The History of Rome, Theodor Mommsen [good english books to read txt] 📗

entertainment, and offensive personalities, even with the mention of names, not unfrequently crept in. But there was no want also of vivid delineation, of grotesque incidents, of telling jokes, and of pithy sayings; and the harlequinade rapidly won for itself no inconsiderable position in the theatrical life of the capital and even in literature.

Dramatic Arrangements

Lastly as regards the development of dramatic arrangements we are not in a position to set forth in detail—what is clear on the whole—that the general interest in dramatic performances was constantly on the increase, and that they became more and more frequent and magnificent. Not only was there hardly any ordinary or extraordinary popular festival that was now celebrated without dramatic exhibitions; even in the country-towns and in private houses representations by companies of hired actors were common. It is true that, while probably various municipal towns already at this time possessed theatres built of stone, the capital was still without one; the building of a theatre, already contracted for, had been again prohibited by the senate in 599 on the suggestion of Publius Scipio Nasica. It was quite in the spirit of the sanctimonious policy of this age, that the building of a permanent theatre was prohibited out of respect for the customs of their ancestors, but nevertheless theatrical entertainments were allowed rapidly to increase, and enormous sums were expended annually in erecting and decorating structures of boards for them. The arrangements of the stage became visibly better. The improved scenic arrangements and the reintroduction of masks about the time of Terence are doubtless connected with the fact, that the erection and maintenance of the stage and stage-apparatus were charged in 580 on the public chest.(16) The plays which Lucius Mummius produced after the capture of Corinth (609) formed an epoch in the history of the theatre. It was probably then that a theatre acoustically constructed after the Greek fashion and provided with seats was first erected, and more care generally was expended on the exhibitions.(17) Now also there is frequent mention of the bestowal of a prize of victory—which implies the competition of several pieces—of the audience taking a lively part for or against the leading actors, of cliques and -claqueurs-. The decorations and machinery were improved; moveable scenery artfully painted and audible theatrical thunder made their appearance under the aedileship of Gaius Claudius Pulcher in 655;(18) and twenty years later (675) under the aedileship of the brothers Lucius and Marcus Lucullus came the changing of the decorations by shifting the scenes. To the close of this epoch belongs the greatest of Roman actors, the freedman Quintus Roscius (d. about 692 at a great age), throughout several generations the ornament and pride of the Roman stage,(19) the friend and welcome boon-companion of Sulla—to whom we shall have to recur in the sequel.

Satura

In recitative poetry the most surprising circumstance is the insignificance of the Epos, which during the sixth century had occupied decidedly the first place in the literature destined for reading; it had numerous representatives in the seventh, but not a single one who had even temporary success. From the present epoch there is hardly anything to be reported save a number of rude attempts to translate Homer, and some continuations of the Ennian Annals, such as the "Istrian War" of Hostius and the "Annals (perhaps) of the Gallic War" by Aulus Furius (about 650), which to all appearance took up the narrative at the very point where Ennius had broken off—the description of the Istrian war of 576 and 577. In didactic and elegiac poetry no prominent name appears. The only successes which the recitative poetry of this period has to show, belong to the domain of what was called -Satura—-a species of art, which like the letter or the pamphlet allowed of any form and admitted any sort of contents, and accordingly in default of all proper generic characters derived its individual shape wholly from the individuality of each poet, and occupied a position not merely on the boundary between poetry and prose, but even more than half beyond the bounds of literature proper. The humorous poetical epistles, which one of the younger men of the Scipionic circle, Spurius Mummius, the brother of the destroyer of Corinth, sent home from the camp of Corinth to his friends, were still read with pleasure a century afterwards; and numerous poetical pleasantries of that sort not destined for publication probably proceeded at that time from the rich social and intellectual life of the better circles of Rome.

Lucilius

Its representative in literature is Gaius Lucilius (606-651) sprung of a respectable family in the Latin colony of Suessa, and likewise a member of the Scipionic circle. His poems are, as it were, open letters to the public. Their contents, as a clever successor gracefully says, embrace the whole life of a cultivated man of independence, who looks upon the events passing on the political stage from the pit and occasionally from the side-scenes; who converses with the best of his epoch as his equals; who follows literature and science with sympathy and intelligence without wishing personally to pass for a poet or scholar; and who, in fine, makes his pocket-book the confidential receptacle for everything good and bad that he meets with, for his political experiences and expectations, for grammatical remarks and criticisms on art, for incidents of his own life, visits, dinners, journeys, as well as for anecdotes which he has heard. Caustic, capricious, thoroughly individual, the Lucilian poetry has yet the distinct stamp of an oppositional and, so far, didactic aim in literature as well as in morals and politics; there is in it something of the revolt of the country against the capital; the Suessan's sense of his own purity of speech and honesty of life asserts itself in antagonism to the great Babel of mingled tongues and corrupt morals. The aspiration of the Scipionic circle after literary correctness, especially in point of language, finds critically its most finished and most clever representative in Lucilius. He dedicated his very first book to Lucius Stilo, the founder of Roman philology,(20) and designated as the public for which he wrote not the cultivated circles of pure and classical speech, but the Tarentines, the Bruttians, the Siculi, or in other words the half-Greeks of Italy, whose Latin certainly might well require a corrective. Whole books of his poems are occupied with the settlement of Latin orthography and prosody, with the combating of Praenestine, Sabine, Etruscan provincialisms, with the exposure of current solecisms; along with which, however, the poet by no means forgets to ridicule the insipidly systematic Isocratean purism of words and phrases,(21) and even to reproach his friend Scipio in right earnest jest with the exclusive fineness of his language.(22) But the poet inculcates purity of morals in public and private life far more earnestly than he preaches pure and simple Latinity. For this his position gave him peculiar advantages. Although by descent, estate, and culture on a level with the genteel Romans of his time and possessor of a handsome house in the capital, he was yet not a Roman burgess, but a Latin; even his position towards Scipio, under whom he had served in his early youth during the Numantine war, and in whose house he was a frequent visitor, may be connected with the fact, that Scipio stood in varied relations to the Latins and was their patron in the political feuds of the time.(23) He was thus precluded from a public life, and he disdained the career of a speculator—he had no desire, as he once said, to "cease to be Lucilius in order to become an Asiatic revenue-farmer." So he lived in the sultry age of the Gracchan reforms and the agitations preceding the Social war, frequenting the palaces and villas of the Roman grandees and yet not exactly their client, at once in the midst of the strife of political coteries and parties and yet not directly taking part with one or another; in a way similar to Beranger, of whom there is much that reminds us in the political and poetical position of Lucilius. From this position he uttered his comments on public life with a sound common sense that was not to be shaken, with a good humour that was inexhaustible, and with a wit perpetually gushing:

