TRANSITION FROM LUCILIUS TO LUCRETIUS AND CATULLUS.
An interval of nearly half a century elapsed between the death of
Lucilius and the appearance of the poem of Lucretius. During this
period no poetical works of any value were produced at Rome. The only
successors of the older tragedians, C. Julius Caesar (Consul B.C. 88)
and C. Titius, never obtained a success on the stage approaching to
that still accorded to the older dramas. No rival appeared to dispute
the popularity enjoyed by Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence, as authors
of the Comoedia Palliata; but the literary activity of Afranius and
of T. Quintius Atta, the most eminent among the authors of the Fabulae
togatae, extended into the early years of the first century B.C. It
was during this period also that the Fabula Atellana was raised by L.
Pomponius of Bononia and Novius into the rank of regular literature.
The tendency to depart more and more from the Greek type of comedy,
and to revert to the scenic entertainment native to Italy, is seen in
the attempt of Laberius, in the last years of the Republic, to raise
the Mimus into the sphere of recognised literary art. The Annalistic
epic of Hostius on the Istrian war, and the Annales of Furius, of
Antium, a friend of the elder Catulus, perpetuated the traditional
influence of Ennius, during the interval between Lucilius and
Lucretius. The first attempts to introduce the erotic poetry of
Alexandria, in the form of epigrams and short lyrical poems,
also belong to this period. The writers of this new kind of
poetry,--Valerius Aedituus, Q. Lutatius Catulus (the Colleague of
Marius in his consulship of the year 102 B.C.), and Laevius, the
author of Erotopaegnia, have significance only as indicating the
direction which Roman poetry followed in the succeeding generation.
Cicero in his youth cultivated verse-making, both as a translator
of the poem of Aratus, and as the author of an original poem on
his townsman Marius. His hexameters show considerable advance in
rhythmical smoothness and exactness beyond the previous condition of
that metre, as exemplified in the fragments of Ennius and Lucilius:
and his translation of Aratus marks a stage in the history of Latin
poetry as affording a native model, which Lucretius did not altogether
disregard in the structure of his verse and diction[1]. But Cicero
is not to be ranked among the poets of Rome. He merely practised
verse-making as part of his general literary training. He retained
the accomplishment till his latest years, and shows his facility by
translating passages from the Greek tragedians in his philosophical
works. That he had no true poetical faculty is shown by the apparent
indifference with which he regarded the works of the two great poets
of his time. This indifference is the more marked from his generous
recognition of the oratorical promise and accomplishment of the men
of a younger generation. The tragedies of Q. Cicero were mere literary
exercises and made no impression on his generation. Though several of
the multifarious works of Varro were written in verse, yet the whole
cast of his mind was thoroughly prosaic. His tastes and abilities were
those of an antiquarian scholar, not of a man of poetic genius and
accomplishment.
The period of nearly half a century, from 102 till about 60 B.C.,
must thus be regarded as altogether barren in genuine poetical result.
During this long interval there appeared no successor to carry on the
work of developing the poetical side of a national literature, begun
by Plautus, Ennius, and Lucilius. The only metrical compositions
of this time were either inferior reproductions of the old forms or
immature anticipations of the products of a later age. The political
disturbance of the times between the tribunate of Tib. Gracchus and
the first consulship of Crassus and Pompey (B.C. 70) was unfavourable
to the cultivation of that poetry which is expressive of national
feeling: and the Roman genius for art was as yet too immature to
produce the poetry of individual reflection or personal passion. The
state of feeling throughout Italy, before and immediately subsequent
to the Social War, alienated from Rome the sympathetic genius of the
kindred races from whom her most illustrious authors were drawn in
later times. It was in the years of comparative peace, between the
horrors of the first civil war and the alarm preceding the outbreak of
the second, that a new poet grew apparently unnoticed to maturity, and
the silence was at last broken after the long repression of Italian
genius by a voice at once stronger in native vitality and richer in
acquired culture than any which had preceded it.
But there is one thing significant in the literary character of this
period, otherwise so barren in works of taste and imagination. Those
by whom the art of verse was practised are no longer 'Semi-Graeci' or
humble provincials, but Romans of political or social distinction.
The chief authors in the interval between the first and second era
of Roman poetry are either members of the aristocracy or men of old
family belonging to the equestrian order. And this connexion between
literature and social rank continues till the close of the Republic.
