Roman Tragedy
The Hellenism of Euripides flowed to Rome through very various channels, and probably produced a speedier and deeper effect there by indirect means than in the form of direct translation. The tragic drama in Rome was not exactly later in its rise than the comic[39]; but the far greater expense of putting a tragedy on the stage - which was undoubtedly felt as a consideration of moment, at least during the Hannibalic war - as well as the nature of the audience[40] retarded the development of tragedy. In the comedies of Plautus the allusions to tragedies are not very frequent, and most references of this kind may have been taken from the originals. The first and only influential tragedian of this epoch was the younger contemporary of Naevius and Plautus, Quintus Ennius (515-585), whose pieces were already travestied by contemporary comic writers, and were exhibited and declaimed by posterity down to the days of the empire.
The tragic drama of the Romans is far less known to us than the comic: on the whole the same features, which have been noticed in the case of comedy, are presented by tragedy also. The dramatic stock, in like manner, was mainly formed by translations of Greek pieces. The preference was given to subjects derived from the siege of Troy and the legends immediately connected with it, evidently because this cycle of myths alone was familiar to the Roman public through instruction at school; by their side incidents of striking horror predominate, such as matricide or infanticide in the Eumenides, the Alcmaeon, the Cresphontes, the Melanippe, the Medea, and the immolation of virgins in the Polyxena, the Erechthides, the Andromeda, the Iphigenia - we cannot avoid recalling the fact, that the public for which these tragedies were prepared was in the habit of witnessing gladiatorial games. The female characters and ghosts appear to have made the deepest impression. In addition to the rejection of masks, the most remarkable deviation of the Roman edition from the original related to the chorus. The Roman theatre, fitted up doubtless in the first instance for comic plays without chorus, had not the special dancing-stage (orchestra) with the altar in the middle, on which the Greek chorus performed its part, or, to speak more correctly, the space thus appropriated among the Greeks served with the Romans as a sort of pit; accordingly the choral dance at least, with its artistic alternations and intermixture of music and declamation, must have been omitted in Rome, and, even if the chorus was retained, it had but little importance. Of course there were various alterations of detail, changes in the metres, curtailments, and disfigurements; in the Latin edition of the Iphigenia of Euripides, for instance, the chorus of women was - either after the model of another tragedy, or by the editor's own device - converted into a chorus of soldiers. The Latin tragedies of the sixth century cannot be pronounced good translations in our sense of the word[41]; yet it is probable that a tragedy of Ennius gave a far less imperfect image of the original of Euripides than a comedy of Plautus gave of the original of Menander.
Moral Effect of Tragedy
The historical position and influence of Greek tragedy in Rome were entirely analogous to those of Greek comedy; and while, as the difference in the two kinds of composition necessarily implied, the Hellenistic tendency appeared in tragedy under a purer and more spiritual form, the tragic drama of this period and its principal representative Ennius displayed far more decidedly an anti-national and consciously propagandist aim. Ennius, hardly the most important but certainly the most influential poet of the sixth century, was not a Latin by birth, but on the contrary by virtue of his origin half a Greek. Of Messapian descent and Hellenic training, he settled in his thirty-fifth year at Rome, and lived there - at first as a resident alien, but after 570 as a burgess[42] - in straitened circumstances, supported partly by giving instruction in Latin and Greek, partly by the proceeds of his pieces, partly by the donations of those Roman grandees, who, like Publius Scipio, Titus Flamininus, and Marcus Fulvius Nobilior, were inclined to promote the modern Hellenism and to reward the poet who sang their own and their ancestors' praises and even accompanied some of them to the field in the character, as it were, of a poet laureate nominated beforehand to celebrate the great deeds which they were to perform. He has himself elegantly described the client-like qualities requisite for such a calling[43]. From the outset and by virtue of the whole tenor of his life a cosmopolite, he had the skill to appropriate the distinctive features of the nations among which he lived - Greek, Latin, and even Oscan - without devoting himself absolutely to any cne of them; and while the Hellenism of the earlier Roman poets was the result rather than the conscious aim of their poetic activity, and accordingly they at least attempted more or less to take their stand on national ground, Ennius on the contrary is very distinctly conscious of his revolutionary tendency, and evidently