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The Oxford Book Of Latin Verse
From the earliest fragments to the end of the Vth Century A.D.
Chosen by
H.W. Garrod
Fellow of Merton College.
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
FIRST PUBLISHED 1912
REPRINTED 1921, 1926, 1934, 1940 1943, 1947, 1952, 1964, 1968
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
The plan of this book excludes epic and the drama, and in general so
much of Roman poetry as could be included only by a licence of excerpt
mostly dangerous and in poetry of any architectonic pretensions
intolerable. If any one remarks as inconsistent with this plan the
inclusion of the more considerable fragments of Ennius and the early
tragedians, I will only say that I have not thought it worth while to be
wiser here than Time and Fate, which have of their own act given us
these poets in lamentable excerpt. A more real inconsistency may be
found in my treatment of the didactic poets. It seemed a pity that
Didactic Poetry--in some ways the most characteristic product of the
Roman genius--should, in such a Collection as this, be wholly
unrepresented. It seemed a pity: and it seemed also on the whole
unnecessary. It seemed unnecessary, for the reason that many of the
great passages of Lucretius, Vergil, and Manilius hang so loosely to
their contexts that the poets themselves seem to invite the gentle
violence of the excerptor. These passages are 'golden branches' set in
an alien stock--_non sua seminat arbos_. The hand that would pluck them
must be at once courageous and circumspect. But they attend the fated
despoiler:
Ergo alte uestiga oculis et rite repertum
carpe manu, namque ipse uolens facilisque sequetur
si te fata uocant.
Even outside Didactic Poetry I have allowed myself an occasional
disloyalty to my own rule against excerpts. I have, for example,
detached one or two lyrics from the Tragedies of Seneca. And, again,
from the long and sometimes tedious _Itinerarium_ of Rutilius I have
detached the splendid apostrophe to Rome which stands in the forefront
of that poem. These are pieces without which no anthology of Latin
poetry would be anything but grotesquely incomplete. And after all we
should be the masters and not the slaves of our own rules.
Satire finds no place in this book. Horace is represented only by his
lyrics. Juvenal and Persius are not represented at all. The _Satires_
and _Epistles_ of Horace are books of deep and wide influence. They have
taught lessons in school which have been remembered in the world. They
have made an appeal to natures which teaching more profound and
spiritual leaves untouched. By their large temper and by their complete
freedom from cant they have achieved a place in the regard of men from
which they are not likely to be dislodged by any changes of literary
fashion or any fury of the enemies of humane studies. I am content to
leave them in this secure position, and not to intrude them into a
Collection where Horace himself would have known them to be out of
place. Indeed, he has himself said upon this subject all that needs to
be said.[1] Persius similarly, in the Prologue to his _Satires_,
excludes himself from the company of the great poets. Nor can I believe
that Juvenal has any place among them. In the rhetoric of rancour he is
a distinguished practitioner. But he wants two qualities essential to
great poetry--truth and humanity. I say this because there are critics
who speak of Juvenal as though he were Isaiah.
My Selection begins with fragments of the Saliar hymns, and ends with
the invocation of Phocas to 'Clio, reverend wardress of Antiquity.' If I
am challenged to justify these _termini_, I will say of the first of
them that I could not begin earlier, and that it is commonly better to
take the beginnings offered to us than to make beginnings for ourselves.
The lower _terminus_ is not so simple a matter. I set myself here two
rules. First, I resolved to include no verse which, tried by what we
call 'classical' standards, was metrically faulty. Secondly, I judged it
wiser to exclude any poetry definitely Christian in character--a rule
which, as will be seen, does not necessarily exclude all the work of
Christian poets. Within these limits, I was content to go on so long as
I could find verse instinct with any genuine poetic feeling. The author
whose exclusion I most regret is Prudentius. If any one asks me, Where
is Merobaudes? where Sedulius? where Dracontius? I answer that they are
where they have always been--out of account. Interesting, no doubt, in
other ways, for the student of poetry they do not count. Prudentius
counts. He has his place. But it is not in this Collection. It is among
other memories, traditions, and aspirations, by the threshold of a world
where Vergil takes solemn and fated leave of those whom he has guided
and inspired:
Non aspettar mio dir più nè mio cenno.
I have spent a good deal of labour on the revision of texts: and I hope
that of some poems, particularly the less known poems, this book may be
found to offer a purer recension than is available elsewhere. I owe it
to myself, however, to say that I have sometimes preferred the
convenience of the reader to the dictates of a rigorous criticism. I
have thought it, for example, not humane to variegate the text of an
Anthology with despairing _obeli_: and occasionally I have covered up an
indubitable lacuna by artifices which I trust may pass undetected by the
general reader and unreproved by the charitable critic.
H.W.G.
