The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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-Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret
In terris oppressa gravi sub religione,
Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,
Primum Graius homo mortalis tendere contra
Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra.
Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque-.
The poet accordingly was zealous to overthrow the gods,
as Brutus had overthrown the kings, and "to release nature
from her stern lords." But it was not against the long ago enfeebled
throne of Jovis that these flaming words were hurled; just like Ennius,
Lucretius fights practically above all things against the wild
foreign faiths and superstitions of, the multitude, the worship
of the Great Mother for instance and the childish lightning-lore
of the Etruscans. Horror and antipathy towards that terrible world
in general, in which and for which the poet wrote, suggested his poem.
It was composed in that hopeless time when the rule of the oligarchy
had been overthrown and that of Caesar had not yet been established,
in the sultry years during which the outbreak of the civil war
was awaited with long and painful suspense. If we seem to perceive
in its unequal and restless utterance that the poet daily
expected to see the wild tumult of revolution break forth
over himself and his work, we must not with reference to his view
of men and things forget amidst what men, and in prospect
of what things, that view had its origin. In the Hellas of the epoch
before Alexander it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt
by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born,
and the next best to die. Of all views of the world possible
to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age
this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit
for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul
and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods
which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children
in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing
than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose
from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods
of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal
blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life,
but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions
of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul
to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress
worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those that obey
than to press into the confused crowd of candidates for the office
of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part
under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes.
This philosophico-practical tendency is the true ideal essence
of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid, not choked,
by all the dreariness of its physical demonstrations. Essentially
on this rests its comparative wisdom and truth. The man who
with a reverence for his great predecessors and a vehement zeal,
to which this century elsewhere knew no parallel, preached such doctrine
and embellished it with the charm of art, may be termed at once
a good citizen and a great poet. The didactic poem concerning
the Nature of Things, however much in it may challenge censure,
has remained one of the most brilliant stars in the poorly illuminated
expanse of Roman literature; and with reason the greatest of German
philologues chose the task of making the Lucretian poem
once more readable as his last and most masterly work.
The Hellenic Fashionable Poetry
Lucretius, although his poetical vigour as well as his art was admired
by his cultivated contemporaries, yet remained--of late growth
as he was--a master without scholars. In the Hellenic fashionable
poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars,
who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters.
With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets
avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry--the drama,
the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances
consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short-
winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains
bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field
intervening between narrative and song. Multifarious didactic
poems were written. Small half-heroic, half-erotic epics
were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy
peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic
of the philological source whence it sprang, in which the poet
more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings,
predominantly sensuous, with epic shreds from the cycle of Greek legend.
Festal lays were diligently and artfully manufactured; in general,
owing to the want of spontaneous poetical invention, the occasional poem
preponderated and especially the epigram, of which the Alexandrians
produced excellent specimens. The poverty of materials and the want
of freshness in language and rhythm, which inevitably cleave
to every literature not national, men sought as much as possible
to conceal under odd themes, far-fetched phrases, rare words,
and artificial versification, and generally under the whole apparatus
of philologico-antiquarian erudition and technical dexterity.
Such was the gospel which was preached to the Roman boys of this period,
and they came in crowds to hear and to practise it; already (about 700)
the love-poems of Euphorion and similar Alexandrian poetry formed
the ordinary reading and the ordinary pieces for declamation
of the cultivated youth.(19) The literary revolution took place;
but it yielded in the first instance with rare exceptions only premature
or unripe fruits. The number of the "new-fashioned poets" was legion,
but poetry was rare and Apollo was compelled, as always when so many
throng towards Parnassus, to make very short work. The long poems never
were worth anything, the short ones seldom. Even in this literary age
the poetry of the day had become a public nuisance; it sometimes
happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery
as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's
shop, whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding
and the smooth paper. A real public, in the sense in which national
literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians
as well as to the Hellenic; it was thoroughly the poetry of a clique
or rather cliques, whose members clung closely together,
abused intruders, read and criticised among themselves the new poems,
sometimes also quite after the Alexandrian fashion celebrated
the successful productions in fresh verses, and variously sought
to secure for themselves by clique-praises a spurious and ephemeral
renown. A notable teacher of Latin literature, himself poetically
active in this new direction, Valerius Cato appears to have exercised
a sort of scholastic patronage over the most distinguished men
of this circle and to have pronounced final decision on the relative
value of the poems. As compared with their Greek models,
these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom,
sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products
must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry
still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature.
Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns
far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done,
a greater correctness and consistency in language and metre
were certainly attained; but it was at the expense of the flexibility
and fulness of the national idiom. As respects the subject-matter,
under the influence partly of effeminate models, partly
of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance
little conducive to poetry; but the favourite metrical compendia
of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as
the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end
of this or more probably at the commencement of the following period,
the geographical manual of Eratosthenes by Publius Varro of the Aude
and the physico-medicinal manual of Nicander by Aemilius Macer.
It is neither to be wondered at nor regretted that of this countless
host of poets but few names have been preserved to us;
and even these are mostly mentioned merely as curiosities
or as once upon a time great; such as the orator Quintus Hortensius
with his "five hundred thousand lines" of tiresome obscenity,
and the somewhat more frequently mentioned Laevius, whose -Erotopaegnia-
attracted a certain interest only by their complicated measures
and affected phraseology. Even the small epic Smyrna by Gaius
Helvius Cinna (d. 710?), much as it was praised by the clique,
bears both in its subject--the incestuous love of a daughter
for her father--and in the nine years' toil bestowed on it the worst
characteristics of the time.
Catullus
Those poets alone of this school constitute an original
and pleasing exception, who knew how to combine with its neatness
and its versatility of form the national elements of worth still existing
in the republican life, especially in that of the country-towns.
To say nothing here of Laberius and Varro, this description
applies especially to the three poets already mentioned above(20)
of the republican opposition, Marcus Furius Libaculus (652-691),
Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) and Quintus Valerius Catullus
(667-c. 700). Of the two former, whose writings have perished,
we can indeed only conjecture this; respecting the poems of Catullus
we can still form a judgment. He too depends in subject and form
on the Alexandrians. We find in his collection translations of pieces
of Callimachus, and these not altogether the very good,
but the very difficult. Among the original pieces, we meet
with elaborately-turned fashionable poems, such as the over-artificial
Galliambics in praise of the Phrygian Mother; and even the poem,
otherwise so beautiful, of the marriage of Thetis has been
artistically spoiled by the truly Alexandrian insertion
of the complaint of Ariadne in the principal poem. But by the side
of these school-pieces we meet with the melodious lament
of the genuine elegy, the festal poem in the full pomp of individual
and almost dramatic execution, above all, the freshest miniature painting
of cultivated social life, the pleasant and very unreserved
amatory adventures of which half the charm consists in prattling
and poetizing about the mysteries of love, the delightful life
of youth with full cups and empty purses, the pleasures
of travel and of poetry, the Roman and still more frequently
the Veronese anecdote of the town, and the humorous jest
amidst the familiar circle of friends. But not only does Apollo
touch the lyre of the poet, he wields also the bow; the winged dart
of sarcasm spares neither the tedious verse-maker nor the provincial
who corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently
and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people
is endangered. The short-lined and merry metres, often enlivened
by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free
from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory. These poems lead us
alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po; but the poet
is incomparably more at home in the latter. His poems are based
on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self-
consciousness of a burgess and a burgess in fact of a rural town,
on the contrast of Verona with Rome, on the contrast of the homely
municipal with the high-born lords of the senate who usually
maltreat their humble friends--as that contrast was probably felt
more vividly than anywhere else in Catullus' home, the flourishing
and comparatively vigorous Cisalpine Gaul. The most beautiful
of his poems reflect the sweet pictures of the Lago di Garda,
and hardly at this time could any man of the capital have written
a poem like the deeply pathetic one on his brother's death,
or the excellent genuinely homely festal hymn for the marriage of Manlius
and Aurunculeia. Catullus, although dependent on the Alexandrian masters
and standing in the midst of the fashionable and clique poetry
of that age, was yet not merely a good scholar among many mediocre
and bad ones, but himself as much superior to his masters
as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior
to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters. Eminent creative vigour
indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him;
he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems
are, as he himself calls them, nothing but "pleasantries
and trifles." Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries
electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art-critics
of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius
as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries
as well as their successors were completely right. The Latin nation
has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance
and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection
as in Catullus; and in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus
is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show.
