It was natural that this excessive deference to their authority should be impaired both by the ampler recognition of the claims of modern poetry, and by a more intimate familiarity with Greek literature. They have suffered, in the estimation of literary critics, from the change in poetical taste which commenced about the beginning of the present century, and, in that of scholars, from the superior attractions of the great epic, dramatic, and lyrical poets of Greece. They were thus, for some time, the objects of undue disparagement rather than of undue admiration. The perception of the large debt which they owed to their Greek masters, led to some forgetfulness of their original merits. Their Roman character and Italian feeling were insufficiently recognised under the foreign forms and metres in which these qualities were expressed. It used to be said, with some appearance of plausibility, that Roman poetry is not only much inferior in interest to the poetry of Greece, but that it is a work of cultivated imitation, not of creative art; that other forms of literature were the true expression of the genius of the Roman people; that their poets brought nothing new into the world; that they enriched the life of after times with no pure vein of native feeling, nor any impressive record of national experience.

Besides possessing the charm of poetical feeling and artistic form in unequalled measure, Greek poetry is to modern readers the immediate revelation of a new world of thought and action, in all its lights and shadows and moving life. Like their politics, the poetry of the Greeks sprang from many independent centres, and renewed itself in every epoch of the national civilisation. Roman poetry, on the other hand, has neither the same novelty nor variety of matter; nor did it, like the epic, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poetry of Greece, adapt itself to the changing phases of human life in different generations and different States. But the poets of Rome have another kind of value. There is a charm in their language and sentiment distinct from that which is found in any other literature of the world. Certain deep and abiding impressions are stamped upon their works, which have penetrated into the cultivated sentiment of modern times. If, as we read them, the imagination is not so powerfully stimulated by the revelation of a new world, yet, in the elevated tones of Roman poetry, there is felt to be a permanent affinity with the strength and dignity of man's moral nature; and, in the finer and softer tones, a power to move the heart to sympathy with the beauty, the enjoyment, and the natural sorrows of a bygone life. If we are no longer moved by the eager hopes and buoyant fancies of the youthful prime of the ancient world, we seem to gather up, with a more sober sympathy, the fruits of its mature experience and mellowed reflexion.

But, although oratory and history may have been more essential to the national life of the Romans, and more adapted to their genius, their poetry still remains their most complete literary expression. Of the many famous orators of the Republic one only has left his speeches to modern times. The works of the two greatest Roman historians have reached us in a mutilated shape; and the most important periods in the later history of the Republic are not represented in what remains of the works of any Latin writer. Tacitus records only the sombre and monotonous annals of the early Empire; and the extant books of Livy contain the account of times and events from which he himself was separated by many generations. Roman poetry, on the other hand, is the contemporary witness of several important eras in the history of the Republic and the Empire. It includes many authentic and characteristic fragments from the great times of the Scipios,—the complete works of the two poets of finest genius, who flourished in the last days of the Republic,—the masterpieces of the brilliant Augustan era;—and, of the works of the Empire, more than are needed to exemplify the decay of natural feeling and of poetical inspiration under the deadening pressure of Imperialism. And, besides illustrating different eras, the Roman poets throw light on the most various aspects of Roman life and character. They are the most authentic witnesses both of the national sentiment and ideas, and of the feelings and interests of private life. They stamp on the imagination the ideal of Roman majesty; and they bring home to modern sympathies the charm and the pathos of the old Italian life, and the activities and humours of society in the great capital of pleasure and business.

Roman poetry was the living heir, not the lifeless reproduction of the genius of Greece. If it seems to have been a highly-trained accomplishment rather than the irrepressible outpouring of a natural faculty, still this accomplishment was based upon original gifts of feeling and character, and was marked by its own peculiar features. The creative energy of the Greeks died out with Theocritus; but their learning and taste, surviving the decay of their political existence, passed into the education of a kindred race, endowed, above all other races of antiquity, with the capacity of receiving and assimilating alien influences, and of producing, alike in action and in literature, great results through persistent purpose and concentrated industry. It was owing to their gifts of appreciation and their capacity for labour, that the Roman poets, in the era of the transition from the freedom and vigour of the Republic to the pomp and order of the Empire, succeeded in producing works which, in point of execution, are not much inferior to the masterpieces of Greece. It was due to the spirit of a new race,—speaking a new language, living among different scenes, acting their own part in the history of the world,—that the ancient inspiration survived the extinction of Greek liberty, and reappeared, under altered conditions, in a fresh succession of powerful works, which owe their long existence as much to the vivid feeling as to the artistic perfection by which they are characterised.

The Romans, as a race, were wanting in speculative capacity; and thus their poetry does not rise, or rises only in Lucretius, to those imaginative heights from which the great lyrical and dramatic poets of Greece contemplated the spectacle of human life in all its wonder and solemnity. Yet both the epic and the lyrical poetry of Rome have a character and perfection of their own. The Aeneid, with many resemblances in points of detail to the poems of Homer, is yet, in design and execution, a true national monument. The lyrical poetry of Rome, if inferior to the choral poetry of Greece in range of thought and in ethereal grace of expression, and, apparently, to the early Iambic and Melic poetry of Greece in the range of the emotions to which it appeals, is yet an instrument of varied power, capable of investing the more serious or more transient joys and sorrows of life with an unfading charm, and rising into fuller and more commanding tones to express the national sentiment and moral dignity of Rome. Didactic poetry obtained in Lucretius and Virgil ampler volume and profounder meaning than in their Greek models, Empedocles and Hesiod. It was by the skill of the two great Latin poets that poetic art was made to embrace within its province the treatment of a great philosophical argument, and of a great and ancient form of human industry. The Satires and Epistles of Horace showed, for the first time, how the didactic spirit could deal in poetry with the whole conduct and familiar experience of life. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, while borrowing the metre of their compositions from the early poets of Ionia and the later writers at the court of Alexandria, have taken the substance of their poetry to a great extent from their own lives and interests; and have treated their materials with a fluent and varied brilliancy of style, and often with a graceful tenderness and sincerity of feeling, unborrowed from any foreign source. It may thus be generally affirmed that the Roman poets, although adding little to the great discoveries or inventions in literature, and although not equally successful in all their adaptations of the inventions of their predecessors, have yet left the stamp of their own genius and character on some of the great forms which poetry has assumed.

The metres of Roman poetry are also adaptations to the Latin language of the metres previously employed in the epic, lyrical, dramatic and elegiac poetry of Greece. The Italian race had, in earlier times, struck out a native measure, called the Saturnian,—of a rapid and irregular movement,—in which their religious emotions, their festive and satiric raillery, and their commemorative instincts found a rude expression. But after this measure had been rejected by Ennius, as unsuited to the gravity of his greatest work, the Roman poets continued to imitate the metres of their Greek predecessors. But, in their hands, these became characterised by a slower, more stately, and regular movement, not only differing widely from the ring of the native Saturnian rhythm, but also, with every improvement in poetic accomplishment, receding further and further from the freedom and variety of the Greek measures. The comic and tragic measures, in which alone the Roman writers observed a less strict rule than their models, never attained among them to any high metrical excellence. The rhythm of the Greek poets, owing in a great measure to the frequency of vowel sounds in their language, is more flowing, more varied, and more richly musical than that of Roman poetry. Thus, although their verse is constructed on the same metrical laws, there is the most marked contrast between the rapidity and buoyancy of the Iliad or the Odyssey, and the stately and weighty march of the Aeneid. Notwithstanding their outward conformity to the canons of a foreign language, the most powerful and characteristic measures of Roman poetry,—such as the Lucretian and the Virgilian hexameter, and the Horatian alcaic,—are distinguished by a grave, orderly, and commanding tone, symbolical of the genius and the majesty of Rome. In such cases, as the Horatian sapphic and the Ovidian elegiac, where the structure of the verse is too slight to produce this impressive effect, there is still a remarkable divergence from the freedom and manifold harmony of the early Greek poets to a more uniform and monotonous cadence.

and those who came after him devoted still greater study to attain perfection in the diction and rhythm of poetry. But their success was gained with some loss of direct force and freshness in the expression of feeling. In Virgil and in Horace words are combined in a less natural order than in Homer and the Attic dramatists. Their language does not strike the mind with the spontaneous force of Greek poetry, nor does it seem equally capable of gaining and retaining the ear of a popular audience. Catullus alone among the great Roman poets combines in those short poems, which are the direct expression of his feeling, perfect grace with the happiest freedom and simplicity. Yet the studied and compact diction of Latin poetry, if wanting in fluency, ease, and directness, lays a strong hold upon the mind, by its power of marking with emphasis what is most essential and prominent in the ideas and objects presented to the imagination. The thought and sentiment of Rome have thus been engraved on her poetical literature, in deep and enduring characters. And, notwithstanding all manifest traces of imitation, the diction of the greatest Roman poets attests the presence of genuine creative power. A strong vital force is recognised in the direct and vigorous diction of Ennius and Lucretius; and, though more latent, it is felt no less really to pervade the stateliness and chastened splendour of Virgil, and the subtle moderation of Horace.

Roman poetry, from this point of view, appears to be the old Greek art reappearing under new conditions: or rather the new art of the civilised world, after it had been leavened by Greek thought, taste, and education. The poetry of Rome was, however, a living power, after the creative energy of Greece had disappeared, so that, were it nothing more, that literature would still be valuable as the fruit of the later summer of antiquity. As in Homer, the earliest poet of the ancient world, there is a kind of promise of the great life that was to be; so, in the Augustan poets, there is a retrospective contemplation of the life, the religion, and the art of the past,—a gathering up of 'the long results of time.' But the Roman poets had also a strong vein of original character and feeling, and many phases of national and personal experience to reveal. They had to give a permanent expression to the idea of Rome, and to perpetuate the charm of the land and life of Italy. In their highest tones, they give utterance to the patriotic spirit, the dignified and commanding attributes, and the moral strength of the Imperial Republic. But other elements in their art proclaim their large inheritance of the receptive and emotional nature which, in ancient as in modern times, has characterised the Southern nations. As the patrician and plebeian orders were united in the imperial greatness of the commonwealth, as the energy of Rome and of the other Italian communities was welded together to form a mighty national life, so these apparently antagonistic elements combined to create the majesty and beauty of Roman poetry. Either of these elements would by itself have been unproductive and incomplete. The pure Roman temperament was too austere, too unsympathetic, too restrained and formal, to create and foster a luxuriant growth of poetry: the genial nature of the south, when dissociated from the control of manlier instincts and the elevation of higher ideals, tended to degenerate into licentious effeminacy, both in life and literature. The fragments of the earlier tragic and epic poets indicate the predominance of the gravity and the masculine strength inherent in the Roman temper, almost to the exclusion of the other element. Roman comedy, on the other hand, gave full play to Italian vivacity and sensuousness with only slight restraint from the higher instincts inherited from ancient discipline. In Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, moral energy and dignity of character are most happily combined with susceptibility to the charm and the power of Nature. Catullus and the elegiac poets of the Augustan age abandoned themselves to the passionate enjoyment of their lives, under little restraint either from the pride or the virtue of their forefathers. Their faults and weaknesses are of a type apparently most opposed to the tendencies of the higher Roman character. Yet even these may be looked upon as a kind of indirect testimony to the ancient vigour of the race. Catullus, in his very coarseness, betrays the grain of that strong nature, out of which the freedom and energy of the Republic had been developed. Ovid, in his libertinism, displays his vigorous and ardent vitality. The indifference of Tibullus and Propertius to the graver duties and interests of life, looks like a reaction from a standard of manliness too high to be permanently upheld.

Roman poetry, from this point of view, appears to be the old Greek art reappearing under new conditions: or rather the new art of the civilised world, after it had been leavened by Greek thought, taste, and education. The poetry of Rome was, however, a living power, after the creative energy of Greece had disappeared, so that, were it nothing more, that literature would still be valuable as the fruit of the later summer of antiquity. As in Homer, the earliest poet of the ancient world, there is a kind of promise of the great life that was to be; so, in the Augustan poets, there is a retrospective contemplation of the life, the religion, and the art of the past,—a gathering up of 'the long results of time.' But the Roman poets had also a strong vein of original character and feeling, and many phases of national and personal experience to reveal. They had to give a permanent expression to the idea of Rome, and to perpetuate the charm of the land and life of Italy. In their highest tones, they give utterance to the patriotic spirit, the dignified and commanding attributes, and the moral strength of the Imperial Republic. But other elements in their art proclaim their large inheritance of the receptive and emotional nature which, in ancient as in modern times, has characterised the Southern nations. As the patrician and plebeian orders were united in the imperial greatness of the commonwealth, as the energy of Rome and of the other Italian communities was welded together to form a mighty national life, so these apparently antagonistic elements combined to create the majesty and beauty of Roman poetry. Either of these elements would by itself have been unproductive and incomplete. The pure Roman temperament was too austere, too unsympathetic, too restrained and formal, to create and foster a luxuriant growth of poetry: the genial nature of the south, when dissociated from the control of manlier instincts and the elevation of higher ideals, tended to degenerate into licentious effeminacy, both in life and literature. The fragments of the earlier tragic and epic poets indicate the predominance of the gravity and the masculine strength inherent in the Roman temper, almost to the exclusion of the other element. Roman comedy, on the other hand, gave full play to Italian vivacity and sensuousness with only slight restraint from the higher instincts inherited from ancient discipline. In Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace, moral energy and dignity of character are most happily combined with susceptibility to the charm and the power of Nature. Catullus and the elegiac poets of the Augustan age abandoned themselves to the passionate enjoyment of their lives, under little restraint either from the pride or the virtue of their forefathers. Their faults and weaknesses are of a type apparently most opposed to the tendencies of the higher Roman character. Yet even these may be looked upon as a kind of indirect testimony to the ancient vigour of the race. Catullus, in his very coarseness, betrays the grain of that strong nature, out of which the freedom and energy of the Republic had been developed. Ovid, in his libertinism, displays his vigorous and ardent vitality. The indifference of Tibullus and Propertius to the graver duties and interests of life, looks like a reaction from a standard of manliness too high to be permanently upheld.

Among the most truly Roman characteristics of Latin poetry, national and patriotic sentiment is conspicuous. Among the poets of the Republic, Naevius and Lucilius were animated by political as well as national feeling. The chief work of Ennius was devoted to the commemoration of the ancient traditions, the august institutions, the advancing power, and the great character of the Roman State. In the works of the Augustan age, the fine episodes of the Georgics, the whole plan and many of the details of the Aeneid, show the spell exercised over the mind of Virgil by the ancient memories and the great destiny of his country, and bear witness to his deep love of Italy, and his pride in her natural beauty and her strong breed of men. Horace rises above his irony and epicureanism, to celebrate the imperial majesty of Rome, and to bear witness to the purity of the Sabine households, and to the virtues exhibited in the best types of Roman character. The Fasti of Ovid, also, is a national poem, owing its existence to the renewed interest imparted to the mythical and early story of Rome by the establishment of the Empire. The other elegiac poets, though they devote much less of their writings to the subject, yet betray a graver and deeper feeling in the rare passages in which they appeal to patriotic memories.

Roman poetry is pervaded also by a peculiar vein of imaginative emotion. There is no feeling so characteristic of the higher works of Roman genius as the sense of majesty. This feeling is called forth by the idea or outward manifestation of strength, stability, vastness, and order; by whatever impresses the imagination as the symbol of power and authority, whether in the aspect of Nature, or in the works, actions, and institutions of man. It is in their most serious and elevated writings, and chiefly in their epic and didactic poetry, that the Romans show their peculiar susceptibility to this grave and dignified emotion. Even the plain and rude diction of Ennius rises into rugged grandeur when he is moved by the vastness or massive strength of outward things, by 'the pomp and circumstance' of war, or by the august forms and symbols of government. The majestic tones of Lucretius seem to give a voice to the deep feeling of the order and immensity of the universe which possessed him. The sustained dignity of the Aeneid, and the splendour of some of its finest passages—such for instance as that which brings before us the solemn and magnificent spectacle of the fall of Troy—attest how the imagination of Virgil was moved to sympathy with the attributes of ancient and powerful sovereignty.

There are, however, as was said above, other feelings expressed in Roman poetry, more akin to modern sympathies. In no other branch of ancient literature is so much prominence given to the enjoyment of Nature, the passion of love, and the joys, sorrows, tastes, and pursuits of the individual. The gravity and austerity of the old Roman life, and the predominance of public over private interest in the best days of the Republic, tended to repress, rather than to foster, the birth of these new modes of emotion. They are like the flower of that more luxuriant but less stately Italian life which spread itself abroad under the shadow of Roman institutions, and came to a rapid maturity after her conquests had brought to Rome the accumulated treasures of the world, and left to her more fortunate sons ample leisure to enjoy them.

The poetry of the Augustan age and of that immediately preceding it is deeply pervaded by this new sentiment. Each of the great poets manifests the feeling in his own way. Lucretius, while contemplating the majesty of Nature's laws, and the immensity of her range, is at the same time powerfully moved to sympathy with her ever-varying life. He feels the charm of simply living in fine weather, and looking on the common aspects of the world,—such as the sea-shore, fresh pastures and full-flowing rivers, or the new loveliness of the early morning. He represents the punishment of the Danaides as a symbol of the incapacity of the human spirit to enjoy the natural charm of the recurring seasons of the year. Catullus, too, although his active social temper did not respond to the spell which Nature exercised over the contemplative and pensive spirits of Lucretius and Virgil, has many fine images from the outward world in his poems. He delights in comparing the grace and the passion of youth with the bloom of flowers and the stateliness of trees; he associates the beauty of Sirmio with his bright picture of the happiness of home; he feels the return of the genial breezes of spring as enhancing his delight in leaving the dull plains of Phrygia, and in hastening to visit the famous cities of Asia. Virgil's early art was characterised by his friend and brother poet in the lines,—

The passion of love was a favourite theme both of the early lyrical poets of Greece, and of the courtly writers of Alexandria; but the works of the former have reached us only in inconsiderable fragments; and the latter, with the exception of Theocritus, are much inferior to the Roman poets who made them their models. It is in Latin literature that we are brought most near to the power of this passion in the ancient world. Few among the poets who have recorded their own experience of love, in any age, have expressed a feeling so true or so intense as Catullus. He has all the ardent, self-forgetful devotion, if he wants the chivalry and purity, of modern sentiment. He has painted the love of others also with grateful fidelity. He has shown the finest sense in discerning, and the finest power in delineating the charm of youthful passion, when first awakening into life, or first unfolding into true affection. It is by his delineation of the agony of Dido that Virgil has imparted the chief personal interest to the story of the Aeneid; and the love which finds a voice in his pastoral poems is as ideal as that which has found its truest voice in some of our great modern poets. Horace is the poet of the lighter and gayer moods of the passion. Without ever becoming a slave to it, he experienced enough of its pains and pleasures to enable him to paint the fascination or the waywardness of a mistress with the equable feeling of an epicurean, but, at the same time, with the refined observation of a poet. The elegiac poets of the Augustan age, making pleasure the chief pursuit of their lives, have made the more sensuous phases of this passion the predominant motive of their poetry. Yet the tenderness of Tibullus is as genuine as that of Virgil; there is ardent emotion expressed by Propertius for his living mistress, and deep feeling in the lines in which he recalls her memory after death; the license of Ovid is, if not redeemed, at least relieved, by his buoyant wit and his brilliant fancy.

It is a common remark that the very greatest poets are those about whose personal characteristics least is known. It is impossible in their case to determine how far they have expressed their real sympathies or convictions. They rise above the prejudices of their country and the accidents of their time, and can see the good and evil inseparably mixed in all human action. No criticism can throw any trustworthy light on the personal position, the pursuits and aims, the outward and inward experience of Homer. It cannot even be determined with certainty how much of the poetry which bears his name is the creation of one, seemingly, inexhaustible genius; and how much is the 'divine voice' of earlier singers still 'floating around him.' Such inquiries are ever attracting and ever baffling a high curiosity. They leave the mind perplexed with the doubt whether it is discerning, in the far distance, the outline of solid mountain-land, or only the transient shapes of the clouds. Hesiod, on the other hand, a poet of perhaps equal antiquity, but of an infinitely lower order of genius, has left his own likeness graphically delineated on his remains. There is much to interest a reader in the old didactic poem, 'The Works and Days,' but it is not the interest of studying a work of art or of creative genius. The charm of the book consists partly in its power of calling up the ideas of a remote antiquity and of human life in its most elemental conditions; partly in the distinct impression which it bears of a character of an antique and primitive and yet not unfamiliar type;—a character of deep natural piety and righteousness, but with a quaint intermixture of other qualities;—homespun sagacity and worldly wisdom; genuine thrift, and horror of idleness, of war, of seafaring enterprise;—sardonic dislike of the airs and vices of women, and a grim discontent with his own condition, and with the poor soil which it was his lot to till⁶. It is through his want of those gifts of genius which have made Homer immortal as a poet, and a mere name as a man, that Hesiod has left so distinct a picture of himself to the latest times. In like manner Roman poetry, while never rising to the heights of purely creative and impersonal genius, from this very defect, is a truer revelation of the poets themselves. The Aeneid supplies ample materials for understanding the affections and convictions of Virgil. Lucretius makes his personal presence felt through the whole march of his argument, and supports every position of his system not with his logic only, but with the whole force of his nature. The fragments of Ennius and of Lucilius afford ample evidence by which we may judge what kind of men they were.

II. The age of Lucretius and Catullus, whose active poetical career belongs to the last age of the Republic, the decennium before the outbreak of the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey:

The chief interest of Roman poetry, considered as the work of men of natural genius and cultivated taste, and as the expression of great national ideas or of individual thought and impulse, ceases with the end of the Augustan age. Under the continued pressure of the Empire, true poetical inspiration and pure feeling for art were lost. One certain test of this decay is the absence of musical power and sweetness from the verse of the later poets. Yet some of the poets of the Empire have their own peculiar value. Lucan and Juvenal recall in their vigorous rhetoric the masculine tone and fervid feeling of the old Roman character, liberalised by the progress of thought and education. In the Satires of Persius, there is an atmosphere of purer morality than in any earlier Roman writer, with the exception of Cicero. There is much vigour, sense, wit, and a keen appreciation of life, intermingled with the coarseness of Martial. Yet it is owing rather to their rhetorical or their intellectual ability and to their historical interest, than to their poetical genius, that these writers are still read and admired. If good taste, culture, and devotion to the Muses could make a man a poet in an unpoetical age, Statius would be counted among the great poets of Rome. The artificial epics of Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus may be occasionally read in the interests of learning: but it is hardly probable that they will, or desirable that they should, ever be permanently restored from the neglect and oblivion into which they have long been sinking.

But it has been maintained, in recent times, that this was but the second birth of Roman poetry, and that a golden age of native minstrelsy had preceded this historical development of literature. The most distinguished supporters of this theory were Niebuhr and Macaulay. In the preface to his Lays of Rome, Macaulay says that 'this early literature abounded with metrical romances, such as are found in every country where there is much curiosity and intelligence, but little reading and writing.'

Niebuhr

From the extreme antiquity of these ceremonial chants it may be inferred that metrical expression among the Romans, as among the Greeks and other ancient nations, owed its origin to a primitive religious worship. But while the early Greek hymns or chants in honour of the Gods soon assumed the forms of pleasant tales of human adventure, or tragic tales of human suffering, the Roman hymns retained their formal and ritual character unchanged among all the changes of creed and language. In the lines just quoted there is no trace of creative fancy, nor any germ of devotional feeling, which might have matured into lyrical or contemplative poetry. They sound like the words of a rude incantation. They are the obscure memorial of a primitive, agricultural people, living in a blind sense of dependence on their gods, and restrained by a superstitious formalism from all activity of thought or fancy. Such compositions cannot be attributed to the inspiration or skill of any early poet, but seem to have been copied from the uncouth and spontaneous shouts of a simple, unsophisticated priesthood, engaged in a rude ceremonial dance. If these hymns stand in any relation to Latin literature, they may perhaps be regarded as springing from the same vein of public sentiment, as called forth the hymn composed by Livius Andronicus during the Second Punic War, and as rude precursors of those composed by Catullus and Horace, and chanted by a chorus of youths and maidens in honour of the protecting Deities of Rome.

suggest no more idea of poetical inspiration than the occasional notices, in Latin authors, of the oracles of the Sibylline books. The language of prophecy naturally assumes a metrical or rhythmical form, partly as an aid to the memory, partly, perhaps, as a means of giving to the words uttered the effect of a more solemn intonation. In Greece, the oracles of the Delphian priestess, and the predictions of soothsayers, collected in books or circulating orally among the people, were expressed in hexameter verse and in the traditional diction of epic poetry; but they were never ranked under any form of poetic art. The verses of the Vates, so far as any inference can be formed as to their nature, appear to have been products and proofs of unimaginative superstition or imposture, rather than of any imaginative inspiration among the early inhabitants of Latium.

These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum¹¹, were the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which also was familiar to the Romans before they became acquainted with Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more probable etymology¹² of the word satura connects it in origin with the satura lanx, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian farsa¹³, and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing, differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy¹⁴ to the representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous character; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined with music (saturas impletas modis), even after the introduction of the regular drama.

5. But it was not from any of these sources that Niebuhr supposed the poetical character of early Roman history to be derived. Nor is there any analogy between the religious hymns, or the Fescennine verses of Italy, and the modern ballad. But there is evidence of the existence, at one time, of other metrical compositions of which scarcely anything is definitely ascertained, except that they were sung at banquets, to the accompaniment of the flute, in celebration of the praises of great men. There is no direct evidence of the time when these compositions, some of which were believed by Niebuhr to have attained the dimensions of Epic poems, existed, or when they fell into disuse. Cato, as quoted by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, and in the Brutus¹⁶, is our earliest authority on the subject. His testimony is to the effect that many generations before his time, the guests at banquets were in the habit of singing, in succession, the praises of great men, to the music of the flute. Cicero, in the Brutus, expresses a wish that these songs still existed in his own day; 'utinam exstarent illa carmina, quae multis saeculis ante suam aetatem in epulis esse cantitata a singulis convivis de clarorum virorum laudibus in Originibus scriptum reliquit Cato.' Varro again is quoted, to the effect that boys used to be present at banquets, for the purpose of singing 'ancient poems,' celebrating the praises of their ancestors. Valerius Maximus mentions 'that the older men used at banquets to celebrate in song the illustrious deeds of their ancestors, in order to stimulate the youth to imitate them.' Passages are quoted also from Horace, from Dionysius, and from Tacitus, implying a belief in the ancient existence of these compositions.

The fact, however, remains, that the Romans did possess, in early times, some kind of native minstrelsy, in which they honoured the memory and the exploits of their great men. And this impulse of hero-worship became in later times an important factor in their epic poetry. But is there any reason to suppose that these compositions were of the nature and importance assigned to them by Niebuhr, and had any value in respect of invention and execution? It is difficult to believe that such a native force of feeling and imagination, pouring itself forth in stirring ballads and continuous epic poems, could have been frozen so near its source; or that a rich, popular poetry, not scattered through thinly-peopled districts, but the possession of a great commonwealth—one most tenacious of every national memorial—could have entirely disappeared, under any foreign influence, in the course of one or two generations. But even on the supposition that a great national poetry might have passed from the memory of men—as, possibly, the poems existing before the time of Homer may have been lost or merged in the greater glories of the Iliad and the Odyssey—this early poetry could not have perished without leaving permanent influence on the Roman language. The growth of poetical language necessarily accompanies the growth of poetical feeling and inspiration. The sensuous, passionate, and musical force by which a language is first moulded into poetry is transmitted from one generation of poets to another. The language of Homer, by its natural and musical flow, by its accumulated wealth of meaning, by the use of traditional epithets and modes of expression, that penetrate far back into the belief, the feelings, and the life of an earlier time, implies the existence of a long line of poets who preceded him. On the other hand, the diction of the fragments of Ennius, in its strength and in its rudeness, is evidently, in great measure, the creation of his own time and his own mind. He has no true discernment of the characteristic difference between the language of prose and of poetry. The materials of his art had not been smoothed and polished by any long, continuous stream of national melody, but were rough-hewn and adapted by his own energy to the rugged structure of his poem.

The commemorative odes appear to have been recited or sung at banquets, not by poets or rhapsodists, but by boys or guests. There is one notice, indeed, of a class of men who practised the profession of minstrelsy. This passage, which is quoted by Aulus Gellius from the writings of Cato, implies the very lowest estimation of the position and character of the poet, and points more naturally to the composers of the libellous verses forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables, than to the authors of heroic and national lays:—'Poetry was not held in honour; if anyone devoted himself to it, or went about to banquets, he was called a vagabond¹⁷.'

It cannot, indeed, be disputed that although the legendary tales of Roman history may have drawn more of their colour from life than from imagination, yet there is no criterion by which the amount of fact contained in them can be separated from the other elements of which they were composed. Oral tradition among the Romans, as among other nations, was founded on impressions originally received without any careful sifting of evidence; and these first impressions would naturally be modified in accordance with the feelings and opinions of each generation, through which they were transmitted. Aetiological myths, or the attempt to explain some institution or memorial by some concrete fact, and the systematic reconstruction of forgotten events, have also entered largely into the composition of Roman history. But these admissions do not lead to the conclusion that the art or fancy of any class of early poets was added to the unconscious operation of popular feeling in moulding the impressive tales of early heroism, partly out of the memory of real events and personages, partly out of the ideal of character, latent in the national mind. It has been remarked by Sir G. C. Lewis that many even of the Greek myths, abounding 'in striking, pathetic, and interesting events,' existed as prose legends, and were handed down in the common speech of the people. In like manner, such tales as those of Lucretia and Virginia, of Horatius and the Fabii, of Cincinnatus, Coriolanus, and Camillus, which stand out prominently in the twilight of Roman history, may have been preserved in fama vulgaris, or among the family traditions of the great houses, till they were gathered into the poem of Ennius and the prose narratives of the early annalists¹⁸. In so far as they are shaped or coloured by imagination, they do not bear traces of the conscious art of a poet, but rather of an unconscious conformity to the national ideal of character. The most impressive of these legendary stories illustrate the primitive virtues of the Roman character, such as chastity, frugality, fortitude, and self-devotion; or the national characteristics of patrician pride and a stern exercise of parental authority. There is certainly no internal evidence that any of them originated in a pure poetic impulse, or gave birth to any work of poetic art deserving a permanent existence in literature.

The analogy of other nations might suggest the inference that a race which in its maturity produced a genuine poetic literature must, in the early stages of its history, have given some proof of poetic inspiration. It is natural to associate the idea of poetry with youth both in nations and individuals. Yet the evidence of their language, of their religion, and of their customs, leads to the conclusion that the Romans, while prematurely great in action and government, were, in the earlier stages of their national life, little moved by any kind of poetical imagination. The state of religious feeling or belief which gives birth to or co-exists with primitive poetry has left no trace of itself upon the early Roman annals. It is generally found that a fanciful mythology, of a bright, gloomy, or grotesque character, in accordance with the outward circumstances and latent spirit or humour of the particular race among whom it originates, precedes and for a time accompanies the poetry of romantic action. The creative faculty produces strange forms and conditions of supernatural life out of its own mysterious sympathy with Nature, before it learns to invent tales of heroic action and of tragic calamity out of its sympathy with human energy and passion, and its interest in marking the course of destiny, and the vicissitudes of life. The development of the Roman religion betrays the absence, or at least the weaker influence of that imaginative power which shaped the great mythologies of different races out of the primeval worship of nature. The later element introduced into Roman religion was due not to imagination but to reflection. The worship of Fides, Concordia, Pudicitia, and the like, marks a great progress from the early adoration of the sun, the earth, the vault of heaven, and the productive power of nature; but it is a progress in understanding and moral consciousness, not in poetical feeling nor imaginative power. It shows that Roman civilisation advanced without this vivifying influence,—that the mind of the race early reached the maturity of manhood, without passing through the dreams of childhood or the buoyant fancies of youth.

The circumstances of the Romans, in early times, were also different from those by which the growth of a romantic poetry has usually been accompanied. Though, like all races born to a great destiny, they had much latent imaginative ardour of feeling, this was employed by them, unconsciously, in elevating and purifying the ideal of the State and the family, as actually realised in experience. Their orderly organisation,—the early establishment of their civic forms,—the strict discipline of family life among them,—the formal and ceremonial character of their national religion,—and their strong interest in practical affairs,—were not calculated either to kindle the glow of individual genius, or to dispose the mass of the people to listen to the charm of musical verse. The wars of the young Republic, carried on by a well-trained militia, for the acquisition of new territory, formed the character to solid strength and steady discipline, but could not act upon the fancy in the same way as the distant enterprise, the long struggles for national independence, or the daring forays, which have thrown the light of romance around the warlike youth of other races. The tillage of the soil, in which the brief intervals between their wars were passed, was a tame and monotonous pursuit compared with the maritime adventure which awoke the energies of Greece, or with the wild and lonely, half-pastoral, half-marauding life, out of which a true ballad poetry arose in modern times. Some traces of a wilder life, or some faint memories of their Sabine forefathers, may be dimly discerned in the earliest traditions of the Roman people; but their youth was essentially practical,—great and strong in the virtues of temperance, gravity, fortitude, reverence for law and the majesty of the State, combined with a strong love of liberty and sturdy resistance to wrong. These qualities are the foundations of a powerful and orderly State, not the root or the sap by which a great national poetry is nourished¹⁹.

Two circumstances, however, must in the meantime have prepared the minds of the Romans for the reception of the new literature. Sicily had been the chief battle-field of the contending powers. In their intercourse with the Sicilian Greeks, the Romans had great facilities for becoming acquainted with the Greek language, and frequent opportunities of being present at dramatic representations. There was a theatre in every important town of Sicily, as may be seen in the ruins still remaining on the sites of Segesta, Syracuse, Tauromenium, and Catana; and the enjoyment of the drama entered largely into the life of the Sicilian, as it had into that of the Italian Greeks. Many Greeks also had been brought to Rome as slaves after the capture of Tarentum, and were employed in educating the young among the higher classes. Thus many Roman citizens were prepared, by their circumstances and education, to take interest in the legends and in the dramatic form of literature introduced from Greece; while the previous existence of the saturae, and other scenic exhibitions at Rome, tended to make the new comic drama at least acceptable to the mass of the population.

Yet this long period, in which poetry, with so much difficulty and such scanty resources, struggled into existence at Rome, is connected with the age of Cicero by an unbroken line of literary continuity. Naevius, the younger contemporary of Livius, and the first native poet, was actively engaged in the composition of his poems till the time of his death; about which period his greater successor first appeared at Rome. For about thirty years, Ennius shone alone in epic and tragic poetry. The poetic successor of Ennius was his nephew, Pacuvius. He, in the later years of his life, lived in friendly intercourse with his younger rival Accius, who, again, in his old age, had frequently conversed with Cicero⁴. The torch, which was first lighted by Livius Andronicus from the decaying fires of Greece, was thus handed down by these few men, through this long period, until it was extinguished during the stormy times which fell in the youth of the great orator and prose writer of the Republic.

No complete work of any of these poets has been preserved to modern times. Our knowledge of the epic, tragic, and satiric poetry of this long period is derived partly from ancient testimony, but chiefly from the examination of numerous fragments. Most of these have been preserved, not by critics on account of their beauty and worth, but by grammarians on account of the obsolete words and forms of speech contained in them,—a fact, which probably leads us to attribute to the earlier literature a more abnormal and ruder style than that which really belonged to it. A few of the longest and most interesting fragments have come down in the works of the admirers of those ancient poets, especially of Cicero and Aulus Gellius. The notion that can be formed of the early Roman literature must thus, of necessity, be incomplete. Yet these fragments are sufficient to produce a consistent impression of certain prevailing characteristics of thought and sentiment. Many of them are valuable from their own intrinsic worth; others again from the grave associations connected with their antiquity, and from the authentic evidence they afford of the moral and intellectual qualities, the prevailing ideas and sympathies of the strongest race of the ancient world, about, or shortly after, the time when they attained the acme of their moral and political greatness.

In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. This work long retained its place as a school-book, and is spoken of by Horace as forming part of his own early lessons under the rod of Orbilius⁶. One or two lines of the translation still remain, and exemplify its rough and prosaic diction, and the extreme irregularity of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey⁷,

In the year 206 b.c. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M. Metellus Praetor Urbanus, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested¹⁰, with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed. The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circumstance to which Plautus¹¹ alludes in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in b.c. 204¹², though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date¹³. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero¹⁴, that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between b.c. 261 and b.c. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

The nobles, whose enmity he provoked, were probably attacked by him in his comedies. One passage is quoted by Aulus Gellius, in which a failing of the great Scipio is exposed¹⁹. Other fragments are found indicative of his freedom of speech and bold independence of character:—

Whatever may have been the origin of the belief in the connexion of Rome with Troy, it certainly prevailed before the poem of Naevius was composed, as at the beginning of the First Punic War the inhabitants of Egesta opened their gates to Rome, in acknowledgment of their common descent from Troy. But the story of the old connexion of Aeneas and Dido, symbolising the former league and the later enmity between Romans and Carthaginians, most probably first assumed shape in the time of the Punic Wars. The belief, as shadowed forth in Naevius, that the triumph of Rome had been decreed from of old by Jupiter, and promised to the mythical ancestress of Aeneas, proves that the Romans were possessed already with the idea of their national destiny. How much of the tale of Aeneas and Dido is due to the imagination of Naevius it is impossible to say; but his treatment of the mythical part of his story,—his introduction of the storm, the complaint of Venus, etc.,—merits the praise of happy and suggestive invention, and of a real adaptation to his main subject.

The fragments of Ennius will repay a more minute examination than those of any author belonging to the first period of Roman literature. They are of more intrinsic value, and they throw more light on the spirit of the age in which they were written. It was to him, not to Naevius or to Plautus, that the Romans looked as the father of their literature. He did more than any other man to make the Roman language a vehicle of elevated feeling, by forcing it to conform to the metrical conditions of Greek poetry; and he was the first fully to elicit the deeper veins of sentiment latent in the national imagination. The versatility of his powers, his large acquaintance with Greek literature, his sympathy with the practical interests of his time, the serious purpose and the intellectual vigour with which he carried out his work, enabled him to be in letters, what Scipio was in action, the most vital representative of his epoch. It has happened too that the fragments from his writings and the testimonies concerning him are more expressive and characteristic than in the case of any other among the early writers. There are none of his contemporaries, playing their part in war or politics, and not many among the writers of later times, of whom we can form so distinct an image.

He lived on terms of intimacy with influential members of the noblest families in Rome, and became the familiar friend of the great Scipio. When he died at the age of seventy, his bust was believed to be placed in the tomb of the Scipios, between those of the conqueror of Hannibal and of the conqueror of Antiochus. He died in the year b.c. 169. The most famous of his works were his Tragedies and the Annals, a long historical poem written in eighteen books. But, in addition to these, he composed several miscellaneous works, of which only very scanty fragments have been preserved.

This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the better class of families in his native district; and the consciousness of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies. He bore witness to his nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius² that 'in the possession of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he possessed three hearts.' Of these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire for the purposes of literature or of social intercourse, was most likely to have been his inherited tongue. Rudiae, from its Italian nationality, from its neighbourhood to the cities of Magna Graecia, and from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-place, not only of three different languages,—that of common life, that of culture and education, that of military service—but of the three different spirits or tendencies which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas³—referred to in the expression of Ovid,—

the poet owed the 'Italian heart,' the virtue of a race still uncorrupted and unsophisticated, the buoyant energy and freshness of feeling which enabled him to apprehend all the novelty and the greatness of the momentous age through which he lived. The South of Italy afforded, at this time, means of education, which were denied to Rome or Latium; and the peace enjoyed by his native district for the first twenty years of his life granted to Ennius leisure to avail himself of these means, which he could not have enjoyed had he been born a few years later. In the short account of his life in Jerome's continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, it is stated that he was born at Tarentum. Though this is clearly an error, it seems probable that the poet may have spent the years of his education there. Though Tarentum, since its capture by the Romans, had lost its political importance, it still continued to be a centre of Greek culture and of social pleasure. Dramatic representations had been especially popular among a people who had drifted far away 'ex Spartana dura illa et horrida disciplina⁴' of their ancestors. From the knowledge of the Attic tragedians displayed by Ennius in his later career it is likely that he had witnessed representations of their works on a Greek stage, before he began, in middle life, to direct his own genius to dramatic composition. The knowledge and admiration of Homer which stimulated him to the composition of his greatest work, might have been acquired in any centre of Greek culture. But the intellectual interests indicated in some of his miscellaneous writings have a kind of local character, distinguishing them alike from the older philosophies of Athens and from the more recent science of Alexandria. His acceptance of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the physical fancies expressed in some of the fragments of the Epicharmus probably came to him from the teaching of the Neo-Pythagoreans, who were widely spread among the Greeks of Southern Italy. The rationalistic speculations of Euhemerus, which appear in strange union with the 'somnia Pythagorea' of the Annals, were of Sicilian origin. The gastronomic treatise, which Ennius afterwards translated into Latin, was the work of Archestratus of Gela. The class of persons for whom such a work would originally be written was likely to be found among the luxurious livers of Sicily and Magna Graecia. Thus while the serious poetry of Ennius was inspired by the older and nobler works of Greek genius, the influence of a more vulgar and prosaic class of teachers, transmitted by him to Roman thought and literature, was probably derived from the place of his early education.

