THE ROMAN EPIC BEFORE THE TIME OF VIRGIL.
The distinction between what is called the primitive and the literary epic
has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. The two kinds of
narrative poem belong to totally different epochs in civilisation; they
are also the products of very different national temperaments and
faculties. It is somewhat remarkable that those literatures which are
richest in literary epics—the ancient Latin, the modern Italian, and the
English—are those which possess few or no native poems either of the type
realised in the Nibelungen-Lied, the Song of Roland, and poems of that
class, or of the type realised in the Iliad and Odyssey; nor is there, in
connexion with the earlier traditions of the Italian or the English race,
that cycle of heroic adventure and personages in which such poems have
their origin. The composition of the Aeneid and of the Paradise Lost
implies powers of combination, of arranging great masses of materials, of
concentration of the mind on a single object, more analogous to those
which produced the vast historical work of Livy and ‘The Decline and Fall’
of Gibbon, than to the spontaneity, the _naïveté_, the rapidity of
conception and utterance, and that immediate sympathy between poet and
people, to which we owe the continuous poems developed out of some germ of
popular ballad or national legend. It was the peculiar glory of Greece,
that in the earlier stage of her literary development she manifested not
only a perfection of expression and of art, but a maturity of
intelligence, a true insight into the meaning of life, a nobility of
imagination in union with a clearness and sanity of judgment, which the
most advanced eras of other literatures scarcely equal. Thus the two great
Greek epics are unique in character, and, while they have, in the highest
degree, the excellences of each class, they can properly be ranked under
neither. While exhibiting, better than any other writings, man and the
outward world in ‘the first intention,’—man in the energy and buoyancy of
the national youth, and Nature in the vividness of impression which she
makes on the mind and sense in their most healthy activity,—they are at
the same time masterpieces of art and great monuments of the national
mind. The Greek imagination with no appearance of effort produced works of
such compass and harmonious proportion as only long years of labour and
reflection in collecting and combining materials in accordance with a
predetermined purpose produced in other literatures.
We are not called upon to consider here the conditions out of which the
earlier type of epic poetry is developed, or to enquire why the Latin race
failed to create at least some inartistic legendary poem of sufficient
length to be ranked in that form of literature. Perhaps no answer could be
given to the question excepting that the Latin race had not sufficient
creative force to produce such a work,—which is simply another way of
stating the fact that it did not produce epic poems. The Romans were from
a very early period interested in their past history and traditions. They
seem to have shaped, either out of real incidents in their national and
family history, or out of their chief national characteristics, stories of
strong human interest(434), which only want the ‘vates sacer’ to be
converted into poems. Every great family seems to have had its own
traditions, glorifying the exploits and preserving the memory of
illustrious ancestors; and whatever may have been the case in regard to
the legendary stories connected with the fortunes of the State, some of
these traditions were undoubtedly expressed in rude Saturnian verse, and
chanted at family gatherings and at funeral banquets. The memory of these
ancestral lays—if we may apply that word to them—survived till the time of
Cicero, Horace, and apparently even of Tacitus(435), though no actual
trace of them appears to have existed even in the age of the elder Cato.
But the influence of these rude germs of poetry—if they exercised any
influence on Latin literature at all—was confined to the structure of
Roman history. An enquiry into the origin and growth of Roman epic poetry
need not concern itself with them.
Neither is it necessary here to go back into the vexed and probably
insoluble question of the genesis of the Homeric poems. That these stand
in most intimate relation with the Virgilian epic is a patent fact; and
the nature of this intimate relation will be examined in some of the
subsequent chapters. But they first began to act on the Roman imagination
and art many centuries after they assumed their present form. The Romans
accepted them as they did the lyrical and dramatic poetry of Greece, and
were absolutely unconcerned with the questions as to their origin which
interest modern curiosity. For the adequate understanding of the form and
substance of the Roman epic as it was shaped by its greatest master, a
competent knowledge of the Iliad and Odyssey must be presupposed; but it
is unnecessary in a work on Latin literature to discuss the origin and
character of the epic poetry of the Greeks on the same scale on which
their idyllic and didactic poetry has been discussed in previous chapters.
But just as historical composition, regarded as a branch of art, though
originating in the imitation of Greek models, has assumed in the works of
Livy and Tacitus a distinctively Roman type, in conformity with certain
characteristics of the race and with the weight of new matter which it has
to embody, so, too, the type of epic poetry realised by Virgil has
acquired a distinctive character as a vehicle of Roman sentiment and
material. To appreciate the native, as distinct from the foreign element
in the mould in which Virgil’s representation is cast, it is necessary to
attend to certain instincts and tendencies which were calculated strongly
to affect any form of narrative poetry amongst the Romans, and also to
take a rapid survey of the history of their narrative poetry from the
beginning of their literature to the Augustan Age.