_Oxford, Sept. 2, 1912._
INTRODUCTION
I
Latin poetry begins where almost all poetry begins--in the rude
ceremonial of a primitive people placating an unknown and dreaded
spiritual world. The earliest fragments are priestly incantations. In
one of these fragments the Salii placate Leucesius, the god of
lightning. In another the Arval Brethren placate Mars or Marmar, the god
of pestilence and blight (_lues rues_). The gods are most dreaded at the
seasons most important to a primitive people, seed-time, for example,
and harvest. The Salii celebrated Mars at seed-time--in the month which
bears his name, _mensis Martius_. The name of the Arval Brethren betrays
their relation to the gods who watch the sown fields. The aim of this
primitive priestly poetry is to get a particular deity into the power of
the worshipper. To do this it is necessary to know his name and to use
it. In the Arval hymn the name of the god is reiterated--it is a spell.
Even so Jacob wished to know--and to use--the name of the god with whom
he wrestled. These priestly litanies are accompanied by wild dances--the
Salii are, etymologically, 'the Dancing men'--and by the clashing of
shields. They are cast in a metre not unsuited to the dance by which
they are accompanied. This is the famous Saturnian metre, which remained
the metre of all Latin poetry until the coming of the Greeks. Each verse
falls into two halves corresponding to the forward swing and the recoil
of the dance. Each half-verse exhibits three rhythmical beats answering
to the beat of a three-step dance. The verse is in the main accentual.
But the accent is hieratic. The hieratic accent is discovered chiefly in
the first half of the verse: where the natural accent of a disyllabic
word is neglected and the stress falls constantly on the final
syllable.[2] This hieratic accent in primitive Latin poetry is
important, since it was their familiar use of it which made it easy for
the Romans to adapt the metres of Greece.
The first poets, then, are the priests. But behind the priests are the
people--moved by the same religious beliefs and fears, but inclined, as
happens everywhere, to make of their 'holy day' a 'holiday'. And hence a
different species of poetry, known to us chiefly in connexion with the
harvest-home and with marriage ceremonial--the so-called Fescennine
poetry. This poetry is dictated by much the same needs as that of the
priests. It is a charm against _fascinum_, 'the evil eye': and hence the
name Fescennine. The principal constituent element in this Fescennine
poetry was obscene mockery. This obscenity was magical. But just as it
takes two to make a quarrel, so the obscene mockery of the Fescennine
verses required two principals. And here, in the improvisations of the
harvest-home, we must seek the origins of two important species of Latin
poetry--drama and satire.
There was magic in the house as well as in the fields. Disease and Death
demanded, in every household, incantations. We still possess fragments
of Saturnian verse which were employed as charms against disease. Magic
dirges (_neniae_) were chanted before the house where a dead man lay.
They were chanted by a _praefica_, a professional 'wise woman', who
placated the dead man by reiterated praise of him. These chants probably
mingled traditional formulae with improvisation appropriate to
particular circumstances. The office of the _praefica_ survived into a
late period. But with the growth of Rationalism it very early came into
disrepute and contempt. Shorter lived but more in honour was an
institution known to us only from casually preserved references to it in
Cato and Varro. This was the _Song in Praise of Famous Men_ which was
sung at banquets. Originally it was sung by a choir of carefully
selected boys (_pueri modesti_), and no doubt its purpose was to
propitiate the shades of the dead. At a later period the boy choristers
disappear, and the _Song_ is sung by individual banqueters. The ceremony
becomes less religious in character, and exists to minister to the
vanity of great families and to foster patriotism. In Cato's time the
tradition of it survived only as a memory from a very distant past. Its
early extinction must be explained by the wider use among the Romans of
written memorials. Of these literary records nothing has survived to us:
even of epitaphs preserved to us in inscriptions none is earlier than
the age of Cato. So far as our knowledge of Latin literature extends we
pass at a leap from what may be called the poetry of primitive magic[3]
to Livius Andronicus' translation of the _Odyssey_. Yet between the
work of Livius and this magical poetry there must lie a considerable
literary development of which we know nothing. Two circumstances may
serve to bring this home to us. The first is that stage plays are known
to have been performed in Rome as early as the middle of the fourth
century. The second is that there existed in Rome in the time of Livius
a school of poets and actors who were sufficiently numerous and
important to be permitted to form a Guild or College.