Of the share which Ennius had in the war we know only that he served in Sardinia with the rank of centurion. That he had become a man of some note in that capacity is suggested by the fact that he attracted the attention of the Roman quaestor Cato, and accompanied him to Rome. A certain dramatic interest attaches to this first meeting of the typical representative of Roman manners and traditions and great enemy of foreign innovations, with the man by whom, more than by any one else, the mind of Rome was enlarged and liberalised, and many of her most cherished convictions were most seriously undermined. This actual service in a great war left its impress on the work done by Ennius. Fragments both of his tragedies and his Annals prove how thoroughly he understood and appreciated the best qualities of the soldierly character. This fellowship in hardship and danger fitted him to become the national poet of a race of soldiers. He has drawn from his own observation an image of the fortitude and discipline of the Roman armies, and of the patriotic devotion and resolution of the men by whom these armies were led. There is a strong realism in the expression of martial sentiment in Ennius, marking him out as a man familiar with the life of the camp and the battle-field, and quite distinct from the idealising enthusiasm of Livy and Virgil⁷.

Ennius entered on his career as a writer at a time when the long strain of a great struggle was giving place to the confidence and security of a great triumph. He lived for thirty-five years longer, witnessing the rapid advance of Roman conquest in Greece and Asia, and over the barbarous tribes of the West. He died one year before the crowning victory of Pydna. During all his later life his sanguine spirit and patriotic enthusiasm were buoyed up by the success of the Roman and Italian arms abroad; while his political sympathies were in thorough accord with the dominant influences in the government of the State. At no other period of Roman history was the ascendency of the Senate and of the great houses more undisputed, or, on the whole, more wisely and ably exercised. In the lists of those who successively fill the great curule magistracies, we find almost exclusively the names of members of the old patrician or of the more recent plebeian nobility. At no other period does the tribunician opposition to the senatorian direction of affairs and to the authority of the magistrate appear weaker or more intermittent. It was not till a generation after the death of Ennius that the moral corruption and political and social disorganisation—the ultimate results of the great military successes gained under the absolute ascendency of the Senate,—became fully manifest. It is difficult to say how far the aristocratic and antipopular bias of all Roman literature may have been determined by the political conditions of the time in which that literature received the most powerful impulse, and by the personal relations and peculiar stamp of character of the man by whom that impulse was given.

The more frequent and closer contact with the mind of Greece not only refined the taste and enlarged the intelligence of those capable of feeling its influence, but produced at the same time a change in men's deepest convictions. Though the definite tenets of Stoicism and Epicureanism did not acquire ascendency till a later time, the dissolving force of Greek speculative thought and Greek views of life forced its way into Rome through various channels,—especially through the adaptations of the tragedies of Euripides and of the comedy of Menander. All these tendencies of the time acted on Ennius, stimulating his mental activity in various directions. His natural temperament and his acquired culture brought him into harmony with the spirit of his age without raising him too much above it. A poet of more delicacy of taste and perfection of execution would have been unintelligible to his contemporaries. A more systematic thinker would have been out of harmony with the conditions of life by which he was surrounded. Breadth, vigour, a spirit clinging to what was most vital in the old state of things, and yet readily adapting itself to what was new, were the qualities needed to establish a literature true to the genius of Rome in the second century b.c., and containing the promise of the more perfect accomplishment of a later age. And these qualities belonged to Ennius by natural gifts and the experience and culture of his earlier years.

In none of his fragments is there any trace of that melancholy after-thought which pervades the poetry of his greatest successors, Lucretius and Virgil. From the humorous exaggeration of Horace,

There are many touches in this picture, which suggest the kind of intimacy in which Ennius may have lived with Fulvius Nobilior when accompanying him in his Aetolian campaign, or his bearing when taking part in the light or serious talk of the Scipios. The learning and power of speech, the knowledge of antiquity and of the manners of the day, attributed to this friend of Servilius, were gifts which we may attribute to the poet both on ancient testimony and on the evidence afforded by the fragments of his writings. The good sense, tact, and knowledge of the world, the cheerfulness in life and conversation, the honour and integrity of character represented in the same passage, are among the personal qualities which, in all ages, form a bond of union between men eminent in great practical affairs and men eminent in literature. Such were the qualities which, according to his own account, recommended Horace to the intimate friendship of Maecenas. Many expressive fragments from the lost poetry of Ennius give assurance that he was a man in whom learning and the ardent temperament of genius were happily united with the worth and sense described in this nameless portrait.

The elder Africanus may have been attracted to Ennius not only by his passion for Greek culture, but by a certain community of nature. The mystical enthusiasm, the high self-confidence, the direct simplicity combined with majesty of character, impressed on the language of the poet were equally impressed on the action and bearing of the soldier. The feeling which Ennius in his turn entertained for Scipio was one of enthusiastic admiration. While paying due honour to the merits and services of other famous men, even of such as Cato and Fabius, who were most opposed to his idol, of Scipio he said that Homer alone could worthily have uttered his praises¹⁴.

Some of the greatest of modern poets, such as Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth, have manifested a feeling similar to that expressed by Ennius and Lucretius. Although appearing in strange contrast with the self-suppression of the highest creative art (as seen in Homer, in Sophocles, and in Shakspeare), this proud self-confidence, 'disdainful of help or hindrance,' is the usual accompaniment of an intense nature and of a genius exercised with some serious moral, religious, or political purpose. The least pleasing side of the feeling, even in men of generous nature, is the scorn,—not of envy, but of imperfect sympathy,—which they are apt to entertain towards rival genius or antagonistic convictions. Something of this spirit appears in the disparaging allusion of Ennius to his predecessor Naevius:—

and explained to him the whole plan of nature. These dreams of the imagination may not have been without effect in enabling Ennius to escape from the gloom which 'eclipsed the brightness of the world' to Lucretius. The light in which the world appeared to the older poet was that of common sense strangely blended with imaginative mysticism. He thus seems to stand midway between the spiritual aspirations of Empedocles and the negation of Lucretius. Born in the vigorous prime of Italian civilisation he came into the inheritance of the bold fancies of the earlier Greeks and of the dull rationalism of their later speculation. His ideas on what transcends experience appear thus to have been without the unity arising from an unreflecting acceptance of tradition, or from the basis of philosophical consistency.

He wrote also a philosophical poem in trochaic septenarian verse, called Epicharmus, founded on writings attributed to the old Sicilian poet, which appear to have resolved the gods of the Greek mythology into natural substances²⁵. A few slight fragments have been preserved from this poem. They speak of the four elements or principles of the universe as 'water, earth, air, the sun'; of 'the blending of heat with cold, dryness with moisture'; of 'the earth bearing and supporting all nations and receiving them again back into herself.' The following is the longest fragment from the poem:—

Further satire, in the hands of its chief masters, aimed at practical moral teaching, not only by precept, ridicule, and invective, and by portraiture of individuals and of types, but also by the use of anecdotes and fables. This last mode of inculcating homely lessons on the conduct of life is common in Horace. It appears, however, to have been first used by Ennius. Aulus Gellius mentions that Aesop's fable of the field-lark and the husbandman 'is very skilfully and gracefully told by Ennius in his satires'; and he quotes the advice appended to the fable, 'Never to expect your friends to do for you what you can do for yourself':

We see in this passage how the passionate character of the situation is enhanced by the mysterious power attributed to Cassandra. A similar excitement of feeling, produced by supernatural terror, appears in a fragment of the Alcmaeon, quoted also by Cicero, and of another the motive is the awe associated with the dim and pale realms of the dead³⁸. In these and similar passages we note the power of expressing the varying moods of passion by varied effects of metre. Horace characterises his ordinary verse in the line,

Neither in general design nor in detail could the Annals be regarded as a pure epic poem. Like the Aeneid, which connects the mythical story of Aeneas with the glories of the Julian line and the great destiny of Rome, the poem of Ennius treated of fabulous tradition, of historical fact, and of great contemporary events; but it did not, like the Aeneid, unite these varied materials in the representation of the fortunes of one individual hero. The action of the poem, instead of being limited to a few days or months, extended over many generations. Nor could the poem terminate with any critical catastrophe, as its object was to unfold the continuous, still advancing progress of the State. From the name it might be inferred that the Annals must have been more like a metrical chronicle than like an epic poem; yet, as being inspired and pervaded by a grand and vital idea, the work was elevated above the level of matter of fact into the region of poetry. The idea of a high destiny, unfolding itself under the old kingly dynasty and the long line of consuls,—through the successive wars with the Italian races, with Pyrrhus and the Carthaginians,—rapidly advancing, though not fully accomplished in the age when the poem was written,—gave unity of plan and consistency of form to its rude and colossal structure. The word Annales, as applied to Roman story, suggests something more than the mere record of events in regular annual sequence. It involves also the idea of unbroken continuity. In the Roman Republic, the unity and vital action of the State were maintained and manifested by the delegation of the functions of government on magistrates appointed from year to year, just as the life of a monarchical state is maintained and manifested in its line of kings. In the spirit animating the work,—in the conception of a past history, stretching back in unbroken grandeur until it is lost in fable, but yet vitally linked to the interests of the present time,—the Annals of Ennius may be compared with the dramas in which Shakspeare has represented the national life of England—in all its greatness and vicissitudes—with the glory and splendour as well as the dark and tragic colours with which that story is inwoven.

There must have been many drawbacks to the popularity of the poem in a more critical time, when strong enthusiasm and forcible conception fail to interest, unless they are combined with the harmonious execution of a work of art. Even from the extant fragments the rude proportions and the unwieldy mass of the original work may be inferred. It is still possible to note the bare, annalistic style of many passages which sink below the level of dignified prose, the barbarisms of taste shown by a fondness for alliterative lines and plays upon words, the more common faults of careless haste and redundance of expression, and of a rugged and irregular cadence. There must have been some peculiar excellences or adaptation to the Roman taste, through which, in spite of these defects, the popularity of the poem was sustained far into the times of the Empire. This late popularity may have been due in part to antiquarian zeal or affectation, but some degree of it, as well as the favour of the age in which the poem was written, must have been founded on more substantial grounds. Apart from other literary interest, this poem first drew forth and established, for the contemplation of after times, the ideal latent in the national mind. The patriotic tones of Virgil have the same kind of ring as these in the older poet—

The manifest defects, as well as the peculiar power of the poem, show how widely it departed from the standard of the Greek epic which it professed to imitate. Its vast dimensions and solid structure are proofs of that capacity of long labour and concentrated interest on one great object, which was the secret of Roman success in other spheres of action. So large a mass of materials held in union only by a pervading national enthusiasm would have been utterly repugnant to Greek taste, intolerant above all things of monotony, and most exacting in its demands of artistic unity and completeness. The fragments of the poem give no idea of careful finish; they produce the impression of massiveness and energy, strength and uniformity of structure, unaccompanied by beauty, grace, or symmetry. The creation of an untutored age may be recognised in the rudeness of design,—of a Roman mind in the national spirit, the colossal proportions, and the strong workmanship of the poem.

The originality of the Roman epic will be still more apparent if we compare the fragments of the Annals, in some points of detail, with the complete works of the poet, whom Ennius regarded as his prototype. There was, in the first place, a marked difference between Homer and the Roman poet in their modes of representing human life and character. The personages of the Iliad and of the Odyssey are living and forcible types of individual character. In Achilles, in Hector, and in Odysseus,—in Helen, Andromache, and Nausicaa, we recognise embodiments the most real, yet the most transcendent, of the grandeur, the heroism, the courage, and strong affection of manhood, and of the grace, the gentleness, and the sweet vivacity of woman. The work of Ennius, on the other hand, instead of presenting varied types of human nature, appears to have unfolded a long gallery of national portraits. The fragments of the poem still afford glimpses of the 'good Ancus'; 'of the man of the great heart, the wise Aelius Sextus'; 'of the sweet speaking orator,' Cethegus, 'the marrow of persuasion.' The stamp of magnanimous fortitude is impressed on the fragmentary words of Appius Claudius Caecus; and sagacity and resolution are depicted in the lines which have handed down the fame of Fabius Maximus. This idea of the poem, as unfolding the heroes of Roman story in regular series, may be gathered also from the language of Cicero: 'Cato, the ancestor of our present Cato, is extolled by him to the skies; the honour of the Roman people is thereby enhanced: finally all those Maximi, Fulvii, Marcelli, are celebrated with a glory in which we all participate⁴¹.' This portraiture of the kings and heroes of the early time, of the orators, soldiers, and statesmen of the Republic, could not have exhibited the variety, the energy, the passion, and all the complex human attributes of Homer's personages. The men who stand prominently out in the annals of Rome were of a more uniform type. They were men of one common aim,—the advancement of Rome; animated with one sentiment,—devotion to the State. All that was purely personal in them seems merged in the traditional pictures which express only the fortitude, dignity, and sagacity of the Republic.

It may be remarked, as a strong proof of the hold which their mythology had on the minds of the ancients, that men so sincere as Ennius and Lucretius, while openly expressing opposition to that system of religious belief, cannot separate themselves from its influence and associations in their poetry. But it is not to be supposed that Ennius, in the passages just referred to, was merely using an artificial machinery to which he attached no meaning. In this representation of the councils of the gods, he embodies that faith in the Roman destiny, which was at the root of the most serious convictions of the Romans, in the most sceptical as well as the most believing ages of their history. This, too, is the real belief, which gives meaning to the supernatural agency in the Aeneid. Aeneas is an instrument in the hands of Fate; Jupiter merely foreknows and pronounces its decrees; the parts assigned to Juno and Venus, in thwarting and advancing these decrees, seem to be an artistic addition to this original conception, suggested perhaps as much by the experience of female influence and intrigue in the poet's own age as by the memories of the Iliad.

Other illustrations are taken from circumstances likely to have been familiar to the men of his own time, but without any apparent intention of adding poetical beauty to the object he is representing. Thus the silent expectation with which the assembled people watch the rival auspices of Romulus and Remus is brought before the mind by an illustration suggested by, and suggestive of, the passionate eagerness with which the public games were witnessed by the Romans of his own age:—

The diction also of the Annals is generally fresh and forcible, sometimes vividly imaginative. But perhaps the most admirable quality of its style is a grave simplicity and sincerity of tone. Especially is this the case in passages expressing appreciation of strength and grandeur of character, as in those fragments from the speeches of Pyrrhus and of Appius Claudius Caecus, already quoted, and in the famous lines commemorative of the resolute character and momentous services of Fabius Maximus:—

The force of many single expressions in these fragments, and the power with which various incidents, situations, and characters, are brought before the mind indicate an active imagination. A sense of energy and life-like movement is the prevailing impression produced by a study of the language and the longer passages in these remains. Many single lines and expressions that have been gathered accidentally, as mere isolated phrases, disjoined from the context in which they originally occurred, bear traces of the ardour with which they were cast into shape. In longer passages, the whole heart, sense, and understanding of the writer seem to be thrown into his narrative. He has not the eye of a poetic artist who observes, as it were, from a distance, and fixes as in a picture, some phase of passionate feeling or some beautiful aspect of repose. He suggests rather the idea of a man of practical energy, who has been present and taken part in the action described, who enters with living interest into every detail, and watches it at the same time with a sagacious discernment and a strong enthusiasm. His power as a narrative poet is the power of forcibly reproducing the outward movement and the inward meaning of an action, and of identifying himself with the hearts and minds of the actors on the scene. Several passages, wanting altogether in poetical beauty, yet arrest the attention by this energy and realism of conception; as, for example, this short and rugged fragment, descriptive of a commander in the crisis of a battle (probably that of Cynoscephalae),—

Sola sibi, semper longam incomitata videtur

The powerful impulse given to Roman tragedy by Ennius was sustained till about the beginning of the first century b.c., first by his nephew M. Pacuvius and after him by L. Accius. The popularity of the drama during this period may be estimated from the fact that, of the early writers of poetry, Lucilius alone contributed nothing to the Roman stage. The plays of the three tragedians who have just been mentioned were not only performed during the lifetime of their authors, but, as appears from many notices of them in Cicero, they held their place on the stage with much popular applause, and were read and admired as literary works till the last days of the Republic. This popularity implies either some adaptation of Roman tragedy to the time in which it was produced, or some special capacity for awakening new interests and ideas in a people hitherto unacquainted with literature. Yet, on the other hand, the want of permanence, and the want of any power of development in the Roman drama, would indicate that it was less adapted to the genius of the nation than either the epic or the satiric poetry of this era. If the dramatic art of Pacuvius and Accius had been as true an expression of the national mind as either the epic poem of Ennius or the satire of Lucilius, it might have been expected that it would have flourished in greater perfection in the eras of finer literary accomplishment. The efforts of Naevius and Ennius were crowned with the fulfilment of Virgil, and the spirit and manner of Lucilius still live in the satires of Horace and Juvenal; but Roman tragedy, notwithstanding the attempt to give it a new and higher artistic development in the Augustan age, dwindled away till it became a mere literary exercise of educated men, and remains only in the artificial and rhetorical compositions attributed to the philosopher Seneca.

The materials or substance of Roman tragedy were almost entirely Greek. The stories and characters represented were, save in the few exceptional cases referred to above, directly derived from the Greek tragedians or from Homer and the cyclic poets. In point of form also and some of the metres employed, Roman tragedy endeavoured to imitate the models on which it was founded, with probably as little perception of the requirements of dramatic art as of refinement in expression and harmony in rhythm. But while generally conforming to their models, the early Roman poets departed in some important respects from their practice. Thus they banished the Chorus from the orchestra, assigning to it merely a subsidiary part in the dialogue. Although some simple lyrical metre, accompanied with music, continued to be employed in the more rapid and impassioned parts of the dialogue, there was no scope, on the Roman stage, for the great lyrical poetry of the Greek drama, and for the nobler functions of the chorus. On the other hand, there seems to have been more opportunity both for action and for oratorical declamation. The acting of a Roman play must have been more like that on a modern stage than the stately movement and the statuesque repose of the Greek theatre. Again, in imitating the iambic and trochaic metres of the Greek drama, the Roman poets were quite indifferent to the laws by which their finer harmony is produced. Any of the feet admissible in an iambic line might occupy any place in the line, with the exception of the last. There is thus little metrical harmony in the fragments of Roman tragedy; but, on the other hand, it may be remarked that the order of the words in these fragments appears more natural and direct than in the more elaborate metres of the later Roman poets.

But it was as impossible for the Roman drama to reproduce the inner spirit of the noblest type of Greek tragedy as to rival its artistic excellence. Greek tragedy, in its mature glory, was not only a purely Greek creation, but was the artistic expression of a remarkable phase through which the human mind has once passed;—a phase in which the vivid fancies and emotions of a primitive age met and combined with the thought, the art, the social and political life of the greatest era of ancient civilisation. The Athenian dramatists, like the great dramatists of other times, imparted a new and living interest to ancient legends; but this was but one part, perhaps not the most important part, of their functions. They represented before the people the destiny and sufferings of national heroes and demigods, sanctified by long association in the feelings of many generations, still honoured by a vital worship, and appealed to as a present help in danger. Thus a highly idealised and profoundly religious character was imparted to the tragic representation of human passion and destiny on the Athenian stage. This view of life, represented and contemplated with solemnity of feeling in the age of Pericles, would have been altogether unmeaning to a Roman of the age of Ennius. Such a one would understand the natural heroism of a strong will, but not the new force and elevation imparted to the will by reliance on the hidden powers and laws overruling human affairs. He might be moved to sympathy with the sufferers or actors on the scene; but he would be altogether insensible to the higher consolation which overcomes the natural sorrow for the mere earthly catastrophe in a great dramatic action. The inward strength and dignity of a Roman senator might enable him to appreciate the magnanimity and kingly nature of Oedipus; but the deeper interest of the great dramas founded on the fortunes of the Theban king, especially the interest arising from his trust in final righteousness, his sense of communion with higher powers, from the thought of his elevation out of the lowest earthly state into perpetual sanctity and honour, was widely remote from the tangible objects of a Roman's desire, and the direct motives of his conduct. Or perhaps a Roman would have a fellow-feeling with the proud and soldierly bearing of Ajax; but he would be blind to the inward lesson of self-knowledge and self-mastery, which Sophocles represents as forced upon the spirit of the Greek hero through the stern visitation of Athene. Equally remote from the ordinary experience and emotions of a Roman would be the feeling of awe, gloom, and mystery, diffused through the great thoughts and imaginations of Aeschylus. Both in Aeschylus and in Sophocles the light and the gloom cast over the human story are not of this world. But in the fragments of the Roman tragedians, though there is often found the expression of magnanimous and independent sentiment, and of a very dignified and manly morality, there is little trace of any sense of the relation of the individual to a Divine power; and there are some indications not only of a scorn for common superstition, but also of disbelief in the foundations of personal religion. The thought of the insecurity of life, of the vicissitudes of human affairs, and of the impotence of man to control his fate, which forced the Greek poets and historians of the fifth century b.c. into deeper speculations on the question of Divine Providence, was utterly alien to the natural temperament of Rome, and to the confidence inspired by uniform success during the long period succeeding the Second Punic War.

The contemplative and religious thought of Greek tragedy was thus as remote from the practical spirit of the Romans as the political license and the personal humours of the old Athenian comedy were from the earnestness of public life and the dignity of government in the great aristocratic Republic. And thus it happened that, as the comic poets of Rome reproduced the new comedy of Athens, which portrayed the passions of private not of political life, and the manners rather of a cosmopolitan than of a purely Greek civilisation, so the tragic poets found the art of Euripides and of his less illustrious successors more easy to imitate than that of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The interest of tragedy, as treated by Euripides, turns upon the catastrophes produced by human passion: the religious meaning has, in a great measure, passed out of it; the characters have dwindled from their heroic stature to the proportions of ordinary life; his thought is the result of the analysis of motives, and the study of familiar experience. He has more affinity with the ordinary thoughts and moods of men than either of the older poets. The older and the later Greek writers have a nearer relation to the spirit of other eras of the world's history than those who represent Athenian civilisation in its maturity. It requires a longer familiarity with the mind and heart of antiquity to realise and enjoy the full meaning of Sophocles, Thucydides, or Aristophanes, than of Homer, Euripides, or Theocritus. Homer is indeed one of the truest, if not the truest, representative of the genius of Greece,—the representative also of the ancient world in the same sense as Shakspeare is of the modern world,—but he is, at the same time, directly intelligible and interesting to all countries and times from his being the most natural and powerful exponent of the elementary feelings and forces of human nature. The later poets, on the other hand, such as Euripides and the writers of the new comedy, were not indeed more truly human, but were less distinctively Greek than their immediate predecessors. They had advanced beyond them in the analytic knowledge of human nature; but, with the decay of religious belief and political feeling, they had lost much of the genius and sentiment by which the old Athenian life was characterised. Both their gain and their loss bring them more into harmony with later modes of thought and feeling. Thus it happened that, while the influence of Aeschylus and Sophocles, of Thucydides and Aristophanes, is scarcely perceptible in Roman literature, Homer and the early lyrical poets who flourished before Greek civilisation exhibited its most special type, and Euripides who, though a contemporary of Sophocles and Aristophanes, yet belonged in spirit and tone to a younger generation, the writers of the new comedy, and the Alexandrine poets who flourished when the purely Greek ideas and character were being merged in a cosmopolitan civilisation, exercised a direct influence on Roman taste and opinion in every age of their literature. The early tragic poets of Rome could not rival or imitate the dramatic art, the pathetic power, the clear and fluent style, the active and subtle analysis of Euripides; but they could approach nearer to him than to any of his predecessors, by treating the myths and personages of the heroic time apart from the sacred associations and ideal majesty of earlier art, and as a vehicle for inculcating the lessons and the experience of familiar life.

According to his testimony, these lively demonstrations of popular approbation were chiefly called out by the moral significance or the political meaning attached to the words, and by the oratorical fervour and passion with which the actor enforced them. Thus Laelius is represented, in the treatise De Amicitia, as testifying to the applause with which the mutual devotion of Pylades and Orestes, as represented in a play of Pacuvius, was received by the audience³: 'What shouts of applause were heard lately through the whole body of the house, on the representation of a new play of my familiar friend, M. Pacuvius, when, the king being ignorant which of the two was Orestes, Pylades maintained that it was he, while Orestes persisted, as was indeed the case, that he was the man! They stood up and applauded at this imaginary situation.' Again, in his speech in defence of Sestius⁴, the same author says, 'amid a great variety of opinions uttered, there never was any passage in which anything said by the poet might seem to bear on our time, which either escaped the notice of the people, or to which the actor did not give point.' In a letter to Atticus (ii. 19) he states that the actor Diphilus had applied to Pompey the phrase 'Miseria nostra tu es magnus,' and that he was compelled to repeat it a thousand times amid the shouts of the whole theatre. He mentions further, in the speech in defence of Sestius⁵ that the actor Aesopus had applied to Cicero himself a passage from a play of Accius (the Eurysaces), in which the Greeks are reproached for allowing one who had done them great public service to be driven into exile; and that the same actor, in the Brutus, had referred to him by name in the words, 'Tullius qui libertatem civibus stabiliverat'; he adds that these words 'were encored over and over again,' 'millies revocatum est.' These and similar passages testify primarily to the intense political excitement of the time at which they were written, but also to the meaning which was looked for by the audience in the words addressed to them on the stage, and which was enforced by the emphasis given to them by the actor.

These considerations may afford some explanation of the fact, that the early Roman tragedy, although having less claim to originality, and less capacity of development than any other branch of Roman literature, yet exercised a more immediate and more general influence than either the epic, lyrical, or satiric poetry of the Republic. For more than a century new tragedies were written and represented at the various public games, and afforded the sole kind of serious intellectual stimulus and education to the mass of the people. During the lifetime of the old dramatists, there was no regular theatre, but merely structures of wood raised for each occasion. A magnificent stone theatre was at last built by Pompey from the spoils of the Mithridatic War; but this, instead of giving a new impulse to dramatic art, was fatal to its existence. The attraction of a gorgeous spectacle superseded that afforded by the works of the older dramatists; and dancers like Bathyllus soon obtained the place in popular favour which had been enjoyed by the 'grave Aesopus and the accomplished Roscius.' The composition of tragedy passed from the hands of popular poets, and became a kind of literary and rhetorical exercise of accomplished men. We hear that Quintus Cicero composed four tragedies in sixteen days, and in the Augustan age Virgil and Horace eulogise the dramatic talent of their friend and patron Asinius Pollio. The 'Ars Poetica' implies that the composition of tragedy was the most fashionable form of literary pursuit among the young aspirants to poetic honour at that time, and the Thyestes of Varius and the Medea of Ovid enjoyed a great literary reputation. These were, however, futile attempts to impart artificial life to a withered branch. Though praised by literary critics, they obtained no general favour. Of all forms of poetry the drama is most dependent on popular sympathy and intelligence. With the loss of contact with public feeling the Roman drama lost its vital power. One cause of the change in public taste was the passion for more frivolous and coarser excitement, such as was afforded by the mimes and by gladiatorial combats and shows of wild beasts to a soldiery brutalised by constant wars, and to the civic masses degraded by idleness and by intermixture from all quarters of the world. Other causes may have acted on the poets themselves, such as the exhaustion of the mine of ancient stories fit for dramatic purposes, and the truer sense, acquired through culture, of the bent of Roman genius. But another cause was the loss of mutual sympathy between the poet and the people, arising from the decay and final extinction of political life. In ancient, as occasionally also in modern times, the contests and interests of politics were the means of affording the highest intellectual stimulus of which they were capable to the large classes on whom literary influences act only indirectly. So long as the old republican sense of citizenship remained, there was a bond of common feelings, ideas, and sympathies between the body of the people and some of the foremost and most highly educated men in Rome. There was an immediate sympathy between the political orator and his audiences within the Senate or in the public assemblies; there was a sympathy, more remote, but still active, between the poet of the Republic, who had the strong feelings of a Roman citizen, and the great body of his countrymen. With the overthrow of free government, this bond of union between the educated and the uneducated classes was destroyed. The former became more refined and fastidious, but lost something in breadth and genuine strength by the want of any popular contact. The latter became more debased, coarser, and more servile. Poetic works were more and more addressed to a small circle of men of rank and education, sharing the same opinions, tastes, and pleasures. They thus became more finished as works of art, but had less direct bearing on the passions and great public interests of their time.

Aulus Gellius quotes the epitaph of Pacuvius, written by himself to be inscribed on his tombstone, with a tribute of admiration to 'its modesty, simplicity, and fine serious spirit'—'Epigramma Pacuvii verecundissimum et purissimum dignumque ejus elegantissima gravitate.'

We find also such inflexions as 'tetinerim,' for 'tenuerim,' 'pegi' for 'pepigi,' 'cluentur' for 'cluent.' These peculiarities are ridiculed in the fragments of Lucilius, and also in a passage of Persius. Another author¹⁵ contrasts the sententiae of Ennius with the periodi of Pacuvius,—a distinction probably connected with the progress of oratory in the interval between the poets. Persius applies the term 'verrucosa' (an epithet not inapplicable to his own style) to the Antiope of Pacuvius, which, on the other hand, was much admired by Cicero¹⁶. Lucilius refers to this harshness of style in the line,

Pacuvius is known to have been the author of about twelve tragedies, founded on Greek subjects; and of one, Paulus, founded on Roman history. Among these, the Antiope was perhaps the most famous and most admired. It was, like the Medea of Ennius, a translation from Euripides. The principal characters in it were the brothers Zethus and Amphion, the one devoted to hunting, the other to music. Their dispute as to the respective advantages of music and philosophy is referred to by Cicero and Horace, and by other authors. The Zethus of Pacuvius is described by Cicero¹⁷ as one who made war on all philosophy; and the author of the treatise addressed to Herennius describes their controversy as beginning about music, and ending about philosophy and the use of virtue. Two dramas, the Dulorestes and the Chryses, the latter being a continuation of the first, represented the adventures of Orestes in his wanderings with his friend Pylades, after the murder of his mother. The former play, in which Orestes was represented as on the point of being sacrificed by his sister Iphigenia, contained the passage already referred to, in which Pylades and Orestes contend as to which should suffer for the other. The Chryses was founded on their subsequent adventures, and the title of the play was apparently taken from the old Homeric priest of Apollo, Chryses, who bore a prominent part in it. Another of the plays of Pacuvius, the Niptra, was founded on, though not translated from, one of Sophocles¹⁸; and the title seems to have been suggested by the story of the recognition of Ulysses by his nurse, Eurycleia, told at Odyssey xix. 386, etc. The subjects of his other dramas may be inferred from their titles:—Armorum Judicium, Atalanta, Hermione, Ilione, Io, Medus (son of Medea), Pentheus, Periboea, Teucer.

The fragments of Pacuvius show not only the cast of understanding, but also the grave and dignified tone of morality, which was found to be one of the most Roman characteristics of Ennius. They indicate also a similar humanity of feeling. The moral nobleness of the situation, in which Pylades and Orestes contend which should sacrifice himself for the other, has already been noticed: 'stantes plaudebant in re ficta.' Again, in the Tusculan Disputations (ii. 21), Cicero commends Pacuvius for deviating from Sophocles, who had represented Ulysses, in the Niptra, as utterly overcome by the power of his wound; while, in Pacuvius, those who are supporting him, 'personae gravitatem intuentes,' address this reproof to him, 'leviter gementi':—

The fragments of Accius afford the first hint of that enjoyment of natural beauty which enters largely into the poetry of a later age; but one or two fragments of Pacuvius, like several passages in Ennius, show the power of observing and describing the sublime and terrible aspects of Nature. The description of the storm which overtook the Greek army after sailing from Troy is perhaps the best specimen in this style:—

Neither the fragments nor the ancient notices of Pacuvius produce on a modern reader so distinct an impression of his peculiar genius and character as may be formed of Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius. His remains are chiefly important as throwing light on the general features of the Roman tragic drama; and few critics would attempt to determine from internal evidence alone whether any particular passage came from the lost works of Pacuvius or of Accius. The main points that are known in his life are his provincial origin, and his relationship to Ennius; the fact of his supporting himself, first by painting, afterwards by the payment he received from the Aediles for his plays; his friendship with Laelius, the centre of the literary circle in Rome during the latter part of the second century b.c.; his intimacy with his younger rival Accius; the facts also that, like Sophocles, he preserved his poetical power unabated till a great age, and that, like Shakspeare, he retired to spend his last years in his native district. The language of his epitaph is suggestive of a kindly and modest temper, and of the calm and serious spirit of age; while that of many of his dramatic fragments bears evidence of his moral strength and worth, and to the manly fervour as well as the gentle humanity of his temperament.

Although Cicero's notice of his own acquaintance with Accius, which is not likely to have existed before the former assumed the toga virilis, is a proof of the great age which the poet attained, it is not certain how long he continued the practice of his art. Seneca, in quoting from the Atreus of this poet the well-known tyrant's maxim, 'oderint dum metuant'—a maxim, according to Suetonius, constantly in the mouth of Caligula,—adds the remark that 'any one could see that it was written in the days of Sulla.' But Aulus Gellius, on the other hand, states that the Atreus was the play which had been read by the poet in his youth to Pacuvius at Tarentum. The termination of the literary career of Accius must have been soon after the beginning of the first century b.c., so that nearly half a century elapses between the last of the works of the older poets and the appearance of the great poem of Lucretius. The journey of Accius to Asia shows the beginning of that taste for foreign travel which became prevalent among the most educated men in a generation later, and grew more and more easy with the advance of Roman conquest, and more attractive from the increased cultivation of Greek literature. Accius is the first of the Roman poets who seems to have possessed a country residence; and some taste for country life and the beauties of Nature first betrays itself in one or two of his fragments. He possessed apparently all the self-esteem and high spirit of the earlier poets. Pliny mentions that though a very little man, he placed a colossal statue of himself in a temple of the Muses³⁴.

The literary qualities most conspicuous in the fragments of Accius, and attributed to him by ancient writers, are of the same kind as those which the dramatic fragments of Ennius and Pacuvius exhibit. Cicero testifies to his oratorical force, to his serious spirit, and to the didactic purpose of his writings. His most important remains illustrate these attributes of his style, along with the shrewd sense and vigorous understanding of the older writers, and afford some traces of a new vein of poetical emotion, which is scarcely observable in earlier fragments. Horace applies the epithet 'altus,' Ovid that of 'animosus' to Accius. Cicero characterises him as 'gravis et ingeniosus poeta,' and attests the didactic purpose of a particular passage in the words, 'the earnest and inspired poet wrote thus with the view of stimulating, not those princes who no longer existed, but us and our children to energy and honourable ambition³⁵.' The style of a passage from the Atreus is described by the same author in the dialogue 'De Oratore,' as 'nervous, impetuous, pressing on with a certain impassioned gravity of feeling³⁶.' Oratorical fervour and dignity seem thus to have been the most distinctive characteristic of his style. Virgil, whose genius made as free use of the diction and sentiment of native as of Greek poets, has cast the ruder language of the old poet into a new mould in some of the greatest speeches of the Aeneid, and seems to have drawn from the same source something of the high spirit and lofty pathos with which he has animated the personages of his story. The famous address, for instance—

Forte ante Auroram, radiorum ardentum indicem,

Cum e somno in segetem agrestis cornutos cient,

Ut rorulentas terras ferro rufidas

Proscindant, glebasque arvo ex molli exsuscitent⁴⁸.

And among these poets the writers of comedy were both most numerous and apparently the most popular in their own time². Besides the names of Naevius, Plautus, Caecilius, and Terence, we know the names of other comic poets of less fame³, and from allusions in the extant plays of Plautus⁴ and in the prologues of Terence we infer that there were other competitors for public favour whose names were unknown to a later generation. In the Ciceronian age the works of these forgotten playwrights were for the most part attributed to Plautus, probably with the view of gaining some temporary popularity for them. In the time of Gellius no fewer than 130 plays passed under his name; among these, twenty-one were regarded as undoubtedly his, nineteen more as probably genuine, and the rest as spurious. They were however all of the class of palliatae; and as the fabulae togatae seem, after the time of Terence, to have been composed in much greater number than those founded on Greek originals, most of them must have belonged to the first half of the second century b.c. Plays of a later date would have clearly shown by their diction that they were not the work of Plautus.

Although this form of literature has little in common with the higher Roman mood, and exercised comparatively slight influence on the style and sentiment of later Roman poetry⁵, yet no review of the creative literature of the Republican period would be complete without some attempt to estimate the value of the comedy of Plautus and Terence. The difficulty of doing so adequately arises from an opposite cause to that which makes our judgment on the art and genius of the Roman tragic poets so incomplete. In the latter case we know what was the character of their Greek models; but we can only conjecture from a number of unconnected fragments, how far the copy deviated in tone and spirit from the original. On the other hand, while we have between twenty and thirty specimens of Latin comedy, we have no finished work of Greek art in the same style, with which to compare them. It makes a great difference in our opinion, not only of the genius of the Roman poets, but of the productive force of the Roman mind, whether we regard Plautus and Terence as facile translators, or as writers of creative originality who filled up the outlines which they took from the new comedy of Athens with matter drawn from their own observation and invention. It makes a great difference in the literary interest of these works, whether we regard them as blurred copies of pictures from later Greek life, or, like so much else in Roman literature, as compositions which, while Greek in form, are yet in no slight degree Roman or Italian in substance, character, life, and sentiment. How far can we answer these questions, either by general considerations, or by a special attention to the actual products of Latin comedy which we possess?

The rhetorical character of Roman education and the rhetorical tendencies of the Roman mind secured favour for this kind of composition till the age of Quintilian. His dictum 'in comoedia maxime claudicamus,' on the other hand, implies that the educated taste of Romans under the Empire did not find much that was congenial in the works of Plautus, Caecilius, or Terence. The tone of Horace is more contemptuous towards Plautus than towards Ennius and the tragic poets. While tragedy continued to be cultivated by eminent writers in the Augustan age and early Empire, few original comedies seem to have been written after the beginning of the first century b.c.⁶ The higher efforts of the comic muse were almost, if not entirely, superseded by the Mimus. These considerations show that comedy was not congenial to the educated or the uneducated taste of Romans in the last years of the Republic, and in the early Empire. But, on the other hand, the popularity enjoyed by the old comedy between the time of Naevius and of Terence, and even down to the earlier half of the Ciceronian age, when some of the great parts in Plautus continued to be performed by the 'accomplished Roscius,' and the admiration expressed for its authors by grammarians and critics, from Aelius Stilo down to Varro and Cicero, show its adaptation to an earlier and not less vigorous, if less refined stage of intellectual development; while the actual survival of many Roman comedies can only be accounted for by a more real adaptation to human nature, both in style and substance, than was attained by Roman tragedy in its straining after a higher ideal of sentiment and expression.

Naevius and Plautus might thus be poets of the people more truly than any later Roman poet could be. The career of Naevius, and the public and personal elements which he introduced into his plays, afford evidence of his desire to use his position as a popular poet for political ends. His imprisonment and subsequent banishment equally attest the determination of the governing class to allow no criticism on public men or affairs, nor anything derogatory to the majesty of the State and the dignified forms of Roman life, to be heard on the stage. Plautus, though prevented either by his own temperament or the vigilance of state-censorship from directly acting on the political sympathies of the commons, maintained the thoroughly popular character of Roman comedy, and poured a strongly national spirit into the forms which he

adopted

Naevius and Plautus might thus be poets of the people more truly than any later Roman poet could be. The career of Naevius, and the public and personal elements which he introduced into his plays, afford evidence of his desire to use his position as a popular poet for political ends. His imprisonment and subsequent banishment equally attest the determination of the governing class to allow no criticism on public men or affairs, nor anything derogatory to the majesty of the State and the dignified forms of Roman life, to be heard on the stage. Plautus, though prevented either by his own temperament or the vigilance of state-censorship from directly acting on the political sympathies of the commons, maintained the thoroughly popular character of Roman comedy, and poured a strongly national spirit into the forms which he

adopted

Our chief authorities for the life of Plautus are a short statement of Jerome, one or two slight notices in Cicero, and a somewhat longer passage in Aulus Gellius (iii. 3. 14). As he died at an advanced age, in the year 184 b.c.⁸ (during the censorship of Cato), he must have been born about the middle of the third century b.c. He was thus a younger contemporary of Naevius, and somewhat older than Ennius. His birthplace was Sarsina in Umbria. That this district must have been thoroughly Latinised in the time of Plautus, is attested by the idiomatic force and purity of his style⁹. He probably came early to Rome, and was at first engaged 'in operis artificum scenicorum,'—in some kind of employment connected with the stage. He saved money in this service, and lost it all in foreign trade,—what he himself calls 'marituma negotia'¹⁰. Returning to Rome in absolute poverty, he was reduced to work as a hired servant in a mill; and while thus employed he first began to write comedies. The names of two of these early works, Saturio and Addictus, have been preserved by Gellius. From this time till his death he seems to have been a most rapid and productive writer. We have no means of determining at what date he began to write. A passage quoted from Cicero has been thought to imply that he was writing for the stage during the life-time of P. and Cn. Scipio, i.e. before 212 b.c. But the earliest allusion to contemporary events that we find in any of his extant plays, is that in the Miles Gloriosus, to the imprisonment of Naevius, probably in 206-5 b.c.¹¹ We have no certainty that any of the extant plays were written before that date, although the mention of Hiero in the Menaechmi, and the use of some more than usually archaic inflexions in that play, have been supposed to indicate an earlier date for it. Of the other plays, the Cistellaria and Stichus were written within a year or two of the Second Punic War¹². The larger number of the extant comedies belong to the last ten years of the poet's life. His plays do not seem to have been published as literary works during his life-time, but to have been left in possession of the acting companies, by whom passages may have been interpolated and others omitted, before they were finally reduced into a literary shape. Most of the prologues to his plays belong to a later time, probably that of the generation after his death¹³. Of the twenty-one plays which Varro accepted, on the ground of their intrinsic merits, as certainly genuine, we possess twenty, and fragments of the remaining one, the Vidularia. The names of some other genuine plays, such as the Saturio, Addictus, and Commorientes, are also known to us.

