harmonious confusion. The whole system obtained
its consecration--political, religious, and national--from the name
of Pythagoras, the ultra-conservative statesman whose supreme principle
was "to promote order and to check disorder," the miracle-worker
and necromancer, the primeval sage who was a native of Italy,
who was interwoven even with the legendary history of Rome,
and whose statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum. As birth
and death are kindred with each other, so--it seemed--Pythagoras
was to stand not merely by the cradle of the republic as friend
of the wise Numa and colleague of the sagacious mother Egeria,
but also by its grave as the last protector of the sacred bird-lore.
But the new system was not merely marvellous, it also worked marvels;
Nigidius announced to the father of the subsequent emperor Augustus,
on the very day when the latter was born, the future greatness
of his son; nay the prophets conjured up spirits for the credulous,
and, what was of more moment, they pointed out to them the places
where their lost money lay. The new-and-old wisdom, such as it was,
made a profound impression on its contemporaries; men of the highest rank,
of the greatest learning, of the most solid ability, belonging
to very different parties--the consul of 705, Appius Claudius,
the learned Marcus Varro, the brave officer Publius Vatinius--
took part in the citation of spirits, and it even appears
that a police interference was necessary against the proceedings
of these societies. These last attempts to save the Roman theology,
like the kindred efforts of Cato in the field of politics, produce at once
a comical and a melancholy impression; we may smile at the creed
and its propagators, but still it is a grave matter when even able men
begin to addict themselves to absurdity.
Training of Youth
Sciences of General Culture at This Period
The training of youth followed, as may naturally be supposed,
the course of bilingual humane culture chalked out in the previous epoch,
and the general culture also of the Roman world conformed
more and more to the forms established for that purpose by the Greeks.
Even the bodily exercises advanced from ball-playing, running,
and fencing to the more artistically-developed Greek gymnastic contests;
though there were not yet any public institutions for gymnastics,
in the principal country-houses the palaestra was already to be found
by the side of the bath-rooms. The manner in which the cycle
of general culture had changed in the Roman world during the course
of a century, is shown by a comparison of the encyclopaedia of Cato(2)
with the similar treatise of Varro "concerning the school-sciences."
As constituent elements of non-professional culture, there appear in Cato
the art of oratory, the sciences of agriculture, of law, of war,
and of medicine; in Varro--according to probable conjecture--grammar,
logic or dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
music, medicine, and architecture. Consequently in the course
of the seventh century the sciences of war, jurisprudence,
and agriculture had been converted from general into professional
studies. On the other hand in Varro the Hellenic training of youth
appears already in all its completeness: by the side of the course
of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, which had been introduced
at an earlier period into Italy, we now find the course which had
longer remained distinctively Hellenic, of geometry, arithmetic,
astronomy, and music.(3) That astronomy more especially,
which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless
erudite dilettantism of the age and, in its relations to astrology,
to the prevailing religious delusions, was regularly and zealously
studied by the youth in Italy, can be proved also otherwise;
the astronomical didactic poems of Aratus, among all the works
of Alexandrian literature, found earliest admittance into the instruction
of Roman youth. To this Hellenic course there was added the study
of medicine, which was retained from the older Roman instruction,
and lastly that of architecture--indispensable to the genteel Roman
of this period, who instead of cultivatingthe ground built
houses and villas.
Greek Instruction
Alexandrinism
In comparison with the previous epoch the Greek as well as
the Latin training improved in extent and in scholastic strictness
quite as much as it declined in purity and in refinement.
The increasing eagerness after Greek lore gave to instruction
of itself an erudite character. To explain Homer or Euripides
was after all no art; teachers and scholars found their account better
in handling the Alexandrian poems, which, besides, were in their spirit
far more congenial to the Roman world of that day than the genuine Greek
national poetry, and which, if they were not quite so venerable
as the Iliad, possessed at any rate an age sufficiently respectable
to pass as classics with schoolmasters. The love-poems of Euphorion,
the "Causes" of Callimachus and his "Ibis," the comically obscure
"Alexandra" of Lycophron contained in rich abundance rare vocables
(-glossae-) suitable for being extracted and interpreted,
sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis,
prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths,
and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts.
Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult; these productions,
in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently
adapted to be lessons for model scholars. Thus the Alexandrian poems
took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction,
especially as trial-themes, and certainly promoted knowledge,
although at the expense of taste and of discretion. The same unhealthy
appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive
their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head. The courses
of the Greek masters in Rome sufficed only for a first start;
every one who wished to be able to converse heard lectures
on Greek philosophy at Athens, and on Greek rhetoric at Rhodes,
and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor,
where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still
to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts
had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion;
whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat
of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men
desirous of culture directed their travels.
Latin Instruction
The advance in Latin instruction was similar to that of Greek.
This in part resulted from the mere reflex influence of the Greek,
from which it in fact essentially borrowed its methods
and its stimulants. Moreover, the relations of politics, the impulse
to mount the orators' platform in the Forum which was imparted
by the democratic doings to an ever-widening circle, contributed
not a little to the diffusion and enhancement of oratorical exercises;
"wherever one casts his eyes," says Cicero, "every place is full
of rhetoricians." Besides, the writings of the sixth century,
the farther they receded into the past, began to be more decidedly
regarded as classical texts of the golden age of Latin literature,
and thereby gave a greater preponderance to the instruction
which was essentially concentrated upon them. Lastly the immigration
and spreading of barbarian elements from many quarters
and the incipient Latinizing of extensive Celtic and Spanish districts,
naturally gave to Latin grammar and Latin instruction a higher importance
than they could have had, so long as Latium only spoke Latin;
the teacher of Latin literature had from the outset a different
position in Comum and Narbo than he had in Praeneste and Ardea.
Taken as a whole, culture was more on the wane than on the advance.
The ruin of the Italian country towns, the extensive intrusion of foreign
elements, the political, economic, and moral deterioration of the nation,
above all, the distracting civil wars inflicted more injury
on the language than all the schoolmasters of the world could repair.
The closer contact with the Hellenic culture of the present,
the more decided influence of the talkative Athenian wisdom
and of the rhetoric of Rhodes and Asia Minor, supplied
to the Roman youth just the very elements that were most pernicious
in Hellenism. The propagandist mission which Latium undertook
among the Celts, Iberians, and Libyans--proud as the task was--
could not but have the like consequences for the Latin language
as the Hellenizing of the east had had for the Hellenic.
The fact that the Roman public of this period applauded
the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator,
and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless
shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection
of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever-
widening circle. But at the same time contemporaries capable
of judging complain that the Hellenic culture in Italy about 690
was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before;
that opportunities of hearing pure and good Latin were but rare,
and these chiefly from the mouth of elderly cultivated ladies;
that the tradition of genuine culture, the good old Latin mother wit,
the Lucilian polish, the cultivated circle of readers
of the Scipionic age were gradually disappearing. The circumstance
that the term -urbanitas-, and the idea of a polished national culture
which it expressed, arose during this period, proves, not that
it was prevalent, but that it was on the wane, and that people
were keenly alive to the absence of this -urbanitas- in the language
and the habits of the Latinized barbarians or barbarized Latins.
Where we still meet with the urbane tone of conversation, as in Varro's
Satires and Cicero's Letters, it is an echo of the old fashion
which was not yet so obsolete in Reate and Arpinum as in Rome.
