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LATIN LITERATURE
BY
J. W. MACKAIL, Sometime Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford
A history of Latin Literature was to have been written for this series of
Manuals by the late Professor William Sellar. After his death I was
asked, as one of his old pupils, to carry out the work which he had
undertaken; and this book is now offered as a last tribute to the memory
of my dear friend and master. J. W. M.
CONTENTS.
I. THE REPUBLIC.
I. ORIGINS OF LATIN LITERATURE: EARLY EPIC AND TRAGEDY.
Andronicus--Naevius--Ennius--Pacuvius--Accius
II. COMEDY: PLAUTUS AND TERENCE.
III. EARLY PROSE: THE SATURA, OR MIXED MODE.
The Early Jurists, Annalists, and Orators--Cato--The
Scipionic Circle--Lucilius
IV. LUCRETIUS.
V. LYRIC POETRY: CATULLUS.
Cinna and Calvus--Catullus
VI. CICERO.
VII. PROSE OF THE CICERONIAN AGE.
Julius Caesar--The Continuators of the Commentaries--
Sallust--Nepos--Varro--Publilius Syrus
II. THE AUGUSTAN AGE.
I. VIRGIL.
II. HORACE.
III. PROPERTIUS AND THE ELEGISTS.
Augustan Tragedy--Gallus--Propertius--Tibullus
IV. OVID.
Sulpicia--Ovid
V. LIVY.
VI. THE LESSER AUGUSTANS.
Manilius--Phaedrus--Velleius--Paterculus--Celsus--
Vitruvius--The Elder Seneca
III. THE EMPIRE.
I. THE ROME OF NERO.
The Younger Seneca--Lucan--Persius--Quintus Curtius
--Columella--Calpurnius--Petronius
II. THE SILVER AGE.
Statius--Valerius Flaccus--Silius Italicus--Martial--The
Elder Pliny--Quintilian
III. TACITUS.
IV. JUVENAL, THE YOUNGER PLINY, SUETONIUS: DECAY OF CLASSICAL LATIN.
V. THE ELOCUTIO NOVELLA.
Fronto--Apuleius--The Pervigilium Veneris
VI. EARLY LATIN CHRISTIANITY.
Minucius Felix--Tertullian--Cyprian--Arnobius--
Lactantius--Commodianus
VII. THE FOURTH CENTURY.
Papinian and Ulpian--Sammonicus--Nemesianus--
Tiberianus--The Augustan History--Ausonius--Claudian
--Prudentius--Ammianus Marcellinus
VIII. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
The End of the Ancient World--The Four Periods of
Latin Literature--The Empire and the Church
INDEX OF AUTHORS.
I.
THE REPUBLIC.
I.
ORIGINS OF LATIN LITERATURE: EARLY EPIC AND TRAGEDY.
To the Romans themselves, as they looked back two hundred years later,
the beginnings of a real literature seemed definitely fixed in the
generation which passed between the first and second Punic Wars. The
peace of B.C. 241 closed an epoch throughout which the Roman Republic had
been fighting for an assured place in the group of powers which
controlled the Mediterranean world. This was now gained; and the pressure
of Carthage once removed, Rome was left free to follow the natural
expansion of her colonies and her commerce. Wealth and peace are
comparative terms; it was in such wealth and peace as the cessation of
the long and exhausting war with Carthage brought, that a leisured class
began to form itself at Rome, which not only could take a certain
interest in Greek literature, but felt in an indistinct way that it was
their duty, as representing one of the great civilised powers, to have a
substantial national culture of their own.
That this new Latin literature must be based on that of Greece, went
without saying; it was almost equally inevitable that its earliest forms
should be in the shape of translations from that body of Greek poetry,
epic and dramatic, which had for long established itself through all the
Greek-speaking world as a common basis of culture. Latin literature,
though artificial in a fuller sense than that of some other nations, did
not escape the general law of all literatures, that they must begin by
verse before they can go on to prose.
Up to this date, native Latin poetry had been confined, so far as we can
judge, to hymns and ballads, both of a rude nature. Alongside of these
were the popular festival-performances, containing the germs of a drama.
If the words of these performances were ever written down (which is
rather more than doubtful), they would help to make the notion of
translating a regular Greek play come more easily. But the first certain
Latin translation was a piece of work which showed a much greater
audacity, and which in fact, though this did not appear till long
afterwards, was much more far-reaching in its consequences. This was a
translation of the _Odyssey_ into Saturnian verse by one Andronicus, a
Greek prisoner of war from Tarentum, who lived at Rome as a tutor to
children of the governing class during the first Punic War. At the
capture of his city, he had become the slave of one of the distinguished
family of the Livii, and after his manumission was known, according to
Roman custom, under the name of Lucius Livius Andronicus.
