Epic poetry at Rome reached its peaks with Ennius and Virgil: the century or more which lay between these two giants produced no great epics, and those who attempted the task are now little more than names. By the Gracchan age drama was passing its zenith, both in tragedy and comedy, but a few notable figures emerged.5 L. Accius (c. 170–c. 85) became a very popular tragedian. We have the titles of over forty of his tragedies which were based on Greek drama (fabulae palliatae) and of two historical dramas (praetextae): his treatment was melodramatic and he preferred violent plots, but his work was highly esteemed not only by his contemporaries but also by Cicero, Horace and Quintillian. The practice of adapting Greek comedies for the Roman stage, which Plautus and Terence had followed with such skill, came to an end with the death in 103 of a writer named Turpilius. A more popular form of comedy emerged in the fabulae togatae, ‘comedies in native dress’, which portrayed domestic life in Italian towns and villages. The pioneer here was Titinius, who was perhaps slightly junior to Terence. T. Quinctius Atta (who died in 77) excelled in his women characters; the titles of eleven of his plays survive. More important was L. Afranius (born about 150), of whose works we have forty-four titles; though he retained an Italian background, he admired Menander and other New Comedy Greek poets. This turning again to Greece suggests that the native inspiration was weakening; at any rate Afranius found no successor to rival his achievements in this field. But if Rome gradually ceased to produce new dramatists of talent (and men tended to write plays as mere literary exercises rather than for production), the earlier plays remained popular in the days of Cicero. Old tragedies and comedies were revived, and stage stars, such as Aesopus and Roscius, enhanced their reputations by their performances in plays by Accius and Plautus. At the same time the theatres were made more attractive and the performance more spectacular and lavish.
Many theatre-goers, however, demanded less intellectual fare: the farce and mime were the answer. A primitive form of rustic farce had grown up in Campania, whence it had spread to Rome (‘Oscan’ or ‘Atellan’ farce). It had a few traditional clownish characters (like Punch and Judy) and much of the dialogue was probably impromptu, crude in jest and language. It was given a more literary form during the Sullan period by two writers, L. Pomponius and Novius, who retained the rustic crudeness and stock characters, but extended the range and even introduced some of the conventional characters of Greek New Comedy. Thereafter the Atellane drama probably reverted to its less literary semi-improvised form and in this guise it continued to enjoy great popularity during the Roman Empire.
The mime, well known in Greek South Italy in early days, was performed by groups of strolling players, who with simple stage and curtain put on a plain show, the chief actor or actress using one or two others as foils to their wit and banter, unrestrained by any sense of decency. This shapeless and varied performance was given literary status by a Roman knight, Decimus Laberius (c. 115–43), but although the names of 43 of his mimes survive, little is known about their form or nature, apart from their frequent indecency in subject and language. No less popular was a slave from Syria, Publilius Syrus, whose ability soon won for him patronage and freedom. In a general challenge to all rivals at the ludi Caesaris in 46 or 45, he defeated even Laberius. Later a collection was made of the moral sayings of his characters, which shows that mimes could provide ethical maxims as well as much indecency. Like the farce, the mime continued in undiminished popularity during the Empire.