Germs of State Training-Schools
Thus the previous culture of youth remained substantially unchanged,
except that--not so much from its own deterioration as
from the general decline of the nation--it was productive of less good
and more evil than in the preceding epoch. Caesar initiated
a revolution also in this department. While the Roman senate
had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture,
the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence
in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it
after the Hellenic fashion. If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise
on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians
of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way
in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently
the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire
was provided for on the part of the state, and which form
the most significant expression of the new state of -humanitas-;
and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment
of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and had already
nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro,
as principal librarian, this implied unmistakeably the design
of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.
Language
The Vulgarism of Asia Minor
The development of the language during this period turned
on the distinction between the classical Latin of cultivated society
and the vulgar language of common life. The former itself
was a product of the distinctively Italian culture; even in the Scipionic
circle "pure Latin" had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken,
no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction
to the language of the great multitude. This epoch opens
with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto
exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation
and accordingly also in literature--a reaction which had
inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction
of a similar nature in the language of Greece. Just about this time
the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous
rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him
began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism. They demanded
full recognition for the language of life, without distinction,
whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria
and Phrygia; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste
of learned cliques, but for that of the great public. There could not
be much objection to the principle; only, it is true, the result
could not be better than was the public of Asia Minor of that day,
which had totally lost the taste for chasteness and purity
of production, and longed only after the showy and brilliant.
To say nothing of the spurious forms of art that sprang
out of this tendency--especially the romance and the history assuming
the form of romance--the very style of these Asiatics was,
as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish,
minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar
and affected; "any one who knows Hegesias," says Cicero,
"knows what silliness is."
Roman Vulgarism
Hortensius
Reaction
The Rhodian School
Yet this new style found its way also into the Latin world.
When the Hellenic fashionable rhetoric, after having at the close
of the previous epoch obtruded into the Latin instruction of youth,(4)
took at the beginning of the present period the final step and mounted
the Roman orators' platform in the person of Quintus Hortensius
(640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the Sullan age,
it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste
of the time; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure
and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded
with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism
the semblance of an artistic performance. This was of great importance.
As in Greece the battles of language were always waged at first
in the schools of the rhetoricians, so in Rome the forensic oration
to a certain extent even more than literature set the standard of style,
and accordingly there was combined, as it were of right,
with the leadership of the bar the prerogative of giving the tone
to the fashionable mode of speaking and writing. The Asiatic vulgarism
of Hortensius thus dislodged classicism from the Roman platform
and partly also from literature. But the fashion soon changed
once more in Greece and in Rome. In the former it was the Rhodian school
of rhetoricians, which, without reverting to all the chaste severity
of the Attic style, attempted to strike out a middle course between it
and the modern fashion: if the Rhodian masters were not too particular
as to the internal correctness of their thinking and speaking,
they at least insisted on purity of language and style, on the careful
selection of words and phrases, and the giving thorough effect
to the modulation of sentences.
Ciceronianism
In Italy it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who, after having
in his early youth gone along with the Hortensian manner,
was brought by hearing the Rhodian masters and by his own
more matured taste to better paths, and thenceforth addicted himself
to strict purity of language and the thorough periodic arrangement
and modulation of his discourse. The models of language, which,
in this respect he followed, he found especially in those circles
of the higher Roman society which had suffered but little or not at all
from vulgarism; and, as was already said, there were still such,
although they were beginning to disappear. The earlier Latin
and the good Greek literature, however considerable was the influence
of the latter more especially on the rhythm of his oratory,
were in this matter only of secondary moment: this purifying
of the language was by no means a reaction of the language of books
against that of conversation, but a reaction of the language
of the really cultivated against the jargon of spurious
and partial culture. Caesar, in the department of language
also the greatest master of his time, expressed the fundamental idea
of Roman classicism, when he enjoined that in speech and writing
every foreign word should be avoided, as rocks are avoided
by the mariner; the poetical and the obsolete word of the older
literature was rejected as well as the rustic phrase or that borrowed
from the language of common life, and more especially the Greek words
and phrases which, as the letters of this period show,
had to a very great extent found their way into conversational language.
Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism
of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance
to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon
to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism
had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were
caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing
beyond recovery. Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself.
With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste
passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious
authorship of the latter gave to this classicism--what it had
hitherto lacked--extensive prose texts. Thus Cicero became
the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism
attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist;
it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less
to the statesman, that the panegyrics--extravagant yet not made up
wholly of verbiage--applied, with which the most gifted representatives
of classicism, such as Caesar and Catullus, loaded him.
The New Roman Poetry
They soon went farther. What Cicero did in prose, was carried out
in poetry towards the end of the epoch by the new Roman school
of poets, which modelled itself on the Greek fashionable poetry,
and in which the man of most considerable talent was Catullus.
Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic
reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed
in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm,
so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful
metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e. g. from the time of Catullus,
it is no longer allowable at once to begin a verse and to close
a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word
or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.
Grammatical Science
At length science stepped in, fixed the law of language,
and developed its rule, which was no longer determined on the basis
of experience, but made the claim to determine experience.
The endings of declension, which hitherto had in part been variable,
were now to be once for all fixed; e. g. of the genitive and dative
forms hitherto current side by side in the so-called fourth declension
(-senatuis- and -senatus-, -senatui-, and -senatu-) Caesar recognized
exclusively as valid the contracted forms (-us and -u).
In orthography various changes were made, to bring the written
more fully into correspondence with the spoken language;
thus the -u in the middle of words like -maxumus- was replaced
after Caesar's precedent by -i; and of the two letters
which had become superfluous, -k and -q, the removal of the first
was effected, and that of the second was at least proposed.
The language was, if not yet stereotyped, in the course of becoming so;
it was not yet indeed unthinkingly dominated by rule, but it had already
become conscious of it. That this action in the department
of Latin grammar derived generally its spirit and method
from the Greek, and not only so, but that the Latin language was also
directly rectified in accordance with Greek precedent, is shown,
for example, by the treatment of the final -s, which till
towards the close of this epoch had at pleasure passed sometimes
as a consonant, sometimes not as one, but was treated by the new-
fashioned poets throughout, as in Greek, as a consonantal
termination. This regulation of language is the proper domain
of Roman classicism; in the most various ways, and for that very reason
all the more significantly, the rule is inculcated and the offence
against it rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero,
by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus; whereas the older generation
expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting
the revolution which had affected the field of language
as remorselessly as the field of politics.(5) But while the new
classicism--that is to say, the standard Latin governed by rule
and as far as possible placed on a parity with the standard Greek--
which arose out of a conscious reaction against the vulgarism
intruding into higher society and even into literature,
acquired literary fixity and systematic shape, the latter by no means
evacuated the field. Not only do we find it naively employed
in the works of secondary personages who have drifted into the ranks
of authors merely by accident, as in the account of Caesar's second
Spanish war, but we shall meet it also with an impress more or less
distinct in literature proper, in the mime, in the semi-romance,
in the aesthetic writings of Varro; and it is a significant
circumstance, that it maintains itself precisely in the most national
departments of literature, and that truly conservative men,
like Varro, take it into protection. Classicism was based
on the death of the Italian language as monarchy on the decline
of the Italian nation; it was completely consistent that the men,
in whom the republic was still living, should continue to give
to the living language its rights, and for the sake of its comparative
vitality and nationality should tolerate its aesthetic defects.
Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch
are everywhere divergent; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry
of Lucretius appears the thoroughly modern poetry of Catullus,
by the side of Cicero's well-modulated period stands the sentence
of Varro intentionally disdaining all subdivision. In this field
likewise is mirrored the distraction of the age.
