A history of Latin literature

Front matter

by

MR. DAVID GUEST

Z> -Y

Preface

Ix writing this book I have aimed at tracing the development of Latin Literature, and at setting forth the influences which determined the character of its successive phases. Even more have I desired to give an idea of the personalities and the productions of the great Latin writers, for these are the fruits of the tree, the growth of which it has been my purpose to indicate.

The book is intended for the general reader, and therefore I have dwelt on the broader aspects of the subject more than on details and points of controversy, while for purposes of illustration I have rather sought than shunned famous and familiar passages. For the same reason, and in accordance with the practice followed in this series, all quotations have been given in English. In the case of the great poets, this is a method which has called for some hardihood, and in a few cases I have availed myself of the help of other translators ; but for the most part the verse translations are my own.

The question as to when Latin Literature came to an end, may be answered in more ways than one. But it may be said that with Rutilius Xamatianus Latin writing vi PREFACE

ceased to be national, and that with Boethius it ceased to be literary. These two circumstances have suggested the approximate limits of the present survey. In the seventh century, the nadir, as Hallam calls it, of the human mind in Europe, the classical tradition became for the time extinct, and the revival of Latin scholarship discernible in the eleventh and twelfth centuries died away on the emergence of the modern European literatures without having produced any works of considerable importance. As for the renewed study of classical antiquity which was the main feature of the Renaissance, and the continued though partial use of the Latin language as a means of communication among the learned, which was one of its consequences, it is only by an extended interpretation of the term that they could be included in a history of Latin Literature.

In writing such a book as this I have throughout been conscious of my obligations to other works. Professor Wight Duff's Literary History of Rome, which was not published until about a quarter of this book was already in type, has helped me much, if only in directing my attention to points and sources of information which I might otherwise have overlooked. M. Rene Pichon's Histoire de la Litte'rature Latine is, like the present volume, a comprehensive sketch, and, apart from particular passages in which I have reproduced some of his criticism, 1 have derived much help from it in estimating the influences which affected the development of Latin Literature, while

PREFACE vii

in the final chapter, which is something in the nature of a catalogue raisonne of authors, I have profited by his guidance in the orientation and, to some extent, the characterisation of writers, mainly ecclesiastical, with whom I have only a limited acquaintance. In treating the Imperial period I have received many suggestions, in some cases as to the selection of passages ior illustration, from Mr. H. E. Butler's Post- Augustan Poets. Besides these histories of Latin Literature, I should make particular reference to the volumes on The Roman Poets of the Republic, Virgil, and The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age, by Professor Sellar ; to studies on Latin poetry by If. Patin, M. Plessis, and Professor Tyrrell ; to the chapters on Literature in Momrasen's History of Rome ; and to both series of Lectures and Essays by Professor H. Nettleship.

To the above and other works references will be found in footnotes. I have not added a bibliography of Latin Literature because it must have included an impracticably long list of editions of Latin authors. The last remark reminds me of the obligations inevitably incurred by one who attempts a survey of Latin Literature to the commentators who have elucidated the Latin writers. No one can write of Lucretius or Catullus without being aware of his debt to Munro and Robinson Ellis. Without pursuing this subject further, I will not deny myself the pleasure of recognising in connection with Cicero how much I owe to the editions of Professor J. S. Reid, and those two other Cambridge scholars, Professor Wilkins and viii PREFACE

Sir J. E. Sandys, who have made the study of Cicero's rhetorical works their especial province. I have to thank Mr. Frowde (Clarendon Press) and Mr. Dent respectively for permission to quote from metrical versions of Horace's Odes by Mr. W. E. Marris, and of the JEneid by Mr. Fairfax Taylor (Temple Classics Series).

Finally my warmest thanks are due to Professor Bury for his kindness in reading the proof-sheets and making suggestions. But since I allowed him very little time in which to do this I take all responsibility for errors and oversights.