Poems in Prose
Romances
Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch. The law
of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which had hitherto remained
unchangeable--that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting
should go together--gave way before the intermixture and disturbance
of all kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant
features of this period. As to romances indeed nothing farther
is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian of this epoch,
Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to translate into Latin
the much-read Milesian tales of Aristides--licentious fashionable novels
of the most stupid sort.
Varro's Aesthetic Writings
A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this debateable
border-land between poetry and prose was the aesthetic writings
of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative
of Latin philologico-historical research, but one of the most fertile
and most interesting authors in belles-lettres. Descended
from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land
but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate,
strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,(21) and already
at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro
of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course,
to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic
part in its doings and sufferings. He supported it, partly
in literature--as when he combated the first coalition,
the "three-headed monster," in pamphlets; partly in more serious
warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant
of Further Spain.(22) When the cause of the republic was lost,
Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library
which was to be formed in the capital. The troubles
of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex,
and it was not till seventeen years after Caesar's death,
in the eighty-ninth year of his well-occupied life, that death
called him away.
Varros' Models
The aesthetic writings, which have made him a name,
were brief essays, some in simple prose and of graver contents,
others humorous sketches the prose groundwork of which was inlaid
with various poetical effusions. The former were the "philosophico-
historical dissertations" (-logistorici-), the latter the Menippean
Satires. In neither case did he follow Latin models,
and the -Satura- of Varro in particular was by no means based
on that of Lucilius. In fact the Roman -Satura- in general
was not properly a fixed species of art, but only indicated negatively
the fact that the "multifarious poem" was not to be included
under any of the recognized forms of art; and accordingly the -Satura-
poetry assumed in the hands of every gifted poet a different and peculiar
character. It was rather in the pre-Alexandrian Greek philosophy
that Varro found the models for his more severe as well as
for his lighter aesthetic works; for the graver dissertations,
in the dialogues of Heraclides of Heraclea on the Black Sea
(d. about 450), for the satires, in the writings of Menippus of Gadara
in Syria (flourishing about 475). The choice was significant.
Heraclides, stimulated as an author by Plato's philosophic
dialogues, had amidst the brilliance of their form totally
lost sight of the scientific contents and made the poetico-fabulistic
dress the main matter; he was an agreeable and largely-read author,
but far from a philosopher. Menippus was quite as little
a philosopher, but the most genuine literary representative
of that philosophy whose wisdom consisted in denying philosophy
and ridiculing philosophers the cynical wisdom of Diogenes;
a comic teacher of serious wisdom, he proved by examples
and merry sayings that except an upright life everything is vain
in earth and heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes
of so-called sages. These were the true models for Varro,
a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full
of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent
but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact
but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps
the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans.(23)
But Varro was no slavish pupil. The impulse and in general
the form he derived from Heraclides and Menippus; but his was a nature
too individual and too decidedly Roman not to keep his imitative
creations essentially independent and national.