The position of Livius is not always clearly understood. We can be sure
that he was not the first Roman poet. Nor is it credible that he was the
first Greek teacher to find his way to Rome from Southern Italy. To what
does he owe his pre-eminence? He owes it, in the first place, to what
may be called a mere accident. He was a schoolmaster: and in his
_Odyssey_ he had the good fortune to produce for the schools precisely
the kind of text-book which they needed: a text-book which was still
used in the time of Horace. Secondly, Livius Andronicus saved Roman
literature from being destroyed by Greek literature. We commonly regard
him as the pioneer of Hellenism. This view needs correcting. We shall
probably be nearer the truth if we suppose that Livius represents the
reaction against an already dominant Hellenism. The real peril was that
the Romans might become not too little but too much Hellenized, that
they might lose their nationality as completely as the Macedonians had
done, that they might employ the Greek language rather than their own
for both poetry and history. From this peril Livius--and the patriotic
nobles whose ideals he represented--saved Rome. It is significant that
in his translation of the _Odyssey_ he employs the old Saturnian
measure. Naevius, a little later, retained the same metre for his epic
upon the Punic Wars. In the epitaph which he composed for himself
Naevius says that 'the Camenae', the native Italian muses, might well
mourn his death, 'for at Rome men have forgotten to speak in Latin
phrase'. He is thinking of Ennius, or the school which Ennius
represents. Ennius' answer has been preserved to us in the lines in
which he alludes scornfully to the _Punica_ of Naevius as written 'in
verses such as the Fauns and Bards chanted of old', the verses, that is,
of the old poetry of magic. Ennius abandons the Saturnian for the
hexameter. Livius and Naevius had used in drama some of the simpler
Greek metres. It is possible that some of these had been long since
naturalized in Rome--perhaps under Etrurian influence. But the
abandonment of the Saturnian was the abandonment of a tradition five
centuries old. The aims of Ennius were not essentially different from
those of Livius and Naevius. But the peril of a Roman literature in the
Greek language was past; and Ennius could afford to go further in his
concessions to Hellenism. It had been made clear that both the Latin
language and the Latin temper could hold their own. And when this was
made clear the anti-Hellenic reaction collapsed. Cato was almost exactly
contemporary with Ennius: and he had been the foremost representative of
the reaction. But in his old age he cried 'Peccavi', and set himself to
learn Greek.
Ennius said that he had three hearts, for he spoke three tongues--the
Greek, the Oscan, and the Latin. And Roman poetry has, as it were, three
hearts. All through the Republican era we may distinguish in it three
elements. There is the Greek, or aesthetic, element: all that gives to
it form or technique. There is the primitive Italian element to which it
owes what it has of fire, sensibility, romance. And finally there is
Rome itself, sombre, puissant, and both in language and ideals
conquering by mass. The effort of Roman poetry is to adjust these three
elements. And this effort yields, under the Republic, three periods of
development. The first covers the second century and the latter half of
the third. In this the Hellenism is that of the classical era of Greece.
The Italian force is that of Southern and Central Italy. The Roman force
is the inspiration of the Punic Wars. The typical name in it is that of
Ennius. The Roman and Italian elements are not yet sufficiently subdued
to the Hellenic. And the result is a poetry of some moral power, not
wanting in fire and life, but in the main clumsy and disordered. The
second period covers the first half of the first century. The Hellenism
is Alexandrian. The Italian influence is from the North of Italy--the
period might, indeed, be called the Transpadane period of Roman poetry.
The Roman influence is that of the Rome of the Civil Wars. The typical
name in it is that of Catullus--for Lucretius is, as it were, a last
outpost of the period before: he stands with Ennius, and the Alexandrine
movement has touched him hardly at all. In this period the Italian
(perhaps largely Celtic) genius is allied with Alexandrianism in revolt
against Rome: and in it Latin poetry may be said to attain formal
perfection. The third period is the Augustan. In it we have the final
conciliation of the Greek, the Italian, and the Roman influences. The
typical name in it is that of Vergil, who was born outside the Roman
_ciuitas_, who looks back to Ennius through Catullus, to Homer through
Apollonius.
It is significant here that it is with the final unification of Italy
(which was accomplished by the enfranchisement of Transpadane Gaul) that
Roman poetry reaches its culmination--and at the same time begins to
decline. Of the makers of Roman poetry very few indeed are Roman. Livius
and Ennius were 'semi-Graeci' from Calabria, Naevius and Lucilius were
natives of Campania. Accius and Plautus--and, later, Propertius--were
Umbrian. Caecilius was an Insubrian Gaul. Catullus, Bibaculus, Ticidas,
Cinna, Vergil were Transpadanes. Asinius Gallus came from Gallia
Narbonensis, Horace from Apulia. So long as there was in the Italian
_municipia_ new blood upon which it could draw, Roman poetry grew in
strength. But as soon as the fresh Italian blood failed Roman poetry
failed--or at any rate it fell away from its own greatness, it ceased to
be a living and quickening force. It became for the first time what it
was not before--imitative; that is to say it now for the first time
reproduced without transmuting. Vergil, of course, 'imitates' Homer. But
observe the nature of this 'imitation'. If I may parody a famous saying,
there is nothing in Vergil which was not previously in Homer--_save
Vergil himself_. But the post-Vergilian poetry is, taken in the mass,
without individuality. There is, of course, after Vergil much in Roman
poetry that is interesting or striking, much that is brilliant,
graceful, or noble. But even so it is notable that much of the best work
seems due to the infusion of a foreign strain. Of the considerable poets
of the Empire, Lucan, Seneca, Martial are of Spanish birth: and a
Spanish origin has been--perhaps hastily--conjectured for Silius.
Claudian is an Alexandrian, Ausonius a Gaul.[4] Rome's rôle in the world
is the absorption of outlying genius. In poetry as in everything else
_urbem fecit quod prius orbis erat_.