How far are we able to fill up this meagre outline by personal indications of the poet left on his works? In the case of any dramatist this is always difficult; and Plautus is not in form only, but in spirit, essentially dramatic. Nothing marks the difference between the popular and the aristocratic tendencies of Roman thought and literature more than the entire absence of any didactic tendency in his plays. He does not think of making his hearers better by his representations, nor does he believe that it is possible to do so¹⁴. He identifies himself as heartily for the time being with his rogues of both sexes as with his rarer specimens of honest men and virtuous women. He seldom indulges in reflexions on life. When he does so it is by the mouth of a slave, who winds up the unfamiliar process in some such way as Pseudolus, 'sed iam satis est philosophatum¹⁵,' or in the lyrical self-reproaches of some prodigal, whose good resolutions vanish on the reappearance of his mistress. Among the innumerable terms of reproach which one slave addresses to another, none is expressive of more withering contempt than the term 'philosophe¹⁶.' But even if we could trace any predominant sympathies in Plautus, or any special vein of reflexion which might seem to throw light on his own experience, some doubt would always remain as to whether he was not in these passages reproducing his original. The loss of many of his prologues deprives us of the kind of knowledge of his circumstances and position which Terence affords us in his prologues. Even the 'asides' to the spectators, which often occur in Plautus, may in many cases be due to the comedians of a later time.

We find one reference to his birthplace, in the form of a bad pun altogether devoid of any trace of sentiment or affection¹⁷. He mentions other districts or towns in Italy in the tone of half-humorous, half-contemptuous indifference, which a Londoner of last, or a Parisian of the present century, might adopt to the provinces¹⁸. More than one allusion indicates that the citizens of Praeneste were especially regarded as butts by the wits of Rome¹⁹. The contempt of the town for the country also appears unmistakeably in the dialogue between Grumio and Tranio in the 'Mostellaria²⁰,' and in the boorish manners of the country lover in the 'Truculentus.' In the eyes of a town-bred wit the chief use of the country is to supply elm-rods for the punishment of pert or refractory slaves. A large number of his illustrations are taken from the handicrafts of the city, but very few are indicative of familiarity with rustic occupations. There is no breath of the poetry of rural nature in Plautus. If he betrays any poetical sensibility to natural influences at all, it is to be found in passages in which the aspects of the sea, in calm or storm, are recalled. Mommsen speaks of 'a most remarkable analogy in many external points between Plautus and Shakespeare²¹. 'Yet there is contrast rather than analogy in the impression left upon their respective works by the associations of their early homes.

He shows much greater familiarity with the life of the lower and middle classes than with that of those above them in station. He is not always happy in his embodiment of the character of a gentleman. Nothing, for instance, can be meaner than the conduct of the second Menaechmus, who is intended to interest us, in his relations to Erotion. And this failure is equally conspicuous in another of his favourite characters, Periplecomenus, the 'lepidus senex' of the Gloriosus. His indecorous geniality is scarcely compatible with the respectability, not to say the dignity, of age. We recognise in his characters and illustrations a vigorous and many-sided contact with life, but no influence derived from association with members of the governing class. In this respect he stood in marked contrast to Ennius and Terence, and probably to Caecilius. The two latter, being freedmen, were naturally brought into closer association with, and dependence on, their social superiors. Plautus writes in the spirit of an 'ingenuus,' in good-humoured sympathy with the mass of the citizens, and with no feeling of bitterness towards the aristocracy, or indeed to any human being whatsoever. He is at home with all kinds of men, except the highest in rank. He takes a good-natured ironical delight in his slaves, courtesans, parasites, and sycophants. He is not shocked by anything they can do or say. He feels the enjoyment of a man of strong animal spirits in laughing at and with them. Even the 'leno,' the least estimable character in the repertory of ancient comedy, he treats rather as a butt than as an object of detestation. He does not by a single phrase show any sign of having been soured or depressed by the misfortunes and vicissitudes of his life. We feel, in his dialogues, the presence of irrepressible animal spirits, and a sense of boundless resource and lively intelligence in his characters, especially in his slaves. From no scrape does it seem hopeless for them to find some means of extrication. Like them, he himself has the buoyancy of one, 'fortunae immersabilis undis.'

may very probably be true, and is by no means to his discredit. The same charge has been brought against some of the most facile and productive creators in modern times, such as Scott, Dickens, and Balzac, and, to a certain extent, even Shakspeare. To the poets of Nature, or of the higher thought and emotions of men, the pure enjoyment of their art may afford sufficient happiness. In so far as they are true to their higher genius, they are, or ought to be, more independent than any other class of men of the pleasures which money can give. But artists whose power consists in vividly realising and representing the various activities, passions, and enjoyments of life, may feel, in their own experience, some of the craving and of the satisfaction which they are called on to describe. Nor is it unnatural that they should take any legitimate means of securing for themselves some share in the objects of desire, which are the moving forces of their imaginary world. In the large place which the details of good living fill in his plays, Plautus exaggerates a tendency which is discernible in the more decorous fictions of Scott and Dickens. In the important part which he assigns to money in many of his dramas, in his business-like mention of specific sums, in the frequency of his illustrations from the practice of keeping accounts, he shows a resemblance to Balzac. The experience of his life must have impressed upon him the value of money. The fact that he saved enough in his early employment in connexion with the stage to embark on mercantile speculations is a proof of early thrift and prudence and of a wish to raise himself in the world. In all this he was merely exhibiting one of the most common characteristics of the middle class among his countrymen.

Many allusions in his plays attest his acquaintance with works of art, with the stories of Greek mythology or the subjects of Greek tragedies, and with the names, at least, of Greek philosophers. His extraordinary productiveness in adapting works from the new comedy shows that he had a complete command of the Greek language. He not only uses Greek phrases, but has endeavoured to enrich the native vocabulary with a considerable number of Greek words in a Latin form³⁵. Yet the knowledge he betrays is that which a man of versatile intelligence, lively curiosity, and retentive memory, would pick up in his varied intercourse with his contemporaries, without any special study of books, except such as were needed for his immediate purpose. The more recondite learning of Ennius was probably as strange to him as that of Ben Jonson was to Shakspeare.

With this new sense of freedom and of fullness of life, the old restraints of religion and of the morality bound up with it were relaxed. The commons began to exercise less and less influence in the state. Their political indifference finds an echo in the slighting allusions which Plautus makes to the duties of public life³⁷. The increased contact with the mind and life of the Greeks powerfully stimulated intellectual curiosity, but at the same time was a great solvent of faith, manners, and morals. The frequent use of the words congraecari, pergraecari, etc., in Plautus, shows that while the highest Roman minds were learning new lessons of wisdom and humanity from the great Greek writers of the past, the ordinary Roman was learning lessons of idleness and dissoluteness from the living Greeks of the time. The armies which returned from the Macedonian wars, and still more from that with Antiochus, brought with them new fashions and new appliances of luxury. Plautus shows a large indulgence, not unmixed with a vein of saturnine humour, for these new ways on which both young and old were eagerly entering. We see in him the unchecked exuberance of animal life, but no sign of the recklessness or the satiety of exhausted passions. Though there is more decorum, more refined sentiment, in the life of pleasure as presented by Terence, there is more often in Plautus an expression of a struggle between the new temptations and the old Roman ideas of thrift, active duty, and self-restraint. The conscience, though easily lulled to sleep, is still capable of feeling the sting of the thought contained in the Lucretian line—

It might perhaps have been expected that a writer of such prodigal invention and so popular and national a fibre as Plautus would have chosen rather to set before his countrymen a humorous image of themselves, than to transport them in imagination to Athens and to exhibit to them those well-used conventional types of Greek life and manners. But, in the first place, the mere fact that it was more easy for him to adapt than to create would have been a sufficient motive to so careless and unconscious an artist. Again, the state-censorship exercised by the magistrates who exhibited the games would naturally deter a poet, who did not wish to encounter the fate of Naevius, from any direct dealing with the delicate subject of Roman social and family life. The later writers of the fabulae togatae seem for the most part to have reproduced the life and personages of the provincial towns in Italy. The position not only of the magistrate but even of the citizen at Rome was invested with a kind of dignity and even sanctity, which it would have been dangerous to violate in a public spectacle. Further, the very novelty and unfamiliarity of the ways of Greek life would be more stimulating to the rude imagination of that age than a reproduction of the everyday life of Rome. It requires a more cultivated fancy to recognise incidents, situations and characters suited for art in actual experience, than to appreciate the conventional types of older dramatists. It is a noticeable fact that Shakspeare places the scene of only one of his comedies in England, and that he too introduces the English names and characteristics of Bottom, Snug, Peter Quince, etc., as Plautus does those of Saturio or Curculio into an imaginary representation of Athenian life. But whatever were his motives for doing so, Plautus professes to introduce his hearers to a representation of Greek manners and morals. His frequent use of the word barbarus in reference to Italian or Roman ways, his use of Latinised Greek words and actual Greek phrases, the Greek names of his personages, the dress in which they appeared, the invariable reference to Greek money, perhaps the actual scene presented to the eye, the frequent mention of ships unexpectedly arriving in harbour, the names of the foreign towns visited, etc., would all tend to remind the audience that they were listening to an action and witnessing a spectacle of Greek life.

But while the outward conditions of his dramas are professedly taken from Greek originals, much of the manner and spirit of his personages is certainly Roman. The language in which they express themselves in the first place is thoroughly their own. This is shown by the large number of his puns and plays on words. These by their spontaneity, sometimes by their grotesqueness, sometimes by a Latin play on a Greek word—such as Archidemides⁴² or Epidamnus,—show their native origin. No writer, again, abounds so much in alliterations, assonances, asyndeta⁴³, which are characteristic of all early Roman poetry down even to Lucretius, and which have no parallel in the more refined and natural diction of the Greek dramatists. Further, we constantly meet with Roman formulae⁴⁴, Roman proverbs⁴⁵, expressions of courtesy⁴⁶, and the like. The very fluency, copiousness, and verve of his language are impossible to a translator, at least in the early stages of a literature. Nothing can be more spontaneous and natural than the dialogue in Plautus. There is, on the other hand, considerable appearance of effort in the reflective passages of the 'cantica'; and this is exactly what we should expect in a Roman writer of originality. Reflexion on life was altogether strange to a Roman in the age of Plautus; to a Greek it was easy and hackneyed. In the prolixity and slow beating out of the thought in some of the 'cantica' we note the beginning of a process unfamiliar to the Roman mind, for which the forms of the Latin language were not yet adapted. The facility of expressing reflexion appears much more developed in Terence. If Plautus were reproducing a Greek original in such passages as Mostell. 85-145, Trinummus 186-273, the thought and the illustration would have lost much in freshness and naïveté but they would have been expressed with much more point and conciseness.

But while the outward conditions of his dramas are professedly taken from Greek originals, much of the manner and spirit of his personages is certainly Roman. The language in which they express themselves in the first place is thoroughly their own. This is shown by the large number of his puns and plays on words. These by their spontaneity, sometimes by their grotesqueness, sometimes by a Latin play on a Greek word—such as Archidemides⁴² or Epidamnus,—show their native origin. No writer, again, abounds so much in alliterations, assonances, asyndeta⁴³, which are characteristic of all early Roman poetry down even to Lucretius, and which have no parallel in the more refined and natural diction of the Greek dramatists. Further, we constantly meet with Roman formulae⁴⁴, Roman proverbs⁴⁵, expressions of courtesy⁴⁶, and the like. The very fluency, copiousness, and verve of his language are impossible to a translator, at least in the early stages of a literature. Nothing can be more spontaneous and natural than the dialogue in Plautus. There is, on the other hand, considerable appearance of effort in the reflective passages of the 'cantica'; and this is exactly what we should expect in a Roman writer of originality. Reflexion on life was altogether strange to a Roman in the age of Plautus; to a Greek it was easy and hackneyed. In the prolixity and slow beating out of the thought in some of the 'cantica' we note the beginning of a process unfamiliar to the Roman mind, for which the forms of the Latin language were not yet adapted. The facility of expressing reflexion appears much more developed in Terence. If Plautus were reproducing a Greek original in such passages as Mostell. 85-145, Trinummus 186-273, the thought and the illustration would have lost much in freshness and naïveté but they would have been expressed with much more point and conciseness.

The exuberant use of terms of endearment and of abuse in Plautus may be also mentioned as an original and Roman characteristic of his genius. His lovers' phrases⁶³, though used by him with a saturnine humour, remind us of the passionate use of similar phrases in Catullus. The slave or cook of Greek comedy may probably have indulged freely in the vituperation of his fellows; but there is an idiomatic heartiness in the interchange of curses and verbal sword-thrusts among the slaves, panders, and cooks of Plautus, which seems congenial to the race who enjoyed the spectacles of the amphitheatre. The inexhaustible fund of merriment supplied by references to or practical exemplifications of the various modes of punishing and torturing slaves, tells of a people not especially cruel, but practically callous either to the infliction or the suffering of pain. The Greek nature was, when roused to passion, capable of fiercer and more cowardly cruelty than the Roman, but was too sensitively organised to enjoy the spectacle or the imagination of inflictions which form the subject of the stalest jokes in Plautus. The spirit of the new comedy as it existed in Greece, was not, on the whole, calculated to elevate, but it certainly was capable of humanising the Roman character.

We are less able to speak of his originality in the selection of incidents and dramatic situations, in the general management of his plots, and his conception of characters. Though more varied than Terence in the subjects which he chooses for dramatic treatment, yet there is great sameness, both of incident, development, and character, in many of them. His favourite subject is a scheme by which a slave, in the interests of his young master, and his mistress, cheats a father, a mercenary captain, or a 'leno,' who are treated, though in different degrees, as enemies of the human race and legitimate objects of spoliation. Some of the best of his plays—the Pseudolus, Bacchides, the Mostellaria, and the Miles Gloriosus—turn entirely upon incidents of this kind—'frustrationes in comoediis' as they are called. There is nothing on which the chief agent in such plots prides himself so much as on his success 'in shearing,' 'planing away,' or 'wiping the nose' of, his antagonist in the game: there is no indignity about which the sense of honour is so sensitive as that of having had 'words palmed off upon one,' and having thus been made an object of ridicule. The invariable enlisting of sympathy in favour of the cheat and against the dupe is a trait more illustrative of the countrymen of Ulysses than of Fabricius; but the 'Tusci turba impia vici' at Rome had, no doubt, their own native aptitude for cheating and lying.

Several other plays turn upon similar 'frustrationes.' Two of the best of these are the 'Curculio' and the 'Epidicus.' Though there are lively and humorous scenes in nearly all his plays, and the language is generally sparkling and vigorous, yet the sameness of situation and character, and the unrelieved tone of light-hearted merriment and mendacity with which this class of play is pervaded soon pall upon the taste. A few, the 'Cistellaria' and the 'Poenulus,' for instance, turn upon the incident of a free-born child being stolen in infancy, and recognised by her parents before she has fatally committed herself to the occupation for which she has been destined. But these are not among the best executed of the Plautine plays. In the 'Stichus' we enjoy the unwonted satisfaction of making acquaintance with two wives who really care for their husbands: and the parasite Gelasimus in that play is as amusing as the characters of the same kind in the Captivi, Curculio, Menaechmi, Persa, etc. But the absence of incident, coherent plot, and adequate dénouement, must prevent this play from being ranked among the more important compositions of Plautus. A few however still remain to be noticed as among the most serious or the most imaginative efforts of his genius. The 'Aulularia,' 'Trinummus,' 'Menaechmi,' 'Rudens,' 'Captivi,' and 'Amphitryo,' are much more varied in their interest than most of those already mentioned, and each of them has its own characteristic excellence.

As in the case of other productive writers there is no absolute agreement as to which are the best of the Plautine plays. Without assigning precedence to any one over the other, a preference may be indicated for these five, as combining the most varied elements of interest with the best execution—Aulularia, Captivi, Menaechmi, Pseudolus, Rudens; and for these, as second to the former in interest owing to some inferiority in comic power, artistic execution, or natural vraisemblance, or owing to some element in them which offends the taste or moral sentiment—Trinummus, Mostellaria, Miles Gloriosus, Bacchides, Amphitruo. These ten plays alone, without taking the others into account, show both in their incidents, scenes, and characters, how much wider Plautus' range of observation was than that of Terence. Even within the narrow limits of the characters most familiar to ancient comedy—the 'amans ephebus,' the 'meretrix blanda,' the 'fallax servus,' the 'bragging captain,' the 'parasite,' the 'leno,' the 'old men'—good, kindly, severe, genial, sensual and disreputable,—we find great individual differences. More than Terence, Plautus maintains a dramatic and ironical superiority over his characters. This is especially shown in his treatment of his young lovers and the objects of their despairing affection. The former exhibit various shades of weakness, from the mere ineffectual struggle between the grain of conscience left them and the attractions of pleasure, to the sentimental impulse to end their woes by suicide. The latter show varying degrees of attraction, from a grace and vivacity that reminds German critics of the Mariana and the Philina in 'Wilhelm Meister,' to the hardness and astuteness of the heroines of the 'Truculentus' and the 'Miles Gloriosus.' Plautus cannot be said to care much about any of them except as objects of amusement and of the study of human nature. Nor, on the other hand, has he any hatred of his worst characters. He has the true dramatist's sympathy with the vigorous conception of Ballio—the same kind of sympathy which made that part a favourite one of the actor Roscius. His characters are interesting and amusing in themselves; they are never used as the mere mouthpieces of the writer's reflexion, wit, or sentiment. It is, of course, impossible to determine definitely how far he was an original creator, how far a merely vigorous imitator. But he is so perfectly at home with his characters, he makes them speak and act so naturally, he is so careless about those minutiae of artistic treatment of which a mere translator would be scrupulously regardful, that it seems most probable that the life with which he animates his conventional type is derived from his own exuberant vitality and his many-sided contact with humanity.

Something of the same kind is implied in the warning addressed by his father to the young Horace. Any breach of the sanctities of family life is invariably reprobated. On the rare occasions where such breaches occur,—as in the Aulularia—they are repaired by marriage. Any one aspiring to play the part of a Lothario—as in the Miles Gloriosus—is made an object both of punishment and ridicule. In this respect the comedy of Plautus contrasts favourably with our own comic drama of the Restoration. There are no scenes in these plays intended or calculated to stimulate the passions; and although there are coarse expressions and allusions in almost all of them, yet the coarseness of Plautus is not to be compared with that of Lucilius, Catullus, Martial, or Juvenal. It is rather in the absence of any virtuous ideal, than in positive incitements to vice, that the Plautine comedy might be called immoral. Although family honour is treated as secure from violation, there is no pure feeling about family life. Sons are afraid of their fathers, run into debt without their knowledge, deceive them in every possible way, occasionally express a wish that their death might enable them to treat their mistresses more generously. Husbands fear their wives and speak on all occasions bitterly against them. Plautus was evidently more familiar with the ways of the 'libertinae' than of Roman matrons of the better sort; and thus while we see little of the latter, what we hear of them is not to their advantage. The only obligation which young men seem to acknowledge is that of honour and friendly service to one another. So too slaves, while they hold it as their first duty to lie and swindle in behalf of their young masters, feel the duty of absolute devotion and sacrifice of themselves to their interests. Plautus shows scarcely any of the Roman feeling of dignity or seriousness, or any regard for patriotism or public duty. There is everywhere abundance of good humour and good sense, but, except in the Captivi and Rudens, we find scarcely any pathos or elevated feeling. The ideal of character which satisfies most of his personages might almost be expressed in the words of Stalagmus in the Captivi—

These early efforts of the Italian lyrical muse do not approach the smoothness and ease of the Glyconics and Phalaecians of Catullus, nor the dignity of the Alcaics and Asclepiadeans of Horace: but they do, in a rude kind of way, show facility and native power in finding a rhythmical vehicle for the emotion or sentiment of the moment. In the longer passages in which they occur, these metres are generally combined with some form of trochaic verse, which again is often exchanged for septenarian or octonarian iambics. Of the rapid transitions with which Plautus passes from one metre to another in the expression of strong excitement of feeling, we have a striking example in the long recitative of Ballio⁸⁸, in which trochaics, septenarian, octonarian, and dimeter, are continually varied by the introduction now of one, now of several, octonarian or septenarian iambics. He thus claims much greater freedom than Terence in the combination of his metres. He exercises also greater license, in substituting two short for one long syllable (in his cretics and trochaics), and in deviating from the laws of position and hiatus accepted by later poets. It is impossible for a modern reader to reproduce the rhythmical flow of passages which must have depended a good deal for their effect on the musical accompaniment, and on the pronunciation of the actor. Yet even though it requires some effort to recognise the legitimate beat of the rhythm 'digito et aure,' it is equally impossible not to recognise the vigour and vehemence of movement of such passages as these—

With Terence Roman literature enters on a new stage of its development. When he appeared, a younger generation had grown up, who not only inherited the enthusiasm for Greek art and letters of the older generation,—of men of the stamp of the elder Scipio, Aemilius Paulus, T. Quintius Flamininus,—but who had been carefully educated from their boyhood in Greek accomplishments. The leading representative of this younger generation, Scipio Aemilianus, was about the same age as Terence, and admitted him to his intimacy; thus showing in his early youth the same enlightened and tolerant spirit and the same cultivated aspiration which made him choose Panaetius and Polybius as the associates of his manhood, and induced him to live in relations of frank unreserve with Lucilius during the latter years of his life. Among the members of the Scipionic circle, Laelius and Furius Philo were also closely associated with Terence; and he is said to have enjoyed the favour of older men of distinction and culture, Sulpicius Gallus, Q. Fabius Labeo, and M. Popillius, men of consular rank and of literary and poetic accomplishment⁴. In the interval between Plautus and Terence, the great gap which was never again to be bridged over had been made between the mass of the people and a small educated class. While the former became less capable of intellectual pleasure, and were beginning to prefer the exhibitions of boxers, rope-dancers, and gladiators⁵, to the comedies which had delighted their fathers, the latter became more exacting than the men of a former generation, in their demands for correctness and elegance. They had acquired through education the fastidiousness of men of culture, a quality not easily gained and retained without some sacrifice of native force and popular sympathies. Recognising the immense superiority of the Greek originals in literature to the rude Roman copies, they believed that the best way to create a national Latin literature was to deviate as little as possible, in spirit, form, and substance, from the works of Greek genius. But though cosmopolitan, or rather purely Greek, in their literary tastes, they were thoroughly patriotic in devotion to their country's interests. They cherished their native language as the great instrument of social and political life; and they recognised the influence which a cultivated literature might have in rendering that instrument finer and more flexible than natural use had made it. By concentrating attention on form and style, without aiming at originality of invention, Latin literature might become a truer medium of Greek culture, and might, at the same time, impart a finer edge and temper to the rude ore of Latin speech.

With Terence Roman literature enters on a new stage of its development. When he appeared, a younger generation had grown up, who not only inherited the enthusiasm for Greek art and letters of the older generation,—of men of the stamp of the elder Scipio, Aemilius Paulus, T. Quintius Flamininus,—but who had been carefully educated from their boyhood in Greek accomplishments. The leading representative of this younger generation, Scipio Aemilianus, was about the same age as Terence, and admitted him to his intimacy; thus showing in his early youth the same enlightened and tolerant spirit and the same cultivated aspiration which made him choose Panaetius and Polybius as the associates of his manhood, and induced him to live in relations of frank unreserve with Lucilius during the latter years of his life. Among the members of the Scipionic circle, Laelius and Furius Philo were also closely associated with Terence; and he is said to have enjoyed the favour of older men of distinction and culture, Sulpicius Gallus, Q. Fabius Labeo, and M. Popillius, men of consular rank and of literary and poetic accomplishment⁴. In the interval between Plautus and Terence, the great gap which was never again to be bridged over had been made between the mass of the people and a small educated class. While the former became less capable of intellectual pleasure, and were beginning to prefer the exhibitions of boxers, rope-dancers, and gladiators⁵, to the comedies which had delighted their fathers, the latter became more exacting than the men of a former generation, in their demands for correctness and elegance. They had acquired through education the fastidiousness of men of culture, a quality not easily gained and retained without some sacrifice of native force and popular sympathies. Recognising the immense superiority of the Greek originals in literature to the rude Roman copies, they believed that the best way to create a national Latin literature was to deviate as little as possible, in spirit, form, and substance, from the works of Greek genius. But though cosmopolitan, or rather purely Greek, in their literary tastes, they were thoroughly patriotic in devotion to their country's interests. They cherished their native language as the great instrument of social and political life; and they recognised the influence which a cultivated literature might have in rendering that instrument finer and more flexible than natural use had made it. By concentrating attention on form and style, without aiming at originality of invention, Latin literature might become a truer medium of Greek culture, and might, at the same time, impart a finer edge and temper to the rude ore of Latin speech.

Our knowledge of the life of Terence is derived chiefly from a fragment of the lost work of Suetonius, De viris illustribus, preserved in the commentary of Donatus. Confirmation of some of the statements contained in the life is obtained from later writers and speakers, and also from the prologues to the different plays, which throw light on the literary and personal relations of the poet. These prologues were among the original sources of Suetonius: but he quotes or refers to the works of various grammarians and antiquarians—Porcius Licinus, Volcatius Sedigitus, Santra, Nepos, Fenestella, Q. Cosconius—as his authorities. The first two lived within a generation or two after the death of Terence, and the first of them shows a distinct animus against him and his patrons. But notwithstanding the abundance of authorities, there is uncertainty as to both the date of his birth and the place and manner of his death. The doubt as to the former arises from the discrepancy of the MSS. His last play, the Adelphoe, was exhibited in 160 b.c. Shortly after its production he went to Greece, being then, according to the best MSS., in his twenty-fifth ('nondum quintum atque vicesimum egressus⁶ annum'), according to inferior MSS., in his thirty-fifth year. This uncertainty is increased by a discrepancy between the authorities quoted by Suetonius. Cornelius Nepos is quoted for the statement that he was about the same age as Scipio (born 185 b.c.) and Laelius, while Fenestella, an antiquarian of the later Augustan period, represented him as older. As the authority of the MSS. coincides with that of the older record, the year 185 b.c. may be taken as the most probable date of his birth. In the case of an author drawing originally from life, it might seem improbable that he should have written six comedies, so true in their apprehension and delineation of various phases of human nature, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. But the case of an imitative artist reproducing impressions derived from literature is different; and the circumstances of Terence's Phoenician origin and early life may well have developed in him a precocity of talent. His acknowledged intimacy with Scipio and Laelius, and the general belief that they assisted him in the composition of his plays, agree better with the statement that he was about their own age than that he was ten years older. The lines at the end of the prologue to the Heauton Timorumenos—

He was not a popular poet, in the sense in which Plautus was popular; he made no claim to original invention, or even original treatment of his materials: he was however not a mere translator but rather an adapter from the Greek; and his aim was to give a true picture of Greek life and manners in the purest Latin style. He stands in much the same relation to Menander and other writers of the new comedy¹¹, as that in which a fine engraver stands to a great painter. He speaks with the enthusiasm not of a creative genius, but of an imitative artist, inspired by a strong admiration of his models. And this view of his aim is confirmed by the result which he attained. He has none of the purely Roman characteristics of Plautus, in sentiment, allusion, or style¹²; none of his extravagance, and none of his creative exuberance of fancy. The law which Terence always imposes on himself is the 'ne quid nimis.' He aims at correctness and consistency, and rejects nearly every expression or allusion which might remind his hearers that they were in Rome and not in Athens. His plots are tamer and less varied in their interest than those of Plautus, but they are worked out much more carefully and artistically. He takes great pains in the opening scenes to make the situation in which the play begins clear, and he allows the action to proceed to the dénouement through the medium of the natural play of character and motive. As a painter of life it is not by striking effects, but by his truth in detail, and his power of delineating the finer distinctions in varying specimens of the same type, that he gains the admiration of the reader. There are no strongly-drawn or vividly conceived personages in his plays, but they all act and speak in the most natural manner. Though he has left no trace in any of his plays of one drawing directly from the life, there is no more truthful, natural, and delicate delineator of human nature, in its ordinary and more level moods, within the whole range of classical literature. Characters, circumstances, motives, etc., are all in keeping with a cosmopolitan type of citizen or family life, courteous and humane, taking the world easily, and outwardly decorous in its pleasures, but without serious interests, or high aspirations.

Terence is, accordingly, in substance and form, a 'dimidiatus Menander,'—a Roman only in his language. The aim of his art was to be as purely Athenian as it was possible for one writing in Latin to be. While his great gift to Roman literature is that he first made it artistic, that he imparted to rude Latium the sense of elegance, consistency, and moderation, his gift to the world is that, through him, it possesses a living image of Greek society in the third century b.c. presented in the purest Latin idiom. The life of Athens after the loss of her religious belief, her great political activity, and speculative and artistic energy,—or, rather, one of the phases of that life, as it was shaped by Menander for dramatic purposes—supplies the material of all his plays. It is the embodiment of the lighter side of the philosophy of Epicurus, without the elevation of the speculative and scientific curiosity which gave serious interest even to that form of the philosophic life. There is a charm of friendliness, urbanity, social enjoyment, superficial kindness of heart, in the picture presented: and it was a necessary stage in the culture of the best Romans that they should learn to appreciate this charm, and assimilate its influence in their intercourse with one another. The Greek comedy of Menander was a lesson to the Romans in manners, in tolerance, in kindly indulgence to equals and inferiors, and in the cultivation of pleasant relations with one another. The often quoted line,—

is often urged, but without any feeling that this divergence needs an apology. The hollowness of the social conditions on which this superficial agreeability and humanity rested is revealed by passages in these plays which prove that the habitual comfort of a moderately wealthy class was maintained by the practice of infanticide: and a virtuous wife is represented as begging the forgiveness of her husband for having given her child away instead of ordering it to be put to death¹³. In its outward amenity, as well as its inward hollowness, the social and family life depicted in the comedies of Terence was the very antithesis of the old Roman austere and formal discipline. How far this new view of life contributed to the subsequent deterioration of Roman character, it is difficult to say. The writings of Cicero and Horace show that the receptive Italian intellect was able to extract the elements of courtesy, tolerance, and social amiability out of such a delineation without any loss of native manliness and strength of affection. And thus perhaps, apart from their literary charm, the permanent gain to the world from the comedies of Terence and the philosophy which they embody, has been greater than the immediate loss to the weaker members of the Roman youth who may have been misled by the view of life presented in them.

Love, generally in the form of pathetic sentiment rather than of irregular passion, is the motive of all the pieces. There is generally a double love-story; one, an attachment, which, if not virtuous in the beginning, has become so afterwards, and which ends in marriage and the discovery that the lady is the daughter of a citizen, who has been exposed or carried away in her infancy; the other, an ordinary intrigue, like those which form the subject of most of the comedies of Plautus. In his treatment of love, Terence may be said to be the precursor of Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus. He has the serious sense of its pains and pleasures which they display, though he wants the passionate intensity of the two first of these. The greatest attraction of his love passages arises from his tenderness of feeling. In this he is like Tibullus. Although the origin of the sentiment, in most of his plays, is nothing deeper than desire, inspired by outward charms and enhanced by compassion, yet we recognise in him, or in the model which he followed, much more than in Plautus, a belief in and appreciation of constancy and fidelity. In his treatment of his 'amantes ephebi' he shows sympathy with, rather than the humorous superiority to, their weaknesses which we find in Plautus. But though there is more grossness in the older poet, yet there is occasionally more real indelicacy in Terence; as in the subject of the 'Eunuchus' and in the acceptance by Phaedria, at the end of that play, of the suggestion of Gnatho, which, in its union of mercenary with sentimental motives, is almost more repugnant to natural feeling than the conclusion of the 'Asinaria' and 'Bacchides.'

Gnatho is a new and more subtly conceived type of the parasite, and in Thraso the 'Miles Gloriosus' does not transcend the limits of credibility. Parmeno and Phaedria are natural embodiments of the confidential slave and the weak lover. Their relations to one another are brought out with more delicate irony and finer psychological analysis, though with less vigour than those of Pseudolus and Calidorus, or of Ludus and Pistoclerus in the Pseudolus and Bacchides of Plautus. The Davus, Geta, and Syrus of the other plays are tamer and less humorous than the slaves of Plautus; but they play their part with wit and liveliness, and the rôle which they have to perform is not felt to be incompatible with the ordinary conditions of life. Aeschinus, in the Adelphoe, shows a higher spirit and more energy of character than most of the other lovers in Plautus or Terence. The contrast between the genial, indulgent, selfish man of the world, and the harder type of character produced by exclusive devotion to business, is well brought out in the Micio and Demea of the Adelphoe, and in the Chremes and Menedemus of the Heauton Timorumenos. The two brothers in the 'Phormio,' Demipho and Chremes, are also happily characterised and distinguished from one another; and Phormio is himself a type of the parasite, as distinct from Gnatho, as he is from the Gelasimus or Curculio of Plautus. The character-painting in Terence is altogether free from the tendency to exaggeration and caricature which is the besetting fault of some of the greatest humourists. Yet with all his truth of detail, his careful avoidance of the extreme forms of villainy, roguery, and inhuman hardness, it may be doubted whether the life represented by Terence is not on the whole more purely conventional than that represented by Plautus. His personages seem to move about in a kind of 'Fools' paradise' without the knowledge of good or evil. All the sentimental virtues seem to flourish spontaneously, even in the hearts of his courtesans: and though he holds up a true ideal of fidelity in love and loyalty in friendship, yet the chief practical lesson that seems to be suggested is the necessity of overcoming the restraints imposed by prudence and conscience on the indulgence of natural inclination.

If we consider the form, substance, and spirit of these six plays, we find that their merit consists in the art with which the situation is unfolded and the plot developed, the consistency and moderation with which a conventional view of life and various types of character are set before us, and in the large part played in them by the tender and sympathetic emotions. But their great attraction, both to ancient and modern readers, has been their charm of style. The diction of Terence, while it wants the creativeness and exuberance of Plautus, is free from the mannerisms which accompanied these large endowments of the older poet. The superiority of his style over that of Lucilius, who wrote a generation after him, is almost immeasurable. The fine Attic flavour is more perceptible in his Latin, than in the Greek of his contemporaries. He does not attempt to emulate the 'numeri innumeri' of Plautus, but limits himself almost entirely to those metres which suit the natural flow of placid or more animated conversation, viz. the iambic (senarian or septenarian) and the trochaic septenarian. The effect of his metre is to introduce measure, propriety, grace, and point into ordinary speech without impairing its ease and spontaneousness. The natural vivacity and urbanity of his style is equally apparent in dialogue, or in rapid and picturesque narrative of incidents and pathetic situations¹⁶. He is full of happy often-quoted sayings, such as

But Roman satire sprang up and flourished independently of any of those kinds of composition. In national spirit and moral purpose it was unlike the personal lampoons of the Greek satirists. It was perhaps not less personal, but was more ethical; it professed at least to be animated not by private enmity but by public spirit. It embraced also a much greater variety of topics. Horace finds a closer parallel to the satire of Lucilius in the old Athenian comedy. These two kinds of literature have this in common, that they are the expression of public, not of personal feeling. But though Lucilius probably, like Horace after him, studied the old comic poets 'Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes,' to catch something of their spirit and manner in his satire, Roman satire was not an imitation of Greek comedy. Where Roman literature professes to be an imitation of Greek, it is the form and the metre much more than the spirit and matter that are reproduced. Greek comedy and Roman satire were the independent results of freedom of speech and criticism in different ages and countries. Their difference in form arose out of fundamental differences in the character as well as in the genius of the two nations. Although Roman speakers and writers exercised a license of speech and of personal criticism equal to that which prevailed in the Athenian democracy, and beyond what the spirit of personal honour tolerates in modern times, yet the exposure of public men to ridicule on the stage was utterly repugnant to the instincts of an aristocratic republic in which one of the great bonds of union was respect for outward authority¹. The tendency of the Roman mind to reduce all things to rule and to express itself in abstract comments on life, rather than to represent human nature in living forms, also favoured the assumption by Lucilius of a mode of literature addressing itself to the understanding of readers, and not to the curiosity of spectators.

The spirit by which satire is animated was native to Italy. The germ out of which it was developed was the Fescennina licentia, or, as it is called by Dionysius, the

κέρτομος καὶ σατυρικὴ παιδιά

It endeavoured also, by acting on individual character, to effect objects which the Roman State strove to accomplish by direct legislation. The various sumptuary laws of that age, and the enactments made to repress the study of Greek rhetoric and philosophy, emanated from the same spirit which led Lucilius to denounce the increase of luxury and the affectation of Greek manners among his contemporaries. The strong Roman appetites and the novelty of new studies prevailed alike over the artificial restraints of legislative enactments, and over the contemptuous and the earnest teaching of satire. But the influence of satire could reach further than that of censors or sumptuary laws. While it could brand notorious offenders it was able also to unmask hypocritical pretences—

Whatever strength there may be in the other objections urged against accepting the date 148 b.c. as that of the birth of Lucilius, it is difficult to believe that Lucilius should have taken part in the Numantine War, and been admitted to apparently equal intimacy with Scipio before he had attained the age of fifteen. It is still more difficult to suppose that the earliest book or books of his Satires, composed before the death of Scipio, should be the work of a boy under nineteen years of age. But with these admissions it is not necessary to throw back the date of the poet's birth so far as is done by Müller. A more probable explanation of the error in the date was suggested by Mr. Munro in the Journal of Philology. He supposes that Jerome in copying the words of Suetonius referring to the death and funeral of Lucilius substituted the 'anno aetatis xlvi. for lxiv. or lxvi., and then adapted the year of birth to the annus Abrahae which would correspond to this false reading.' Mr. Munro adds, 'Everything would now run smooth. Lucilius when he went with Scipio to Spain would be in the prime of manhood, thirty-two or thirty-four years of age. Soon after that time he would be writing and publishing his earliest Books, xxvi.-xxix., and then xxx. Some of these at all events would be published before the death of Scipio, when the poet would be thirty-seven or thirty-nine⁸.' It may be added against the supposition that Lucilius was born in the year 180 b.c., that, in that case, we should have expected to have found in his numerous fragments allusions to events even earlier than the Censorship of P. Cornelius Lupus or the wars with Viriathus. Moreover the notices of his relation to Scipio and Laelius, as in the 'discincti ludere' of Horace, and in the story told by the Scholiast on that passage, of Laelius coming on them, when the poet was chasing Scipio round the table with a napkin, seem to indicate the familiar footing of a much younger to older men.

His satires were written in thirty Books. The remaining fragments amount to about 1100 lines. Most of these are single lines, preserved by grammarians as illustrative of the use of words. The amount and variety of these, if they had no other value, would at least be suggestive of the industry with which grammatical and philological research into their own language was carried on by Roman writers. Some fragments are found in ancient commentaries on the Satires and Epistles of Horace. The longer passages are quoted by Cicero, Gellius, Lactantius, and others. The Books from i. to xx. were written in hexameters; Book xxii., apparently, in elegiacs, a metre which had hitherto been employed only in short epigrams. Of the intervening Books between xxii. and xxvi. there remains only one line⁹. Books xxvi. and xxix., from which a large number of lines have been preserved, were written in trochaics and iambics. The last Book (xxx.) was written in hexameters. From the fact that the trochaic and iambic metres had been chiefly employed by the older writers of saturae, it seems probable that Lucilius made his first attempts in these metres, that he afterwards adopted the hexameter, and that in one or two of his latest books he attempted to write continuously in elegiacs. The allusions in Book xxvi. to the Spanish wars and to the 'exploits of Cornelius,' and the statement of his reasons for coming forward as an author, render it not improbable that this Book was the earliest in order of composition. It was in this Book that he appeared most conspicuously as the censor and critic of the older writers, a position not unlikely to have been assumed, at the very outset of his career, by one who claimed to initiate a change in Roman literature.

The fragments however, when read collectively, bring out the main sources of interest which the Romans found in the writings of Lucilius; first, the interest of a self-portraiture and close personal relation established with the reader¹⁴: second, the interest of a censorious criticism on politics, morals, and literature¹⁵.

This establishment of a personal relation with his readers was one of the most original elements in the Lucilian satire. He was the first of Roman, and one of the first among all, writers, who took the public into his confidence, and gained their ear, without exposing himself to contempt, by making a frank and unreserved display of his inmost and most personal thoughts and feelings. Had his works reached us entire, we should probably have found the same kind of attraction in them, from the sense of familiar intimacy with a man of interesting character and intelligence, which we find in the Epistles of Cicero and the Satires and Epistles of Horace.

