Chapter XIV

Literature and Art

The influences which stimulated the growth of Roman literature were

of a character altogether peculiar and hardly paralleled in any other

nation. To estimate them correctly, it is necessary in the first

place that we should glance at the instruction of the people and

its recreations during this period.

Knowledge of Languages

Language lies at the root of all mental culture; and this was

especially the case in Rome. In a community where so much importance

was attached to speeches and documents, and where the burgess, at an

age which is still according to modern ideas regarded as boyhood, was

already entrusted with the uncontrolled management of his property and

might perhaps find it necessary to make formal speeches to the

assembled community, not only was great value set all along on the

fluent and polished use of the mother-tongue, but efforts were early

made to acquire a command of it in the years of boyhood. The Greek

language also was already generally diffused in Italy in the time of

Hannibal. In the higher circles a knowledge of that language, which

was the general medium of intercourse for ancient civilization, had

long been a far from uncommon accomplishment; and now, when the change

of Rome's position in the world had so enormously increased the

intercourse with foreigners and the foreign traffic, such a knowledge

was, if not necessary, yet presumably of very material importance to

the merchant as well as the statesman. By means of the Italian slaves

and freedmen, a very large portion of whom were Greek or half-Greek

by birth the Greek language and Greek knowledge to a certain extent

reached even the lower ranks of the population, especially in the

capital. The comedies of this period may convince us that even the

humbler classes of the capital were familiar with a sort of Latin,

which could no more be properly understood without a knowledge of

Greek than the English of Sterne or the German of Wieland without

a knowledge of French.(1) Men of senatorial families, however, not

only addressed a Greek audience in Greek, but even published their

speeches--Tiberius Gracchus (consul in 577 and 591) so published a

speech which he had given at Rhodes--and in the time of Hannibal wrote

their chronicles in Greek, as we shall have occasion to mention more

particularly in the sequel. Individuals went still farther. The

Greeks honoured Flamininus by complimentary demonstrations in the

Roman language,(2) and he returned the compliment; the "great general

of the Aeneiades" dedicated his votive gifts to the Greek gods after

the Greek fashion in Greek distichs.(3) Cato reproached another

senator with the fact, that he had the effrontery to deliver Greek

recitations with the due modulation at Greek revels.

Under the influence of such circumstances Roman instruction developed

itself. It is a mistaken opinion, that antiquity was materially

inferior to our own times in the general diffusion of elementary

attainments. Even among the lower classes and slaves there was much

reading, writing, and counting: in the case of a slave steward, for

instance, Cato, following the example of Mago, takes for granted the

ability to read and write. Elementary instruction, as well as

instruction in Greek, must have been long before this period imparted

to a very considerable extent in Rome. But the epoch now before us

initiated an education, the aim of which was to communicate not merely

an outward expertness, but a real mental culture. Hitherto in Rome

a knowledge of Greek had conferred on its possessor as little

superiority in civil or social life, as a knowledge of French perhaps

confers at the present day in a hamlet of German Switzerland; and the

earliest writers of Greek chronicles may have held a position among

the other senators similar to that of the farmer in the fens of

Holstein who has been a student and in the evening, when he comes home

from the plough, takes down his Virgil from the shelf. A man who

assumed airs of greater importance by reason of his Greek, was

reckoned a bad patriot and a fool; and certainly even in Cato's time

one who spoke Greek ill or not at all might still be a man of rank

and become senator and consul. But a change was already taking place.

The internal decomposition of Italian nationality had already,

particularly in the aristocracy, advanced so far as to render the

substitution of a general humane culture for that nationality

inevitable: and the craving after a more advanced civilization was

already powerfully stirring the minds of men. Instruction in the

Greek language as it were spontaneously met this craving. The

classical literature of Greece, the Iliad and still more the Odyssey,

had all along formed the basis of that instruction; the overflowing

treasures of Hellenic art and science were already by this means

spread before the eyes of the Italians. Without any outward

revolution, strictly speaking, in the character of the instruction

the natural result was, that the empirical study of the language

became converted into a higher study of the literature; that the

general culture connected with such literary studies was communicated

in increased measure to the scholars; and that these availed

themselves of the knowledge thus acquired to dive into that Greek

literature which most powerfully influenced the spirit of the age

--the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Menander.

In a similar way greater importance came to be attached to instruction

in Latin. The higher society of Rome began to feel the need, if not

of exchanging their mother-tongue for Greek, at least of refining it

and adapting it to the changed state of culture; and for this purpose

too they found themselves in every respect dependent on the Greeks.

The economic arrangements of the Romans placed the work of elementary

instruction in the mother-tongue--like every other work held in little

estimation and performed for hire--chiefly in the hands of slaves,

freedmen, or foreigners, or in other words chiefly in the hands of

Greeks or half-Greeks;(4) which was attended with the less difficulty,

because the Latin alphabet was almost identical with the Greek and the

two languages possessed a close and striking affinity. But this was

the least part of the matter; the importance of the study of Greek in

a formal point of view exercised a far deeper influence over the study

of Latin. Any one who knows how singularly difficult it is to find

suitable matter and suitable forms for the higher intellectual culture

of youth, and how much more difficult it is to set aside the matter

and forms once found, will understand how it was that the Romans knew

no mode of supplying the desideratum of a more advanced Latin

instruction except that of simply transferring the solution of this

problem, which instruction in the Greek language and literature

furnished, to instruction in Latin. In the present day a process

entirely analogous goes on under our own eyes in the transference of

the methods of instruction from the dead to the living languages.

But unfortunately the chief requisite for such a transference was

wanting. The Romans could, no doubt, learn to read and write Latin

by means of the Twelve Tables; but a Latin culture presupposed a

literature, and no such literature existed in Rome.

The Stage under Greek Influence

To this defect was added a second. We have already described the

multiplication of the amusements of the Roman people. The stage had

long played an important part in these recreations; the chariot-races

formed strictly the principal amusement in all of them, but these

races uniformly took place only on one, viz. the concluding, day,

while the earlier days were substantially devoted to stage-

entertainments. But for long these stage-representations consisted

chiefly of dances and jugglers' feats; the improvised chants, which

were produced on these occasions, had neither dialogue nor plot.(5)

It was only now that the Romans looked around them for a real drama.

The Roman popular festivals were throughout under the influence of

the Greeks, whose talent for amusing and for killing time naturally

rendered them purveyors of pleasure for the Romans. Now no national

amusement was a greater favourite in Greece, and none was more varied,

than the theatre; it could not but speedily attract the attention of

those who provided the Roman festivals and their staff of assistants.

The earlier Roman stage-chant contained within it a dramatic germ

capable perhaps of development; but to develop the drama from that

germ required on the part of the poet and the public a genial power

of giving and receiving, such as was not to be found among the Romans

at all, and least of all at this period; and, had it been possible to

find it, the impatience of those entrusted with the amusement of the

multitude would hardly have allowed to the noble fruit peace and

leisure to ripen. In this case too there was an outward want, which

the nation was unable to satisfy; the Romans desired a theatre, but

the pieces were wanting.

Rise of a Roman Literature

On these elements Roman literature was based; and its defective

character was from the first and necessarily the result of such

an origin. All real art has its root in individual freedom and a

cheerful enjoyment of life, and the germs of such an art were not

wanting in Italy; but, when Roman training substituted for freedom

and joyousness the sense of belonging to the community and the

consciousness of duty, art was stifled and, instead of growing, could

not but pine away. The culminating point of Roman development was the

period which had no literature. It was not till Roman nationality

began to give way and Hellenico-cosmopolite tendencies began to

prevail, that literature made its appearance at Rome in their train.

Accordingly from the beginning, and by stringent internal necessity,

it took its stand on Greek ground and in broad antagonism to the

distinctively Roman national spirit. Roman poetry above all had its

immediate origin not from the inward impulse of the poets, but from

the outward demands of the school, which needed Latin manuals, and of

the stage, which needed Latin dramas. Now both institutions--the

school and the stage--were thoroughly anti-Roman and revolutionary.

The gaping and staring idleness of the theatre was an abomination to

the sober earnestness and the spirit of activity which animated the

Roman of the olden type; and--inasmuch as it was the deepest and

noblest conception lying at the root of the Roman commonwealth, that

within the circle of Roman burgesses there should be neither master

nor slave, neither millionnaire nor beggar, but that above all a like

faith and a like culture should characterize all Romans--the school

and the necessarily exclusive school-culture were far more dangerous

still, and were in fact utterly destructive of the sense of equality.

The school and the theatre became the most effective levers in the

hands of the new spirit of the age, and all the more so that they used

the Latin tongue. Men might perhaps speak and write Greek and yet not

cease to be Romans; but in this case they accustomed themselves to

speak in the Roman language, while the whole inward being and life

were Greek. It is not one of the most pleasing, but it is one of the

most remarkable and in a historical point of view most instructive,

facts in this brilliant era of Roman conservatism, that during its

course Hellenism struck root in the whole field of intellect not

immediately political, and that the -maitre de plaisir- of the

great public and the schoolmaster in close alliance created

a Roman literature.