The poets of the Ciceronian age,--Hortensius, Memmius, Lucretius,
Catullus, Calvus, Cinna, &c.--either themselves belonged to the
governing class, or were men of leisure and independent means, living
as equals with the members of that class. This circumstance explains
much of the difference in tone between the literature of that age and
both the earlier and later literature. The separation in taste and
sympathy between the higher classes and the mass of the people which
had begun in the days of Terence, grew wider and wider with the
growth of culture and with the increasing bitterness of political
dissensions. It was only among the rich and educated that poetry
could now expect to find an audience; and the poetry written for them
appealed, for the most part, to the convictions, tastes, pleasures,
and animosities which they shared as members of a class, not, like the
best Augustan poetry, to the higher sympathies which they might share
as the depositaries of great national traditions. But if this poetry
was too exclusively addressed to a class--a class too, though refined
by culture, yet living for the most part the life of fashion and
pleasure--it had the merit of being the sincere expression of men
writing to please themselves and their equals. It was not called upon
to make any sacrifice of individual conviction or public sentiment to
satisfy popular taste or the requirements of an Imperial master.
But though barren in poetry this interval was far from being barren
in other intellectual results. This was the era of the great Roman
orators, the successors of Laelius, Carbo, the Gracchi, etc., and the
immediate predecessors and contemporaries of Cicero. It was through
the care with which public speaking was cultivated that Latin
prose was formed into that clear, exact, dignified, and commanding
instrument, which served through so many centuries as the universal
organ of history, law, philosophy, learning, and religion,--of public
discussion and private correspondence. While Latin poetry is, both in
spirit and manner, quite as much Italian as Roman, Latin prose bears
the stamp of the political genius of Rome. It was the deliberate
expression of the mind of men practised in affairs, exercised in the
deliberations of the Senate, the harangues of the public assemblies,
the pleadings of the courts,--of men accustomed to determine and
explain questions of law and to draw up edicts binding on all subjects
of the State,--trained, moreover, to a sense of literary form by the
study of Greek rhetoric, and naturally guided to clearness and
dignity of expression by the orderly understanding, the strong hold on
reality, and the authoritative bearing which were their birthright as
Romans. The effort which obtained its crowning success in the prose
style of Cicero left its mark on other forms of literature. History
continued to be written by members of the great governing families to
serve both as a record of events and a weapon of party warfare.
The large and varied correspondence of Cicero shows how general the
accomplishment of style had become among educated men. And if this
result was, in the main, due to the fervour of mind and temper
elicited by the contests of public life, the systematic teaching of
grammarians and rhetoricians acted as a corrective of the natural
exuberance or carelessness of the rhetorical faculty.
Perfection of style attained in one of the two great branches of a
national literature cannot fail to react on the other. It was
the peculiarity of Latin literature that this perfection or high
accomplishment was reached in prose sooner than in poetry. The
contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar, whose genius impelled them to
awaken into new life the long silent Muses of Italy, were conscious
that the great effort demanded of them was to raise Latin verse to a
similar perfection of form, diction, and musical cadence. What Cicero
did for Latin prose, in revealing the fertility of its resources,
in giving to it more ample volume, and eliciting its capabilities of
sonorous rhythmical movement, Lucretius aspires to do for Latin verse.
Although Catullus in forming his more elaborate style worked carefully
after the manner of his Greek models, yet we may attribute something
of the terseness, the idiomatic verve, the studied simplicity of
expression in his lighter pieces to the literary taste which he shared
with the younger race of orators, who claimed to have substituted
Attic elegance for Asiatic exuberance of ornament.
During all this interval, in which native poetry was neglected, the
art and thought of Greece were penetrating more deeply into Italy.
Cicero, in his defence of Archias, attests the eagerness with which
Greek studies were cultivated during the early years of the century;
'Erat Italia tunc plena Graecarum artium ac disciplinarum, studiaque
haec et in Latio vehementius tum colebantur quam nunc iisdem in
oppidis, et hic Romae propter tranquillitatem reipublicae non
neglegebantur.' With the reviving tranquillity of the Republic these
studies also revived. Learned Greeks continued to flock to Rome and
to attach themselves to members of the great houses,--the Luculli,
the Metelli, Pompey, etc.; and it became more and more the custom for
young men of birth and wealth to travel or spend some years of study
among the famous cities of Greece and Asia. This new and closer
contact of the Greek with the Roman mind came about, not as the
earlier one through dramatic representations, but, in a great measure,
through the medium of books, which began now to be accumulated at Rome
both in public and private libraries. Probably no other cause produces
so great a change in national character and intellect as the awakening
of the taste and the creating of facilities for reading. By the
diffusion of books, as well as by the instruction of living teachers,
the Romans of this generation came under the influence of a new class
of writers, whose spirit was more in harmony with the modern world
than the old epic and dramatic poets, viz. the exponents of the
different philosophic systems and the learned poets of Alexandria.