Contents

PAGE

I. THE BEGINNINGS . I

II. THE INVASION OF HELLENIC INFLUENCE 13

II The Invasion Of Hellenic Influence

Greek influences had not been wanting at Rome from the earliest times. The Romans had received their alphabet from the Greeks. The Sibylline books were in Greek. The national festival (the hidi Romani) and the Servian constitution show indications of Greek influence. Some barbarous transliterations of Greek names and words bear witness to early commercial intercourse between Roman and Greek.

But there had been no taking over of Greek literature and culture such as was now to be effected. The causes of the change were these. The conflict, external and internal, which, while it lasted, had absorbed the energies of Rome, was at an end. Almost simultaneously Rome achieved the union of the orders (287 B.C.) and the headship of Italy (268 B.C.). The Pyrrhic war (280-272 B.C.), ended by the capture of Tarentum, brought her into close contact with the Greeks of Southern Italy, the first Punic war, which followed it (264-241 B.C.), with those of Sicily. Her literary development atrophied by the long struggle from which she had emerged, conscious of new wants and an enlarged intellectual horizon, Rome was confronted with a literature which had passed through all its stages and stood complete in its unparalleled beauty. Parvenue among the nations, she required at 13 once education and amusement. For the first there was no text-book but the twelve tables, for the second no plays but the formless saturce.

Thus it was that, in circumstances typical of the situation, artistic literature began with an epic and a play translated from the Greek.

Andronicus, a Greek or semi-Greek, was brought to Rome on the capture of Tarentum (272 B.C.). He became the slave of Livius, a noble Roman, taught his children, and on being manumitted as a reward for his services took the name of L. Livius Andronicus. Thereafter he continued to occupy himself as a teacher of Greek and Latin, and also as an actor and stage-manager. Out of these occupations rose his literary production. To provide himself with a text-book for his pupils he made a Latin translation of the Odyssey. To provide a repertoire for himself and his company he reproduced Greek plays in Latin form. In 240 B.C. — the date is significant, for it was the year after the end of the first Punic war — a tragedy and a comedy by him were acted at the ludi Romani, the first plays with regular plots ever seen upon the Roman stage. The recognition of his literary efforts did not stop here. In 207 B.C., with a view to averting disasters which were apprehended in consequence of a prodigy, he was commissioned by the Pontifices to compose an ode to be sung by twenty-seven maidens going in procession, and seemingly * another later, perhaps to celebrate the victory of Sena won by the son of his patron. Further, in compliment to him the temple of Minerva was assigned as a place of meeting to writers and actors,

* The ode sung quia prosperous respublica populi Romani geri coepta esset (Festus, p. 333) appears to be distinct from that just referred to which is recorded by Livy, xxvii. 27.

LIVIUS ANDRONICUS 15

who were incorporated in a guild (collegium), as the flute-players had been long before.

The Latin Odyssey was a sufficiently rude representation of the original. Owing to the difficulty of adapting the Latin language to the dactylic metre — unless, indeed, it were to suit a public not unfamiliar with narrative poems in this metre— Livius wrote it in the Saturnian rhythm. A rough rendering of the first line,

The man of wiles Ulysses sing me now, Camena, *

will suffice to show that it has none of the flow of the hexameter. The epic diction, with its wealth of compounds, Livius was unable to reproduce. To judge by the fragments which survive, amounting to some forty lines, the work is that of an unskilful translator. He inserts adjectives, he fails to reproduce characteristic words and expressions, he alters moods, he substitutes metaphors of his own for those in the original. In a word, the work is a paraphrase rather than a translation, and the general effect (though this is in part due to the archaic phraseology and the halting rhythm) is quaint, and even grotesque. In his tragedies (we have titles and fragments of nine belonging to the Trojan cycle) the Greek, writing in the metres of the original, is more successful. Tone and language are more varied, though here again the same features recur. A comparison of Teucer's lament over the ingratitude of a son in the Ajax Mastigophoros,

We render virtue praise ; but swiftlier far It melts than frost in springtime,

with the corresponding passage in Sophocles (Ajax, 1266) shows that much has been omitted and a new image

* See note at the end of this chapter.

introduced. If one is to judge him by the standard of later attainment, one may readily concur with Cicero,* who, with reference to its archaic stiffness, declared that Livius' Odyssey resembled the wooden images attributed to Daedalus, and that his plays were not worth a second reading. Yet he is important as the initiator of that art of translation, paraphrastic, but with a striving after poetical expression, which was the medium through which the Hellenic drama was presented to the Romans for a hundred and fifty years.