labours with zeal to bring into vogue neologico-Hellenic ideas among the Italians. His most serviceable instrument was tragedy. The remains of his tragedies show that he was well acquainted with the whole range of the Greek tragic drama and with Aeschylus and Sophocles in particular; it is the less therefore the result of accident, that he has modelled the great majority of his pieces, and all those that attained celebrity, on Euripides. In the selection and treatment he was doubtless influenced partly by external considerations. But these alone cannot account for his bringing forward so decidedly the Euripidean element in Euripides; for his neglecting the choruses still more than did his original; for his laying still stronger emphasis on sensuous effect than the Greek; nor for his taking up pieces like the Thyestes and the Telephus so well known from the immortal ridicule of Aristophanes, with their princes' woes and woful princes, and even such a piece as Menalippa the Female Philosopher, in which the whole plot turns on the absurdity of the national religion, and the tendency to make war on it from the physicist point of view is at once apparent. The sharpest arrows are everywhere - and that partly in passages which can be proved to have been inserted[44] - directed against faith in the miraculous, and we almost wonder that the censorship of the Roman stage allowed such tirades to pass as the following:
Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus;
Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest.
We have already remarked[45] that Ennius scientifically inculcated the same irreligion in a didactic poem of his own; and it is evident that he was in earnest with this freethinking. With this trait other features are quite accordant - his political opposition tinged with radicalism, that here and there appears[46]; his singing the praises of the Greek pleasures of the table[47]; above all his setting aside the last national element in Latin poetry, the Saturnian measure, and substituting for it the Greek hexameter. That the "multiform" poet executed all these tasks with equal neatness, that he elaborated hexameters out of a language of by no means dactylic structure, and that without checking the natural flow of his style he moved with confidence and freedom amidst unwonted measures and forms - are so many evidences of his extraordinary plastic talent, which was in fact more Greek than Roman[48]; where he offends us, the offence is owing much more frequently to Greek alliteration[49] than to Roman ruggedness. He was not a great poet, but a man of graceful and sprightly talent, throughout possessing the vivid sensibilities of a poetic nature, but needing the tragic buskin to feel himself a poet and wholly destitute of the comic vein. We can understand the pride with which the Hellenizing poet looked down on those rude strains
quos olim Faunei vatesque canebant,
and the enthusiasm with which he celebrates his own artistic poetry:
Enni foeta, salve,
Versus propinas flammeos medullitus.
The clever man had an instinctive assurance that he had spread his sails to a prosperous breeze; Greek tragedy became, and thenceforth remained, a possession of the Latin nation.
National Dramas
Through less frequented paths, and with a less favourable wind, a bolder mariner pursued a higher aim. Naevius not only like Ennius - although with far less success - adapted Greek tragedies for the Roman stag
e, but also attempted to create, independently of the Greeks, a grave national drama (fabula praetextata). No outward obstacles here stood in the way; he brought forward subjects both from Roman legend and from the contemporary history of the country on the stage of his native land. Such were his Nursing of Romulus and Remus or the Wolf, in which Amulius king of Alba appeared, and his Clastidium, which celebrated the victory of Marcellus over the Celts in 532.(49) After his example, Ennius in his Ambracia described from personal observation the siege of that city by his patron Nobilior in 565[50]. But the number of these national dramas remained small, and that species of composition soon disappeared from the stage; the scanty legend and the colourless history of Rome were unable permanently to compete with the rich cycle of Hellenic legends. Respecting the poetic value of the pieces we have no longer the means of judging; but, if we may take account of the general poetical intention, there were in Roman literature few such strokes of genius as the creation of a Roman national drama. Only the Greek tragedians of that earliest period which still felt itself nearer to the gods - only poets like Phrynichus and Aeschylus - had the courage to bring the great deeds which they had witnessed, and in which they had borne a part, on the stage by the side of those of legendary times; and here, if anywhere, we are enabled vividly to realize what the Punic wars were and how powerful was their effect, when we find a poet, who like Aeschylus had himself fought in the battles which he sang, introducing the kings and consuls of Rome upon that stage on which men had hitherto been accustomed to see none but gods and heroes.