Livius Andronicus

In the very earliest Roman author the later development appears, as it

were, in embryo. The Greek Andronikos (from before 482, till after

547), afterwards as a Roman burgess called Lucius(6) Livius

Andronicus, came to Rome at an early age in 482 among the other

captives taken at Tarentum(7) and passed into the possession of the

conqueror of Sena(8) Marcus Livius Salinator (consul 535, 547). He

was employed as a slave, partly in acting and copying texts, partly in

giving instruction in the Latin and Greek languages, which he taught

both to the children of his master and to other boys of wealthy

parents in and out of the house. He distinguished himself so much in

this way that his master gave him freedom, and even the authorities,

who not unfrequently availed themselves of his services--commissioning

him, for instance, to prepare a thanksgiving-chant after the fortunate

turn taken by the Hannibalic war in 547--out of regard for him

conceded to the guild of poets and actors a place for their common

worship in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine. His authorship

arose out of his double occupation. As schoolmaster he translated the

Odyssey into Latin, in order that the Latin text might form the basis

of his Latin, as the Greek text was the basis of his Greek,

instruction; and this earliest of Roman school-books maintained its

place in education for centuries. As an actor, he not only like every

other wrote for himself the texts themselves, but he also published

them as books, that is, he read them in public and diffused them by

copies. What was still more important, he substituted the Greek drama

for the old essentially lyrical stage poetry. It was in 514, a year

after the close of the first Punic war, that the first play was

exhibited on the Roman stage. This creation of an epos, a tragedy,

and a comedy in the Roman language, and that by a man who was more

Roman than Greek, was historically an event; but we cannot speak of

his labours as having any artistic value. They make no sort of claim

to originality; viewed as translations, they are characterized by a

barbarism which is only the more perceptible, that this poetry does

not naively display its own native simplicity, but strives, after a

pedantic and stammering fashion, to imitate the high artistic culture

of the neighbouring people. The wide deviations from the original

have arisen not from the freedom, but from the rudeness of the

imitation; the treatment is sometimes insipid, sometimes turgid, the

language harsh and quaint.(9) We have no difficulty in believing the

statement of the old critics of art, that, apart from the compulsory

reading at school, none of the poems of Livius were taken up a second

time. Yet these labours were in various respects norms for succeeding

times. They began the Roman translated literature, and naturalized

the Greek metres in Latium. The reason why these were adopted only

in the dramas, while the Odyssey of Livius was written in the national

Saturnian measure, evidently was that the iambuses and trochees of

tragedy and comedy far more easily admitted of imitation in Latin

than the epic dactyls.

But this preliminary stage of literary development was soon passed.

The epics and dramas of Livius were regarded by posterity, and

undoubtedly with perfect justice, as resembling the rigid statues

of Daedalus destitute of emotion or expression--curiosities rather

than works of art.

But in the following generation, now that the foundations were

once laid, there arose a lyric, epic, and dramatic art; and it is

of great importance, even in a historical point of view, to trace

this poetical development.

Drama

Theatre

Both as respects extent of production and influence over the public,

the drama stood at the head of the poetry thus developed in Rome. In

antiquity there was no permanent theatre with fixed admission-money;

in Greece as in Rome the drama made its appearance only as an element

in the annually-recurring or extraordinary amusements of the citizens.

Among the measures by which the government counteracted or imagined

that they counteracted that extension of the popular festivals which

they justly regarded with anxiety, they refused to permit the erection

of a stone building for a theatre.(10) Instead of this there was

erected for each festival a scaffolding of boards with a stage for

the actors (-proscaenium-, -pulpitum-) and a decorated background

(-scaena-); and in a semicircle in front of it was staked off the

space for the spectators (-cavea-), which was merely sloped without

steps or seats, so that, if the spectators had not chairs brought

along with them, they squatted, reclined, or stood.(11) The women

were probably separated at an early period, and were restricted to

the uppermost and worst places; otherwise there was no distinction of

places in law till 560, after which, as already mentioned,(12) the

lowest and best positions were reserved for the senators.

Audience

The audience was anything but genteel. The better classes, it is

true, did not keep aloof from the general recreations of the people;

the fathers of the city seem even to have been bound for decorum's

sake to appear on these occasions. But the very nature of a burgess

festival implied that, while slaves and probably foreigners also were

excluded, admittance free of charge was given to every burgess with

his wife and children;(13) and accordingly the body of spectators

cannot have differed much from what one sees in the present day at

public fireworks and -gratis- exhibitions. Naturally, therefore, the

proceedings were not too orderly; children cried, women talked and

shrieked, now and then a wench prepared to push her way to the stage;

the ushers had on these festivals anything but a holiday, and found

frequent occasion to confiscate a mantle or to ply the rod.

The introduction of the Greek drama increased the demands on the

dramatic staff, and there seems to have been no redundance in the

supply of capable actors: on one occasion for want of actors a piece

of Naevius had to be performed by amateurs. But this produced no

change in the position of the artist; the poet or, as he was at this

time called, the "writer," the actor, and the composer not only

belonged still, as formerly, to the class of workers for hire in

itself little esteemed,(14) but were still, as formerly, placed in

the most marked way under the ban of public opinion, and subjected

to police maltreatment.(15) Of course all reputable persons kept

aloof from such an occupation. The manager of the company (-dominus

gregis-, -factionis-, also -choragus-), who was ordinarily also the

chief actor, was generally a freedman, and its members were ordinarily

his slaves; the composers, whose names have reached us, were all of

them non-free. The remuneration was not merely small--a -honorarium-

of 8000 sesterces (80 pounds) given to a dramatist is described

shortly after the close of this period as unusually high--but was,

moreover, only paid by the magistrates providing the festival, if the

piece was not a failure. With the payment the matter ended; poetical

competitions and honorary prizes, such as took place in Attica, were

not yet heard of in Rome--the Romans at this time appear to have

simply applauded or hissed as we now do, and to have brought forward

only a single piece for exhibition each day.(16) Under such

circumstances, where art worked for daily wages and the artist instead

of receiving due honour was subjected to disgrace, the new national

theatre of the Romans could not present any development either

original or even at all artistic; and, while the noble rivalry of

the noblest Athenians had called into life the Attic drama, the Roman

drama taken as a whole could be nothing but a spoiled copy of its

predecessor, in which the only wonder is that it has been able to

display so much grace and wit in the details.

That only one piece was produced each day we infer from the fact,

that the spectators come from home at the beginning of the piece

(Poen. 10), and return home after its close (Epid. Pseud. Rud. Stich.

Truc. ap. fin.). They went, as these passages show, to the theatre

after the second breakfast, and were at home again for the midday

meal; the performance thus lasted, according to our reckoning, from

about noon till half-past two o'clock, and a piece of Plautus, with

music in the intervals between the acts, might probably occupy nearly

that length of time (comp. Horat. Ep. ii. i, 189). The passage, in

which Tacitus (Ann. xiv. 20) makes the spectators spend "whole days"

in the theatre, refers to the state of matters at a later period.

Comedy

In the dramatic world comedy greatly preponderated over tragedy; the

spectators knit their brows, when instead of the expected comedy a

tragedy began. Thus it happened that, while this period exhibits

poets who devoted themselves specially to comedy, such as Plautus

and Caecilius, it presents none who cultivated tragedy alone; and

among the dramas of this epoch known to us by name there occur three

comedies for one tragedy. Of course the Roman comic poets, or rather

translators, laid hands in the first instance on the pieces which had

possession of the Hellenic stage at the time; and thus they found

themselves exclusively(17) confined to the range of the newer Attic

comedy, and chiefly to its best-known poets, Philemon of Soli in

Cilicia (394?-492) and Menander of Athens (412-462). This comedy came

to be of so great importance as regards the development not only of

Roman literature, but even of the nation at large, that even history

has reason to pause and consider it.