Five years after the first performance of a play by Livius a new writer, N^EVius, appeared upon the scene. In more than one respect Naevius was a complete contrast to Livius. Livius was a semi-Greek, a freedman, and a schoolmaster ; Naevius a Latin settled in Campania, a Roman citizen, and a soldier. At least he fought in the first Punic war. This implies that he was not an actor. Thus he did not produce his plays as an incident in his profession.

Like Livius he wrote both tragedies and comedies. As an instance of the former we may take the Lycurgus.

In the fragments of this play, which follows the outline of the Bacchce, we catch a glimpse of the maenads "bearing crested snakes unharmed" and hear the haughty orders of the Edonian king for their arrest and punishment. The soldiers announce how they found the revellers sporting by the stream, and how they " come like dumb beasts unterrified to death." Then we have Liber himself in altercation with the king, and finally, at a word from the god, the palace of Lycurgus bursts into " a flower of flame" and a voice is heard bidding those within bring the king, the son of Dryas, forth.f

* Brutus, 71. t Cf. Merry, Fragments of Latin Poetry, p. 16.

N^VIUS 17

These fragments show a great advance on the art of Livius. The verse has a freer movement, the language is more lively and more poetical.

But the bent of Naevius was rather towards comedy than tragedy. We know the names of thirty-four of his comedies as against seven tragedies. The fact that he was the first to fuse two pieces into one (by the process known as contaminatio) is perhaps significant of the freedom with which he treated his originals. But, whether a literal translation from some original or not, his description in his Tarentine Girl of how a flirt keeps half a dozen admirers in play at once is full of humour and vivacity. In point of fact Naevius' sense of humour got him into trouble. He would fain have reproduced the freedom of political allusion of the old Attic comedy, or transferred the licence of the Fescennines to the stage. One Theodotus he ridiculed by name; he alluded to compromising passages in the early life of the conqueror of Zama, and he fell foul of the Metelli, one of the most powerful families in Rome. He implied that their pre-eminence in the State was not altogether due to merit ; * to which the Metellus attacked, seemingly the consul of 206 B.C., replied in a line threatening that the poet should suffer for his insolence. t The Metelli were able to carry out their threat : Naevius was thrown into prison. He is said to have made his amende in two plays written there (the Hariolus and the Leo), after which he was released on the interposition of the tribunes. But he did not learn prudence by adversity. Again he incurred the penalty of free speech, and this time he went into exile at Utica. This must have been after the end of the Punic war, or

B he could not have gone to Utica except as a deserter. His death is referred to 199 B.C.

Another distinguishing characteristic of Naevius is his national feeling. Perhaps it is not safe to draw inferences from the fact that many of his comedies bear Latin titles ; but from a passage in one of them,* The Soothsayer (Hariolus), it would seem that the scene was laid in Italy — in other words, that Naevius was the originator of the Roman comedy [fabula togata). Further, he originated the Roman historical play {fabula prcetexta or pratextata). In the Alimonium Romuli et Remi he dramatised the legendary origin of the city, and in the Clastidium the winning of the spolia opima by Marcellus, cos 222, from the Insubrian chief Virdumarus under the walls of that township.