Varro's Philosophico-Historical Essays
For his grave dissertations, in which a moral maxim
or other subject of general interest is handled, he disdained,
in his framework to approximate to the Milesian tales, as Heraclides
had done, and so to serve up to the reader even childish little stories
like those of Abaris and of the maiden reawakened to life
after being seven days dead. But seldom he borrowed the dress
from the nobler myths of the Greeks, as in the essay "Orestes
or concerning Madness"; history ordinarily afforded him a worthier
frame for his subjects, more especially the contemporary history
of his country, so that these essays became, as they were called
-laudationes- of esteemed Romans, above all of the Coryphaei
of the constitutional party. Thus the dissertation "concerning Peace"
was at the same time a memorial of Metellus Pius, the last
in the brilliant series of successful generals of the senate;
that "concerning the Worship of the Gods" was at the same time
destined to preserve the memory of the highly-respected
Optimate and Pontifex Gaius Curio; the essay "on Fate" was connected
with Marius, that "on the Writing of History" with Sisenna
the first historian of this epoch, that "on the Beginnings
of the Roman Stage" with the princely giver of scenic spectacles
Scaurus, that "on Numbers" with the highly-cultured
Roman banker Atticus. The two philosophico-historical essays
"Laelius or concerning Friendship," "Cato or concerning Old Age,"
which Cicero wrote probably after the model of those of Varro,
may give us some approximate idea of Varro's half-didactic,
half-narrative, treatment of these subjects.
Varros' Menippean Satires
The Menippean satire was handled by Varro with equal originality
of form and contents; the bold mixture of prose and verse is foreign
to the Greek original, and the whole intellectual contents
are pervaded by Roman idiosyncrasy--one might say, by a savour
of the Sabine soil. These satires like the philosophico-historical
essays handle some moral or other theme adapted to the larger public,
as is shown by the several titles---Columnae Herculis-, --peri doxeis--;
--Euren ei Lopas to Poma, peri gegameikoton--, -Est Modus
Matulae-, --peri metheis--; -Papiapapae-, --peri egkomios--.
The plastic dress, which in this case might not be wanting,
is of course but seldom borrowed from the history of his native country,
as in the satire -Serranus-, --peri archairesion--. The Cynic-
world of Diogenes on the other hand plays, as might be expected,
a great part; we meet with the --Kounistor--, the --Kounorreiton--,
the 'Ippokouon, the --'Oudrokouon--, the --Kounodidaskalikon--
and others of a like kind. Mythology is also laid under contribution
for comic purposes; we find a -Prometheus Liber-, an -Ajax
Stramenticius-, a -Hercules Socraticus-, a -Sesqueulixes-
who had spent not merely ten but fifteen years in wanderings.
The outline of the dramatic or romantic framework is still discoverable
from the fragments in some pieces, such as the -Prometheus Liber-,
the -Sexagessis-, -Manius-; it appears that Varro frequently,
perhaps regularly, narrated the tale as his own experience;
e. g. in the -Manius- the dramatis personae go to Varro and discourse
to him "because he was known to them as a maker of books."
as to the poetical value of this dress we are no longer allowed
to form any certain judgment; there still occur in our fragments
several very charming sketches full of wit and liveliness--
thus in the -Prometheus Liber- the hero after the loosing
of his chains opens a manufactory of men, in which Goldshoe the rich
(-Chrysosandalos-) bespeaks for himself a maiden, of milk and finest wax,
such as the Milesian bees gather from various flowers, a maiden
without bones and sinews, without skin or hair, pure and polished, slim,
smooth, tender, charming. The life-breath of this poetry is polemics--
not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius
and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern
elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar
living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly,
or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry,(24)
of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which
the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned
his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise
regulations. In the constitutional struggle Varro did what seemed to him
the duty of a citizen; but his heart was not in such party-doings--
"why," he complains on one occasion, "do ye call me
from my pure life into the filth of your senate-house?" He belonged
to the good old time, when the talk savoured of onions and garlic,
but the heart was sound. His polemic against the hereditary foes
of the genuine Roman spirit, the Greek philosophers, was only
a single aspect of this old-fashioned opposition to the spirit
of the new times; but it resulted both from the nature of the Cynical
philosophy and from the temperament of Varro, that the Menippean lash
was very specially plied round the cars of the philosophers
and put them accordingly into proportional alarm--it was not
without palpitation that the philosophic scribes of the time
transmitted to the "severe man" their newly-issued treatises.