At the other extreme from these sub-literary, or non-literary, forms of entertainment stand the literary circles and above all the two splendid poets that emerged in the late Republic, Lucretius and Catullus. Many cultured men tried their hands at poetry for their own or their friends’ amusement, and there seems to have been a guild or college for professional poets which met in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine; at one time Accius was its head. Private literary circles did not necessarily cease with the death of Scipio Aemilianus’ various friends. Lutatius Catulus (cos. 102) had contacts with other literary men even if he did not form a ‘circle’ in the way that Aemilianus had done; he thus helped to form a link with Cicero and his contemporaries. In the late Republic a coterie of younger poets, the Neoterici, turned away from earlier Greek poetry for their inspiration to the school of Alexandria, which was marked by great and often pedantic learning; it sought fresh material, not before handled in verse, and often the poet’s own emotions were given more rein. Members of this group in Rome included C. Licinius Calvus (son of the annalist Licinius Macer), of whose poems only a few fragments survive, Cinna (possibly C. Helvius Cinna the unfortunate tribune of 44 B.C.), and their friend C. Valerius Catullus.6
Catullus7 (c. 84–c. 54) was born in Cisalpine Gaul at Verona, the son of a wealthy family, and went to Rome about 62. He became infatuated with the Lesbia of his poems, whose real name was Clodia; she was one of the sisters of the tribune of 58, P. Clodius, probably the wife of Metellus Celer (cos. 60). Later he was supplanted in her affections by other lovers, including Caelius, presumably Cicero’s young friend M. Caelius Rufus. If these traditional identifications are correct, as they most likely are, Catullus will have fallen in love with one of the most profligate women of Roman society and the leader of a fast set. In 57 he served on the staff of the propraetor Memmius in Bithynia, and probably after his return he composed a final bitter farewell to Lesbia (poem 11). He also directed some stinging lampoons against Caesar and the Caesarians. His poems, of which 116 survive, comprise short lyrics on a variety of subjects, a few longer pieces, and a group in elegiac metre. Though he owed much to Alexandrine influence, he also turned to the older Greek poets, especially Sappho. With her, he may be reckoned among the greatest lyric poets of ancient, and indeed, all times. His success he owed partly to his love of nature and to the sincerity and depths of the personal feelings that he expressed, which contrasted strongly with earlier Roman conceptions of gravitas and yet reflected a simplicitas alien to the sophisticated society in which he lived.
Titus Lucretius Carus8 (c. 94–55), the slightly older contemporary of Catullus, is an obscure figure: it is even uncertain whether he was a member or only a dependant of the aristocratic family of the Lucretii. He dedicated his poem to C. Memmius, a son-in-law of Sulla and praetor in 58, who had befriended Catullus and Cinna: whether Memmius was primarily his friend or patron cannot be said. Nor can the famous story that he was poisoned by a love-philtre, suffered bouts of insanity and committed suicide be confirmed. As an Epicurean, he took no part in public life. His poem De Rerum Natura, in six books, is didactic in purpose: it expounds the materialism and atomic theory of his master Epicurus, in an attempt to free man from superstitious fears by proving that the human soul does not survive death (which should therefore not be feared) and that the gods do not intervene in mundane affairs; these are governed by mechanical laws which control the movement of the atoms of which the universe is made, though owing to a postulated spontaneous swerve in the motion of the atoms, man is allowed free-will in this otherwise deterministic system. If he had merely succeeded in putting Epicurus’ philosophy before Roman readers (and this is what Lucretius himself regarded as his main achievement), his great technical skill in handling such material in verse would have been noteworthy, but that was not all, because he happened to be a great poet also. He brought to this unpromising theme such intensity of feeling that his poems are shot through with passages of great majesty, eloquence and splendour, and on the strength of these tokens of a powerful and vivid imagination he is reckoned by some critics worthy to be classed with Virgil himself.
4. HISTORICAL WRITING9
The earliest Romans to write histories were some senators who lived during the Hannibalic War. Somewhat surprisingly they composed their works in Greek, not Latin: this was partly because they wanted to justify and explain Roman policy to the Greek world. Though they found some imitators in the second century, Cato the Censor set the example of writing in Latin when he composed an account of Rome’s o
rigins and history down to his own day. Other writers then began to treat Roman history in a year-by-year ‘annalistic’ manner: one of the earliest of them was L. Calpurnius Piso, the consul of 133, whose work ran from the origins of Rome down to his own day. An important development took place c. 123 when the Pontifex Maximus published in eighty books the Annales Maximi. This was a systematic arrangement of the material provided by the Tabulae Pontificum, which had for centuries been set up annually in the Regia and gave the names of the magistrates (fasti) and other matters of public interest. The publication of this material in convenient and ‘standard’ form stimulated other writers. In Gracchan times Cn. Gellius wrote Annales on a fuller scale than his predecessors, and the son-in-law of Laelius, C. Fannius (cos. 122), was the author of an authoritative history, perhaps from the origins, but probably of his own times. Three later annalists of the Sullan age, Valerius Antias, Claudius Quadrigarius and C. Licinius Macer (tribune in 73) wrote on an extended scale (Valerius in at least seventy-five books) and elaborated their material. By literary devices and rhetorical skill they heightened the interest of their works, but their facts were often less reliable than those of their more sober predecessors. Valerius in particular confused and misrepresented much, partly under the political and family influences of his own day. The works of these three writers are particularly important because they were later extensively used by Livy who gave the annalistic tradition of Roman history its classic form.