Character of the Newer Attic Comedy

The pieces are of tiresome monotony. Almost without exception the

plot turns on helping a young man, at the expense either of his father

or of some -leno-, to obtain possession of a sweetheart of undoubted

charms and of very doubtful morals. The path to success in love

regularly lies through some sort of pecuniary fraud; and the crafty

servant, who provides the needful sum and performs the requisite

swindling while the lover is mourning over his amatory and pecuniary

distresses, is the real mainspring of the piece. There is no want of

the due accompaniment of reflections on the joys and sorrows of love,

of tearful parting scenes, of lovers who in the anguish of their

hearts threaten to do themselves a mischief; love or rather amorous

intrigue was, as the old critics of art say, the very life-breath of

the Menandrian poetry. Marriage forms, at least with Menander, the

inevitable finale; on which occasion, for the greater edification

and satisfaction of the spectators, the virtue of the heroine usually

comes forth almost if not wholly untarnished, and the heroine herself

proves to be the lost daughter of some rich man and so in every

respect an eligible match. Along with these love-pieces we find

others of a pathetic kind. Among the comedies of Plautus, for

instance, the -Rudens- turns on a shipwreck and the right of asylum;

while the -Trinummus- and the -Captivi- contain no amatory intrigue,

but depict the generous devotedness of the friend to his friend and

of the slave to his master. Persons and situations recur down to the

very details like patterns on a carpet; we never get rid of the asides

of unseen listeners, of knocking at the house-doors, and of slaves

scouring the streets on some errand or other. The standing masks,

of which there was a certain fixed number--viz., eight masks for old

men, and seven for servants--from which alone in ordinary cases at

least the poet had to make his choice, further favoured a stock-model

treatment. Such a comedy almost of necessity rejected the lyrical

element in the older comedy--the chorus--and confined itself from the

first to conversation, or at most recitation; it was devoid not of the

political element only, but of all true passion and of all poetical

elevation. The pieces judiciously made no pretence to any grand or

really poetical effect: their charm resided primarily in furnishing

occupation for the intellect, not only through their subject-matter

--in which respect the newer comedy was distinguished from the old as

much by the greater intrinsic emptiness as by the greater outward

complication of the plot--but more especially through their execution

in detail, in which the point and polish of the conversation more

particularly formed the triumph of the poet and the delight of the

audience. Complications and confusions of one person with another,

which very readily allowed scope for extravagant, often licentious,

practical jokes--as in the -Casina-, which winds up in genuine

Falstaffian style with the retiring of the two bridegrooms and of the

soldier dressed up as bride--jests, drolleries, and riddles, which in

fact for want of real conversation furnished the staple materials of

entertainment at the Attic table of the period, fill up a large

portion of these comedies. The authors of them wrote not like Eupolis

and Aristophanes for a great nation, but rather for a cultivated

society which spent its time, like other clever circles whose

cleverness finds little fit scope for action, in guessing riddles and

playing at charades. They give us, therefore, no picture of their

times; of the great historical and intellectual movements of the age

no trace appears in these comedies, and we need to recall, in order

to realize, the fact that Philemon and Menander were really

contemporaries of Alexander and Aristotle. But they give us a

picture, equally elegant and faithful, of that refined Attic society

beyond the circles of which comedy never travels. Even in the dim

Latin copy, through which we chiefly know it, the grace of the

original is not wholly obliterated; and more especially in the pieces

which are imitated from Menander, the most talented of these poets,

the life which the poet saw and shared is delicately reflected not so

much in its aberrations and distortions as in its amiable every day

course. The friendly domestic relations between father and daughter,

husband and wife, master and servant, with their love-affairs and

other little critical incidents, are portrayed with so broad a

truthfulness, that even now they do not miss their effect: the

servants' feast, for instance, with which the -Stichus- concludes is,

in the limited range of its relations and the harmony of the two

lovers and the one sweetheart, of unsurpassed gracefulness in its

kind. The elegant grisettes, who make their appearance perfumed and

adorned, with their hair fashionably dressed and in variegated, gold-

embroidered, sweeping robes, or even perform their toilette on the

stage, are very effective. In their train come the procuresses,

sometimes of the most vulgar sort, such as one who appears in the

-Curculio-, sometimes duennas like Goethe's old Barbara, such as

Scapha in the -Mostettaria-; and there is no lack of brothers and

comrades ready with their help. There is great abundance and variety

of parts representing the old: there appear in turn the austere

and avaricious, the fond and tender-hearted, and the indulgent

accommodating, papas, the amorous old man, the easy old bachelor, the

jealous aged matron with her old maid-servant who takes part with her

mistress against her master; whereas the young men's parts are less

prominent, and neither the first lover, nor the virtuous model son who

here and there occurs, lays claim to much significance. The servant-

world--the crafty valet, the stern house-steward, the old vigilant

tutor, the rural slave redolent of garlic, the impertinent page--forms

a transition to the very numerous professional parts. A standing

figure among these is the jester (-parasitus-) who, in return for

permission to feast at the table of the rich, has to entertain the

guests with drolleries and charades, or, according to circumstances,

to let the potsherds be flung at his head. This was at that time a

formal trade in Athens; and it is certainly no mere poetical fiction

which represents such a parasite as expressly preparing himself for

his work by means of his books of witticisms and anecdotes. Favourite

parts, moreover, are those of the cook, who understands not only how

to boast of unheard-of sauces, but also how to pilfer like a

professional thief; the shameless -leno-, complacently confessing to

the practice of every vice, of whom Ballio in the -Pseudolus- is a

model specimen; the military braggadocio, in whom we trace a very

distinct reflection of the free-lance habits that prevailed under

Alexander's successors; the professional sharper or sycophant, the

stingy money-changer, the solemnly silly physician, the priest,

mariner, fisherman, and the like. To these fall to be added, lastly,

the parts delineative of character in the strict sense, such as the

superstitious man of Menander and the miser in the -Aulularia- of

Plautus. The national-Hellenic poetry has preserved, even in this its

last creation, its indestructible plastic vigour; but the delineation

of character is here copied from without rather than reproduced from

inward experience, and the more so, the more the task approaches to

the really poetical. It is a significant circumstance that, in the

parts illustrative of character to which we have just referred,

the psychological truth is in great part represented by abstract

development of the conception; the miser here collects the parings of

his nails and laments the tears which he sheds as a waste of water.

But the blame of this want of depth in the portraying of character,

and generally of the whole poetical and moral hollowness of this newer

comedy, lay less with the comic writers than with the nation as a

whole. Everything distinctively Greek was expiring: fatherland,

national faith, domestic life, all nobleness of action and sentiment

were gone; poetry, history, and philosophy were inwardly exhausted;

and nothing remained to the Athenian save the school, the fish-market,

and the brothel. It is no matter of wonder and hardly a matter of

blame, that poetry, which is destined to shed a glory over human

existence, could make nothing more out of such a life than the

Menandrian comedy presents to us. It is at the same time very

remarkable that the poetry of this period, wherever it was able to

turn away in some degree from the corrupt Attic life without falling

into scholastic imitation, immediately gathers strength and freshness

from the ideal. In the only remnant of the mock-heroic comedy of this

period--the -Amphitruo- of Plautus--there breathes throughout a purer

and more poetical atmosphere than in all the other remains of the

contemporary stage. The good-natured gods treated with gentle irony,

the noble forms from the heroic world, and the ludicrously cowardly

slaves present the most wonderful mutual contrasts; and, after the

comical course of the plot, the birth of the son of the gods amidst

thunder and lightning forms an almost grand concluding effect But this

task of turning the myths into irony was innocent and poetical, as

compared with that of the ordinary comedy depicting the Attic life of

the period. No special accusation may be brought from a historico-

moral point of view against the poets, nor ought it to be made matter

of individual reproach to any particular poet that he occupies the

level of his epoch: comedy was not the cause, but the effect of the

corruption that prevailed in the national life. But it is necessary,

more especially with a view to judge correctly the influence of these

comedies on the life of the Roman people, to point out the abyss which

yawned beneath all that polish and elegance. The coarsenesses and

obscenities, which Menander indeed in some measure avoided, but of

which there is no lack in the other poets, are the least part of the

evil. Features far worse are, the dreadful desolation of life in

which the only oases are lovemaking and intoxication; the fearfully

prosaic atmosphere, in which anything resembling enthusiasm is to be

found only among the sharpers whose heads have been turned by their

own swindling, and who prosecute the trade of cheating with some sort

of zeal; and above all that immoral morality, with which the pieces of

Menander in particular are garnished. Vice is chastised, virtue is

rewarded, and any peccadilloes are covered by conversion at or after

marriage. There are pieces, such as the -Trinummus- of Plautus and

several of Terence, in which all the characters down to the slaves

possess some admixture of virtue; all swarm with honest men who allow

deception on their behalf, with maidenly virtue wherever possible,

with lovers equally favoured and making love in company; moral

commonplaces and well-turned ethical maxims abound. A finale of

reconciliation such as that of the -Bacchides-, where the swindling

sons and the swindled fathers by way of a good winding up all go to

carouse together in the brothel, presents a corruption of morals

thoroughly worthy of Kotzebue.