His independent social position, and the character of the times in which he lived, enabled him to perform the office of a political satirist with more freedom than any other Roman writer. He belonged to the middle party between the extreme partisans of the aristocracy and of the democracy, the party of Scipio and Laelius, and that to which Cicero, in a later age, naturally inclined. He directed his satire against the corruption, incapacity, and arrogance²⁸ of the nobles by whom the wars abroad and affairs at home were mismanaged. His service under Scipio, and his admiration of his generalship, made him keenly sensitive to the disgrace incurred by the Roman arms under 'the limping Hostilius and Manius²⁹,' and in the war against Viriathus. Among those assailed by him on political grounds, L. Hostilius Tubulus, notorious for openly receiving bribes while presiding at a trial for murder, and C. Papirius Carbo, the friend of Tib. Gracchus and the suspected murderer of Scipio, were conspicuous. The more reputable names of Q. Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus and Mucius Scaevola are also mentioned among the objects of his satire³⁰. Personal motives—and especially his devotion to Scipio³¹—may have stimulated these animosities; but there were instances enough of incapacity in war, profligacy and extortion in the government of the provinces, corruption and favouritism in the administration of justice, of venality and ignorance in the electoral bodies, to justify the bold exposure by Lucilius of 'the leading men of the State and of the mass of the people in their tribes.' The personality of his attacks probably made him many enemies; and thus we hear that he was assailed by name on the stage, and was unable to obtain redress, while a writer who had taken a similar liberty with the tragic poet Accius was condemned. But the honour of a public funeral awarded to him at his death would indicate that the final verdict of his contemporaries was that in assuming the censorial function of attaching marks of infamy against the names of eminent men he was actuated, in the main, by worthy motives, and had done good service to the State.

indicates the same repugnance to marriage, which is expressed in a fragment of contemporary oratory, quoted by A. Gellius: 'If, Quirites, we could get on at all without wives, we should all keep clear of that nuisance; but since, in the way of nature, life cannot go on comfortably with them, nor at all without them, we ought rather to provide for the continued well-being of the world than for our temporary comfort.' The dislike to incur the responsibilities of family life, which appears so conspicuously among the cultivated classes in the later times of the Republic, was probably, if we are to judge from the testimony and examples of Lucilius and Horace, as much the result of the license allowed to men, as of the extravagant habits or jealous imperiousness of women.

But these passages are simple, direct, and clear, compared with many of the single lines or longer passages, already quoted in illustration of the substance of his satire. These leave an impression not only of a total want of the 'limae labor,' but of an abnormal harshness and difficulty, beyond what we find in the fragments of Pacuvius, Accius, or Ennius. The fragments of his trochaics and iambics are much simpler, 'much less depart from the natural order of the words,' than those of his hexameters: a fact which reminds us of the great advance made by Horace in adapting the heroic measure to the familiar experience of life. Lucilius is moreover a great offender against not only the graces but the decencies of language. Lines are found in his fragments as coarse as the coarsest in Catullus or Juvenal: nor could he urge the extenuating plea of having forgotten the respect due to his readers from the necessity of relieving his wounded feelings or of vindicating morality.

But perhaps the most important condition determining the original scope of Roman poetry was the predominance in that era of public over personal interests. Like Virgil and Horace, most of the early poets were men born in comparatively a humble station; yet by their force of intellect and character they became the familiar friends of the foremost men in the State. But while the poets of the Augustan age owed the charm of their existence to the patronage of the great, the earlier poets depended for their success mainly on popular favour. The intimacy subsisting between the leaders of action and of literature during the second century b.c. arose from the mutual attraction of greatness in different spheres. The chief men in the Republic obtained their position by their services to the State, and thus the personal attachment subsisting between them and men of letters was a bond connecting the latter with the public interest. The early poetry of the Republic is not the expression of an educated minority keeping aloof from public life. If it is animated by a strong aristocratic spirit, the reason is that the aristocratic spirit was predominant in the public life of Rome during that century.

This general popularity is an argument in favour of the original spirit animating this early literature. It implies the power of embodying some sentiment or idea of national or public interest. Thus Roman tragedy appears to have been received with favour, chiefly in consequence of the grave Roman tone of its maxims, and the Roman bearing of its personages. The epic poetry of the age did not, like the Odyssey, relate a story of personal adventure, but unfolded the annals of the State in continuous order, and appealed to the pride which men felt, as Romans, in their history and destiny. The satire of Lucilius was not intended merely to afford amusement by ridiculing the follies of social life, but played a part in public affairs by political partisanship and antagonism, and maintained the traditional standard of manners and opinions against the inroads of foreign influences. Latin comedy, indeed, was a more purely cosmopolitan product. The plays of Terence especially would affect those who listened to them simply as men and not as Roman citizens. But the comedy of Plautus abounded in the humour congenial to the Italian race, and owed much of its popularity to the strong Roman colouring spread over the Greek outlines of his representations.

The political condition of Rome in the second century b.c. is reflected in the changes through which her literature passed. For nearly two-thirds of that century, Roman history seems to go through a stage of political quiescence, as compared at least with the vigorous life and stormy passions of its earlier and later phases. But under the surface a great change was taking place, both in the government and the social condition of the people, the effects of which made themselves sufficiently manifest during the last century of the existence of the Republic. The outbreak of the long gathering forces of discontent and disorder is as distinctly marked in Roman history, as the outbreak of the revolutionary forces in modern Europe. The year 133 b.c., the date of the first tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, has the same kind of significance as the year 1789 A.D. Nor is it a mere coincidence that about the same time a great change takes place in the spirit of Roman literature. The comedies of Plautus, written in the first years of the century, while they reflect the political indifference of the mass of the people, are yet indicative of their general spirit of contentment, and their hearty enjoyment of life. The epic of Ennius, written a little later, proclaims the undisputed ascendency of an aristocracy, still moulded by its best traditions, and claiming to lead a united people. The remains of Roman tragedy breathe the high spirit of the governing class, and attest the severer virtue still animating its best representatives. The comedies of Terence seem addressed to the taste of a younger generation of greater refinement, but of a laxer moral fibre than their fathers, and of a class becoming separated by more elaborate culture from ordinary Roman citizens. Expressions in his prologues², however, show that there was as yet no division between classes arising from political discontent. But in the satire of Lucilius we read the protest of the better Roman spirit against the lawless arrogance of the nobles, their incapacity in war, their corrupt administration of justice, their iniquitous government of the provinces; against the ostentatious luxury of the rich; the avarice of the middle classes; the venality of the mob, and the profligacy of their leaders; and against the insincerity and animosities fostered among the educated classes by the contests of the forum and the law-courts.

The style of the early poets was marked by haste, harshness, and redundance, occasionally by verbal conceits and similar errors of taste. That of the writers of comedy, on the other hand, is easy, natural, and elegant. The Latin language seems thus to have adapted itself to the needs of ordinary social life more readily than to the expression of elevated feeling. Though many phrases in the fragments which have been reviewed are boldly and vigorously conceived, few passages are written with continuous ease and smoothness, and the language constantly halts, as if inadequate to the meaning which labours under it. The style has, in general, the merits of directness and sincerity, often of freshness and vigour, but wants altogether the depth and richness of colour, as well as the finish and moderation which we expect in the literature of a people to whom poetry and art are naturally congenial, and associated with many old memories and feelings. Their merits of style, such as the simple force with which they go directly to the heart of a matter, and the grave earnestness of their tone, are qualities characteristic rather of oratory than of poetry. But this colouring of their style is very different from the artificial rhetoric of the literature of the Empire. The oratorical style of the early poets was the natural result of a sympathy with the most practical intellectual instrument of their age. The rhetoric of the Empire was the expression of an artificial life, in which literature was cultivated to beguile the tedium of compulsory inaction, and the highest form of public speaking had sunk from its proud office as the organ of political freedom into a mere exercise of pedants and schoolboys³.

Historical composition also took its rise at Rome at this period. Although the earliest Roman annalists composed their works in the Greek language, it was not from the desire of imitating the historic art of Greece that this art was first cultivated at Rome. The origin of Roman history may be referred rather to the same impulse which gave birth to the epic poems of Naevius and Ennius. The early annalists were men of action and eminent station, who desired to record the important events in which they themselves had taken part, and to fix them for ever in the annals of their country. History originated at Rome in the impulse to keep alive the record of national life, not, as among the Greeks, in the spell which human story and the wonder of distant lands exercised over the imagination. Its office was not to teach lessons of political wisdom, but to commemorate the services of great men, and to satisfy a Roman's pride in the past, and his trust in the future of his country. The word annales suggests a different idea of history from that entertained and exemplified by Herodotus and Thucydides. The purpose of building up the record of unbroken national life was present to, though probably not realised by, the earliest annalists who preserved the line of magistrates, and kept account of the religious observances in the State: in the time of the expansion of Roman power, this purpose directed the attention of men of action to the composition of prose annals, and stimulated the productive genius of Naevius and Ennius: and when, in the Augustan age, the national destiny seemed to be fulfilled, the same purpose inspired the great epic of Virgil, and the 'colossal masterwork of Livy.'

Another form of literature, in which Rome became pre-eminent, first began in this era,—the writing of familiar letters. It was natural that a correspondence should be maintained among intimate friends and members of an active social circle, separated for years from one another by military service, or employment in the provinces; and the new taste for literature would induce the writers to give form and finish to these compositions, so that they might be interesting not only to the persons addressed, but to all the members of the same circle. The earliest compositions of this kind of which we read, are the familiar letters in verse ('Epistolas versiculis facetis ad familiares missas' Cicero calls them) written to his friends by the brother of Mummius, during the siege of Corinth⁴. That these had some literary value may be inferred from the fact that they survived down to the age of Cicero, and are spoken of in the letters to Atticus, as having often been quoted to him by a member of the family of Mummii. One of the earliest satires of Lucilius appears to have been a letter written to Scipio after the capture of Numantia; and several of his other satires were written in an epistolary form. How happily the later Romans employed this form in prose and verse is sufficiently proved by the letters of Cicero and Pliny, and the metrical Epistles of Horace.

This era also saw the beginning of the critical and grammatical studies which flourished through every period of Roman literature, and continued long after the cessation of all productive originality. This critical effort was a necessary condition of the cultivation of art by the Romans. The perfection of form attained by the great Roman poets of a later time was no exercise of a natural gift, but the result of many previous efforts and failures, and of much reflection on the conditions which had been, with no apparent effort, fulfilled by their Greek masters. Neither did their language acquire the symmetry, precision, and harmony, which make it so effective a vehicle in prose and verse, except as the result of assiduous labour. The natural tendency of the spoken language was to rapid decomposition. This was first arrested by Ennius, who cast the literary language of Rome into forms which became permanent after his time. Among his poetic successors in this era Accius and Lucilius made critical and grammatical studies the subjects of some of their works. Lucilius was a contemporary and friend of the most famous of the early grammarians, Aelius Stilo, the critic to whom is attributed the saying that 'if the muses were to speak in Latin, they would speak in the language of Plautus.' Critical works in trochaic verse were written by Porcius Licinus, and Volcatius Sedigitus, who appear to have been the chief authorities from whom later writers derived their information as to the lives of the early poets. It is characteristic of the want of spontaneousness in Latin literature, as compared with the fresh and varied impulses which the Greek genius obeyed in every stage of its literary development, that reflection on the principles of composition, efforts to form the language into a more certain and uniform vehicle, and comment on living writers, were carried on concurrently with the creative efforts of the more original minds.

The period of nearly half a century, from 102 till about 60 b.c., must thus be regarded as altogether barren in genuine poetical result. During this long interval there appeared no successor to carry on the work of developing the poetical side of a national literature, begun by Plautus, Ennius, and Lucilius. The only metrical compositions of this time were either inferior reproductions of the old forms or immature anticipations of the products of a later age. The political disturbance of the times between the tribunate of Tib. Gracchus and the first consulship of Crassus and Pompey (b.c. 70) was unfavourable to the cultivation of that poetry which is expressive of national feeling: and the Roman genius for art was as yet too immature to produce the poetry of individual reflection or personal passion. The state of feeling throughout Italy, before and immediately subsequent to the Social War, alienated from Rome the sympathetic genius of the kindred races from whom her most illustrious authors were drawn in later times. It was in the years of comparative peace, between the horrors of the first civil war and the alarm preceding the outbreak of the second, that a new poet grew apparently unnoticed to maturity, and the silence was at last broken after the long repression of Italian genius by a voice at once stronger in native vitality and richer in acquired culture than any which had preceded it.

But there is one thing significant in the literary character of this period, otherwise so barren in works of taste and imagination. Those by whom the art of verse was practised are no longer 'Semi-Graeci' or humble provincials, but Romans of political or social distinction. The chief authors in the interval between the first and second era of Roman poetry are either members of the aristocracy or men of old family belonging to the equestrian order. And this connexion between literature and social rank continues till the close of the Republic. The poets of the Ciceronian age,—Hortensius, Memmius, Lucretius, Catullus, Calvus, Cinna, &c.—either themselves belonged to the governing class, or were men of leisure and independent means, living as equals with the members of that class. This circumstance explains much of the difference in tone between the literature of that age and both the earlier and later literature. The separation in taste and sympathy between the higher classes and the mass of the people which had begun in the days of Terence, grew wider and wider with the growth of culture and with the increasing bitterness of political dissensions. It was only among the rich and educated that poetry could now expect to find an audience; and the poetry written for them appealed, for the most part, to the convictions, tastes, pleasures, and animosities which they shared as members of a class, not, like the best Augustan poetry, to the higher sympathies which they might share as the depositaries of great national traditions. But if this poetry was too exclusively addressed to a class—a class too, though refined by culture, yet living for the most part the life of fashion and pleasure—it had the merit of being the sincere expression of men writing to please themselves and their equals. It was not called upon to make any sacrifice of individual conviction or public sentiment to satisfy popular taste or the requirements of an Imperial master.

But though barren in poetry this interval was far from being barren in other intellectual results. This was the era of the great Roman orators, the successors of Laelius, Carbo, the Gracchi, etc., and the immediate predecessors and contemporaries of Cicero. It was through the care with which public speaking was cultivated that Latin prose was formed into that clear, exact, dignified, and commanding instrument, which served through so many centuries as the universal organ of history, law, philosophy, learning, and religion,—of public discussion and private correspondence. While Latin poetry is, both in spirit and manner, quite as much Italian as Roman, Latin prose bears the stamp of the political genius of Rome. It was the deliberate expression of the mind of men practised in affairs, exercised in the deliberations of the Senate, the harangues of the public assemblies, the pleadings of the courts,—of men accustomed to determine and explain questions of law and to draw up edicts binding on all subjects of the State,—trained, moreover, to a sense of literary form by the study of Greek rhetoric, and naturally guided to clearness and dignity of expression by the orderly understanding, the strong hold on reality, and the authoritative bearing which were their birthright as Romans. The effort which obtained its crowning success in the prose style of Cicero left its mark on other forms of literature. History continued to be written by members of the great governing families to serve both as a record of events and a weapon of party warfare. The large and varied correspondence of Cicero shows how general the accomplishment of style had become among educated men. And if this result was, in the main, due to the fervour of mind and temper elicited by the contests of public life, the systematic teaching of grammarians and rhetoricians acted as a corrective of the natural exuberance or carelessness of the rhetorical faculty.

During all this interval, in which native poetry was neglected, the art and thought of Greece were penetrating more deeply into Italy. Cicero, in his defence of Archias, attests the eagerness with which Greek studies were cultivated during the early years of the century; 'Erat Italia tunc plena Graecarum artium ac disciplinarum, studiaque haec et in Latio vehementius tum colebantur quam nunc iisdem in oppidis, et hic Romae propter tranquillitatem reipublicae non neglegebantur.' With the reviving tranquillity of the Republic these studies also revived. Learned Greeks continued to flock to Rome and to attach themselves to members of the great houses,—the Luculli, the Metelli, Pompey, etc.; and it became more and more the custom for young men of birth and wealth to travel or spend some years of study among the famous cities of Greece and Asia. This new and closer contact of the Greek with the Roman mind came about, not as the earlier one through dramatic representations, but, in a great measure, through the medium of books, which began now to be accumulated at Rome both in public and private libraries. Probably no other cause produces so great a change in national character and intellect as the awakening of the taste and the creating of facilities for reading. By the diffusion of books, as well as by the instruction of living teachers, the Romans of this generation came under the influence of a new class of writers, whose spirit was more in harmony with the modern world than the old epic and dramatic poets, viz. the exponents of the different philosophic systems and the learned poets of Alexandria. These new influences helped to denationalise Roman thought and literature, to make the individual more conscious of himself, and to stimulate the passions and pleasures of private life. While the endeavour to regulate life in accordance with a system of philosophy tended to isolate men from their fellows, the study of the Alexandrine poets, the cultivation of art for its own sake, the exclusive admiration of a particular manner of writing fostered the spirit of literary coteries as distinct from the spirit of a national literature. But making allowance for all these drawbacks, it is to the Alexandrine culture that the education of the Roman sense of literary beauty is primarily due. Along with this culture, indeed, the taste for other forms of art, which was rapidly developed and largely fed in the last age of the Republic, powerfully cooperated. Lucretius specifies among the 'deliciae vitae'

As the bent given to philosophical and literary studies developed the inner life and personal tastes of the individual, the political disorganisation of the age tended to stimulate new modes of thought and life, which had not, in any former generation, been congenial to the Roman mind. While the work of political destruction was being carried on along with the most strenuous gratification of their passions by one set among the leading men at Rome—such as Catiline and his associates, and, somewhat later, Clodius, Curio, Caelius, Antony, etc.—among men of more sensitive and refined natures the pleasures of the contemplative life began to exercise a novel fascination. The comparative seclusion in which men like Lucullus and Hortensius lived in their later years may, perhaps, be accounted for by other reasons than the mere love of ease and pleasure. It was a symptom of that despair of the Republic which is so often expressed in Cicero's letters, and of the consequent diversion of thought from practical affairs to the questions and interests which concern the individual. In the same way the unsettlement and afterwards the loss of political life at Athens gave a great impulse both to the various philosophical sects on the one hand, and to the literature of the new comedy, which deals exclusively with private life, on the other. In Rome this alienation from politics naturally allied itself, among members of the aristocracy, with the acceptance of the Epicurean philosophy. The slow dissolution of religious belief which had been going on since the first contact of the Roman mind with that of Greece, awoke in Rome, as it had done in Greece, a deeper interest in the ultimate questions of the existence and nature of the gods and of the origin and destiny of the human soul. We see how the contemplation of these questions consoled Cicero when no longer able to exercise his energy and vivid intelligence on public affairs. He discusses them with candour and seriousness of spirit and with a strong leaning to the more hopeful side of the controversy, but scarcely from the point of view which regards their settlement as of supreme importance to human well-being. But they are raised from much greater depths of feeling and inward experience by Lucretius, to whom the life of political warfare and personal ambition was utterly repugnant, and who had dedicated himself, with all the intensity of his passionate and poetical temperament, to the discovery and the teaching of the true meaning of life. The happiest results of his recluse and contemplative life were the revelation of a new delight open to the human spirit through sympathy with the spirit of Nature, and the deepening beyond anything which had yet found expression in literature of the fellow-feeling which unites man not only to humanity but to all sentient existence. The taste, so congenial to the Italian, for country life found in him its first and most powerful poetical interpreter: while the humanity of sentiment, first instilled through the teaching of comedy, and fostered by later literary and ethical study, was enforced with a greatness of heart and imagination which has seldom been equalled in ancient or modern times.

Of the poetry which arose out of these conditions of life and culture, two representatives only are known to us in their works, Lucretius and Catullus. From the testimony of their contemporaries we know them to have been recognised as the greatest of the poets of that age. Lucretius in his own province held an unquestioned pre-eminence. Yet that other minds were occupied with the topics which he alone treated with a masterly hand is proved by the existence of a work, of a somewhat earlier date, by one Egnatius, bearing the title 'De Rerum Natura,' and also by Cicero's notice, in connexion with his mention of Lucretius, of the 'Empedoclea' of Sallustius. Varro also is mentioned by ancient writers, in connexion with Empedocles and Lucretius, as the author of a metrical work 'De Rerum Natura⁴.' More satisfactory evidence is afforded by the discussions in the 'De Natura Deorum,' the 'Tusculan Questions,' and the 'De Finibus,' of the interest taken by educated men in the class of questions which Lucretius professed to answer. Yet neither the antecedent nor the later attention devoted to these subjects explains the powerful attraction which they had for Lucretius. In him, more than in any other Roman, we recognise a fresh and deep source of poetic thought and feeling appearing in the world. The culture of his age may have suggested or rendered possible the channel which his genius followed, but cannot account for the power and intensity with which it poured itself into that channel. He cannot be said either to sum up the art and thought contemporary with himself, or, like Virgil, to complete that of preceding times. The work done by him, and the influence exercised by him on the poetry of Rome and on the world, are to be explained only by his original and individual force.

Yet indications in the poem itself have been pointed out which might incline us to accept the story rather as a meagre tradition of some tragic circumstances in the poet's history, than as the idle invention of an uncritical age. The unrelieved intensity of thought and feeling, by which more almost than any other work of literature it is characterised, seems indicative of an overstrain of power, which may well have caused the loss or eclipse of what to the poet was the sustaining light and joy of his life⁴. Under such a calamity it would have been quite in accordance with the principles of his philosophy to seek refuge in self-destruction, and to imitate an example which he notes in the case of another speculative thinker, on becoming conscious of failing intellectual power⁵. But this general sense of overstrained tension of thought and feeling is, as was first pointed out by his English Editor, much intensified by references in the poem (as at i. 32; iv. 33, etc.), to the horror produced on the mind by apparitions seen in dreams and waking visions⁶. 'The emphatic repetition,' says Mr. Munro, 'of these horrid visions seen in sickness might seem to confirm what is related of the poet being subject to fits of delirium or disordering sickness of some sort.' He further shows by quotation from Suetonius' 'Life of Caligula,' that such mental conditions were attributed to the administration of a love-philtre. The coincidence in these recorded cases may imply nothing more than the credulity of Suetonius, or of the authorities whom he followed: but it is conceivable that Lucretius may have himself attributed what was either a disorder of his own constitution, or the result of a prolonged overstrain of mind, to the effects of some powerful drug taken by him in ignorance⁷.

The statement involved in the words 'quos Cicero emendavit,' has also been the subject of much criticism. No one can read the poem without recognising the truth of the conclusion established by Lachmann, and accepted by the most competent Editors of the poem since his time, that the work must have been left by the author in an unfinished state and given to the world by some friend or some person to whom the task of editing it had been entrusted. But there is some difficulty in accepting the statement that this editor was Cicero. His silence on the subject of his editorial labours, when contrasted with the frank communicativeness of his Epistles in regard to anything which for the time interested him, and the slight esteem with which he regarded the philosophy which is embodied in the poem, justify some hesitation in accepting the authority of Jerome on this point also. He only once mentions the poem in a letter to his brother Quintus⁸, and in passages of his philosophical works in which he seems to allude to it he expresses himself slightingly and somewhat contemptuously⁹. In the disparaging references to the Latin writers on Greek philosophy before the appearance of his own Tusculan Questions and Academics, he makes no exception in favour of Lucretius. The words in his letter to his brother Quintus are these, 'Lucretii poemata, ut scribis, ita sunt, multis luminibus ingenii, multae tamen artis: sed cum veneris, virum te putabo, si Sallustii Empedoclea legeris, hominem non putabo.' Professor Tyrrell in his 'Correspondence of Cicero,' remarks on this passage (vol. II. page 106): 'The criticism of Quintus, with which Cicero expresses his accord, was that Lucretius had not only much of the genius of Ennius and Attius, but also much of the art of the poets of the new school, among them even Catullus, who are fashioning themselves on the model of the Alexandrine poets, especially Callimachus and Euphorion of Chalcis. This new school Cicero refers to as the

νεώτεροι

This is all the direct external evidence available for the personal history of Lucretius. It is remarkable, when compared with the information given in his other notices, that the record of Jerome does not even mention the poet's birth-place. This may be explained on the supposition either that the authorities followed by Jerome knew very little about him, or that, if he were born at Rome, there would not be the same motive for giving prominence to the place of his birth, as in the case of poets and men of letters who brought honour to the less famous districts of Italy. While Lucretius applies the word patria to the Roman State ('patriai tempore iniquo'), and the adjective patrius to the Latin language, these words are used by other Roman poets,—Ennius and Virgil for instance,—in reference to their own provincial homes. The Gentile name Lucretius was one eminently Roman, nor is there ground for believing that, like the equally ancient and noble name borne by the other great poet of the age, it had become common in other parts of Italy. The name suggests the inference that Lucretius was descended from one of the most ancient patrician houses of Rome, but one, as is pointed out by Mr. Munro, more famous in the legendary than in the later annals of the Republic. Some members of the same house are mentioned in the letters of Cicero among the partisans of Pompey: and possibly the Lucretius Ofella, who was one of the victims of Sulla's tyranny, may have been connected with the poet. As the position indicated by the whole tone of the poem is that of a man living in easy circumstances, and of one, who, though repelled by it, was yet familiar with the life of pleasure and luxury, he must have belonged either to a senatorian family, or to one of the richer equestrian families, the members of which, if not engaged in financial and commercial affairs, often lived the life of country gentlemen on their estates and employed their leisure in the cultivation of literature. The tone of the dedication to Memmius, a member of a noble plebeian house, and of the occasional addresses to him in the body of the poem, is not that of a client to a patron, but of an equal to an equal:—

This relation to Memmius is the only additional fact which an examination of the poem brings into light. Nothing is learned from it of the poet's parentage, his education, his favourite places of residence, of his career, of his good or evil fortune. There were eminent Epicurean teachers at Athens and Rome (Patro, Phaedrus, Philodemus, etc.) during his youth and manhood, but it is useless to ask what influence of teachers or personal experience induced him to become so passionate a devotee of the doctrines of Epicurus. Yet though no direct reference to his circumstances is found in his writings, we may yet mark indirect traces of the impression produced upon him by the age in which his youth and manhood were passed; we seem to catch some glimpses of his habitual pursuits and tastes, to gain some real insight into his being, to apprehend the attitude in which he stood to the great teachers of the past, and to know the man by knowing the objects in life which most deeply interested him. Nothing, we may well believe, was further from his wish or intention than to leave behind him any record of himself. No Roman poet has so entirely sunk himself and the remembrance of his own fortunes in absorption in his subject. But his strong personal force and individuality have penetrated deeply into all his representation, his reasoning, and his exhortation. From the beginning to the end of the poem we feel that we are listening to a living voice speaking to us with the direct impressiveness of personal experience and conviction. No writer ever used words more clearly or more sincerely: no one shows a greater scorn for the rhetorical artifices which disguise the lack of meaning or insinuate a false conclusion by fine-sounding phrases:—

Thus the first general impression of Lucretius which we form from his poem is that of one who, from a strong distaste to the life of action and social pleasure, deliberately chose the life of contemplation,—the 'fallentis semita vitae.' Some illustrations of his argument—as, for instance, a description of the state of mental tension produced by witnessing public games and spectacles for many days in succession¹⁶, of the reflexion of the colours cast on the stage by the awnings of the theatre¹⁷, of the works of art adorning the houses of the great¹⁸, etc.—imply that he had not always been a stranger to the enjoyments of city life, and that they attracted him by a certain fascination of pomp and novelty. His pictures of the follies of the 'jeunesse dorée' (at iv. 1121, etc.), and of sated luxury (at iii. 1060, etc.), show that he had been a witness of the conditions of life out of which they were engendered. At iv. 784, in speaking of the power of the mind to call up images, he specifies 'conventus hominum, pompam, convivia, pugnas.' But such illustrations are rare when compared with those which speak of a life passed in the open air, and of intimate familiarity with many aspects of Nature. The vivid minuteness with which outward things are described, as well as the occasional use of such words as vidi¹⁹, show that though a few of the sights observed by him may have been drawn from the physics of Epicurus²⁰, the great mass of them had either been originally observed by himself or at least had been verified in his own experience. He was endowed not only with the poet's susceptibility to the beauty and movement of the outward world, but also with the observing faculty and curiosity of a naturalist: and by both impulses he was more attracted to the solitudes of Nature than to the haunts of men. Many bright illustrations of his argument tell of hours spent by the sea shore. Thus he notes minutely the effect of the exhalations from the salt water in wearing away rocks and walls (i. 336; iv. 220), of the invisible influence of the sea-air in producing moisture in clothes (i. 305; vi. 472), or a salt taste in the mouth (iv. 222), of the varied forms of shells paving the shore (ii. 374), of the sudden change of colour when the winds raise the white crest of the waves (ii. 765), of the appearance of sky and water produced by a black storm-cloud passing over the sea (vi. 256). Other passages show his familiarity with inland scenes,—with the violent rush of rivers in flood (i. 280, etc.), or their stately flow through fresh meadows (ii. 362), or their ceaseless unperceived action in eating away their banks (v. 256);—or again, with all the processes of husbandry, the growth of plants and trees, the ways of flocks and herds in their pastures, and the sounds and sights of the pathless woods. While he anticipates Virgil in his Italian love of peaceful landscape, he shows some foretaste of the modern passion for the mountains,—as (at ii. 331) where he speaks of 'some spot among the lofty hills,' commanding a distant view of a wide expanse of plain, and (at iv. 575) where he recalls the memory of wanderings among mountain solitudes—

enables us to think of him as, although isolated in his thoughts from other men, yet not separated from them in the daily intercourse of life by any unsocial austerity. Such separation would have been quite opposed both to the teaching and the example of his master. Some remembrance of active adventure is suggested by illustrations of his philosophy drawn from the experience of a sea-voyage (iv. 387, etc., 432), of riding through a rapid stream (iv. 420), of watching the action of dogs tracking their game through woods and over mountains (i. 404), or renewing the memories of the chase in their dreams (v. 991, etc.). The lines (at ii. 40, etc., and 323, etc.) show that his imagination had been moved by witnessing the evolutions of armies, not indeed in actual warfare, but in the pomp and pageantry of martial spectacles,—'belli simulacra cientes.' These and many other indirect indications afford some glimpses of his habitual manner of life and of the pursuits that gave him most lively pleasure: but they do not give us any special knowledge of the particular districts of Italy in which he lived, or of the scenes in foreign lands which he may have visited. The poem tells us nothing immediately of the trials or passions of his life, though of both he seems to bear the scars. But as passages in which he reveals the deep secrets of human passion and suffering prove him to have been a man of strong, ardent, and vividly susceptible temperament, so the numerous illustrations drawn from the repertory of his personal observation tell of an eye trained to take delight in the outward face of Nature as well as of a mind unwearied in its search into her hidden laws. One great charm of his work is that it breathes of the open air more than of the library. If, in dealing with the problems of human life, his strain—

But we may trust with even more confidence to the indications of his inner than of his outward life. The spirit and purpose which impelled Lucretius to expound his philosophy can be understood without any collateral knowledge of his history. The dominant impulse of his being is the ardent desire to emancipate human life from the fears and passions by which it is marred and degraded. He has more of the zeal of a religious reformer than any other ancient thinker, except one who in all his ways of life was most unlike him, the Athenian Socrates. The speculative enthusiasm which bears him along through his argument is altogether subsidiary to the furtherance of his practical purpose. Even the poetical power to which the work owes its immortality was valued chiefly as a pleasing means of instilling the unpalatable medicine of his philosophy²³ into the minds and hearts of unwilling hearers. It is the constant presence of this practical purpose, and the profound sense which he has of the actual misery and degradation of human life, and of the peace and dignity which are attainable by man, that impart to his words the peculiar tone of impassioned earnestness to which there is no parallel in ancient literature.

While there is frequent allusion to the Stoics in the poem, there is no direct mention either of them or of their chief teachers, Zeno, Chrysippus, or Cleanthes. Neither do the greater names of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle appear in it, though one or two passages clearly imply some familiarity with the writings of Plato²⁷. But among the moral teachers of antiquity he acknowledges Epicurus only. The whole enthusiasm of his temperament breaks out in admiration of him. He alone is the true interpreter of Nature and conqueror of superstition (i. 75); the reformer 'who has made pure the human heart' (vi. 24); the 'guide out of the storms and darkness of life into calm and light' (iii. 1; v. 11, 12); the 'sun who at his rising extinguished all the lesser stars' (iii. 1044). He is to be ranked even as a God on account of his great services to man, in teaching him the mastery over his fears and passions:—

There was a truer affinity of nature between Lucretius and another philosopher whom he names with the warmest feelings of love and veneration—Empedocles of Agrigentum—the most famous of the early physiological poets of Greece. He flourished during the fifth century b.c., and was the author of a didactic poem on Nature, of which some fragments still remain, sufficient to indicate the nature of the work and the character of the man. These fragments prove that Lucretius had carefully studied the older poem, and adopted it as his model in using a poetical form and diction to expound his philosophical system. He declares, indeed, his opposition to the doctrine of Empedocles, which traced the origin of all things to four original elements; but he adopted into his own system many both of his expressions and of his philosophical ideas. The line in which the Roman poet enunciates his first principle,—

The passages in which Lucretius imitates him show how clearly he recognised his exact vision of outward things, and his true appreciation of the moral strength and dignity of man. The frequent imitations of Euripides³⁵ show that while he felt the spell of his pathos, he was also attracted by the poetic mould into which the tragic poet has cast the physical speculations of Anaxagoras. Allusion is made in tones of indifference or disparagement to other poets of Greece, as having, in common with the painters of former times, given shape and substance to the superstitious fancies of mankind. It is characteristic of his powerful and independent genius, that, unlike the younger poets of his generation, he adheres to the older writers of the great days of Greece, and acknowledges no debt to the Alexandrine School. Although amply furnished with the knowledge necessary for the performance of his task, he is a poet of original genius much more than of learning and culture: and he is thus more drawn to those who acted on him by a kindred power, than to those who might have served him as models of poetic form or repertories of poetic illustration. The strength of his understanding attracted him to some of the great prose-writers of Greece, by whom that quality is most conspicuously displayed; notably to Thucydides, whom he has closely followed in his account of the 'Plague at Athens,' and, as has been shown by Mr. Munro, to Hippocrates. The kind of attraction which the last of these has for him confirms the criticism of Goethe, that Lucretius shows the observing faculty of a physician, as well as of a poet.

seem indeed to spring from sources of patriotic affection, perhaps all the deeper because not too loudly proclaimed. But in the body of the poem his illustrations are taken as frequently from Greek as from Roman story, from the strangeness of foreign lands as from the beauty of Italian scenes. The Georgics of Virgil, in the whole conception of Nature as a living power, and in many special features, owe much to the imaginative thought of Lucretius; but nothing can be more unlike the spirit of the older poet than the episodes in which Virgil pours forth all his Roman feeling and his love of Italy. The height from which Lucretius contemplates all human history, as 'a procession of the nations handing on the torch of life from one to another,' is wide apart from that from which Virgil beholds all the nations of the world doing homage to the majesty of Rome. The poem of Lucretius breathes the spirit of a man, apparently indifferent to the ordinary sources of pleasure and of pride among his countrymen. Living in an era, the most momentous in its action on the future history of the world, he was only repelled by its turbulent activity. The contemplation of the infinite and eternal mass and order of Nature made the issues of that age and the imperial greatness of his country appear to him as transient as the events of the old Trojan and Theban wars. To him, as to the modern poet, whose imagination most nearly resembles his, the thought of more enduring things had

But these three aspects, though they may be considered separately, are not really independent of one another. The speculative ideas on which the system of philosophy is ultimately based impart confidence and elevation to the moral teaching, and new meaning and imaginative grandeur to the interpretation of Nature and of human life, on which the permanent value of the poem depends. Thus, although the philosophical argument, which forms as it were the skeleton of the work, is in many places barren and uninteresting, yet it is necessary to master it before we can form a true estimate of the personality of the poet, of the main passion and labour of his life, of the full meaning of his thought, and the full compass of his poetic genius. Moreover, the study of the argument is interesting on its own account. In no other work are the strength and the weakness of ancient physical philosophy so apparent. If the poem of Lucretius adds nothing to the knowledge of scientific facts, it throws a powerful light on one phase of the ancient mind. It is a witness of the eager imagination and of the searching thought of that early time, which endeavoured, by the force of individual thinkers and the intuitions of genius, to solve a problem which is perhaps beyond the reach of the human faculties, and to explain, at a single glance, secrets of Nature which have only slowly been revealed to the patient labours and combined investigations of many generations of enquirers.

The first question which arises after a review of the whole argument is that suggested by the statement of Jerome, and brought into prominence since the publication of Lachmann's edition of Lucretius, viz. whether there is good reason for believing that the poem was left by the author in an unfinished state. In answering this question, it is to be observed, on the one hand, that there is no incompleteness in the fulfilment of the original plan of the work, unless from one or two hints¹⁶ we conclude that the poet intended giving a fuller account of the blessed state of the Gods than that given at iii. 17-24. He announces at i. 54, etc., and again at i. 127, etc., the design of the poem as embracing the first principles of natural philosophy, and the application of these principles to certain special subjects, viz. the nature of soul and body, the origin of the belief in ghosts, the natural causes of creation, and the meaning of certain celestial phenomena.

In estimating the strength and the weakness of the system expounded by Lucretius, it is necessary to distinguish between the exposition of the principles of the atomic philosophy, contained in the first two books, and the explanation of natural phenomena contained in the remaining books. The first, notwithstanding some arbitrary and unverifiable assumptions, represents a real and important stage in the progress of enquiry; the second, although containing many striking observations and immediate inferences from the facts and processes of Nature, is, from the point of view of modern science, to be regarded mainly, as a curious page in the records of human error. Whatever may be said of the Epicurean additions to the system, it seems to be admitted that the original hypothesis of Democritus has been more pregnant in results, and has more affinity with the most advanced physical speculations of modern times, than the doctrines of all the other philosophers of antiquity. But even amid the mass of unwarranted assumptions and erroneous explanations contained in the later books, the topics discussed—such as the relation of the mind to the body, the mode by which sensible impressions are conveyed to the mind, the processes by which our globe assumed its present form, the origin of life, the evolution of humanity from its lowest to its higher stages of development, the origin of spiritual beliefs, of the humaner sentiments, of language, etc.—possess the interest of being kindred to those on which speculative activity is most employed in the present day. If the study of Lucretius forces upon our minds the arbitrary assumptions, the inadequate method, and the false conclusions of ancient science, it enables us to appreciate the disinterested greatness of its aims, and the enlightened curiosity which sought to solve the vastest problems.

The weak points of this philosophy, the mistaken aim and incomplete method of enquiry, the real ignorance of facts disguised under an appearance of systematic treatment, the unproductiveness of the results for any practical accession to man's power over Nature, are quite obvious to any modern reader, who, without any special study of physical science, cannot help being familiar with information which is now universally diffused, but which was beyond the reach of the most ardent enquirers and original thinkers of antiquity. But the amount of information possessed by different ages, or by different men, is no criterion of their relative intellectual power. The mental force of a strong and adventurous thinker may be recognised struggling even through these mists of error. The weakness of the system, interpreted by Lucretius, is the necessary weakness of the childhood of knowledge. But along with the weakness and the ignorance there are also the keen feeling, the clear eye, and the buoyant fancies of early years,—the germs and the promise of a strong maturity.

The history of the physical science of the ancients cannot, indeed, be regarded as so interesting or important as that of their metaphysical philosophy. And this is so, not only on account of the comparative scantiness of their real acquisitions in the one as compared with the ideas and method which they have contributed to the other, and with the masterpieces which they have added to its literature; but still more on this account, that in physical knowledge new discovery supplants the place of previous error or ignorance, and can be understood without reference to what has been supplanted; whereas the power and meaning of philosophical ideas is unintelligible, apart from the knowledge of their origin and development. The history of physical science in ancient times affords satisfaction to a natural curiosity, but is not an indispensable branch of scientific study. The history of ancient mental philosophy, on the other hand,—the source not only of most of our metaphysical ideas and terms, but of many of the most familiar thoughts and words in daily use,—is the basis of all speculative study. Yet among the various kinds of interest which this poem has for different classes of modern readers this is not to be forgotten, that it enables a student of science to estimate the actual discoveries, and, still more, the prognostications of discovery attained by the irregular methods of early enquiry. The school of philosophy to which Lucretius belonged was distinguished above other schools for the attention which it gave to the facts of Nature. Though he himself makes no claim to original discovery, he yet shows a philosophical grasp of the whole system which he adopted, and a rigorous study of its details. He does not, like Virgil, merely reproduce some general results of ancient physics, to enhance the poetical conception of Nature: as he is not satisfied with those general results about human life and the origin of man, which amused a meditative poet and practical epicurean like Horace. He was a real student both of the plan of Nature and of man's relation to it. Out of the stores of his abundant information the modern reader may best learn not only the errors but also the happy guesses and pregnant suggestions of ancient science.

The passionate intensity of his nature has left its impress on the enunciation of his physical as well as of his moral doctrines. He has a thoroughly logical grasp of his subject as a whole. He shows the capacity of unfolding it and marshalling all his arguments in symmetrical order, and of arranging in due subordination vast masses of details. Vigour in acquiring and tenacity in retaining the knowledge of facts are combined with a high organising faculty. He has also, beyond any other Roman writer, a power of analysing and comprehending abstract ideas, such as that of the infinite, of space and time, of causation and the like, and of keeping the consequences involved in these ideas present to his mind through long-sustained processes of reasoning. He alone among his countrymen possessed, if not the faculty of original speculation, the genuine philosophic impulse, and the powers of mind demanded for abstruse and systematic thinking.

That language, which gives admirable expression to the dictates of common sense and to the dignified emotions which inspire the conduct of great affairs, is ill adapted both for the expression of abstract ideas and for maintaining a long process of connected argument. Lucretius has occasionally to meet the first difficulty by the adoption of Graecisms, and the second by some sacrifice of artistic elegance. Thus he uses omne for

τὸ πᾶν

τὸ εἶναι

But it is in his grasp of speculative ideas, and in his application of them to interpret the living world, that the greatness of Lucretius as an imaginative thinker is most apparent. The substantial truth of all the ancient philosophies lay in the ideas which they attempted to express and embody, not in the symbols by which these ideas were successively represented. Lucretius has a place among the few adventurous thinkers of antiquity who attained to high eminences of contemplation, which were hidden from the mass of their contemporaries, and which, in the breadth of view afforded by them, are not far below the higher levels of our modern conceptions of Nature and human life. And there came to him, as to the earlier race of thinkers, that which comes so rarely to modern enquiry, the fresh and poetical sense of surprise and keen curiosity, as at the first discovery of a new country, or the first unfolding of some illimitable prospect.