Literary Effort
Greek Literati in Rome
In the literature of this period we are first of all struck
by the outward increase, as compared with the former epoch,
of literary effort in Rome. It was long since the literary activity
of the Greeks flourished no more in the free atmosphere
of civic independence, but only in the scientific institutions
of the larger cities and especially of the courts. Left to depend
on the favour and protection of the great, and dislodged
from the former seats of the Muses(6) by the extinction
of the dynasties of Pergamus (621), Cyrene (658), Bithynia (679),
and Syria (690) and by the waning splendour of the court
of the Lagids--moreover, since the death of Alexander the Great,
necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers
among the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins--
the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes
towards Rome. Among the host of Greek attendants with which
the Roman of quality at this time surrounded himself, the philosopher,
the poet, and the memoir-writer played conspicuous parts
by the side of the cook, the boy-favourite, and the jester.
We meet already literati of note in such positions; the Epicurean
Philodemus, for instance, was installed as domestic philosopher
with Lucius Piso consul in 696, and occasionally edified the initiated
with his clever epigrams on the coarse-grained Epicureanism
of his patron. From all sides the most notable representatives
of Greek art and science migrated in daily-increasing numbers to Rome
where literary gains were now more abundant than anywhere else.
Among those thus mentioned as settled in Rome we find the physician
Asclepiades whom king Mithradates vainly endeavoured to draw away from it
into his service; the universalist in learning, Alexander of Miletus,
termed Polyhistor; the poet Parthenius from Nicaea in Bithynia;
Posidonius of Apamea in Syria equally celebrated as a traveller,
teacher, and author, who at a great age migrated in 703 from Rhodes
to Rome; and various others. A house like that of Lucius Lucullus
was a seat of Hellenic culture and a rendezvous for Hellenic literati
almost like the Alexandrian Museum; Roman resources and Hellenic
connoisseurship had gathered in these halls of wealth and science
an incomparable collection of statues and paintings of earlier
and contemporary masters, as well as a library as carefully selected
as it was magnificently fitted up, and every person of culture
and especially every Greek was welcome there--the master of the house
himself was often seen walking up and down the beautiful colonnade
in philological or philosophical conversation with one of his
learned guests. No doubt these Greeks brought along with their
rich treasures of culture their preposterousness and servility
to Italy; one of these learned wanderers for instance, the author
of the "Art of Flattery," Aristodemus of Nysa (about 700)
recommended himself to his masters by demonstrating that Homer
was a native of Rome!
Extent of the Literary Pursuits of the Romans
In the same measure as the pursuits of the Greek literati prospered
in Rome, literary activity and literary interest increased among
the Romans themselves. Even Greek composition, which the stricter
taste of the Scipionic age had totally set aside, now revived.
The Greek language was now universally current, and a Greek treatise
found a quite different public from a Latin one; therefore Romans
of rank, such as Lucius Lucullus, Marcus Cicero, Titus Atticus,
Quintus Scaevola (tribune of the people in 700), like the kings
of Armenia and Mauretania, published occasionally Greek prose
and even Greek verses. Such Greek authorship however by native Romans
remained a secondary matter and almost an amusement; the literary
as well as the political parties of Italy all coincided in adhering
to their Italian nationality, only more or less pervaded
by Hellenism. Nor could there be any complaint at least as to want
of activity in the field of Latin authorship. There was a flood
of books and pamphlets of all sorts, and above all of poems, in Rome.
Poets swarmed there, as they did only in Tarsus or Alexandria;
poetical publications had become the standing juvenile sin
of livelier natures, and even then the writer was reckoned fortunate
whose youthful poems compassionate oblivion withdrew from criticism.
Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty
at a sitting his five hundred hexameters in which no schoolmaster
found anything to censure, but no reader discovered anything to praise.
The female world also took a lively part in these literary pursuits;
the ladies did not confine themselves to dancing and music,
but by their spirit and wit ruled conversation and talked excellently
on Greek and Latin literature; and, when poetry laid siege
to a maiden's heart, the beleaguered fortress not seldom surrendered
likewise in graceful verses. Rhythms became more and more
the fashionable plaything of the big children of both sexes;
poetical epistles, joint poetical exercises and competitions
among good friends, were of common occurrence, and towards the end
of this epoch institutions were already opened in the capital,
at which unfledged Latin poets might learn verse-making for money.
In consequence of the large consumption of books the machinery
for the manufacture of copies was substantially perfected,
and publication was effected with comparative rapidity and cheapness;
bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's
shop a usual meeting-place of men of culture. Reading had become
a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not
already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one
who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library.
The superior officer was seen in the camp-tent with the obscene
Greek romance, the statesman in the senate with the philosophical
treatise, in his hands. Matters accordingly stood in the Roman state
as they have stood and will stand in every state where the citizens
read "from the threshold to the closet." The Parthian vizier
was not far wrong, when he pointed out to the citizens of Seleucia
the romances found in the camp of Crassus and asked them whether
they still regarded the readers of such books as formidable opponents.
The Classicists and the Moderns
The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not be otherwise,
for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes.
The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics,
the national-Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Helleno-Italian
or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy,
fought their battles also on the field of literature. The former
attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre,
in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more
the character of classical. With less taste and stronger party
tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius,
and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies. The leaves
of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively
greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets
of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch
of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly
as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors
as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall.
No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion
of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic
of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too
there was no want of trimmers. Cicero for instance, although in prose
one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency,
revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same
antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution
and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying,
"that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation
of Sophocles than the original." While thus the modern literary tendency
cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even
among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there were not wanting already
bolder judges, who treated the native literature as disrespectfully
as the senatorial politics. Not only did they resume the strict
criticism of the Scipionic epoch and set store by Terence only in order
to condemn Ennius and still more the Ennianists, but the younger
and bolder men went much farther and ventured already--though only as yet
in heretical revolt against literary orthodoxy--to call Plautus
a rude jester and Lucilius a bad verse-smith. This modern tendency
attached itself not to the native authorship, but rather
to the more recent Greek literature or the so-called Alexandrinism.
The Greek Alexandrinism
We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting
this remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art,
as is requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature
of this and the later epochs. The Alexandrian literature was based
on the decline of the pure Hellenic idiom, which from the time
of Alexander the Great was superseded in daily life by an inferior
jargon deriving its origin from the contact of the Macedonian dialect
with various Greek and barbarian tribes; or, to speak more accurately,
the Alexandrian literature sprang out of the ruin of the Hellenic nation
generally, which had to perish, and did perish, in its national
individuality in order to establish the universal monarchy of Alexander
and the empire of Hellenism. Had Alexander's universal empire continued
to subsist, the former national and popular literature would have been
succeeded by a cosmopolitan literature Hellenic merely in name,
essentially denationalized and called into life in a certain measure
by royal patronage, but at all events ruling the world;
but, as the state of Alexander was unhinged by his death,
the germs of the literature corresponding to it rapidly perished.
Nevertheless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed--
with its nationality, its language, its art--belonged to the past.
It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture--
for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed--but of men of erudition
that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead;
that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried
with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that,
possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition
was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous
productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism.
It is essentially similar to that literature of scholars, which,
keeping aloof from the living Romanic nationalities and their vulgar
idioms, grew up during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
among a cosmopolitan circle of erudite philologues--as an artificial
aftergrowth of the departed antiquity; the contrast between
the classical and the vulgar Greek of the period of the Diadochi
is doubtless less strongly marked, but is not, properly speaking,
different from that between the Latin of Manutius
and the Italian of Macchiavelli.