These new influences helped to denationalise Roman thought and
literature, to make the individual more conscious of himself, and
to stimulate the passions and pleasures of private life. While the
endeavour to regulate life in accordance with a system of philosophy
tended to isolate men from their fellows, the study of the Alexandrine
poets, the cultivation of art for its own sake, the exclusive
admiration of a particular manner of writing fostered the spirit
of literary coteries as distinct from the spirit of a national
literature. But making allowance for all these drawbacks, it is to the
Alexandrine culture that the education of the Roman sense of literary
beauty is primarily due. Along with this culture, indeed, the taste
for other forms of art, which was rapidly developed and largely fed
in the last age of the Republic, powerfully cooperated. Lucretius
specifies among the 'deliciae vitae'
Carmina, picturas, et daedala signa[2];
and, in more than one place, he writes, with sympathetic admiration,
of the charm of instrumental music,
Musaea mele per chordas organici quae
Mobilibus digitis expergefacta figurant[3].
The delicate appreciation of the paintings, statues, gems, vases,
etc., either brought to Rome as the spoils of conquest, or seen in
their original home by educated Romans, travelling for pleasure or
employed in the public service, was not without effect in
calling forth the ideal of literary form, realised in some of the
master-pieces of Catullus. We may suppose too that the cultivation of
music had some share in eliciting the lyrical movement in Latin verse
from the fact mentioned by Horace, that the songs of Catullus and
Calvus were ever in the mouths of the fashionable professors of that
art in a later age. If the life of the generation which witnessed
the overthrow of the Republic was one of alarm and vicissitude, of
political unsettlement and moral unrestraint, it was, at the same
time, very rich in its capabilities of sensuous and intellectual
enjoyment. The appetite for pleasure was still too fresh to produce
that deadening of energy and of feeling, which is most fatal to
literary creativeness. The passionate life led by Catullus and his
friends may have shortened the days of some of them, and tended to
limit the range and to lower the aims of their genius, but it did not
dull their vivid sense of beauty, chill their enjoyment of their
art, or impair the mastery over its technical details, for which they
strove.
As the bent given to philosophical and literary studies developed
the inner life and personal tastes of the individual, the political
disorganisation of the age tended to stimulate new modes of thought
and life, which had not, in any former generation, been congenial
to the Roman mind. While the work of political destruction was being
carried on along with the most strenuous gratification of their
passions by one set among the leading men at Rome--such as Catiline
and his associates, and, somewhat later, Clodius, Curio, Caelius,
Antony, etc.--among men of more sensitive and refined natures
the pleasures of the contemplative life began to exercise a novel
fascination. The comparative seclusion in which men like Lucullus and
Hortensius lived in their later years may, perhaps, be accounted for
by other reasons than the mere love of ease and pleasure. It was a
symptom of that despair of the Republic which is so often expressed
in Cicero's letters, and of the consequent diversion of thought from
practical affairs to the questions and interests which concern the
individual. In the same way the unsettlement and afterwards the loss
of political life at Athens gave a great impulse both to the various
philosophical sects on the one hand, and to the literature of the new
comedy, which deals exclusively with private life, on the other. In
Rome this alienation from politics naturally allied itself, among
members of the aristocracy, with the acceptance of the Epicurean
philosophy. The slow dissolution of religious belief which had been
going on since the first contact of the Roman mind with that of
Greece, awoke in Rome, as it had done in Greece, a deeper interest in
the ultimate questions of the existence and nature of the gods and of
the origin and destiny of the human soul. We see how the contemplation
of these questions consoled Cicero when no longer able to exercise
his energy and vivid intelligence on public affairs. He discusses them
with candour and seriousness of spirit and with a strong leaning to
the more hopeful side of the controversy, but scarcely from the point
of view which regards their settlement as of supreme importance to
human well-being. But they are raised from much greater depths of
feeling and inward experience by Lucretius, to whom the life of
political warfare and personal ambition was utterly repugnant, and who
had dedicated himself, with all the intensity of his passionate and
poetical temperament, to the discovery and the teaching of the true
meaning of life. The happiest results of his recluse and contemplative
life were the revelation of a new delight open to the human spirit
through sympathy with the spirit of Nature, and the deepening
beyond anything which had yet found expression in literature of
the fellow-feeling which unites man not only to humanity but to
all sentient existence. The taste, so congenial to the Italian,
for country life found in him its first and most powerful poetical
interpreter: while the humanity of sentiment, first instilled through
the teaching of comedy, and fostered by later literary and ethical
study, was enforced with a greatness of heart and imagination which
has seldom been equalled in ancient or modern times.
The dissolution of traditional beliefs and of the old loyalty to
the State produced very different results on the art and life of the
younger poets of that generation. The pursuit of pleasure, and the
cultivation, purely for its own sake, of art which drew its chief
materials from the life of pleasure, became the chief end and aim
of their existence. In so far as they turned their thoughts from
the passionate pleasures of their own lives and the contemplation of
passionate incidents and situations in art, it was to give expression
to the personal animosities which they entertained to the leaders of
the revolutionary movement. Nor did this animosity spring so much
from public spirit as from a repugnance of taste towards the coarser
partisans of the popular cause, and from the instinctive sense that
the privileges enjoyed by their own caste were not likely to survive
any great convulsion of the State. The intensity of their personal
feelings of love and hatred, and the limitation of their range of
view to the things which gave the most vivid and immediate pleasure
to themselves and to others like them, were the sources of both their
strength and weakness.
