The history of Rome. Book IV

by Theodor Mommsen

  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 respect of his intellectual and literary standpoint, but who first or rather alone brought literary appreciation and description to bear on Rome's place in the world, and to whom all subsequent generations, and we too, owe the best part of our knowledge of the Roman development. Polybius (c. 54
6-c. 627) of Megalopolis in the Peloponnesus, son of the Achaean statesman Lycortas, took part apparently as early as 565 in the expedition of the Romans against the Celts of Asia Minor, and was afterwards on various occasions, especially during the third Macedonian war, employed by his countrymen in military and diplomatic affairs. After the crisis occasioned by that war in Hellas he was carried off along with the other Achaean hostages to Italy[26], where he lived in exile for seventeen years (587-604) and was introduced by the sons of Paullus to the genteel circles of the capital. By the sending back of the Achaean hostages[27] he was restored to his home, where he thenceforth acted as permanent mediator between his confederacy and the Romans. He was present at the destruction of Carthage and of Corinth (608). He seemed educated, as it were, by destiny to comprehend the historical position of Rome more clearly than the Romans of that day could themselves. From the place which he occupied, a Greek statesman and a Roman prisoner, esteemed and occasionally envied for his Hellenic culture by Scipio Aemilianus and the first men of Rome generally, he saw the streams, which had so long flowed separately, meet together in the same channel and the history of the states of the Mediterranean resolve itself into the hegemony of Roman power and Greek culture. Thus Polybius became the first Greek of note, who embraced with serious conviction the comprehensive view of the Scipionic circle, and recognized the superiority of Hellenism in the sphere of intellect and of the Roman character in the sphere of politics as facts, regarding which history had given her final decision, and to which people on both sides were entitled and bound to submit. In this spirit he acted as a practical statesman, and wrote his history.

  If in his youth he had done homage to the honourable but impracticable local patriotism of the Achaeans, during his later years, with a clear discernment of inevitable necessity, he advocated in the community to which he belonged the policy of the closest adherence to Rome. It was a policy in the highest degree judicious and beyond doubt well-intentioned, but it was far from being high-spirited or proud. Nor was Polybius able wholly to disengage himself from the vanity and paltriness of the Hellenic statesmanship of the time. He was hardly released from exile, when he proposed to the senate that it should formally secure to the released their former rank in their several homes; whereupon Cato aptly remarked, that this looked to him as if Ulysses were to return to the cave of Polyphemus to request from the giant his hat and girdle. He often made use of his relations with the great men in Rome to benefit his countrymen; but the way in which he submitted to, and boasted of, the illustrious protection somewhat approaches fawning servility. His literary activity breathes throughout the same spirit as his practical action. It was the task of his life to write the history of the union of the Mediterranean states under the hegemony of Rome. From the first Punic war down to the destruction of Carthage and Corinth his work embraces the fortunes of all the civilized states - namely Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Carthage, and Italy - and exhibits in causal connection the mode in which they came under the Roman protectorate; in so far he describes it as his object to demonstrate the fitness and reasonableness of the Roman hegemony.

  In design as in execution, this history stands in clear and distinct contrast with the contemporary Roman as well as with the contemporary Greek historiography. In Rome history still remained wholly at the stage of chronicle; there existed doubtless important historical materials, but what was called historical composition was restricted - with the exception of the very respectable but purely individual writings of Cato, which at any rate did not reach beyond the rudiments of research and narration - partly to nursery tales, partly to collections of notices. The Greeks had certainly exhibited historical research and had written history; but the conceptions of nation and state had been so completely lost amidst the distracted times of the Diadochi, that none of the numerous historians succeeded in following the steps of the great Attic masters in spirit and in truth, or in treating from a general point of view the matter of world-wide interest in the history of the times.