The Roman Alexandrinism
Italy had hitherto been in the main disinclined towards Alexandrinism.
Its season of comparative brilliance was the period shortly before
and after the first Punic war; yet Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius
and generally the whole body of the national Roman authors
down to Varro and Lucretius in all branches of poetical production,
not excepting even the didactic poem, attached themselves,
not to their Greek contemporaries or very recent predecessors,
but without exception to Homer, Euripides, Menander and the other masters
of the living and national Greek literature. Roman literature
was never fresh and national; but, as long as there was a Roman people,
its authors instinctively sought for living and national models,
and copied, if not always to the best purpose or the best authors,
at least such as were original. The Greek literature originating
after Aexander found its first Roman imitators--for the slight
initial attempts from the Marian age(7) can scarcely be taken
into account--among the contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar;
and now the Roman Alexandrinism spread with singular rapidity.
In part this arose from external causes. The increased contact
with the Greeks, especially the frequent journeys of the Romans
into the Hellenic provinces and the assemblage of Greek literati
in Rome, naturally procured a public even among the Italians
for the Greek literature of the day, for the epic and elegiac poetry,
epigrams, and Milesian tales current at that time in Greece. Moreover,
as we have already stated(8) the Alexandrian poetry had its established
place in the instruction of the Italian youth; and thus reacted
on Latin literature all the more, since the latter continued to be
essentially dependent at all times on the Hellenic school-training.
We find in this respect even a direct connection of the new Roman
with the new Greek literature; the already-mentioned Parthenius,
one of the better known Alexandrian elegists, opened, apparently
about 700, a school for literature and poetry in Rome, and the excerpts
are still extant in which he supplied one of his pupils of rank
with materials for Latin elegies of an erotic and mythological
nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt.
But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called
into existence the Roman Alexandrinism; it was on the contrary
a product--perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable--
of the political and national development of Rome. On the one hand,
as Hellas resolved itself into Hellenism, so now Latium
resolved itself into Romanism; the national development of Italy
outgrew itself, and was merged in Caesar's Mediterranean empire,
just as the Hellenic development in the eastern empire of Alexander.
On the other hand, as the new empire rested on the fact
that the mighty streams of Greek and Latin nationality, after having
flowed in parallel channels for many centuries, now at length coalesced,
the Italian literature had not merely as hitherto to seek
its groundwork generally in the Greek, but had also to put itself
on a level with the Greek literature of the present, or in other words
with Alexandrinism. With the scholastic Latin, with the closed number
of classics, with the exclusive circle of classic-reading -urbani-,
the national Latin literature was dead and at an end; there arose
instead of it a thoroughly degenerate, artificially fostered,
imperial literature, which did not rest on any definite nationality,
but proclaimed in two languages the universal gospel of humanity,
and was dependent in point of spirit throughout and consciously
on the old Hellenic, in point of language partly on this,
partly on the old Roman popular, literature. This was no improvement.
The Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar was doubtless a grand and--
what is more--a necessary creation; but it had been called
into life by an arbitrary superior will, and therefore
there was nothing to be found in it of the fresh popular life,
of the overflowing national vigour, which are characteristic of younger,
more limited, and more natural commonwealths, and which the Italian
state of the sixth century had still been able to exhibit.
The ruin of the Italian nationality, accomplished in the creation
of Caesar, nipped the promise of literature. Every one who has
any sense of the close affinity between art and nationality
will always turn back from Cicero and Horace to Cato and Lucretius;
and nothing but the schoolmaster's view of history and of literature--
which has acquired, it is true, in this department the sanction
of prescription--could have called the epoch of art beginning
with the new monarchy pre-eminently the golden age. But while
the Romano-Hellenic Alexandrinism of the age of Caesar and Augustus
must be deemed inferior to the older, however imperfect, national
literature, it is on the other hand as decidedly superior
to the Alexandrinism of the age of the Diadochi as Caesar's enduring
structure to the ephemeral creation of Alexander. We shall have
afterwards to show that the Augustan literature, compared with
the kindred literature of the period of the Diadochi, was far less
a literature of philologues and far more an imperial literature
than the latter, and therefore had a far more permanent
and far more general influence in the upper circles of society
than the Greek Alexandrinism ever had.
Dramatic Literature
Tragedy and Comedy Disappear
Nowhere was the prospect more lamentable than in dramatic literature.
Tragedy and comedy had already before the present epoch
become inwardly extinct in the Roman national literature.
New pieces were no longer performed. That the public still
in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions--
belonging to this epoch--of Plautine comedies with the titles
and names of the persons altered, with reference to which
the managers well added that it was better to see a good old piece
than a bad new one. From this the step was not great to that entire
surrender of the stage to the dead poets, which we find
in the Ciceronian age, and to which Alexandrinism made no opposition.
Its productiveness in this department was worse than none.
Real dramatic composition the Alexandrian literature never knew;
nothing but the spurious drama, which was written primarily for reading
and not for exhibition, could be introduced by it into Italy, and soon
accordingly these dramatic iambics began to be quite as prevalent
in Rome as in Alexandria, and the writing of tragedy in particular
began to figure among the regular diseases of adolescence.
We may form a pretty accurate idea of the quality of these productions
from the fact that Quintus Cicero, in order homoeopathically
to beguile the weariness of winter quarters in Gaul,
composed four tragedies in sixteen days.
The Mime
Laberius
In the "picture of life" or mime alone the last still vigorous
product of the national literature, the Atellan farce,
became engrafted with the ethological offshoots of Greek comedy,
which Alexandrinism cultivated with greater poetical vigour
and better success than any other branch of poetry. The mime originated
out of the dances in character to the flute, which had long been usual,
and which were performed sometimes on other occasions, e. g.
for the entertainment of the guests during dinner, but more especially
in the pit of the theatre during the intervals between the acts.
It was not difficult to form out of these dances--in which the aid
of speech had doubtless long since been occasionally employed--
by means of the introduction of a more organized plot and a regular
dialogue little comedies, which were yet essentially distinguished
from the earlier comedy and even from the farce by the facts,
that the dance and the lasciviousness inseparable from such dancing
continued in this case to play a chief part, and that the mime,
as belonging properly not to the boards but to the pit, threw aside
all ideal scenic effects, such as masks for the face and theatrical
buskins, and--what was specially important--admitted of the female
characters being represented by women. This new mime, which first
seems to have come on the stage of the capital about 672,
soon swallowed up the national harlequinade, with which it indeed
in the most essential respects coincided, and was employed
as the usual interlude and especially as afterpiece along with
the other dramatic performances.(9) The plot was of course
still more indifferent, loose, and absurd than in the harlequinade;
if it was only sufficiently chequered, the public did not ask
why it laughed, and did not remonstrate with the poet, who instead
of untying the knot cut it to pieces. The subjects were chiefly
of an amorous nature, mostly of the licentious sort; for example,
poet and public without exception took part against the husband,
and poetical justice consisted in the derision of good morals.
The artistic charm depended wholly, as in the Atellana,
on the portraiture of the manners of common and low life;
in which rural pictures are laid aside for those of the life
and doings of the capital, and the sweet rabble of Rome--
just as in the similar Greek pieces the rabble of Alexandria--
is summoned to applaud its own likeness. Many subjects
are taken from the life of tradesmen; there appear the--
here also inevitable--"Fuller," then the "Ropemaker," the "Dyer,"
the "Salt-man," the "Female Weavers," the "Rascal"; other pieces
give sketches of character, as the "Forgetful," the "Braggart,"
the "Man of 100,000 sesterces";(10) or pictures of other lands,
the "Etruscan Woman," the "Gauls," the "Cretan," "Alexandria";
or descriptions of popular festivals, as the "Compitalia,"
the "Saturnalia," "Anna Perenna," the "Hot Baths"; or parodies
of mythology, as the "Voyage to the Underworld," the "Arvernian Lake."