But Naevius was to give stronger proof of his originality and patriotism than this. Writing, like Livius, in the Saturnian metre, he produced an epic, originally a continuous whole, later divided into seven books, on the first Punic war. The Bellum Punicum is the first original poem in Latin of which we have any knowledge. A remarkable feature in Naevius' treatment of the subject was that he went back to the origin of Rome, and in the two opening books gave the earliest Latin account of the legend of ^Eneas. In this he was to some extent the predecessor of Vergil. Servius states that the passage in the first JEneid which describes how ^Sneas was caught in a storm, how Venus complained to Jupiter, and how he consoled her by the promise of the future greatness of Rome was " taken from Naevius." The statement is specially significant in the case of the promise of Jupiter,

BELLUM PUNICUM 19

for it shows that Naevius already had the idea which plays so large a part in the JEneid, namely, that the greatness of Rome had a place far back in the past, in the ordinances of fate and the foreknowledge of the gods. It is not certain that Naevius also anticipated Vergil in telling the story of Dido and ./Eneas. But there are indications that he did so ; and certainly the connection of the enmity between the countries with the relations between the founder of Rome and the Carthaginian queen would have been more vital and more telling in Naevius' work, which had the Carthaginian struggle as its sole subject, and was written at a time when that struggle was an absorbing actuality. Only scanty fragments of the work survive. From them it would seem that the legendary events of the first two books were treated with some imagination and attempt at picturesque effect, but that the bulk of the work was simply versified prose.

Valerius the consul Takes a portion of his army on an expedition

is a not unfair example of the narrative, which, it may be remarked, is generally in the historic present. It has been compared not inaptly with the rhyming chronicles of mediaeval times. Especially does its style recall that of the Scipionic epitaphs produced some half a century earlier.* Yet, if unadorned, the narrative is rapid and vigorous, and a couple of lines which tell how Regulus'

* With compare

Epitaph of Scipio Barbatus, C. /. L. i, 30.

troops held it better to die where they stood than to return home dishonoured show the spirit which is the special note of Naevius.*

It is as the predecessor of Vergil that Naevius is significant, and not, as his epitaph f might seem to imply, as the last of the native minstrels. The inferiority of his work in Saturnians to that in the comic fragments shows that he was hampered either by the metre or by the traditions of composition which he followed. Really he was the outcome of the new conditions, and even in the Punka his treatment of the gods shows that he was a student of Homer. Only his strong individuality and his national feeling induced him to stand yet awhile on the ancient ways ; or perhaps he was too much of a Latin and not enough of a professional to make the technical changes which were to be made by his successor.

Such was Ennius (239-169 B.C.), both as the author, like him, of a Latin epic and as a writer at once of tragedy and comedy, although Plautus (254-184 B.C.), who was the first to specialise in comedy, comes next in chronological order. Ennius was born at Rudiae, a Calabrian town in the territory of the Messapii. This territory, early Hellenised and included in Magna Graecia, had been conquered by the Romans in 266 B.C. and subjected to Latin influences. There is, then, some doubt as to Ennius' precise nationality. He is described as a Greek in Festus (p. 293), as: a semi-Greek by Suetonius (De Gramm. i.), while he himself traced his descent from

ENNIUS 21

King Messapus, implying that he was of the aboriginal Italian race. If, as he used to say, he had " three hearts," because he could speak Greek, Oscan, and Latin, it was his Latin heart which his circumstances did most to develop. He fought in the second Punic war, as Naevius had done in the first. In 204 B.C. he was serving in Sardinia, where he was found by Cato, and induced by him to come to Rome. There he gained a living by teaching and writing. He became the friend of eminent men, notably of Scipio Africanus the elder and M. Fulvius Nobilior. The exploits of the former he celebrated in a work called Scipio, probably embodied in his Saturce, and the estimation in which he was held by his patron is shown by the fact that his bust was placed in the tomb of the Scipios. The latter he accompanied on his ^Etolian campaign (189 B.C.), and described the capture of Ambraci? by him in a work of the same name, probably an historical play. Through the influence of Fulvius' son, he became a Roman citizen. When the younger Fulvius founded colonies in Picenum in 184 B.C., Ennius took part in the allotment, and thus acquired the citizenship. He continued, however, to live at Rome, where he died in 169 B.C.