Beside the strictly annalistic tradition another method of historical presentation developed, partly from the example of the earlier senators who had written in Greek and from the more discursive work of Cato, but chiefly under the impact of the Universal History of Polybius, the Greek statesman who had been interned in Italy and had won the friendship of Scipio Aemilianus (p. 11). He wrote to show how and why Rome had united the world and how her empire was bringing material and moral advantages to its members. The same idea and viewpoint also inspired the Histories of Posidonius, a Greek philosopher (c. 135–51/50 B.C.), who continued the history of Rome and the eastern and western peoples with whom she same into contact from the point where Polybius’ work had ended (146 B.C.) down to Sulla’s dictatorship. He wrote from the standpoint of the Roman nobility, while his personal contacts with Marius and Pompey led him to dislike the former and admire the latter. The works of Polybius and Posidonius, with their justification of Roman imperialism, their wider interest in mankind as a whole, and their historical accuracy, made a tremendous impact on Roman thought. One of the immediate effects was that Sempronius Asellio (military tribune at Numantia in 133) wrote a history of his time (down to at least 91 B.C.), following Polybius’ more pragmatic attitude. Although Posidonius’ Histories do not survive, they influenced Roman historians as Sallust, Caesar and Tacitus, and Greek writers as Plutarch and Diodorus: the last, who lived at the end of the Republic, wrote a Universal History down to 54 B.C. in forty books.
In an age when the individual began to count more in public life men naturally turned to composing their autobiographies or Memoirs: Aemilius Scaurus, Rutilius Rufus, Q. Catulus and Sulla all did so, and though their works are lost they are reflected in the use made of them by Plutarch for his Lives. Biography is represented by the De Viris Illustribus, written by Cicero’s friend Cornelius Nepos who came to Rome from Cisalpine Gaul: in this book of Lives he compared famous Greeks and Romans. He also wrote some longer biographies, e.g. of Cato the Censor and Cicero, together with a universal history in three books. In his surviving work, a small part of de Vir. Ill., his value as a historian is not great. Another friend of Cicero, Atticus, provided some material for historians when he produced a Liber Annalis, a chronological table of Roman history, and drew up pedigrees of some famous families as the Fabii and Aemilii. He also wrote a Greek monograph on Cicero’s consulship. The historical monograph had been introduced at Rome by Coelius Antipater, who composed after 121 B.C. an account of the Second Punic War in seven books. Written in Latin with vividness and literary skill and based on Carthaginian as well as Roman sources, this work set a new fashion in addition to providing a standard history of its period. The example was followed by Caesar and Sallust.
Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars (the former based on his annual despatches to the Senate) provided material for future historians rather than claimed to be in themselves historia in the Roman sense of the word; they have already been briefly discussed (chapter VII, n. 5). Although their publication no doubt had a political purpose and the author was not free from a natural desire to establish the rightness of his conduct, they bear the stamp of essential truth: the simple and vigorous style, the lucidity of language and exposition, the unobtrusiveness of the writer, and the candour with which he lets the facts speak for themselves, all this suggests a basic honesty rather than a sinister manipulation of the facts. Some implicit self-justification there may have been, but scarcely deliberate tendentious distortion. The Commentaries cannot but show events as Caesar himself saw them and Caesar was both a general and a politician, fighting first for position, then for dignitas and survival.
The eighth book De Bello Gallico was written by A. Hirtius (cos. 43), an officer of Caesar, who lacked Caesar’s military experience. Hirtius was also probably the author of a continuation of Caesar’s Civil War, the Bellum Alexandrinum, though he did not take part in that war himself; this book includes Caesar’s campaign at Zela. Two other works deal with Caesar’s campaigns: the Bellum Africum (of 47–6 B.C.), written by a competent soldier who was not a staff officer, and the Bellum Hispaniense (campaign of Munda), written in awkward Latin by an eye-witness.