Apt nicknames and short commonplaces which were easily retained
and applied were welcome; but every piece of nonsense
was of itself privileged; in this preposterous world Bacchus
is applied to for water and the fountain-nymph for wine.
Isolated examples even of the political allusions formerly
so strictly prohibited in the Roman theatre are found in these mimes.(11)
As regards metrical form, these poets gave themselves, as they tell us,
"but moderate trouble with the versification"; the language abounded,
even in the pieces prepared for publication, with vulgar expressions
and low newly-coined words. The mime was, it is plain,
in substance nothing but the former farce; with this exception,
that the character-masks and the standing scenery of Atella
as well as the rustic impress are dropped, and in their room
the life of the capital in its boundless liberty and licence
is brought on the stage. Most pieces of this sort were doubtless
of a very fugitive nature and made no pretension to a place
in literature; but the mimes of Laberius, full of pungent
delineation of character and in point of language and metre
exhibiting the hand of a master, maintained their ground in it;
and even the historian must regret that we are no longer permitted
to compare the drama of the republican death-struggle in Rome
with its great Attic counterpart.
Dramatic Spectacles
With the worthlessness of dramatic literature the increase
of scenic spectacles and of scenic pomp went hand in hand.
Dramatic representations obtained their regular place in the public life
not only of the capital but also of the country towns; the former
also now at length acquired by means of Pompeius a permanent theatre
(699;(12)), and the Campanian custom of stretching canvas
over the theatre for the protection of the actors and spectators
during the performance, which in ancient times always took place
in the open air, now likewise found admission to Rome (676).
As at that time in Greece it was not the--more than pale-Pleiad
of the Alexandrian dramatists, but the classic drama, above all
the tragedies of Euripides, which amidst the amplest development
of scenic resources kept the stage, so in Rome at the time of Cicero
the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, and the comedies
of Plautus were those chiefly produced. While the latter had been
in the previous period supplanted by the more tasteful but in point
of comic vigour far inferior Terence, Roscius and Varro,
or in other words the theatre and philology, co-operated to procure
for him a resurrection similar to that which Shakespeare experienced
at the hands of Garrick and Johnson; but even Plautus had to suffer
from the degenerate susceptibility and the impatient haste
of an audience spoilt by the short and slovenly farces, so that
the managers found themselves compelled to excuse the length
of the Plautine comedies and even perhaps to make omissions
and alterations. The more limited the stock of plays, the more
the activity of the managing and executive staff as well as
the interest of the public was directed to the scenic representation
of the pieces. There was hardly any more lucrative trade in Rome
than that of the actor and the dancing-girl of the first rank.
The princely estate of the tragic actor Aesopus has been
already mentioned;(13) his still more celebrated contemporary
Roscius(14) estimated his annual income at 600,000 sesterces
(6000 pounds)(15) and Dionysia the dancer estimated hers
at 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds). At the same time
immense sums were expended on decorations and costume;
now and then trains of six hundred mules in harness crossed
the stage, and the Trojan theatrical army was employed
to present to the public a tableau of the nations vanquished
by Pompeius in Asia. The music which accompanied the delivery
of the inserted choruses likewise obtained a greater
and more independent importance; as the wind sways the waves,
says Varro, so the skilful flute-player sways the minds of the listeners
with every modulation of melody. It accustomed itself to the use
of quicker time, and thereby compelled the player to more lively action.
Musical and dramatic connoisseurship was developed; the -habitue-
recognized every tune by the first note, and knew the texts
by heart; every fault in the music or recitation was severely
censured by the audience. The state of the Roman stage in the time
of Cicero vividly reminds us of the modern French theatre.
As the Roman mime corresponds to the loose tableaux of the pieces
of the day, nothing being too good and nothing too bad for either
the one or the other, so we find in both the same traditionally
classic tragedy and comedy, which the man of culture is in duty bound
to admire or at least to applaud. The multitude is satisfied,
when it meets its own reflection in the farce, and admires
the decorative pomp and receives the general impression of an ideal world
in the drama; the man of higher culture concerns himself at the theatre
not with the piece, but only with its artistic representation.
Moreover the Roman histrionic art oscillated in its different spheres,
just like the French, between the cottage and the drawing-room.
It was nothing unusual for the Roman dancing-girls to throw off
at the finale the upper robe and to give a dance in undress
for the benefit of the public; but on the other hand in the eyes
of the Roman Talma the supreme law of his art was, not the truth
of nature, but symmetry.
Metrical Annals
In recitative poetry metrical annals after the model of those
of Ennius seem not to have been wanting; but they were perhaps
sufficiently criticised by that graceful vow of his mistress
of which Catullus sings--that the worst of the bad heroic poems
should be presented as a sacrifice to holy Venus, if she would only
bring back her lover from his vile political poetry to her arms.
Lucretius
Indeed in the whole field of recitative poetry at this epoch
the older national-Roman tendency is represented only by a single work
of note, which, however, is altogether one of the most important
poetical products of Roman literature. It is the didactic poem
of Titus Lucretius Carus (655-699) "Concerning the Nature of Things,"
whose author, belonging to the best circles of Roman society,
but taking no part in public life whether from weakness of health
or from disinclination, died in the prime of manhood shortly before
the outbreak of the civil war. As a poet he attached himself
decidedly to Ennius and thereby to the classical Greek literature.
Indignantly he turns away from the "hollow Hellenism" of his time,
and professes himself with his whole soul and heart to be the scholar
of the "chaste Greeks," as indeed even the sacred earnestness
of Thucydides has found no unworthy echo in one of the best-known
sections of this Roman poem. As Ennius draws his wisdom
from Epicharmus and Euhemerus, so Lucretius borrows the form
of his representation from Empedocles, "the most glorious
treasure of the richly gifted Sicilian isle"; and, as to the matter,
gathers "all the golden words together from the rolls of Epicurus,"
"who outshines other wise men as the sun obscures the stars."
Like Ennius, Lucretius disdains the mythological lore with which
poetry was overloaded by Alexandrinism, and requires nothing
from his reader but a knowledge of the legends generally current.(16)
In spite of the modern purism which rejected foreign words from poetry,
Lucretius prefers to use, as Ennius had done, a significant Greek word
in place of a feeble and obscure Latin one. The old Roman alliteration,
the want of due correspondence between the pauses of the verse and those
of the sentence, and generally the older modes of expression
and composition, are still frequently found in Lucretius' rhythms,
and although he handles the verse more melodiously than Ennius,
his hexameters move not, as those of the modern poetical school,
with a lively grace like the rippling brook, but with a stately slowness
like the stream of liquid gold. Philosophically and practically
also Lucretius leans throughout on Ennius, the only indigenous poet
whom his poem celebrates. The confession of faith of the singer
of Rudiae(17)--
-Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus-:--
describes completely the religious standpoint of Lucretius,
and not unjustly for that reason he himself terms his poem
as it were the continuation of Ennius:--
-Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus amoeno
Detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam,
Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret-.