Roman Comedy

Its Hellenism a Necessary Result of the Law

Such were the foundations, and such the elements which shaped the

growth, of Roman comedy. Originality was in its case excluded not

merely by want of aesthetic freedom, but in the first instance,

probably, by its subjection to police control. Among the considerable

number of Latin comedies of this sort which are known to us, there is

not one that did not announce itself as an imitation of a definite

Greek model; the title was only complete when the names of the Greek

piece and of its author were also given, and if, as occasionally

happened, the "novelty" of a piece was disputed, the question was

merely whether it had been previously translated. Comedy laid the

scene of its plot abroad not only frequently, but regularly and under

the pressure of necessity; and that species of art derived its special

name (-fabula palliata-) from the fact, that the scene was laid away

from Rome, usually in Athens, and thai the -dramatis personae- were

Greeks or at any rate not Romans. The foreign costume is strictly

carried out even in detail, especially in those things in which the

uncultivated Roman was distinctly sensible of the contrast, Thus the

names of Rome and the Romans are avoided, and, where they are referred

to, they are called in good Greek "foreigners" (-barbari-); in like

manner among the appellations of moneys and coins, that occur ever

so frequently, there does not once appear a Roman coin. We form a

strange idea of men of so great and so versatile talents as Naevius

and Plautus, if we refer such things to their free choice: this

strange and clumsy "exterritorial" character of Roman comedy

was undoubtedly due to causes very different from aesthetic

considerations. The transference of such social relations, as are

uniformly delineated in the new Attic comedy, to the Rome of the

Hannibalic period would have been a direct outrage on its civic order

and morality. But, as the dramatic spectacles at this period were

regularly given by the aediles and praetors who were entirely

dependent on the senate, and even extraordinary festivals, funeral

games for instance, could not take place without permission of the

government; and as the Roman police, moreover, was not in the habit

of standing on ceremony in any case, and least of all in dealing with

the comedians; the reason is self-evident why this comedy, even after

it was admitted as one of the Roman national amusements, might still

bring no Roman upon the stage, and remained as it were banished to

foreign lands.

Political Neutrality

The compilers were still more decidedly prohibited from naming any

living person in terms either of praise or censure, as well as from

any captious allusion to the circumstances of the times. In the whole

repertory of the Plautine and post-Plautine comedy, there is not,

so far as we know, matter for a single action of damages. In like

manner--if we leave out of view some wholly harmless jests--we meet

hardly any trace of invectives levelled at communities (invectives

which, owing to the lively municipal spirit of the Italians, would

have been specially dangerous), except the significant scoff at the

unfortunate Capuans and Atellans (18) and, what is remarkable, various

sarcasms on the arrogance and the bad Latin of the Praenestines.(19)

In general no references to the events or circumstances of the

present occur in the pieces of Plautus. The only exceptions are,

congratulations on the course of the war(20) or on the peaceful times;

general sallies directed against usurious dealings in grain or money,

against extravagance, against bribery by candidates, against the

too frequent triumphs, against those who made a trade of collecting

forfeited fines, against farmers of the revenue distraining for

payment, against the dear prices of the oil-dealers; and once--in the

-Curculio- --a more lengthened diatribe as to the doings in the Roman

market, reminding us of the -parabases- of the older Attic comedy, and

but little likely to cause offence(21) But even in the midst of such

patriotic endeavours, which from a police point of view were entirely

in order, the poet interrupts himself;

-Sed sumne ego stultus, qui rem curo publicam

Ubi sunt magistratus, quos curare oporteat?-

and taken as a whole, we can hardly imagine a comedy politically more

tame than was that of Rome in the sixth century.(22) The oldest

Roman comic writer of note, Gnaeus Naevius, alone forms a remarkable

exception. Although he did not write exactly original Roman comedies,

the few fragments of his, which we possess, are full of references to

circumstances and persons in Rome. Among other liberties he not only

ridiculed one Theodotus a painter by name, but even directed against

the victor of Zama the following verses, of which Aristophanes need

not have been ashamed:

-Etiam qui res magnas manu saepe gessit gloriose,

Cujus facta viva nunc vigent, qui apud gentes solus praestat,

Eum suus pater cum pallio uno ab amica abduxit.-

As he himself says,

-Libera lingua loquemur ludis Liberalibus,-

he may have often written at variance with police rules, and put

dangerous questions, such as:

-Cedo qui vestram rem publicam tantam amisistis tam cito?-

which he answered by an enumeration of political sins, such as:

-Proveniebant oratores novi, stulti adulescentuli.-

But the Roman police was not disposed like the Attic to hold stage-

invectives and political diatribes as privileged, or even to tolerate

them at all. Naevius was put in prison for these and similar sallies,

and was obliged to remain there, till he had publicly made amends and

recantation in other comedies. These quarrels, apparently, drove

him from his native land; but his successors took warning from his

example--one of them indicates very plainly, that he has no desire

whatever to incur an involuntary gagging like his colleague Naevius.

Thus the result was accomplished--not much less unique of its kind

than the conquest of Hannibal--that, during an epoch of the most

feverish national excitement, there arose a national stage utterly

destitute of political tinge.

Character of the Editing of Roman Comedy

Persons and Situations

But the restrictions thus stringently and laboriously imposed by

custom and police on Roman poetry stifled its very breath, Not without

reason might Naevius declare the position of the poet under the

sceptre of the Lagidae and Seleucidae enviable as compared with his

position in free Rome.(23) The degree of success in individual

instances was of course determined by the quality of the original

which was followed, and by the talent of the individual editor; but

amidst all their individual variety the whole stock of translations

must have agreed in certain leading features, inasmuch as all the

comedies were adapted to similar conditions of exhibition and a

similar audience. The treatment of the whole as well as of the

details was uniformly in the highest degree free; and it was necessary

that it should be so. While the original pieces were performed in

presence of that society which they copied, and in this very fact

lay their principal charm, the Roman audience of this period was so

different from the Attic, that it was not even in a position rightly

to understand that foreign world. The Roman comprehended neither

the grace and kindliness, nor the sentimentalism and the whitened

emptiness of the domestic life of the Hellenes. The slave-world was

utterly different; the Roman slave was a piece of household furniture,

the Attic slave was a servant. Where marriages of slaves occur or a

master carries on a kindly conversation with his slave, the Roman

translators ask their audience not to take offence at such things

which are usual in Athens;(24) and, when at a later period comedies

began to be written in Roman costume, the part of the crafty servant

had to be rejected, because the Roman public did not tolerate slaves

of this sort overlooking and controlling their masters. The

professional figures and those illustrative of character, which were

sketched more broadly and farcically, bore the process of transference

better than the polished figures of every-day life; but even of those

delineations the Roman editor had to lay aside several--and these

probably the very finest and most original, such as the Thais, the

match-maker, the moon-conjuress, and the mendicant priest of Menander

--and to keep chiefly to those foreign trades, with which the Greek

luxury of the table, already very generally diffused in Rome, had made

his audience familiar. If the professional cook and the jester in the

comedy of Plautus are delineated with so striking vividness and so

much relish, the explanation lies in the fact, that Greek cooks had

even at that time daily offered their services in the Roman market,

and that Cato found it necessary even to instruct his steward not to

keep a jester. In like manner the translator could make no use of a

very large portion of the elegant Attic conversation in his originals.

The Roman citizen or farmer stood in much the same relation to

the refined revelry and debauchery of Athens, as the German of a

provincial town to the mysteries of the Palais Royal. A science of

cookery, in the strict sense, never entered into his thoughts; the

dinner-parties no doubt continued to be very numerous in the Roman

imitation, but everywhere the plain Roman roast pork predominated

over the variety of baked meats and the refined sauces and dishes of

fish. Of the riddles and drinking songs, of the Greek rhetoric and

philosophy, which played so great a part in the originals, we meet

only a stray trace now and then in the Roman adaptation.

Construction of the Plot

The havoc, which the Roman editors were compelled in deference to

their audience to make in the originals, drove them inevitably into

methods of cancelling and amalgamating incompatible with any artistic

construction. It was usual not only to throw out whole character-

parts of the original, but also to insert others taken from other

comedies of the same or of another poet; a treatment indeed which,

owing to the outwardly methodical construction of the originals and

the recurrence of standing figures and incidents, was not quite so bad

as it might seem. Moreover the poets, at least in the earlier period,

allowed themselves the most singular liberties in the construction of

the plot. The plot of the -Stichus- (performed in 554) otherwise so

excellent turns upon the circumstance, that two sisters, whom their

father urges to abandon their absent husbands, play the part of

Penelopes, till the husbands return home with rich mercantile gains

and with a beautiful damsel as a present for their father-in-law.

In the -Casina-, which was received with quite special favour by the

public, the bride, from whom the piece is named and around whom the

plot revolves, does not make her appearance at all, and the denouement

is quite naively described by the epilogue as "to be enacted later

within." Very often the plot as it thickens is suddenly broken off,

the connecting thread is allowed to drop, and other similar signs of

an unfinished art appear. The reason of this is to be sought probably

far less in the unskilfulness of the Roman editors, than in the

indifference of the Roman public to aesthetic laws. Taste, however,

gradually formed itself. In the later pieces Plautus has evidently

bestowed more care on their construction, and the -Captivi- for

instance, the -Pseudolus-, and the -Bacchides- are executed in a

masterly manner after their kind. His successor Caecilius, none of

whose pieces are extant, is said to have especially distinguished

himself by the more artistic treatment of the subject.