If we are to understand the character, then, of Roman poetry in its best
period, in the period, that is, which ends with the death of Augustus,
we must figure to ourselves a great and prosaic people, with a great and
prosaic language, directing and controlling to their own ends spiritual
forces deeper and more subtle than themselves. Of these forces one is
the Greek, the other may for convenience be called the Italian. In the
Italian we must allow for a considerable intermixture of races: and we
must remember that large tracts at least of Northern Italy, notably
Transpadane Gaul and Umbria, have been penetrated by Celtic influence.
No one can study Roman poetry at all deeply or sympathetically without
feeling how un-Roman much of it really is: and again--despite its
Hellenic forms and its constant study of Hellenism--how un-Greek. It is
not Greek and not Roman, and we may call it Italian for want of a better
name. The effects of this Italian quality in Roman poetry are both
profound and elusive; and it is not easy to specify them in words. But
it is important to seize them: for unless we do so we shall miss that
aspect of Roman poetry which gives it its most real title to be called
poetry at all. Apart from it it is in danger of passing at its best for
rhetoric, at its worst for prose.
Ennius is a poet in whom the Roman, as distinct from the Italian,
temperament has asserted itself strongly. It has asserted itself most
powerfully, of course, in the _Annals_. Even in the _Annals_, however,
there is a great deal that is neither Greek nor Roman. There is an
Italian vividness. The coloured phraseology is Italian. And a good deal
more. But it is in the tragedies--closely as they follow Greek
models--that the Italian element is most pronounced. Take this from the
_Alexander_:
adest, adest fax obuoluta sanguine atque incendio:
multos annos latuit, ciues, ferte opem et restinguite.
iamque mari magno classis cita
texitur, exitium examen rapit:
adueniet, fera ueliuolantibus
navibus complebit manus litora.
Mr. Sellar has called attention to the 'prophetic fury' of these lines,
their 'wild agitated tones'. They seem, indeed, wrought in fire. Nor do
they stand alone in Ennius. Nor is their fire and swiftness Roman. They
are preserved to us in a passage of Cicero's treatise _De Diuinatione_:
and in the same passage Cicero applies to another fragment of Ennius
notable epithets. He speaks of it as _poema tenerum et moratum et
molle_. The element of _moratum_, the deep moral earnestness, is Roman.
The other two epithets carry us outside the typically Roman
temperament. Everybody remembers Horace's characterization of Vergil:
molle atque facetum
Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure Camenae.
Horace is speaking there of the Vergil of the Transpadane period: the
reference is to the _Eclogues_. The Romans had _hard_ minds. And in the
_Eclogues_ they marvelled primarily at the revelation of temperament
which Horace denotes by the word _molle_. Propertius, in whose Umbrian
blood there was, it has been conjectured, probably some admixture of the
Celtic, speaks of himself as _mollis in omnes_. The _ingenium molle_,
whether in passion, as with Propertius, or, as with Vergil, in
reflection, is that deep and tender sensibility which is the least Roman
thing in the world, and which, in its subtlest manifestations, is
perhaps the peculiar possession of the Celt. The subtle and moving
effects, in the _Eclogues_, of this _molle ingenium_, are well
characterized by Mr. Mackail, when he speaks of the 'note of brooding
pity' which pierces the 'immature and tremulous cadences' of Vergil's
earliest period. This _molle ingenium_, that here quivers beneath the
half-divined 'pain-of-the-world', is the same temperament as that which
in Catullus gives to the pain of the individual immortally poignant
expression. It is the same temperament, again, which created Dido.
Macrobius tells us that Vergil's Dido is just the Medea of Apollonius
over again. And some debt Vergil no doubt has to Apollonius. To the
Attic drama his debt is far deeper; and he no doubt intended to invest
the story of Dido with the same kind of interest as that which attaches
to, say, the Phaedra of Euripides. Yet observe. Vergil has not
_hardness_ enough. He has not the unbending righteousness of the tragic
manner. The rather hard moral grandeur of the great Attic dramatists,
their fine spiritual steel, has submitted to a strange softening
process. Something melting and subduing, something neither Greek nor
Roman, has come in. We are passed out of classicism: we are moving into
what we call romanticism. Aeneas was a brute. There is nobody who does
not feel that. Yet nobody was meant to feel that. We were meant to feel
that Aeneas was what Vergil so often calls him, _pius_. But the Celtic
spirit--for that is what it is--is over-mastering. It is its
characteristic that it constantly girds a man--or a poet--and carries
him whither he would not. The fourth _Aeneid_ is the triumph of an
unconscionable Celticism over the whole moral plan of Vergil's epic.
I will not mention Lesbia by the side of Dido. The Celtic spirit too
often descends into hell. But I will take from Catullus in a different
mood two other examples of the Italic romanticism. Consider these three
lines:
usque dum tremulum mouens
cana tempus anilitas
omnia omnibus annuit,
--'till that day when gray old age shaking its palsied head nods in all
things to all assent.' That is not Greek nor Roman. It is the
unelaborate magic of the Celtic temperament. Keats, I have often
thought, would have 'owed his eyes' to be able to write those three
lines. He hits sometimes a like matchless felicity:
She dwells with Beauty, Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu.