Once more--and for the last time--the poem of Lucretius is resonant
with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness
of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable
Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet
is more at home than in his own degenerate age.(18) To him too
his own song "gracefully welling up out of rich feeling" sounds,
as compared with the common poems, "like the brief song of the swan
compared with the cry of the crane";--with him too the heart swells,
listening to the melodies of its own invention, with the hope
of illustrious honours--just as Ennius forbids the men to whom
he "gave from the depth of the heart a foretaste of fiery song,"
to mourn at his, the immortal singer's, tomb.
It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents,
far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most
if not to all his contemporaries, fell upon an age in which
he felt himself strange and forlorn, and in consequence of this
made the most singular mistake in the selection of a subject. The system
of Epicurus, which converts the universe into a great vortex of atoms
and undertakes to explain the origin and end of the world as well as
all the problems of nature and of life in a purely mechanical way,
was doubtless somewhat less silly than the conversion of myths
into history which was attempted by Euhemerus and after him by Ennius;
but it was not an ingenious or a fresh system, and the task
of poetically unfolding this mechanical view of the world
was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life
and art on a more ungrateful theme. The philosophic reader censures
in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points
of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies
are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions,
with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets
at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part
of the poem absolutely unreadable. In spite of these incredible defects,
before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed,
this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic
wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on any;
and it was by no means merely the occasional similitudes,
and the other inserted descriptions of mighty natural phenomena
and yet mightier passions, which acquired for the poet this chaplet.
The genius which marks the view of life as well as the poetry
of Lucretius depends on his unbelief, which came forward
and was entitled to come forward with the full victorious power
of truth, and therefore with the full vigour of poetry, in opposition
to the prevailing hypocrisy or superstition.
-Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret
In terris oppressa gravi sub religione,
Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,
Primum Graius homo mortalis tendere contra
Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra.
Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque-.
The poet accordingly was zealous to overthrow the gods,
as Brutus had overthrown the kings, and "to release nature
from her stern lords." But it was not against the long ago enfeebled
throne of Jovis that these flaming words were hurled; just like Ennius,
Lucretius fights practically above all things against the wild
foreign faiths and superstitions of, the multitude, the worship
of the Great Mother for instance and the childish lightning-lore
of the Etruscans. Horror and antipathy towards that terrible world
in general, in which and for which the poet wrote, suggested his poem.
It was composed in that hopeless time when the rule of the oligarchy
had been overthrown and that of Caesar had not yet been established,
in the sultry years during which the outbreak of the civil war
was awaited with long and painful suspense. If we seem to perceive
in its unequal and restless utterance that the poet daily
expected to see the wild tumult of revolution break forth
over himself and his work, we must not with reference to his view
of men and things forget amidst what men, and in prospect
of what things, that view had its origin. In the Hellas of the epoch
before Alexander it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt
by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born,
and the next best to die. Of all views of the world possible
to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age
this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit
for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul
and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods
which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children
in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing
than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose
from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods
of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal
blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life,
but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions
of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul
to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress
worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those that obey
than to press into the confused crowd of candidates for the office
of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part
under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes.
This philosophico-practical tendency is the true ideal essence
of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid, not choked,
by all the dreariness of its physical demonstrations. Essentially
on this rests its comparative wisdom and truth. The man who
with a reverence for his great predecessors and a vehement zeal,
to which this century elsewhere knew no parallel, preached such doctrine
and embellished it with the charm of art, may be termed at once
a good citizen and a great poet. The didactic poem concerning
the Nature of Things, however much in it may challenge censure,
has remained one of the most brilliant stars in the poorly illuminated
expanse of Roman literature; and with reason the greatest of German
philologues chose the task of making the Lucretian poem
once more readable as his last and most masterly work.
The Hellenic Fashionable Poetry
Lucretius, although his poetical vigour as well as his art was admired
by his cultivated contemporaries, yet remained--of late growth
as he was--a master without scholars. In the Hellenic fashionable
poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars,
who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters.
With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets
avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry--the drama,
the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances
consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short-
winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains
bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field
intervening between narrative and song. Multifarious didactic
poems were written. Small half-heroic, half-erotic epics
were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy
peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic
of the philological source whence it sprang, in which the poet
more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings,
predominantly sensuous, with epic shreds from the cycle of Greek legend.
Festal lays were diligently and artfully manufactured; in general,
owing to the want of spontaneous poetical invention, the occasional poem
preponderated and especially the epigram, of which the Alexandrians
produced excellent specimens. The poverty of materials and the want
of freshness in language and rhythm, which inevitably cleave
to every literature not national, men sought as much as possible
to conceal under odd themes, far-fetched phrases, rare words,
and artificial versification, and generally under the whole apparatus
of philologico-antiquarian erudition and technical dexterity.
Such was the gospel which was preached to the Roman boys of this period,
and they came in crowds to hear and to practise it; already (about 700)
the love-poems of Euphorion and similar Alexandrian poetry formed
the ordinary reading and the ordinary pieces for declamation
of the cultivated youth.(19) The literary revolution took place;
but it yielded in the first instance with rare exceptions only premature
or unripe fruits. The number of the "new-fashioned poets" was legion,
but poetry was rare and Apollo was compelled, as always when so many
throng towards Parnassus, to make very short work. The long poems never
were worth anything, the short ones seldom. Even in this literary age
the poetry of the day had become a public nuisance; it sometimes
happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery
as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's
shop, whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding
and the smooth paper. A real public, in the sense in which national
literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians
as well as to the Hellenic; it was thoroughly the poetry of a clique
or rather cliques, whose members clung closely together,
abused intruders, read and criticised among themselves the new poems,
sometimes also quite after the Alexandrian fashion celebrated
the successful productions in fresh verses, and variously sought
to secure for themselves by clique-praises a spurious and ephemeral
renown. A notable teacher of Latin literature, himself poetically
active in this new direction, Valerius Cato appears to have exercised
a sort of scholastic patronage over the most distinguished men
of this circle and to have pronounced final decision on the relative
value of the poems. As compared with their Greek models,
these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom,
sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products
must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry
still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature.
Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns
far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done,
a greater correctness and consistency in language and metre
were certainly attained; but it was at the expense of the flexibility
and fulness of the national idiom. As respects the subject-matter,
under the influence partly of effeminate models, partly
of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance
little conducive to poetry; but the favourite metrical compendia
of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as
the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end
of this or more probably at the commencement of the following period,
the geographical manual of Eratosthenes by Publius Varro of the Aude
and the physico-medicinal manual of Nicander by Aemilius Macer.
It is neither to be wondered at nor regretted that of this countless
host of poets but few names have been preserved to us;
and even these are mostly mentioned merely as curiosities
or as once upon a time great; such as the orator Quintus Hortensius
with his "five hundred thousand lines" of tiresome obscenity,
and the somewhat more frequently mentioned Laevius, whose -Erotopaegnia-
attracted a certain interest only by their complicated measures
and affected phraseology. Even the small epic Smyrna by Gaius
Helvius Cinna (d. 710?), much as it was praised by the clique,
bears both in its subject--the incestuous love of a daughter
for her father--and in the nine years' toil bestowed on it the worst
characteristics of the time.
Catullus
Those poets alone of this school constitute an original
and pleasing exception, who knew how to combine with its neatness
and its versatility of form the national elements of worth still existing
in the republican life, especially in that of the country-towns.
