The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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The Classicists and the Moderns
The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not be otherwise,
for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes.
The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics,
the national-Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Helleno-Italian
or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy,
fought their battles also on the field of literature. The former
attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre,
in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more
the character of classical. With less taste and stronger party
tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius,
and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies. The leaves
of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively
greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets
of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch
of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly
as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors
as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall.
No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion
of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic
of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too
there was no want of trimmers. Cicero for instance, although in prose
one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency,
revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same
antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution
and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying,
"that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation
of Sophocles than the original." While thus the modern literary tendency
cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even
among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there were not wanting already
bolder judges, who treated the native literature as disrespectfully
as the senatorial politics. Not only did they resume the strict
criticism of the Scipionic epoch and set store by Terence only in order
to condemn Ennius and still more the Ennianists, but the younger
and bolder men went much farther and ventured already--though only as yet
in heretical revolt against literary orthodoxy--to call Plautus
a rude jester and Lucilius a bad verse-smith. This modern tendency
attached itself not to the native authorship, but rather
to the more recent Greek literature or the so-called Alexandrinism.
The Greek Alexandrinism
We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting
this remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art,
as is requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature
of this and the later epochs. The Alexandrian literature was based
on the decline of the pure Hellenic idiom, which from the time
of Alexander the Great was superseded in daily life by an inferior
jargon deriving its origin from the contact of the Macedonian dialect
with various Greek and barbarian tribes; or, to speak more accurately,
the Alexandrian literature sprang out of the ruin of the Hellenic nation
generally, which had to perish, and did perish, in its national
individuality in order to establish the universal monarchy of Alexander
and the empire of Hellenism. Had Alexander's universal empire continued
to subsist, the former national and popular literature would have been
succeeded by a cosmopolitan literature Hellenic merely in name,
essentially denationalized and called into life in a certain measure
by royal patronage, but at all events ruling the world;
but, as the state of Alexander was unhinged by his death,
the germs of the literature corresponding to it rapidly perished.
Nevertheless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed--
with its nationality, its language, its art--belonged to the past.
It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture--
for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed--but of men of erudition
that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead;
that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried
with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that,
possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition
was elevated into a semblance of productiveness. This posthumous
productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism.
It is essentially similar to that literature of scholars, which,
keeping aloof from the living Romanic nationalities and their vulgar
idioms, grew up during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
among a cosmopolitan circle of erudite philologues--as an artificial
aftergrowth of the departed antiquity; the contrast between
the classical and the vulgar Greek of the period of the Diadochi
is doubtless less strongly marked, but is not, properly speaking,
different from that between the Latin of Manutius
and the Italian of Macchiavelli.
The Roman Alexandrinism
Italy had hitherto been in the main disinclined towards Alexandrinism.
Its season of comparative brilliance was the period shortly before
and after the first Punic war; yet Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius
and generally the whole body of the national Roman authors
down to Varro and Lucretius in all branches of poetical production,
not excepting even the didactic poem, attached themselves,
not to their Greek contemporaries or very recent predecessors,
but without exception to Homer, Euripides, Menander and the other masters
of the living and national Greek literature. Roman literature
was never fresh and national; but, as long as there was a Roman people,
its authors instinctively sought for living and national models,
and copied, if not always to the best purpose or the best authors,
at least such as were original. The Greek literature originating
after Aexander found its first Roman imitators--for the slight
initial attempts from the Marian age(7) can scarcely be taken
into account--among the contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar;
and now the Roman Alexandrinism spread with singular rapidity.
In part this arose from external causes. The increased contact
with the Greeks, especially the frequent journeys of the Romans
into the Hellenic provinces and the assemblage of Greek literati
in Rome, naturally procured a public even among the Italians
for the Greek literature of the day, for the epic and elegiac poetry,
epigrams, and Milesian tales current at that time in Greece. Moreover,
as we have already stated(8) the Alexandrian poetry had its established
place in the instruction of the Italian youth; and thus reacted
on Latin literature all the more, since the latter continued to be
essentially dependent at all times on the Hellenic school-training.
We find in this respect even a direct connection of the new Roman
with the new Greek literature; the already-mentioned Parthenius,
one of the better known Alexandrian elegists, opened, apparently
about 700, a school for literature and poetry in Rome, and the excerpts
are still extant in which he supplied one of his pupils of rank
with materials for Latin elegies of an erotic and mythological
nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt.
But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called
into existence the Roman Alexandrinism; it was on the contrary
a product--perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable--
of the political and national development of Rome. On the one hand,
as Hellas resolved itself into Hellenism, so now Latium
resolved itself into Romanism; the national development of Italy
outgrew itself, and was merged in Caesar's Mediterranean empire,
just as the Hellenic development in the eastern empire of Alexander.