But into the effects which Catullus just happens upon by a luck of
temperament Keats puts more of his life-blood than a man can well spare.
Take, again, this from the _Letter to Hortalus_. Think not, says
Catullus, that your words have passed from my heart,
ut missum sponsi furtiuo munere malum
procurrit casto uirginis e gremio,
quod miserae oblitae molli sub ueste locatum,
dum aduentu matris prosilit, excutitur;
atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu,
huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor,
--'as an apple, sent by some lover, a secret gift, falls from a maid's
chaste bosom. She placed it, poor lass, in the soft folds of her robe
and forgot it. And when her mother came towards her out it fell; fell
and rolled in headlong course. And vexed and red and wet with tears are
her guilty cheeks!'
That owes something, no doubt, to Alexandria. But in its exquisite
sensibility, its supreme delicacy and tenderness, it belongs rather to
the romantic than to the classical literatures.
_Molle atque facetum_: the deep and keen fire of mind, the quick glow of
sensibility--that is what redeems literature and life alike from
dullness. The Roman, the typical Roman, was what we call a 'dull man'.
But the Italian has this fire. And it is this that so often redeems
Roman literature from itself. We are accustomed to associate the word
_facetus_ with the idea of 'wit'. It is to be connected, it would seem,
etymologically with _fax_, 'a torch'. Its primitive meaning is
'brightness', 'brilliance': and if we wish to understand what Horace
means when he speaks of the element of '_facetum_' in Vergil, perhaps
'glow' or 'fire' will serve us better than 'wit'. _Facetus_, _facetiae_,
_infacetus_, _infacetiae_ are favourite words with Catullus. With
_lepidus_, _illepidus_, _uenustus_, _inuenustus_ they are his usual
terms of literary praise and dispraise. These words hit, of course,
often very superficial effects. Yet with Catullus and his friends they
stand for a literary ideal deeper than the contexts in which they occur:
and an ideal which, while it no doubt derives from the enthusiasm of
Alexandrian study, yet assumes a distinctively Italian character. Poetry
must be _facetus_: it must glow and dance. It must have _lepor_: it must
be clean and bright. There must be nothing slipshod, no tarnish. 'Bright
is the ring of words when the right man rings them.' It must have
_uenustas_, 'charm', a certain melting quality. This ideal Roman poetry
never realizes perhaps in its fullness save in Catullus himself. In the
lighter poets it passes too easily into an ideal of mere cleverness:
until with Ovid (and in a less degree Martial) _lepor_ is the whole man.
In the deeper poets it is oppressed by more Roman ideals.
The _facetum ingenium_, as it manifests itself in satire and invective,
does not properly here concern us: it belongs to another order of
poetry. Yet I may be allowed to illustrate from this species of
composition the manner in which the Italian spirit in Roman poetry
asserts for itself a dominating and individual place. _Satura quidem
tota nostra est_, says Quintilian. We know now that this is not so: that
Quintilian was wrong, or perhaps rather that he has expressed himself in
a misleading fashion. Roman Satire, like the rest of Roman literature,
looks back to the Greek world. It stands in close relation to
Alexandrian Satire--a literature of which we have hitherto been hardly
aware. Horace, when he asserted the dependence of Lucilius on the old
Attic Comedy, was nearer the truth than Quintilian. But the influence of
Attic Comedy comes to Lucilius (and to Horace and to Juvenal and to
Persius) by way of the Alexandrian satirists. From the Alexandrians come
many of the stock themes of Roman Satire, many of its stock characters,
much of its moral sentiment. The _captator_, the {mempsimoiros},
the _auarus_ are not the creation of Horace and Juvenal. The seventh
satire of Juvenal is not the first 'Plaint of the Impoverished
Schoolmaster' in literature. Nor is Horace _Sat._ II. viii the earliest
'Dinner with a Nouveau-Riche'. In all this, and in much else in Roman
Satire, we must recognize Alexandrian influence. Yet even so we can
distinguish clearly--much more clearly, indeed, than in other
departments of Latin poetry--the Roman and the primitive Italian
elements. 'Ecquid is homo habet aceti in pectore?' asks Pseudolus in
Plautus. And Horace, in a well-known phrase, speaks of _Italum acetum_,
which the scholiast renders by 'Romana mordacitas'. This 'vinegar' is
the coarse and biting wit of the Italian countryside. It has its origin
in the casual ribaldry of the _uindemiatores_: in the rudely improvized
dramatic contests of the harvest-home. Transported to the city it
becomes a permanent part of Roman Satire. Roman Satire has always one
hero--the average _paterfamilias_. Often he is wise and mild and
friendly. But as often as not he is merely the _uindemiator_, thinly
disguised, pert and ready and unscrupulous, 'slinging vinegar' not only
at what is morally wrong but at anything which he happens either to
dislike or not to understand. The vices of his--often
imaginary--antagonist are recounted with evident relish and with parade
of detail.