From these high places of his philosophy,—'the "templa serena" well-bulwarked by the learning of the wise'⁵⁰ he derives not only a sense of certainty in thought and security in life, but also his wide contemplative view, and his profound feeling of the majesty of the universe. The idea of universal law enables him to apprehend in all the processes of Nature a presence which awakens reverence and enforces obedience. This idea imparts unity of tone to the whole poem, informs its language, and seems to mould the very rhythm of its verse.

Each individual of a flock is different from every other, and by this difference only can the mother recognise her offspring. This sense of individuality intensifies the pathos of many passages in the poem. By regarding each being as having an existence of its own, the poet enters with sympathy into the feelings of all sentient existence,—of dumb animals as well as of human creatures. The freshness and distinctness of all his pictures from Nature are the result of an eye trained by his philosophy to see each thing not only as part of the universal life, but as existing in and for itself.

(6)  The abstract properties of the atoms, discussed in the first two books, so far from being arbitrary assumptions, without any relation to actual existence, are thus found to be the conditions which explain the order, life, immensity, individuality, and subtlety manifested in the universe. These conceptions, which bridge the chasm between the particles of lifeless matter and the living world, unite in the more general conception of Nature. What then is involved in this conception—the dominant conception of the poem in its philosophical as well as its imaginative aspects? Something more than the subsidiary conceptions mentioned above. There is, in the first place, all that is involved in the unity of an organic whole. But to this whole the imagination of the poet seems, in some passages, to attach attributes scarcely reconcileable with the mechanical principles of his philosophy. In emancipating himself from the religious traditions of antiquity, Lucretius did not altogether escape from the power of an idea, so deeply rooted in the thought of past ages, as to seem to be an integral element of human consciousness. It is against the limitations which the ancient mythology imposed on the idea of Divine agency, rather than against the idea itself, as it is understood in modern times, that his philosophy protests. To Nature his imagination attributes not only life, but creative and regulative power. There would be more truth in calling this conception pantheistic than atheistic. But the sense of will, freedom, individual life, is so strong in Lucretius, that we think of the 'natura daedala rerum' rather as a personal power, with attributes in some respects analogous to those of man, than as a being in whose existence all other life is merged. Though this figurative attribution of personal qualities to great natural forces cannot be pressed as evidence of philosophical belief, yet as it shows, on the one hand, an unconscious survival of the state of mind which gave birth to mythology, so it seems to be the unconscious awakening of a spiritual conception of a creative and sustaining power in the universe.

His philosophy may have been forced on him by personal experience, or the intimations of experience may have assumed their form and colour from the nature of his philosophy. But the memories of his youth and the experience of things witnessed in his manhood did undoubtedly colour all his thoughts and feelings on human life. Some of the forms of evil against which he contends had never been so prominently displayed before. Yet all these considerations afford only a partial explanation of the character of his practical philosophy. There were other Roman Epicureans, contemporary with him and later, and none are known to have been in any way like him. Although his nature was made of the strong Roman fibre; although his mind had been deeply imbued with the spirit of Greek philosophy; although his view of life was necessarily coloured by the action of his times; yet all these considerations go but a little way to explain his attitude of mind and the work which he accomplished in the world. Over all these considerations this predominates, that he was a man of great original and individual force, and one who in power and sincerity of thought and feeling rose higher than any other above the level of his age and country.

The evils of life, for the cure of which Lucretius considers his philosophy available, appeared to him to spring not out of man's relation to Nature, but out of the weakness of his reason and the corruption of his heart. The great service of Epicurus consisted not only in revealing the laws of Nature, but in laying his finger on the secret cause of man's unhappiness. Observing the insufficiency of all external goods to bestow peace and contentment, he saw that the evil lay in the vessel into which these blessings were poured:—

While his belief in the Gods is thus expressed in vague outline and poetical symbolism, yet it is clear that as he recognised a secret, orderly, and omnipotent power in Nature, so also he recognised the ideal of a purer and serener life than that of earthly existence. These two elements in all true religion, a reverential acknowledgment of a universal power and order, and a sense of a diviner life with which man may have communion, were part of the being of Lucretius. His denial of supernatural beliefs extended not only to all the fables and false conceptions of ancient mythology, but to the doctrine of a Divine Providence recompensing men, here or hereafter, according to their actions. The intensity of his nature led him to identify all religion with the cruel or childish fables of the popular faith. The certainty with which he grasped the truth of the laws and order of Nature was incompatible with the only conception he could form of a Divine action on the world. His deep sense of human rights and deep sympathy with human feeling rebelled against a belief in Powers exercising a capricious tyranny over the world, and exacting human sacrifice as a propitiation of their offended majesty. His reverence for truth and his sense of the power and mystery of Nature led him to scorn the virtue attributed to an idolatrous and formal worship. This attitude of religious isolation, not more from his own time than from the subsequent course of thought, in a man of unusual sincerity and earnestness of feeling, is certainly among the most impressive phenomena of ancient literature. The spirit in which he denies the beliefs of the world is far from resembling the triumph of a cold philosophy over the religious associations of mankind. He is moved even to a kind of poetical sympathy with some of the ceremonies and symbols of Paganism. A sense of religious awe,—a sympathetic recognition of the power of religious emotion over the hearts of men,—is expressed, for instance, in the lines which describe the procession of Cybele through the great cities and nations of the world. While guarding himself against the pollution of a base idolatry, he yet acknowledges not only the power of religious associations to entwine themselves with human affections, but the intrinsic power of the truths symbolised in that worship; viz. the truth of the majesty of Nature, and of the duties arising from the elemental affections to parents and country. In regard to all his religious impressions his intensity of feeling and imagination seems to place him on a solitary height, nearly as far apart from the followers of his own school as from their adversaries¹¹.

The practical use of the study of Nature, according to Lucretius, is, first, to inspire confidence in the room of an ignorant and superstitious fear of supernatural power; and, secondly, to show what man really needs, and so to clear the heart from all artificial desires and passions. All that is wanted for happiness in this world is a mind free from error, and a heart neither incapable of natural enjoyment (fluxum pertusumque) nor vitiated by false appetite²⁶. Of the errors to which man is liable superstition and the fear of death are the most deeply seated. Of the artificial desires and passions, on the other hand, the most destructive are the love of power and of riches, and the sensual appetite for pleasure. In the opening lines of the second book the strife of ambition, the rivalries of rank and intellect in the warfare of politics are contrasted with the serene life of philosophy, as darkness, error, and danger with light, certainty, and peace—

The love of riches and of luxurious living, which had begun to corrupt the Roman character in the age of Lucilius, had increased to gigantic dimensions in the last age of the Republic. By no aspect of his age was Lucretius more repelled than by this. No doctrine is enforced in the poem with more sincerity of conviction than that of the happiness and dignity of plain and natural living, the vanity of all the appliances of wealth, and their inability to give real enjoyment either to body or mind. In a well-known passage at the beginning of the second book he adapts an ideal description from Homer's account of the palace of Alcinous to the costly magnificence and splendour of Roman banquets, with which he contrasts the pleasure of gratifying simple tastes, in fine weather, among the beauties of Nature—

show how strong and real was his regard for the great elemental affections of human nature. But, on the other hand, he is austerely indifferent to the follies and the idealising fancies of lovers. With satirical and not fastidious realism he strips passion of all romance, and exhibits it as a bondage fatal alike to character and independence, to peace of mind and to self-respect. But it is the weakness, not the immorality of licentious passion which he condemns. And it would be altogether an anachronism to attribute to a writer of that age sentiments on this subject in harmony either with the austere virtue of the primitive Romans, or with the moral standard of modern times. It is not the indulgence of inclination, but its excess and perversion, by which the happiness and dignity of life are placed in another's power, which he condemns.

Yet a modern reader, without accepting the conclusions of his philosophy, may sympathise with much of his spirit. In his firm faith in the laws which govern the universe, he will recognise a great position established, as essential to the progress of religious as of scientific thought. He will see, in the earnest intensity of his feeling and the sincerity of his expression, a spirit akin to the purer kinds of religious fervour in modern times. In no other writer, ancient or modern, will he find a profounder sense of human dignity, of the supreme claims of affection, of the superiority of a natural to a conventional life. From the direct exhortation and the indirect teaching of Lucretius, he may learn such lessons as these,—that it is man's first business to know and obey the laws of his being,—that the sphere of his happiest activity is to be found in contemplation rather than in action,—that his well-being consists in valuing rightly the real blessings of life rather than in following the illusions of fancy or of custom,—in reverencing the sanctity of family life,—and in cherishing a kindly sympathy with all living things. If there was nothing especially new in the views which he enunciated, the power of realising the common conditions of life, the passionate effort not only to rise himself above human weakness, but to redeem the whole race of man from the curse of ignorance, and the force of imaginative sympathy with which he executed this part of his task were, perhaps, something altogether new in the world.

It remains to consider the poem of Lucretius as a work of literary art and genius. Much indeed of what may be said on the subject of his genius has necessarily been anticipated in the chapters devoted to the consideration of his personal characteristics, his speculative philosophy, and his moral teaching. The 'multa lumina ingenii' are most conspicuous in those passages of his poem which best illustrate the range and distinctness of his observation, the grandeur and truth of his philosophical conceptions, the passionate sympathy with which he strove to elevate and purify human life. But, at the same time, the most manifest defects of the poem, considered as a work of art, spring from the same source as its greatness considered as a work of genius, viz. the diversity and conflicting aims of the faculties employed on its production. Although, perhaps, from a Roman point of view, the practical purpose which reduces the mass of miscellaneous details to unity, and the success with which he encounters the difficulties both of matter and language, might entitle the poem to be regarded as a work 'multae artis,' yet, when tested by the canons either of Greek or of modern taste, it fails in the most essential conditions of art,—the choice of subject and the form of construction. The title of the poem is indeed taken from a Greek model, the poem of Empedocles, '

περὶ φύσεως

Ὁμηρικός

φυσιολόγοι

And while the whole conception of the work, as regards both matter and method of treatment, necessarily involves a large interfusion of prosaic materials with the finer product of his genius, it must be added that there is considerable inequality of execution even in its more inspired passages. A few consecutive passages show indeed the finest sense of harmony, and are finished in a style not much inferior to that of Virgil. Such, for instance, are the opening lines:—

But long passages seem rather to revert to the roughness of Ennius than to approach the smooth and varied cadences of Virgil. Though the imaginative effect of single expressions is generally more forcible than in any Latin poet, yet the composition of long paragraphs is apt to overflow into prosaic detail, or to display the qualities of logical consecutiveness or close adherence to fact rather than those of skilled accomplishment and conformity with the principles of beauty. In common with the older race of Roman poets he exhibits that straining after verbal effects by means of alliteration, assonances, asyndeta, etc., which marks the ruder stages of literary development. The Latin language, although beginning to feel the quickening of a new life, had not yet been formed into its more exquisite modulations, nor learned the power of suggesting delicate shades of meaning and the new strength derivable from the reserved use of its resources. All these causes,—the vast and miscellaneous range, and the abstruse character of his subject, the dryness and futility of much of the argument, the frequent subordination of poetry to science, the inadequacy of the Latin language as a vehicle of thought and its imperfect development as an organ of poetry,—prevented the poem from ever obtaining great popularity in ancient times, and have denied to it in modern times anything like the large influence which has been enjoyed in different ages and countries by Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Even the more ardent admirers of the poem are tempted to pass from one to another of the higher ranges and more commanding summits, which swell gradually or rise abruptly out of the general level over which he leads them, rather than to follow him through all the windings of his argument.

Again, although his rhythm, even at its best, falls far short of the intricate harmony and variety of Virgil, and, in its more level passages, scarcely aims at pleasing the ear at all, yet there is a kind of grandeur and dignity even in its monotony, varied, as that is, by deeper and more majestic tones whenever his spirit is stirred by impulses of awe, wonder, and delight. There is always a sense of life and onward movement in the flow of his verse. Often there is a kind of cumulative force revealing a more powerful emotion of heart and imagination as his thoughts and images press on one another in close and ordered sequence. Thus, for instance, the effect of the lines describing the religious impressions produced on the early inhabitants of the world by the grand and awful aspects of Nature, depends, not on any harmonious variation of sounds, but on the swelling and culminating power with which the whole passage breaks on the ear,—

The music of Lucretius is altogether his own. As he was the first among his countrymen who contemplated in a reverential spirit the majesty of Nature and the more solemn meaning of life, so he was the first to call out the full rhythmical majesty and deep organ-tones of the Latin language, to embody in sound the spiritual emotions stirred by that contemplation.

Thus although the poetical style of Lucretius shows the traces of labour and premeditation, and of occasional imitation both of foreign and native models, it is more than that of any other Latin poet, the immediate creation of his own genius. The 'ingenuei fontis,' by which his imagination was so abundantly fed, found many spontaneous outlets, and were not checked in their speed or stained in their purity by the artificial channels in which he sometimes forced them to flow. If the loving labour, so prodigally bestowed upon the task of finding words and rhythm⁴ adequate to his great theme, explains some peculiarities of his diction, the qualities which have made the work immortal are due to his noble singleness of heart and sincerity of nature, and to the openness and sensibility with which his imagination received impressions, the penetrative force with which it saw into the heart of things, and the creative energy with which it shaped what it received and discerned into vivid pictures and symbols.

The creative power of imagination which gives new life to words and thoughts is also present in many vivid and picturesque expressions, either scattered through the main argument, or shining in brilliant combinations in the more elaborate parts of the work. By this more imaginative use of language, the poet can illustrate his ideas by subtle analogies, or embody them in visible symbols, or endow the objects he describes with the personal attributes of will and energy. Thus, for instance, the penetrating subtlety of the mind in exploring the secrets of Nature becomes a visible force in the curious felicity of the expression (i. 408), 'caecasque latebras insinuare omnis.' The freedom and boundless range of the imagination is suggested with picturesque effect in the familiar expression—

It is not so much the beauty of form and colour, as the appearance of force and life which he reproduces. He has not, like Catullus, the pure delight of an artist in painting outward scenes. He does not express, like Virgil, the charm of old associations attaching to famous places. It is the association of great laws, not of great memories, which moves him in contemplating the outward world. Neither has he invested any particular place with the attraction which Horace has given to his Sabine home, and Catullus to Sirmio. But no ancient or modern poet has expressed more happily the natural enjoyment of beholding the changing life and familiar face of the world. No other writer makes us feel with more reality the quickening of the spirit, produced by the sunrise or the advent of spring, by living in fine weather or looking on fair and peaceful landscapes. The freshness of the feeling with which outward scenes inspire him is one of the great charms of the poem, especially as a relief to the pervading gravity of his thought. More than any poet, except Wordsworth, he seems to derive a pure and healthy joy from the common sights and sounds of animate and inanimate Nature. No distempered fancies or regrets, no vague longings for some unattainable rapture, coloured the natural aspect which the world presented to his eyes and mind.

the pathos and respect for every mode of natural feeling denoted in such expressions as 'desiderio perfixa iuvenci'; and, lastly, the power of investing the most common things with the majesty of the laws which they express and illustrate. This passage is adduced as a proof and illustration of the varieties in form of the primordial atoms. In a passage, immediately preceding, the perpetual motion of the atoms, going on beneath an appearance of absolute rest, is illustrated by two pictures, one taken from the jubilant life of the animal creation—

His imagination, which depicts so forcibly the intimations of experience, is able to hear him beyond the known and familiar regions of life. As it enables him to pass—

Lucretius and Catullus were regarded by their contemporaries as the greatest poets of the last age of the Republic¹. They alone represent the poetry of that time to the modern world. Although born into the same social rank, and acted upon by the dissolving influences, the intellectual stimulus, and the political agitation of the same time, no poets could be named of a more distinct type of genius and character. The first has left behind him only the record of his impersonal contemplation. His life was passed more in communion with Nature than in contact with the world: his experiences of happiness or sorrow entered into his art solely as affording materials for his abstract thought. The second has stamped upon his pages the lasting impression of the deepest joy and pain of his life, as well as of the lightest cares and fancies that occupied the passing hour. Intensely social in his temper and tastes, he lived habitually the life of the great city and the provincial town, observing and sharing in all their pleasures, distractions, and animosities, and only escaping, from time to time, for a brief interval to his country houses on the Lago di Garda and in the neighbourhood of Tivoli. He seems to have had no other aim in life than that of passionately enjoying his youth in the pleasures of love, in friendly intercourse with men of his own rank and age, in the practice of his art, and the study of the older poets, by whom that art was nourished. All his poems, with the exception of three or four works of creative fancy and one or two translations, have for their subject some personal incident, feeling, or character. Nearly all have some immediate relation to himself, and give expression to his love or hatred, his admiration or scorn, his happiness or misery. There is nearly as little in them of reflexion on human life as of meditative communion with Nature; but, as individual men and women excited in him intense affection or passion, so certain beautiful places and beautiful objects in Nature charmed his fancy and sank into his heart. He shows himself, spiritually and intellectually, the child of his age in his ardent vitality, in the license of his life and satire, in the fierceness of his antipathies; and also in his eager reception of the spirit of Greek art, his delight in the poets of Greece and the tales of the Greek mythology, in his striving after form and grace in composition, and in the enthusiasm with which he anticipates the joy of travelling among 'the famous cities of Asia.' In all our thoughts of him he is present to our imagination as the 'young Catullus'—

More than any great ancient, and than any great modern poet, with the exception, perhaps, of Keats, he affords the measure of what youth can do, and what it fails to do, in poetry. Although the exact age at which he died is disputed, yet the evidence of his poems shows that he did not outlive the boyish heart. In character he was even younger than in actual age. Nearly all his work was done between the years 61 and 54 b.c.; and most of it, apparently, with little effort. Born with the keenest capacities of pleasure and of pain, he never learned to regulate them: nor were they, seemingly, united with such enduring vital power as to carry him past the perilous stage of his career, so as to enable him with maturer power and more concentrated industry to employ his genius and accomplishment on works of larger scope, more capable of withstanding the shocks and chances of time, than the small volume which, by a fortunate accident, has preserved the flower and bloom of his life, and the record of all the 'sweet and bitter' which he experienced at the hands of that Power—

This collection consists of about 116 poems⁶, written in various metres, and varying in length from epigrams of only two lines to an 'epyllion' which extends to 408 lines. The poems numbered from i to lx, are short lyrical or satiric pieces, written in the phalaecian, glyconic, or iambic metres, and devoted almost entirely to subjects of personal interest. The middle of the volume is occupied by the longer poems—numbered lxi to lxviii^b—of a more purely artistic and mostly an impersonal character, written in the glyconic, galliambic, hexameter, and elegiac metres. The latter part of the volume is entirely occupied by epigrammatic or other short pieces in elegiac metre, varying in length from two to twenty-six lines. Many of the epigrams refer to the persons who are the subject of the short lyric and iambic pieces. There is no attempt to arrange the poems in anything like chronological order. Thus, among the first twelve poems, ii, iii, v, vii, ix, xii, are probably to be assigned to the years 61 and 60 b.c., while iv, x, xi, certainly belong to the last three years of the poet's life. It is difficult to imagine on what principle the juxtaposition of certain poems was determined. Probably, in some cases, it may have been on the mere mechanical one of filling up the pages symmetrically by poems of suitable length. Sometimes we find poems of the same character, or referring to the same person, grouped together, and yet varied by the insertion of one or two pieces related to the larger group by contrast rather than similarity of tone. Thus the passionate exaltation of the earlier Lesbia-poems is first relieved by a poem (iv) written in another metre, and appealing to a much calmer class of feelings, and next varied by one (vi) written in the same metre, and suggested by a friend's amour, which in its meanness and obscurity serves as a foil to the glory and brightness of the good fortune enjoyed by the poet. Yet this clue does not carry us far in determining the principle, if indeed there was any principle, on which either the short lyrical poems or

the elegiac epigrams were arranged. These various poems were written under the influence of every mood to which he was liable; and, like other passionate lyrical poets, he was susceptible of the most opposite moods. The most trivial incident might give rise to them equally with the greatest joy or the greatest sorrow of his life. As he felt a strong need to express, and had a happy facility in expressing his purest and brightest feelings, so he felt no shame in indulging, and knew no restraint in expressing, his coarsest propensities and bitterest resentments: and he evidently regarded his worst moods no less than his best as legitimate material for his art. Thus pieces more coarse than almost anything in literature are interspersed among others of the sunniest brightness and purity. The feelings with which we linger over the exquisite beauty of the 'Sirmio,' and are stirred by the noble inspiration of the 'Hymn to Diana,' receive a rude shock from the two intervening poems, characterised by a want of reticence and reserve not often paralleled in the literature or the speech of civilised nations. In a poet of modern times a similar collocation might be supposed indicative of a cynical bitterness of spirit—of a mind mocking its own purest impulses. But Catullus is too genuine and sincere a man, too natural in his enjoyments, and too healthy in all his moods, to be taken as an example of this distempered type of genius. It seems more likely, as is conjectured by recent commentators⁷, that the present collection was made (perhaps at Verona) in a comparatively late age, when the knowledge of the circumstances of Catullus and the intelligent appreciation of his poems was lost.

These poems, whether good or bad, serious or trivial, are all written with such transparent sincerity that they bring the poet before us almost as if he were our contemporary. They make him known to us in many different moods,—in joy and grief, in the ecstasy and the despair of love, in the frank outpouring of affection and the enjoyment of social intercourse, in the bitterness of his scorn and animosity, in the license of his coarser indulgences. They enable us to start with him on his travels; to enjoy with him the beauty of his home on the Italian lakes; to pass with him from the life of letters and idle pleasure and the brilliant intellectual society of Rome to the more homely but not more virtuous ways and the more commonplace people of his native province; to join with him in ridiculing some affectation of an acquaintance, or to feel the contagion of his admiration for genius or wit in man, grace in woman, or beauty in Nature. In the glimpses of him which we get in the familiar round of his daily life, we seem to catch the very turn of his conversation⁸, to hear his laugh at some absurd incident⁹, to see his face brighten as he welcomes a friend from a distant land¹⁰, to mark the quick ebullition of anger at some slight or rudeness¹¹, or to be witnesses of his passionate tears as something recalls to him the memory of his lost happiness, or makes him feel his present desolation¹². His impressible nature realises with extraordinary vividness of pleasure and pain experiences which by most people are scarcely noticed. To be rightly appreciated, his poems must be read with immediate reference to the circumstances and situations which gave rise to them. We must take them up with our feelings attuned to the mood in which they were written. Hence, before attempting to criticise them, we must try, by the help of internal and any available external evidence, to determine the successive stages of his personal and literary career, and so to get some idea of the social relations and the state of feeling of which they were the expression.

are thought to indicate the anticipation of approaching death. But if 54 b.c. is to be accepted as the year of his death, one of Jerome's two other statements, viz. that he was born in the year 87 b.c. and that he died at the age of thirty, must be wrong. Most critics and commentators hold that the first date is right, and that the mistake lies in the words 'xxx. aetatis anno.' Mr. Munro, with more probability, believes the error to lie in the 87 b.c., and that Jerome, 'as so often happens with him, has blundered somewhat in transferring to his complicated era the Consulships by which Suetonius would have dated.' He argues further, that the phrase 'iuvenalia tempora,' in the passage quoted above from Ovid and written by him at the age of twenty-five, is more applicable to one who died at the age of thirty than of thirty-three. A further argument for believing that the 'xxx. aetatis anno' is right, and the date 87 b.c. consequently wrong, is that the age at which a person died was more easily ascertained than the date at which he was born, owing to the common practice of recording the former in sepulchral inscriptions. It is easy to see how a mistake might have occurred in substituting the first of the four successive Consulships of Cinna (87 b.c.) for the last in 84 b.c.; but it is not so obvious how the substitution of xxx. for xxxiii. could have taken place. The only ground for assuming that the date of 87 b.c. is more likely to be right, is that thereby the disparity of age between Catullus and his mistress Clodia, who must have been born in 95 or 94 b.c., is somewhat lessened. But when we remember that she was actually twelve years older than M. Caelius Rufus, who succeeded Catullus as her lover, and that Cicero in his defence of Caelius speaks of her as supporting from her own means the extravagance of her youthful ('adulescentis') lovers¹⁴, there is no more difficulty in supposing that she was ten than that she was seven years older than Catullus. Moreover, the brotherly friendship in which Catullus lived with Calvus, and his earlier intimate relations with Caelius and Gellius, who were all born in or about the year 82 b.c., seem to indicate that he was nearer to them in age than he would have been if born in 87 b.c. Between the age of twenty and thirty a difference of five years is not frequent among very intimate associates, who live together on a footing of perfect freedom. Again, the expression of the feelings both of love and friendship in the earlier poems of Catullus—written about the year 61 or 60 b.c.—seems more like that of a youth of twenty-three or four, than of twenty-six or seven, especially when we remember that, by his own confession, he had entered at a precociously early age on his career both of pleasure and of poetry. The date 84 b.c. accordingly seems to fit the recorded facts of his life and the peculiar character of his poetry better than that of 87 b.c.; and there seems to be more opening for a mistake in assigning the particular date of the poet's birth and death, than in recording the number of years which he lived¹⁵.

to be subsequent to the liaison with Clodia. This last line can only refer to the one all-absorbing passion of the poet's life. His own relations to Aufilena, in whose affections he seems to have tried to supplant his friend Quintius, were subsequent to the composition of that poem. It is possible, as Westphal suggests, that the Veronese bride, 'viridissimo nupta flore puella' of the 17th poem, in whom Catullus evidently took a lively interest, may have been this Aufilena, at an earlier stage of her career.

That the intrigue was carried on and had even reached its second stage—that of the 'amantium irae'—in the life-time of Metellus, appears from the 83rd poem,

If he can no longer be her only lover, he still hopes to be the most favoured. But he soon finds even this privilege denied to him. His love-poetry henceforth assumes a different sound. For a time, indeed, his reproaches are uttered in a tone of sadness not unmixed with tenderness. Afterwards, even though his passion from time to time revives with its old vehemence, and he again becomes the slave of Lesbia's caprice, his tone becomes angry, hard, and scornful. Finally, the evidence of her shameless life and innumerable infidelities with Caelius, Gellius, Egnatius, and 'three hundred others,' enables him utterly to renounce her. The earlier of the poems, both of anger and reconciliation, may probably have been written in the life-time of Metellus, i. e. in 60 or in the beginning of 59 b.c. But later in that year Metellus died, suspected of being poisoned by his wife, who, on the ground of that suspicion, was named by Caelius Rufus, after his passion had merged in a hatred equal to that of Catullus, by the terrible oxymoron of 'Clytemnestra quadrantaria.' Her widowhood gained for her absolute license in the indulgence of her propensities, and the first use she made of her liberty was to receive Caelius Rufus into her house on the Palatine. What her ultimate fate was we do not know, but the language of Cicero, Caelius, and Catullus show that she could inspire as deadly hatred as passionate admiration, and that the 'Juno-like' charm of her beauty, the grace and fascination of her presence, the intellectual accomplishment which made poets and orators for a time her slaves, did not save her from sinking into the lowest degradation.

and have kept it by him for years, elaborating the unfamiliar poetic diction in which it is expressed, and enlarging its original plan by the insertion of the long Ariadne episode. It is the only poem of Catullus which produces the impression of the slow and reflective processes of art as distinct from the rapidly shaping power of immediate inspiration. From this circumstance alone we should regard it as a work on which his maturest faculty was employed. But it has been shown⁴³ that throughout the poem, and more especially in the episode of Ariadne, there are clear indications that Catullus had read and imitated the poem of Lucretius, which appeared about the end of 55 or the beginning of 54 b.c. We may therefore conclude that in the year 54 b.c.—the last of his life—Catullus was still engaged either in the original composition of his longest poem, or in giving to it the finishing touches. The concluding lines of the poem—

The fame of Catullus, as alone among ancient poets of love rivalling the traditional glory of Sappho, does not rest only on those poems which record the varying vicissitudes of his own experience. His longer and more artistic poems are all concerned with some phase of this passion, either in its more beautiful and pathetic aspects, or in its perversion and corruption. Thus he not only selects from Greek legends the story of the desertion of Ariadne, of the brief union of Protesilaus and Laodamia, of the glory and blessedness of Peleus and Thetis, but he makes the tragic deed of Attis, instigated by the fanatical hatred of love,—'Veneris nimio odio,'—the subject of his art. Others of his poems are inspired by sympathy with the happiness of his friends in the enjoyment of their love, and with their sorrow when that love is interrupted by death. The most charming of all his longer poems is the Epithalamium which celebrates the union of Manlius with his bride. No truer picture of the passionate devotion of lovers has ever been painted than that presented in the few playful and tender but burning lines of the 'Acme and Septimius.' His own experience did not teach him the lessons of cynicism. At the close as at the beginning of his career, he finds in the union of passion with truth and constancy the most real source of happiness. The elegiac lines in which he comforts his friend Calvus for the loss of Quintilia bear witness to the strength and delicacy of his friendship, and, along with others of his poems, make us feel that the life of pleasure in that age was not only brightened by genius and culture, but also elevated by pure affection and sympathy,—

That he possessed no ordinary share of 'piety,' in the Roman sense of the word, appears from the poems which express his grief for his brother's death. He died in the Troad; and we have seen how, some years after the event, Catullus turned aside from his pleasant voyage among the Isles of Greece and coasts of Asia, to visit his tomb and to offer upon it the customary funeral gifts. His words in reference to this great sorrow, in all the poems in which he speaks of it, are full of deep and simple human feeling. He does not venture to comfort himself with the hope which he suggests to Calvus, in the lines on the death of Quintilia, of a conscious existence after death; but he resolves that his love shall still endure even after the eternal separation from its object. Yet while yielding to the first shock of this affliction, so as to become for the time indifferent to the passion which had swayed his life, and to the delight which he had taken in the works of ancient poets and the exercise of his art, he does not allow himself to forget what was due to living friends. It is characteristic of his frank affectionate nature, that, while dead to his old interests in life and literature, he finds his chief comfort in unburthening his heart to his friends and in writing to them words of delicate consideration. He cannot bear that, even in a trifling matter, Hortalus should find him forgetful of a promise: and he longs to lighten the sorrow of his friend Manlius, who had written to him in some sudden affliction,—probably the loss of the bride in whose honour Catullus had, a short time previously, composed his great Nuptial Ode. Though all other feelings were dead, and neither love could distract nor poetry heal his grief, his heart was alive to the memory of former kindness⁵⁴, to the natural craving for sympathy, and to the duty of thinking of others.

About one half of the shorter poems, and more than half of the epigrams, are to be classed among his personal lampoons or light satiric pieces. Many of these show Catullus to us on that side of his character, which it is least pleasant or profitable to dwell on. He could not indeed write anything which did not bear the stamp of the vital force and sincerity of his nature: but even his vigour of expression does not compensate for the survival in literature of the feelings and relations which are most ignoble in actual life. Yet some of these satiric pieces have an interest which amply justifies their preservation. The greatest of all his lampoons, the 29th, has an historical as well as a literary value. Tacitus, as well as Suetonius, refers to it. It is not only a masterpiece of terse invective, but, like the 11th, it is a powerful specimen of imaginative irony. The momentous events of a most momentous era—the Eastern conquests of Pompey, the first Spanish campaign of Caesar, the subjugation of Gaul, the invasion of Britain, the revolutionary measures of 'father-in-law and son-in-law,'—are all made to look as if they had had no other object or result than that of pampering the appetites of a worthless favourite. Other lampoons, such as those against Memmius and Piso, have also an historical interest. They testify to the republican freedom of speech, the open expression of which was soon to be silenced for ever. They enable us to understand how strong a social and political weapon the power of epigram was in ancient Rome,—a power which continued to be exercised, though no longer with republican freedom, under the Empire. The pen of the poet was employed in the warfare of parties as fiercely as the tongue of the orator; and although Catullus did not spare partisans of the Senate, such as Memmius, yet all his associations and tastes combined to turn his hostility chiefly against the popular leaders and their tools. The more genial satiric pieces, again, are chiefly interesting as throwing light on the social and literary life of Rome and the provincial towns of Italy. They give us an idea of the lighter talk, the criticism, and merriment of the younger men in the world of letters and fashion during the last age of the Republic. If they are not master-pieces of humour, they are full of gaiety, animal spirits, shrewd observation, and not very unkindly comment on men and manners.

Catullus is one of the great poets of the world, not so much through gifts of imagination—though with these he was well endowed—as through his singleness of nature, his vivid impressibility, and his keen perception. He received the gifts of the passing hour so happily, that, to produce pure and lasting poetry, it was enough for him to utter in natural words something of the fulness of his heart. His interests, though limited in range, were all genuine and human. His poems inspired by personal feeling seem to come from him without any effort. He says, on every occasion, exactly what he wanted to say, in clear, forcible, direct language. There are, indeed, even in his simplest poems, a few strokes of imaginative expression, as, for instance,—

In these smaller poems he shows himself as great a master of metre as of language. The more sustained power which he has over the flow of his verse, is best exemplified by the skylark ring of his great Nuptial Ode, by the hurrying agitation of the Attis, and the stately calm of the Peleus and Thetis, giving place to a more impassioned movement in the 'Ariadne' episode. But in his shorter poems, also, he shows the true gift of the

ἀοιδός

The language of Catullus in these shorter poems is his own, or, where not his own, is drawn from such wells of Latin undefiled as Plautus and Terence. His metres are happy applications of those invented or largely used by the earlier lyric poets of Greece,—Sappho, Anacreon, Archilochus,—and the later Phalaecus. For the form of some of his longer poems he has taken, and not with the happiest result, the Alexandrine poets for his models. But in these shorter poems, so far as he has had any models, he has tried to emulate the perfection attained in the older and purer era of Greek inspiration. But it is not through imitation that he has attained a perfection of form like to theirs. It is owing to the singleness and strength of his feeling and impression, that these poems are so exquisite in their unity and simplicity. Catullus does not care to present the gem of his own thought in an alien setting, as Horace, in his earlier Odes at least, has often done. It is one of the surest notes of his lyrical genius that, while more modest in his general self-estimate than any of the great Roman poets, he trusts more implicitly than any of them to his own judgment and inspiration to find the most fitting and telling medium for the communication of his thought. Thus he presents only what is essential, unencumbered with any associations from older poetry. The form is indeed so perfect that we scarcely think of it. We feel only that nothing mars or interrupts the revelation of the poet's heart and soul. We apprehend, as perhaps we never apprehended before, some one single feeling of great potency and great human influence in a poem of some ten or twenty lines, every word of which adds something to the whole impression. Thus for instance, in the poems—

we apprehend through a perfectly pure medium, and by a single intuition, the highest pitch of the passionate love of man and woman, the perfect beauty and joy of self-forgetful friendship, the eager enthusiasm for travel and adventure, the deep delight of returning to a beautiful and well-loved home, the 'sorrow's crown of sorrows' in 'remembering happier things.' We may see, too, in a totally different sphere of experience, how Catullus instinctively seizes the moment of supreme intensity of emotion, and utters what is vitally characteristic of it. He is not, in any sense, one of the Anacreontic singers of the pleasures of wine, of whom Horace is the typical example in ancient times. Neither was he one, who, like Burns, habitually forgot, in the excitement of good fellowship, the perils of Bacchanalian merriment. Yet even the drinking songs of the Scottish poet scarcely realise with more vivacity the moment of mad elevation when a revel is at its height, than Catullus has done in the song of seven short lines—

The 'Hymn to Diana' occupies an intermediate place between the poems founded on personal feelings and the longer and more purely artistic pieces. Like the first it seems unconsciously, or at least without leaving any trace of conscious purpose, to have conformed to the conditions of the purest art. It is, like them, a perfect whole, one of those, to quote Mr. Munro, '"cunningest patterns" of excellence, such as Latium never saw before or after, Alcaeus, Sappho, and the rest then and only then having met their match⁶⁴'. It resembles some of the longer poems in being a creation of sympathetic imagination, not an immediate expression of personal feeling. It must have been written for some public occasion; and the selection of Catullus to compose it would imply that he was recognised as the greatest lyrical poet in his lifetime, and that it was written after his reputation was established. It is a poem not only of pure artistic excellence, but of imaginative conception, like that exemplified in the 'Attis' and the 'Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis.' The 'Diana' of Catullus is not a vague abstraction or conventional figure, as the Gods and Goddesses in the Odes of Horace are apt to be. The mythology of Greece received a new life from his imagination. In this poem he shows too, what he hardly indicates elsewhere⁶⁵, that he could identify himself in sympathy with the national feeling and religion of Rome. The Goddess addressed is a living Power, blending in her countenance the human and picturesque aspects of the Greek Artemis with the more spiritual and beneficent attributes of the Roman Diana. Yet no confusion or incongruity arises from the union into one concrete representation of these originally diverse elements. She lives to the imagination as a Power who, in the fresh morning of the world, had roamed in freedom over the mountains, the woods, the secret dells, and the river-banks of earth⁶⁶,—and now from a far away sphere watched over women in travail, increased the store of the husbandman, and was the especial guardian of the descendants of Romulus.

This poem affords a natural transition to the longer and more purely artistic pieces in the centre of the volume. Yet with some even of these a personal element is interfused. The hymn in honour of the nuptials of Manlius, is, like the short poem on the loves of Acme and Septimius, inspired by the poet's sympathy with the happiness of a friend. The 68th poem attempts to weave into one texture his own love of Lesbia, and the romance of Laodamia and Protesilaus. But in general these poems bring before us a new side of the art of Catullus. In one way indeed they add to our knowledge of his personal tastes. The larger place given in them to ornament and illustration lets us know what objects in Nature afforded him most delight. His life was too full of human interest to allow him to devote his art to the celebration of Nature: yet he could not have been the poet he was if he had not been susceptible to her influence. And this susceptibility, indicated in occasional touches in the shorter poems, finds greater scope in the poems of impersonal art which still remain to be considered.

The absence of all personal allusion in this poem, and its resemblance in tone and rhythm to some fragments of the Lesbian poetess, might suggest the idea that it was translated, or at least imitated, from the Greek. But, on the other hand, from its harmony with the kind of subject and imagery in which Catullus most delights, and from the close observation of Italian Nature, shown in such lines as this—

The 'Attis' is the most original of all his poems. As a work of pure imagination, it is the most remarkable poetical creation in the Latin language. In this poem Catullus throws himself, with marvellous power, into a character and situation utterly alien to common experience, and pours an intense flood of human feeling and passion into a legend of strange Oriental fanaticism. The effect of the piece is, in a great measure, produced by the startling vividness of its language and imagery, and by the impetuous rush of its metre. Though the poem may have been partly founded on Greek materials, yet Catullus has treated the subject in a thoroughly original manner. It is difficult to believe that any translation could produce that impression of genuine creative power, which is forced upon every reader of the Attis. There is nothing at all like the spirit of this poem in extant Greek literature. No other writer has presented so life-like an image of the frantic exultation and fierce self-sacrificing spirit of an inhuman fanaticism; and of the horror and sense of desolation which the natural man, more especially a Greek or Roman, would feel in the midst of the wild and strange scenes described in the poem, when first awaking to the consciousness of his voluntary bondage, and of the forfeiture of his country and parents, and the free social life of former days. A few touches in the poem—as, for instance, the expressions, 'niveis manibus,' 'roseis labellis,' and 'Ego gymnasii fui flos,'—all introduced incidentally,—force upon the mind the contrast between the tender youth and beauty of Attis and the fierce power of the passion that possesses him. The false excitement and noisy tumult of the evening deepen the sense of the terrible reality and blank despair of the morning.

The phrases are to a much greater extent cast in a Greek mould⁷³. The words follow one another in a less natural order. Ornamental epithets, metaphorical phrases, and the substitution of abstract for concrete words, occur much more frequently. Latin poetry creates for itself an artificial diction by assimilating, to a much greater extent than in any earlier work of genius, the long-accumulated wealth of Greek poetry. This was a gain to its resources, opening up and giving expression to a new range of emotions, but a gain against which must be set off a considerable loss of freshness and naïveté.