In the first place, the strong national sentiment of Rome was a feeling
which could not fail to be appealed to in any works which aimed at
securing both general and permanent interest. The heroic story of Greece
was indeed able for a time to attract general attention at Rome from the
novelty of the dramatic representations in which it was introduced. But
even Roman tragedy, to judge from the testimony of Cicero and others,
seems to have owed more of its popularity to the grave spirit by which it
was animated and the Roman strength of will exhibited in its personages,
than to the legitimate sources of interest in a drama, viz. the play of
human motives and the vicissitudes of human fortunes. But to sustain the
interest of a long narrative, as distinct from a dramatic poem, it was
necessary to act on some deep and general feeling. Not only did the
hearers require to be thus moved to attention, but the poet himself could
only thus be inspired and sustained in the unfamiliar task of literary
composition. Now, looking to other manifestations of Roman energy, we see
that whatever force was not employed on present necessities, was given,
not as among the Greeks to ideal creation, but to the commemoration of
events of public importance, and to the transmission of the lessons as
well as of the history of the passing time. The connexion between the past
and the future was maintained by monuments of different kinds, by public
inscriptions, written annals, fasts, or festivals recording some momentous
experience in the history of the State. All that we know and can still see
of Roman work suggests the thought of a people who had an instinctive
consciousness of a long destiny; who built, acted, and wrote with a view
to a distant future. A national history was the legitimate expression of
this impulse; but before the language was developed into a form suited for
a continuous work in prose, it was natural that the tendency to realise
the past and hand down the memory of the present should find an outlet for
itself in various forms of narrative poetry.
Again, the Romans had a strong personal feeling of admiration for their
great men. They were animated by that generous passion to which, in modern
times, the term hero-worship has been applied. And corresponding with this
feeling on the part of his countrymen, there was in the object of it a
strong love of glory, a strong passion to perpetuate his name. Through the
whole course of Roman history we recognise this motive acting powerfully
on the men most eminent in war, politics, and literature, and on no one
more powerfully than on the Emperor Augustus. The memory of the great men
of Rome and of their actions was kept alive by monuments, statues, coins,
waxen images preserved in the atrium of the family house, by the poems
sung and speeches delivered among funeral ceremonies, by inscriptions on
tombs (such as that still read on the tomb of Scipio Barbatus), by family
names (such as that of Africanus) derived from great exploits, and, under
the Empire, by the great triumphal arches and columns which still excite
the admiration of travellers. The Roman passion for glory received its
highest gratification in the triumph which celebrated great military
exploits. The culmination of the tendency to glorify actual living men, or
men recently dead, is witnessed in the deification of the Emperors. With
the development of literature we find, as we should expect, this tendency
of the imagination allying itself with poetry, from the time when Ennius
devoted one work to the celebration of Scipio down to the panegyrists of
Augustus, Messala, or Agrippa(436) under the early Empire. A new direction
and a new motive were thus given to narrative poetry—a direction and
motive which had no inconsiderable influence in determining Virgil to the
choice of the subject of the Aeneid.
Another characteristic of the race was likely to impress itself on the
form and execution of their narrative poetry, viz. their love of works of
large compass and massive structure. Vastness of design and solid
workmanship are as distinctive properties of Roman art, as harmony of
proportion and beauty of form are of the works of Greek imagination. To
compose a literary work which should be representative of the genius of
Rome, it was necessary that the author should be not only imbued with
Roman sentiment and ideas, but also endowed with the Roman capacity for
patient and persevering industry. Concentration of purpose on works
conceived and executed on a great scale, with a view both to immediate and
permanent results, was an essentially Roman quality. The Romans built
their aqueducts and baths for the commonest needs of life, and constructed
their roads and encampments, in such a way as to astonish the world after
the lapse of nearly two thousand years. With similar energy and
persistence of purpose they built up their greatest literary works. This
characteristic favoured the growth among them of a type of epic poetry as
distinct from that of Greece as the Coliseum was from the Parthenon.