The few fragments of his _Odyssey_ which survive do not show any high
level of attainment; and it is interesting to note that this first
attempt to create a mould for Latin poetry went on wrong, or, perhaps it
would be truer to say, on premature lines. From this time henceforth the
whole serious production of Latin poetry for centuries was a continuous
effort to master and adapt Greek structure and versification; the
_Odyssey_ of Livius was the first and, with one notable exception, almost
the last sustained attempt to use the native forms of Italian rhythm
towards any large achievement; this current thereafter sets underground,
and only emerges again at the end of the classical period. It is a
curious and significant fact that the attempt such as it was, was made
not by a native, but by a naturalised foreigner.
The heroic hexameter was, of course, a metre much harder to reproduce in
Latin than the trochaic and iambic metres of the Greek drama, the former
of which especially accommodated itself without difficulty to Italian
speech. In his dramatic pieces, which included both tragedies and
comedies, Andronicus seems to have kept to the Greek measures, and in
this his example was followed by his successors. Throughout the next two
generations the production of dramatic literature was steady and
continuous. Gnaeus Naevius, the first native Latin poet of consequence,
beginning to produce plays a few years later than Andronicus, continued
to write busily till after the end of the second Punic War, and left the
Latin drama thoroughly established. Only inconsiderable fragments of his
writings survive; but it is certain that he was a figure of really great
distinction. Though not a man of birth himself, he had the skill and
courage to match himself against the great house of the Metelli. The
Metelli, it is true, won the battle; Naevius was imprisoned, and finally
died in exile; but he had established literature as a real force in Rome.
Aulus Gellius has preserved the haughty verses which he wrote to be
engraved on his own tomb--
_Immortelles mortales si foret fas flere
Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam;
Itaque postquam est Orci traditus thesauro
Obliti sunt Romai loquier lingua Latina._
The Latin Muses were, indeed, then in the full pride and hope of a
vigorous and daring youth. The greater part of Naevius' plays, both in
tragedy and comedy, were, it is true, translated or adapted from Greek
originals; but alongside of these,--the _Danae_, the _Iphigenia_, the
_Andromache_, which even his masculine genius can hardly have made more
than pale reflexes of Euripides--were new creations, "plays of the purple
stripe," as they came to be called, where he wakened a tragic note from
the legendary or actual history of the Roman race. His _Alimonium Romuli
et Remi_, though it may have borrowed much from the kindred Greek legends
of Danae or Melanippe, was one of the foundation-stones of a new national
literature; in the tragedy of _Clastidium_, the scene was laid in his own
days, and the action turned on an incident at once of national importance
and of romantic personal heroism--a great victory won over the Gallic
tribes of Northern Italy, and the death of the Gallic chief in single
combat at the hand of the Roman consul.
In his advanced years, Naevius took a step of even greater consequence.
Turning from tragedy to epic, he did not now, like Andronicus, translate
from the Greek, but launched out on the new venture of a Roman epic. The
Latin language was not yet ductile enough to catch the cadences of the
noble Greek hexameter; and the native Latin Saturnian was the only
possible alternative. How far he was successful in giving modulation or
harmony to this rather cumbrous and monotonous verse, the few extant
fragments of the _Bellum Punicum_ hardly enable us to determine; it is
certain that it met with a great and continued success, and that, even in
Horace's time, it was universally read. The subject was not unhappily
chosen: the long struggle between Rome and Carthage had, in the great
issues involved, as well as in its abounding dramatic incidents and
thrilling fluctuations of fortune, many elements of the heroic, and
almost of the superhuman; and in his interweaving of this great pageant
of history with the ancient legends of both cities, and his connecting
it, through the story of Aeneas, with the war of Troy itself, Naevius
showed a constructive power of a very high order. It is, doubtless,
possible to make too much of the sweeping statements made in the comments
of Macrobius and Servius on the earlier parts of the _Aeneid_--"this
passage is all taken from Naevius;" "all this passage is simply conveyed
from Naevius' _Punic War_." Yet there is no doubt that Virgil owed him
immense obligations; though in the details of the war itself we can
recognise little in the fragments beyond the dry and disconnected
narrative of the rhyming chronicler. Naevius laid the foundation of the
Roman epic; he left it at his death--in spite of the despondent and
perhaps jealous criticism which he left as his epitaph--in the hands of
an abler and more illustrious successor.
Quintus Ennius, the first of the great Roman poets, and a figure of
prodigious literary fecundity and versatility, was born at a small town
of Calabria about thirty years later than Naevius, and, though he served
as a young man in the Roman army, did not obtain the full citizenship
till fifteen years after Naevius' death. For some years previously he had
lived at Rome, under the patronage of the great Scipio Africanus, busily
occupied in keeping up a supply of translations from the Greek for use on
the Roman stage. Up to his death, at the age of seventy, he continued to
write with undiminished fertility and unflagging care. He was the first
instance in the Western world of the pure man of letters. Alongside of
his strictly literary production, he occupied himself diligently with the
technique of composition--grammar, spelling, pronunciation, metre, even
an elementary system of shorthand. Four books of miscellaneous
translations from popular Greek authors familiarised the reading public
at Rome with several branches of general literature hitherto only known
to scholars. Following the demand of the market, he translated comedies,
seemingly with indifferent success. But his permanent fame rested on two
great bodies of work, tragic and epic, in both of which he far eclipsed
his predecessors.