It is not only in Satire that we meet this _Italum acetum_. We meet it
also in the poetry of personal invective. This department of Roman
poetry would hardly perhaps reward study--and it might very well revolt
the student--if it were not that Catullus has here achieved some of his
most memorable effects. In no writer is the _Italum acetum_ found in so
undiluted a sort. And he stands in this perhaps not so much for himself
as for a Transpadane school. The lampoons of his compatriot Furius
Bibaculus were as famous as his own. Vergil himself--if, as seems
likely, the _Catalepton_ be a genuine work of Vergil--did not escape the
Transpadane fashion. In fact the Italian aptitude for invective seems in
North Italy, allied with the study of Archilochus, to have created a new
type in Latin literature--a type which Horace essays not very
successfully in the _Epodes_ and some of the _Odes_. The invective of
Catullus has no humbug of moral purpose. It has its motive in mere hate.
Yet Catullus knew better than any one how subtle and complex an emotion
is hate. Two poems will illustrate better than anything I could say his
power here: and will at the same time make clear what I mean when I
distinguish the Italian from the Roman temperament in Latin poetry.
Let any one take up the eleventh poem of Catullus:
cum suis uiuat ualeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullam amans uere sed identidem omnium
ilia rumpens.
There is invective. There is the lash with a vengeance. Yet the very
stanza that follows ends in a sob:
nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit uelut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam
tactus aratrost.
Turn now for an inverse effect to the fifty-eighth poem:
Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa,
illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
plus quam se atque suos amauit omnes ...
Note the dragging cadences, the pathetic iteration, the scarce-concealed
agony of longing. Yet this five-line poem ends in a couplet of
intolerable obscenity.
There once more you have the unpredictable Celtic temperament--obscenity
of wrath dissolving in the tenderness of unbidden tears, fond regret
stung suddenly to a rage foul and unscrupulous.
But let me here guard against a misapprehension. The more closely we
study Roman poetry the more clearly do we become aware of the presence
in it of a non-Roman element: and the more does it seem as though this
non-Roman element were the originative force, as though it were to this
that Roman poetry owes most of that in it which we regard as essentially
poetical. The quickening force in the best Roman poetry is the Italian
blood. Yet we speak of this poetry as Roman: and it is not without
reason that we do so. If it was to a great extent made by Italians, it
was made by Italians who were already Romanized. Indeed the Italian and
the Roman elements are never so separate or so disparate in actuality as
they appear in literary analysis. The Italian spirit worked always under
the spell of Rome, and not under any merely external compulsion. And the
spell of Rome is over the whole of Roman poetry. The Italians were only
a nation _through Rome_: and a great poetry must have behind it a great
life: it must express a great people, their deeds and their ideals.
Roman poetry does, beyond almost any other poetry, bear the impress of a
great nation. And after all the _language_ of this poetry is the
language of the Romans. It is said of it, of course, that it is an
unpoetical language. And it is true that it has not the dance and
brightness of Greek: that it is wanting in fineness and subtlety: that
it is defective in vocabulary. All this is true. Yet the final test of
the poetical character of a language is the poetry that is written in
it. The mere sound of Roman poetry is the sound of a great nation. And
here let us remember what we ought never to forget in reading Roman
poetry. It was not made to be read. It was made to be spoken. The Roman
for the most part did not read. He was read to. The difference is plain
enough. Indeed it is common to hear the remark about this or that book,
that 'It is the kind of book that ought to be read aloud'. Latin books
_were_ read aloud. And this practice must have reacted, however
obscurely, upon the writing of them. Some tinge of rhetoric was
inevitable. And here I am led to a new theme.
II
Perhaps no poetry of equal power and range is so deeply infected with
rhetoric as the Roman. A principal cause of this is, no doubt, the
language. But there are other causes, and we shall most easily penetrate
these if we consider what I may call the environment of Roman poetry.
Two conditions in Rome helped to foster literary creation among a people
by temperament unimaginative. Of these the first is an educational
system deliberately and steadily directed towards the development of
poetical talent. No nation ever believed in poetry so deeply as the
Romans. They were not a people of whom we can say, as we can of the
Greeks, that they were _born to_ art and literature. Those of them who
attained to eminence in art and literature knew this perfectly well.
They knew by how laborious a process they had themselves arrived at such
talent as they achieved. The characteristic Roman triumphs are the
triumphs of material civilization. But the Romans were well aware that a
material civilization cannot be either organized or sustained without
the aid of spiritual forces, and that among the most important of the
spiritual forces that hold together the fabric of nationality are art
and literature. With that large common sense of theirs which, as they
grew in historical experience, became more and more spiritual, they
perceived early, and they gauged profoundly, the importance of
accomplishments not native to their genius. They knew what had happened
to the 'valiant kings' who 'lived before Agamemnon'--and why. The same
could easily happen to a great empire. That is partially, of course, a
utilitarian consideration. But the Romans believed also, and deeply, in
the power of literature--and particularly of poetry--to humanize, to
moralize, to mould character, to inspire action. It was this faith
which, as Cicero tells us, lay behind the great literary movement
associated with the circle of Scipio Africanus. It was this faith which
informed the Augustan literature. Horace was a man of the world--or he
liked to think himself one. He was no dreamer. Yet when he speaks of the
influence of high poetry upon the formation of character he speaks with
a grave Puritanism worthy of Plato. These practical Romans had a
practicality deeper than ours. The average Englishman, when he is told
that 'the battle of Waterloo was won by the sonnets of Wordsworth', is
puzzled and even offended. Nothing of Eton and its playing-fields?