To say nothing here of Laberius and Varro, this description
applies especially to the three poets already mentioned above(20)
of the republican opposition, Marcus Furius Libaculus (652-691),
Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) and Quintus Valerius Catullus
(667-c. 700). Of the two former, whose writings have perished,
we can indeed only conjecture this; respecting the poems of Catullus
we can still form a judgment. He too depends in subject and form
on the Alexandrians. We find in his collection translations of pieces
of Callimachus, and these not altogether the very good,
but the very difficult. Among the original pieces, we meet
with elaborately-turned fashionable poems, such as the over-artificial
Galliambics in praise of the Phrygian Mother; and even the poem,
otherwise so beautiful, of the marriage of Thetis has been
artistically spoiled by the truly Alexandrian insertion
of the complaint of Ariadne in the principal poem. But by the side
of these school-pieces we meet with the melodious lament
of the genuine elegy, the festal poem in the full pomp of individual
and almost dramatic execution, above all, the freshest miniature painting
of cultivated social life, the pleasant and very unreserved
amatory adventures of which half the charm consists in prattling
and poetizing about the mysteries of love, the delightful life
of youth with full cups and empty purses, the pleasures
of travel and of poetry, the Roman and still more frequently
the Veronese anecdote of the town, and the humorous jest
amidst the familiar circle of friends. But not only does Apollo
touch the lyre of the poet, he wields also the bow; the winged dart
of sarcasm spares neither the tedious verse-maker nor the provincial
who corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently
and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people
is endangered. The short-lined and merry metres, often enlivened
by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free
from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory. These poems lead us
alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po; but the poet
is incomparably more at home in the latter. His poems are based
on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self-
consciousness of a burgess and a burgess in fact of a rural town,
on the contrast of Verona with Rome, on the contrast of the homely
municipal with the high-born lords of the senate who usually
maltreat their humble friends--as that contrast was probably felt
more vividly than anywhere else in Catullus' home, the flourishing
and comparatively vigorous Cisalpine Gaul. The most beautiful
of his poems reflect the sweet pictures of the Lago di Garda,
and hardly at this time could any man of the capital have written
a poem like the deeply pathetic one on his brother's death,
or the excellent genuinely homely festal hymn for the marriage of Manlius
and Aurunculeia. Catullus, although dependent on the Alexandrian masters
and standing in the midst of the fashionable and clique poetry
of that age, was yet not merely a good scholar among many mediocre
and bad ones, but himself as much superior to his masters
as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior
to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters. Eminent creative vigour
indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him;
he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems
are, as he himself calls them, nothing but "pleasantries
and trifles." Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries
electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art-critics
of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius
as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries
as well as their successors were completely right. The Latin nation
has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance
and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection
as in Catullus; and in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus
is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show.
Poems in Prose
Romances
Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch. The law
of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which had hitherto remained
unchangeable--that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting
should go together--gave way before the intermixture and disturbance
of all kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant
features of this period. As to romances indeed nothing farther
is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian of this epoch,
Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to translate into Latin
the much-read Milesian tales of Aristides--licentious fashionable novels
of the most stupid sort.
Varro's Aesthetic Writings
A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this debateable
border-land between poetry and prose was the aesthetic writings
of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative
of Latin philologico-historical research, but one of the most fertile
and most interesting authors in belles-lettres. Descended
from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land
but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate,
strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,(21) and already
at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro
of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course,
to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic
part in its doings and sufferings. He supported it, partly
in literature--as when he combated the first coalition,
the "three-headed monster," in pamphlets; partly in more serious
warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant
of Further Spain.(22) When the cause of the republic was lost,
Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library
which was to be formed in the capital. The troubles
of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex,
and it was not till seventeen years after Caesar's death,
in the eighty-ninth year of his well-occupied life, that death
called him away.
Varros' Models
The aesthetic writings, which have made him a name,
were brief essays, some in simple prose and of graver contents,
others humorous sketches the prose groundwork of which was inlaid
with various poetical effusions. The former were the "philosophico-
historical dissertations" (-logistorici-), the latter the Menippean
Satires. In neither case did he follow Latin models,
and the -Satura- of Varro in particular was by no means based
on that of Lucilius. In fact the Roman -Satura- in general
was not properly a fixed species of art, but only indicated negatively
the fact that the "multifarious poem" was not to be included
under any of the recognized forms of art; and accordingly the -Satura-
poetry assumed in the hands of every gifted poet a different and peculiar
character. It was rather in the pre-Alexandrian Greek philosophy
that Varro found the models for his more severe as well as
for his lighter aesthetic works; for the graver dissertations,
in the dialogues of Heraclides of Heraclea on the Black Sea
(d. about 450), for the satires, in the writings of Menippus of Gadara
in Syria (flourishing about 475). The choice was significant.
Heraclides, stimulated as an author by Plato's philosophic
dialogues, had amidst the brilliance of their form totally
lost sight of the scientific contents and made the poetico-fabulistic
dress the main matter; he was an agreeable and largely-read author,
but far from a philosopher. Menippus was quite as little
a philosopher, but the most genuine literary representative
of that philosophy whose wisdom consisted in denying philosophy
and ridiculing philosophers the cynical wisdom of Diogenes;
a comic teacher of serious wisdom, he proved by examples
and merry sayings that except an upright life everything is vain
in earth and heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes
of so-called sages. These were the true models for Varro,
a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full
of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent
but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact
but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps
the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans.(23)
But Varro was no slavish pupil. The impulse and in general
the form he derived from Heraclides and Menippus; but his was a nature
too individual and too decidedly Roman not to keep his imitative
creations essentially independent and national.
Varro's Philosophico-Historical Essays
For his grave dissertations, in which a moral maxim
or other subject of general interest is handled, he disdained,
in his framework to approximate to the Milesian tales, as Heraclides
had done, and so to serve up to the reader even childish little stories
like those of Abaris and of the maiden reawakened to life
after being seven days dead. But seldom he borrowed the dress
from the nobler myths of the Greeks, as in the essay "Orestes
or concerning Madness"; history ordinarily afforded him a worthier
frame for his subjects, more especially the contemporary history
of his country, so that these essays became, as they were called
-laudationes- of esteemed Romans, above all of the Coryphaei
of the constitutional party. Thus the dissertation "concerning Peace"
was at the same time a memorial of Metellus Pius, the last
in the brilliant series of successful generals of the senate;
that "concerning the Worship of the Gods" was at the same time
destined to preserve the memory of the highly-respected
Optimate and Pontifex Gaius Curio; the essay "on Fate" was connected
with Marius, that "on the Writing of History" with Sisenna
the first historian of this epoch, that "on the Beginnings
of the Roman Stage" with the princely giver of scenic spectacles
Scaurus, that "on Numbers" with the highly-cultured
Roman banker Atticus. The two philosophico-historical essays
"Laelius or concerning Friendship," "Cato or concerning Old Age,"
which Cicero wrote probably after the model of those of Varro,
may give us some approximate idea of Varro's half-didactic,
half-narrative, treatment of these subjects.
Varros' Menippean Satires
The Menippean satire was handled by Varro with equal originality
of form and contents; the bold mixture of prose and verse is foreign
to the Greek original, and the whole intellectual contents
are pervaded by Roman idiosyncrasy--one might say, by a savour
of the Sabine soil. These satires like the philosophico-historical
essays handle some moral or other theme adapted to the larger public,
as is shown by the several titles---Columnae Herculis-, --peri doxeis--;
--Euren ei Lopas to Poma, peri gegameikoton--, -Est Modus
Matulae-, --peri metheis--; -Papiapapae-, --peri egkomios--.