We possess the names, and a considerable body of fragments, of upwards of
twenty of his tragedies; the greater number of the fragments being
preserved in the works of Cicero, who was never tired of reading and
quoting him. As is usual with such quotations, they throw light more on
his mastery of phrase and power of presenting detached thoughts, than on
his more strictly dramatic qualities. That mastery of phrase is
astonishing. From the silver beauty of the moonlit line from his
_Melanippe_--
_Lumine sic tremulo terra et cava caerula candent_,
to the thunderous oath of Achilles--
_Per ego deum sublimas subices
Umidas, unde oritur imber sonitu saevo et spiritu_
they give examples of almost the whole range of beauty of which the Latin
language is capable. Two quotations may show his manner as a translator.
The first is a fragment of question and reply from the prologue to the
_Iphigenia at Aulis_, one of the most thrilling and romantic passages in
Attic poetry--
Agam. _Quid nocti videtur in altisono
Caeli clupeo?_
Senex. _Temo superat
Cogens sublime etiam atque etiam
Noctis iter_.
What is singular here is not that the mere words are wholly different
from those of the original, but that in the apparently random variation
Ennius produces exactly the same rich and strange effect. This is no
accident: it is genius. Again, as a specimen of his manner in more
ordinary narrative speeches, we may take the prologue to his _Medea_,
where the well-known Greek is pretty closely followed--
_Utinam ne in nemore Pelio securibus
Caesa cecidisset abiegna ad terram trabes,
Neve inde navis inchoandae exordium
Coepisset, quae nunc nominatur nomine
Argo, quia Argivi in ea dilecti viri
Vecti petebant pellem inauratam arietis
Colchis, imperio regis Peliae, per dolum:
Nam nunquam era errans mea domo ecferret pedem
Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia._
At first reading these lines may seem rather stiff and ungraceful to ears
familiar with the liquid lapse of the Euripidean iambics; but it is not
till after the second or even the third reading that one becomes aware in
them of a strange and austere beauty of rhythm which is distinctively
Italian. Specially curious and admirable is the use of elision (in the
eighth, for instance, and even more so in the fifth line), so
characteristic alike of ancient and modern Italy. In Latin poetry Virgil
was its last and greatest master; its gradual disuse in post-Virgilian
poetry, like its absence in some of the earliest hexameters, was fatal to
the music of the verse, and with its reappearance in the early Italian
poetry of the Middle Ages that music once more returns.
It was in his later years, and after long practice in many literary
forms, that Ennius wrote his great historical epic, the eighteen books of
_Annales_, in which he recorded the legendary and actual history of the
Roman State from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy down to the events of his
own day. The way here had been shown him by Naevius; but in the interval,
chiefly owing to Ennius' own genius and industry, the literary
capabilities of the language had made a very great advance. It is
uncertain whether Ennius made any attempt to develop the native metres,
which in his predecessor's work were still rude and harsh; if he did, he
must soon have abandoned it. Instead, he threw himself on the task of
moulding the Latin language to the movement of the Greek hexameter; and
his success in the enterprise was so conclusive that the question between
the two forms was never again raised. The _Annales_ at once became a
classic; until dislodged by the _Aeneid_, they remained the foremost and
representative Roman poem, and even in the centuries which followed, they
continued to be read and admired, and their claim to the first eminence
was still supported by many partisans. The sane and lucid judgment of
Quintilian recalls them to their true place; in a felicitous simile he
compares them to some sacred grove of aged oaks, which strikes the senses
with a solemn awe rather than with the charm of beauty. Cicero, who again
and again speaks of Ennius in terms of the highest praise, admits that
defect of finish on which the Augustan poets lay strong but not
unjustified stress. The noble tribute of Lucretius, "as our Ennius sang
in immortal verse, he who first brought down from lovely Helicon a
garland of evergreen leaf to sound and shine throughout the nations of
Italy," was no less than due from a poet who owed so much to Ennius in
manner and versification.
It is not known when the _Annales_ were lost; there are doubtful
indications of their existence in the earlier Middle Ages. The extant
fragments, though they amount only to a few hundred lines, are sufficient
to give a clear idea of the poet's style and versification, and of the
remarkable breadth and sagacity which made the poem a storehouse of civil
wisdom for the more cultured members of the ruling classes at Rome, no
less than a treasury of rhythm and phrase for the poets. In the famous
single lines like--
_Non cauponantes bellum sed belligerantes_,
or--
_Quem nemo ferro potuit superare me auro_,
or--
_Ille vir haud magna cum re sed plenu' fidei_,
or the great--
_Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque_
Ennius expressed, with even greater point and weight than Virgil himself,
the haughty virtue, the keen and narrow political instinct, by which the
small and struggling mid-Italian town grew to be arbitress of the world;
not Lucretius with his vast and melancholy outlook over a world where
patriotism did not exist for the philosopher, not Virgil with his deep
and charmed breedings over the mystery and beauty of life and death,
struck the Roman note so exclusively and so certainly.