The perfection attained by Catullus in his best lyrical poetry, and the power displayed in his longer pieces, are so high and genuine that we are hardly surprised at the enthusiasm of those who have ranked him, in respect both of art and genius, foremost among Roman poets. If the pure essence of poetry could be separated from the whole spiritual and intellectual being of the poet, much might be said in favour of that estimate. Others, who think that the work accomplished by Lucretius, Virgil, and Horace is, both in quantity and quality, of more lasting value to the world, cannot forget that had they died at the same early age as Catullus, their names would have been unknown, or perhaps remembered as those of Cinna and Cornificius are now. From the exquisite skill with which Catullus has treated light and playful themes, he has been sometimes compared to modern poets who have no other claim to recognition than a similar facility. But if he is to be compared with any, it is not with the minor poets, ancient or modern, but with the greater, that he is to be ranked. The two eminent English scholars who have made a special study of this poet, and have done more than almost any others in recent times to elucidate his meaning and gain for him his just recognition, look upon him as the equal of Sappho and Alcaeus. Among modern poets he has been compared to one, most unlike him in all the outward conditions of his life, and in many of the conditions of his art,—the poet Burns⁷⁸. In general intellectual power, in the breadth of his human sympathies, the modern poet is much the greater. He is, in all ways, the larger man. But in some endowments of heart and genius the ancient poet is far from being the inferior. He was more fortunate in his nearness to the greatest source of poetic culture, and in the use of a medium of expression, not of a local and limited influence, but one which brings him into immediate relation with educated men of all ages and countries. But in the passionate ardour of their temperament, and the robustness, too closely allied with coarseness, of their fibre; in their susceptibility to beautiful and tender emotions, and the mobility of nature with which they yielded to impulses the most opposite to these; in their large capacity of love and scorn, of pleasure and pain; in their genuine sincerity and firm hold on real life; in the keenness of their satire, and their shrewd observation of the world around them;—in their simple and direct force of feeling and expression; in the freshness of their love for the fairer objects in Nature with which they were most familiar,—they have much in common. The resemblance of the concluding lines of the 'Final renunciation of Lesbia' to the sentiment of the 'Daisy' has been already noticed. The scornful advice, conveyed in the words 'pete nobiles amicos,' finds many an echo in the tones of the modern poet. The art of both is so inseparably associated with their lives, that our admiration of it can hardly help being enhanced or qualified by personal sympathy with, or dislike of their characters. In the case of Catullus it must be allowed that if a careless pursuit of pleasure, an apparent absence of all high aims in life, the too frequent indulgence in the coarsest language and the vilest imputations, could alienate our affections from a great poet, his art would be judged at a disadvantage. But his own frank revelations, from which we learn his faults, must equally be taken as the unintended evidence of his nobler and more generous nature. If his passions led him too far astray, he himself, so far as now appears, alone suffered from them. There is no trace in him of the selfish calculation, or the baser falsehood, which renders 'the life of pleasure,' as led by many men, detestable. There was in his case no 'hardening of all within' as its effect. The small volume bequeathed by him to the world is in itself a sufficient result of his few years. If he is in a great degree unreflective, if he does not consciously realise what are the ends of life, yet he does not look on life in a spirit of cynicism or frivolity. Whatever vein of reflection appears in him is not devoid of reverence and seriousness. His too frequent coarseness is to be explained by the manners of his age and race; and the imputations which he makes on his enemies were, in all probability, never meant to be taken seriously. Although unfortunate in his love, he has shown a capacity of ardent, self-forgetful, and constant devotion, that deserved a better object. He could care for another more than for his own life and happiness. And he had, in a degree rarely equalled, a virtue which devoted lovers often want, the truest, kindliest, most considerate and appreciative affection for many friends. His very dependence on their sympathy in all his joy and sorrow is a claim on the sympathy of the world. If to love warmly, constantly, and unselfishly be the best title to the love of others, few poets, in any age or country, deserve a kindlier place in the hearts of men than 'the young Catullus.'

¹  Hom. Od. xxii. 347.

²  Cf. Cic. Tusc. Disp. i. 2, 3. Sero igitur a nostris poetae vel cogniti vel recepti. At contra oratorem celeriter complexi sumus: nec cum primo eruditum, aptum tamen ad dicendum.

³  Smith's Dict. of Greek and Roman Biography, art. Catullus.

⁴  Horace, Sat. i. 10. 45.

⁵  'He used from time to time to intrust all his secret thoughts to his books, as to trusty friends; it was to them only he turned in evil fortune or in good; and thus it is, that the whole life of the old poet lies before our eyes, as if it were portrayed on a votive picture.'—Sat. ii. 1. 30.

⁶  The parallel which Mr. Ruskin draws (Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 194) between an ancient Greek and 'a good, conscientious, but illiterate Scotch Presbyterian Border farmer of a century or two back,' becomes intelligible if we regard Hesiod as a normal type of the Greek mind.

παντοίας ἐνέφυσεν

But their poetry, on the other hand, came to the Romans after their habits were fully formed², as an ornamental addition to their power,—

κηπίον καὶ ἐγκαλλώπισμα πλούτου

Catullus, while eagerly enjoying his life, seems, in regard to the political turmoil of his time, to 'daff the world aside, and bid it pass': yet there is, as has been well said³, a rough republican flavour in his careless satire; and he retained to the last, and boldly asserted, what was the earliest, as well as the latest, instinct of ancient liberty—the spirit of resistance to the arbitrary rule of any single man.

Vergilio annuerunt gaudentes rure camenae⁴.

Vita senis⁵.

It is a common remark that the very greatest poets are those about whose personal characteristics least is known. It is impossible in their case to determine how far they have expressed their real sympathies or convictions. They rise above the prejudices of their country and the accidents of their time, and can see the good and evil inseparably mixed in all human action. No criticism can throw any trustworthy light on the personal position, the pursuits and aims, the outward and inward experience of Homer. It cannot even be determined with certainty how much of the poetry which bears his name is the creation of one, seemingly, inexhaustible genius; and how much is the 'divine voice' of earlier singers still 'floating around him.' Such inquiries are ever attracting and ever baffling a high curiosity. They leave the mind perplexed with the doubt whether it is discerning, in the far distance, the outline of solid mountain-land, or only the transient shapes of the clouds. Hesiod, on the other hand, a poet of perhaps equal antiquity, but of an infinitely lower order of genius, has left his own likeness graphically delineated on his remains. There is much to interest a reader in the old didactic poem, 'The Works and Days,' but it is not the interest of studying a work of art or of creative genius. The charm of the book consists partly in its power of calling up the ideas of a remote antiquity and of human life in its most elemental conditions; partly in the distinct impression which it bears of a character of an antique and primitive and yet not unfamiliar type;—a character of deep natural piety and righteousness, but with a quaint intermixture of other qualities;—homespun sagacity and worldly wisdom; genuine thrift, and horror of idleness, of war, of seafaring enterprise;—sardonic dislike of the airs and vices of women, and a grim discontent with his own condition, and with the poor soil which it was his lot to till⁶. It is through his want of those gifts of genius which have made Homer immortal as a poet, and a mere name as a man, that Hesiod has left so distinct a picture of himself to the latest times. In like manner Roman poetry, while never rising to the heights of purely creative and impersonal genius, from this very defect, is a truer revelation of the poets themselves. The Aeneid supplies ample materials for understanding the affections and convictions of Virgil. Lucretius makes his personal presence felt through the whole march of his argument, and supports every position of his system not with his logic only, but with the whole force of his nature. The fragments of Ennius and of Lucilius afford ample evidence by which we may judge what kind of men they were.

¹  Epist. ii. 1. 157.

²  Georg. ii. 385.

³  It is thus interpreted by the same author:—Nos, lares, juvate. Ne malam luem, Mamers, sinas incurrere in plures. Satur esto, fere Mars. In limen insili. Desiste verberare (limen)! Semones alterni advocate cunctos. Nos, Mamers, juvato. Tripudia.

⁴  Such is the interpretation of Corssen, Origines Poesis Romanae.

⁵  Epist. ii. 1. 86.

⁶  Cf. Virg. Aen. vii. 81, 82:—

⁷  Cf. Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. i. 24, note 1.

⁸  Livy xxv. 12.

⁹  'Through this fashion the Fescennine raillery arose and poured forth rustic banter in responsive verse; the spirit of freedom, made welcome, as the season came round, first played its part genially; but soon the jests grew cruel, then changed into sheer fury, and began, with impunity, to threaten and assail honourable households. Men smarted under the sharp edge of its cruel tooth: even those who were unassailed felt concern for the common weal. A law was passed, and a penalty enforced, forbidding any one to be lampooned in scurrilous verses. Thus they changed their style, and were brought back to a kindly and pleasant tone, under fear of a beating.'—Epist. ii. 1. 144-55.

¹⁰  Sei quis ocentasit, casmenue condisit, quod infamiam faxsit flacitiomque alterei, fuste feritor.

¹¹  Teuffel quotes from Festus: Fescennini versus qui canebantur in nuptiis, ex urbe Fescennina dicuntur allati, sive ideo dicti quia fascinum putabantur arcere. It seems more natural to connect the name of these verses, which were especially characteristic of the Latin peasantry, with fascinum (the phallic symbol) than with any particular town of Etruria, though the name of that town may perhaps have the same origin.

¹²  Mommsen's explanation, 'the masque of the full men' ('saturi'), does not seem to meet with general acceptance.

¹³  Cf. Teuffel, vi. 2.

¹⁴  vii. 2.

¹⁵  Cf. Teuffel, Wagner's Translation, p. 102.

¹⁶  Tusc. Disp. iv. 2; Brutus, 19.

¹⁷  Noct. Att. xi. 2. A similar character at one time attached to minstrels in Scotland.

¹⁸  Some of these tales may have been originally aetiological, but the human interest even in these was probably drawn originally from actual incidents and personages of the Early Republic. Some of the aetiological myths, such as that of Attus Navius the augur, have no human interest, though they have an historical interest in connexion with early Roman religion or institutions.

¹⁹  Cf. Schwegler, Röm. Gesch. i. 1. 24.>

Munditiae pepulere¹.

Versibus incomptis ludunt risuque soluto².

Triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe, triumpe³.

The address to Mars 'Satur fu,' or, according to another reading, 'Satur furere,' 'be satisfied or done with raging,' probably refers to the severity of the winter and early spring⁴. The words have reference to the attributes of the God in the old Italian religion, in which the powers of Nature were deified and worshipped long before Mars was identified with the Greek Ares. The other expressions in the prayer appear to be, either directions given to the dancers, or the sounds uttered as the dance proceeded.

Another short fragment has been preserved from the hymn of the Salii, also an ancient priesthood, supposed to date from the times of the early kings. The hymn is characterised by Horace, among other specimens of ancient literature, as equally unintelligible to himself and to its affected admirers⁵.

were probably as far removed from poetry as the ritual chants of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Fauni were the woodland gods of Italy, and were, besides their other functions, supposed to be endowed with prophetic power⁶. The word Vates, till the Augustan age, meant not a poet but a soothsayer. The Camenae or Casmenae (another form of which word appears in Carmenta, the prophetic mother of Evander) were worshipped, not as the inspirers of poetry, but as the foretellers of future events⁷. Both Greeks and Romans sought to obtain a knowledge of the future, either through the interpretation of omens, or through the voice of persons supposed to be divinely endowed with foresight. But the Greeks, even in the regard which they paid to auguries and oracles, were influenced, for the most part, by their lively imagination; while the Romans, from the earliest to the latest eras of their history, in all their relations to the supernatural world, adhered to a scrupulous and unimaginative ceremonialism. The notices in Latin literature of the functions of these early Vates—as, for instance, the counsel of the Etrurian seer to drain the Alban Lake during the war with Veii, and the prophecy of Marcius uttered during the Second Punic War,

were probably as far removed from poetry as the ritual chants of the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The Fauni were the woodland gods of Italy, and were, besides their other functions, supposed to be endowed with prophetic power⁶. The word Vates, till the Augustan age, meant not a poet but a soothsayer. The Camenae or Casmenae (another form of which word appears in Carmenta, the prophetic mother of Evander) were worshipped, not as the inspirers of poetry, but as the foretellers of future events⁷. Both Greeks and Romans sought to obtain a knowledge of the future, either through the interpretation of omens, or through the voice of persons supposed to be divinely endowed with foresight. But the Greeks, even in the regard which they paid to auguries and oracles, were influenced, for the most part, by their lively imagination; while the Romans, from the earliest to the latest eras of their history, in all their relations to the supernatural world, adhered to a scrupulous and unimaginative ceremonialism. The notices in Latin literature of the functions of these early Vates—as, for instance, the counsel of the Etrurian seer to drain the Alban Lake during the war with Veii, and the prophecy of Marcius uttered during the Second Punic War,

Amnem Trojugena Cannam Romane fuge, etc.⁸,

Ad bene dicendum delectandumque redacti⁹.

The change in character, here described, from coarse and good-humoured bantering to libellous scurrility, may be conjectured to have taken place when the Fescennine freedom passed from villages and country districts to the active social and political life within the city. That this change had taken place in Rome at an early period, is proved by the fact that libellous verses were forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables¹⁰. The original Fescennine verse appears, from the testimony of Horace, to have been in metrical dialogue. This rude amusement, in which a coarse kind of banter was interchanged during their festive gatherings, was in early times characteristic of the rural populations of Greece and Sicily, as well as Italy, and was one of the original elements out of which Greek comedy and Greek pastoral poetry were developed. These verses had a kindred origin with that of the Phallic Odes among the Greeks. They both appear to have sprung out of the rudest rites and the grossest symbolism of rustic paganism. The Fescennine raillery long retained traces of this original character. Catullus mentions the 'procax Fescennina locutio,' among the accompaniments of marriage festivals; and the songs of the soldiers, in the extravagant license of the triumphal procession, betrayed unmistakably this primitive coarseness.

These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum¹¹, were the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which also was familiar to the Romans before they became acquainted with Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more probable etymology¹² of the word satura connects it in origin with the satura lanx, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian farsa¹³, and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing, differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy¹⁴ to the representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous character; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined with music (saturas impletas modis), even after the introduction of the regular drama.

These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum¹¹, were the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which also was familiar to the Romans before they became acquainted with Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more probable etymology¹² of the word satura connects it in origin with the satura lanx, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian farsa¹³, and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing, differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy¹⁴ to the representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous character; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined with music (saturas impletas modis), even after the introduction of the regular drama.

These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum¹¹, were the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which also was familiar to the Romans before they became acquainted with Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more probable etymology¹² of the word satura connects it in origin with the satura lanx, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian farsa¹³, and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing, differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy¹⁴ to the representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous character; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined with music (saturas impletas modis), even after the introduction of the regular drama.

These rude and inartistic verses, which took their name either from the town of Fescennia in Etruria or from the word fascinum¹¹, were the first expression of that aggressive and censorious spirit which ultimately animated Roman satire. But the original satura, which also was familiar to the Romans before they became acquainted with Greek literature, was somewhat different both from the Fescennine verses, and from the lampoons which arose out of them. The more probable etymology¹² of the word satura connects it in origin with the satura lanx, a plate filled with various kinds of fruit offered to the gods. If this etymology be the true one, the word meant originally a medley of various contents, like the Italian farsa¹³, and it evidently had not lost this meaning when first employed in regular literature by Ennius and Lucilius. The original satura was a kind of dramatic entertainment, accompanied with music and dancing, differing from the Fescennine verses in being regularly composed and not extemporaneous, and from the drama, in being without a connected plot. The origin of this composition is traced by Livy¹⁴ to the representation of Etrurian dancers, who were brought to Rome during a pestilence. The Roman youth, according to his account, being moved to imitation of these representations, in which there was neither acting nor speaking, added to them the accompaniment of verses of a humorous character; and continued to represent these jocular medleys, combined with music (saturas impletas modis), even after the introduction of the regular drama.

4. The didactic tendency which is so conspicuous in the cultivated literature of Rome manifested itself also in the indigenous compositions of Italy. The popular maxims and precepts preserved by the old agricultural writers and afterwards embodied by Virgil in his Georgics, were handed down from generation to generation in the Saturnian rhythm. But, apparently, the first metrical composition committed to writing was a poem of an ethical or didactic character, written two generations before the first dramatic representation of Livius Andronicus, by Appius Claudius Caecus, who is also the earliest known to us in the long line of Roman orators¹⁵.

5. But it was not from any of these sources that Niebuhr supposed the poetical character of early Roman history to be derived. Nor is there any analogy between the religious hymns, or the Fescennine verses of Italy, and the modern ballad. But there is evidence of the existence, at one time, of other metrical compositions of which scarcely anything is definitely ascertained, except that they were sung at banquets, to the accompaniment of the flute, in celebration of the praises of great men. There is no direct evidence of the time when these compositions, some of which were believed by Niebuhr to have attained the dimensions of Epic poems, existed, or when they fell into disuse. Cato, as quoted by Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations, and in the Brutus¹⁶, is our earliest authority on the subject. His testimony is to the effect that many generations before his time, the guests at banquets were in the habit of singing, in succession, the praises of great men, to the music of the flute. Cicero, in the Brutus, expresses a wish that these songs still existed in his own day; 'utinam exstarent illa carmina, quae multis saeculis ante suam aetatem in epulis esse cantitata a singulis convivis de clarorum virorum laudibus in Originibus scriptum reliquit Cato.' Varro again is quoted, to the effect that boys used to be present at banquets, for the purpose of singing 'ancient poems,' celebrating the praises of their ancestors. Valerius Maximus mentions 'that the older men used at banquets to celebrate in song the illustrious deeds of their ancestors, in order to stimulate the youth to imitate them.' Passages are quoted also from Horace, from Dionysius, and from Tacitus, implying a belief in the ancient existence of these compositions.

The commemorative odes appear to have been recited or sung at banquets, not by poets or rhapsodists, but by boys or guests. There is one notice, indeed, of a class of men who practised the profession of minstrelsy. This passage, which is quoted by Aulus Gellius from the writings of Cato, implies the very lowest estimation of the position and character of the poet, and points more naturally to the composers of the libellous verses forbidden by the laws of the Twelve Tables, than to the authors of heroic and national lays:—'Poetry was not held in honour; if anyone devoted himself to it, or went about to banquets, he was called a vagabond¹⁷.'

It cannot, indeed, be disputed that although the legendary tales of Roman history may have drawn more of their colour from life than from imagination, yet there is no criterion by which the amount of fact contained in them can be separated from the other elements of which they were composed. Oral tradition among the Romans, as among other nations, was founded on impressions originally received without any careful sifting of evidence; and these first impressions would naturally be modified in accordance with the feelings and opinions of each generation, through which they were transmitted. Aetiological myths, or the attempt to explain some institution or memorial by some concrete fact, and the systematic reconstruction of forgotten events, have also entered largely into the composition of Roman history. But these admissions do not lead to the conclusion that the art or fancy of any class of early poets was added to the unconscious operation of popular feeling in moulding the impressive tales of early heroism, partly out of the memory of real events and personages, partly out of the ideal of character, latent in the national mind. It has been remarked by Sir G. C. Lewis that many even of the Greek myths, abounding 'in striking, pathetic, and interesting events,' existed as prose legends, and were handed down in the common speech of the people. In like manner, such tales as those of Lucretia and Virginia, of Horatius and the Fabii, of Cincinnatus, Coriolanus, and Camillus, which stand out prominently in the twilight of Roman history, may have been preserved in fama vulgaris, or among the family traditions of the great houses, till they were gathered into the poem of Ennius and the prose narratives of the early annalists¹⁸. In so far as they are shaped or coloured by imagination, they do not bear traces of the conscious art of a poet, but rather of an unconscious conformity to the national ideal of character. The most impressive of these legendary stories illustrate the primitive virtues of the Roman character, such as chastity, frugality, fortitude, and self-devotion; or the national characteristics of patrician pride and a stern exercise of parental authority. There is certainly no internal evidence that any of them originated in a pure poetic impulse, or gave birth to any work of poetic art deserving a permanent existence in literature.

The circumstances of the Romans, in early times, were also different from those by which the growth of a romantic poetry has usually been accompanied. Though, like all races born to a great destiny, they had much latent imaginative ardour of feeling, this was employed by them, unconsciously, in elevating and purifying the ideal of the State and the family, as actually realised in experience. Their orderly organisation,—the early establishment of their civic forms,—the strict discipline of family life among them,—the formal and ceremonial character of their national religion,—and their strong interest in practical affairs,—were not calculated either to kindle the glow of individual genius, or to dispose the mass of the people to listen to the charm of musical verse. The wars of the young Republic, carried on by a well-trained militia, for the acquisition of new territory, formed the character to solid strength and steady discipline, but could not act upon the fancy in the same way as the distant enterprise, the long struggles for national independence, or the daring forays, which have thrown the light of romance around the warlike youth of other races. The tillage of the soil, in which the brief intervals between their wars were passed, was a tame and monotonous pursuit compared with the maritime adventure which awoke the energies of Greece, or with the wild and lonely, half-pastoral, half-marauding life, out of which a true ballad poetry arose in modern times. Some traces of a wilder life, or some faint memories of their Sabine forefathers, may be dimly discerned in the earliest traditions of the Roman people; but their youth was essentially practical,—great and strong in the virtues of temperance, gravity, fortitude, reverence for law and the majesty of the State, combined with a strong love of liberty and sturdy resistance to wrong. These qualities are the foundations of a powerful and orderly State, not the root or the sap by which a great national poetry is nourished¹⁹.

¹   Cf. Lewis, Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i. chap. ii. 14.

²   Cf. Lewis, Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i. chap. ii. 14, 15.

³   Horace, Epist. ii. 1. 161-3.

⁴   Cic. Brutus, ch. 28.

⁵   Brutus, 18.

⁶   Epist. ii. 1. 71.

⁷   viii. 138.

⁸   xxvii. 17.

⁹   Brutus 15.

¹⁰   By Prof. A. F. West of Princeton College, U.S. 'On a patriotic passage of the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus.'

¹¹   Plautus, Miles Gloriosus, ii. 2. 27.

¹²   Brutus, 15.

¹³   Mommsen remarks that he could not have retired to Utica till after it fell into the possession of the Romans.

¹⁴   De Senectute, 14.

¹⁵   'Ye who keep watch over the person of the king, hasten straightway to the leafy places, where the copsewood is of nature's growth, not planted by man.'

¹⁶   'Like one playing at ball in a ring, she tosses about from one to another, and is at home with all. To one she nods, to another winks; she makes love to one, clasps another. Her hand is busy here, her foot there. To one she gives a ring to look at, to another blows a kiss; with one she sings, with another corresponds by signs.'

¹⁷   The reading of the passage here adopted is that given by Munk.

¹⁸   De Senectute, 6.

¹⁹  

²⁰   'What I in the theatre here have made good by the applause given to me, to think that any of these great people should now dare to interfere with! How much better thing is the slavery here' (i.e. represented in this play), 'than the liberty we actually enjoy?'

²¹   'I have always held liberty to be of more value and a better thing than money.' The reading is that given by Munk.

²²   Mommsen remarks that, in the fragments of this poem, the action is generally represented in the present tense.

²³   Brutus, 19.

²⁴   'I, for my part, as I listen to my mother-in-law, Laelia (for women more easily preserve the pure idiom of antiquity, because, from their limited intercourse with the world, they retain always their earlier impressions), in listening, I say to her, I fancy that I am listening to Plautus or Naevius. The very tones of her voice are so natural and simple, that she seems absolutely free from affectation or imitation; from this I gather that her father spoke, and her ancestors all spoke, in the very same way.'—Cicero, De Oratore iii. 12.

The historical event which first brought the Romans into familiar contact with the Greeks, was the war with Pyrrhus and with Tarentum, the most powerful and flourishing among the famous Greek colonies in lower Italy. In earlier times, indeed, through their occasional communication with the Greeks of Cumae, and the other colonies in Italy, they had obtained a vague knowledge of some of the legends of Greek poetry. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced at Rome from Epidaurus in b.c. 293, and the oracle of Delphi had been consulted by the Romans in still earlier times. As the Sibylline verses appear to have been composed in Greek, their interpreters must have been either Greeks or men acquainted with that language¹. The identification of the Greek with the Roman mythology had probably commenced before Greek literature was known to the Romans, although the works of Naevius and Ennius must have had an influence in completing this process. Greek civilisation had come, however, at an earlier period into close relation with the south of Italy; and the natives of that district, such as Ennius and Pacuvius, who first settled at Rome, were spoken of by the Romans as 'Semi-Graeci.' But, until after the fall of Tarentum, there appears to have been no familiar intercourse between the two great representatives of ancient civilisation. Till the war with Pyrrhus, the knowledge that the two nations had of one another was slight and vague. But, immediately after that time, the affairs of Rome began to attract the attention of Greek historians², and the Romans, though very slowly, began to obtain some acquaintance with the language and literature of Greece.

The historical event which first brought the Romans into familiar contact with the Greeks, was the war with Pyrrhus and with Tarentum, the most powerful and flourishing among the famous Greek colonies in lower Italy. In earlier times, indeed, through their occasional communication with the Greeks of Cumae, and the other colonies in Italy, they had obtained a vague knowledge of some of the legends of Greek poetry. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced at Rome from Epidaurus in b.c. 293, and the oracle of Delphi had been consulted by the Romans in still earlier times. As the Sibylline verses appear to have been composed in Greek, their interpreters must have been either Greeks or men acquainted with that language¹. The identification of the Greek with the Roman mythology had probably commenced before Greek literature was known to the Romans, although the works of Naevius and Ennius must have had an influence in completing this process. Greek civilisation had come, however, at an earlier period into close relation with the south of Italy; and the natives of that district, such as Ennius and Pacuvius, who first settled at Rome, were spoken of by the Romans as 'Semi-Graeci.' But, until after the fall of Tarentum, there appears to have been no familiar intercourse between the two great representatives of ancient civilisation. Till the war with Pyrrhus, the knowledge that the two nations had of one another was slight and vague. But, immediately after that time, the affairs of Rome began to attract the attention of Greek historians², and the Romans, though very slowly, began to obtain some acquaintance with the language and literature of Greece.

Quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile ferrent³.

Yet this long period, in which poetry, with so much difficulty and such scanty resources, struggled into existence at Rome, is connected with the age of Cicero by an unbroken line of literary continuity. Naevius, the younger contemporary of Livius, and the first native poet, was actively engaged in the composition of his poems till the time of his death; about which period his greater successor first appeared at Rome. For about thirty years, Ennius shone alone in epic and tragic poetry. The poetic successor of Ennius was his nephew, Pacuvius. He, in the later years of his life, lived in friendly intercourse with his younger rival Accius, who, again, in his old age, had frequently conversed with Cicero⁴. The torch, which was first lighted by Livius Andronicus from the decaying fires of Greece, was thus handed down by these few men, through this long period, until it was extinguished during the stormy times which fell in the youth of the great orator and prose writer of the Republic.

The two earliest authors who fill a period of forty years in the literary history of Rome, extending from the end of the First to the end of the Second Punic War, are Livius Andronicus and Cn. Naevius. Of the first very little is known. The fragments of his works are scanty and unimportant, and have been preserved by grammarians merely as illustrative of old forms of the language. The admirers of Naevius and Ennius, in ancient times, awarded only scanty honours to the older dramatist. Cicero, for instance, says of his plays 'that they are not worth reading a second time⁵.' The importance which attaches to Livius consists in his being the accidental medium through which literary art was first introduced to the Romans. He was a Greek, and, as is generally supposed, a native of Tarentum. He educated the sons of his master, M. Livius Salinator, from whom he afterwards received his freedom. The last thirty years of his life were devoted to literature, and chiefly to the reproduction of the Greek drama in a Latin dress. His tragedies appear all to have been founded on Greek subjects; most of them, probably, were translations. Among the titles, we hear of the Aegisthus, Ajax, Equus Trojanus, Tereus, Hermione, etc.—all of them subjects which continued to be popular with the later tragedians of Rome. No fragment is preserved sufficient to give any idea of his treatment of the subjects, or of his general mode of thought and feeling. Little can be gathered from the scanty remains of his works, except some idea of the harshness and inelegance of his diction.

In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. This work long retained its place as a school-book, and is spoken of by Horace as forming part of his own early lessons under the rod of Orbilius⁶. One or two lines of the translation still remain, and exemplify its rough and prosaic diction, and the extreme irregularity of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey⁷,

In addition to his dramas, he translated the Odyssey into Saturnian verse. This work long retained its place as a school-book, and is spoken of by Horace as forming part of his own early lessons under the rod of Orbilius⁶. One or two lines of the translation still remain, and exemplify its rough and prosaic diction, and the extreme irregularity of the Saturnian metre. The lines of the Odyssey⁷,

He was appointed also, on one occasion, near the end of the Second Punic War, to compose a hymn to be sung by 'virgines ter novenae,' which is described by Livy, the historian, as rugged and unpolished⁸.

Cn. Naevius is really the first in the line of Roman poets, and the first writer in the Latin language whose fragments give indication of original power. It has been supposed that he was a Campanian by birth, on the authority of Aulus Gellius, who characterised his famous epitaph as 'plenum superbiae Campanae.' But the phrase 'Campanian arrogance' seems to have been used proverbially for 'gasconade'; and as there was a plebeian Gens Naevia in Rome, it is quite as probable that he was by birth a Roman citizen. The strong political partisanship displayed in his plays seems favourable to this supposition, as is also the active interference of the tribunes on his behalf. Weight must however be given to the remark of Mommsen, 'the hypothesis that he was not a Roman citizen, but possibly a citizen of Cales or of some other Latin town in Campania, renders the fact that the Roman police treated him so unscrupulously the more easy of explanation.' On the other hand it has been observed that had he been an alien the tribunes could not have interfered on his behalf. He served either in the Roman army or among the Socii in the First Punic War, and thus must have reached manhood before the year 241 b.c. Cicero mentions that he lived to a good old age, and that he died in exile about the end of the third century b.c.⁹. The date of his birth may thus be fixed with approximate probability about the year 265 b.c. No particulars of his military service are recorded, but it is most probable that the scene of his service was the west of Sicily, on which the struggle was concentrated during the later years of the war. If we connect the newly developed taste for the drama with the intercourse of Romans with Sicilian Greeks during the war, we may connect another important influence on Roman literature and Roman belief which first appeared in the epic poem of Naevius with the Phoenician settlements in the west of Sicily. The origin of the belief in the mythical connexion of

Aeneas

In the year 206 b.c. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M. Metellus Praetor Urbanus, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested¹⁰, with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed. The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circumstance to which Plautus¹¹ alludes in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in b.c. 204¹², though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date¹³. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero¹⁴, that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between b.c. 261 and b.c. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

In the year 206 b.c. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M. Metellus Praetor Urbanus, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested¹⁰, with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed. The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circumstance to which Plautus¹¹ alludes in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in b.c. 204¹², though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date¹³. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero¹⁴, that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between b.c. 261 and b.c. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

In the year 206 b.c. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M. Metellus Praetor Urbanus, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested¹⁰, with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed. The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circumstance to which Plautus¹¹ alludes in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in b.c. 204¹², though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date¹³. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero¹⁴, that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between b.c. 261 and b.c. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

In the year 206 b.c. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M. Metellus Praetor Urbanus, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested¹⁰, with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed. The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circumstance to which Plautus¹¹ alludes in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in b.c. 204¹², though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date¹³. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero¹⁴, that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between b.c. 261 and b.c. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

In the year 206 b.c. Q. Caecilius Metellus was Consul, his brother M. Metellus Praetor Urbanus, an office that held out an almost certain prospect of the Consulship; and it has been suggested¹⁰, with much probability, that it was against them that this sneer was directed. The Metelli carried out their threat, as Naevius was imprisoned, a circumstance to which Plautus¹¹ alludes in one of the few passages in which Latin comedy deviates from the conventional life of Athenian manners to notice the actual circumstances of the time. While in prison, he composed two plays (the Hariolus and Leon), which contained some retractation of his former attacks, and he was liberated through the interference of the Tribunes of the Commons. But he was soon after banished, and took up his residence at Utica, where he is said by Cicero, on the authority of ancient records, to have died, in b.c. 204¹², though the same author adds that Varro, 'diligentissimus investigator antiquitatis,' believed that he was still alive for some time after that date¹³. It is inferred, from a passage in Cicero¹⁴, that his poem on the First Punic War was composed in his old age. Probably it was written in his exile, when removed from the sphere of his active literary efforts. As he served in that war, some time between b.c. 261 and b.c. 241, he must have been well advanced in years at the time of his death.

Ingenio arbusta ubi nata sunt, non obsita¹⁵.

Cum alio cantat, attamen dat alii digito literas¹⁶.

The chief characteristic illustrated by the scanty fragments of his dramas is the political spirit by which they were animated. Thus Cicero¹⁷ refers to a passage in one of his plays (ut est in Naevii ludo) where, to the question, 'Who had, within so short a time, destroyed your great commonwealth?' the pregnant answer is given,

Proveniebant oratores novi, stulti adolescentuli¹⁸.

The nobles, whose enmity he provoked, were probably attacked by him in his comedies. One passage is quoted by Aulus Gellius, in which a failing of the great Scipio is exposed¹⁹. Other fragments are found indicative of his freedom of speech and bold independence of character:—

Quanto libertatem hanc hic superat servitus²⁰?

and this also²¹:—

Urit, populatur, vastat, rem hostium concinnat²².

But the fragments of the poem are really too unimportant to afford ground for a true estimate of its general merit. They supply some evidence in regard to the irregularity of the metre in which it was written. The uncertainty which prevails as to its structure may be inferred from the fact that different conjectural readings of every fragment are proposed by different commentators. A saying of an old grammarian, Atilius Fortunatianus, is quoted to the effect that he could not adduce from the whole poem of Naevius any single line, as a normal specimen of the pure Saturnian verse. Cicero bears strong testimony to the merits of the poem in point of style. He says in one place, 'the Punic War delights us like a work of Myron²³.' In the dialogue 'De Oratore,' he represents Crassus as comparing the idiomatic purity which distinguished the conversation of his mother-in-law, Laelia, and other ladies of rank, with the style of Plautus and Naevius. 'Equidem quum audio socrum meam Laeliam (facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod, multorum sermonis expertes, ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt); sed eam sic audio, ut Plautum mihi aut Naevium videar audire. Sono ipso vocis ita recto et simplici est, ut nihil ostentationis aut imitationis afferre videatur; ex quo sic locutum ejus patrem judico, sic majores²⁴.' Expressions from his plays were, from their weight and compact brevity, quoted familiarly in the days of Cicero, such as 'sero sapiunt Phryges' and 'laudari a laudato viro,' which, like so many other pithy Latin sayings, is still in use to express a distinction that could not be characterised in happier or shorter terms. It is to be remarked also that the merit, which he assumes to himself in his epitaph, is the purity with which he wrote the Latin language.

But the fragments of the poem are really too unimportant to afford ground for a true estimate of its general merit. They supply some evidence in regard to the irregularity of the metre in which it was written. The uncertainty which prevails as to its structure may be inferred from the fact that different conjectural readings of every fragment are proposed by different commentators. A saying of an old grammarian, Atilius Fortunatianus, is quoted to the effect that he could not adduce from the whole poem of Naevius any single line, as a normal specimen of the pure Saturnian verse. Cicero bears strong testimony to the merits of the poem in point of style. He says in one place, 'the Punic War delights us like a work of Myron²³.' In the dialogue 'De Oratore,' he represents Crassus as comparing the idiomatic purity which distinguished the conversation of his mother-in-law, Laelia, and other ladies of rank, with the style of Plautus and Naevius. 'Equidem quum audio socrum meam Laeliam (facilius enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod, multorum sermonis expertes, ea tenent semper, quae prima didicerunt); sed eam sic audio, ut Plautum mihi aut Naevium videar audire. Sono ipso vocis ita recto et simplici est, ut nihil ostentationis aut imitationis afferre videatur; ex quo sic locutum ejus patrem judico, sic majores²⁴.' Expressions from his plays were, from their weight and compact brevity, quoted familiarly in the days of Cicero, such as 'sero sapiunt Phryges' and 'laudari a laudato viro,' which, like so many other pithy Latin sayings, is still in use to express a distinction that could not be characterised in happier or shorter terms. It is to be remarked also that the merit, which he assumes to himself in his epitaph, is the purity with which he wrote the Latin language.

¹   Parco admodum sumptu contentus et unius ancillae ministerio.

²   xvii. 17.

³   The line—

⁴   Livy xxxviii. 17.

⁵   'When the Carthaginians were coming from all sides to the conflict, and all things, beneath high heaven, confounded by the hurry and tumult of war, shook with alarm: and men were in doubt to which of the two the empire of the whole world, by land and sea, should fall.'—Lucret. iii. 834-7.

⁶   Mommsen, book iii. ch. 5.

⁷   The author of Caesar's Spanish War quotes Ennius in his account of the critical moment in the Battle of Munda:—'Hic, ut ait Ennius, "pes pede premitur, armis teruntur arma."'—Bell. Hisp. xxxi.

⁸   Amphit. 52-3—

⁹   Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, etc.

¹⁰   De Senectute, 5.

¹¹   De Oratore, ii. 68.

¹²   'L. Aelium Stilonem dicere solitum ferunt Q. Ennium de semet ipso haec scripsisse, picturamque istam morum et ingenii ipsius Q. Ennii factam esse.'—Gell. xii. 4.

¹³   'He finished: and summons to him one with whom often, and right gladly, he shared his table, his talk, and the whole weight of his business, when weary with debate, throughout the day, on high affairs of state, within the wide Forum and the august Senate,—one to whom he could frankly speak out serious matters, trifles, and jest; to whom he could pour forth and safely confide, if he wanted to confide in any one, all that he cared to utter, good or bad; with whom, in private and in public, he had much entertainment and enjoyment,—a man of that nature which no thought ever prompts to baseness through levity or malice: a learned, honest, pleasant man, eloquent, contented, and cheerful, of much tact, speaking well in season; courteous and of few words; with much old buried lore; whom length of years had made versed in old and recent ways; in the laws of many ancients, divine and human; one who knew when to speak and when to be silent. Him, during the battle, Servilius thus addresses.'

¹⁴  

Σκιπίωνα γὰρ ᾄδων καὶ ἐπὶ μέγα τὸν ἄνδρα ἐχᾶραι βουλόμενος φησὶ μόνον ἂν Ὅμηρον ἐπαξίους ἐπαίνους εἰπεῖν Σκιπίωνος

¹⁵   'Here is he laid, to whom no one, either countryman or enemy, has been able to pay a due meed for his services.'

¹⁶   'From the utmost east, beyond the Maeotian marsh, there is no one who in actions can vie with me. If it is lawful for any one to ascend to the realms of the gods, to me alone the vast gate of heaven is opened!'

¹⁷   'Yet nothing more glorious than this man doth it (the island of Sicily) seem to have contained, nor aught more holy, nor more wonderful and beloved.'

¹⁸   'Behold, my countrymen, the bust of the old man, Ennius. He penned the record of your fathers' mighty deeds. Let no one pay to me the meed of tears, nor weep at my funeral. And why? because I still live, as I speed to and fro, through the mouths of men.'

¹⁹   'Hail, poet Ennius, who pledgest to mortals thy fiery verse from thy inmost marrow.'

²⁰   'Others have treated the subject in the verses, which in days of old the Fauns and bards used to sing, before any one had climbed the cliffs of the Muses, or gave any care to style.'

²¹   'I have always said and will say that the gods of heaven exist, but I think that they heed not the conduct of mankind; for, if they did, it would be well with the good and ill with the bad; and it is not so now.'

²²  

²³   Vahlen.

²⁴   Horace, Sat. ii. 4.

²⁵   'The poetical philosophy, which the later Pythagoreans had extracted from the writings of the old Sicilian comedian, Epicharmus of Megara, or rather had, at least for the most part, circulated under cover of his name, regarded the Greek gods as natural substances, Zeus as the atmosphere, the soul as a particle of Sun-dust, and so forth.'—Mommsen's Hist. of Rome, Book iii. ch. 15. (Dickson's Translation.)

²⁶   'This is that Jupiter which I speak of, which the Greeks call the air; it is first wind and clouds; afterwards rain, and after rain, cold; next it becomes wind, then air again. All those things which I mention to you are Jupiter, because it is he who supports mortals and cities and all animals.'

²⁷   Mommsen.

²⁸   'Inventore minor.'—Horace.

²⁹   Another passage, ascribed to Ennius, descriptive of the greed of a parasite, occupies the ground common to Roman comedy and to Roman satire:—

³⁰   The meaning of the passage amounts to no more than this, that the man who tries to 'sell' another, and fails, is himself 'sold.'

³¹   Brutus, 20.

³²   De Fin. i. 2.

³³   Cf. Eur. Med. 1-8:—

³⁴   Several of these fragments will be examined later.

³⁵   Tusc. Disp. ii. 16.

³⁶   'How tender, how true to character, how affecting!'—De Div. i. 31. 'What a great poet, though he is despised by those admirers of Euphorion. He understands that sudden and unlooked-for calamities are more grievous. A noble poem,—pathetic in its matter, language, and music.'—Tusc. Disp. iii. 19.

³⁷   'Here it is; here, the torch, wrapped in fire and blood. Many years it hath lain hid; help, citizens, and extinguish it. For now, on the great sea, a swift fleet is gathering. It hurries along a host of calamities. They come: a fierce host lines the shores with sail-winged ships.' Exitium = exitiorum; cf. Cic. Orator. 46, Itaque idem poeta, qui inusitatius contraxerat 'Patris mei meum factum pudet' pro 'meorum factorum' et 'Texitur: exitium examen rapit' pro 'exitiorum.'

³⁸   Acad. ii. 28.

³⁹   Gellius, xvii. 21.

⁴⁰   He speaks of Eurydice as the wife of Aeneas. This statement he is supposed to have derived from the Cypria.

⁴¹   Cicero, Arch. 9.

⁴²   'Wisdom is banished from amongst us, violence rules the day: the good orator is despised, the rough soldier loved; striving, not with words of learning, but with words of hate, they get embroiled in feuds, and stir up enmity one with another. They challenge not their adversaries to contend by forms of law, but claim their rights by the sword, and aim at sovereign power, and make their way by sheer force.'

⁴³   Cic. De Off. i. 12.