The plastic dress, which in this case might not be wanting,
is of course but seldom borrowed from the history of his native country,
as in the satire -Serranus-, --peri archairesion--. The Cynic-
world of Diogenes on the other hand plays, as might be expected,
a great part; we meet with the --Kounistor--, the --Kounorreiton--,
the 'Ippokouon, the --'Oudrokouon--, the --Kounodidaskalikon--
and others of a like kind. Mythology is also laid under contribution
for comic purposes; we find a -Prometheus Liber-, an -Ajax
Stramenticius-, a -Hercules Socraticus-, a -Sesqueulixes-
who had spent not merely ten but fifteen years in wanderings.
The outline of the dramatic or romantic framework is still discoverable
from the fragments in some pieces, such as the -Prometheus Liber-,
the -Sexagessis-, -Manius-; it appears that Varro frequently,
perhaps regularly, narrated the tale as his own experience;
e. g. in the -Manius- the dramatis personae go to Varro and discourse
to him "because he was known to them as a maker of books."
as to the poetical value of this dress we are no longer allowed
to form any certain judgment; there still occur in our fragments
several very charming sketches full of wit and liveliness--
thus in the -Prometheus Liber- the hero after the loosing
of his chains opens a manufactory of men, in which Goldshoe the rich
(-Chrysosandalos-) bespeaks for himself a maiden, of milk and finest wax,
such as the Milesian bees gather from various flowers, a maiden
without bones and sinews, without skin or hair, pure and polished, slim,
smooth, tender, charming. The life-breath of this poetry is polemics--
not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius
and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern
elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar
living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly,
or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry,(24)
of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which
the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned
his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise
regulations. In the constitutional struggle Varro did what seemed to him
the duty of a citizen; but his heart was not in such party-doings--
"why," he complains on one occasion, "do ye call me
from my pure life into the filth of your senate-house?" He belonged
to the good old time, when the talk savoured of onions and garlic,
but the heart was sound. His polemic against the hereditary foes
of the genuine Roman spirit, the Greek philosophers, was only
a single aspect of this old-fashioned opposition to the spirit
of the new times; but it resulted both from the nature of the Cynical
philosophy and from the temperament of Varro, that the Menippean lash
was very specially plied round the cars of the philosophers
and put them accordingly into proportional alarm--it was not
without palpitation that the philosophic scribes of the time
transmitted to the "severe man" their newly-issued treatises.
Philosophizing is truly no art. With the tenth part of the trouble
with which a master rears his slave to be a professional baker,
he trains himself to be a philosopher; no doubt, when the baker
and the philosopher both come under the hammer, the artist of pastry
goes off a hundred times dearer than the sage. Singular people,
these philosophers! One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey--
it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with,
otherwise where would any honey-wine be left? Another thinks
that men grow out of the earth like cresses. A third has invented
a world-borer (--Kosmotorounei--) by which the earth will some
day be destroyed.
-Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat
Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus-.
It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard--by which is meant
an etymologizing Stoic--cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith's
scales; but there is nothing that surpasses the genuine
philosophers' quarrel--a Stoic boxing-match far excels any encounter
of athletes. In the satire -Marcopolis-, --peri archeis--,
when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart,
matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant,
but ill with the philosopher; the -Celer- -- -di'-enos- -leimmatos-logos--,
son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent--
evidently the philosophic -Dilemma---with the mattock.
With this morally polemic tendency and this talent for embodying it
in caustic and picturesque expression, which, as the dress of dialogue
given to the books on Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows,
never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily
combined an incomparable knowledge of the national manners
and language, which is embodied in the philological writings
of his old age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays
itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness.
Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian,
who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation
in its former idiosyncrasy and seclusion as well as in its modern state
of transition and dispersion, and had supplemented and deepened
his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language
by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives.
His partial deficiency in rational judgment and learning--
in our sense of the words--was compensated for by his clear
intuition and the poetry which lived within him. He sought
neither after antiquarian notices nor after rare antiquated
or poetical words;(25) but he was himself an old and old-fashioned man
and almost a rustic, the classics of his nation were his favourite
and long-familiar companions; how could it fail that many details
of the manners of his forefathers, which he loved above all
and especially knew, should be narrated in his writings, and that
his discourse should abound with proverbial Greek and Latin phrases,
with good old words preserved in the Sabine conversational language,
with reminiscences of Ennius, Lucilius, and above all of Plautus?
We should not judge as to the prose style of these aesthetic
writings of Varro's earlier period by the standard of his work
on Language written in his old age and probably published
in an unfinished state, in which certainly the clauses
of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative
like thrushes on a string; but we have already observed that Varro
rejected on principle the effort after a chaste style and Attic periods,
and his aesthetic essays, while destitute of the mean bombast
and the spurious tinsel of vulgarism, were yet written after an unclassic
and even slovenly fashion, in sentences rather directly joined
on to each other than regularly subdivided. The poetical pieces
inserted on the other hand show not merely that their author
knew how to mould the most varied measures with as much mastery
as any of the fashionable poets, but that he had a right
to include himself among those to whom a god has granted the gift
of "banishing cares from the heart by song and sacred poesy."(26)
the sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem
of Lucretius; to the more general causes which prevented this
there falls to be added their thoroughly individual stamp,
which was inseparable from the greater age, from the rusticity,
and even from the peculiar erudition of their author. But the grace
and humour of the Menippean satires above all, which seem to have been
in number and importance far superior to Varro's graver works,
captivated his contemporaries as well as those in after times
who had any relish for originality and national spirit; and even we,
who are no longer permitted to read them, may still from the fragments
preserved discern in some measure that the writer "knew how to laugh
and how to jest in moderation." And as the last breath
of the good spirit of the old burgess-times ere it departed,
as the latest fresh growth which the national Latin poetry put forth,
the Satires of Varro deserved that the poet in his poetical testament
should commend these his Menippean children to every one
"who had at heart the prosperity of Rome and of Latium";
and they accordingly retain an honourable place in the literature
as in the history of the Italian people.(27)
Historical Composition
Sisenna
The critical writing of history, after the manner in which
the Attic authors wrote the national history in their classic period
and in which Polybius wrote the history of the world, was never
properly developed in Rome. Even in the field most adapted for it--
the representation of contemporary and of recently past events--
there was nothing, on the whole, but more or less inadequate attempts;
in the epoch especially from Sulla to Caesar the not very important
contributions, which the previous epoch had to show in this field--
the labours of Antipater and Asellius--were barely even equalled.
The only work of note belonging to this field, which arose
in the present epoch, was the history of the Social and Civil Wars
by Lucius Cornelius Sisenna (praetor in 676). Those who had read it
testify that it far excelled in liveliness and readableness
the old dry chronicles, but was written withal in a style
thoroughly impure and even degenerating into puerility; as indeed
the few remaining fragments exhibit a paltry painting of horrible
details,(28) and a number of words newly coined or derived
from the language of conversation. When it is added that the author's
model and, so to speak, the only Greek historian familiar to him
was Clitarchus, the author of a biography of Alexander the Great
oscillating between history and fiction in the manner of the semi-
romance which bears the name of Curtius, we shall not hesitate
to recognize in Sisenna's celebrated historical work, not a product
of genuine historical criticism and art, but the first Roman essay
in that hybrid mixture of history and romance so much a favourite
with the Greeks, which desires to make the groundwork of facts
life-like and interesting by means of fictitious details and thereby
makes it insipid and untrue; and it will no longer excite surprise
that we meet with the same Sisenna also as translator of Greek
fashionable romances.(29)
Annals of the City