Of the poetry which arose out of these conditions of life and culture,
two representatives only are known to us in their works, Lucretius and
Catullus. From the testimony of their contemporaries we know them
to have been recognised as the greatest of the poets of that age.
Lucretius in his own province held an unquestioned pre-eminence. Yet
that other minds were occupied with the topics which he alone treated
with a masterly hand is proved by the existence of a work, of a
somewhat earlier date, by one Egnatius, bearing the title 'De Rerum
Natura,' and also by Cicero's notice, in connexion with his mention of
Lucretius, of the 'Empedoclea' of Sallustius. Varro also is mentioned
by ancient writers, in connexion with Empedocles and Lucretius, as
the author of a metrical work 'De Rerum Natura[4].' More satisfactory
evidence is afforded by the discussions in the 'De Natura Deorum,' the
'Tusculan Questions,' and the 'De Finibus,' of the interest taken by
educated men in the class of questions which Lucretius professed to
answer. Yet neither the antecedent nor the later attention devoted
to these subjects explains the powerful attraction which they had for
Lucretius. In him, more than in any other Roman, we recognise a fresh
and deep source of poetic thought and feeling appearing in the world.
The culture of his age may have suggested or rendered possible the
channel which his genius followed, but cannot account for the power
and intensity with which it poured itself into that channel. He
cannot be said either to sum up the art and thought contemporary with
himself, or, like Virgil, to complete that of preceding times. The
work done by him, and the influence exercised by him on the poetry of
Rome and on the world, are to be explained only by his original and
individual force.
Catullus, on the other hand, was the most successful among a band
of rival poets with most of whom he lived in intimacy. Among the men
older than himself, Hortensius, the orator, and Memmius were known as
writers of amatory poetry. His name as a lyric poet is most usually
coupled with that of his friend Calvus; and a well-known passage of
Tacitus[5] brings together his lampoons and those of Bibaculus as
being 'referta contumeliis Caesarum.' Among others to whom he was
bound by the ties of friendship and common tastes were C. Helvius
Cinna, author of an Alexandrine epic, called Zmyrna, and Caecilius,
author of a poem on Cybele. Ticidas and Anser, mentioned by Ovid among
his own precursors in amatory poetry, also belong to this generation.
Among the swarms of poetasters--
Saecli incommoda, pessimi poetae,--
a countryman of his own, Volusius[6], the author of a long Annalistic
epic, is held up by Catullus to especial obloquy.
While so much of the literature of that age has perished, we are
fortunate in possessing the works of the greatest authors in prose and
verse. The poems of Lucretius and Catullus enable us, better perhaps
than any other extant Latin works, to appreciate the most opposite
capacities and tendencies of the Roman genius. In their force and
individuality, they are alike valuable as the last poetic voices of
the Republic, and as, perhaps, the most free and sincere voices of
Rome. The first is one of the truest representatives of the national
strength, majesty, seriousness of spirit, massive constructive energy;
the second is the most typical example of the strong vitality
and passionate ardour of the Italian temperament and of its vivid
susceptibility to the varied beauties of Greek art.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Munro, in his Introduction to Part II of his
Commentary on Lucretius, illustrates this relation of the work
of the poet to this youthful production of Cicero.]
[Footnote 2: v. 1451.]
[Footnote 3: ii. 412; cf. also ii. 505-6:--
Et cycnea mele Phoebeaque daedala chordis
Carmina consimili ratione oppressa silerent.
These lines point to the union of music and lyrical poetry.]
[Footnote 4: Cp. the passages quoted from Quintilian,
Lactantius, etc. by W.S. Teuffel, Wagner's Translation, p.
239.]
[Footnote 5: Annals, iv. 34.]
[Footnote 6: Tanusius Geminus, who has generally been identified
with Volusius from the passage in Seneca, Ep. 93. 11,
'Annales Tanusii scis quam ponderosi sint et quid vocentur,'
is supposed, on the evidence of Suetonius, to have been the author
of a prose history, which he, Plutarch, and Strabo used as an
authority for the times. Seneca certainly must have identified them.
He may have written both in prose and verse, or perhaps the Annals
in verse may have been the historical authority appealed to.
There is, however, this further difficulty in identifying them,
that there is no apparent reason why Catullus should in his case
have deviated from his invariable practice of speaking of the
objects of his satire by their own names. Cf. Schmidt, Catullus,
Prolegomena, p. xlvi.]