LECTURES ON LATIN POETRY 7 LATIN POETRY LECTURES DELIVERED IN 1893 ON THE PERCV TURNBULL MEMORIAL FOUNDATION IN THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY BY R. Y. TYRRELL REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON Coypyright, 1895, BY R. Y. TYRRELL. All rights reserved. TO THE PARENTS OP PERCY GRAEME TURNBULL (Cfeis jPolume IS DEDICATED WITH SENTIMENTS OF THE SINCEREST RESPECT, ADMIRATION, AND ESTEEM BALTIMORE, MARYLAND. Sixa ftvapitti icoivov PINDAR, Nem. iv. is. Oh for red flowers of fire from Pindar's hand, To weave with warp of legendary lore That pictured woof, the tale of Baltimore f O fairest daughter of old Maryland, O lordly town on whose inviolate strand Burst the loud shock of war that overbore The tyrannous Atlantic's imminent roar ! Long to its scabbard her reluctant brand Clave : and when, weeping those were gracious tears - At last she drew it, then with force tenfold The htfge third wave of battle ruining rolFd And thunder 1 d on, till from the frozen meres To sun-bathed Florida, from main to main, Man cast from off him Racfs galling chain. R. Y. TYRRELL. PREFACE. THESE lectures form the third course delivered on the Percy Turnbull Memorial foundation in the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore in the spring of 1893. The first course was given by Mr. Ed- mund Clarence Stedman in 1891, on "The Nature and Elements of Poetry," and was followed in 1892 by " The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry," by Professor Jebb. I will not deprecate in vain the (alas ! ) inevitable comparison with these two masterly volumes, but will hasten to put be- fore my readers the general scope and aim which I proposed to myself, and in doing so I will use the words which formed the opening paragraphs of the introductory lecture as delivered in Baltimore : " In the first of the lectures I take a very rapid survey of Latin poetry as a whole, never pausing to consider at all closely any particular poet, except in the case of one or two literary personages whose influence on the course of Latin poetry seems to have been generally underrated, and to whom I shall not have an opportunity to recur in subse- quent lectures. I fear the imperative necessity to generalize on this first to me most welcome occasion of making your acquaintance will ren- der it hard for me to avoid trying your patience. X PREFACE The next lecture, too, dealing with the early Latin poetry, must still be of a somewhat general cast. After that we shall be able to confine our attention mainly to individual poets, or to compared or contrasted pairs of poets, until the consideration of the Poetry of the Decline again makes it neces- sary to abandon the microscope for the field-glass, and to accommodate our vision to a wider prospect. I will endeavor here briefly to describe what will be my scope and aim. "It is plain that I should not have sufficient time, even supposing I had sufficient audacity, to con- struct a kind of catechism of what we should believe about Latin poetry, or even to attempt to give an exhaustive summary of its contents. Still less would it be possible or profitable to try to set forth a conspectus of what other people have thought on this subject. It comes, then, to this : I must aim at putting before you what I think most interesting in connection with Latin poetry, sometimes describ- ing how certain masterpieces (for, of course, we shall be brought to consider some masterpieces) have affected myself. I hope, therefore, that if I do not constantly pause to explain that I am only giving what is in my own mind, and not at all claiming any right to speak ex cathedra, you will not for that reason suppose that I am putting for- ward for your acceptance views which I am really submitting to your judgment. This University has invited an expression of my opinions on a subject which has been for many years most attractive to PREFACE xi me, and I regard such an invitation on your part as a very distinguished honor done to me and to my University. I hope to gain your assent to most of my views, and, even when I do not gain assent, I shall be glad if I succeed in stimulating the play of consciousness on important and fascinating topics, even though it should take the form of a criticism which even if dissentient will, I am sure, be kind. I shall not attempt to give a life of each poet who may be under consideration, except in so far as the incidents of his career have left a distinct impress on his work. It will be more in accordance with my own tastes, and (as I believe) with the scope of the Percy Turnbull Lectures, to devote the hours during which it will be my pleasant task to address you, not to biography or literary history, but rather to analysis and literary criticism ; and to endeavor to set before you rather studies in the different poets and periods than chapters in a history of lit- erature. I shall have to ask, not what were the works of each poet, but what was his work ; how he looked out on the world, and what was the world on which he looked ; whether he had a message to society, and how far he succeeded in delivering it. " I shall be by no means an unvarying eulogist of Latin poetry. Indeed, in the case of some of the poets I fear I shall run the risk of being called a harsh and unsympathetic critic. I shall have to put before you many things which have often been said before. I have, however, endeavored as much as possible to avoid tracks that are too well beaten, Xll PREFACE and to dwell in preference on points of view which may seem to have been comparatively neglected. " To attempt, it may be said, to say anything at the same time true and new on such a theme as Virgil or Horace, really seems out of the question. But it is a characteristic of philological and histor- ical inquiry that the same subject admits of being viewed from very diverse points, and this is pe- culiarly true in dealing with poetry. Each actor, each musician, has a different way of rendering Shakespeare or Beethoven, and there is no final interpretation of the work of a great artist. Lit- erature can do no more than give us the opinions and sentiments of particular persons at particular times. To estimate even to understand these opinions and sentiments, we must know something of the times and circumstances in which they were expressed. It will be requisite, therefore, now and then, to invade the domain of history and biogra- phy, and thus diversify our more purely literary studies." Such, then, broadly, was my aim. But here I must make my acknowledgments to the writers who have throughout been my guides and inspir- ers. Many of them will be at once recognized as indispensable : for instance, every writer or lec- turer on Lucretius must owe infinite obligations to the great work of Munro ; and the same remark applies to the best editors of the other great poets of Rome : I mean to that editor who (like Coning- ton and Mayor and Ellis) has in each case been PREFACE Xlii acknowledged to have made a particular poet his own peculiar province. Then the historians of Rome Mommsen, Merivale, Gibbon often help the lecturer, as well as histories of literature, like the excellent work of Mr. Crutwell, and the late Professor Sellar's acute and eloquent studies in Roman poetry. The German writers, especially Bernhardy and Teuffel revised by Schwabe, are, of course, very valuable. But I have found the French school most helpful and stimulating. M. Patin's volumes entitled " Etudes sur la Poe"sie Latine " have been invaluable to me, especially in the earlier lectures, and, though I have often ex- pressed my obligations to him, I owe to him many debts not specifically acknowledged, in the way of suggestion and point of view. An equal or greater debt I would own to another charming French critic, M. Constant Martha, whose eloquent study, " Le Poe'me de Lucrece," is as fascinating in style and as profound in insight as his " Moralistes sous 1'Empire Romain," which works have both been largely used by me in the third and seventh lec- tures. Nisard's " Les Poetes Latins de la De'ca- dence " was the basis of the last lecture. Often, too, the masterly essays of M. Gaston Boissier have been helpful and inspiring. Indeed, for breadth of view as well as charm of style, the French writers on Latin literature seem to me quite unrivaled. In the case of other writers who have not been so largely used, acknowledgment is made to each in his own place. Among them I would mention xir PREFACE especially the late Professor Nettleship's essays, and the tract of Hartman, " De Horatio Poeta." Though my obligations to previous writers are so large, my own opinions will be found to be a very pronounced ingredient in the book : I fear they will seem too pronounced to some, especially to the uncompromising and indiscriminate fautores ueterum. Many of the lectures appeared in English and American magazines either before or after they were delivered as lectures ; and I have to thank the proprietors and editors of the several maga- zines, especially those of the " Quarterly Review " (London), and the "Atlantic Monthly" (Boston), for permission to use them in this volume. In hardly any case, however, does the lecture appear in exactly the same form which it had as an article. Nor are the lectures printed precisely as they were delivered. To some (especially V., VI., VIII.), considerable additions have been made. The Ap- pendix on Recent Translators of Virgil formed no part of the lecture as delivered in Baltimore and Chicago ; neither did the remarks on Petronius in the eighth lecture. I have not printed in the lec- tures certain expressions called forth from me from time to time at their delivery by the uniform cour- tesy and friendliness of my hearers in America, at Baltimore, Richmond, Chicago, and New York, a courtesy and friendliness which upheld me at a time when my state of health made me apprehen- sive lest I should be quite unfit to show myself at PREFACE XV all worthy of the high distinction which the invita- tion of the several learned bodies conferred on me. I therefore ask leave to express here my deep and abiding sense of the true kindness and generosity of which I was the object in America. Dull in- deed would be the lecturer who should not feel, in such audiences as I had the good fortune to meet, a source of sustaining inspiration and of a comfort- ing conviction that, whatever failings there might be on his part, one thing at all events would not fail, the encouraging kindliness and genuine sympathy of hearers as sincerely warm-hearted as keenly intelligent. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTORY. PAGB Different points of view from which Poetry may be regarded . I Chief bequest of Rome to the civilized world 2 Rise of Latin, as distinguished from Greek, poetry .... 2 Testimonies to its foreign origin ........... 2 Pre-Hellenic Latin poetry 4 Effect of Greek literature 5 Difficulties which beset the rise of the Drama 5 Early success of Tragedy 7 Difficulty in the history of Latin Tragedy 7 Plautus and Terence 8 Their successors 8 Verses ascribed to Trabea 8 Atellane plays 9 The mimes ..II Anecdote about Caesar and Laberius n Anecdote about Cicero and Laberius 12 Publilius Syrus 13 Poetry of the Caesarian epoch 13 Cicero's poetry 14 Cicero's translations from the Greek 18 Lucretius and Catullus 19 The Augustan College of Poets 20 Lost Augustan poets 21 M. Patin's view of the extant Augustan poetry 23 Virgil and Ovid 26 Post-Augustan poetry 27 xviii CONTENTS II. EARLY LATIN POETRY. Characteristics of very early Roman poetry 28 Anecdote illustrating the popularity of the Ennian epic ... 31 Roman tragedy 32 Passages in Ennius anticipating sentiments in modern literature 34 Pacuvius 35 His defects 36 His popularity 36 Attius 37 Latin tragic poets compared 39 Elevation of Attius 39 Common sense of Attius 41 Defects in Latin tragedy . . 41 Latin comedy 43 Characteristic features of Latin comedy 44 Consequent confusions 45 Horace's criticism on Plautus 46 Motifs of his plays 47 Defects in construction 48 Amphitruo 48 Political life in Latin comedy 49 Prologues of Plautus and Terence 50 Civil and domestic life 50 Plautine drama not adverse to morality 52 Plautus essentially urban 52 Compared with Dickens 53 Compared with Terence 53 Terence ' 54 His refinement 54 Meyer's view of Terence 55 Literary referees under the Republic 56 Caecilius 56 Afranius 57 III. LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. Epicureanism as a doctrine dead 59 Sources of vitality in the poem of Lucretius ....... 59 Varied attractions of the poem 60 CONTENTS xix Relation of Lucretius towards God and Religion 6l Roman religion ... 62 Attitude of Lucretius towards it 64 Enthusiasm of Lucretius ... 67 Illustrated by his attitude towards the passions 68 His worship of Epicurus 68 His delight and belief in his work 69 His " towering passion " ........69 The valley of the shadow of death 70 The gospel according to Lucretius '71 Lucretius on death 72 Allusions to Lucretius by ancient writers 74 Criticism of Cicero on Lucretius 74 Tales about his life 75 Doctrine of a future life in the ancient world 75 The " anti- Lucretius " in Lucretius 77 Language of Lucretius religious 79 Lucretius compared with Swift 80 Originality of Lucretius 8l Vehicle of his teaching 81 Childish speculations in the poem 82 Epicureanism a thorough-going belief 83 Relation of scientific theories to religion 84 Anticipations of modern science in Lucretius 85 Intense interest of Lucretius in his work 86 Beauty of imagery and diction .86 Place of Lucretius among the poets of the world 89 IV. CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION TO THE AUGUSTAN AGE. Lucretius and Catullus contrasted 90 The poems of Catullus the history of his heart 91 Position and circumstances of Catullus 92 Clodia, the Lesbia of Catullus 94 M. Caelius Rufus 98 Poems illustrating the growth of the passion of Catullus . . 100 Other poems of Catullus 106 Mistaken comparison of Catullus with Moore 108 Ode to his villa at Sirmio . HO xx CONTENTS The shorter poems in The"Attis" 112 Figure borrowed by Tennyson from the " Attis " . . . .115 Sadness of Catullus 116 Catullus the connecting link with Augustan poetry . . . .117 Elegiac poetry of the Augustan age . . . 118 Propertius 119 Tibullus 120 Propertius and Ovid compared ....121 Ovid 123 V. VIRGIL. Influence of Virgil on subsequent thought and letters . . .126 His success immediate and enduring 127 Reaction against Virgil in the present century 128 Comparison with Homer 129 The Aeneid as an epic poem 130 Contrast with the Greek 130 Gentleness of mood 131 Contrast with Homer's enjoyment of battle 132 Virgilian catalogues compared with Homeric 133 Conscious art of Virgil 134 Aeneid not to be treated as a romance 136 Fine manners of Aeneas 138 Choice of Aeneas as a hero 139 Distinction of tone in the Aeneid 140 Virgil's similes compared with the Greek 141 First six books of the Aeneid compared with last six . . .143 Famous passages in Virgil , 145 Virgil a religious poet 154 Virgil as a saint, and as a magician 156 Sadness of Latin poetry iCo VL HORACE. Comparative neglect of Horace in his own time ..... 162 His great popularity in modern times 164 The sources of his attractiveness 165 CONTENTS xxi Professor Sellar on Horace . . 166 Relation of Horace towards his predecessors 167 Horace compared with Pope . 168 Merits and defects of Lucilius 169 How used by Horace 169 Source of Lucilian fragments 172 Probable Lucilian origin of Sat. I. 9 . . 172 The journey to Brundisium * 173 The dinner of Nasidienus 176 Horace's moral essays : 177 Example of a figure borrowed from Lucilius 181 The Epistles 182 The Epodes and Odes 184 Divergent views about the Odes 185 Imaginary incidents 186 Horace's Sabine farm a welcome present 187 But Horace was not a lover of the country 189 Insincerity of his love poems . . . . 192 Views of Peerlkamp, Goethe, and Hartman 193 Horace's attitude towards poetry i 195 Incorrect expressions in the Odes t * i t 197 Examples of uncertain touch 198 Type-hunting expounders of Horace 199 Further examples of insincerity in the love poems 204 Horace as a literary critic 206 Chief source of his popularity with the modern world . . . 208 His relations towards Maecenas 21 1 Eccentricity of Maecenas 213 Horace and Maecenas both rare types 214 VII. LATIN SATIRE. Rise and source of Satire . 216 Relation to Atellane plays and mimes 218 Originality of Latin Satire 219 The Roman satirists enjoyed their work 221 Discrepant estimates of Persius 221 His style and diction 224 Horatian passages how modified by Persius 226 CONTENTS Home life of Persius 227 Its effect on his writings 231 His Philistines 232 Subjects of his Satires 233 His Christian tone 235 His ethics 236 Juvenal and Persius contrasted 237 In what sense was Juvenal a satirist ? 238 His life 240 His attitude toward vice 240 Juvenal a preacher 243 But not a martyr 244 His picturesqueness 245 Defects arising from it 248 Roman traits in Juvenal 250 His blindness to social tendencies 252 His contempt for the Greeks 254 For the Jews 255 His attitude toward religion 255 Toward slaves 256 Toward the poor and Christianity 257 The spirit of his age 258 VIII. LATIN POETRY OF THE DECLINE. Phaedrus 260 Compared with Aesop 261 Lucan's precocity 262 His early training 263 The emperor's jealousy and its result 264 Lucan's death 265 Quintilian's criticism on the " Pharsalia " 267 Lucan's religious feelings, and his rhetoric 267 His exaggeration 268 Lucan a perfect type of Silver Poetry 268 Seneca 269 Effect of Stoicism on his plays 270 Compared with Euripides 271 CONTENTS xxiii Petronius Arbiter 272 His work an excellent picture of social life 274 Specimen of the " Satyricon " from this point of view . . . 275 General estimate of the " Satyricon " 279 Recitation, its rise and fall 281 Statius 283 Poet to the aristocracy 284 Martial 285 Often misrepresented 286 Poorly rewarded for his flatteries 286 Meagre details of his life 287 Estimate of his poetry 288 Statius and Martial compared 289 The worst line hi Latin poetry 291 Merivale on the Flavian epoch 291 Latin verse-writers 292 APPENDIX. Some recent translations of Virgil 295 INDEX 321 LECTURES ON LATIN POETRY. t INTRODUCTORY. POETRY may be regarded and estimated from two points of view, the d priori and Different the a posteriori. The former rests on riewfrom principles which are very likely to be poet^may arbitrary and incomplete. It will always regarded. be found to be more satisfactory to ask ourselves what a thing is or has been provided, of course, an answer is possible than to decide what it ought to be according to certain principles laid down by ourselves. The d priori method has manifest disadvantages in a review which extends over many centuries. For, as regards poetry at least, abstract principles must of necessity be vague and shifting. Just as a great traveler makes our old maps worse than useless when a lake takes the place of a Sahara, and a mountain ridge that of a prairie, so too in literature, sometimes a new planet swims into our ken, and the main principles of artistic construction are revolutionized. What would Pope have made of Browning, or of Walt Whitman ? Would Edgar Allan Poe have thought INTROD UCTOR Y of describing as a novel that delicate study in psychological analysis, " The Lady of the Aroos- took"? It is in her Prose rather than in her Poetry that Chi f Rome has really expressed herself. For bequest of a long time the Roman people were ex- Rome to the , , , . , civilized clusively devoted to agriculture and war. Their sole care was to defend themselves and preserve their existence, to devise for them- selves some kind of constitution in the constant struggle of patrician and plebeian, of rich and poor, and to discover a modus mvendi with their exter- nal and intestine foes. To these problems they devoted all their energies, and their efforts in these directions were crowned with conspicuous suc- cess. Their laws have survived the Roman Re- public to this day, have afforded a model to the civilized world, and bid fair to last as long as Western civilization endures. Poetry came to the Roman nation late, after the conquest of Italy, Carthage, and Greece, Latin, as dis- and formed part of the plunder of the fron^Greek,, world which began to pour into the Im- perial treasuries. Hence the first and broadest distinction between Greek poetry, which developed naturally, and Latin, which was trans- planted ; and this is the reason why Rome suc- ceeded best in didactic poetry, because that product of art best bears removal to Testimonies J to its foreign another soil. When the Greek nation became a province of Rome, the Latin FOREIGN ORIGIN literature became a province of the Greek. This fact is oftenest expressed in the terse but trite Horatian verse which tells how " Captive Greece captured her conqueror rude ; " but not less apt, and certainly less hackneyed, are the words which Livy puts into the mouth of Cato in the Senate, " Therefore the more I fear that these things may prove our conquerors, not we theirs." 1 The same rather obvious truth is expressed with characteristic rudeness by Porcius Licinus, a poet contemporary with Cicero : " During the second Punic War, to Italy's rude land The Muse repair'd with winged foot, and there she took her stand." 8 Equally characteristic of its author is the ele- gance with which Ovid describes the early struggles of Rome, which left her no time for the cultivation of literature. " Not yet had Greece, the home of words not deeds, On her rude conquerors imposed her creeds ; Who best could fight, his was the highest art, And he most learn'd who best could launch the dart." 8 1 "Eo plus horreo ne illae magis res nos capiant cuarn nos illas. " XXX. 4. 2 " Poenico bello secundo Musa pinnato gradu Intulit se bellicosam in Romuli gentem feram." 8 " Nondum tradiderat victas victoribus artes Graecia, f acundum sed male forte genus ; Qui bene pugnabat Romanam noverat artem, Mittere qui potuit tela disertus erat." Fast. III. I oi. INTRODUCTORY When we refer to Latin poetry before the Greek influence, we are either talking of an lemc Latin assumed and hypothetical literature like that of which Macaulay has given us such ingenious and eloquent specimens in his "Lays of Ancient Rome," or else of writings and documents which have nothing but the name in common with poetry as we now understand the word. Cicero, indeed, tells us that Appius Clau- dius Caecus wrote a poem of a gnomic character which he calls Pythagorean. If he did, it is in- teresting to find that didactic poetry was not only Rome's greatest success, but her earliest attempt. But for the rest, early Roman poetry, which was then called scriptura, was used only for state docu- ments, lists and records, and the poets were called scribae. The poems, carmina, were laws such as those of the Twelve Tables, treaties of the kings with Gabii and the Sabines, pontifical books, and such like, and were written in Saturnian verse. Beside these there were rustic litanies, and those chants at festivals and funerals in praise of ances- tors and founders of families, of which Cicero speaks, and on which Macaulay based his theory of a lost Latin ballad poetry. To these must be added the Fescennine strains in which peasants bantered each other at rustic merry-makings, and from which more or less directly rose three kinds of composition in which Roman writers achieved high success, comedy, satire, and amoebaean pas- toral poetry. EFFECT OF GREEK LITERATURE 5 But all these pale dawnings of art faded into mist before the sunburst of Greek lit- Effectof erature. To apply to it the eulogy of Greek . , ,. literature. Lucretius on Epicurus, Greek literature extinguished everything on which its radiance burst, " E'en as the Sun uprisen quenches the fires of Night." 1 The first and greatest debt to Greece was the Drama, the popularity of which at Rome Difficulties has been greatly underrated. It is true SSftfcW that it had to struggle with certain diffi- the Drama - culties which it did not meet in Greece, and to which in modern times it is not exposed. The Romans unquestionably looked on the expression of grief as unmanly. Cicero condemns Sopho- cles for allowing Philoctetes to utter cries of pain, and for suffering Heracles to give voice to his agony in the death scene in the " Trachiniae ; " and commends Pacuvius for putting no lamenta- tions into the mouth of Ulysses when dying of the wound inflicted by his son Telegonus. Pacuvius expresses the Roman feeling when he says that " A man may rail against the strokes of Fortune, But not bewail them : that were woman's part." 2 Attius tells us that the best comfort in affliction is the hope that we have concealed our wound. In the " Telamon " of Ennius, the father, hearing of 1 " Restinxit Stellas exortus ut aetherius Sol." 2 " Conqueri fortunam adversam non lamentari decet ; Id viri est officium ; fletus muliebri ing^nio additust." INTRODUCTOR Y the death of his son Ajax, says that, when he sent him to Troy to fight for his fatherland, he knew that he sent him " To deadly strife, not to a festival." 1 Such a theory as to the limits within which the expression of grief ought to be confined would of course be adverse to the production of genuine tragedy, and would rather favor the rise of those so-called tragedies which Seneca under the Em- pire wrote for the arm-chair, not for the stage, and in which he surfeited even the Romans with stoical dignity and superhuman impassibility. Again, comedy suffered from the fact that Rome would tolerate no invasion of private life, as is shown by the fate of Naevius, who expiated by his death in African exile an attack on the pow- erful family of the Metelli, and an allusion to the private life of the victor of Zama. Besides, these importations from Greece were supported only by the taste, perhaps the affectation, of the rich and noble ; the people preferred rope-dancers, as we learn from the Prologue to the " Hecyra " of Ter- ence. Hence we find that the actors despised the verdict of the masses, and were ambitious to appeal to the classes alone. Arbuscula in Horace 2 is indifferent to the hisses of the populace if she can only secure the applause of the Knights. 1 " Ego cum genui turn moriturum scivi et ei rei sustuli. Praeterea ad Trojam cum misi ob defendendam Grae- ciam Scibam me in mortiferum bellum non in epulas mittere." * Satires, I. 9. 76. STRANGE FEATURE IN LATIN TRAGEDY ^ However, that, in spite of these very serious dis- advantages, Tragedy at least was held in no mean estimation at Rome, we gather success oi Tragedy. not only from the great wealth and posi- tion attained by the tragic actor Aesopus, but also from the distinct testimony of Horace, who tells us 1 that houses thronged with spectators of high position witnessed the reproductions of the works of the Attic dramatists in Rome, where the classes, not the masses, seem to have been able to make or mar the fortunes of the stage. One of the strongest arguments against the au- thenticity of the early history of Rome Difficulty in is that, though the duration of the mon- S^fn" 7 archy was about two hundred and forty Tra s ed y- years, yet this period is said to have embraced only seven reigns, an average of about five and thirty years to each reign. The history of Latin Tragedy presents a similar difficulty : three names, Ennius, Pacuvius, and Attius, stand to represent a period of more than a hundred years, from the first Africanus to Sulla. Comedy, not being so distinctly an imported and transplanted novelty, but having a somewhat congenial soil in a coun- try where Fescennine interludes, masques, and Atellane plays were indigenous, would doubtless have taken deeper root but for the stern prohibi- tion of those personalities without which the comic drama can hardly become truly popular or racy of the soil. 1 Epistles, II. i. 60. 