Roman Barbarism

In the treatment of details the endeavour of the poet to bring matters

as far as possible home to his Roman hearers, and the rule of police

which required that the pieces should retain a foreign character,

produced the most singular contrasts. The Roman gods, the ritual,

military, and juristic terms of the Romans, present a strange

appearance amid the Greek world; Roman -aediles- and -tresviri- are

grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose

scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without

scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman

local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough; but

interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very

ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the

pieces into a ruder shape, which the editors deemed necessary to suit

the far from Attic culture of their audience. It is true that several

even of the new Attic poets probably needed no accession to their

coarseness; pieces like the -Asinaria- of Plautus cannot owe their

unsurpassed dulness and vulgarity solely to the translator.

Nevertheless coarse incidents so prevail in the Roman comedy, that the

translators must either have interpolated them or at least have made a

very one-sided selection. In the endless abundance of cudgelling and

in the lash ever suspended over the back of the slaves we recognize

very clearly the household-government inculcated by Cato, just as

we recognize the Catonian opposition to women in the never-ending

disparagement of wives. Among the jokes of their own invention, with

which the Roman editors deemed it proper to season the elegant Attic

dialogue, several are almost incredibly unmeaning and barbarous.(25)

Metrical Treatment

So far as concerns metrical treatment on the other hand, the flexible

and sounding verse on the whole does all honour to the composers. The

fact that the iambic trimeters, which predominated in the originals

and were alone suitable to their moderate conversational tone, were

very frequently replaced in the Latin edition by iambic or trochaic

tetrameters, is to be attributed not so much to any want of skill

on the part of the editors who knew well how to handle the trimeter,

as to the uncultivated taste of the Roman public which was pleased

with the sonorous magnificence of the long verse even where it was

not appropriate.

Scenic Arrangements

Lastly, the arrangements for the production of the pieces on the stage

bore the like stamp of indifference to aesthetic requirements on the

part of the managers and the public. The stage of the Greeks--which

on account of the extent of the theatre and from the performances

taking place by day made no pretension to acting properly so called,

employed men to represent female characters, and absolutely required

an artificial strengthening of the voice of the actor--was entirely

dependent, in a scenic as well as acoustic point of view, on the use

of facial and resonant masks. These were well known also in Rome; in

amateur performances the players appeared without exception masked.

But the actors who were to perform the Greek comedies in Rome were

not supplied with the masks--beyond doubt much more artificial--that

were necessary for them; a circumstance which, apart from all else in

connection with the defective acoustic arrangements of the stage,(26)

not only compelled the actor to exert his voice unduly, but drove

Livius to the highly inartistic but inevitable expedient of having

the portions which were to be sung performed by a singer not belonging

to the staff of actors, and accompanied by the mere dumb show of the

actor within whose part they fell. As little were the givers of the

Roman festivals disposed to put themselves to material expense for

decorations and machinery. The Attic stage regularly presented a

street with houses in the background, and had no shifting decorations;

but, besides various other apparatus, it possessed more especially

a contrivance for pushing forward on the chief stage a smaller one

representing the interior of a house. The Roman theatre, however, was

not provided with this; and we can hardly therefore throw the blame

on the poet, if everything, even childbirth, was represented on

the street.

Aesthetic Result

Such was the nature of the Roman comedy of the sixth century. The

mode in which the Greek dramas were transferred to Rome furnishes a

picture, historically invaluable, of the diversity in the culture

of the two nations; but in an aesthetic and a moral point of view the

original did not stand high, and the imitation stood still lower. The

world of beggarly rabble, to whatever extent the Roman editors might

take possession of it under the benefit of the inventory, presented

in Rome a forlorn and strange aspect, shorn as it were of its delicate

characteristics: comedy no longer rested on the basis of reality, but

persons and incidents seemed capriciously or carelessly mingled as in

a game of cards; in the original a picture from life, it became in the

reproduction a caricature. Under a management which could announce

a Greek agon with flute-playing, choirs of dancers, tragedians, and

athletes, and eventually convert it into a boxing-match;(27) and in

presence of a public which, as later poets complain, ran away en masse

from the play, if there were pugilists, or rope-dancers, or even

gladiators to be seen; poets such as the Roman composers were--workers

for hire and of inferior social position--were obliged even perhaps

against their own better judgment and their own better taste to

accommodate themselves more or less to the prevailing frivolity and

rudeness. It was quite possible, nevertheless, that there might arise

among them individuals of lively and vigorous talent, who were able at

least to repress the foreign and factitious element in poetry, and,

when they had found their fitting sphere, to produce pleasing and

even important creations.

Naevius

At the head of these stood Gnaeus Naevius, the first Roman who

deserves to be called a poet, and, so far as the accounts preserved

regarding him and the few fragments of his works allow us to form

an opinion, to all appearance as regards talent one of the most

remarkable and most important names in the whole range of Roman

literature. He was a younger contemporary of Andronicus--his poetical

activity began considerably before, and probably did not end till

after, the Hannibalic war--and felt in a general sense his influence;

he was, as is usually the case in artificial literatures, a worker in

all the forms of art produced by his predecessor, in epos, tragedy,

and comedy, and closely adhered to him in the matter of metres.

Nevertheless, an immense chasm separates the poets and their poems.

Naevius was neither freedman, schoolmaster, nor actor, but a citizen

of unstained character although not of rank, belonging probably to one

of the Latin communities of Campania, and a soldier in the first Punic

war.(28) In thorough contrast to the language of Livius, that of

Naevius is easy and clear, free from all stiffness and affectation,

and seems even in tragedy to avoid pathos as it were on purpose; his

verses, in spite of the not unfrequent -hiatus- and various other

licences afterwards disallowed, have a smooth and graceful flow.(29)

While the quasi-poetry of Livius proceeded, somewhat like that of

Gottsched in Germany, from purely external impulses and moved wholly

in the leading-strings of the Greeks, his successor emancipated Roman

poetry, and with the true divining-rod of the poet struck those

springs out of which alone in Italy a native poetry could well up

--national history and comedy. Epic poetry no longer merely

furnished the schoolmaster with a lesson-book, but addressed itself

independently to the hearing and reading public. Composing for the

stage had been hitherto, like the preparation of the stage costume, a

subsidiary employment of the actor or a mechanical service performed

for him; with Naevius the relation was inverted, and the actor now

became the servant of the composer. His poetical activity is marked

throughout by a national stamp. This stamp is most distinctly

impressed on his grave national drama and on his national epos, of

which we shall have to speak hereafter; but it also appears in his

comedies, which of all his poetic performances seem to have been the

best adapted to his talents and the most successful. It was probably,

as we have already said,(30) external considerations alone that

induced the poet to adhere in comedy so much as he did to the Greek

originals; and this did not prevent him from far outstripping his

successors and probably even the insipid originals in the freshness of

his mirth and in the fulness of his living interest in the present;

indeed in a certain sense he reverted to the paths of the Aristophanic

comedy. He felt full well, and in his epitaph expressed, what he had

been to his nation:

-Immortales mortales si foret fas fiere,

Flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam;

Itaque, postquam est Orci traditus thesauro,

Obliti sunt Romae loquier lingua Latina.-

Such proud language on the part of the man and the poet well befitted

one who had witnessed and had personally taken part in the struggles

with Hamilcar and with Hannibal, and who had discovered for the

thoughts and feelings of that age--so deeply agitated and so

elevated by mighty joy--a poetical expression which, if not exactly

the highest, was sound, adroit, and national. We have already

mentioned(31) the troubles into which his licence brought him with

the authorities, and how, driven presumably by these troubles from

Rome, he ended his life at Utica. In his instance likewise the

individual life was sacrificed for the common weal, and the

beautiful for the useful.

Plautus

His younger contemporary, Titus Maccius Plautus (500?-570), appears to

have been far inferior to him both in outward position and in the

conception of his poetic calling. A native of the little town of

Sassina, which was originally Umbrian but was perhaps by this time

Latinized, he earned his livelihood in Rome at first as an actor, and

then--after he had lost in mercantile speculations what he had gained

by his acting--as a theatrical composer reproducing Greek comedies,

without occupying himself with any other department of literature and

probably without laying claim to authorship properly so called. There

seems to have been at that time a considerable number of persons who

made a trade of thus editing comedies in Rome; but their names,

especially as they did not perhaps in general publish their works,(32)

were virtually forgotten, and the pieces belonging to this stock of

plays, which were preserved, passed in after times under the name

of the most popular of them, Plautus. The -litteratores- of the

following century reckoned up as many as 130 such "Plautine pieces";

but of these a large portion at any rate were merely revised by

Plautus or had no connection with him at all; the best of them are

still extant. To form a proper judgment, however, regarding the

poetical character of the editor is very difficult, if not impossible,

since the originals have not been preserved. That the editors

reproduced good and bad pieces without selection; that they were

subject and subordinate both to the police and to the public; that

they were as indifferent to aesthetical requirements as their

audience, and to please the latter, lowered the originals to a

farcical and vulgar tone--are objections which apply rather to the

whole manufacture of translations than to the individual remodeller.