Something has also already been said about the historical works of Caesar’s supporter, C. Sallustius Crispus,10 who after serving him in the civil war, was appointed governor of Africa (p. 47; chapter III, n. 13; VI, n. 4; VII, n. 20). Thereafter he was accused of extortion, but avoided trouble and spent his remaining days in his famous Gardens (Horti Sallustiani) in Rome. In 43 he published his account of the Catilinarian Conspiracy (Bellum Catilinae) and his Bellum Iugurthinum some two years later. After 39 B.C. he turned from monographs to a full History of Rome, beginning from 78 B.C. where an earlier writer, L. Cornelius Sisenna (who had started from the Social War) had left off, and continuing the story down to 67 B.C. But whereas Sisenna had written from the conservative point of view, the five books of Sallust’s Historiae and his monographs champion the popular cause. Both the Catiline and the Jugurtha denounce the degeneracy and corruption of the Optimates, and the former also defends Caesar from the charge that he was involved in Catiline’s conspiracy; both therefore are political pamphlets rather than impartial and detailed accounts of their subject-matter. In style Sallust followed Thucydides and developed a terse, archaic manner which was epigrammatic, vivid and effective, but he fell woefully short of his master in objectivity of matter. Yet despite his bias, he by no means always exalts his hero Marius (partly because he made use of Sulla’s Memoirs), and his vivid character sketches, even of politicians of the other side, are not always unfair. Unfortunately only a few fragments of his chief work survive. Two Letters to Caesar and an Invective against Cicero are also attributed to Sallust, but their genuineness is very doubtful (see chapter VII, n. 20). Sallust was much concerned with the corrupting effects of power, ambition and avarice on character, but his views are not original and he should not be claimed as a great thinker. As a critical historian he cannot be placed among the great, but his literary skill raises him high among the writers of Rome.
5. ORATORY11
Oratorical skill became of increasing value to its possessors, whether displayed in the Senate House, lawcourts or Assemblies. Distinction in oratory or law, it was said, ranked with nobility of birth and military service as one of the three claims to the consulship. It was owing to his powerful oratorical gifts that Cicero won his way to the consulship and into the ranks of the nobility. Increasing numbers of young Romans studied the technique of public speech, whether at R
ome or at the Greek rhetorical schools in the East. In Cicero’s opinion Roman achievement first equalled that of Greece in the oratory of Gaius Gracchus and his successors, many of whom published their speeches after delivery. Two masters of the next generation whom Cicero admired were M. Antonius (cos. 99), grandfather of the triumvir, and L. Crassus (cos. 95). When Cicero himself began to practise, the chief figure at the Roman bar was Q. Hortensius Hortalus (114–50), who favoured the Asiatic school of oratory which was more floral and ornamental than the simpler and more restrained Attic style that was cultivated by many, including young Caesar. Cicero himself followed a style midway between these two extreme schools, and with such success that when he triumphed over Hortensius at the trial of Verres he gained the first place, which he retained for the rest of his life.
In his speeches Cicero raised Latin prose to its highest point in this sphere. A rich vocabulary, amplitude of expression and great attention to the rhythm of his clauses produced a sonorous and majestic style, which might be varied with subtle strokes of irony, wit, or bitter invective. This result was not reached by mere natural talent; oratory was now a skilled and technical art, and Cicero not only studied the theory, but also wrote upon it. The most important of his rhetorical treatises are the three books of the De Oratore, the Brutus and the Orator.
In Cicero the culture of the later Republic is seen at its best. Unsurpassed in the field of oratory, he also turned his hand to works on political theory (p. 135 f.) and philosophy (p. 173), to translations of Greek authors, and to poetry; his most famous poem was the one he composed on his own consulship (de consulatu meo) in which he appears to have shown a lack of skill surprising in such a master of prose-rhythms. Not the least of his contributions were his private letters which he wrote to his friends without any idea of later publication. They are among the most interesting legacies of antiquity, not only for the flood of light that they throw upon the Roman world of his day, but also for the revelation of his own thought and personality. Through them we have a more intimate knowledge of Cicero than of almost any other figure of antiquity. There he stands revealed, in all his strength and weakness, and, taken all in all, few other statesmen of his day, had their private thoughts been thus recorded, would have provided so worthy an example of the culture and humanity of the age.
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