On the other hand, as the new empire rested on the fact
that the mighty streams of Greek and Latin nationality, after having
flowed in parallel channels for many centuries, now at length coalesced,
the Italian literature had not merely as hitherto to seek
its groundwork generally in the Greek, but had also to put itself
on a level with the Greek literature of the present, or in other words
with Alexandrinism. With the scholastic Latin, with the closed number
of classics, with the exclusive circle of classic-reading -urbani-,
the national Latin literature was dead and at an end; there arose
instead of it a thoroughly degenerate, artificially fostered,
imperial literature, which did not rest on any definite nationality,
but proclaimed in two languages the universal gospel of humanity,
and was dependent in point of spirit throughout and consciously
on the old Hellenic, in point of language partly on this,
partly on the old Roman popular, literature. This was no improvement.
The Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar was doubtless a grand and--
what is more--a necessary creation; but it had been called
into life by an arbitrary superior will, and therefore
there was nothing to be found in it of the fresh popular life,
of the overflowing national vigour, which are characteristic of younger,
more limited, and more natural commonwealths, and which the Italian
state of the sixth century had still been able to exhibit.
The ruin of the Italian nationality, accomplished in the creation
of Caesar, nipped the promise of literature. Every one who has
any sense of the close affinity between art and nationality
will always turn back from Cicero and Horace to Cato and Lucretius;
and nothing but the schoolmaster's view of history and of literature--
which has acquired, it is true, in this department the sanction
of prescription--could have called the epoch of art beginning
with the new monarchy pre-eminently the golden age. But while
the Romano-Hellenic Alexandrinism of the age of Caesar and Augustus
must be deemed inferior to the older, however imperfect, national
literature, it is on the other hand as decidedly superior
to the Alexandrinism of the age of the Diadochi as Caesar's enduring
structure to the ephemeral creation of Alexander. We shall have
afterwards to show that the Augustan literature, compared with
the kindred literature of the period of the Diadochi, was far less
a literature of philologues and far more an imperial literature
than the latter, and therefore had a far more permanent
and far more general influence in the upper circles of society
than the Greek Alexandrinism ever had.
Dramatic Literature
Tragedy and Comedy Disappear
Nowhere was the prospect more lamentable than in dramatic literature.
Tragedy and comedy had already before the present epoch
become inwardly extinct in the Roman national literature.
New pieces were no longer performed. That the public still
in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions--
belonging to this epoch--of Plautine comedies with the titles
and names of the persons altered, with reference to which
the managers well added that it was better to see a good old piece
than a bad new one. From this the step was not great to that entire
surrender of the stage to the dead poets, which we find
in the Ciceronian age, and to which Alexandrinism made no opposition.
Its productiveness in this department was worse than none.
Real dramatic composition the Alexandrian literature never knew;
nothing but the spurious drama, which was written primarily for reading
and not for exhibition, could be introduced by it into Italy, and soon
accordingly these dramatic iambics began to be quite as prevalent
in Rome as in Alexandria, and the writing of tragedy in particular
began to figure among the regular diseases of adolescence.
We may form a pretty accurate idea of the quality of these productions
from the fact that Quintus Cicero, in order homoeopathically
to beguile the weariness of winter quarters in Gaul,
composed four tragedies in sixteen days.
The Mime
Laberius
In the "picture of life" or mime alone the last still vigorous
product of the national literature, the Atellan farce,
became engrafted with the ethological offshoots of Greek comedy,
which Alexandrinism cultivated with greater poetical vigour
and better success than any other branch of poetry. The mime originated
out of the dances in character to the flute, which had long been usual,
and which were performed sometimes on other occasions, e. g.
for the entertainment of the guests during dinner, but more especially
in the pit of the theatre during the intervals between the acts.
It was not difficult to form out of these dances--in which the aid
of speech had doubtless long since been occasionally employed--
by means of the introduction of a more organized plot and a regular
dialogue little comedies, which were yet essentially distinguished
from the earlier comedy and even from the farce by the facts,
that the dance and the lasciviousness inseparable from such dancing
continued in this case to play a chief part, and that the mime,
as belonging properly not to the boards but to the pit, threw aside
all ideal scenic effects, such as masks for the face and theatrical
buskins, and--what was specially important--admitted of the female
characters being represented by women. This new mime, which first
seems to have come on the stage of the capital about 672,
soon swallowed up the national harlequinade, with which it indeed
in the most essential respects coincided, and was employed
as the usual interlude and especially as afterpiece along with
the other dramatic performances.(9) The plot was of course
still more indifferent, loose, and absurd than in the harlequinade;
if it was only sufficiently chequered, the public did not ask
why it laughed, and did not remonstrate with the poet, who instead
of untying the knot cut it to pieces. The subjects were chiefly
of an amorous nature, mostly of the licentious sort; for example,
poet and public without exception took part against the husband,
and poetical justice consisted in the derision of good morals.