One of the most striking facts about Ennius was his versatility. Plays, comedies, tragedies, and Roman historic dramas, satires, miscellaneous translations, epigrams, and, lastly, an epic in many books, such was the varied output of his long life. Such production was only possible because the works were to a large extent translations or adaptations. Titles and fragments of twenty-two plays by Ennius survive. In the choice of his originals he preferred the Trojan cycle, and of the poets Euripides. Following in the steps of Nasvius, but with greater command of language, Ennius produced free translations of his originals. Cicero, indeed (De Fin. i. 4), instances Ennius' Medea among the plays which had been translated " word for word " from the Greek, but elsewhere (Ac. Post. 10) he says with more truth that, with the other Roman dramatists, he gave "the purport and not the words " of the Greek poets. As a rule these reproductions can be judged from fragments only, and without the possibility of comparing them with their prototypes. But in the case especially of some fragments of the Medea there is this possibility. What is the impression left by the comparison ? Sometimes curtailed by omissions, the Latin is on the whole certainly fuller than the original. Expressions are duplicated,* epithets introduced,! explanations added. The colour is laid on more thickly ; finer touches are sometimes effaced ; in one instance at least the meaning X has been misunderstood. Yet the impression left is that of writing dignified without being bombastic, while from the way in which the natural order of the words is adhered to it is well suited to the comprehension of a homely as well as a cultivated audience. Especially does Ennius excel in passages expressive of strong emotion, such as Cassandra's ecstatic prevision of the horrors to be brought on Troy by Paris (in the Alexander, quoted by Cic, De Div. i. 31), and Andromache's gorgeously worded lament over the city's downfall.^

But Ennius did not restrict himself to the reproduction of Greek tragedies. In the Sabina; (rape of the Sabines)

ENNIUS : SATIRES 23

he dramatised an episode in the legendary history of Rome, and in the Ambracia * the capture of the iEtolian capital by his patron M. Fulvius Nobilior. For comedy he had less aptitude. The titles of but two of his comedies are known, and in this province he gained only a succes d'esiime. Volcatius Sedigitus, a critic of the time of Varro, who in his work De Poetis enumerated the Latin comic poets in order of merit, put Ennius last. But in his saturce he initiated a fresh branch of literature. It would seem that the native form of drama known as satura had been driven off the stage by the adapted Greek play, and that Ennius was the first to produce a form of composition which in its miscellaneous character (extending even to the mixture of metres) and its conversational tone preserved the tradition of the plotless dialogues of the primitive drama. We know at least that in his satires Ennius takes his readers into his confidence (" I never write poetry unless I have the gout," he says), and that, like the later literary satires, they contained dialogue and fable is shown by references to a dialogue between Life and Death, and to the fable of the lark and the husbandman. Of such saturce Ennius is variously stated to have written four or six books ; and some or all of the following works, of which we have little more than the titles, may have belonged to them. Of these Epicharmus and Euhemerus, metrical versions, the first of a poem containing the physical speculations of the philosopher-dramatist, the second of the "sacred chronicle" in which Euhemerus gave a rationalistic explanation of myth, bear witness to the sceptical tendencies of Ennius ; the Hedyfagetica, a rendering in Latin hexameters of a mock-heroic gastronomical poem * Possibly, however, it belongs to the Satura.

by Archestratus of Gela, to his love of good living. Then there were moral maxims (prcccepta or protrepticus), licentious poems in the manner of Sotades, a Greek writer of the third century B.C., and epigrams, one of them an epitaph on Ennius himself, two on Scipio Africanus, the earliest extant attempts in the elegiac metre in Latin, and the book called Scipio. All these have been included, though on no definite proof, among the satires. Perhaps there is rather more reason for doing so in the case of Scipio than in the others, because it shows a mixture of metres, the description of the calm which prevailed when Scipio crossed to Africa being in trochaic tetrameters, while a fragment referring to the " broad smooth plains of Africa " which witnessed his triumph is in hexameters.