⁴⁴   'Neither do I ask gold for myself, nor offer ye to me a ransom. Let us wage the war, not like hucksters, but like soldiers—with the sword, not with gold, putting our lives to the issue. Whether our mistress Fortune wills that you or I should reign, or what her purpose be, let us prove by valour. And hearken too to this saying,—The brave men, whom the fortune of battle spares, their liberty I have resolved to spare. Take my offer, as I grant it, under favour of the great gods.'

⁴⁵   'Whither have your minds, which heretofore were wont to stand firm, madly swerved from the straight course?'

⁴⁶   A comparison with the original passage (Iliad vi. 506) will show that Ennius, while reproducing much, though not all, of the force and life of Homer's image, has added also some touches of his own:—

⁴⁷   'They watch, as when the consul is going to give the signal, all look eagerly to the barrier, to see how soon he may start the chariots from the painted entrance.'

⁴⁸  

⁴⁹  

Ἔννιος Ῥωμαῖος ποιητής· ὃν Αἰλιανὸς ἐπαινεῖν ἄξιόν φησι

δῆλον δὲ ὡς ἐτεθήπει τοῦ ποιητοῦ τὴν μεγαλόνοιαν καὶ τῶν μέτρων τὸ μεγαλεῖον καὶ ἀξιάγαστον

⁵⁰   Cf. Iliad xxiii. 114-120; and also Virgil, Aen. vi. 179:—

⁵¹   'One man, by biding his time, restored the commonwealth. He cared not for what men said of him, as compared with our safety: therefore now his fame waxeth brighter day by day.'

⁵²   'He watched the courage of his army, to see if any murmur should arise for some pause to the long battle, some rest from their weary toil.'

⁵³   'As sang our Ennius, the first who brought down from beautiful Helicon a chaplet of unfading leaf, the fame of which should be bruited loud through the nations of Italian men.'

⁵⁴   'When the old dame had risen, and with trembling limbs had brought the light, thus she (Ilia), roused in terror from her sleep, with tears tells her tale: "Daughter of Eurydice, whom our father loved, my strength and life now fail me through all my frame. For methought that a goodly man was bearing me off through the pleasant willow-groves, by the river-banks, and places strange to me. Thereafter, O my sister, I seemed to be wandering all alone, and with slow steps to track my way, to be seeking thee, and to be unable to find thee near; no footpath steadied my step. Afterwards methought I heard my father address me in these words—'Daughter, trouble must first be borne by thee; afterwards thy fortune shall rise up again from the river.' With these words, O sister, he suddenly departed, nor gave himself to my sight, though my heart yearned to him, though I kept eagerly stretching my hands to the blue vault of heaven, weeping, and calling on him with loving tones. With pain and weary heart at last sleep left me."'

⁵⁵   Aen. ii. 270.

⁵⁶   'Regret and sorrow fill their hearts, while thus they say to one another, O Romulus, God-like Romulus, how great a guardian of our country did the gods create in thee! O father, author of our being, O blood sprung from the gods! it is thou that hast brought us forth within the realms of light.'

⁵⁷   E.g. passages such as the following:—

⁵⁸   'O father! O fatherland! O house of Priam, palace, closing on high-sounding hinge, I have seen thee, guarded by a barbaric host, with carved and deep-fretted roof, with ivory and gold royally adorned.'

⁵⁹   'But they rise superior in spirit, and spurn the first sharp wounds of war.'

⁶⁰   'When I begat them, I knew that they must die, and to that end I bred them. Besides, when I sent them to Troy to fight for Greece, I was well aware that I was sending them, not to a feast, but to a deadly war.'

⁶¹   'Such is my nature. Enmity and friendship equally I bear stamped on my forehead.'

⁶²   'Ennio delector, ait quispiam, quod non discedit a communi ordine verborum.'—Orator, 11.

⁶³   Cicero, Brutus, 15; Aulus Gellius, xii. 2.

⁶⁴   'He was called by those, his fellow-countrymen, who flourished then and enjoyed their day, the chosen flower of the people, and the marrow of persuasion.'

⁶⁵   Compare his account of the Tribune in the Istrian war:—

⁶⁶   Cf. 'Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem,' etc.

⁶⁷   Cf.

⁶⁸   'Egregie cordatus homo catus Aeliu' Sextus.'

⁶⁹   'In idleness the mind knows not what it wants. This is now our case. We are neither now at home nor abroad. We go hither, back again to the place from which we came,—when we have reached it we desire to leave it again. Our mind is all astray—existence goes on outside of real life.'

⁷⁰   iii. 1059-67.

⁷¹   'But your superstitious prophets and impudent fortune-tellers, idle fellows, or madmen, or the victims of want, who cannot discern the path for themselves, yet point the way out to others, and ask a drachma from the very persons to whom they promise a fortune.'

⁷²   'And there it is announced to Julianus that a certain public reader, an accomplished man, with a very well-trained and musical voice, read the Annals of Ennius publicly in the theatre. Let us go, says he, to hear this "Ennianista," whoever he is,—for by that name he chose to be called.'—Aulus Gellius, xviii. 5.

⁷³   'Let us venerate Ennius like the groves, sacred from their antiquity, in which the great and ancient oak-trees are invested not so much with beauty as with sacred associations.'—Inst. Or. x. i. 88.

⁷⁴   'Ennius, the wise and strong, and the second Homer, as his critics will have it, seems to care little for the issue of all his promises and Pythagorean dreams.'—Epist. II. i. 50-2.

I.  He was born at Rudiae, a town of Calabria, in b.c. 239, the year after the first representation of a drama on the Roman stage. He first entered Rome in b.c. 204, in the train of Cato, who, when acting as quaestor in Sardinia, found the poet in that island serving, with the rank of centurion, in the Roman army. In the poem of Silius Italicus, he is fancifully represented as distinguishing himself in personal combat like one of the heroes of the Iliad. After this time he resided at Rome, 'living,' according to the statement of Jerome, 'very plainly, on the Aventine' (the Plebeian quarter of the city), 'attended only by a single maid-servant¹,' and supporting himself by teaching Greek and by his writings. He accompanied M. Fulvius Nobilior in his Aetolian campaign. Through the influence of his son, he obtained the honour of Roman citizenship, probably at the time when the colony of Pisaurum was planted in b.c. 184. This distinction Ennius has himself recorded in a line of the Annals which indicates the high value which the Roman allies attached to this privilege:—

This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the better class of families in his native district; and the consciousness of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies. He bore witness to his nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius² that 'in the possession of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he possessed three hearts.' Of these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire for the purposes of literature or of social intercourse, was most likely to have been his inherited tongue. Rudiae, from its Italian nationality, from its neighbourhood to the cities of Magna Graecia, and from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-place, not only of three different languages,—that of common life, that of culture and education, that of military service—but of the three different spirits or tendencies which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas³—referred to in the expression of Ovid,—

This claim to royal descent indicates that the poet was a member of the better class of families in his native district; and the consciousness of old lineage, which prompted the claim, probably strengthened the high self-confidence by which he was animated, and helped to determine the strong aristocratic bias of his sympathies. He bore witness to his nationality in the saying quoted by Gellius² that 'in the possession of the Greek, Oscan, and Latin speech, he possessed three hearts.' Of these three languages the Oscan, as the one of least value to acquire for the purposes of literature or of social intercourse, was most likely to have been his inherited tongue. Rudiae, from its Italian nationality, from its neighbourhood to the cities of Magna Graecia, and from its relation of dependence on Rome, must have been in the time of the boyhood of Ennius a meeting-place, not only of three different languages,—that of common life, that of culture and education, that of military service—but of the three different spirits or tendencies which were operative in the creation of the new literature. To his home among the hills overlooking the Grecian seas³—referred to in the expression of Ovid,—

the poet owed the 'Italian heart,' the virtue of a race still uncorrupted and unsophisticated, the buoyant energy and freshness of feeling which enabled him to apprehend all the novelty and the greatness of the momentous age through which he lived. The South of Italy afforded, at this time, means of education, which were denied to Rome or Latium; and the peace enjoyed by his native district for the first twenty years of his life granted to Ennius leisure to avail himself of these means, which he could not have enjoyed had he been born a few years later. In the short account of his life in Jerome's continuation of the Eusebian Chronicle, it is stated that he was born at Tarentum. Though this is clearly an error, it seems probable that the poet may have spent the years of his education there. Though Tarentum, since its capture by the Romans, had lost its political importance, it still continued to be a centre of Greek culture and of social pleasure. Dramatic representations had been especially popular among a people who had drifted far away 'ex Spartana dura illa et horrida disciplina⁴' of their ancestors. From the knowledge of the Attic tragedians displayed by Ennius in his later career it is likely that he had witnessed representations of their works on a Greek stage, before he began, in middle life, to direct his own genius to dramatic composition. The knowledge and admiration of Homer which stimulated him to the composition of his greatest work, might have been acquired in any centre of Greek culture. But the intellectual interests indicated in some of his miscellaneous writings have a kind of local character, distinguishing them alike from the older philosophies of Athens and from the more recent science of Alexandria. His acceptance of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the physical fancies expressed in some of the fragments of the Epicharmus probably came to him from the teaching of the Neo-Pythagoreans, who were widely spread among the Greeks of Southern Italy. The rationalistic speculations of Euhemerus, which appear in strange union with the 'somnia Pythagorea' of the Annals, were of Sicilian origin. The gastronomic treatise, which Ennius afterwards translated into Latin, was the work of Archestratus of Gela. The class of persons for whom such a work would originally be written was likely to be found among the luxurious livers of Sicily and Magna Graecia. Thus while the serious poetry of Ennius was inspired by the older and nobler works of Greek genius, the influence of a more vulgar and prosaic class of teachers, transmitted by him to Roman thought and literature, was probably derived from the place of his early education.

Omnibus humanis esset terraque marique⁵.

Though during that struggle the loyalty of some of the Italian communities was shaken, yet the aristocratic party in every city, and the Greek States generally, were true to the Roman alliance⁶. Thus his political sympathies, as well as his Greek education, would incline Ennius to identify himself with the cause of Rome, and his ardent imagination apprehended the grandeur and majesty with which she played her part in the contest. It was in the Second Punic War that the ideal of what was greatest in the character and institutions of Rome was most fully realised. Her good fortune supplied from among the contingent furnished to the war by her Messapian allies a man of a nature so sympathetic with her own and an imagination so vivid as to gain for the ideal thus created a permanent realisation.

Of the share which Ennius had in the war we know only that he served in Sardinia with the rank of centurion. That he had become a man of some note in that capacity is suggested by the fact that he attracted the attention of the Roman quaestor Cato, and accompanied him to Rome. A certain dramatic interest attaches to this first meeting of the typical representative of Roman manners and traditions and great enemy of foreign innovations, with the man by whom, more than by any one else, the mind of Rome was enlarged and liberalised, and many of her most cherished convictions were most seriously undermined. This actual service in a great war left its impress on the work done by Ennius. Fragments both of his tragedies and his Annals prove how thoroughly he understood and appreciated the best qualities of the soldierly character. This fellowship in hardship and danger fitted him to become the national poet of a race of soldiers. He has drawn from his own observation an image of the fortitude and discipline of the Roman armies, and of the patriotic devotion and resolution of the men by whom these armies were led. There is a strong realism in the expression of martial sentiment in Ennius, marking him out as a man familiar with the life of the camp and the battle-field, and quite distinct from the idealising enthusiasm of Livy and Virgil⁷.

Along with the military and political activity of the time, during which Ennius lived in Rome, the stirring of a new intellectual life was apparent. Even during the war dramatic representations continued to take place, and the most active part of the career of Naevius, and a considerable part of that of Plautus, belong to the years during which Hannibal was still in Italy. After the cessation of the war, we note in the pages of Livy that much greater prominence is given to the celebration of public games, of which at this time dramatic representations formed the chief part. The regular holidays for which the Aediles provided these entertainments became more numerous; and the art of the dramatist was employed to enhance the pomp of the spectacle on the occasion of a great triumph, or of the funeral of an illustrious man. The death of Livius Andronicus and the banishment of Naevius, which must have happened about the time that Ennius arrived at Rome, had deprived the Roman stage of the only writers of any name, who had attempted to introduce upon it the works of the Greek tragedians. Ennius had, indeed, rather to create than to revive the taste for tragedy. The prologue to the Amphitryo⁸ shows how much more congenial the reproduction of the ordinary life of the Greeks was to the uneducated audiences of Rome than the higher effort to familiarise them with the personages and adventures of the heroic age. The great era of Roman comedy was coincident with the literary career of Ennius. It was then that the best extant plays of Plautus were produced, and that Caecilius Statius, whom ancient critics ranked as his superior, flourished. The quality attributed to the latter in the line of Horace,

indicates a closer affinity with the spirit of Ennius, than the moral and political indifference of the older dramatist. The aim of Ennius was to raise literature from being a mere popular recreation, and to bring it into accord with the higher mood of the nation; to use it as a medium both of elevation and enlightenment. In carrying out this aim he appealed to the temper and to the newly awakened interests of members of the aristocratic class, who were coming into close contact with educated Greeks, and were beginning to appreciate the treasures of art and literature now opened up to them. The career of Q. Fabius Pictor, the first historian of Rome, and the first who made a name for himself in painting, who lived at this time, attests this twofold attraction. The friendly relations which Roman generals, such as T. Quintius Flamininus, established with the famous Greek cities, in which they appeared as liberators rather than conquerors, were the result of intellectual enthusiasm as much as of a definite policy. With the wars of Pyrrhus and the capture of Tarentum, the first stage of the process described in the lines of Horace began⁹: the end of the Second Punic War was the second stage in the process. It is to this period, rather than to the progress of the war, that the words of the Grammarian, Porcius Licinus, most truly apply,

There is no reason to believe that he had obtained any eminence in literature before he settled in middle age at Rome. His genius was of that robust order which grows richer and livelier with advancing years. The Annals was the work of his old age,—the ripe fruit of a strong and energetic manhood, prolonged to the last in hopeful activity. Cicero speaks of 'the cheerfulness with which he bore the two evils of old age and poverty¹⁰.' Wherever the poet speaks of himself, his words reveal a sanguine and contented spirit; as, in that fine simile, where he compares himself, at the close of his active and successful career, to a brave horse which has often won the prize at the Olympian games, and in old age obtains his well-deserved repose:—

it may be inferred that he belonged to the class of poets of a lusty and social nature, of which Dryden is a type in modern times, who enjoyed the pleasures of wine and good fellowship. The well-known anecdote, told by Cicero, of the interchange of visits between Scipio Nasica and Ennius¹¹, though not a brilliant specimen of Roman wit, is interesting from the light which it throws on the easy terms of intimacy in which the poet lived with the members of the most eminent Roman families. Such testimonies and traits of personal character make us think of Ennius as a man of genial and social temper, as well as of 'an intense and glowing mind.'

It was probably through his position as a teacher of Greek that Ennius first became known to the leading men of Rome. If this position was at first one of dependence, similar to that in which in earlier times the client stood to his patron, it soon changed into one of mutual esteem and admiration. We can best understand the relation in which he stood to men eminent in the state and in the camp, from a passage from the seventh book of the Annals quoted by Aulus Gellius. In that passage the poet is stated, on the authority of L. Aelius Stilo¹² (an early grammarian, a friend of Lucilius, and one of Cicero's teachers), to have drawn his own portrait, under an imaginary description of a confidential friend of the Roman general, Servilius Geminus. The portrait has the air of being drawn from the life, with a rapid and forcible hand, and with a minuteness of detail significant of close personal observation:—

Hunc inter pugnas Servilius sic compellat¹³.

The elder Africanus may have been attracted to Ennius not only by his passion for Greek culture, but by a certain community of nature. The mystical enthusiasm, the high self-confidence, the direct simplicity combined with majesty of character, impressed on the language of the poet were equally impressed on the action and bearing of the soldier. The feeling which Ennius in his turn entertained for Scipio was one of enthusiastic admiration. While paying due honour to the merits and services of other famous men, even of such as Cato and Fabius, who were most opposed to his idol, of Scipio he said that Homer alone could worthily have uttered his praises¹⁴.

Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium¹⁵;

Mi soli caeli maxima porta patet¹⁶.

Nec sanctum magis, et mirum carumque videtur¹⁷.

Faxit. Cur? Volito vivu' per ora virum¹⁸.

Versus propinas flammeos medullitus¹⁹,

Nec dicti studiosus erat²⁰.

Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest²¹:

and he exposed, with caustic sense, the false pretences of augurs, prophets, and astrologers. His translation of the Sacred Chronicle of Euhemerus exercised a permanent influence on the religious convictions of his countrymen. But while led to these conclusions by the spirit of his age, and by the study of the later speculations of Greece, he believed in the soul's independence of the body, and of its continued existence, under other conditions, after death. He declared that the spirit of Homer, after many changes,—at one time having animated a peacock²², again, having been incarnate in the sage of Crotona,—had finally passed into his own body: and he told how the shade—which he regards as distinct from the soul or spirit—of his great prototype had appeared to him from the invisible world,—

II.  (1)  In laying the foundations of Roman literature, Ennius displayed not only the fervent sympathies and active faculty of genius, but also great energy and industry, and a many-sided learning. The composition of his tragedies and of the Annals, while making most demand on his original gifts, implied also a diligent study of Homer and of the Greek tragedians, and a large acquaintance with the traditions and antiquities of Rome. But besides the works on which his highest poetical faculty was employed, other writings, of a philosophical, didactic, and miscellaneous character, gave evidence of the versatility of his powers and interests. It does not appear that he was the author of any prose writing. His version of the Sacred Chronicle of Euhemerus was more probably a poetical adaptation than a literal prose translation of that work. The work of Euhemerus was conceived in that spirit of vulgar rationalism, which is condemned by Plato in the Phaedrus. He explained away the fables of mythology, by representing them as a supernatural account of historical events. Several extracts of the work quoted by Lactantius, as from the translation of Ennius, look as if they had been reduced from a form originally metrical into the prose of a later era²³. There is thus no evidence, direct or indirect, to prove that Ennius had any share in forming the style of Latin prose. But if verse was the sole instrument which he used, this was certainly not due to the poetical character of all the topics which he treated, but, more likely, to the fact that his acquired aptitude, and the state of the Latin language in his time, made metrical writing more natural and easy than prose composition.

One of his works in verse was a treatise on good living, called Hedyphagetica, founded on the gastronomic researches of Archestratus of Gela,—a sage who is said to have devoted his life to the study of everything that contributed to the pleasures of the table, and to have recorded his varied experience and research with the grave dignity of epic verse. A few lines from this translation or adaptation of Ennius, giving an account of the coasts on which the best fish are to be found, have been preserved by Apuleius. The lines are curious as exemplifying that tone of half-serious enthusiasm, which all who treat, either in prose or verse, of the pleasures of eating seem naturally to adopt, as for instance the Catius of Horace in his discourse on gastronomy²⁴. The language in which the scarus, a fish unhappily lost to the modern epicure, is described as 'the brain almost of almighty Jove,' fits all the requirements of gastronomic rapture:—

He wrote also a philosophical poem in trochaic septenarian verse, called Epicharmus, founded on writings attributed to the old Sicilian poet, which appear to have resolved the gods of the Greek mythology into natural substances²⁵. A few slight fragments have been preserved from this poem. They speak of the four elements or principles of the universe as 'water, earth, air, the sun'; of 'the blending of heat with cold, dryness with moisture'; of 'the earth bearing and supporting all nations and receiving them again back into herself.' The following is the longest fragment from the poem:—

Quoniam mortalis atque urbes beluasque omnis juvat²⁶.

Another of his miscellaneous works, probably of a moral and didactic character, was known by the name of Protreptica. It is possible that all of these works²⁷, as well as the Scipio, formed part of the Saturae, or Miscellanies, under which title Ennius composed four, or, according to another authority, six books. The Romans looked upon Lucilius as the inventor of satire in the later sense of that word²⁸;—he having been the first to impress upon the satura the character of censorious criticism, which it has borne since his time. But there was another kind of satura, of which Ennius and Pacuvius in early times, and Varro at a somewhat later time, were regarded as the principal authors. This was really a miscellany treating of various subjects, in various metres, and, as employed by Varro, was written partly in prose, partly in verse. This kind of composition, as well as the Lucilian satire, arose out of the old indigenous satura or dramatic medley, familiar to the Romans before the introduction of Greek literature. When the scenic element in the original satura was superseded by the new comedy introduced from Greece, the old name was first applied to a miscellaneous kind of composition, in which ordinary topics were treated in a serious but apparently desultory way; and even as employed by Lucilius and Horace the satura retained much of its original character. The satires of Ennius were written in various metres, iambic, trochaic, and hexameter, and treated of various topics of personal and public interest. The few passages which ancient authorities quote as fragments from them are not of much value in themselves, but when taken in connexion with the testimonies as to their character, they are of some interest as showing that this kind of composition was a form intermediate between the old dramatic satura and the satire of Lucilius and Horace. It is recorded that in one of these pieces, Ennius introduced a dialogue between Life and Death;—thus transmitting in the use of dialogue (which appears very frequently in Horace and Persius) some vestige of the original scenic medley. Ennius also appears, like Lucilius and Horace, to have communicated in his satires his own personal feelings and experience, as in the fragment already quoted:—

Another of his miscellaneous works, probably of a moral and didactic character, was known by the name of Protreptica. It is possible that all of these works²⁷, as well as the Scipio, formed part of the Saturae, or Miscellanies, under which title Ennius composed four, or, according to another authority, six books. The Romans looked upon Lucilius as the inventor of satire in the later sense of that word²⁸;—he having been the first to impress upon the satura the character of censorious criticism, which it has borne since his time. But there was another kind of satura, of which Ennius and Pacuvius in early times, and Varro at a somewhat later time, were regarded as the principal authors. This was really a miscellany treating of various subjects, in various metres, and, as employed by Varro, was written partly in prose, partly in verse. This kind of composition, as well as the Lucilian satire, arose out of the old indigenous satura or dramatic medley, familiar to the Romans before the introduction of Greek literature. When the scenic element in the original satura was superseded by the new comedy introduced from Greece, the old name was first applied to a miscellaneous kind of composition, in which ordinary topics were treated in a serious but apparently desultory way; and even as employed by Lucilius and Horace the satura retained much of its original character. The satires of Ennius were written in various metres, iambic, trochaic, and hexameter, and treated of various topics of personal and public interest. The few passages which ancient authorities quote as fragments from them are not of much value in themselves, but when taken in connexion with the testimonies as to their character, they are of some interest as showing that this kind of composition was a form intermediate between the old dramatic satura and the satire of Lucilius and Horace. It is recorded that in one of these pieces, Ennius introduced a dialogue between Life and Death;—thus transmitting in the use of dialogue (which appears very frequently in Horace and Persius) some vestige of the original scenic medley. Ennius also appears, like Lucilius and Horace, to have communicated in his satires his own personal feelings and experience, as in the fragment already quoted:—

Nequid expectes amicos, quod tute agere possies²⁹.

Qui frustratur frustrast, si ille non est frustra³⁰.

It was certainly due to Ennius that Roman tragedy was first raised to that pitch of popular favour which it enjoyed till the age of Cicero. While actively employed in many other fields of literature, he carried on the composition of his tragedies till the latest period of his life. Cicero records that the Thyestes was represented at the celebration of the Ludi Apollinares, shortly before the poet's death³¹. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known, and a few fragments remain from all of them. About one half of these bear the titles of the heroes and heroines connected with the Trojan cycle of events, such as the Achilles, Achilles Aristarchi, Ajax, Alexander, Andromache Aechmalotis, Hectoris Lutra, Hecuba, Iphigenia, Phoenix, Telamo. One at least of his tragedies, the Medea, was literally translated from the Greek of Euripides, whom he seems to have made his model, in preference to the older Attic dramatists. Cicero³² speaks of it, along with the Antiope of Pacuvius, as being translated word for word from the Greek; and a comparison of the fragments of the Latin with the passages in the Medea of Euripides shows how closely Ennius followed his original. In one place he has mistranslated his author,—the passage (Eur. Med. 215),

It was certainly due to Ennius that Roman tragedy was first raised to that pitch of popular favour which it enjoyed till the age of Cicero. While actively employed in many other fields of literature, he carried on the composition of his tragedies till the latest period of his life. Cicero records that the Thyestes was represented at the celebration of the Ludi Apollinares, shortly before the poet's death³¹. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known, and a few fragments remain from all of them. About one half of these bear the titles of the heroes and heroines connected with the Trojan cycle of events, such as the Achilles, Achilles Aristarchi, Ajax, Alexander, Andromache Aechmalotis, Hectoris Lutra, Hecuba, Iphigenia, Phoenix, Telamo. One at least of his tragedies, the Medea, was literally translated from the Greek of Euripides, whom he seems to have made his model, in preference to the older Attic dramatists. Cicero³² speaks of it, along with the Antiope of Pacuvius, as being translated word for word from the Greek; and a comparison of the fragments of the Latin with the passages in the Medea of Euripides shows how closely Ennius followed his original. In one place he has mistranslated his author,—the passage (Eur. Med. 215),

Medea, animo aegra, amore saevo saucia³³.

In his Hecuba, also, and probably in his Iphigenia, Ennius made free use of the dramas founded on the same subjects by Euripides. But in many of his dramatic fragments the sentiment expressed is clearly that of a Roman, not of a Greek mind³⁴. The subjects of many of his dramas, such as the Achilles, the Ajax, the Hectoris Lutra, the Telamon, the Iphigenia, afforded scope for the exhibition of the soldierly character. Cicero³⁵ adduces the wounded Eurypylus as an example of the kind of fortitude and superiority to pain produced by the discipline of the Roman armies. The same author quotes with great admiration scenes from the Alexander and from the Andromache Aechmalotis, in which pathos is the predominant sentiment. He adds to his quotations the comments 'O poema tenerum, et moratum, et molle'; and again, 'O poetam egregium, quamquam ab his cantoribus Euphorionis contemnitur! Sentit omnia repentina et necopinata esse graviora ... praeclarum carmen est enim et rebus et verbis et modis lugubre³⁶.' In the former of these scenes Cassandra, under the influence of Apollo, reluctant and ashamed (perhaps in this feeling the hand of a Roman rather than of a Greek poet may be recognised), yet mastered by prophetic fury, bursts forth in these wild, agitated tones:—

In his Hecuba, also, and probably in his Iphigenia, Ennius made free use of the dramas founded on the same subjects by Euripides. But in many of his dramatic fragments the sentiment expressed is clearly that of a Roman, not of a Greek mind³⁴. The subjects of many of his dramas, such as the Achilles, the Ajax, the Hectoris Lutra, the Telamon, the Iphigenia, afforded scope for the exhibition of the soldierly character. Cicero³⁵ adduces the wounded Eurypylus as an example of the kind of fortitude and superiority to pain produced by the discipline of the Roman armies. The same author quotes with great admiration scenes from the Alexander and from the Andromache Aechmalotis, in which pathos is the predominant sentiment. He adds to his quotations the comments 'O poema tenerum, et moratum, et molle'; and again, 'O poetam egregium, quamquam ab his cantoribus Euphorionis contemnitur! Sentit omnia repentina et necopinata esse graviora ... praeclarum carmen est enim et rebus et verbis et modis lugubre³⁶.' In the former of these scenes Cassandra, under the influence of Apollo, reluctant and ashamed (perhaps in this feeling the hand of a Roman rather than of a Greek poet may be recognised), yet mastered by prophetic fury, bursts forth in these wild, agitated tones:—

In his Hecuba, also, and probably in his Iphigenia, Ennius made free use of the dramas founded on the same subjects by Euripides. But in many of his dramatic fragments the sentiment expressed is clearly that of a Roman, not of a Greek mind³⁴. The subjects of many of his dramas, such as the Achilles, the Ajax, the Hectoris Lutra, the Telamon, the Iphigenia, afforded scope for the exhibition of the soldierly character. Cicero³⁵ adduces the wounded Eurypylus as an example of the kind of fortitude and superiority to pain produced by the discipline of the Roman armies. The same author quotes with great admiration scenes from the Alexander and from the Andromache Aechmalotis, in which pathos is the predominant sentiment. He adds to his quotations the comments 'O poema tenerum, et moratum, et molle'; and again, 'O poetam egregium, quamquam ab his cantoribus Euphorionis contemnitur! Sentit omnia repentina et necopinata esse graviora ... praeclarum carmen est enim et rebus et verbis et modis lugubre³⁶.' In the former of these scenes Cassandra, under the influence of Apollo, reluctant and ashamed (perhaps in this feeling the hand of a Roman rather than of a Greek poet may be recognised), yet mastered by prophetic fury, bursts forth in these wild, agitated tones:—

Navibus complevit manus litora³⁷.

We see in this passage how the passionate character of the situation is enhanced by the mysterious power attributed to Cassandra. A similar excitement of feeling, produced by supernatural terror, appears in a fragment of the Alcmaeon, quoted also by Cicero, and of another the motive is the awe associated with the dim and pale realms of the dead³⁸. In these and similar passages we note the power of expressing the varying moods of passion by varied effects of metre. Horace characterises his ordinary verse in the line,

At its conclusion, he claimed for his old age the repose due to a brave and triumphant career. He composed the eighteenth book, the last, in his sixty-seventh year, three years before his death³⁹. The great length to which the poem extended, and the vast amount of materials which it embraced, imply a long and steady concentration of his powers on the task. It was one requiring much learning as well as original conception. The fragments of the poem afford proofs of a familiarity with Homer, and of acquaintance with the Cyclic poets⁴⁰. It is impossible to say how much of the early Roman history, as it has come down to modern times, is due to the diligence of Ennius in collecting, and to his genius in giving life to the traditions and ancient records of Rome. He was certainly the earliest writer who gathered them up, and united them in a continuous narrative. The work accomplished by him required not only the antiquarian lore of a man

At its conclusion, he claimed for his old age the repose due to a brave and triumphant career. He composed the eighteenth book, the last, in his sixty-seventh year, three years before his death³⁹. The great length to which the poem extended, and the vast amount of materials which it embraced, imply a long and steady concentration of his powers on the task. It was one requiring much learning as well as original conception. The fragments of the poem afford proofs of a familiarity with Homer, and of acquaintance with the Cyclic poets⁴⁰. It is impossible to say how much of the early Roman history, as it has come down to modern times, is due to the diligence of Ennius in collecting, and to his genius in giving life to the traditions and ancient records of Rome. He was certainly the earliest writer who gathered them up, and united them in a continuous narrative. The work accomplished by him required not only the antiquarian lore of a man

The originality of the Roman epic will be still more apparent if we compare the fragments of the Annals, in some points of detail, with the complete works of the poet, whom Ennius regarded as his prototype. There was, in the first place, a marked difference between Homer and the Roman poet in their modes of representing human life and character. The personages of the Iliad and of the Odyssey are living and forcible types of individual character. In Achilles, in Hector, and in Odysseus,—in Helen, Andromache, and Nausicaa, we recognise embodiments the most real, yet the most transcendent, of the grandeur, the heroism, the courage, and strong affection of manhood, and of the grace, the gentleness, and the sweet vivacity of woman. The work of Ennius, on the other hand, instead of presenting varied types of human nature, appears to have unfolded a long gallery of national portraits. The fragments of the poem still afford glimpses of the 'good Ancus'; 'of the man of the great heart, the wise Aelius Sextus'; 'of the sweet speaking orator,' Cethegus, 'the marrow of persuasion.' The stamp of magnanimous fortitude is impressed on the fragmentary words of Appius Claudius Caecus; and sagacity and resolution are depicted in the lines which have handed down the fame of Fabius Maximus. This idea of the poem, as unfolding the heroes of Roman story in regular series, may be gathered also from the language of Cicero: 'Cato, the ancestor of our present Cato, is extolled by him to the skies; the honour of the Roman people is thereby enhanced: finally all those Maximi, Fulvii, Marcelli, are celebrated with a glory in which we all participate⁴¹.' This portraiture of the kings and heroes of the early time, of the orators, soldiers, and statesmen of the Republic, could not have exhibited the variety, the energy, the passion, and all the complex human attributes of Homer's personages. The men who stand prominently out in the annals of Rome were of a more uniform type. They were men of one common aim,—the advancement of Rome; animated with one sentiment,—devotion to the State. All that was purely personal in them seems merged in the traditional pictures which express only the fortitude, dignity, and sagacity of the Republic.

Rem repetunt, regnumque petunt, vadunt solida vi⁴².

Many lines of the Annals are evidently fragments of speeches. The most remarkable of these passages is one from a speech of Pyrrhus, and is characterised by Cicero as expressing 'sentiments truly regal and worthy of the race of the Aeacidae⁴³.' This fragment, although evincing nothing of the fluency, the passion, or the argumentative subtlety of debate, yet suggests the power of a great orator by its grave authoritative appeal to the moral dignity of man:—

Dono ducite, doque volentibu' cum magnis dis⁴⁴.

Antehac, dementes sese flexere viai⁴⁵?

Spiritus ex anima calida spumas agit albas⁴⁶.

Quam mox emittat pictis e faucibu' currus⁴⁷.

Riserunt omnes risu Jovis omnipotentis.⁴⁸

Yet, in spite of these imperfections, both his rhythm and language produce the impression of power and originality. With all the roughness and irregularity of his measure, and notwithstanding the inharmonious structure of continuous passages, his lines often have a weighty and impressive effect, like that produced by some of the great passages in Lucretius and Virgil. It is said of the rhetorician Aelian that he excessively admired in Ennius both 'the greatness of his mind and the grandeur of his metre⁴⁹.' Something of this sonorous grandeur may be recognised in a fragment descriptive of the havoc made by woodcutters in a great forest,—a passage in which the language of Ennius again appears as a connecting link between that of Homer and of Virgil:—

Arbustum fremitu siluai frondosai⁵⁰.

Ergo plusque magisque viri nunc gloria claret⁵¹.

Pugnandi fieret, aut duri fini' laboris⁵².

Per gentes Italas hominum quae clara clueret⁵³;

Vix aegro cum corde meo me somnu' reliquit⁵⁴.

Another of the most impressive passages in the early books of the Aeneid—the dream in which Hector appears to Aeneas⁵⁵—was evidently suggested by the description which Ennius gave of the appearance of the shade of Homer to himself. Some of his dramatic fragments, also, as for instance the scene between Hecuba and Cassandra already referred to, show a real power of conceiving and representing passionate situations.

Tu produxisti nos intra luminis oras⁵⁶.

may recall the pride and enthusiasm which are kindled in the heart of Virgil by the names of the various tribes of Italy, and of places renowned for their fame in story, or their picturesque environment⁵⁷. This fond use of proper names recalling old associations or the charm of natural scenery is also among the most familiar characteristics of the poetry of Scott.

Auro ebore instructum regifice!⁵⁸

Volnera belli dispernunt⁵⁹;

Scibam me in mortiferum bellum, non in epulas mittere⁶⁰.

Aeque inimicitiam atque amicitiam in frontem promptam gero⁶¹.

There is no subtlety nor rhetorical point in the expression of his serious convictions. The very style of the tragedies, which, as Cicero says⁶², 'does not depart from the natural order of the words,' is a symbol of frankness and straightforwardness.

He shows also, in his delineations of character, high appreciation of practical wisdom, and of its most powerful instrument in a free State, the persuasive power of oratory. This appreciation is expressed in the lines so much admired by Cicero and Aulus Gellius⁶³, though ridiculed by the purism of Seneca:—

Flos delibatus populi suadaeque medulla⁶⁴.

He seems to admire the sterling qualities of character and intellect rather than the brilliant manifestations of impulse and genius. He celebrates the heroism of brave endurance rather than of chivalrous daring⁶⁵: the fortitude that, in the long run, wins success, and saves the State⁶⁶, rather than the impetuous valour which achieves a barren glory; the sincerity and simplicity which are stronger than art, yet that know when to speak and when to be silent⁶⁷; the sagacity which enables men to understand their circumstances, and to turn them to the best account⁶⁸.

He seems to admire the sterling qualities of character and intellect rather than the brilliant manifestations of impulse and genius. He celebrates the heroism of brave endurance rather than of chivalrous daring⁶⁵: the fortitude that, in the long run, wins success, and saves the State⁶⁶, rather than the impetuous valour which achieves a barren glory; the sincerity and simplicity which are stronger than art, yet that know when to speak and when to be silent⁶⁷; the sagacity which enables men to understand their circumstances, and to turn them to the best account⁶⁸.

He seems to admire the sterling qualities of character and intellect rather than the brilliant manifestations of impulse and genius. He celebrates the heroism of brave endurance rather than of chivalrous daring⁶⁵: the fortitude that, in the long run, wins success, and saves the State⁶⁶, rather than the impetuous valour which achieves a barren glory; the sincerity and simplicity which are stronger than art, yet that know when to speak and when to be silent⁶⁷; the sagacity which enables men to understand their circumstances, and to turn them to the best account⁶⁸.

He seems to admire the sterling qualities of character and intellect rather than the brilliant manifestations of impulse and genius. He celebrates the heroism of brave endurance rather than of chivalrous daring⁶⁵: the fortitude that, in the long run, wins success, and saves the State⁶⁶, rather than the impetuous valour which achieves a barren glory; the sincerity and simplicity which are stronger than art, yet that know when to speak and when to be silent⁶⁷; the sagacity which enables men to understand their circumstances, and to turn them to the best account⁶⁸.

Incerte errat animus: praeter propter vitam vivitur⁶⁹,—

Quippe domi nihilo melius qui sentiat esse, etc.⁷⁰

Quibus divitias pollicentur, ab eis drachmam ipsi petunt⁷¹.

Such appear to be the chief attributes of genius and imaginative sentiment, and the chief moral and intellectual features indicated in the fragments of Ennius. It is not indeed possible, from the tenor of single passages, to judge of the composition of a whole drama or of a continuous book of the Annals. No single scene or speech can afford sufficient grounds for inferring the amount of creative power with which his characters were conceived and sustained in all their complex relations. Yet enough has appeared in these fragments, which, from the accidental mode of their preservation, must be regarded as the ordinary samples and not chosen specimens of his style, to confirm the ancient belief in his pre-eminence and to determine the prevailing characteristics of his genius. There is ample evidence of the great popularity which he enjoyed among his countrymen, and of the high estimate which many of the best Roman writers formed of his power. It is recorded that great crowds ('magna frequentia') attended the public reading of the Annals. Virgil was said to have introduced many lines into the Aeneid, with the view of pleasing a public devoted to Ennius ('populus Ennianus'). The title of Ennianista was assumed by a public reader of the Annals in the time of Hadrian, when there was a strong revival of admiration for the older literature of Rome⁷². Cicero often speaks of the poet as 'noster Ennius,' and quotes him with all the signs of hearty admiration and affection. The numerous references in his works to the Annals and the Tragedies imply also a thorough familiarity with these poems on the part of the readers for whom his philosophical and rhetorical treatises were written. The criticism of Quintilian, 'Ennium sicut sacros vetustate lucos adoremus, in quibus grandia et antiqua robora jam non tantam habent speciem quantam religionem⁷³,' expresses a sentiment of traditional reverence as well as of personal appreciation. Aulus Gellius, a writer of the time of Hadrian, often quotes and comments upon him with hearty and genial sympathy. The greatest among the Roman poets also, directly and indirectly, acknowledge their admiration. The strong testimony of Lucretius is alone sufficient to establish the fame of Ennius as a man of remarkable force and genius. The spirit of the Annals still lives in the antique charm and national feeling which make the epic poem of Virgil the truest representation of Roman sentiment which has come down to modern times. By Ovid he is characterised as—

Such appear to be the chief attributes of genius and imaginative sentiment, and the chief moral and intellectual features indicated in the fragments of Ennius. It is not indeed possible, from the tenor of single passages, to judge of the composition of a whole drama or of a continuous book of the Annals. No single scene or speech can afford sufficient grounds for inferring the amount of creative power with which his characters were conceived and sustained in all their complex relations. Yet enough has appeared in these fragments, which, from the accidental mode of their preservation, must be regarded as the ordinary samples and not chosen specimens of his style, to confirm the ancient belief in his pre-eminence and to determine the prevailing characteristics of his genius. There is ample evidence of the great popularity which he enjoyed among his countrymen, and of the high estimate which many of the best Roman writers formed of his power. It is recorded that great crowds ('magna frequentia') attended the public reading of the Annals. Virgil was said to have introduced many lines into the Aeneid, with the view of pleasing a public devoted to Ennius ('populus Ennianus'). The title of Ennianista was assumed by a public reader of the Annals in the time of Hadrian, when there was a strong revival of admiration for the older literature of Rome⁷². Cicero often speaks of the poet as 'noster Ennius,' and quotes him with all the signs of hearty admiration and affection. The numerous references in his works to the Annals and the Tragedies imply also a thorough familiarity with these poems on the part of the readers for whom his philosophical and rhetorical treatises were written. The criticism of Quintilian, 'Ennium sicut sacros vetustate lucos adoremus, in quibus grandia et antiqua robora jam non tantam habent speciem quantam religionem⁷³,' expresses a sentiment of traditional reverence as well as of personal appreciation. Aulus Gellius, a writer of the time of Hadrian, often quotes and comments upon him with hearty and genial sympathy. The greatest among the Roman poets also, directly and indirectly, acknowledge their admiration. The strong testimony of Lucretius is alone sufficient to establish the fame of Ennius as a man of remarkable force and genius. The spirit of the Annals still lives in the antique charm and national feeling which make the epic poem of Virgil the truest representation of Roman sentiment which has come down to modern times. By Ovid he is characterised as—

Quo promissa cadant et somnia Pythagorea⁷⁴,

¹   E.g. the Dulorestes of Pacuvius.