On the other hand we may regard as characteristic of Plautus, the

masterly handling of the language and of the varied rhythms, a rare

skill in adjusting and working the situation for dramatic effect,

the almost always clever and often excellent dialogue, and, above all,

a broad and fresh humour, which produces an irresistible comic effect

with its happy jokes, its rich vocabulary of nicknames, its whimsical

coinage of words, its pungent, often mimic, descriptions and

situations--excellences, in which we seem to recognize the former

actor. Undoubtedly the editor even in these respects retained what

was successful in the originals rather than furnished contributions

of his own. Those portions of the pieces which can with certainty

be traced to the translator are, to say the least, mediocre; but they

enable us to understand why Plautus became and remained the true

popular poet of Rome and the true centre of the Roman stage, and

why even after the passing away of the Roman world the theatre has

repeatedly reverted to his plays.

Caecilius

Still less are we able to form a special opinion as to the third

and last--for though Ennius wrote comedies, he did so altogether

unsuccessfully--comedian of note in this epoch, Statins Caecilius. He

resembled Plautus in his position in life and his profession. Born in

Cisalpine Gaul in the district of Mediolanum, he was brought among the

Insubrian prisoners of war(33) to Rome, and earned a livelihood, first

as a slave, afterwards as a freedman, by remodelling Greek comedies

for the theatre down to his probably early death (586). His language

was not pure, as was to be expected from his origin; on the other

hand, he directed his efforts, as we have already said,(34) to a more

artistic construction of the plot. His pieces experienced but a dull

reception from his contemporaries, and the public of later times laid

aside Caecilius for Plautus and Terence; and, if nevertheless the

critics of the true literary age of Rome--the Varronian and Augustan

epoch--assigned to Caecilius the first place among the Roman editors

of Greek comedies, this verdict appears due to the mediocrity of the

connoisseur gladly preferring a kindred spirit of mediocrity in the

poet to any special features of excellence. These art-critics

probably took Caecilius under their wing, simply because he was more

regular than Plautus and more vigorous than Terence; notwithstanding

which he may very well have been far inferior to both.

Moral Result

If therefore the literary historian, while fully acknowledging the

very respectable talents of the Roman comedians, cannot recognize

in their mere stock of translations a product either artistically

important or artistically pure, the judgment of history respecting its

moral aspects must necessarily be far more severe. The Greek comedy

which formed its basis was morally so far a matter of indifference, as

it was simply on the same level of corruption with its audience; but

the Roman drama was, at this epoch when men were wavering between the

old austerity and the new corruption, the academy at once of Hellenism

and of vice. This Attico-Roman comedy, with its prostitution of body

and soul usurping the name of love--equally immoral in shamelessness

and in sentimentality--with its offensive and unnatural generosity,

with its uniform glorification of a life of debauchery, with its

mixture of rustic coarseness and foreign refinement, was one

continuous lesson of Romano-Hellenic demoralization, and was felt

as such. A proof of this is preserved in the epilogue of the

-Captivi- of Plautus:--

-Spectators, ad pudicos mores facta haec fabulast.

Neque in hoc subigitationes sunt neque ulla amatio

Nec pueri suppositio nec argenti circumductio,

Neque ubi amans adulescens scortum liberet clam suum patrem.

Huius modi paucas poetae reperiunt comoedias,

Ubi boni meliores fiant. Nunc vos, si vobis placet,

Et si placuimus neque odio fuimus, signum hoc mittite;

Qui pudicitiae esse voltis praemium, plausum date!-

We see here the opinion entertained regarding the Greek comedy by

the party of moral reform; and it may be added, that even in those

rarities, moral comedies, the morality was of a character only adapted

to ridicule innocence more surely. Who can doubt that these dramas

gave a practical impulse to corruption? When Alexander the Great

derived no pleasure from a comedy of this sort which its author read

before him, the poet excused himself by saying that the fault lay not

with him, but with the king; that, in order to relish such a piece, a

man must be in the habit of holding revels and of giving and receiving

blows in an intrigue. The man knew his trade: if, therefore, the

Roman burgesses gradually acquired a taste for these Greek comedies,

we see at what a price it was bought. It is a reproach to the Roman

government not that it did so little in behalf of this poetry, but

that it tolerated it at all Vice no doubt is powerful even without a

pulpit; but that is no excuse for erecting a pulpit to proclaim it.

To debar the Hellenic comedy from immediate contact with the persons

and institutions of Rome, was a subterfuge rather than a serious means

of defence. In fact, comedy would probably have been much less

injurious morally, had they allowed it to have a more free course,

so that the calling of the poet might have been ennobled and a Roman

poetry in some measure independent might have been developed; for

poetry is also a moral power, and, if it inflicts deep wounds, it can

do much to heal them. As it was, in this field also the government

did too little and too much; the political neutrality and moral

hypocrisy of its stage-police contributed their part to the fearfully

rapid breaking up of the Roman nation.

National Comedy

Titinius

But, while the government did not allow the Roman comedian to depict

the state of things in his native city or to bring his fellow-citizens

on the stage, a national Latin comedy was not absolutely precluded

from springing up; for the Roman burgesses at this period were not yet

identified with the Latin nation, and the poet was at liberty to lay

the plot of his pieces in the Italian towns of Latin rights just as

in Athens or Massilia. In this way, in fact, the Latin original

comedy arose (-fabula togata- (35)): the earliest known composer

of such pieces, Titinius, flourished probably about the close of

this period.(36)

This comedy was also based on the new Attic intrigue-piece; it was

not translation, however, but imitation; the scene of the piece lay

in Italy, and the actors appeared in the national dress,(37) the

-toga-. Here the Latin life and doings were brought out with peculiar

freshness. The pieces delineate the civil life of the middle-sized

towns of Latium; the very titles, such as -Psaltria- or -Ferentinatis-

, -Tibicina-, -Iurisperita-, -Fullones-, indicate this; and many

particular incidents, such as that of the townsman who has his shoes

made after the model of the sandals of the Alban kings, tend to

confirm it. The female characters preponderate in a remarkable manner

over the male.(38) With genuine national pride the poet recalls

the great times of the Pyrrhic war, and looks down on his new

Latin neighbours,--

-Qui Obsce et Volsce fabulantur; nam Latine nesciunt.-

This comedy belongs to the stage of the capital quite as much as did

the Greek; but it was probably animated by something of that rustic

antagonism to the ways and the evils of a great town, which appeared

contemporaneously in Cato and afterwards in Varro. As in the German

comedy, which proceeded from the French in much the same way as the

Roman comedy from the Attic, the French Lisette was very soon

superseded by the -Frauenzimmerchen- Franziska, so the Latin national

comedy sprang up, if not with equal poetical power, at any rate with

the same tendency and perhaps with similar success, by the side of

the Hellenizing comedy of the capital.

Tragedies

Euripides

Greek tragedy as well as Greek comedy came in the course of this epoch

to Rome. It was a more valuable, and in a certain respect also an

easier, acquisition than comedy. The Greek and particularly the

Homeric epos, which was the basis of tragedy, was not unfamiliar

to the Romans, and was already interwoven with their own national

legends; and the susceptible foreigner found himself far more at home

in the ideal world of the heroic myths than in the fish-market of

Athens. Nevertheless tragedy also promoted, only with less abruptness

and less vulgarity, the anti-national and Hellenizing spirit; and in

this point of view it was a circumstance of the most decisive

importance, that the Greek tragic stage of this period was chiefly

under the sway of Euripides (274-348). This is not the place for a

thorough delineation of that remarkable man and of his still more

remarkable influence on his contemporaries and posterity; but the

intellectual movements of the later Greek and the Graeco-Roman epoch

were to so great an extent affected by him, that it is indispensable

to sketch at least the leading outlines of his character. Euripides

was one of those poets who raise poetry doubtless to a higher level,

but in this advance manifest far more the true sense of what ought to

be than the power of poetically creating it. The profound saying which

morally as well as poetically sums up all tragic art--that action is

passion--holds true no doubt also of ancient tragedy; it exhibits

man in action, but it makes no real attempt to individualize him.

The unsurpassed grandeur with which the struggle between man and

destiny fulfils its course in Aeschylus depends substantially on

the circumstance, that each of the contending powers is only conceived

broadly and generally; the essential humanity in Prometheus and

Agamemnon is but slightly tinged by poetic individualizing. Sophocles

seizes human nature under its general conditions, the king, the old

man, the sister; but not one of his figures displays the microcosm of

man in all his aspects--the features of individual character. A high

stage was here reached, but not the highest; the delineation of man

in his entireness and the entwining of these individual--in themselves

finished--figures into a higher poetical whole form a greater

achievement, and therefore, as compared with Shakespeare, Aeschylus

and Sophocles represent imperfect stages of development. But, when

Euripides undertook to present man as he is, the advance was logical

and in a certain sense historical rather than poetical. He was

able to destroy the ancient tragedy, but not to create the modern.