8 INTRODUCTORY The Graeco-Roman drama of Plautus and Ter- piautus and ence was really sad under its superficial Terence. gaiety. The complete separation of po- litical from private life, the isolation of women, the dullness of home, the consequent craving for coarse excitement, the demoralization of the slave into his master's pimp, all these traits are com- mon to the Rome of Plautus and Terence and to Greece in her decline. The two playwrights felt this. Terence dealt with the phenomena pre- sented to him after the manner of Horace, with a smile and a shrug ; Plautus, in the fashion of Juve- nal, with fierce indignation and disgust. The fa- Their bulae falliatae of Plautus and Terence successors. were succeeded by fabulae togatae, deal- ing with a lower stratum of society ; and finally by tabernariae, which went lower still, until the trabeatae were introduced under Augustus, and took in hand a very high class of society again. This whole distinction between plays vulgar, mid- dle-class, and aristocratic betrays a want of that dramatic sense which ought to tell the playwright that in the true drama of life these classes are mingled and fused, and not distinctly ticketed and kept apart. Hence Rome produced no Euripides, no Shakespeare, no Moliere. The so-called togatae are represented by a num- ber of names more or less obscure, Verses ascribed to Luscius, Attilius, Titinius, Turpilius, Trabea. _, A ,, , . Trabea. As we shall not have occasion to return to these shadowy personalities again, it ATELLANE PLAYS may be interesting to quote here the extremely clever verses which Muretus wrote and submitted to Joseph Scaliger, who pronounced them to be by Trabea : " Here, si querellis ejulatu fletibus Medicina fieret miseriis mortalium, Auro parandae lacrimae contra forent. Nunc haec ad minuenda mala non magis valent Quam naenia praeficae ad excitaridos mortuos. Res turbidae consilium non fletum expetunt. Ut imbre tellus sic riganda est mens mero, Ut ilia fruges haec bona consilia efferat." l The manner is perfect ; but it is no disrespect to Scaliger to point out what modern scholarship has observed, but what in his day was unknown, that the modern origin of the verses is betrayed by several violations of the proper caesura in dac- tyls and anapaests, and by the fact that a writer of Trabea's time could not have made the first sylla- ble of lacrimae long. After them came the remodeled Atellane plays under Sulla. In them originally the place Atellane was Campania, the persons were con- plays- ventional types, and the language even is said to have had a tinge of Oscan. The scene was not 1 " Sir, if by cries and groans and floods of tears Mortals could minister to human ills, Then every tear were worth its weight in gold. But tears no more can mitigate man's woes Than keens and dirges can bring back the dead. Affliction asks philosophy, not tears. Moisten your clay with wine, from which will spring Sound sense, as from the rain earth's kindly fruits." 10 INTRODUCTORY Rome, but some municipal town, and the dialogue was mainly improvised. Sulla turned these Atel- lane interludes into regular plays like the come- dies of Plautus and Terence, and is said even to have composed some Atellane farces himself. The chief authors of these were Pomponius and Novius, in whose time circumstances rendered attacks on provincial oddities more piquant, be- cause Italy, having saved Rome from the Cartha- ginians and the Cimbri, began then to ask from the Imperial City something more than the privilege of shedding her blood in Rome's defence ; and no- thing pleased the Romans more than to be reminded how absurd were the pretensions of these provin- cials, these rustics, these inurbani, to be on a foot- ing of equality with Rome. In the hands of Pom- ponius and Novius the Atellane passed from half Oscan patois to Latin, from prose to verse, from an improvised sketch to a written play, from a cast consisting of amateur young aristocrats to a com- pany of regular actors. In these plays Pappus, Bucco, Maccus, and Dorsennus were used as stalk- ing-horses for the ridiculing of certain social types ; for instance, Pappus praeteritus, or " The Disappointed Candidate," dealt with the humors of elections, and to some extent foreshadowed the Harlequin, Clown, and Pantaloon of modern pan- tomime. They were followed by the mimes of Laberius and Publilius Syrus. When the mimes fell into disrepute, as if to illustrate the sensible admonition of their creator, Laberius, THE MIMES II " I Ve had my day, and so will my successor. None have a property in public favor," l the Atellane play was revived by one Mummius under Tiberius. It became disgustingly coarse and licentious. We learn from Martial 2 that under Domitian a real crucifixion was introduced into such a play. The mimes were interludes, like the Atellaixe plays, but no longer dealt with the con- r J ' The mimes. ventional personages of whom Rome had become weary. The virtue of the Roman lady, so jealously guarded (as we shall see) in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, was no longer maintained in the mime. Valerius Maximus tells us that the town of Massilia showed her regard for morality by prohibiting the mime, and Ovid 3 points out how absurd it is to allege the licentious tendency of his poetry in an age when that form of the drama was patronized. You are no doubt familiar with the story how Caesar, offended by some independent Anecdote verses of Laberius which seemed to be Caesar and aimed at himself, compelled the veteran Labenus - mime-writer, though a knight, to take part as an actor in one of his own farces ; and you are ac- quainted with the manly lines in which, in his pro- logue, Laberius expressed his sense of the affront which had been put upon him : " I, who Ve lived sixty years without a stain, Who left my house this morn a Roman knight, 1 " Cecidi ego, cadet qui sequitur, laus est publica. 1 * 2 De Sped. VII. 8 Frist. II. 497. 12 INTRODUCTORY Go back a player ! Certes, I have lived A day too long." l But I may be permitted to remind you of an an- ecdote handed down by Macrobius and And about * Cicero and others touching an amusing exchange Laberius. . , , of words between Laberius and Cicero. When Laberius, on the occasion just referred to, was about to resume his seat among the spectators after playing his part, he found no room in the places reserved for the Equites. "We should be glad," said Cicero, who was present, "to make room for you, if we were not so much crowded." "That must be a strange sensation for you," replied La- berius, " seeing that you are so accustomed to sit on two stools at once." This little incident per- haps accounts for Cicero's disparaging allusion to Laberius in a letter to Cornificius : z "I have grown so inured to boredom that I can sit out the pro- ductions of Laberius and Syrus." Horace's well- known sneer at Laberius is perhaps only a sign that the court poet did not forget that Laberius had offended the founder of the Empire by such free speeches as : " Many he needs must fear whom many fear." 8 It may amuse us here to recall a few of the maxims ascribed to Publilius Syrus, as we shall not 1 " Ego bis tricenis annis actis sine nota Eques Romanus a lare egressus meo Domum revertar mimus. Nimirum hoc die Uno plus vixi mihi quam vivendum fuit." 2 Fam. XII. 10. * " Necesse est multos timeat quern multi timent" PUBLILIUS SYRUS 13 again return to this subject. Perhaps among the best are, "The beggar's wants are few, pubimus the miser's countless ; " l " Good com- Syrus> pany 's the best lift on a journey ; " 2 and a very ingeniously expressed sentiment which cannot be Englished, as we have no words answering to the distinction between cuivis and cuiquam. The mean- ing is little more than " What has happened once to one man may happen again to another." The expression is very deft, " Cuivis potest accidere quod cuiquam potest." Trimalchio, in the " Satyricon " of Petronius Ar- biter, estimates the respective merits of Cicero and Syrus, and decides that Cicero has the greater power of expression (disertiorem), but that Syrus has greater distinction of style (honestiorem). It is uncertain whether the very elegant iambics in condemnation of Roman luxury, attributed there by Trimalchio to Syrus, are really by him, or are a clever parody by Petronius. Before this epoch, epic poetry had taken its rise with Naevius and Ennius, who, succeeded Poetry of the by Lucilms, also laid the foundations of Caesarian Satire. But it was in the Caesarean age that the yield (proventus, as Pliny calls it) of poetry became really copious. That period was marked by a mania for writing verses, in spite of the civil and political disorders of the time. Caesar himself, 1 " Desunt inopiae pauca, avaritiae omnia." 3 " Comes facundus in via pro vehiculo est." 14 INTRODUCTORY on his way to Spain, wrote an Iter, or " Impressions of my Journey." Many of the orators mentioned in the "Brutus" were poets also. Hirtius chroni- cled in verse the Istrian War. Furius Bibaculus essayed the task, which Marcus Cicero abandoned and his brother pursued, of describing the cam- paigns of Caesar in Gaul. Calvus, whom Horace to his lasting disgrace couples with Catullus in de- preciating both, sang Quintilia in rivalry to Lesbia, and strove with an " lo " to emulate that divine poem, the " Peleus and Thetis." Helvius Cinna for nine years touched and retouched his poem entitled " Smyrna," dealing with an unpleasant theme like that of Shelley's " Cenci " until the work became unreadable, and his conduct proverbial through a verse of Horace's. It is but fair to add that the "Smyrna" won the pronounced approval of the coming poet Catullus. But of all the writers in verse, save only those Cicero's two > Lucretius and Catullus, who from poetry. ^ Q t j me o f Nepos down to the present day have been recognized as the "bright particu- lar stars " of the Caesarean epoch, by far the most important and interesting, not only for his real poetical ability but for the influence which he exercised on subsequent Art, is the great orator and consummate man of letters, M. Tullius Cicero. As both his powers and his influence in this depart- ment of literature have been very greatly underrated, I may be excused for dwelling a little on this phase in the genius of a man who might almost have CICERO'S POETRY 15 been called "myriad-minded." If Cicero does not deserve the name as well as Shakespeare, at all events he has a far better title to it than that unknown bishop to whom the term /xupiovovs was originally applied by Photius. Plutarch describes Cicero as having been alike the first poet and the first orator of his age, a criticism which startles us when we remember the gibes of Juvenal and Martial, and the unfavorable comments of Seneca, Gellius, and Tacitus. It is true that as a poet he was eclipsed by Lucretius and Catullus, but he had first been eclipsed by a greater than these, by himself. He was his own greatest rival, suppositi- cins sibi ipsi, in the phrase of Martial. The glories of the advocate, the orator, the philosopher, the unrivaled essayist and letter-writer, made