The History of Rome, Book III - Theodor Mommsen
Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46
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
Ennius proposed to himself the very same task as Naevius; but the
similarity of the subject only brings out into stronger relief the
political and poetical contrast between the national and the anti-
national poet. Naevius sought out for the new subject a new form;
Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos. The
hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of
the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation,
took the place of the homely historic narrative. Wherever the
circumstances admit, Homer is directly translated; e. g. the burial of
those that fell at Heraclea is described after the model of the burial
of Patroclus, and under the helmet of Marcus Livius Stolo, the
military tribune who fights with the Istrians, lurks none other than
the Homeric Ajax; the reader is not even spared the Homeric invocation
of the Muse. The epic machinery is fully set agoing; after the battle
of Cannae, for instance, Juno in a full council of the gods pardons
the Romans, and Jupiter after obtaining the consent of his wife
promises them a final victory over the Carthaginians. Nor do the
"Annals" fail to betray the neological and Hellenistic tendencies of
the author. The very employment of the gods for mere decoration bears
this stamp. The remarkable vision, with which the poem opens, tells
in good Pythagorean style how the soul now inhabiting Quintus Ennius
had previously been domiciled in Homer and still earlier in a peacock,
and then in good physicist style explains the nature of things and
the relation of the body to the mind. Even the choice of the subject
serves the same purpose--at any rate the Hellenic literati of all ages
have found an especially suitable handle for their Graeco-cosmopolite
tendencies in this very manipulation of Roman history. Ennius lays
stress on the circumstance that the Romans were reckoned Greeks:
-Contendunt Graecos, Graios memorare solent sos.-
The poetical value of the greatly celebrated Annals may easily be
estimated after the remarks which we have already made regarding the
excellences and defects of the poet in general. It was natural that
as a poet of lively sympathies, he should feel himself elevated by the
enthusiastic impulse which the great age of the Punic wars gave to the
national sensibilities of Italy, and that he should not only often
happily imitate Homeric simplicity, but should also and still more
frequently make his lines strikingly echo the solemnity and decorum of
the Roman character. But the construction of his epic was defective;
indeed it must have been very lax and indifferent, when it was
possible for the poet to insert a special book by way of supplement
to please an otherwise forgotten hero and patron. On the whole the
Annals were beyond question the work in which Ennius fell farthest
short of his aim. The plan of making an Iliad pronounces its own
condemnation. It was Ennius, who in this poem for the first time
introduced into literature that changeling compound of epos and of
history, which from that time up to the present day haunts it like a
ghost, unable either to live or to die. But the poem certainly had
its success. Ennius claimed to be the Roman Homer with still greater
ingenuousness than Klopstock claimed to be the German, and was
received as such by his contemporaries and still more so by posterity.
The veneration for the father of Roman poetry was transmitted from
generation to generation; even the polished Quintilian says, "Let us
revere Ennius as we revere an ancient sacred grove, whose mighty oaks
of a thousand years are more venerable than beautiful;" and, if any
one is disposed to wonder at this, he may recall analogous phenomena
in the successes of the Aeneid, the Henriad, and the Messiad. A
mighty poetical development of the nation would indeed have set
aside that almost comic official parallel between the Homeric
Iliad and the Ennian
Annals as easily as we have set aside the comparison of Karschin
with Sappho and of Willamov with Pindar; but no such development took
place in Rome. Owing to the interest of the subject especially for
aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the
Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared to the
culture of later generations readable or worth reading; and thus,
singularly enough, posterity came to honour this thoroughly anti-
national epos of a half-Greek -litterateur- as the true model
poem of Rome.
Prose Literature
A prose literature arose in Rome not much later than Roman poetry,
but in a very different way. It experienced neither the artificial
furtherance, by which the school and the stage prematurely forced the
growth of Roman poetry, nor the artificial restraint, to which Roman
comedy in particular was subjected by the stern and narrow-minded
censorship of the stage. Nor was this form of literary activity
placed from the outset under the ban of good society by the stigma
which attached to the "ballad-singer." Accordingly the prose
literature, while far less extensive and less active than the
contemporary poetical authorship, had a far more natural growth.
While poetry was almost wholly in the hands of men of humble rank and
not a single Roman of quality appears among the celebrated poets of
this age, there is, on the contrary, among the prose writers of this
period hardly a name that is not senatorial; and it is from the
circles of the highest aristocracy, from men who had been consuls and
censors--the Fabii, the Gracchi, the Scipios--that this literature
throughout proceeds. The conservative and national tendency, in the
nature of the case, accorded better with this prose authorship than
with poetry; but here too--and particularly in the most important
branch of this literature, historical composition--the Hellenistic
bent had a powerful, in fact too powerful, influence both on matter
and form.