Everywhere he halted half-way. Masks, through which the expression

of the life of the soul is, as it were, translated from the particular

into the general, were as necessary for the typical tragedy of

antiquity as they are incompatible with the tragedy of character;

but Euripides retained them. With remarkably delicate tact the older

tragedy had never presented the dramatic element, to which it was

unable to allow free scope, unmixed, but had constantly fettered it

in some measure by epic subjects from the superhuman world of gods and

heroes and by the lyrical choruses. One feels that Euripides was

impatient under these fetters: with his subjects he came down at least

to semi-historic times, and his choral chants were of so subordinate

importance, that they were frequently omitted in subsequent

performance and hardly to the injury of the pieces; but yet he has

neither placed his figures wholly on the ground of reality, nor

entirely thrown aside the chorus. Throughout and on all sides he is

the full exponent of an age in which, on the one hand, the grandest

historical and philosophical movement was going forward, but in which,

on the other hand, the primitive fountain of all poetry--a pure and

homely national life--had become turbid. While the reverential piety

of the older tragedians sheds over their pieces as it were a reflected

radiance of heaven; while the limitation of the narrow horizon of the

older Hellenes exercises its satisfying power even over the hearer;

the world of Euripides appears in the pale glimmer of speculation as

much denuded of gods as it is spiritualised, and gloomy passions shoot

like lightnings athwart the gray clouds. The old deeply-rooted faith

in destiny has disappeared; fate governs as an outwardly despotic

power, and the slaves gnash their teeth as they wear its fetters.

That unbelief, which is despairing faith, speaks in this poet with

superhuman power. Of necessity therefore the poet never attains a

plastic conception overpowering himself, and never reaches a truly

poetic effect on the whole; for which reason he was in some measure

careless as to the construction of his tragedies, and indeed not

unfrequently altogether spoiled them in this respect by providing no

central interest either of plot or person--the slovenly fashion of

weaving the plot in the prologue, and of unravelling it by a -Deus ex

machina- or a similar platitude, was in reality brought into vogue by

Euripides. All the effect in his case lies in the details; and with

great art certainly every effort has in this respect been made to

conceal the irreparable want of poetic wholeness. Euripides is

a master in what are called effects; these, as a rule, have a

sensuously-sentimental colouring, and often moreover stimulate

the sensuous impression by a special high seasoning, such as the

interweaving of subjects relating to love with murder or incest.

The delineations of Polyxena willing to die and of Phaedra pining

away under the grief of secret love, above all the splendid picture

of the mystic ecstasies of the Bacchae, are of the greatest beauty

in their kind; but they are neither artistically nor morally pure,

and the reproach of Aristophanes, that the poet was unable to paint a

Penelope, was thoroughly well founded. Of a kindred character is the

introduction of common compassion into the tragedy of Euripides.

While his stunted heroes or heroines, such as Menelaus in the -Helena-,

Andromache, Electra as a poor peasant's wife, the sick and ruined

merchant Telephus, are repulsive or ridiculous and ordinarily both,

the pieces, on the other hand, which keep more to the atmosphere of

common reality and exchange the character of tragedy for that of the

touching family-piece or that almost of sentimental comedy, such as

the -Iphigenia in Aulis-, the -Ion-, the -Alcestis-, produce perhaps

the most pleasing effect of all his numerous works. With equal

frequency, but with less success, the poet attempts to bring into play

an intellectual interest. Hence springs the complicated plot, which

is calculated not like the older tragedy to move the feelings, but

rather to keep curiosity on the rack; hence the dialectically pointed

dialogue, to us non-Athenians often absolutely intolerable; hence the

apophthegms, which are scattered throughout the pieces of Euripides

like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of

Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human

experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so

far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided

with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between

maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in

Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is replaced in the tragedies

of Euripides by moral or political purpose. Without strictly or

directly entering on the questions of the day, and having in view

throughout social rather than political questions, Euripides in the

legitimate issues of his principles coincided with the contemporary

political and philosophical radicalism, and was the first and chief

apostle of that new cosmopolitan humanity which broke up the old Attic

national life. This was the ground at once of that opposition which

the ungodly and un-Attic poet encountered among his contemporaries,

and of that marvellous enthusiasm, with which the younger generation

and foreigners devoted themselves to the poet of emotion and of love,

of apophthegm and of tendency, of philosophy and of humanity. Greek

tragedy in the hands of Euripides stepped beyond its proper sphere and

consequently broke down; but the success of the cosmopolitan poet was

only promoted by this, since at the same time the nation also stepped

beyond its sphere and broke down likewise. The criticism of

Aristophanes probably hit the truth exactly both in a moral and in a

poetical point of view; but poetry influences the course of history

not in proportion to its absolute value, but in proportion as it is

able to forecast the spirit of the age, and in this respect Euripides

was unsurpassed. And thus it happened, that Alexander read him

diligently; that Aristotle developed the idea of the tragic poet with

special reference to him; that the latest poetic and plastic art in

Attica as it were originated from him (for the new Attic comedy did

nothing but transfer Euripides into a comic form, and the school of

painters which we meet with in the designs of the later vases derived

its subjects no longer from the old epics, but from the Euripidean

tragedy); and lastly that, the more the old Hellas gave place to the

new Hellenism, the more the fame and influence of the poet increased,

and Greek life abroad, in Egypt as well as in Rome, was directly or

indirectly moulded in the main by Euripides.

Roman Tragedy

The Hellenism of Euripides flowed to Rome through very various

channels, and probably produced a speedier and deeper effect there

by indirect means than in the form of direct translation. The tragic

drama in Rome was not exactly later in its rise than the comic;(39)

but the far greater expense of putting a tragedy on the stage--which

was undoubtedly felt as a consideration of moment, at least during the

Hannibalic war--as well as the nature of the audience(40) retarded the

development of tragedy. In the comedies of Plautus the allusions to

tragedies are not very frequent, and most references of this kind may

have been taken from the originals. The first and only influential

tragedian of this epoch was the younger contemporary of Naevius

and Plautus, Quintus Ennius (515-585), whose pieces were already

travestied by contemporary comic writers, and were exhibited and

declaimed by posterity down to the days of the empire.

The tragic drama of the Romans is far less known to us than the comic:

on the whole the same features, which have been noticed in the case of

comedy, are presented by tragedy also. The dramatic stock, in like

manner, was mainly formed by translations of Greek pieces. The

preference was given to subjects derived from the siege of Troy and

the legends immediately connected with it, evidently because this

cycle of myths alone was familiar to the Roman public through

instruction at school; by their side incidents of striking horror

predominate, such as matricide or infanticide in the -Eumenides-,

the -Alcmaeon-, the -Cresphontes-, the -Melanippe-, the -Medea-, and

the immolation of virgins in the -Polyxena-, the -Erechthides-, the

-Andromeda-, the -Iphigenia- --we cannot avoid recalling the fact,

that the public for which these tragedies were prepared was in the

habit of witnessing gladiatorial games. The female characters and

ghosts appear to have made the deepest impression. In addition to the

rejection of masks, the most remarkable deviation of the Roman edition

from the original related to the chorus. The Roman theatre, fitted up

doubtless in the first instance for comic plays without chorus, had

not the special dancing-stage (-orchestra-) with the altar in the

middle, on which the Greek chorus performed its part, or, to speak

more correctly, the space thus appropriated among the Greeks served

with the Romans as a sort of pit; accordingly the choral dance at

least, with its artistic alternations and intermixture of music and

declamation, must have been omitted in Rome, and, even if the chorus

was retained, it had but little importance. Of course there were

various alterations of detail, changes in the metres, curtailments,

and disfigurements; in the Latin edition of the -Iphigenia- of

Euripides, for instance, the chorus of women was--either after the

model of another tragedy, or by the editor's own device--converted

into a chorus of soldiers. The Latin tragedies of the sixth century

cannot be pronounced good translations in our sense of the word;(41)

yet it is probable that a tragedy of Ennius gave a far less imperfect

image of the original of Euripides than a comedy of Plautus gave of

the original of Menander.