his poetic bays pale. Before the rise of Lucretius and Catul- lus, there is little doubt that Cicero was the poet of his age. Even in his early works, "Marius" and the "Phaenomena" and " Prognostica," we find a new and very noticeable polish and harmony of ca- dence, which must have had a great effect on the nascent muse of Lucretius and Catullus. In the poem on his consulate, whence come the unlucky verses which in the minds of most people stand by themselves for the poetry of Cicero, " O fortunatam natam me consule Romam ! " and " Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi, " we find an expression on which Virgil himself could not have improved when he calls the comets 16 INTRODUCTORY claro tremulos ardore, " quivering with lucid fire." The jingle for which the first of these verses has been condemned can hardly have been due to want of ear. The writer who is so fastidiously sensitive to euphony that he will not allow words which might conclude a hexameter, as forming a dactyl and spondee, to stand together in his prose works, is not likely to have fallen inadvertently into the collocation of natam natam. Indeed, Quintilian quotes a similar assonance in a letter of Cicero's to Brutus, 1 and we find pleniore ore in Off. I. 6l. Moreover, one must remember how easy it would have been to transpose natam and Romam. If Cicero deliberately accepted this assonance, one would be disposed to think that his authority might well be set against the judgment of Quintil- ian and Juvenal, not to speak of later critics. The vanity of the verse is but a vice of the age in which the austere Caesar could send such a piece of fustian as veni, vidi, vici to the senate, and es- cape the ridicule with which such a dispatch from the seat of war would now be received. As regards the second of the verses so gener- ally and so inconsiderately condemned, it may be remarked that the expression, cedant arma togae, would not have seemed ridiculous to Cassius, who uses a very similar phrase in a letter to Cicero, 3 1 " Ciceroni in epistulis excidit res mihi invisae visae sunf, Brute? Quintil. IX. 41. 2 " Est enim tua toga omnium armis f elicior. " Fatn, XIII. 13.1. CICERO'S POETRY I? nor to Pliny, who writes of togae triumphum lin- guaeque lanream. Caesar thought highly of the poetry of Cicero, who sometimes betrays some of the characteristic traits of the " fretful tribe." He is very anxious to know what people think of his verses, especially what Caesar thinks. In a letter to his brother he says of the poem which we have been discussing : " What is Caesar's opinion about my poem ? The first book, I know, he deems excellent, not surpassed even in Greek literature ; the rest, up to a certain point, he seemed to think what shall I say ? slipshod. Find out for me, is it the style or the subject he does not like ? " 1 We read with pleasure in another letter 2 that Cicero abandoned his intention of collaborating with his brother Quintus in a poem on Caesar's " Gallic Wars," because he " feels no heart for the theme," abest eVflovo-taoyxo's. He is too good a re- publican to enjoy strewing flowers on the path of Caesar to the throne. The Augustans felt no want of heart for the praise of Caesar, nor did Cicero show any lack of enthusiasm when he eulogized Cato or thundered against Antony. A passage from the same unlucky poem, too long to quote, chal- lenges comparison with the splendid verses in the 1 Q. Fr. II. 15. (16.) 5. The words reliqua ad quern- dam locum padv^repa may mean " the rest of his expressions were not so enthusiastic," but the broad meaning of the pas- sage is not affected by the interpretation of the particular words. a Q.Fr. 111.4.4. 1 8 I NT ROD UCTOR Y first Georgia in which Virgil recounts the portents which presaged Caesar's death. It is true that there is in Cicero an excessive illustration of the same point. This is a characteristic of the early style, and shows him inferior as an artist to Virgil. But it is one thing to be inferior as an artist to Virgil a proposition which may be predicated of nearly every poet who has ever written and quite another to be, as Juvenal describes Cicero, so wretched a poetaster that, if in eloquence he had been on the same level, he might have re- garded with indifference the dagger of Antony, since he would have been too insignificant to excite the resentment of any one. But by far the finest poems of Cicero are those Cicero's splendid translations from the Greek translations W j t j 1 w hi c h h e h as embellished his rhe- irom the Greek. torical and philosophical works. There is in the "De Divinatione," II. 63, 64, a very fine rendering of the portent from which Calchas inferred the duration of the siege of Ilium the devouring of the little birds by the serpent ; * and the song of the Sirens 2 is translated with great taste in " De Finibus," V. 49. But conspicuous above the rest are the speeches of Prometheus on the Caucasus, and of Hercules dying on Mount Oeta 3 versions from Aeschylus and Sophocles which used to be ascribed to Attius, as being quite beyond the unhappy author of 1 Iliad, II. 299-330. 2 Odyss. XII. 184-191. 8 Tusc. II. 19-25. LUCRETIUS AND CATULLUS 19 " O fortunatam natam me console Romam," but which are now rightly attributed to Cicero, and which no judicious critic can read without recog- nizing a dignity and even splendor of diction not surpassed in Latin literature. With these we would couple a beautiful rendering from the " Cresphontes " of Euripides, 1 in which Cresphon- tes declares that " When a child 's born, our friends should throng our halls And wail for all the ills that flesh is heir to ; But when a man has done his long day's work, And goes to his long home to take his rest, We all with joy and gladness should escort him." These vigorous and admirably tasteful render- ings from the Greek drama by Cicero possess a further and unique interest as standing midway between the roughness of the old Latin drama and the far less powerful almost feeble elegance of Varius and Ovid. But now appear two great geniuses who would have eclipsed Cicero as a poet, even if he had not already eclipsed himself. Lu- and cretius gave the world a philosophical poem which has never been surpassed, and Catullus showed for the first time what truly epic Latin hex- 1 " Nam nos decebat coetu celebrantes domum Lugere ubi esset aliquis in lucem editus, Humanae vitae varia reputantes mala; At qui labores morte finisset graves Hunc omni amicos laude et laetitia exsequi." ruse. Disp. I. 115- 20 INTRODUCTORY ameters were, in the divine poem of "The Mar- riage of Peleus and Thetis." Catullus is some- times described as the forerunner of Lucretius, but he is not so either chronologically or psychologi- cally. The great work of Lucretius has been well called " an improvisation of genius ; " and it has all the merits, together with some of the defects, of its high-engendered origin. Catullus, on the other hand, weighs his words, sometimes holds himself in, and, as Horace says, plays the part of the polished talker who husbands his powers, and sometimes deliberately forbears to exercise them. Catullus is in fact already an Augustan, and leads us by an easy transition to the Augustan Age. Augustus encouraged poetry with political views. The so-called Augustan poets were al- The Augus- tan College most a college, or at least a select liter- ary hierarchy like the French Academy. Valerius Maximus speaks of " a College of Poets " (collegium poetarum), and its president seems to have been Spurius Maecius Tarpa, of whom we hear in Cicero's letters and in Horace. Patronage was not a new thing in the time of Augustus. Scipio, Laelius, Memmius, were the forerunners of Maecenas, Pollio, Messalla. But Augustus en- couraged it not only by private hospitality, but by making it a guild, by multiplying copies of stand- ard works, and by establishing libraries and encour- aging the sale of books : we learn that there was a bookseller at Utica. It has been said that the Bourbons forgot nothing and learned nothing. LOST AUGUSTAN POETS 21 The first Roman emperor, unlike them, was an apt pupil in the school of life, and ever ready to learn and to apply its lessons. But, like them, he forgot nothing. Least of all did he forget that there was once a young man called Octavius and afterwards Octavian. He remembered that young man too. well to neglect any means of obliterating his memory. Poetry, it struck him, not history, was the screen that lay most ready to his hand. History could not but hint at least at the unscru- pulous treachery of that young man's triumvirate, the cruelty of his parricidal massacres, the mglori- ousness of his military career, his domestic infamy. Poetry could leave all these untouched and dwell on the reign of peace, the restoration of religion and morality, the standards of Crassus retrieved, and the boundaries of the Empire enlarged. Among all his Academicians he met none so skillful to harp on this string as Virgil and Horace, as that worshiper of Nature whom he drew reluctant from his rustic retreat, and that grandson of a slave whom he found content with a small clerk- ship in town. To quote the expression of M. Taine, Roman Poetry first passed under the yoke of Greece, then under the yoke of Augustus. The Augustan Age, strictly so called, as regards poetry, may be said to run for us from Lost Angus- Virgil to Ovid, who had just seen Virgil tan P ets - and no more. 1 But a multitude of Augustan poets have perished, and are revealed to us only by 1 " Virgilium vidi tantum." Trist. IV. 10, 51. 