Nothing of Wellington and his Guards? What have sonnets in common with
soldiering? But the Roman knew of himself that sonnets are a kind of
soldiering. And much as he admired deeds, he knew that there is no deed
greater than 'the song that nerves a nation's heart.'
These are not mere words: and this was not, in the Roman, an idle faith.
It was a practical faith; that is to say, he acted upon it. Upon this
faith was based, at any rate in the early period of Roman history, the
whole of the Roman system of education. The principal business of the
Roman schoolmaster was to take the great poets and interpret them 'by
reading and comment'. Education was practically synonymous with the
study of the poets. The poets made a man brave, the poets made a man
eloquent, the poets made him--if anything could make him--poetical. It
is hardly possible to over-estimate the obscure benefit to the national
life of a discipline in which the thought and language of the best
poetry were the earliest formative influences.
The second of the two conditions which favoured literary creation in
Rome was a social system which afforded to a great and influential class
the leisure for literary studies and the power to forward them. These
two conditions are, roughly, synchronous in their development. Both take
rise in the period of the Punic Wars. The Punic Wars not only quickened
but they deepened and purified Roman patriotism. They put the history of
the world in a new light to the educated Roman. The antagonism of Greek
and Roman dropped away. The wars with Pyrrhus were forgotten. The issue
was now no longer as between Greece and Rome, but as between East and
West. The Roman saw in himself the last guardian of the ideals of
Western civilization. He must hand on the torch of Hellenic culture.
Hence, while in other countries Literature _happens_, as the sun and the
air happen--as a part of the working of obscure natural forces--in Rome
it is from the beginning a premeditated self-conscious organization.
This organization has two instruments--the school of the _grammaticus_
and the house of the great noble. Here stands Philocomus, here Scipio.
In the period of the Punic Wars this organization is only rudimentary.
By no means casual, it is none the less as yet uninfected by
officialism. The transition from the age of Scipio to the age of
Augustus introduced two almost insensible modifications:
(1) In the earlier period the functions of the _grammaticus_ and the
_rhetor_ were undifferentiated. The _grammaticus_, as he was known
later, was called then _litteratus_ or _litterator_. He taught both
poetry and rhetoric. But Suetonius tells us that the name denoted
properly an 'interpres poetarum': and we may infer that in the early
period instruction in rhetoric was only a very casual adjunct of the
functions of the _litterator_. At what precise date the office of the
_litterator_ became bifurcated into the two distinct professions of
_grammaticus_ and _rhetor_ we cannot say. It seems likely that the
undivided office was retained in the smaller Italian towns after it had
disappeared from the educational system of Rome. The author of
_Catelepton V_, who may very well be Vergil, appears to have frequented
a school where poetry and rhetoric were taught in conjunction. Valerius
Cato and Sulla, the former certainly, the latter probably, a
Transpadane, were known as _litteratores_. But the _litterator_
gradually everywhere gave place to the _grammaticus_: and behind the
_grammaticus_, like Care behind the horseman, sits spectrally the
_rhetor_.
(2) The introduction of the _rhetor_ synchronizes with the transition
from the private patron to the patron-as-government-official. And by an
odd accident both changes worked in one and the same direction. That the
system of literary patronage was in many of its effects injurious to the
Augustan literature is a thesis which was once generally allowed. But it
was a thesis which could easily take exaggerated expression. And against
the view which it presents there has recently been a not unnatural
reaction. A moderate representative of this reaction is the late
Professor Nettleship. 'The intimacy', says Nettleship[5], 'which grew
up between Octavianus and some of the great writers of his time did not
imply more than the relation which ... often existed between a poor poet
and his powerful friend. For as the men of nobler character among the
Roman aristocracy were mostly ambitious of achieving literary success
themselves, and were sometimes really successful in achieving it: as
they had formed a high ideal of individual culture ... aiming at
excellence in literature and philosophy as well as in politics and the
art of war, so they looked with a kindly eye on the men of talent and
genius who with less wealth and social resources than their own were
engaged in the great work of improving the national literature.'