Moral Effect of Tragedy

The historical position and influence of Greek tragedy in Rome

were entirely analogous to those of Greek comedy; and while, as

the difference in the two kinds of composition necessarily implied,

the Hellenistic tendency appeared in tragedy under a purer and more

spiritual form, the tragic drama of this period and its principal

representative Ennius displayed far more decidedly an anti-national

and consciously propagandist aim. Ennius, hardly the most important

but certainly the most influential poet of the sixth century, was not

a Latin by birth, but on the contrary by virtue of his origin half a

Greek. Of Messapian descent and Hellenic training, he settled in his

thirty-fifth year at Rome, and lived there--at first as a resident

alien, but after 570 as a burgess(42)--in straitened circumstances,

supported partly by giving instruction in Latin and Greek, partly by

the proceeds of his pieces, partly by the donations of those Roman

grandees, who, like Publius Scipio, Titus Flamininus, and Marcus

Fulvius Nobilior, were inclined to promote the modern Hellenism and

to reward the poet who sang their own and their ancestors' praises and

even accompanied some of them to the field in the character, as it

were, of a poet laureate nominated beforehand to celebrate the great

deeds which they were to perform. He has himself elegantly described

the client-like qualities requisite for such a calling.(43) From the

outset and by virtue of the whole tenor of his life a cosmopolite, he

had the skill to appropriate the distinctive features of the nations

among which he lived--Greek, Latin, and even Oscan--without devoting

himself absolutely to any cne of them; and while the Hellenism of the

earlier Roman poets was the result rather than the conscious aim of

their poetic activity, and accordingly they at least attempted more or

less to take their stand on national ground, Ennius on the contrary is

very distinctly conscious of his revolutionary tendency, and evidently

labours with zeal to bring into vogue neologico-Hellenic ideas among

the Italians. His most serviceable instrument was tragedy. The

remains of his tragedies show that he was well acquainted with the

whole range of the Greek tragic drama and with Aeschylus and Sophocles

in particular; it is the less therefore the result of accident, that

he has modelled the great majority of his pieces, and all those that

attained celebrity, on Euripides. In the selection and treatment he

was doubtless influenced partly by external considerations. But these

alone cannot account for his bringing forward so decidedly the

Euripidean element in Euripides; for his neglecting the choruses still

more than did his original; for his laying still stronger emphasis on

sensuous effect than the Greek; nor for his taking up pieces like the

-Thyestes- and the -Telephus- so well known from the immortal ridicule

of Aristophanes, with their princes' woes and woful princes, and even

such a piece as Menalippa the Female Philosopher, in which the whole

plot turns on the absurdity of the national religion, and the tendency

to make war on it from the physicist point of view is at once

apparent. The sharpest arrows are everywhere--and that partly in

passages which can be proved to have been inserted(44)--directed

against faith in the miraculous, and we almost wonder that the

censorship of the Roman stage allowed such tirades to pass as

the following:--

-Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,

Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus;

Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.-

We have already remarked(45) that Ennius scientifically inculcated the

same irreligion in a didactic poem of his own; and it is evident that

he was in earnest with this freethinking. With this trait other

features are quite accordant--his political opposition tinged with

radicalism, that here and there appears;(46) his singing the praises

of the Greek pleasures of the table;(47) above all his setting aside

the last national element in Latin poetry, the Saturnian measure, and

substituting for it the Greek hexameter. That the "multiform" poet

executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated

hexameters out of a language of by no means dactylic structure, and

that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with

confidence and freedom amidst unwonted measures and forms--are so many

evidences of his extraordinary plastic talent, which was in fact more

Greek than Roman;(48) where he offends us, the offence is owing much

more frequently to Greek alliteration(49) than to Roman ruggedness.

He was not a great poet, but a man of graceful and sprightly talent,

throughout possessing the vivid sensibilities of a poetic nature, but

needing the tragic buskin to feel himself a poet and wholly destitute

of the comic vein. We can understand the pride with which the

Hellenizing poet looked down on those rude strains --

-quos olim Faunei vatesque canebant,-

and the enthusiasm with which he celebrates his own artistic poetry:

-Enni foeta, salve,

Versus propinas flammeos medullitus.-

The clever man had an instinctive assurance that he had spread his

sails to a prosperous breeze; Greek tragedy became, and thenceforth

remained, a possession of the Latin nation.

National Dramas

Through less frequented paths, and with a less favourable wind, a

bolder mariner pursued a higher aim. Naevius not only like Ennius

--although with far less success--adapted Greek tragedies for the

Roman stage, but also attempted to create, independently of the

Greeks, a grave national drama (-fabula praetextata-). No outward

obstacles here stood in the way; he brought forward subjects both

from Roman legend and from the contemporary history of the country on

the stage of his native land. Such were his Nursing of Romulus and

Remus or the Wolf, in which Amulius king of Alba appeared, and his

-Clastidium-, which celebrated the victory of Marcellus over the

Celts in 532.(49) After his example, Ennius in his -Ambracia-

described from personal observation the siege of that city by his

patron Nobilior in 565.(50) But the number of these national dramas

remained small, and that species of composition soon disappeared from

the stage; the scanty legend and the colourless history of Rome were

unable permanently to compete with the rich cycle of Hellenic legends.

Respecting the poetic value of the pieces we have no longer the means

of judging; but, if we may take account of the general poetical

intention, there were in Roman literature few such strokes of genius

as the creation of a Roman national drama. Only the Greek tragedians

of that earliest period which still felt itself nearer to the gods

--only poets like Phrynichus and Aeschylus--had the courage to bring

the great deeds which they had witnessed, and in which they had borne

a part, on the stage by the side of those of legendary times; and

here, if anywhere, we are enabled vividly to realize what the Punic

wars were and how powerful was their effect, when we find a poet,

who like Aeschylus had himself fought in the battles which he sang,

introducing the kings and consuls of Rome upon that stage on which

men had hitherto been accustomed to see none but gods and heroes.

Recitative Poetry

Recitative poetry also took its rise during this epoch at Rome.

Livius naturalized the custom which among the ancients held the

place of our modern publication--the public reading of new works by

the author--in Rome, at least to the extent of reciting them in his

school. As poetry was not in this instance practised with a view to

a livelihood, or at any rate not directly so, this branch of it was

not regarded by public opinion with such disfavour as writing for the

stage: towards the end of this epoch one or two Romans of quality had

publicly come forward in this manner as poets.(51) Recitative poetry

however was chiefly cultivated by those poets who occupied themselves

with writing for the stage, and the former held a subordinate place as

compared with the latter; in fact, a public to which read poetry might

address itself can have existed only to a very limited extent at this

period in Rome.

Satura

Above all, lyrical, didactic, and epigrammatic poetry found but feeble

representation. The religious festival chants--as to which the annals

of this period certainly have already thought it worth while to

mention the author--as well as the monumental inscriptions on temples

and tombs, for which the Saturnian remained the regular measure,

hardly belong to literature proper. So far as the minor poetry makes

its appearance at all, it presents itself ordinarily, and that as

early as the time of Naevius, under the name of -satura-. This term

was originally applied to the old stage-poem without action, which

from the time of Livius was driven off the stage by the Greek drama;

but in its application to recitative poetry it corresponds in some

measure to our "miscellaneous poems," and like the latter denotes not

any positive species or style of art, but simply poems not of an epic

or dramatic kind, treating of any matters (mostly subjective), and

written in any form, at the pleasure of the author. In addition to

Cato's "poem on Morals" to be noticed afterwards, which was presumably

written in Saturnian verses after the precedent of the older first

attempts at a national didactic poetry,(52) there came under this

category especially the minor poems of Ennius, which that writer,

who was very fertile in this department, published partly in his

collection of -saturae-, partly separately. Among these were brief

narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of

his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus,(53) of

the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name

of Epicharmus,(54) and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela,

a poet who treated of the higher cookery; as also a dialogue between

Life and Death, fables of Aesop, a collection of moral maxims,

parodies and epigrammatic trifles--small matters, but indicative

of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies

of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this

field, which the censorship did not reach.

Metrical Annals

Naevius

The attempts at a metrical treatment of the national annals lay

claim to greater poetical and historical importance. Here too it was

Naevius who gave poetic form to so much of the legendary as well as

of the contemporary history as admitted of connected narrative; and

who, more especially, recorded in the half-prosaic Saturnian national

metre the story of the first Punic war simply and distinctly, with

a straightforward adherence to fact, without disdaining anything at

all as unpoetical, and without at all, especially in the description

of historical times, going in pursuit of poetical flights or

embellishments--maintaining throughout his narrative the present

tense.(55) What we have already said of the national drama of the

same poet, applies substantially to the work of which we are now

speaking. The epic, like the tragic, poetry of the Greeks lived and

moved essentially in the heroic period; it was an altogether new and,

at least in design, an enviably grand idea--to light up the present

with the lustre of poetry. Although in point of execution the

chronicle of Naevius may not have been much better than the rhyming

chronicles of the middle ages, which are in various respects of

kindred character, yet the poet was certainly justified in regarding

this work of his with an altogether peculiar complacency. It was no

small achievement, in an age when there was absolutely no historical

literature except official records, to have composed for his

countrymen a connected account of the deeds of their own and the

earlier time, and in addition to have placed before their eyes

the noblest incidents of that history in a dramatic form.

Ennius