22 INTRODUCTORY grammarians, who quote from their works to es- tablish some usage. Cornelius Nepos gives us a sad example of how contemporaneous renown may fail to make any impression, even the slightest; on posterity. He points, in emphatic and carefully weighed terms, to one of whom he writes, " I think I can well assert that he is our most brilliant poet since Lucretius and Catullus." To whom is he re- ferring? To one L. Julius Calidus, of whom we know nothing, except that there was once such a person. Tibullus 1 assures us that no one came nearer to the immortal Homer (aeterno propior non alter Homero) than one Valgius. Paterculus places beside Virgil a certain Rabirius, of whom we know only two things, that he composed a poem on the Alexandrine War, and that Ovid 2 gives him the praise of being "mighty-mouthed " (magni oris), the very epithet which Tennyson bestows on Milton in the fine experiment in Alcaic verse beginning : " O mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity ! God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages ! " We are told, too, of others who at least chose fine themes, and themes neglected by their betters. Some one named Cornelius Severus, in a poem on the Sicilian War, rendered due homage to the greatness of Cicero, who is not mentioned by Virgil, Horace, or Ovid, or even alluded to, unless 1 IV. i, i bo. 2 Pont. IV. 1 6, 5. LOST AUGUSTAN POETS we are to see an allusion, which would not be very flattering, in a passage in the sixth book of the "Aene'id." 1 We also read that a Pedo Albinova- nus related before Tacitus the voyages of Ger- manicus in the Northern Seas ; and that a certain Cotta wrote a "Pharsalia" under Augustus, in which we may infer that he embraced the cause espoused by the gods, not that which found favor with Cato, and glorified the winning side. But of all these once eminent poets and poems we know next to nothing ; and still less about the tragedies of Pollio and Varius, the comedies of Fundanius, the elegies of Gallus, the epics of Va- rius and Rabirius. What little information we do possess we owe to chance allusions in Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Quintilian, Velleius, and the Grammarians. Thus Time scatters about his poppies of oblivion, and poets who in their own time had the repu- tation of a Milton or a Tennyson have now be- come a mere name, so many letters in a certain order. These considerations invite a reference to an ingenious speculation of the brilliant M Patin , s French critic, M. Patin. We are far view of the . . extant from sure, he points out, that we possess Augustan in our so-called Augustan poets a type J of the poetry which really was most characteristic of that age. Nay, more, there are reasons to be- lieve that time has spared to us what was rather 1 Line 849, orabunt causas melius. 24 INTRODUCTORY a recoil from the prevailing genius of the time. These reasons may be classified under two heads. First, our Augustan poetry is remarkable for its carefulness. Now, Horace is never tired of urging the necessity of careful writing. We have often heard that " easy writing is hard reading," and that " Time will have nothing to do with anything pro* duced without his aid." These may be called the favorite texts of Horace when he preaches on Art, and undoubtedly his protests are directed not against his predecessors but against his contempo- raries. It was because they were written without any real carefulness and limae labor that so many of the poems of his time were ephemeral, and re- sembled the garlands in the elegy of Propertius J which withered on the brows of the revelers, and shed their bloom into the wine-cup as it went round. Now Horace often speaks of his own as- siduous care, and rests on it his hope of immortal fame. Propertius foretells Virgil's deathless re- nown as the guerdon of the same quality. We know that Virgil thought that he had not bestowed nearly sufficient care on his epic, and wished to destroy it ; and Ovid tells us 2 that with his own hand he burned the "Metamorphoses." After- wards, on learning that the work still survived in other copies, he begs his readers to remember that it had not received from him the last touch (sum- mam manum), and announces that he craves not praise but pardon (et veniam pro laude petd). 1 II. 14, 52. 2 Trist. I. 7, 15. LOST AUGUSTAN POETS 2$ Thus it would appear that the poets whom we especially denominate Augustan in one important quality represent not the spirit of their age but rather a recoil from it. And, further, we learn from vari- ous hints in our Augustans that there existed under Augustus and his immediate successors a court poetry which was official and conventional, and was devoted to the laudation of the Emperor and his exploits in commonplace and mythological fash- ion. Our poets more or less ironically protest their inability to rise to the height of such an argument. Horace declares that such a theme is for a Varius. Propertius tells how Apollo touched his ear and admonished him to beware of strains so ambitious. Virgil opines that we have had enough of Pelops and his ivory shoulder, of the relentless Eurystheus, and of the altars of the infamous Busiris. 1 Our Augustan poets betake themselves to the Alexan- drines, Theocritus and Callimachus. The elegy of Propertius 2 to the court poet Ponticus, author of a dead and buried "Thebais," is an excellent expres- sion of the relation of our Augustans to the court poetry of the Augustan Age. It seems, then, highly probable that what we call the Augustan poetry was really not the poetry tharacteristic of that epoch, but even a recoil from it, and a timid but decisive protest against it. The more credit to our Augustan poets, who taught their countrymen what was true urbanitas. The expression urbanitas always has a very definite 1 Georgics, 3, 4. 2 I. 7. 26 INTROD UCTOR Y meaning in the mouth of a Roman, to whom the City was as supreme as to a modern Parisian. Urbanitas was the essential condition of literary acceptability. But its meaning changed in every generation. Lucilius is called perurbanus by Ci- cero, and inurbanus by Horace, yet each of these critics knew exactly what iirbanus meant, and applied it correctly according to the view of his age. It may be said that Virgil wrote to order. So Virgil and he did, but the theme suited the poet as well as the time. The court of Augus- tus was as corrupt and blast as that of Ptolemy, for which Theocritus sang the delights of rural life. And Virgil had a personal interest in the old stock from which "stout Etruria grew" (fortis Etruria crevit}. In his epic Virgil succeeded in produ- cing, in an age no longer epical, a brilliant reflec- tion of the poetry which characterizes the epoch of childish belief and insouciance. Virgil has bor- rowed much from Homer, but he has taken from him nothing that he has not made new. He is the cloud which receives the light of the sun, and gives it back with the colors of the rainbow. Victor Hugo has said that Virgil is the moon of Homer, and truly there is in him a tender mel- ancholy which takes the place of the dazzling brilliancy of the Greek. His pious reproduction of the age of childish belief has suggested to crit- ics a comparison of Virgil with Tasso. Ovid was the Ariosto of the Augustan age, who took POST-AUGUSTAN POETRY 2/ mythology no more seriously than Ariosto took chivalry. 1 At Rome it seemed as if the stream of epic poetry would never run dry. On it rolled, carry- p os t-Augu3- ing on its unrippled surface to the gulf fc" 1 ? 06 ^- of oblivion Memnonids, Perseids, Heracleids,. The- seids, Thebaids, Achilleids, Amazonids, Phaeacids, without number. The river of Time has happened to throw up to us a few spars from the wreckage, a few poets not, perhaps, much better than those whom it has engulfed, Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, Claudian, all of whom, together with Sta- tius and even Lucan, Scaliger said that he would gladly give for a complete Ennius : " Utinam ha- beremus Ennium integrum et amisissemus Luca- num, Statium, Silium Italicum, et tous ces gascons la." The last word, "gasconaders," which is often quoted as gargons, " lads," was used by Scaliger to mark the difference between the natural simplicity of Ennius and the inflated diction of the Silver Age. Henceforth, though every year produces, in Pliny's phrase, its crop (proventum) of poets, Latin poetry is successful only in satire and epigram. 1 " In non credendos corpora versa modos." Trist.ll. 64. II. EARLY LATIN POETRY. ROMAN poetry may be said to begin in 514, with Charactens- Livius Andronicus, who translated the early R^man Odyssey into Saturnian verse, a work poetry. about which we know nothing that is interesting except that Horace probably had the same feeling towards it as most schoolboys now have towards Horace, for it was the book which he had to study at school under the ferula of the proverbially severe Orbilius. In the very early poets of Rome, what most strikes us is a strange unevenness of execution. They do not seem to have caught any apprehen- sion of that subtle quality which should distin- guish even the humblest poetry from the very most ambitious prose. In our own literature in- stances of this insensitiveness to the essential difference between poetry and prose are very rare, and they hardly ever coexist with occasional ele- vation. In early Latin poetry, lapses into mere prose are common, and yet we often meet real poetry side by side with them. Brilliant gifts of expression and true elevation of sentiment are found coexisting with abject humbleness of style, or even insensibility to the very existence of such a thing as style. , VERY EARLY ROMAN POETRY 29 Macaulay quotes from Blackmore a so-called poem which is certainly marked by a "plentiful lack " of inspiration : " Fancy six hundred gentlemen at least, And each one mounted on his capering beast; Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals." But this attempt at description, bald as it is, al- most soars in comparison with some specimens of early Latin poetry which have come down to us ; for instance, this passage from the epic of Naevius on the Punic War : "The Romans cross to Malta, harry the place With fire and sword, settle the enemies' business ; " * or : " Marcus Valerius consul leads a brigade On a campaign ; " 3 or this couplet from Ennius : " Years seven hundred, more or less, have passed Since Rome with auguries august arose ; " * a passage which, though it rises a little in the ex- pression "auguries august," certainly creeps in the cautious accuracy of " more or less," and reminds us of a Dublin story, how a certain solicitor, in challenging to a duel another member of his own profession, invited him to meet him in the Phoenix 1 " Transit Melitam Romanus insuiam integram omnem Urit populatur vastat, rem hostium concinnat." 