²   De Re Rustica, Lib. ii. Praef. Quoted also by Columella, Praef. 15.

³   De Amicitia, 7.

⁴   Cic. Pro P. Sestio, 65.

⁵   Chap. 57.

⁶   Cicero, Brutus, 48, 45; De Orat. iii. 8. 30: 'Quid noster hic Caesar nonne novam quandam rationem attulit orationis et dicendi genus induxit prope singulare? Quis unquam res praeter hunc tragicas paene comice, tristes remisse, severas hilare, forenses scaenica prope venustate tractavit atque ita, ut neque iocus magnitudine rerum excluderetur nec gravitas facetiis minueretur.'

⁷   Cf. Cic. De Orat. iii. 7: 'Atque id primum in poetis cerni licet quibus est proxima cognatio cum oratoribus quam sint inter sese Ennius, Pacuvius, Acciusque dissimiles.'

⁸   'Sanctitas certe, et, ut sic dicam, virilitas, ab iis petenda est, quando nos in omnia deliciarum vitia dicendi quoque ratione defluximus.'—Quintil. Inst. Or. i. 8. 9.

⁹   Inst. Or. x. i. 97.

¹⁰   Cf. Cic. Opt. Gen. Orat.: 'Itaque licet dicere et Ennium summum epicum poetam si cui ita videtur, et Pacuvium tragicum, et Caecilium fortasse comicum.'

¹¹   Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxv. 7.

¹²   xiii. 2.

¹³   'Young man, though thou art in haste, this stone entreats thee to regard it, and then read what is written:—Here are laid the bones of the poet Marcus Pacuvius. This I desired to be not unknown to thee. Farewell.'

¹⁴   Brutus, 74.

¹⁵   The writer of the treatise on Rhetoric addressed to C. Herennius.

¹⁶   'Quis enim tam inimicus paene nomini Romano est, qui Ennii Medeam aut Antiopam Pacuvii spernat aut rejiciat, quod se eisdem Euripidis fabulis delectari dicat?'—Cic. De Fin. i. 2.

¹⁷   De Oratore, ii. 37.

¹⁸   Cic. Tusc. Disp. ii. 21.

¹⁹   'Behold this, which around and above encompasseth the earth, and puts on brightness at the rising of the sun, becomes dark at his setting; that which our people call Heaven, and the Greeks Aether. Whatever this is, it is to all things the source of life, form, nourishment, growth, existence; it is the grave and receptacle of all things, and the parent, too, of all things: all things which arise from it equally lapse into it again.' Compare with this passage Lucretius, ii. 991—

²⁰   'Philosophers say that Fortune is mad, blind, and senseless, and represent her as set on a round rolling stone. They say that she is mad, because she is harsh, fickle, untrustworthy; blind, for this reason, that she can see nothing to which to attach herself; senseless, because she cannot distinguish between the worthy and unworthy. Other philosophers again deny the existence of Fortune, but hold that all things are ruled by chance. That this is more probable, common experience proves, as Orestes was but the other day a king, and is now a beggar.'

²¹   'For those men who understand the language of birds, and have more wisdom from examining the liver of other beings than from their own (i.e. understanding), I think should be heard rather than listened to.'

²²   'Thou, too, Ulysses, although we see thee sore wounded, art yet almost too much cast down; thou, who hast been used to pass thy life in arms!'

²³   'To complain of adverse fortune is well, but not to lament over it. The one is the act of a man; it is a woman's part to weep.'

²⁴   Sueton. Caes. 84.

²⁵   De Orat. ii. 46.

²⁶   'Didst thou venture to let him part from thee, or to enter Salamis without him; and didst thou not fear to see thy father's face, when in his old age, bereft of his children, thou hast torn him with anguish, robbed, crushed him; nor didst thou feel for thy brother's death, and his child, who was trusted to thy protection—?'

²⁷   Compare especially the fragments of the speeches of C. Gracchus.

²⁸   'Glad at their starting, they watch the play of the fish, and are never weary of watching them. Meanwhile, nearly at sunset, the sea grows rough, darkness gathers, the blackness of night and of the storm-clouds hides the world, the lightning flashes between the clouds, the heaven is shaken with the thunder, hail mixed with torrents of rain dashes down in sudden showers; from all quarters all the winds burst forth, the wild whirlwinds arise, the sea boils with the surging waters.'—Quoted partly from Cic. De Div. i. 14; partly from De Orat. iii. 39.

²⁹   'The groaning of the ships' tackling, the dashing together of the ships, the uproar, the crash, the rattle of the thunder, and the whistling of the ropes.'

³⁰   'Give me your foot, that with the brown waters I may wash away the brown dust with those hands with which I have often rubbed gently the feet of Ulysses, and with my hands' softness soothe your weariness.'

³¹   'It represented the deeds of Roman kings and generals: hence it is evident that at least it wanted the unity of time of the Greek tragedy; that it was a history like Shakspeare's.'—Niebuhr's Roman History, vol. i. note 1150.

³²   Brutus, 28.

³³   'Decimus quidem Brutus, summus ille vir et imperator, Accii, amicissimi sui, carminibus templorum ac monumentorum aditus exornavit suorum.'—Chap. 11.

³⁴   Hist. Nat. xxxiv. 10: 'Notatum ab auctoribus, et L. Accium poetam in Camenarum aede maxima forma statuam sibi posuisse, cum brevis admodum fuisset.'

³⁵   Pro Plancio, 24.

³⁶   De Orat. iii. 58.

³⁷   'Tereus, in his wild mood and savage spirit, gazed upon her, maddened with burning passion, quite desperate; in his madness, he resolves a cursed deed.'

³⁸   'Withdraw him within: for the lofty dignity of his aspect has moved my mind to compassion.'

³⁹   'That man indeed we pity whose nobleness gives distinction to his misery.'

⁴⁰   'Dost thou not know, that whatever rank fortune has assigned to a man, no meanness of station ever weakens a fine nature?'

⁴¹   'This was the part of a man, to bear adversity easily.'

⁴²   'Though fortune could strip me of kingdom and wealth, it cannot strip me of my virtue.'

⁴³   'No nature is so strong, no breast so savage, which is not shaken by words, does not melt at misfortune.'

⁴⁴   'I trust not those augurs, who enrich the ears of others with their words, that they may enrich their own houses with gold.' There is of course a pun on the auris and auro.

⁴⁵   'O king, what men usually do in life, what they think about, care about, see,—their pursuits and occupations, when awake,—if these occur to any one in sleep, it is not wonderful.'

⁴⁶   'So huge a mass is approaching—sounding from the deep with a mighty rushing noise; it rolls the waves before it, forces through the eddies, plunges forward, throws up and dashes back the sea.'—Quoted in Cic. De Nat. Deor. ii. 35.

⁴⁷   'Lying beneath the pole by the seven stars, whence the blustering roar of the north-wind drives before it the chill snows.'

⁴⁸   'By chance before the dawn, harbinger of burning rays, when the husbandmen bring forth the oxen from their rest into the fields, that they may break the red, dew-sprinkled soil with the plough, and turn up the clods from the soft soil.'

⁴⁹   'That rock makes the passage narrow, and from beneath that rock a spring gushing out sweeps past the river's bank.'

⁵⁰   Inst. Or. x. i. 99.

The primary attraction, by means of which the tragic drama established itself at Rome, must have been the power of scenic representations to convey a story, and to produce novel impressions on a people to whom reading was quite unfamiliar. In Homer, the cyclic poets, and the Attic dramatists, there existed for the Romans of the second century b.c. a new world of incident and human interest quite different from the grave story of their own annals. This new world, which was becoming gradually familiar to their eyes through the works of plastic and pictorial art, was made more living and intelligible to them in the representations of their tragic poets. It cannot be supposed that these poets attempted to reproduce the antique Hellenic character of the legends on which they founded their dramas. In this early stage of literary culture, the harmonious cadences of rhythm, the fine and delicate shades of expression, the main requirements of dramatic art,—such as the skilful construction of a plot, the consistent keeping of a character, the evolution of a tragic catastrophe through the meeting of passion and outward accident,—would have been lost upon the unexacting audiences who thronged the temporary theatres on occasional holidays. The fragments of the lost dramas indicate that the matter was presented in a straightforward style, little differing in sound and meaning from the tone of serious conversation. Although little can be known or conjectured as to the general conduct of the action in a Roman drama, yet there are indications that in some cases a series of adventures, instead of one complete action, were represented¹. But while failing, or not attempting to reproduce the Greek spirit and art of their originals, the Roman poets seem to have animated the outlines of their foreign story and of their legendary characters with something of the spirit of their own time and country. They imparted to their dramas a didactic purpose and rhetorical character which directly appealed to Roman tastes. The fragments quoted from their works, the testimonies of later Roman writers, and the natural inference to be drawn from the moral and intellectual characteristics of the people, all point to the conclusion that the long-sustained popularity of tragedy rested mainly on the satisfaction which it afforded to the ethical sympathies, and to the oratorical tastes of the audience.

The evidence for this popularity is chiefly to be found in Cicero; and it is mainly, though not solely, to the popularity which the tragic drama enjoyed in his own age that he testifies. The loss of the earlier writings renders it impossible to adduce contemporary evidence of the immediate success of this form of literature. But the activity with which tragedy was cultivated for about a century, and the favour with which Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, were regarded by the leading men in the State, suggest the inference that the popularity of the drama in the age of Cicero, after the writers themselves had passed away, and when more exciting spectacles occupied public attention, was only a continuation of the general favour which these poets enjoyed in their lifetime. Cicero in many places mentions the great applause with which the expression of feeling in different dramas was received, and speaks of the great crowds ('maximus consessus' or 'magna frequentia'), including women and children, attending the representation. Varro states that, in his time, 'the heads of families had gradually gathered within the walls of the city, having quitted their ploughs and pruning-hooks, and that they liked to use their hands in the theatres and circus better than on their crops and vineyards².' The large fortunes amassed and the high consideration enjoyed by the actors Aesopus and Roscius afford further evidence of the favour with which the representation of tragedy and comedy was received in the age of Cicero.

According to his testimony, these lively demonstrations of popular approbation were chiefly called out by the moral significance or the political meaning attached to the words, and by the oratorical fervour and passion with which the actor enforced them. Thus Laelius is represented, in the treatise De Amicitia, as testifying to the applause with which the mutual devotion of Pylades and Orestes, as represented in a play of Pacuvius, was received by the audience³: 'What shouts of applause were heard lately through the whole body of the house, on the representation of a new play of my familiar friend, M. Pacuvius, when, the king being ignorant which of the two was Orestes, Pylades maintained that it was he, while Orestes persisted, as was indeed the case, that he was the man! They stood up and applauded at this imaginary situation.' Again, in his speech in defence of Sestius⁴, the same author says, 'amid a great variety of opinions uttered, there never was any passage in which anything said by the poet might seem to bear on our time, which either escaped the notice of the people, or to which the actor did not give point.' In a letter to Atticus (ii. 19) he states that the actor Diphilus had applied to Pompey the phrase 'Miseria nostra tu es magnus,' and that he was compelled to repeat it a thousand times amid the shouts of the whole theatre. He mentions further, in the speech in defence of Sestius⁵ that the actor Aesopus had applied to Cicero himself a passage from a play of Accius (the Eurysaces), in which the Greeks are reproached for allowing one who had done them great public service to be driven into exile; and that the same actor, in the Brutus, had referred to him by name in the words, 'Tullius qui libertatem civibus stabiliverat'; he adds that these words 'were encored over and over again,' 'millies revocatum est.' These and similar passages testify primarily to the intense political excitement of the time at which they were written, but also to the meaning which was looked for by the audience in the words addressed to them on the stage, and which was enforced by the emphasis given to them by the actor.

According to his testimony, these lively demonstrations of popular approbation were chiefly called out by the moral significance or the political meaning attached to the words, and by the oratorical fervour and passion with which the actor enforced them. Thus Laelius is represented, in the treatise De Amicitia, as testifying to the applause with which the mutual devotion of Pylades and Orestes, as represented in a play of Pacuvius, was received by the audience³: 'What shouts of applause were heard lately through the whole body of the house, on the representation of a new play of my familiar friend, M. Pacuvius, when, the king being ignorant which of the two was Orestes, Pylades maintained that it was he, while Orestes persisted, as was indeed the case, that he was the man! They stood up and applauded at this imaginary situation.' Again, in his speech in defence of Sestius⁴, the same author says, 'amid a great variety of opinions uttered, there never was any passage in which anything said by the poet might seem to bear on our time, which either escaped the notice of the people, or to which the actor did not give point.' In a letter to Atticus (ii. 19) he states that the actor Diphilus had applied to Pompey the phrase 'Miseria nostra tu es magnus,' and that he was compelled to repeat it a thousand times amid the shouts of the whole theatre. He mentions further, in the speech in defence of Sestius⁵ that the actor Aesopus had applied to Cicero himself a passage from a play of Accius (the Eurysaces), in which the Greeks are reproached for allowing one who had done them great public service to be driven into exile; and that the same actor, in the Brutus, had referred to him by name in the words, 'Tullius qui libertatem civibus stabiliverat'; he adds that these words 'were encored over and over again,' 'millies revocatum est.' These and similar passages testify primarily to the intense political excitement of the time at which they were written, but also to the meaning which was looked for by the audience in the words addressed to them on the stage, and which was enforced by the emphasis given to them by the actor.

According to his testimony, these lively demonstrations of popular approbation were chiefly called out by the moral significance or the political meaning attached to the words, and by the oratorical fervour and passion with which the actor enforced them. Thus Laelius is represented, in the treatise De Amicitia, as testifying to the applause with which the mutual devotion of Pylades and Orestes, as represented in a play of Pacuvius, was received by the audience³: 'What shouts of applause were heard lately through the whole body of the house, on the representation of a new play of my familiar friend, M. Pacuvius, when, the king being ignorant which of the two was Orestes, Pylades maintained that it was he, while Orestes persisted, as was indeed the case, that he was the man! They stood up and applauded at this imaginary situation.' Again, in his speech in defence of Sestius⁴, the same author says, 'amid a great variety of opinions uttered, there never was any passage in which anything said by the poet might seem to bear on our time, which either escaped the notice of the people, or to which the actor did not give point.' In a letter to Atticus (ii. 19) he states that the actor Diphilus had applied to Pompey the phrase 'Miseria nostra tu es magnus,' and that he was compelled to repeat it a thousand times amid the shouts of the whole theatre. He mentions further, in the speech in defence of Sestius⁵ that the actor Aesopus had applied to Cicero himself a passage from a play of Accius (the Eurysaces), in which the Greeks are reproached for allowing one who had done them great public service to be driven into exile; and that the same actor, in the Brutus, had referred to him by name in the words, 'Tullius qui libertatem civibus stabiliverat'; he adds that these words 'were encored over and over again,' 'millies revocatum est.' These and similar passages testify primarily to the intense political excitement of the time at which they were written, but also to the meaning which was looked for by the audience in the words addressed to them on the stage, and which was enforced by the emphasis given to them by the actor.

In so far as it served any political end we may infer from the personal relations of the poets, from the approving testimony of Cicero, and from the personages and the nature of the situations represented, that, unlike the older comedy of Naevius and Plautus, it was in sympathy with the spirit of the dominant aristocracy. The 'boni' or 'optimates' regarded themselves as the true guardians of law and liberty, and it would be to their partisans that the resistance to, and denunciations of tyrannical rule, expressed in such plays as the Atreus, the Tereus, and the Brutus of Accius, must have been most acceptable. Members of the aristocracy, eminent in public life and accomplished as orators, became themselves authors of tragedies. Of these two are mentioned by Cicero, C. Julius Caesar, a contemporary and friend of the orator Crassus, and C. Titius, a Roman Eques, also distinguished as an orator⁶. These instances, and the comments Cicero makes upon them, indicate the close affinity of Roman tragedy to the training and accomplishments which fitted men for public life at Rome.

Passages already referred to, and others which will be brought forward later, imply also that the audience were easily moved by the dramatic art and the elocution of the actor. We hear of the pains which the best actors took to perfect themselves in their art, and of the success which they attained in it. Cicero specifies among the accomplishments of an orator, the 'voice of a tragedian, the gestures and bearing of a consummate actor.' The stage may be said to have been to the Romans partly a school of practical life, partly a school of oratory. Spirited declamation, the expression, by voice and gesture, of vehement passion, of moral and political feeling, and of practical wisdom, would gratify the same tastes that were fostered by the discussions and harangues of the Forum⁷.

and also by the epithets 'altus' and 'animosus' applied by him and Ovid to the poet Accius. Quintilian describes the ancient tragedies as superior to those of his own time in the management of their plots ('oeconomia'), and adds that 'manliness and solemnity of style' ('virilitas et sanctitas')⁸, were to be studied in them. He states also that Accius and Pacuvius were distinguished by 'the earnestness of their thought, the weight of their language, the commanding bearing of their personages⁹.' The fragments of all the tragic poets bear further evidence to the union of these qualities in their thought and style.

and also by the epithets 'altus' and 'animosus' applied by him and Ovid to the poet Accius. Quintilian describes the ancient tragedies as superior to those of his own time in the management of their plots ('oeconomia'), and adds that 'manliness and solemnity of style' ('virilitas et sanctitas')⁸, were to be studied in them. He states also that Accius and Pacuvius were distinguished by 'the earnestness of their thought, the weight of their language, the commanding bearing of their personages⁹.' The fragments of all the tragic poets bear further evidence to the union of these qualities in their thought and style.

The origin and the earliest stage of the Roman drama have been examined in a previous chapter. For about a century after the close of the Second Punic War new tragedies continued to be represented at Rome with little interruption, first by Ennius, afterwards by his nephew Pacuvius and by Accius. They devoted themselves more exclusively than any of their predecessors to the composition of tragedy. While the fame of Ennius chiefly rested on his epic poem¹⁰, Pacuvius and Accius are classed together as representatives of the tragic poetry of the Republic. Though in point of age there was a difference of fifty years between them, yet Cicero mentions, on the authority of Accius himself, that they had brought out plays under the same Aediles, when the one was eighty years of age and the other thirty.

M. Pacuvius, nephew, by the mother's side, of Ennius, was born at Brundusium, in the south of Italy, about 219 b.c., and died at Tarentum about 129 b.c., at the age of ninety. He obtained some distinction as a painter¹¹, and he is supposed to have written his tragedies late in life. Jerome records of him, 'picturam exercuit et fabulas vendidit.' Cicero represents Laelius as speaking of him as a friend, 'amici et hospitis mei.' A pleasing anecdote is told by Aulus Gellius¹² of his intercourse with his younger rival, L. Accius. 'When Pacuvius, at a great age, and suffering from disease of long standing, had retired from Rome to Tarentum, Accius, at that time a considerably younger man, on his journey to Asia, arrived at that town, and stayed with Pacuvius. And being kindly entertained, and constrained to stay for several days, he read to him, at his request, his tragedy of Atreus. Then, as the story goes, Pacuvius said, that what he had written appeared to him sonorous and elevated but somewhat harsh and crude. "It is just as you say," replied Accius; "and in truth I am not sorry for it, for I hope that I shall write better in future. For, as they say, the same law holds good in genius as in fruit. Fruits which are originally harsh and sour afterwards become mellow and pleasant; but those which have a soft and withered look, and are very juicy at first, become soon rotten without ever becoming ripe. It appears, accordingly, that there should be left something in genius also for the mellowing influence of years and time."' This anecdote, while giving a pleasing impression of the friendly relation subsisting between the older and younger poets, seems to add some corroboration to the opinion that the Romans valued more the oratorical style than the dramatic art of their tragedies. It affords support also to the testimony of Horace and Quintilian in regard to the distinction which the admirers of the old poetry drew between the excellence of Pacuvius and Accius:—

M. Pacuvius, nephew, by the mother's side, of Ennius, was born at Brundusium, in the south of Italy, about 219 b.c., and died at Tarentum about 129 b.c., at the age of ninety. He obtained some distinction as a painter¹¹, and he is supposed to have written his tragedies late in life. Jerome records of him, 'picturam exercuit et fabulas vendidit.' Cicero represents Laelius as speaking of him as a friend, 'amici et hospitis mei.' A pleasing anecdote is told by Aulus Gellius¹² of his intercourse with his younger rival, L. Accius. 'When Pacuvius, at a great age, and suffering from disease of long standing, had retired from Rome to Tarentum, Accius, at that time a considerably younger man, on his journey to Asia, arrived at that town, and stayed with Pacuvius. And being kindly entertained, and constrained to stay for several days, he read to him, at his request, his tragedy of Atreus. Then, as the story goes, Pacuvius said, that what he had written appeared to him sonorous and elevated but somewhat harsh and crude. "It is just as you say," replied Accius; "and in truth I am not sorry for it, for I hope that I shall write better in future. For, as they say, the same law holds good in genius as in fruit. Fruits which are originally harsh and sour afterwards become mellow and pleasant; but those which have a soft and withered look, and are very juicy at first, become soon rotten without ever becoming ripe. It appears, accordingly, that there should be left something in genius also for the mellowing influence of years and time."' This anecdote, while giving a pleasing impression of the friendly relation subsisting between the older and younger poets, seems to add some corroboration to the opinion that the Romans valued more the oratorical style than the dramatic art of their tragedies. It affords support also to the testimony of Horace and Quintilian in regard to the distinction which the admirers of the old poetry drew between the excellence of Pacuvius and Accius:—

Ossa. Hoc volebam nescius ne esses. Vale¹³.

Among the testimonies to his literary qualities the best known is that of Horace, quoted above. Cicero, in speaking of the age of Laelius as that of the purest Latinity, does not allow this merit to Pacuvius and to the comic poet Caecilius. He says of them, 'male locutos esse¹⁴.' Pacuvius seems to have attempted to introduce new forms of words, such as 'temeritudo,' 'geminitudo,' 'vanitudo,' 'concorditas,' 'unose'; and also to have carried to a greater length than any of the older poets the tendency to form such poetical compounds as 'tardigradus,' 'flexanimus,' 'flexidicus,' 'cornifrontis'—a tendency which the Latin language continued more and more to repudiate in the hands of its most perfect masters. One line is quoted in which the tendency probably reached the extremest limits it ever did in any Latin author,—

We find also such inflexions as 'tetinerim,' for 'tenuerim,' 'pegi' for 'pepigi,' 'cluentur' for 'cluent.' These peculiarities are ridiculed in the fragments of Lucilius, and also in a passage of Persius. Another author¹⁵ contrasts the sententiae of Ennius with the periodi of Pacuvius,—a distinction probably connected with the progress of oratory in the interval between the poets. Persius applies the term 'verrucosa' (an epithet not inapplicable to his own style) to the Antiope of Pacuvius, which, on the other hand, was much admired by Cicero¹⁶. Lucilius refers to this harshness of style in the line,

We find also such inflexions as 'tetinerim,' for 'tenuerim,' 'pegi' for 'pepigi,' 'cluentur' for 'cluent.' These peculiarities are ridiculed in the fragments of Lucilius, and also in a passage of Persius. Another author¹⁵ contrasts the sententiae of Ennius with the periodi of Pacuvius,—a distinction probably connected with the progress of oratory in the interval between the poets. Persius applies the term 'verrucosa' (an epithet not inapplicable to his own style) to the Antiope of Pacuvius, which, on the other hand, was much admired by Cicero¹⁶. Lucilius refers to this harshness of style in the line,

Pacuvius is known to have been the author of about twelve tragedies, founded on Greek subjects; and of one, Paulus, founded on Roman history. Among these, the Antiope was perhaps the most famous and most admired. It was, like the Medea of Ennius, a translation from Euripides. The principal characters in it were the brothers Zethus and Amphion, the one devoted to hunting, the other to music. Their dispute as to the respective advantages of music and philosophy is referred to by Cicero and Horace, and by other authors. The Zethus of Pacuvius is described by Cicero¹⁷ as one who made war on all philosophy; and the author of the treatise addressed to Herennius describes their controversy as beginning about music, and ending about philosophy and the use of virtue. Two dramas, the Dulorestes and the Chryses, the latter being a continuation of the first, represented the adventures of Orestes in his wanderings with his friend Pylades, after the murder of his mother. The former play, in which Orestes was represented as on the point of being sacrificed by his sister Iphigenia, contained the passage already referred to, in which Pylades and Orestes contend as to which should suffer for the other. The Chryses was founded on their subsequent adventures, and the title of the play was apparently taken from the old Homeric priest of Apollo, Chryses, who bore a prominent part in it. Another of the plays of Pacuvius, the Niptra, was founded on, though not translated from, one of Sophocles¹⁸; and the title seems to have been suggested by the story of the recognition of Ulysses by his nurse, Eurycleia, told at Odyssey xix. 386, etc. The subjects of his other dramas may be inferred from their titles:—Armorum Judicium, Atalanta, Hermione, Ilione, Io, Medus (son of Medea), Pentheus, Periboea, Teucer.

Pacuvius is known to have been the author of about twelve tragedies, founded on Greek subjects; and of one, Paulus, founded on Roman history. Among these, the Antiope was perhaps the most famous and most admired. It was, like the Medea of Ennius, a translation from Euripides. The principal characters in it were the brothers Zethus and Amphion, the one devoted to hunting, the other to music. Their dispute as to the respective advantages of music and philosophy is referred to by Cicero and Horace, and by other authors. The Zethus of Pacuvius is described by Cicero¹⁷ as one who made war on all philosophy; and the author of the treatise addressed to Herennius describes their controversy as beginning about music, and ending about philosophy and the use of virtue. Two dramas, the Dulorestes and the Chryses, the latter being a continuation of the first, represented the adventures of Orestes in his wanderings with his friend Pylades, after the murder of his mother. The former play, in which Orestes was represented as on the point of being sacrificed by his sister Iphigenia, contained the passage already referred to, in which Pylades and Orestes contend as to which should suffer for the other. The Chryses was founded on their subsequent adventures, and the title of the play was apparently taken from the old Homeric priest of Apollo, Chryses, who bore a prominent part in it. Another of the plays of Pacuvius, the Niptra, was founded on, though not translated from, one of Sophocles¹⁸; and the title seems to have been suggested by the story of the recognition of Ulysses by his nurse, Eurycleia, told at Odyssey xix. 386, etc. The subjects of his other dramas may be inferred from their titles:—Armorum Judicium, Atalanta, Hermione, Ilione, Io, Medus (son of Medea), Pentheus, Periboea, Teucer.

Indidemque eadem quae oriuntur, de integro aeque eodem incidunt¹⁹.

Velut Orestes modo fuit rex, factu'st mendicus modo²⁰.

Magis audiendum quam auscultandum censeo²¹;

Aevom agere²²!

Id viri est officium, fletus muliebri ingenio additus²³.

Men' servasse ut essent qui me perderent?²⁴

Other passages again appear to be fragments of spirited dialogue, and well adapted to show the art and the elocution of the actor. Cicero²⁵ quotes from the Teucer of Pacuvius the reproach of Telamon, couched in much the same terms as those which Teucer himself anticipates in the Ajax of Sophocles:—

Neque ejus gnati parvi, qui tibi in tutelam est traditus—²⁶?

In commenting on these lines, Cicero speaks of the passion displayed by the actor ('so that even out of his mask the eyes of the actor appeared to me to burn'), and of the sudden change to pathos in his voice as he proceeded. He adds the further comment, 'Do we suppose that Pacuvius, in writing this passage, was in a calm and passionless mood?'—one of many proofs that the 'gravity' of the old tragedians was that of strong and ardent, not of phlegmatic natures, and that their strength was tempered by a pathos and humanity of feeling which were gradually gaining ascendency over the old Roman austerity. The language in such passages has not only the straightforward directness which is the general characteristic of the early literature, but a force and impetuosity added to its gravity, recalling the style of some fragments of the older orators²⁷.

Fervit aestu pelagus²⁸.

Strepitus fremitus clamor tonitruum et rudentum sibilus²⁹.

Lassitudinemque minuam manuum mollitudine³⁰.

or his more fortunate son who conquered the Macedonians at Pydna, yet it would seem much more probable that the poet should celebrate a great triumph of his own time, achieved by one in whom, from his connexion with Scipio, the nephew of Ennius would feel a special interest, than that he should recall a great calamity of a past generation, neither near enough to excite immediate attention, nor sufficiently remote to justify an imaginative treatment. The Fabulae Praetextatae, of which this was one, were, as Niebuhr³¹ has pointed out, historical plays rather than tragedies. Such a drama would not naturally or necessarily require a tragic catastrophe, but would represent the traditions of the earlier annals, or the great events of current history, in accordance with the dictates of national feeling. No important fragment of this drama has been preserved, but the fact of its having been written by Pacuvius is interesting, as affording a parallel to the celebration of the victory of Marcellus in the Clastidium of Naevius, and of the success of M. Fulvius Nobilior in the Ambracia of Ennius.

L. Accius (or Attius) was born in the year 170 b.c., of parentage similar to that of Horace—'parentibus libertinis.' He was a native of the Roman colony of Pisaurum in Umbria, founded in 184 b.c.; and an estate in that district was known in after times by the name 'fundus Accianus.' Like Pacuvius, he lived to a great age, though the exact date of his death is uncertain. Cicero, who was born b.c. 106, speaks of the oratorical and literary accomplishment of D. Junius Brutus—Consul, along with P. Scipio Nasica, b.c. 138, and one of the most famous soldiers and chiefs of the senatorian party in that age—on the authority of what he had himself often heard from the poet: 'ut ex familiari ejus L. Accio poeta sum audire solitus³².' The meeting of the old tragic poet and of the great orator is remarkable, as a link connecting the two epochs in literature, which stand so widely apart in the spirit and style by which they are respectively characterised. Cicero again, in the speech in defence of Archias, mentions the intimacy subsisting between D. Brutus and the poet³³. The expressions 'familiari ejus' and 'amicissimi sui,' like that of 'hospitis et amici mei,' applied by Laelius, in Cicero's dialogue, to Pacuvius, indicate that the relation between the poets (men of humble or provincial origin) and eminent statesmen and soldiers, was in that age one of familiar intimacy rather than of patronage and dependence.

L. Accius (or Attius) was born in the year 170 b.c., of parentage similar to that of Horace—'parentibus libertinis.' He was a native of the Roman colony of Pisaurum in Umbria, founded in 184 b.c.; and an estate in that district was known in after times by the name 'fundus Accianus.' Like Pacuvius, he lived to a great age, though the exact date of his death is uncertain. Cicero, who was born b.c. 106, speaks of the oratorical and literary accomplishment of D. Junius Brutus—Consul, along with P. Scipio Nasica, b.c. 138, and one of the most famous soldiers and chiefs of the senatorian party in that age—on the authority of what he had himself often heard from the poet: 'ut ex familiari ejus L. Accio poeta sum audire solitus³².' The meeting of the old tragic poet and of the great orator is remarkable, as a link connecting the two epochs in literature, which stand so widely apart in the spirit and style by which they are respectively characterised. Cicero again, in the speech in defence of Archias, mentions the intimacy subsisting between D. Brutus and the poet³³. The expressions 'familiari ejus' and 'amicissimi sui,' like that of 'hospitis et amici mei,' applied by Laelius, in Cicero's dialogue, to Pacuvius, indicate that the relation between the poets (men of humble or provincial origin) and eminent statesmen and soldiers, was in that age one of familiar intimacy rather than of patronage and dependence.

Although Cicero's notice of his own acquaintance with Accius, which is not likely to have existed before the former assumed the toga virilis, is a proof of the great age which the poet attained, it is not certain how long he continued the practice of his art. Seneca, in quoting from the Atreus of this poet the well-known tyrant's maxim, 'oderint dum metuant'—a maxim, according to Suetonius, constantly in the mouth of Caligula,—adds the remark that 'any one could see that it was written in the days of Sulla.' But Aulus Gellius, on the other hand, states that the Atreus was the play which had been read by the poet in his youth to Pacuvius at Tarentum. The termination of the literary career of Accius must have been soon after the beginning of the first century b.c., so that nearly half a century elapses between the last of the works of the older poets and the appearance of the great poem of Lucretius. The journey of Accius to Asia shows the beginning of that taste for foreign travel which became prevalent among the most educated men in a generation later, and grew more and more easy with the advance of Roman conquest, and more attractive from the increased cultivation of Greek literature. Accius is the first of the Roman poets who seems to have possessed a country residence; and some taste for country life and the beauties of Nature first betrays itself in one or two of his fragments. He possessed apparently all the self-esteem and high spirit of the earlier poets. Pliny mentions that though a very little man, he placed a colossal statue of himself in a temple of the Muses³⁴.

The literary qualities most conspicuous in the fragments of Accius, and attributed to him by ancient writers, are of the same kind as those which the dramatic fragments of Ennius and Pacuvius exhibit. Cicero testifies to his oratorical force, to his serious spirit, and to the didactic purpose of his writings. His most important remains illustrate these attributes of his style, along with the shrewd sense and vigorous understanding of the older writers, and afford some traces of a new vein of poetical emotion, which is scarcely observable in earlier fragments. Horace applies the epithet 'altus,' Ovid that of 'animosus' to Accius. Cicero characterises him as 'gravis et ingeniosus poeta,' and attests the didactic purpose of a particular passage in the words, 'the earnest and inspired poet wrote thus with the view of stimulating, not those princes who no longer existed, but us and our children to energy and honourable ambition³⁵.' The style of a passage from the Atreus is described by the same author in the dialogue 'De Oratore,' as 'nervous, impetuous, pressing on with a certain impassioned gravity of feeling³⁶.' Oratorical fervour and dignity seem thus to have been the most distinctive characteristic of his style. Virgil, whose genius made as free use of the diction and sentiment of native as of Greek poets, has cast the ruder language of the old poet into a new mould in some of the greatest speeches of the Aeneid, and seems to have drawn from the same source something of the high spirit and lofty pathos with which he has animated the personages of his story. The famous address, for instance—

The literary qualities most conspicuous in the fragments of Accius, and attributed to him by ancient writers, are of the same kind as those which the dramatic fragments of Ennius and Pacuvius exhibit. Cicero testifies to his oratorical force, to his serious spirit, and to the didactic purpose of his writings. His most important remains illustrate these attributes of his style, along with the shrewd sense and vigorous understanding of the older writers, and afford some traces of a new vein of poetical emotion, which is scarcely observable in earlier fragments. Horace applies the epithet 'altus,' Ovid that of 'animosus' to Accius. Cicero characterises him as 'gravis et ingeniosus poeta,' and attests the didactic purpose of a particular passage in the words, 'the earnest and inspired poet wrote thus with the view of stimulating, not those princes who no longer existed, but us and our children to energy and honourable ambition³⁵.' The style of a passage from the Atreus is described by the same author in the dialogue 'De Oratore,' as 'nervous, impetuous, pressing on with a certain impassioned gravity of feeling³⁶.' Oratorical fervour and dignity seem thus to have been the most distinctive characteristic of his style. Virgil, whose genius made as free use of the diction and sentiment of native as of Greek poets, has cast the ruder language of the old poet into a new mould in some of the greatest speeches of the Aeneid, and seems to have drawn from the same source something of the high spirit and lofty pathos with which he has animated the personages of his story. The famous address, for instance—

Confingit³⁷.

Commovit animum excelsa aspecti dignitas³⁸;

Nobilitat³⁹.

Nunquam ulla humilitas ingenium infirmat bonum⁴⁰.

Erat istuc virile, ferre advorsam fortunam facul⁴¹.

Eripere quivit, at virtutem non quit⁴².

Quod non labascat lingua, mitiscat malo⁴³.

Alienas, suas ut auro locupletent domos⁴⁴.

Minus mirum est⁴⁵.

Ruit prolapsa, pelagus respergit, reflat⁴⁶.

Aquilonis stridor gelidas molitur nives⁴⁷.

Proscindant, glebasque arvo ex molli exsuscitent⁴⁸.

Scatebra fluviae radit ripam⁴⁹.

It remains to sum up the most important results as to the early tragic drama of Rome, which have been obtained from a consideration of ancient testimony and of the fossil remains of this lost literature, as we find them collected and arranged from the works of ancient critics and grammarians. The Roman tragedies seem to have borne much the same relation to the works of the Attic tragedians as Roman comedy to the new comedy of Athens. The expression of Quintilian, 'in comoedia maxime claudicamus⁵⁰,' following immediately on the praise which he bestows on Pacuvius and Accius, implies that in his opinion the earlier writers had been more successful in tragedy than in comedy. But a comparison between the fragments of the tragedians and the extant works of Plautus and Terence, proves that, in style at least, Roman comedy was much the most successful; and this superiority is no doubt one main cause of its partial preservation. The style of Roman tragedy appears to have been direct and vigorous, serious, often animated with oratorical passion, but singularly devoid of harmony, subtlety, poetical refinement and inspiration. There is no testimony in favour of any great dramatic conceptions or impersonations. The poets appear to have aimed at expressing some particular passion oratorically, as Virgil has done so powerfully in his representation of Mezentius and Turnus, but not to have created any of those great types of human character such as the world owes to Homer, Sophocles, and Shakspeare. The popularity and the power of Roman tragedy, during the century preceding the downfall of the Republic, are to be attributed chiefly to its didactic and oratorical force, to the Roman bearing of the persons represented, to the ethical and occasionally the political cast of the sentiments expressed by them, and to the plain and vigorous style in which they are enunciated. The works of the tragic poets aided the development of the Roman language. They communicated new ideas and experience, and fostered among the mass of the Roman people the only taste for serious literature of which they were capable. They may have exercised a beneficial influence also on the thoughts and lives of men. They kept the national ideal of duty, the 'manners of the olden time,' the 'fas et antiqua castitudo' (to use an expression of Accius), before the minds of the people: they inculcated by precept and by representations great lessons of fortitude and energy: they taught the maxims of common sense, and touched the minds of their audiences with a humanity of feeling naturally alien to them. No teaching on the stage could permanently preserve the old Roman virtue, simplicity, and loyalty to the Republic, against the corrupting and disorganising effects of constant wars and conquests, and of the gross forms of luxury, that suited the temperament of Rome: but, among the various influences acting on the mind of the people, none probably was of more unmixed good than that of the tragic drama of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius.

¹   Prologue to Casina, 18, 19.

²   Prologue to Amphitryo, 52.

³   Licinius and Atilius are placed before Terence in the Canon of Volcatius Sedigitus.

⁴   E.g. Pseudolus, 1081:—

⁵   The influence of Plautus may be traced in the style of Catullus, and perhaps in the sentiment of the passage in Lucretius, iv. 1121, etc.; and that of Terence also in Catullus, and in the Satires, Epistles, and some of the Odes of Horace.

⁶   Fundanius, the friend of Horace, appears to have made an attempt to produce an artistic revival of the old comedy in the Augustan age, as Pollio, Varius, Ovid and others did of the old tragic drama, but with no permanent success.

⁷   E.g. the dance of Pseudolus. Pseud. 1246, etc.

⁸   Cic. Brut. 15. 60; De Senec. 14. 50.

⁹   Cf. Cicero's testimony to the purity of the style of Naevius and Plautus with his criticism on the style of Caecilius and Pacuvius. Terence was the only foreigner who attained perfect idiomatic purity of speech, but he must have been brought to Rome when quite a child.

¹⁰   'Puplicisne adfinis fuit an maritumis negotiis?'—Trinum. 331.

¹¹   See the paper by Professor H. F. West, reprinted from the American Journal of Philology, referred to supra page 54.

¹²   Cf. the line at the end of the Prologue to the Cistellaria (Act. i. Sc. 3)—

¹³   This is shown in some cases by reference to seats in the theatre, which were not introduced till 155 b.c. In the Prologue to the Casina it is said that only the older men present could remember the first production of that play in the life-time of the poet. The Prologues to the Aulularia, Trinummus, and Rudens, are probably genuine, and also the speech of Auxilium in the Cistellaria.

¹⁴   Cf. Rudens, 1249:—

¹⁵   Pseud. 687.

¹⁶   E.g. Rudens, 986.

¹⁷   Quid? Sarsinatis ecquast, si Umbram non habes.—Mostel. 757.

¹⁸   Post Ephesi sum natus, noenum in Apulis, noenum Aminulae.—Mil. Glor. 653.

¹⁹   Capt. 879; Trinum. 609; Truc. iii. 2. 23; Bacch. 24.

²⁰  

²¹   Vol. ii, p. 440; Eng. Trans.

²²   Cf. Trinum. 820, etc.; Menaechmi, 228, etc.; Stichus, 402, etc.

²³  

²⁴   E.g. Rudens, 906; Trinum. 820.

²⁵   'I shall trade in big ships: at the courts of princes I shall be styled a prince. Afterwards for my amusement I shall build a ship and imitate Stratonicus; I shall visit towns in my voyages: when I shall have become famous, I'll build a big town, and call it Gripus.'—Rudens, 931-5.

²⁶   Pseud. 166.

²⁷  

²⁸  

²⁹   Pseud. 1229, etc.

³⁰   Stichus, 682, etc.

³¹   Cf. Pseud. 720:—

³²   Pseud. 401-2.

³³   Bacchid. 214.

³⁴   De Senec. 14.

³⁵   E.g. graphicus, doulice, euscheme, morus, logos, techinae, prothyme, basilicus, etc., etc.

³⁶   Truculentus, 55-57. Weise condemns the passage as spurious. But whether written by Plautus or not it is in the spirit of the Plautine comedy. In a passage of the Poenulus (Act iii. 1. 21) another reference is made to the sense of security enjoyed since their victory:—

³⁷   Cp. the remark of the parasite in the Persa, 75, 76:—