The artistic charm depended wholly, as in the Atellana,
on the portraiture of the manners of common and low life;
in which rural pictures are laid aside for those of the life
and doings of the capital, and the sweet rabble of Rome--
just as in the similar Greek pieces the rabble of Alexandria--
is summoned to applaud its own likeness. Many subjects
are taken from the life of tradesmen; there appear the--
here also inevitable--"Fuller," then the "Ropemaker," the "Dyer,"
the "Salt-man," the "Female Weavers," the "Rascal"; other pieces
give sketches of character, as the "Forgetful," the "Braggart,"
the "Man of 100,000 sesterces";(10) or pictures of other lands,
the "Etruscan Woman," the "Gauls," the "Cretan," "Alexandria";
or descriptions of popular festivals, as the "Compitalia,"
the "Saturnalia," "Anna Perenna," the "Hot Baths"; or parodies
of mythology, as the "Voyage to the Underworld," the "Arvernian Lake."
Apt nicknames and short commonplaces which were easily retained
and applied were welcome; but every piece of nonsense
was of itself privileged; in this preposterous world Bacchus
is applied to for water and the fountain-nymph for wine.
Isolated examples even of the political allusions formerly
so strictly prohibited in the Roman theatre are found in these mimes.(11)
As regards metrical form, these poets gave themselves, as they tell us,
"but moderate trouble with the versification"; the language abounded,
even in the pieces prepared for publication, with vulgar expressions
and low newly-coined words. The mime was, it is plain,
in substance nothing but the former farce; with this exception,
that the character-masks and the standing scenery of Atella
as well as the rustic impress are dropped, and in their room
the life of the capital in its boundless liberty and licence
is brought on the stage. Most pieces of this sort were doubtless
of a very fugitive nature and made no pretension to a place
in literature; but the mimes of Laberius, full of pungent
delineation of character and in point of language and metre
exhibiting the hand of a master, maintained their ground in it;
and even the historian must regret that we are no longer permitted
to compare the drama of the republican death-struggle in Rome
with its great Attic counterpart.
Dramatic Spectacles
With the worthlessness of dramatic literature the increase
of scenic spectacles and of scenic pomp went hand in hand.
Dramatic representations obtained their regular place in the public life
not only of the capital but also of the country towns; the former
also now at length acquired by means of Pompeius a permanent theatre
(699;(12)), and the Campanian custom of stretching canvas
over the theatre for the protection of the actors and spectators
during the performance, which in ancient times always took place
in the open air, now likewise found admission to Rome (676).
As at that time in Greece it was not the--more than pale-Pleiad
of the Alexandrian dramatists, but the classic drama, above all
the tragedies of Euripides, which amidst the amplest development
of scenic resources kept the stage, so in Rome at the time of Cicero
the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, and the comedies
of Plautus were those chiefly produced. While the latter had been
in the previous period supplanted by the more tasteful but in point
of comic vigour far inferior Terence, Roscius and Varro,
or in other words the theatre and philology, co-operated to procure
for him a resurrection similar to that which Shakespeare experienced
at the hands of Garrick and Johnson; but even Plautus had to suffer
from the degenerate susceptibility and the impatient haste
of an audience spoilt by the short and slovenly farces, so that
the managers found themselves compelled to excuse the length
of the Plautine comedies and even perhaps to make omissions
and alterations. The more limited the stock of plays, the more
the activity of the managing and executive staff as well as
the interest of the public was directed to the scenic representation
of the pieces. There was hardly any more lucrative trade in Rome
than that of the actor and the dancing-girl of the first rank.
The princely estate of the tragic actor Aesopus has been
already mentioned;(13) his still more celebrated contemporary
Roscius(14) estimated his annual income at 600,000 sesterces
(6000 pounds)(15) and Dionysia the dancer estimated hers
at 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds). At the same time
immense sums were expended on decorations and costume;
now and then trains of six hundred mules in harness crossed
the stage, and the Trojan theatrical army was employed
to present to the public a tableau of the nations vanquished
by Pompeius in Asia. The music which accompanied the delivery
of the inserted choruses likewise obtained a greater
and more independent importance; as the wind sways the waves,
says Varro, so the skilful flute-player sways the minds of the listeners
with every modulation of melody. It accustomed itself to the use
of quicker time, and thereby compelled the player to more lively action.
Musical and dramatic connoisseurship was developed; the -habitue-
recognized every tune by the first note, and knew the texts
by heart; every fault in the music or recitation was severely
censured by the audience. The state of the Roman stage in the time
of Cicero vividly reminds us of the modern French theatre.
As the Roman mime corresponds to the loose tableaux of the pieces
of the day, nothing being too good and nothing too bad for either
the one or the other, so we find in both the same traditionally
classic tragedy and comedy, which the man of culture is in duty bound
to admire or at least to applaud. The multitude is satisfied,
when it meets its own reflection in the farce, and admires
the decorative pomp and receives the general impression of an ideal world
in the drama; the man of higher culture concerns himself at the theatre
not with the piece, but only with its artistic representation.