The success of the Latin epic in Ennius' hands was indeed for the period
so complete that it left no room for further development; for the next
hundred years the _Annales_ remained not only the unique, but the
satisfying achievement in this kind of poetry, and it was only when a new
wave of Greek influence had brought with it a higher and more refined
standard of literary culture, that fresh progress could be attained or
desired. It was not so with tragedy. So long as the stage demanded fresh
material, it continued to be supplied, and the supply only ceased when,
as had happened even in Greece, the acted drama dwindled away before the
gaudier methods of the music-hall. Marcus Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius,
wrote plays for the thirty years after his uncle's death, which had an
even greater vogue; he is placed by Cicero at the head of Roman
tragedians. The plays have all perished, and even the fragments are
lamentably few; we can still trace in them, however, that copiousness of
fancy and richness of phrase which was marked as his distinctive quality
by the great critic Varro. Only one Roman play (on Lucius Aemilius
Paulus, the conqueror of Pydna[1]) is mentioned among his pieces; and
this, though perhaps accidental, may indicate that tragedy had not really
pushed its roots deep enough at Rome, and was destined to an early decay.
Inexhaustible as is the life and beauty of the old Greek mythology, it
was impossible that a Roman audience should be content to listen for age
after age to the stories of Atalanta and Antiope, Pentheus and Orestes,
while they had a new national life and overwhelming native interests of
their own. The Greek tragedy tended more and more to become the merely
literary survival that it was in France under Louis Quatorze, that it has
been in our own day in the hands of Mr. Arnold or Mr. Swinburne. But one
more poet of remarkable genius carries on its history into the next age.
Lucius Accius of Pisaurum produced one of his early plays in the year 140
B.C., on the same occasion when one of his latest was produced by
Pacuvius, then an old man of eighty. Accius reached a like age himself;
Cicero as a young man knew him well, and used to relate incidents of the
aged poet's earlier life which he had heard from his own lips. For the
greater part of the fifty years which include Sulla and the Gracchi,
Accius was the recognised literary master at Rome, president of the
college of poets which held its meetings in the temple of Minerva on the
Aventine, and associating on terms of full equality with the most
distinguished statesmen. A doubtful tradition mentions him as having also
written an epic, or at least a narrative poem, called _Annales_, like
that of Ennius; but this in all likelihood is a distorted reflection of
the fact that he handed down and developed the great literary tradition
left by his predecessor. The volume of his dramatic work was very great;
the titles are preserved of no less than forty-five tragedies. In general
estimation he brought Roman tragedy to its highest point. The fragments
show a grace and fancy which we can hardly trace in the earlier
tragedians.
Accius was the last, as he seems to have been the greatest, of his race.
Tragedy indeed continued, as we shall see, to be written and even to be
acted. The literary men of the Ciceronian and Augustan age published
their plays as a matter of course; Varius was coupled by his
contemporaries with Virgil and Horace; and the lost _Medea_ of Ovid, like
the never-finished _Ajax_ of Augustus, would be at the least a highly
interesting literary document. But the new age found fresh poetical forms
into which it could put its best thought and art; while a blow was struck
directly at the roots of tragedy by the new invention, in the hands of
Cicero and his contemporaries, of a grave, impassioned, and stately
prose.
II.
COMEDY: PLAUTUS AND TERENCE.
Great as was the place occupied in the culture of the Greek world by
Homer and the Attic tragedians, the Middle and New Comedy, as they
culminated in Menander, exercised an even wider and more pervasive
influence. A vast gap lay between the third and fifth centuries before
Christ. Aeschylus, and even Sophocles, had become ancient literature in
the age immediately following their own. Euripides, indeed, continued for
centuries after his death to be a vital force of immense moment; but this
force he owed to the qualities in him that make his tragedy transgress
the formal limits of the art, to pass into the wider sphere of the human
comedy, with its tears and laughter, its sentiment and passions. From him
to Menander is in truth but a step; but this step was of such importance
that it was the comedian who became the Shakespeare of Greece. _Omnem
vitae imaginem expressit_ are the words deliberately used of him by the
greatest of Roman critics.
When, therefore, the impulse towards a national literature began to be
felt at Rome, comedy took its place side by side with tragedy and epic as
part of the Greek secret that had to be studied and mastered; and this
came the more naturally that a sort of comedy in rude but definite forms
was already native and familiar. Dramatic improvisations were, from an
immemorial antiquity, a regular feature of Italian festivals. They were
classed under different heads, which cannot be sharply distinguished. The
_Satura_ seems to have been peculiarly Latin; probably it did not differ
deeply or essentially from the two other leading types that arose north
and south of Latium, and were named from the little country towns of
Fescennium in Etruria, and Atella in Campania. But these rude
performances hardly rose to the rank of literature; and here, as
elsewhere, the first literary standard was set by laborious translations
from the Greek.