Ennius' greatest work was the Annals, an epic in hexameters on the history of Rome from the arrival of Apneas to Ennius' own times — or, to be precise, down to 172 B.C., three years before his death. Great in one sense it certainly was. Only six hundred lines survive, but, to judge by the detail in which the events were treated, the whole must have been considerably longer than the Iliad. It does not appear that Ennius, like Naevius described the voyage of ^Eneas to Africa and the Carthaginian episode. The poem seems to have begun with his arrival in Italy. But the narrative was much fuller, except that Ennius passed lightly over the first Punic war ; for, as he says in contemptuous reference to his predecessor,

Others have writ the tale In measures used of old by faun and bard.

The first three books bring the recital down to the end of the kingly period. The next three continue it to the

ENNIUS: ANNALS 25

end of the conquest of Italy, the sixth book being devoted to the Pyrrhic war. The seventh book described the first and the eighth, ninth, and probably the tenth the second Punic war. The eleventh and twelfth books dealt with the wars with Philip, and the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth with the war with Antiochus and the ^Etolian war.

At this point the poet made a fresh start. He resumes the narrative with an account of the Istrian war, which began in 178 B.C. The elder Pliny says that he added the book out of admiration for the courage displayed in that war by T. Caelius Teucer and his brother, one of whom was probably the tribune whose exploits are described in the longest fragment of the book. The events which intervened between the ^Etolian war and the beginning of the Istrian war Ennius seems to have passed over rapidly. This is intelligible, for they included the downfall of his patrons, the Scipios. The last two books carried the narrative on to the beginning of the third Macedonian war.

There are two obvious criticisms to be made on the Annals. The first is that the writer has confused the provinces of epic and history. It may be admitted that historic events are not the most suitable for epic treatment, and the more nearly contemporary they are the less suitable do they become. But the Hannibalic War became to Romans almost at once their heroic age. And apart from this it is difficult to withhold absolutely from historic epic the justification which is generally accorded to historic tragedy. The Annals of Ennius were to the Romans in some measure what the historical plays of Shakespeare are to us.

A stronger ground of objection to the Annals may be found in the fact that the epic is wanting in unity. Unity of form there could not be in a work to which the author could add book after book as Livy did to his history. But unity of idea it had, the idea of the greatness and expanding destinies of Rome. And this is why Mommsen's characterisation of the Annals as "this thoroughly anti-national epos of a half-Greek scholar " is misleading. It is true that Ennius, owing to the fact of his having been born in a Hellenised town, was enabled to profit by the opportunity which contact with Greek authors had put in the way of Rome, and to approximate more speedily to the suddenly revealed levels of attainment than would have been possible to a pure-bred Roman. But like the Italians generally he had felt the absorptive power of Rome, and it was his proudest boast that he had been made a Roman citizen. It is true, again, that Ennius' epic, written in hexameters instead of in the native Saturnian metre, was largely influenced by the study of the only available model for epos. Ennius could not have expressed more clearly his aspiration to be " a second Homer," which his partial countrymen afterwards held him to have realised, than by representing as he does in the dream with which the Annals opens that the spirit of Homer had been reincarnated in himself. Ennius borrows Homer's technique, avails himself of his mythological apparatus, applies his similes, and transfers his descriptions to analogous situations of his own. And yet in the whole range of Latin literature there is no work so instinct with national feeling. For more than two centuries it remained the recognised expression of Roman greatness, and if it was displaced by the Vergilian epic, this was due to the art and infinitely wider conception of the later work rather than to its patriotic spirit, for this was inherited from

ENNIUS : VERSIFICATION 27

Ennius. The very essence of Roman steadfastness is in the words

Broad-based upon her ancient ways and men Standeth the Roman State*

A gallery of Roman worthies testifies to his unique power of characterisation : Curius,

Whom none with steel might overcome nor gold ;

Fabius, whose claim on his country's gratitude is set down in the lines

One man for us by waiting saved the State.

Nought for men's talk he cared, for safety much.

Therefore his fame now ever brighter shines.

Ennius' versification is far from finished. Lines heavy and spondaic, or stumbling and unarticulated by caesura, barbarous alliterations or grotesque reproductions of Homeric peculiarities, justify Ovid's description of him as "rude in art." But withal hexameters of stately movement or rugged weight anticipate the Lucretian,f and once or twice J even the Vergilian cadence.