If Roman epic poetry was not to be a mere imitation of the Greek epic, we
should accordingly expect that it should exhibit some or all of these
characteristics,—that it should seek that source of interest which secures
permanent attention to a long narrative poem in national sentiment; that
it should strive to restore the memory of the past history and traditions
of the State and at the same time to give expression to the ideas of the
present time; that it should magnify the greatness of eminent living men
or of those who had served their country before them; and that it should
be conceived on a large scale, and be executed perhaps with rude, but
certainly with strong and massive workmanship. The first original
narrative poem in Latin literature—the Punic War of Naevius—treated of a
subject of living interest, and at the same time glorified the mythical
past of Rome; and, while rude in design and execution, it was conceived
and executed on a scale of large dimensions. The example was thus given of
a Roman epic based on a legendary foundation, but mainly built out of the
materials of contemporary history. We can imagine that, at the time when
this poem was composed, a more vivid interest would be felt in the
fictitious connexion between Rome and Troy from the fact that it was in
the First Punic War that this connexion appears first to have been
generally recognised. The legend had not as in Virgil’s time the prestige
of two centuries, but it had the force of novelty to recommend it for
poetic purposes. At the same time the great struggle between Rome and
Carthage, on which the attention of the world was fixed at the time when
Naevius wrote, must have given a peculiar meaning to the early relations
between the two imperial States, as they were first represented in his
poem.
The poem of Naevius gave the germinative idea and some of the materials to
the first and fourth Books of the Aeneid; it established also the
principle of combining in one work a remote mythical past with a subject
of strong contemporary interest. At the same time it gave the example,
followed by the Roman national epic, before the time of Virgil, of taking
the main subject of the poem from the sphere of actual history. This
confusion between the provinces of poetry and prose had been avoided by
the instinct of Greek taste. Among the large number of Greek epic writers
from the age of Homer to that of Nonnus, we hear of only one or two who
treated of actual historical events. The general neglect of those poems
which in ancient and modern times have treated of historical events and
characters in the forms of epic poetry shows that the Greek instinct in
this, as in all other questions of art, was unerringly right. The choice
and treatment of such a subject are equally fatal to the truth and
completeness of historical representation and to the ideality and unity of
a work of art. Though the objection does not equally apply to dramatic
art, yet the modern instinct, which selects for that mode of
representation subjects remote from our own times, confirms the judgment
in accordance with which the Athenians fined their tragic poet for
reminding them of a too recent sorrow.
The Roman writers recognised the analogy between epic and historic
narrative,—and the way in which they apprehended the alliance between them
was as injurious to the truthfulness of their history as to the symmetry
of their early poetry,—but they did not before the time of Virgil
recognise the artistic distinction between them. The Roman epic and Roman
history originated in the same feeling and impulse—the sentiment of
national glory, the desire to perpetuate the great actions and the career
of conquest, which were the constituent elements of that glory. The
impulse both of poets and historians was to build up a commemorative
monument; not, as among the Greeks, to present the spectacle of human life
in its most animated, varied, and noble movements. To a Roman historian
and to a Roman poet the character and the fate of individuals derived
their chief interest from their bearing on the glory and fortune of the
State. In the Greek epic, on the other hand, the interest in Achilles and
Hector is much more vivid than that felt in the success of the Greek or
Trojan cause. In Herodotus the interest felt in the most important
historical crisis through which the world has ever passed is inseparably
blended with that felt in a great number of individual men, among the
enemies of Greece, no less than among Greeks themselves. In the History of
Livy we do not expect to find truthful delineation or sagacious analysis
of the characters of the leading men of Rome; still less do we expect to
find impartial and sympathetic delineation of the enemies of Rome; but we
seek in his pages the image of the nation’s life in its onward career of
conquest and internal change, as pride and affection shaped it on the
tables of the national memory. The idea of Rome, as the one object of
supreme interest to gods and men, in the past, present, and future,
imparts the unity of sentiment, tone, and purpose which is characteristic
of the type of Roman epic poetry and of Roman history.