2 " Marcus Valerius consul partem exerciti In expeditionem ducit." 8 " Septingenti sunt paulo plus aut minus anni Augusto augurio postquam inclita condita Roma est" 30 EARLY LATIN POETRY Park " in the Fifteen Acres, be the same more or less." Again, Ennius, after a really fine verse invoking the Muses, goes on to explain that " Muses " is a Greek word corresponding to the Latin Casmenae. This is what strikes us in early Latin poetry, real distinction and utter poverty of style side by side and hand in hand. Place beside the bald and uncouth verses quoted just now from Naevius those fine Saturnians of his : " They fain would perish there upon the spot, And not come back to meet their comrades' scorn ; " l and beside the Ennian passage put that grand utterance which has been compared to the voice of an oracle, and which kindled the enthusiasm of the inspired Virgil : " Broad-based upon her men and principles Standeth the state of Rome ; " a and we shall then see clearly this strange quality which distinguishes the early Latin poets from those of Greece, and other nations too, that they were content to creep, though they knew what it was to fly, and that they seem hardly to be aware when they are on the ground and when in the clouds. Quintilian 3 relates an anecdote which shows in what honor the epic of Ennius was held. One 1 " Seseque ei perire mavolunt ibidem Quam cum stupro rebitere ad suos populares." 2 " Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque." 8 VI. 3. 86. POPULARITY OF THE ENNIAN EPIC 31 Sextus Annalis brought some charge against a client of Cicero's, and in the course of Anecdote the trial proudly demanded, " Have you illustrating J the popular. anything to say about Sextus Annalis ? " ity of the That is, " Have you any charge to bring against my character ? " But the words num quid fates de sexto Annali are susceptible of a quite different meaning. Cicero pretended to under- stand him to mean, " Can you repeat anything out of the sixth book of the Annals ? " " To be sure I can," at once replied the consular wag, 1 and he thundered forth the sonorous line, " Quis potis ingentes oras evolvere belli ? " to the enthusiastic delight of his audience and the whole court. Opinion about Ennius underwent a steady change in successive ages. Lucretius calls him " immortal," aeternus ; in Propertius he begins to be "rough," hirsutus ; Ovid characterizes him as "In genius, mighty, but in art unskilled ; " a Martial complains that people are so tasteless that they will read Ennius though they have Virgil ; in the time of Silius Italicus, Ennius is so completely portion and parcel of the past that Silius intro- duces him as a character into his poem. But Ennius, interesting though he is as the founder of the Roman epic and of satire, must no longer engage our attention, except in so far as he affected the early Latin drama, which is the chief 1 Scurra consularis was a favorite sobriquet for Cicero. 2 " Ingenio maximus arte rudis." 32 EARLY LATIN POETRY subject of this lecture. As the real founder of Roman poetry Quintilian finely says of him, in a well-known passage, 1 that we should reverence him as some sacred grove of venerable antiquity whose grand old trees have more majesty than beauty. A generation ago, historians of Latin literature Roman usually discussed the question, Why had tragedy. Rome no tragedy ? Such critics could find no Roman tragedy because they looked for it only in the declamations of Seneca, which probably were never put on the stage. They did not go so far back even as the " Medea " of Ovid and the " Thyestes " of Varius, which Quintilian put on a par with the Attic drama, or the tragedies of Pollio, which Virgil and Horace thought worthy of the Sophoclean buskin. Still less did they think of turning their eyes to the stage of En- nius, Pacuvius, and Attius. It is indeed only com- paratively recently that the efforts of Continental scholarship have presented to us the fragments in which these dramatists have come down to us in such a shape as to render any literary appreciation possible. In a foregoing lecture we have adverted to certain evidences that tragedy was held in es- timation in the Rome of the Ciceronian epoch. These evidences were broadly the testimony of Cicero and of Horace. Latin tragedy took the 1 " Ennium sicut sacros vetustate lucos adoremus, in quibus grandia et antiqua robora jam non tantam habent speciem quantam religionem." Inst. Orat. X. i. 88. ROMAN TRAGEDY 33 Greek models in inverse order, and adapted Eu- ripides first. The Ennian version is literal, and, like Roman comedy, postulates in the audience a knowledge of Greek. Sometimes, where we have an opportunity of comparing the Latin translation with the Greek original, we find the Latin awkward and clumsy. A fine passage in the " Iphigenia in Aulis" runs : " Oh, what a blessing hath the peasant's lot, The happy privilege of uncheck'd tears." 1 It is hard to give in English the Ennian version of it without ^exaggerating its homeliness, but it may perhaps be rendered : " In this the peasant holdeth o'er the king, The one may weep, the other may not well ; " 2 The Greek and Latin passages agree in being both perfectly plain and simple ; but the Ennian is al- most vulgar, and its simplicity is that of "Rejected Addresses : " "Jack 's in a pet, and this it is : He thinks mine came to more than his; " while the simplicity of the Greek is that which so deeply affects us in a great line in Webster's " Duchess of Malfi : " " Cover her face : my eyes dazzle : she died young." Perhaps we might venture to say that the vulgarity in the Latin lies in the word honeste ; to weep is 1 77 Svffyfvfia 8' &s ex 61 Kal yap SaKpvffai paSlcos OUTOJS %. 8 " Plebes in hoc regi antistat loco : licet Lacrimare plebi, regi honeste non licet" 34 EARLY LATIN POETRY not consistent with a king's position at the head of society. It is interesting to detect in these very ancient Passages and somewhat rude efforts of a nation animating just emerging from absolute illiteracy ^"modern 3 something parallel to our own literature ; literature. something to remind us that there are touches of nature which make generations kin, how- ever widely sundered in space and time. " What in the captain 's but a choleric word, That in the soldier is flat blasphemy," is a very true reflection of Shakespeare's ; and a similar thought must have presented itself to the mind of Ennius when he wrote : " To ope his lips is crime in a plain burgher." 1 The whole spirit of the fine poem, " How happy is he born and taught Who serveth not another's will ! " resides in the Ennian verse, " Most free is he whose heart is strong and clean." a The fierce question of Shylock, " Hates any man the thing he would not kill? " is anticipated in " Fear begets hate, hate the desire to kill ; " 8 and "A friend in need is a friend indeed" finds a literal counterpart in " Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur.'" 1 1 " Palam muttire plebeio est piaculum." 2 " Ea libertas est qui pectus purum et firmum gestitat." * " Quern metuunt oderunt quern quisque odit periisse ex- petit." PACUVIUS 35 It is strange to meet as early as in Ennius a maxim which modern novelists would do well to lay to heart : " A little moralizing 's good, a little : I like a taste, but not a bath of it." * Pacuvius was the rival and nephew of Ennius. Like Euripides, he was a painter as well Pacuvius. as a poet, and " Pictor, the surname of the Fabii, shows that this art was then held in high esteem. He learned the bitterness of being eclipsed by a younger rival, Attius, and retired to Tarentum (the ideal retreat of Horace), there to spend the closing years of a long and distinguished life. Aulus Gellius tells us that there he was visited by Attius, who read to him his "Atreus." The old poet found in it elevation and brilliancy, but detected a certain harshness and unripeness. " So much the better," said Attius. "The mind is like a fruit, harsh while it is growing, but mellow when it attains maturity. If it be soft too soon, it is spoiled before it ripens thoroughly. I would fain have something to grow out of." This is a very just remark. The young man whose essay shows nothing turgid, no ungraceful ornament or flashy rhetoric, will never do much as a writer. Dr. John- son's advice to his young friend, to cut out all the fine passages, illustrates his ticklish temper rather than his sound judgment. On the whole, one would 1 " Philosophari mihi necesse, at paucis nam omnino haud placet, Degustandum ex ea, non in ea ingurgitandum censeo." 