There is much here which is truly and tellingly said. We ought never to
forget that the system of patronage sprang from a very lofty notion of
patriotism and of the national welfare. It implies a clear and fine
recognition among the great men of affairs of the principle that a
nation's greatness is not to be measured, and cannot be sustained, by
purely material achievements. It is true, again, that the system of
patronage did not originate with Augustus or the Augustans. Augustus was
a patron of letters just as Scipio had been--because he possessed power
and taste and a wide sense of patriotic obligation. So much is true, or
fairly true. But if it is meant, as I think it is, that the literary
patronage of the Princeps was the same in kind as, and different only in
degree from, that exercised by the great men of the Republican
period--if that is meant, then we have gone beyond what is either true
or plausible.
I am not concerned here, let me say, with the _moral_ effects of
literary patronage. I am concerned only with its literary effects. Nor
will I charge these to Augustus alone. He was but one patron--however
powerful--among many. He did not create the literature which carries his
name. Nevertheless it seems impossible to doubt that it was largely
moulded under his personal influence, and that he has left upon it the
impress of his own masterful and imperial temper. Suetonius in a few
casual paragraphs gives us some insight into his literary tastes and
methods. He represents him as from his youth up a genuine enthusiast for
literature: 'Eloquentiam studiaque liberalia (i.e. _grammatice_ and
rhetoric) ab aetate prima et cupide et laboriosissime exercuit.' Even
upon active military service he made a point of reading, composing, and
declaiming daily. He wrote a variety of prose works, and 'poetica
summatim attigit', he dabbled in poetry. There were still extant in
Suetonius' time two volumes of his poetry, the one a collection of
_Epigrammata_, the other--more interesting and significant--a hexameter
poem upon _Sicily_.[6] Moreover Augustus 'nursed in all ways the
literary talent of his time'. He listened 'with charity and
long-suffering' to endless recitations 'not only of poetry and of
history but of orations and of dialogues'. We are somewhat apt, I fancy,
to associate the practice of recitation too exclusively with the
literary circles of the time of Nero, Domitian, and Trajan. Yet it is
quite clear that already in the Augustan age this practice had attained
system and elaboration. From the silence of Cicero in his Letters (the
Epistles of Pliny furnish a notable contrast) we may reasonably infer
that the custom was not known to him. It is no doubt natural in all ages
that poets and orators should inflict their compositions upon their more
intimate friends. No one of us in a literary society is safe even to-day
from this midnight peril. But even of these informal recitations we hear
little until the Augustan age. Catullus' friend Sestius perhaps recited
his orations in this fashion: but the poem[7] admits a different
interpretation. And it is significant that we are nowhere told that
Cicero declaimed to his friends the speeches of the second action
against Verres. Those speeches were not delivered in court. They were
published after the flight of Verres. If custom had tolerated it we may
be sure that Cicero would not have been slow to turn his friends into a
jury.
The formal recitation, recitation as a 'function', would seem to be the
creation of the Principate. It was the product in part, no doubt, of the
Hellenizing movement which dominated all departments of literary
fashion. But we may plausibly place its origin not so much in the vanity
of authors seeking applause, or in that absence of literary vanity which
courts a frank criticism, as in the relations of the wealthy patron and
his poor but ambitious client. The patron, in fact, did not subscribe
for what he had not read--or heard. The endless recitations to which
Augustus listened were hardly those merely of his personal friends. He
listened, as Suetonius says, 'benigne et patienter'. But it was the
'benignity and patience' not of a personal friend but of a government
official--of a government official dispensing patronage. Suetonius
allows us to divine something of the tastes of this all-powerful
official. He was the particular enemy of 'that style which is easier
admired than understood'--_quae mirentur potius homines quam
intellegant_. It looks as though the clearness and good sense which mark
so distinctively the best Augustan literature were developed to some
extent under the direct influence of the Princeps.
The Princeps and his coadjutors may perhaps be not unprofitably regarded
as the heads of a great Educational Department. Beneath them are
numberless _grammatici_ and _rhetores_. The work of these is directed
towards the ideals of the supreme heads of the Department. How far this
direction is due to accident and how far to some not very defined
control it would be impossible to say. But obviously among the conscious
aims of the schools of many of these _grammatici_ and _rhetores_ was the
ambition of achieving some of the great prizes of the literary world.
The goal of the pupil was government preferment, as we should call it.
And we may perhaps be allowed, if we guard ourselves against the peril
of mistaking a distant analogy for a real similarity of conditions, to
see in the recitations before the Emperor and his ministers, an
inspection, as it were, of schools and universities, an examination for
literary honours and emoluments. And this being so, it is not to no
purpose that the _rhetor_ in this age stands behind the _grammaticus_.
For the final examination, the inspection-by-recitation, is bound to be,
whatever the wishes of any of the parties concerned, an examination in
rhetoric. The theme appointed may be history, it may be philosophy, it
may be poetry. But the performance will be, and must be, rhetoric. The
_Aeneid_ of Vergil may be read and re-read by posterity, and pondered
word by word, line upon line. But it is going to be judged at a single
recitation. For Vergil, it is true, there may be special terms. But this
will be the lot of the many; and the many will develop, to suit it, a
fashion of poetry the influence of which even Vergil himself will hardly
altogether escape. Moreover, there will be, of course, other patrons
than the Princeps, at once less patient and less intelligent.