Naevius in selecting for his epic poem the subject of the First Punic War,
and in connecting that war with the events which were supposed to connect
the Roman State immediately with a divine origin and destiny, was the
first Roman who was moved to write by this powerful impulse. But the man
who first gave full expression to the national idea and feeling, who first
made Rome conscious of herself, and who was the true founder of her
literature, was Ennius. The title which he gave to his
epic—Annales—perhaps the most prosaic title ever given to a work of
genius, indicates the character of his work and his mode of treatment. The
inspiration under which it was written is more truly indicated by the
other name—Romais—by which, according to the testimony of an ancient
grammarian(437), it was sometimes known. He took for his subject the whole
career of Rome, from its mythical beginning in the events which followed
the Trojan war onward to the latest events in his own day. The work was
recognised as a great epic poem, and at the same time fulfilled the part
of a contemporary chronicle. It was a true instinct of genius to feel that
the only material suitable for a Roman epic was to be sought in the idea
of the whole national life. That alone could supply the essential source
of epic inspiration, the sympathy between the poet and those to whom his
poem is addressed, by which the epic poet receives from, as well as gives
back to, his audience. But on the other hand, while he has the true poetic
impulse,—the ‘vivida vis’ and the strong conceptions of a poet,—he came
too soon to acquire the tact and delicacy of conception and execution
equally essential to the creation of works destined for immortality. The
subject was too vast to be treated within the compass of a poem, which
demands to be read as a whole, and to be contemplated as one continuous
mental creation. The treatment of a long series of actions in
chronological order is incompatible with artistic effect; the treatment of
contemporary history is incompatible with the ideality of imaginative
representation. The workmanship of the poem, as exhibited in many
fragments, is powerful, but at the same time rude and unequal. Yet Ennius
was a true representative writer. He appealed powerfully to the national
sentiment; he revived the mythical and historic fame of the past; he
perpetuated the memory and interpreted the meaning of his own time; he
enhanced the glory of the great men and the great families of Rome; and he
produced a work of colossal proportions and massive execution. Till his
place was taken by a successor who united the fervour of a national poet
to the perfect workmanship of an artist, he was justly regarded as the
truest representative in literature of Roman character, sentiment, and
ideas.
Other narrative and historical poems were known by the name of ‘Annales;’
one in three Books, written by Accius, the tragic poet; another written by
A. Furius of Antium, which extended to a greater length, as Macrobius (ii.
1. 34(438)) quotes from the tenth and the eleventh Books lines
appropriated by Virgil,—one of many proofs of the manner in which the
genius of Virgil, acting upon great reading, absorbed the thoughts and
diction of his predecessors. The most important of the historical poems
which continued the mistake of treating recent history in the form of a
metrical chronicle appears to have been the Istrian War of Hostius, the
grandfather of the Cynthia of Propertius, and alluded to by him in the
line,
Splendidaque a docto fama refulget avo.
This poem was written early in the first century B.C., in three Books, and
took up the treatment of Roman history where the Annals of Ennius ended.
In the earlier part of the Ciceronian Age, the decay of public spirit, and
the strong tendency which had set in of advancing individual claims above
the interest of the State, and of looking to individual leaders rather
than to established institutions, gave a new direction to narrative verse.
The passion for personal glory became the principal motive of those poems
which treated of recent or contemporary history. Eminent families and
individuals secured for themselves the services of poets, native or Greek.
Even before this time, Accius, as we learn from Cicero(439), was closely
associated with D. Brutus, and it seems not unlikely that the choice of
the subject of one of his tragedies,—Brutus,—was made as a compliment to
his friend and patron. The Luculli and Metelli retained the services of
Archias, as their panegyrist,—a fact referred to by Cicero in one of his
letters to Atticus, not without a slight touch of jealousy(440). Pompey
was served in the same way by Theophanes of Mitylene. The patronage of the
great to men of letters was thus by no means so disinterested as our first
impressions might lead us to suppose. Cicero himself with his
extraordinary literary activity wrote in his youth a poem on his townsman
Marius, and failing to find any other Greek or Roman to undertake the
task, composed a poem in three Books on his own Consulship(441), with a
result not fortunate to his reputation either for modesty or good taste.
In a letter to his brother Quintus, we find him encouraging him to the
composition of a poem on the Invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar. The
passage is worth attending to as indicating the materials out of which
those poems which aimed at celebrating contemporary events were
framed:—‘What strange scenes, what opportunities for describing things and
places, what customs, tribes, battles. What a theme too you have in your
general himself(442)!’ This passage may be compared with two passages in
Horace, showing that the same kind of thing was expected from a poetical
panegyrist under Augustus. The first of these is from Sat. ii. 1, lines 11
etc., where Trebatius advises Horace,
Caesaris invicti res dicere—
to which advice the poet answers,
Cupidum, pater optime, vires
Deficiunt: neque enim quivis horrentia pilis
Agmina, nec fracta pereuntes cuspide Gallos,
Aut labentis equo describat vulnera Parthi(443).
The other passage from Horace (Epistles, ii. 1. 250) has a closer
resemblance to the passage in Cicero:—
Nec sermones ego mallem
Repentes per humum quam res componere gestas,
Terrarumque situs et flumina dicere, et arces
Montibus impositas, et barbara regna, tuisque
Auspiciis totum confecta duella per orbem(444), etc.
Horace expresses his contempt for this style of poem in other passages of
his Satires, as (ii. 5. 41),
seu pingui tentus omaso
Furius hibernas cana nive conspuet Alpes(445);
and also (Sat. i. 10. 36–37),
Turgidus Alpinus jugulat dum Memnona, dumque
Defingit Rheni luteum caput(446).