Writing of History
Down to the period of the Hannibalic war there was no historical
composition in Rome; for the entries in the book of Annals were of the
nature of records and not of literature, and never made any attempt to
develop the connection of events. It is a significant illustration of
the peculiarity of Roman character, that notwithstanding the extension
of the power of the Roman community far beyond the bounds of Italy,
and notwithstanding the constant contact of the noble society of Rome
with the Greeks who were so fruitful in literary activity, it was not
till the middle of the sixth century that there was felt the need and
desire of imparting a knowledge of the deeds and fortunes of the Roman
people, by means of authorship, to the contemporary world and to
posterity. When at length this desire was felt, there were neither
literary forms ready at hand for the use of Roman history, nor was
there a public prepared to read it, and great talent and considerable
time were required to create both. In the first instance,
accordingly, these difficulties were in some measure evaded by writing
the national history either in the mother-tongue but in that case in
verse, or in prose but in that case in Greek. We have already spoken
of the metrical chronicles of Naevius (written about 550?) and of
Ennius (written about 581); both belong to the earliest historical
literature of the Romans, and the work of Naevius may be regarded as
the oldest of all Roman historical works. At nearly the same period
were composed the Greek "Histories" of Quintus Fabius Pictor(56)
(after 553), a man of noble family who took an active part in state
affairs during the Hannibalic war, and of Publius Scipio, the son of
Scipio Africanus (about 590). In the former case they availed
themselves of the poetical art which was already to a certain extent
developed, and addressed themselves to a public with a taste for
poetry, which was not altogether wanting; in the latter case they
found the Greek forms ready to their hand, and addressed themselves
--as the interest of their subject stretching far beyond the bounds
of Latium naturally suggested--primarily to the cultivated foreigner.
The former plan was adopted by the plebeian authors, the latter by
those of quality; just as in the time of Frederick the Great an
aristocratic literature in the French language subsisted side by side
with the native German authorship of pastors and professors, and,
while men like Gleim and Ramler wrote war-songs in German, kings and
generals wrote military histories in French. Neither the metrical
chronicles nor the Greek annals by Roman authors constituted Latin
historical composition in the proper sense; this only began with Cato,
whose "Origines," not published before the close of this epoch, formed
at once the oldest historical work written in Latin and the first
important prose work in Roman literature.(57)
All these works, while not coming up to the Greek conception of
history,(58) were, as contrasted with the mere detached notices of
the book of Annals, systematic histories with a connected narrative
and a more or less regular structure. They all, so far as we can see,
embraced the national history from the building of Rome down to the
time of the writer, although in point of title the work of Naevius
related only to the first war with Carthage, and that of Cato only
to the very early history. They were thus naturally divided into
the three sections of the legendary period, of earlier, and of
contemporary, history.
History of the Origin of Rome
In the legendary period the history of the origin of the city of Rome
was set forth with great minuteness; and in its case the peculiar
difficulty had to be surmounted, that there were, as we have already
shown,(59) two wholly irreconcileable versions of it in circulation:
the national version, which, in its leading outlines at least, was
probably already embodied in the book of Annals, and the Greek
version of Timaeus, which cannot have remained unknown to these Roman
chroniclers. The object of the former was to connect Rome with
Alba, that of the latter to connect Rome with Troy; in the former
accordingly the city was built by Romulus son of the Alban king,
in the latter by the Trojan prince Aeneas. To the present epoch,
probably either to Naevius or to Pictor, belongs the amalgamation of
the two stories. The Alban prince Romulus remains the founder of
Rome, but becomes at the same time the grandson of Aeneas; Aeneas does
not found Rome, but is represented as bringing the Roman Penates to
Italy and building Lavinium as their shrine, while his son Ascanius
founds Alba Longa, the mother-city of Rome and the ancient metropolis
of Latium. All this was a sorry and unskilful patchwork. The view
that the original Penates of Rome were preserved not, as had hitherto
been believed, in their temple in the Roman Forum, but in the shrine
at Lavinium, could not but be offensive to the Romans; and the Greek
fiction was a still worse expedient, inasmuch as under it the gods
only bestowed on the grandson what they had adjudged to the grandsire.
But the redaction served its object: without exactly denying the
national origin of Rome, it yet deferred to the Hellenizing tendency,
and legalized in some degree that desire to claim kindred with Aeneas
and his descendants which was already at this epoch greatly in
vogue;(60) and thus it became the stereotyped, and was soon accepted
as the official, account of the origin of the mighty community.