Recitative Poetry
Recitative poetry also took its rise during this epoch at Rome. Livius naturalized the custom which among the ancients held the place of our modern publication - the public reading of new works by the author - in Rome, at least to the extent of reciting them in his school. As poetry was not in this instance practised with a view to a livelihood, or at any rate not directly so, this branch of it was not regarded by public opinion with such disfavour as writing for the stage: towards the end of this epoch one or two Romans of quality had publicly come forward in this manner as poets[51]. Recitative poetry however was chiefly cultivated by those poets who occupied themselves with writing for the stage, and the former held a subordinate place as compared with the latter; in fact, a public to which read poetry might address itself can have existed only to a very limited extent at this period in Rome.
Satura
Above all, lyrical, didactic, and epigrammatic poetry found but feeble representation. The religious festival chants - as to which the annals of this period certainly have already thought it worth while to mention the author - as well as the monumental inscriptions on temples and tombs, for which the Saturnian remained the regular measure, hardly belong to literature proper. So far as the minor poetry makes its appearance at all, it presents itself ordinarily, and that as early as the time of Naevius, under the name of satura. This term was originally applied to the old stage-poem without action, which from the time of Livius was driven off the stage by the Greek drama; but in its application to recitative poetry it corresponds in some measure to our "miscellaneous poems", and like the latter denotes not any positive species or style of art, but simply poems not of an epic or dramatic kind, treating of any matters (mostly subjective), and written in any form, at the pleasure of the author. In addition to Cato's "poem on Morals" to be noticed afterwards, which was presumably written in Saturnian verses after the precedent of the older first attempts at a national didactic poetry[52], there came under this category especially the minor poems of Ennius, which that writer, who was very fertile in this department, published partly in his collection of saturae, partly separately. Among these were brief narrative poems relating to the legendary or contemporary history of his country; editions of the religious romance of Euhemerus[53], of the poems dealing with natural philosophy circulating in the name of Epicharmus[54], and of the gastronomies of Archestratus of Gela, a poet who treated of the higher cookery; as also a dialogue between Life and Death, fables of Aesop, a collection of moral maxims, parodies and epigrammatic trifles - small matters, but indicative of the versatile powers as well as the neological didactic tendencies of the poet, who evidently allowed himself the freest range in this field, which the censorship did not reach.
Metrical Annals - Naevius
The attempts at a metrical treatment of the national annals lay claim to greater poetical and historical importance. Here too it was Naevius who gave poetic form to so much of the legendary as well as of the contemporary history as admitted of connected narrative; and who, more especially, recorded in the half-prosaic Saturnian national metre the story of the first Punic war simply and distinctly, with a straightforward adherence to fact, without disdaining anything at all as unpoetical, and without at all, especially in the description of historical times, going in pursuit of poetical flights or embellishments - maintaining throughout his narrative the present tense[55]. What we have already said of the national drama of the same poet, applies substantially to the work of which we are now speaking. The epic, like the tragic, poetry of the Greeks lived and moved essentially in the heroic period; it was an altogether new and, at least in design, an enviably grand idea - to light up the present with the lustre of poetry. Although in point of execution the chronicle of Naevius may not have been much better than the rhyming chronicles of the middle ages, which are in various respects of kindred character, yet the poet was certainly justified in regarding this work of his with an altogether peculiar complacency. It was no small achievement, in an age when there was absolutely no historical literature except official records, to have composed for his countrymen a connected account of the deeds of their own and the earlier time, and in addition to have placed before their eyes the noblest incidents of that history in a dramatic form.