We find, accordingly, that the earlier masters--Andronicus, Naevius,
Ennius--all wrote comedies as well as tragedies, of the type known as
_palliata_, or "dressed in the Greek mantle," that is to say, freely
translated or adapted from Greek originals. After Ennius, this still
continued to be the more usual type; but the development of technical
skill now results in two important changes. The writers of comedy become,
on the whole and broadly speaking, distinct from the writers of tragedy;
and alongside of the _palliata_ springs up the _togata_, or comedy of
Italian dress, persons, and manners.
As this latter form of Latin comedy has perished, with the exception of
trifling fragments, it may be dismissed here in few words. Its life was
comprised in less than a century. Titinius, the first of the writers of
the _fabula togata_ of whom we have any certain information, was a
contemporary of Terence and the younger Scipio; a string of names, which
are names and nothing more, carries us down to the latest and most
celebrated of the list, Lucius Afranius. His middle-class comedies
achieved a large and a long-continued popularity; we hear of performances
of them being given even a hundred years after his death, and Horace
speaks with gentle sarcasm of the enthusiasts who put him on a level with
Menander. With his contemporary Quinctius Atta (who died B.C. 77, in the
year of the abortive revolution after the death of Sulla), he owed much
of his success to the admirable acting of Roscius, who created a stage
tradition that lasted long after his own time. To the mass of the people,
comedy (though it did not err in the direction of over-refinement) seemed
tame by comparison with the shows and pageants showered on them by the
ruling class as the price of their suffrages. As in other ages and
countries, fashionable society followed the mob. The young man about
town, so familiar to us from the brilliant sketches of Ovid, accompanies
his mistress, not to comedies of manners, but to the more exciting
spectacles of flesh and blood offered by the ballet-dancers and the
gladiators. Thus the small class who occupied themselves with literature
had little counteracting influence pressed on them to keep them from the
fatal habit of perpetually copying from the Greek; and adaptations from
the Attic New Comedy, which had been inevitable and proper enough as the
earlier essays of a tentative dramatic art, remained the staple of an art
which thus cut itself definitely away from nature.
That we possess, in a fairly complete form, the works of two of the most
celebrated of these playwrights, and of their many contemporaries and
successors nothing but trifling fragments, is due to a chance or a series
of chances which we cannot follow, and from which we must not draw too
precise conclusions. Plautus was the earliest, and apparently the most
voluminous, of the writers who devoted themselves wholly to comedy.
Between him and Terence a generation intervenes, filled by another
comedian, Caecilius, whose works were said to unite much of the special
excellences of both; while after the death of Terence his work was
continued on the same lines by Turpilius and others, and dwindled away
little by little into the early Empire. But there can be no doubt that
Plautus and Terence fully represent the strength and weakness of the
Latin _palliata_. Together with the eleven plays of Aristophanes, they
have been in fact, since the beginning of the Middle Ages, the sole
representatives of ancient, and the sole models for modern comedy.
Titus Maccius Plautus was born of poor parents, in the little Umbrian
town of Sarsina, in the year 254 B.C., thus falling midway in age between
Naevius and Ennius. Somehow or other he drifted to the capital, to find
employment as a stage-carpenter. He alternated his playwriting with the
hardest manual drudgery; and though the inexhaustible animal spirits
which show themselves in his writing explain how he was able to combine
extraordinary literary fertility with a life of difficulty and poverty,
it must remain a mystery how and when he picked up his education, and his
surprising mastery of the Latin language both in metre and diction. Of
the one hundred and thirty comedies attributed to him, two-thirds were
rejected as spurious by Varro, and only twenty-one ranked as certainly
genuine. These last are extant, with the exception of one, called
_Vidularia_, or _The Carpet-Bag_, which was lost in the Middle Ages; some
of them, however, exist, and probably existed in Varro's time, only in
abridged or mutilated stage copies.
The constructive power shown in these pieces is, of course, less that of
Plautus himself than of his Greek originals, Philemon, Diphilus, and
Menander. But we do not want modern instances to assure us that, in
adapting a play from one language to another, merely to keep the plot
unimpaired implies more than ordinary qualities of skill or
conscientiousness. When Plautus is at his best--in the _Aulularia_,
_Bacchides_, or _Rudens_, and most notably in the _Captivi_--he has
seldom been improved upon either in the interest of his action or in the
copiousness and vivacity of his dialogue.
Over and above his easy mastery of language, Plautus has a further
Claim to distinction in the wide range of his manner. Whether he ever
Went beyond the New Comedy of Athens for his originals, is uncertain;
But within it he ranges freely over the whole field, and the twenty
Extant pieces include specimens of almost every kind of play to which
the name of comedy can be extended. The first on the list, the famous
_Amphitruo_, is the only surviving specimen of the burlesque. The
Greeks called this kind of piece [Greek: ilarotrag_oidia]--a term for
Which _tragédie-bouffe_ would be the nearest modern equivalent;
_tragico-comoedia_ is the name by which Plautus himself describes it
in the prologue. The _Amphitruo_ remains, even now, one of the most
masterly specimens of this kind. The version of Molière, in which he
did little by way of improvement on his original, has given it fresh
currency as a classic; but the French play gives but an imperfect idea
of the spirit and flexibility of the dialogue in Plautus' hands.