Moreover the Roman histrionic art oscillated in its different spheres,
just like the French, between the cottage and the drawing-room.
It was nothing unusual for the Roman dancing-girls to throw off
at the finale the upper robe and to give a dance in undress
for the benefit of the public; but on the other hand in the eyes
of the Roman Talma the supreme law of his art was, not the truth
of nature, but symmetry.
Metrical Annals
In recitative poetry metrical annals after the model of those
of Ennius seem not to have been wanting; but they were perhaps
sufficiently criticised by that graceful vow of his mistress
of which Catullus sings--that the worst of the bad heroic poems
should be presented as a sacrifice to holy Venus, if she would only
bring back her lover from his vile political poetry to her arms.
Lucretius
Indeed in the whole field of recitative poetry at this epoch
the older national-Roman tendency is represented only by a single work
of note, which, however, is altogether one of the most important
poetical products of Roman literature. It is the didactic poem
of Titus Lucretius Carus (655-699) "Concerning the Nature of Things,"
whose author, belonging to the best circles of Roman society,
but taking no part in public life whether from weakness of health
or from disinclination, died in the prime of manhood shortly before
the outbreak of the civil war. As a poet he attached himself
decidedly to Ennius and thereby to the classical Greek literature.
Indignantly he turns away from the "hollow Hellenism" of his time,
and professes himself with his whole soul and heart to be the scholar
of the "chaste Greeks," as indeed even the sacred earnestness
of Thucydides has found no unworthy echo in one of the best-known
sections of this Roman poem. As Ennius draws his wisdom
from Epicharmus and Euhemerus, so Lucretius borrows the form
of his representation from Empedocles, "the most glorious
treasure of the richly gifted Sicilian isle"; and, as to the matter,
gathers "all the golden words together from the rolls of Epicurus,"
"who outshines other wise men as the sun obscures the stars."
Like Ennius, Lucretius disdains the mythological lore with which
poetry was overloaded by Alexandrinism, and requires nothing
from his reader but a knowledge of the legends generally current.(16)
In spite of the modern purism which rejected foreign words from poetry,
Lucretius prefers to use, as Ennius had done, a significant Greek word
in place of a feeble and obscure Latin one. The old Roman alliteration,
the want of due correspondence between the pauses of the verse and those
of the sentence, and generally the older modes of expression
and composition, are still frequently found in Lucretius' rhythms,
and although he handles the verse more melodiously than Ennius,
his hexameters move not, as those of the modern poetical school,
with a lively grace like the rippling brook, but with a stately slowness
like the stream of liquid gold. Philosophically and practically
also Lucretius leans throughout on Ennius, the only indigenous poet
whom his poem celebrates. The confession of faith of the singer
of Rudiae(17)--
-Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus-:--
describes completely the religious standpoint of Lucretius,
and not unjustly for that reason he himself terms his poem
as it were the continuation of Ennius:--
-Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus amoeno
Detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam,
Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret-.
Once more--and for the last time--the poem of Lucretius is resonant
with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness
of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable
Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet
is more at home than in his own degenerate age.(18) To him too
his own song "gracefully welling up out of rich feeling" sounds,
as compared with the common poems, "like the brief song of the swan
compared with the cry of the crane";--with him too the heart swells,
listening to the melodies of its own invention, with the hope
of illustrious honours--just as Ennius forbids the men to whom
he "gave from the depth of the heart a foretaste of fiery song,"
to mourn at his, the immortal singer's, tomb.
It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents,
far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most
if not to all his contemporaries, fell upon an age in which
he felt himself strange and forlorn, and in consequence of this
made the most singular mistake in the selection of a subject. The system
of Epicurus, which converts the universe into a great vortex of atoms
and undertakes to explain the origin and end of the world as well as
all the problems of nature and of life in a purely mechanical way,
was doubtless somewhat less silly than the conversion of myths
into history which was attempted by Euhemerus and after him by Ennius;
but it was not an ingenious or a fresh system, and the task
of poetically unfolding this mechanical view of the world
was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life
and art on a more ungrateful theme. The philosophic reader censures
in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points
of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies
are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions,
with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets
at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part
of the poem absolutely unreadable. In spite of these incredible defects,
before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed,
this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic
wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on any;
and it was by no means merely the occasional similitudes,
and the other inserted descriptions of mighty natural phenomena
and yet mightier passions, which acquired for the poet this chaplet.
The genius which marks the view of life as well as the poetry
of Lucretius depends on his unbelief, which came forward
and was entitled to come forward with the full victorious power
of truth, and therefore with the full vigour of poetry, in opposition
to the prevailing hypocrisy or superstition.