  Their histories were either purely outward records, or they were pervaded by the verbiage and sophistries of Attic rhetoric and only too often by the venality and vulgarity, the sycophancy and the bitterness of the age. Among the Romans as among the Greeks there was nothing but histories of cities or of tribes. Polybius, a Peloponnesian, as has been justly remarked, and holding intellectually a position at least as far aloof from the Attics as from the Romans, first stepped beyond these miserable limits, treated the Roman materials with mature Hellenic criticism, and furnished a history, which was not indeed universal, but which was at any rate dissociated from the mere local states and laid hold of the Romano-Greek state in the course of formation. Never perhaps has any historian united within himself all the advantages of an author drawing from original sources so completely as Polybius. The compass of his task is completely clear and present to him at every moment; and his eye is fixed throughout on the real historical connection of events. The legend, the anecdote, the mass of worthless chronicle-notices are thrown aside; the description of countries and peoples, the representation of political and mercantile relations - all the facts of so infinite importance, which escape the annalist because they do not admit of being nailed to a particular year - are put into possession of their long-suspended rights. In the procuring of historic materials Polybius shows a caution and perseverance such as are not perhaps paralleled in antiquity; he avails himself of documents, gives comprehensive attention to the literature of different nations, makes the most extensive use of his favourable position for collecting the accounts of actors and eye-witnesses, and, in fine, methodically travels over the whole domain of the Mediterranean states and part of the coast of the Atlantic Ocean[28].

  Truthfulness is his nature. In all great matters he has no interest for one state or against another, for this man or against that, but is singly and solely interested in the essential connection of events, to present which in their true relation of causes and effects seems to him not merely the first but the sole task of the historian. Lastly, the narrative is a model of completeness, simplicity, and clearness. Still all these uncommon advantages by no means constitute a historian of the first rank. Polybius grasps his literary task, as he grasped his practical, with great understanding, but with the understanding alone. History, the struggle of necessity and liberty, is a moral problem; Polybius treats it as if it were a mechanical one. The whole alone has value for him, in nature as in the state; the particular event, the individual man, however wonderful they may appear, are yet properly mere single elements, insignificant wheels in the highly artificial mechanism which is named the state. So far Polybius was certainly qualified as no other was to narrate the history of the Roman people, which actually solved the marvellous problem of raising itself to unparalleled internal and external greatness without producing a single statesman of genius in the highest sense, and which resting on its simple foundations developed itself with wonderful almost mathematical consistency. But the element of moral freedom bears sway in the history of every people, and it was not neglected by Polybius in the history of Rome with impunity.

  His treatment of all questions, in which right, honour, religion are involved, is not merely shallow, but radically false. The same holds true wherever a genetic construction is required; the purely mechanical attempts at explanation, which Polybius substitutes, are sometimes altogether desperate; there is hardly, for instance, a more foolish political speculation than that which derives the excellent constitution of Rome from a judicious mixture of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements, and deduces the successes of Rome from the excellence of her constitution.

  His conception of relations is everywhere dreadfully jejune and destitute of imagination: his contemptuous and over-wise mode of treating religious matters is altogether offensive. The narrative, preserving throughout an intentional contrast to the usual Greek historiography with its artistic style, is doubtless correct and clear, but flat and languid, digressi
ng with undue frequency into polemical discussions or into biographical, not seldom very self-sufficient, description of his own experiences. A controversial vein pervades the whole work; the author destined his treatise primarily for the Romans, and yet found among them only a very small circle that understood him; he felt that he remained in the eyes of the Romans a foreigner, in the eyes of his countrymen a renegade, and that with his grand conception of his subject he belonged more to the future than to the present Accordingly he was not exempt from a certain ill-humour and personal bitterness, which frequently appear after a quarrelsome and paltry fashion in his attacks upon the superficial or even venal Greek and the uncritical Roman historians, so that he degenerates from the tone of the historian to that of the reviewer. Polybius is not an attractive author; but as truth and truthfulness are of more value than all ornament and elegance, no other author of antiquity perhaps can be named to whom we are indebted for so much real instruction. His books are like the sun in the field of Roman history; at the point where they begin the veil of mist which still envelops the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars is raised, and at the point where they end a new and, if possible, still more vexatious twilight begins.