Of a very different type is the piece which comes next the _Amphrituo_ in
acknowledged excellence, the _Captivi_. It is a comedy of sentiment,
without female characters, and therefore without the coarseness which (as
one is forced to say with regret) disfigures some of the other plays. The
development of the plot has won high praise from all critics, and
justifies the boast of the epilogue, _Huiusmodi paucas poetae reperiunt
comoedias_. But the praise which the author gives to his own piece--
_Non pertractate facta est neque item ut ceterae,
Neque spurcidici insunt versus immemorabiles,
Hic neque periurus leno est nec meretrix mala
Neque miles gloriosus--_
is really a severe condemnation of two other groups of Plautine plays.
The _Casina_ and the _Truculentus_ (the latter, as we know from Cicero, a
special favourite with its author) are studies in pornography which only
the unflagging animal spirits of the poet can redeem from being
disgusting; and the _Asinaria, Curculio_, and _Miles Gloriosus_ are broad
farces with the thinnest thread of plot. The last depends wholly on the
somewhat forced and exaggerated character of the title-rôle; as the
_Pseudolus_, a piece with rather more substance, does mainly on its
_periurus leno_, Ballio, a character who reminds one of Falstaff in his
entire shamelessness and inexhaustible vocabulary.
A different vein, the domestic comedy of middle-class life, is opened in
one of the most quietly successful of his pieces, the _Trinummus_, or
_Threepenny-bit_. In spite of all the characters being rather fatiguingly
virtuous in their sentiments, it is full of life, and not without
gracefulness and charm. After the riotous scenes of the lighter plays, it
is something of a comfort to return to the good sense and good feeling of
respectable people. It forms an interesting contrast to the _Bacchides_,
a play which returns to the world of the bawd and harlot, but with a
brilliance of intrigue and execution that makes it rank high among
comedies.
Two other plays are remarkable from the fact that, though neither in
construction nor in workmanship do they rise beyond mediocrity, the
leading motive of the plot in one case and the principal character in the
other are inventions of unusual felicity. The Greek original of both is
unknown; but to it, no doubt, rather than to Plautus himself, we are
bound to ascribe the credit of the _Aulularia_ and _Menaechmi_. The
_Aulularia_, or _Pot of Gold_, a commonplace story of middle-class life,
is a mere framework for the portrait of the old miser, Euclio--in itself
a sketch full of life and brilliance, and still more famous as the
original of Moliére's Harpagon, which is closely studied from it. The
_Menaechmi_, or _Comedy of Errors_, without any great ingenuity of
plot or distinction of character, rests securely on the inexhaustible
opportunities of humour opened up by the happy invention of the
twin-brothers who had lost sight of one another from early childhood,
and the confusions that arise when they meet in the same town in
later life.
There is yet one more of the Plautine comedies which deserves special
notice, as conceived in a different vein and worked out in a different
tone from all those already mentioned--the charming romantic comedy
called _Rudens_, or _The Cable_, though a more fitting name for it would
be _The Tempest_. It is not pitched in the sentimental key of the
_Captivi_; but it has a higher, and, in Latin literature, a rarer, note.
By a happy chance, perhaps, rather than from any unwonted effort of
skill, this translation of the play of Diphilus has kept in it something
of the unique and unmistakeable Greek atmosphere--the atmosphere of the
_Odyssey_, of the fisher-idyl of Theocritus, of the hundreds of little
poems in the Greek Anthology that bear clinging about their verses the
faint murmur and odour of the sea. The scene is laid near Cyrene, on the
strange rich African coast; the prologue is spoken, not by a character in
the piece, nor by a decently clothed abstraction like the figures of
Luxury and Poverty which speak the prologue of the _Trinummus_, but by
the star Arcturus, watcher and tempest-bearer.
_Qui gentes omnes, mariaque et terras movet,
Eius sum civis civitate caelitum;
Ita sum ut videtis, splendens stella candida,
Signum quod semper tempore exoritur suo
Hic atque in caelo; nomen Arcturo est mihi.
Noctu sum in caelo clarus atque inter deos;
Inter mortales ambulo interdius_.
The romantic note struck in these opening lines is continued throughout
the comedy, in which, by little touches here and there, the scene is kept
constantly before us of the rocky shore in the strong brilliant sun after
the storm of the night, the temple with its kindly priestess, and the
red-tiled country-house by the reeds of the lagoon, with the solitary
pastures behind it dotted over with fennel. Now and again one is reminded
of the _Winter's Tale_, with fishermen instead of shepherds for the
subordinate characters; more frequently of a play which, indeed, has
borrowed a good deal from this, _Pericles Prince of Tyre_.
The remainder of the Plautine plays may be dismissed with scant notice.