-Nunc vero a mane ad noctem, festo atque profesto
Toto itidem pariterque die populusque patresque
Iactare indu foro se omnes, decedere nusquam.
Uni se atque eidem studio omnes dedere et arti;
Verba dare ut caute possint, pugnare dolose,
Blanditia certare, bonum simulare virum se,
Insidias facere ut si hostes sint omnibus omnes-.

The illustrations of this inexhaustible text remorselessly, without omitting his friends or even the poet himself, assailed the evils of the age, the coterie-system, the endless Spanish war-service, and the like; the very commencement of his Satires was a great debate in the senate of the Olympian gods on the question, whether Rome deserved to enjoy the continued protection of the celestials. Corporations, classes, individuals, were everywhere severally mentioned by name; the poetry of political polemics, shut out from the Roman stage, was the true element and life-breath of the Lucilian poems, which by the power of the most pungent wit illustrated with the richest imagery—a power which still entrances us even in the remains that survive—pierce and crush their adversary "as by a drawn sword." In this—in the moral ascendency and the proud sense of freedom of the poet of Suessa—lies the reason why the refined Venusian, who in the Alexandrian age of Roman poetry revived the Lucilian satire, in spite of all his superiority in formal skill with true modesty yields to the earlier poet as "his better." The language is that of a man of thorough culture, Greek and Latin, who freely indulges his humour; a poet like Lucilius, who is alleged to have made two hundred hexameters before dinner and as many after it, is in far too great a hurry to be nice; useless prolixity, slovenly repetition of the same turn, culpable instances of carelessness frequently occur: the first word, Latin or Greek, is always the best. The metres are similarly treated, particularly the very predominant hexameter: if we transpose the words—his clever imitator says—no man would observe that he had anything else before him than simple prose; in point of effect they can only be compared to our doggerel verses.(24) The poems of Terence and those of Lucilius stand on the same level of culture, and have the same relation to each other as a carefully prepared and polished literary work has to a letter written on the spur of the moment. But the incomparably higher intellectual gifts and the freer view of life, which mark the knight of Suessa as compared with the African slave, rendered his success as rapid and brilliant as that of Terence had been laborious and doubtful; Lucilius became immediately the favourite of the nation, and he like Beranger could say of his poems that "they alone of all were read by the people." The uncommon popularity of the Lucilian poem is, in a historical point of view, a remarkable event; we see from it that literature was already a power, and beyond doubt we should fall in with various traces of its influence, if a thorough history of this period had been preserved. Posterity has only confirmed the judgment of contemporaries; the Roman judges of art who were opposed to the Alexandrian school assigned to Lucilius the first rank among all the Latin poets. So far as satire can be regarded as a distinct form of art at all, Lucilius created it; and in it created the only species of art which was peculiar to the Romans and was bequeathed by them to posterity.

Of poetry attaching itself to the Alexandrian school nothing occurs in Rome at this epoch except minor poems translated from or modelled on Alexandrian epigrams, which deserve notice not on their own account, but as the first harbingers of the later epoch of Roman literature. Leaving out of account some poets little known and whose dates cannot be fixed with certainty, there belong to this category Quintus Catulus, consul in 652(25) and Lucius Manlius, an esteemed senator, who wrote in 657. The latter seems to have been the first to circulate among the Romans various geographical tales current among the Greeks, such as the Delian legend of Latona, the fables of Europa and of the marvellous bird Phoenix; as it was likewise reserved for him on his travels to discover at Dodona and to copy that remarkable tripod, on which might be read the oracle imparted to the Pelasgians before their migration into the land of the Siceli and Aborigines—a discovery which the Roman annals did not neglect devoutly to register.

Historical Composition
Polybius

In historical composition this epoch is especially marked by the emergence of an author who did not belong to Italy either by birth or in