Ennius
Ennius proposed to himself the very same task as Naevius; but the similarity of the subject only brings out into stronger relief the political and poetical contrast between the national and the anti-national poet. Naevius sought out for the new subject a new form; Ennius fitted or forced it into the forms of the Hellenic epos. The hexameter took the place of the Saturnian verse; the ornate style of the Homeridae, striving after plastic vividness of delineation, took the place of the homely historic narrative. Wherever the circumstances admit, Homer is directly translated; e. g. the burial of those that fell at Heraclea is described after the model of the burial of Patroclus, and under the helmet of Marcus Livius Stolo, the military tribune who fights with the Istrians, lurks none other than the Homeric Ajax; the reader is not even spared the Homeric invocation of the Muse. The epic machinery is fully set agoing; after the battle of Cannae, for instance, Juno in a full council of the gods pardons the Romans, and Jupiter after obtaining the consent of his wife promises them a final victory over the Carthaginians. Nor do the "Annals" fail to betray the neological and Hellenistic tendencies of the author. The very employment of the gods for mere decoration bears this stamp. The remarkable vision, with which the poem opens, tells in good Pythagorean style how the soul now inhabiting Quintus Ennius had previously been domiciled in Homer and still earlier in a peacock, and then in good physicist style explains the nature of things and the relation of the body to the mind. Even the choice of the subject serves the same purpose - at any rate the Hellenic literati of all ages have found an especially suitable handle for their Graeco-cosmopolite tendencies in this very manipulation of Roman history. Ennius lays stress on the circumstance that the Romans were reckoned Greeks: Contendunt Graecos, Graios memorare solent sos.
The poetical value of the greatly celebrated Annals may easily be estimated after the remarks which we have already made regarding the excellences and defects of the poet in general. It was natural that as a poet of lively sympathies, he should feel himself elevated by the enthusiastic impulse which the great age of the Punic wars gave to the national sensibilities of Italy, and that he should not only often happily imitate Homeric simplicity, but shoul
d also and still more frequently make his lines strikingly echo the solemnity and decorum of the Roman character. But the construction of his epic was defective; indeed it must have been very lax and indifferent, when it was possible for the poet to insert a special book by way of supplement to please an otherwise forgotten hero and patron. On the whole the Annals were beyond question the work in which Ennius fell farthest short of his aim. The plan of making an Iliad pronounces its own condemnation. It was Ennius, who in this poem for the first time introduced into literature that changeling compound of epos and of history, which from that time up to the present day haunts it like a ghost, unable either to live or to die. But the poem certainly had its success. Ennius claimed to be the Roman Homer with still greater ingenuousness than Klopstock claimed to be the German, and was received as such by his contemporaries and still more so by posterity. The veneration for the father of Roman poetry was transmitted from generation to generation; even the polished Quintilian says, "Let us revere Ennius as we revere an ancient sacred grove, whose mighty oaks of a thousand years are more venerable than beautiful"; and, if any one is disposed to wonder at this, he may recall analogous phenomena in the successes of the Aeneid, the Henriad, and the Messiad. A mighty poetical development of the nation would indeed have set aside that almost comic official parallel between the Homeric Iliad and the Ennian Annals as easily as we have set aside the comparison of Karschin with Sappho and of Willamov with Pindar; but no such development took place in Rome. Owing to the interest of the subject especially for aristocratic circles, and the great plastic talent of the poet, the Annals remained the oldest Roman original poem which appeared to the culture of later generations readable or worth reading; and thus, singularly enough, posterity came to honour this thoroughly anti-national epos of a half-Greek litterateur as the true model poem of Rome.
The History of Rome. Book III Page 55