They comprise three variations on the theme which, to modern taste, has
become so excessively tedious, of the _Fourberies de Scapin_--the
_Epidicus_, _Mostellaria_, and _Persa_; the _Poenulus_, a dull play,
which owes its only interest to the passages in it written in the
Carthaginian language, which offer a tempting field for the conjectures
of the philologist; two more, the _Mercator_ and _Stichus_, of confused
plot and insipid dialogue; and a mutilated fragment of the _Cistellaria_,
or _Travelling-Trunk_, which would not have been missed had it shared the
fate of the _Carpet-Bag_.
The humour of one age is often mere weariness to the next; and farcical
comedy is, of all the forms of literature, perhaps the least adapted for
permanence. It would be affectation to claim that Plautus is nowadays
widely read outside of the inner circle of scholars; and there he is read
almost wholly on account of his unusual fertility and interest as a field
of linguistic study. Yet he must always remain one of the great
outstanding influences in literary history. The strange fate which has
left nothing but inconsiderable fragments out of the immense volume of
the later Athenian Comedy, raised Plautus to a position co-ordinate with
that of Aristophanes as a model for the reviving literature of modern
Europe; for such part of that literature (by much the more important) as
did not go beyond Latin for its inspiration, Plautus was a source of
unique and capital value, in his own branch of literature equivalent to
Cicero or Virgil in theirs.
Plautus outlived the second Punic War, during which, as we gather from
prefaces and allusions, a number of the extant plays were produced. Soon
after the final collapse of the Carthaginian power at Zama, a child was
born at Carthage, who, a few years later, in the course of unexplained
vicissitudes, reached Rome as a boy-slave, and passed there into the
possession of a rich and educated senator, Terentius Lucanus. The boy
showed some unusual turn for books; he was educated and manumitted by his
master, and took from him the name of Publius Terentius the African. A
small literary circle of the Roman aristocracy--men too high in rank to
need to be careful what company they kept--admitted young Terence to
their intimate companionship; and soon he was widely known as making a
third in the friendship of Gaius Laelius with the first citizen of the
Republic, the younger Scipio Africanus. This society, an informal academy
of letters, devoted all its energies to the purification and improvement
of the Latin language. The rough drafts of the Terentian comedies were
read out to them, and the language and style criticised in minute detail;
gossip even said that they were largely written by Scipio's own hand, and
Terence himself, as is not surprising, never took pains to deny the
rumour. Six plays had been subjected to this elaborate correction and
produced on the Roman stage, when Terence undertook a prolonged visit to
Greece for the purpose of further study. He died of fever the next year--
by one account, at a village in Arcadia; by another, when on his voyage
home. The six comedies had already taken the place which they have ever
since retained as Latin classics.
The Terentian comedy is in a way the turning-point of Roman literature.
Plautus and Ennius, however largely they drew from Greek originals, threw
into all their work a manner and a spirit which were essentially those of
a new literature in the full tide of growth. The imitation of Greek
models was a means, not an end; in both poets the Greek manner is
continually abandoned for essays into a new manner of their own, and they
relapse upon it when their imperfectly mastered powers of invention or
expression give way under them. In the circle of Terence the fatal
doctrine was originated that the Greek manner was an end in itself, and
that the road to perfection lay, not in developing any original
qualities, but in reproducing with laborious fidelity the accents of
another language and civilisation. Nature took a swift and certain
revenge. Correctness of sentiment and smooth elegance of diction became
the standards of excellence; and Latin literature, still mainly confined
to the governing class and their dependents, was struck at the root (the
word is used of Terence himself by Varro) with the fatal disease of
mediocrity.
But in Terence himself (as in Addison among English writers) this
mediocrity is, indeed, golden--a mediocrity full of grace and charm. The
unruffled smoothness of diction, the exquisite purity of language, are
qualities admirable in themselves, and are accompanied by other striking
merits; not, indeed, by dramatic force or constructive power, but by
careful and delicate portraiture of character, and by an urbanity (to use
a Latin word which expresses a peculiarly Latin quality) to which the
world owes a deep debt for having set a fashion. In some curious lines
preserved by Suetonius, Julius Caesar expresses a criticism, which we
shall find it hard to improve, on the "halved Menander," to whom his own
fastidious purity in the use of language, no less than his tact and
courtesy as a man of the world, attracted him strongly, while not
blinding him to the weakness and flaccidity of the Terentian drama. Its
effect on contemporary men of letters was immediate and irresistible. A
curious, if doubtfully authentic, story is told of the young poet when he
submitted his first play, _The Maid of Andros_, for the approval of the
Commissioners of Public Works, who were responsible for the production of
plays at the civic festivals. He was ordered to read it aloud to
Caecilius, who, since the death of Plautus, had been supreme without a
rival on the comic stage. Terence presented himself modestly while
Caecilius was at supper, and was carelessly told to sit down on a stool
in the dining-room, and begin. He had not read beyond a few verses when
Caecilius stopped him, and made him take his seat at table. After supper
was over, he heard his guest's play out with unbounded and unqualified
admiration.