The most prolific writer of epics in the latter half of the Ciceronian Age
was Varro Atacinus, the first Transalpine Gaul who appears in Roman
literature; the same who is mentioned by Horace as having made an
unsuccessful attempt to revive the satire of Lucilius:—
Hoc erat, experto frustra Varrone Atacino(447), etc.
He had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul, and wrote a poem on the war
against the Sequani in the traditional form. He also opened up to his
countrymen that vein of epic poetry which had been wrought by the
Alexandrians. The most famous poem of this kind in the literature of the
Republic was the Jason of Varro, imitated probably from the Argonautics of
Apollonius. Propertius speaks of this poem in a passage where he classes
Varro also among the writers of amatory poetry before his own time, such
as Catullus, Cinna, Gallus, and Virgil in his Eclogues:—
Haec quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro,
Varro Leucadiae maxima flamma suae(448).
He is thus as a writer of epic poems, on the one side, of the native
school of Ennius and the Annalists; on the other, he is the originator of
that other type of Roman epic which appears under the Empire in the
Thebaid and Achilleid of Statius and the Argonautics of Valerius Flaccus.
The two great poets of the later Ciceronian era introduced a great change
into Roman poetry,—the practice of careful composition. They are the first
artistic poets of Rome. The rapidity of composition which characterised
all the earlier writers was, in the rude state of the language at that
time, incompatible with high accomplishment. We read of Cicero writing
five hundred hexameters in a night, and of his brother Quintus writing
four tragedies in sixteen days. The true sense of artistic finish first
appeared in Lucretius, and to a greater degree in Catullus, and the
younger men of the Ciceronian Age, Licinius Calvus, Helvius Cinna, etc.
The contempt with which the younger school regarded the old fashion of
composition appears in Catullus’ references—neither delicate nor
complimentary—to the ‘Annales Volusi,’ the ponderous annalistic epic of
his countryman (conterraneus) Tanusius Geminus(449). But in this younger
school, poetry separated itself entirely from the national life, or dealt
with it only in the form of personal epigrams on the popular leaders and
their partisans. The dignity of the hexameter was reserved by them for
didactic or philosophic poetry and short epic idyls treating of the heroic
legends of Greece. Didactic poetry, directing the attention to
contemplation instead of action, established itself as a successful rival
to the old historical epic, in the province of serious literature.
The latter, however, still found representatives in the following
generation. Thus Anser, the panegyrist of Antony, is familiarly known,
owing to one of the few satiric allusions which have been attributed to
Virgil:—
Nam neque adhuc Vario videor nec dicere Cinna
Digna, sed argutos inter strepere anser olores(450).
Varius, with whom he is by implication contrasted in those lines, is
characterised by Horace as ‘Maeonii carminis ales,’ at a time when Virgil
was only famous as the poet of rural life. He was the author of a poem on
the death of Julius Caesar. We hear also of other specimens of the
contemporary epic produced in the Augustan Age, one by Cornelius Severus
treating of the Sicilian Wars, one by Rabirius treating of the Battle of
Actium, and one by Pedo Albinovanus treating of the voyage of Germanicus
‘per oceanum septentrionalem(451).’
We find Horace repeatedly excusing himself with self-disparaging irony,
while exhorting younger poets to the task of directly celebrating the wars
of Augustus,—e.g. Epist. i. 3. 7:—
Quis sibi res gestas Augusti scribere sumit?
Bella quis et paces longum diffundit in aevum(452)?
Horace does indeed celebrate some of the military as well as the peaceful
successes of the Augustan Age, in the only form in which contemporary or
recent events admit of being poetically treated, viz. lyrical poetry. But
considering how eager Augustus was to have his wars celebrated in verse
and how strong in him was the national passion for glory, and considering
that Virgil and Horace were pre-eminently the favourite poets of the time
and the special friends both of the Emperor himself and his minister, it
is remarkable how they both avoid or defer the task which he wished to
impose on them. This reluctance arose from no inadequate appreciation of
his services to the world, but from their high appreciation of what was
due to their art. Virgil had been similarly importuned in earlier times by
Pollio and Varus, and had gracefully waived the claim made on him by
pleading the fitness of his own muse only for the lighter themes of
pastoral poetry. He seems to have hesitated long as to the form which the
celebration of the glories of the Augustan Age should take. How he solved
the problem, how he sought to combine in a work of Greek art the
inspiration of the national epic with the personal celebration of
Augustus, will be treated of in the following chapter.