Philosophizing is truly no art. With the tenth part of the trouble
with which a master rears his slave to be a professional baker,
he trains himself to be a philosopher; no doubt, when the baker
and the philosopher both come under the hammer, the artist of pastry
goes off a hundred times dearer than the sage. Singular people,
these philosophers! One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey--
it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with,
otherwise where would any honey-wine be left? Another thinks
that men grow out of the earth like cresses. A third has invented
a world-borer (--Kosmotorounei--) by which the earth will some
day be destroyed.
-Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat
Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus-.
It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard--by which is meant
an etymologizing Stoic--cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith's
scales; but there is nothing that surpasses the genuine
philosophers' quarrel--a Stoic boxing-match far excels any encounter
of athletes. In the satire -Marcopolis-, --peri archeis--,
when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart,
matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant,
but ill with the philosopher; the -Celer- -- -di'-enos- -leimmatos-logos--,
son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent--
evidently the philosophic -Dilemma---with the mattock.
With this morally polemic tendency and this talent for embodying it
in caustic and picturesque expression, which, as the dress of dialogue
given to the books on Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows,
never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily
combined an incomparable knowledge of the national manners
and language, which is embodied in the philological writings
of his old age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays
itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness.
Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian,
who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation
in its former idiosyncrasy and seclusion as well as in its modern state
of transition and dispersion, and had supplemented and deepened
his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language
by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives.
His partial deficiency in rational judgment and learning--
in our sense of the words--was compensated for by his clear
intuition and the poetry which lived within him. He sought
neither after antiquarian notices nor after rare antiquated
or poetical words;(25) but he was himself an old and old-fashioned man
and almost a rustic, the classics of his nation were his favourite
and long-familiar companions; how could it fail that many details
of the manners of his forefathers, which he loved above all
and especially knew, should be narrated in his writings, and that
his discourse should abound with proverbial Greek and Latin phrases,
with good old words preserved in the Sabine conversational language,
with reminiscences of Ennius, Lucilius, and above all of Plautus?
We should not judge as to the prose style of these aesthetic
writings of Varro's earlier period by the standard of his work
on Language written in his old age and probably published
in an unfinished state, in which certainly the clauses
of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative
like thrushes on a string; but we have already observed that Varro
rejected on principle the effort after a chaste style and Attic periods,
and his aesthetic essays, while destitute of the mean bombast
and the spurious tinsel of vulgarism, were yet written after an unclassic
and even slovenly fashion, in sentences rather directly joined
on to each other than regularly subdivided. The poetical pieces
inserted on the other hand show not merely that their author
knew how to mould the most varied measures with as much mastery
as any of the fashionable poets, but that he had a right
to include himself among those to whom a god has granted the gift
of "banishing cares from the heart by song and sacred poesy."(26)
the sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem
of Lucretius; to the more general causes which prevented this
there falls to be added their thoroughly individual stamp,
which was inseparable from the greater age, from the rusticity,
and even from the peculiar erudition of their author. But the grace
and humour of the Menippean satires above all, which seem to have been
in number and importance far superior to Varro's graver works,
captivated his contemporaries as well as those in after times
who had any relish for originality and national spirit; and even we,
who are no longer permitted to read them, may still from the fragments
preserved discern in some measure that the writer "knew how to laugh
and how to jest in moderation." And as the last breath
of the good spirit of the old burgess-times ere it departed,
as the latest fresh growth which the national Latin poetry put forth,
the Satires of Varro deserved that the poet in his poetical testament
should commend these his Menippean children to every one
"who had at heart the prosperity of Rome and of Latium";
and they accordingly retain an honourable place in the literature
as in the history of the Italian people.(27)