But this admiration of the literary class did not make the refined
conventional art of Terence successful for its immediate purposes on the
stage: he was caviare to the general. Five of the six plays were produced
at the spring festival of the Mother of the Gods--an occasion when the
theatre had not to face the competition of the circus; yet even then it
was only by immense efforts on the part of the management that they
succeeded in attracting an audience. The _Mother-in-Law_ (not, it is
true, a play which shows the author at his best) was twice produced as a
dead failure. The third time it was pulled through by extraordinary
efforts on the part of the acting-manager, Ambivius Turpio. The prologue
written by Terence for this third performance is one of the most curious
literary documents of the time. He is too angry to extenuate the repeated
failure of his play. If we believe him, it fell dead the first time
because "that fool, the public," were all excitement over an exhibition
on the tight-rope which was to follow the play; at the second
representation only one act had been gone through, when a rumour spread
that "there were going to be gladiators" elsewhere, and in five minutes
the theatre was empty.
The Terentian prologues (they are attached to all his plays) are indeed
very interesting from the light they throw on the character of the
author, as well as on the ideas and fashions of his age. In all of them
there is a certain hard and acrid purism that cloaks in modest phrases an
immense contempt for all that lies beyond the writer's own canons of
taste. _In hac est pura oratio_, a phrase of the prologue to _The
Self-Tormentor_, is the implied burden of them all. He is a sort of
Literary Robespierre; one seems to catch the premonitory echo of
well-known phrases, "degenerate condition of literary spirit,
backsliding on this hand and on that, I, Terence, alone left
incorruptible." Three times there is a reference to Plautus, and always
with a tone of chilly superiority which is too proud to break into an
open sneer. Yet among these haughty and frigid manifestoes some
felicity of phrase or of sentiment will suddenly remind us that here,
after all, we are dealing with one of the great formative intelligences
of literature; where, for instance, in the prologue to the lively and
witty comedy of _The Eunuch_, the famous line--
_Nullumst iam dictum quod non dictum sit prius--
drops with the same easy negligence as in the opening dialogue of _The
Self-Tormentor_, the immortal--
_Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto--_
falls from the lips of the old farmer. Congreve alone of English
playwrights has this glittering smoothness, this inimitable ease; if we
remember what Dryden, in language too splendid to be insincere, wrote of
his young friend, we may imagine, perhaps, how Caecilius and his circle
regarded Terence. Nor is it hard to believe that, had Terence, like
Congreve, lived into an easy and honoured old age, he would still have
rested his reputation on these productions of his early youth. Both
dramatists had from the first seen clearly and precisely what they had in
view, and had almost at the first stroke attained it: the very
completeness of the success must in both cases have precluded the
dissatisfaction through which fresh advances could alone be possible.
This, too, is one reason, though certainly not the only one, why, with
the death of Terence, the development of Latin comedy at once ceased. His
successors are mere shadowy names. Any life that remained in the art took
the channel of the farces which, for a hundred years more, retained a
genuine popularity, but which never took rank as literature of serious
value. Even this, the _fabula tabernaria_, or comedy of low life,
gradually melted away before the continuous competition of the shows
which so moved the spleen of Terence--the pantomimists, the jugglers, the
gladiators. By this time, too, the literary instinct was beginning to
explore fresh channels. Not only was prose becoming year by year more
copious and flexible, but the mixed mode, fluctuating between prose and
verse, to which the Romans gave the name of satire, was in process of
invention. Like the novel as compared with the play at the present time,
it offered great and obvious advantages in ease and variety of
manipulation, and in the simplicity and inexpensiveness with which, not
depending on the stated performances of a public theatre, it could be
produced and circulated. But before proceeding to consider this new
literary invention more fully, it will be well to pause in order to
gather up, as its necessary complement, the general lines on which Latin
prose was now developing, whether in response to the influence of Greek
models, or in the course of a more native and independent growth.
III.
EARLY PROSE: THE _SATURA_, OR MIXED MODE.
Law and government were the two great achievements of the Latin race;
and the two fountain-heads of Latin prose are, on the one hand, the texts
of codes and the commentaries of jurists; on the other, the annals of the
inner constitution and the external conquests and diplomacy of Rome. The
beginnings of both went further back than Latin antiquaries could trace
them. Out of the mists of a legendary antiquity two fixed points rise,
behind which it is needless or impossible to go. The code known as
that of the Twelve Tables, of which large fragments survive in later
law-books, was drawn up, according to the accepted chronology, in the
year 450 B.C. Sixty years later the sack of Rome by the Gauls led to
the destruction of nearly all public and private records, and it was
only from this date onwards that such permanent and contemporary
registers--the consular _fasti_, the books of the pontifical college,
the public collections of engraved laws and treaties--were extant as
could afford material for the annalist. That a certain amount of work
in the field both of law and history must have been going on at Rome
from a very early period, is, of course, obvious; but it was not till
the time of the Punic Wars that anything was produced in either field
which could very well be classed as literature.