36 EARLY LA TIN POETRY prefer to see a very young writer rather a dandy in his manner. The affectations are annoying, but he will probably grow out of them, if he happens not to be a prig. It is well that he should feel it necessary to dress his thoughts before he brings them into company. Ribbeck calls Pacuvius the freedman of Euripides, because, though mainly de- pendent on Euripides, he modifies the art of the Greek poet with far greater boldness than Ennius or Attius. The less agreeable features in Pacuvius are his au- dacity in coining monstrous compounds. His defects. ... ,. . . . like refanatrostntm and mcurvicervicum, and his poverty of invention. The latter failing is revealed by the fact that we find in his fragments traces of three different and separate storms. No doubt he excelled in this kind of description, and so he recurs to it whenever he wants an effect. His popu- We have abundant proof of his popular, larity. fty Plautus parodies him more than once ; Lucretius * borrows his expression, hoc cir- cum stipraque, " the spacious firmament on high ; " and it was during the performance of a play of his that the actor who was playing the part of the sleeping Ilione fell into a slumber which was not . feigned, while twelve hundred spectators joined in the appeal of Catienus on the stage, the appeal to Ilione to awake. The way in which Horace 2 relates the anecdote shows that the plays of Pacu- vius must have been very popular, and very famil- 1 V. 319. a Satires, II. 3, 60. ATTIUS 37 iar to the audiences of the time. A fine passage in the " Medus " (son of Medea by Aegeus 1 ) proves that Pacuvius is not merely one who can produce ingenious philosophical reflections and vigorous descriptions. The portrait of the unhappy de- throned Aeetes, a kind of ancient Lear, " With sunken eyes, and wasted frame, and furrows Worn by the tears adown his pallid cheeks," 2 is the work ot a poet who can raise pity and terror, and worthily describe human passion and suffer- ing. His last triumph was at the funeral of the murdered Caesar in the year of the city 710. Among other songs sung in honor of the dead was one from his " Armorum Judicium." There was a sad appropriateness to the occasion in the cry of Ajax, " To think I saved them but to murder me ! " * Velleius gives Attius the palm among the tragic poets. He took Aeschylus for his model, not Sophocles or Euripides, as did his predecessors, but seems to have largely adopted the practice called contaminatio, and to have fused together different dramas, and even different au- 1 If Pacuvius remembered Eur. Med. 722, he must have given to Qpovtos in that verse the improbable and unexampled sense ascribed to the word by Elmsley. 2 " Ref ugere oculi, corpus made extabuit, Lacrumae peredere humore exsangues genas." But it is not absolutely certain that these verses, quoted bj Cicero (Tusc. III. 26), are to be referred to Pacuvius. 8 " Men' servasse ut essent qui me perderent ! " 38 EARLY LATIN POETRY thors. Thus we find in his " Armorum Judicium," which he borrowed from Aeschylus, the well-known verse, taken by him from the " Ajax " of Sophocles, and afterwards adapted from him by Virgil : " Be thine thy father's might, but not his fate." l He also draws upon Homer, and even Apollonius Rhodius, whose very spirited description of the as- tonishment of the Colchian shepherds at the first sight of a ship seems to be reproduced in a passage cited by Cicero (" De Nat. Deor." II. Sg). 2 Like Ennius and Pacuvius, Attius was of humble birth, the son or grandson of a freedman. But the obscurity of his birth was to him no "invidious bar ; " to quote a verse of his own : " A man may dignify his rank ; no rank Can dignify a man." 8 We have already heard his confident answer to the aged Pacuvius, and we are told by Valerius Maxi- mus 4 that when Caesar entered the Collegium Poetarum, of which we have already spoken as being a kind of ancient analogue of the French Academy, Attius did not rise. He acknowledged the superior birth and rank of Caesar, but added, 1 " Virtuti sis par, dispar fortunis patris." 8 " Tanta moles labitur Fremebunda ex alto ingenti sonitu et spiritu," and the following verses to " Vagant timore, pecuda in tumulis deserunt." Ribbeck, p. 158, 391-410. 8 " Homo locum ornat, non hominem locus." 4 III. 7. I. LATIN TRAGIC POETS COMPARED 39 " Here the question is, not who has most ances- tors, but who has most works to point to." Ennius excelled in sententious gravity, pathos, and naturalness ; Pacuvius, in elaboration , Latin tragic of style, which earned him the name of poets com- 11-1 i pared. aoctus, and which sometimes, as in his monstrous compounds, degenerated into pedantry and affectation. The strength of Attius lay in his spirit and elevation of style, for which Horace called him alttis, and Ovid animosus. His Oderint dum metuant, " Let them hate me, so they fear me too," is a thunder-word, and has ever been a favorite quotation with tyrants from Tiberius to Bismarck. The elevation of Attius is very marked. The "Atreus," which he read to Pacuvius, Elevation begins with a stately passage much ad- o Attlus - mired by Cicero, Quintilian, and Seneca: " I 'm Lord of Argos, heir of Pelops' crown, As far as Helle's sea and Ion's main Beat on the Isthmus," 1 a passage which strikes us by the weight of names great in myth-land and hero-land, and produces a vague impression of majesty, like Milton's " Jousted in Aspromont or Montalban, Damasco or Morocco or Trebizond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric's shore, When Charlemagne with all his peerage fell By Fontarabia." 1 " En impero Argis sceptra mihi liquit Pelops Qua ponto ab Helles atque ab lonio mari Urgetur Isthmos." 40 EARLY LATIN POETRY We are told by Plutarch that when the great tragic actor Aesopus uttered these words he en- tered so keenly into the spirit of the passage that he struck dead at his feet a slave who approached too near to the majesty of royal Argos. Again, do not the following lines strongly recall the wise and sober but lofty dignity of Tennyson's " King Arthur " ? " Foul shame I hold it that the blood of queens Should foully mix itself and make the breed Of royal stock a question." 1 And we meet now and then a sentiment quite in the vein of the " Idylls : " " For him is pity, to whose low estate A noble mind lends lustre." 2 In some places the boldness of the Attian diction touches the borders of bombast, as when he says : " From the reverberating cliffs around Starts Echo musical with clangorous peal Of startled laughter ; " 8 or when Thyestes is described as " Tomb of his brood devour'd." * The sound common sense which underlies this 1 " Re in summa summum esse arbitro Periclum matres conquinari regias, Contaminari stirpem ac misceri genus." 2 " Hujus demum miseret cujus nobilitas miserias Nobilitat." * " Simul et circum magna sonantibus Excita saxis suavisona Echo Crepitu clangente cachinnat." * " Natis sepulcrum ipse est parens." COMMON SENSE OF ATTIUS 41 excitability of spirit has already been illustrated by his interview with Pacuvius. A further . Common instance of it is given us by Quintilian. 1 sense of 7 . i I, Attius. So great an admiration, he tells us, was felt for the forensic powers shown in the Attian tragedies that his friends asked him why he did not become an advocate. " Because," he replied, " in my plays the speakers say what I please, and so the other characters can perfectly demolish their arguments ; but in the courts, on the con- trary, I find that my adversaries invariably say the very things I would rather they had left unsaid." But in Attius, as in all the Latin tragic poets, we have to deplore a certain want of con- , Defects in ] trol. The easy, delicate grace of the Latin Greek style was unattainable by the Latin dramatists, and they tried to supply its place by a vigor and amplitude which are excessive and out of place. You will remember the opening verses of Euripides' " Phoenissae," which may be rendered : " O sun, that thro' the fires of the firmament Cleavest thy way, and in thy golden car Launchest the flames from thy swift coursers' feet, Ill-starr'd the ray thou sheddest once on Thebes." How does this appear in Attius ? " O sun, that in thy glistening chariot borne, With coursers swiftly galloping, dost unfold A sheet of gleaming flame and burning heat, 1 IV, 13, 43- 42 EARLY LATIN POETRY Why with such baleful auguries and omens Adverse giv'st thou to Thebes thy radiant light ? " l The grace is lost ; the attributes of the sun, which are merely glanced at (but in most stately phrase) in the Greek, are detailed and catalogued in the Latin. This is the main characteristic of early Latin tragedy. It is too much " in King Cambyses' vein." It substitutes strength for sweetness, heat for light. Our own literature supplies an analogous phenomenon and in a still more exaggerated degree. The cry "he abhorreth not evil" in the Psalms is grand in its simplicity ; it becomes in the New Version by Nathaniel Brady and Nahum Tate (who, I regret to say, was a scholar of Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards Poet Laureate in the reign of Charles II.), " His obstinate, ungenerous spite No execrable means declines; " and "Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?" swells (yet shrinks) into " With restless and ungovern'd rage Why do the heathen storm, And in such vain attempts engage As they can ne'er perform ? " Like Latin tragedy, the version of Tate and Brady tried to make repetition and exaggeration compen- sate for the absence of grace and taste. 1 " Sol qui micantem candido curru atque equis Flammam citatis fervido ardore explicas, Quianam tarn adverse augurio et inimico online Thebis radiatum lumen ostentas tuum ? " LATIN COMEDY 43 The first glimpse we obtain of a national comedy in Italy is in those charming sketches I ^ tin which Horace and Virgil give us of rus- comed y- tic merry-makings at harvests and vintage festivals, in which not only rude dances found a place, but a kind of rough banter in Saturnian verse was ex- changed between peasants wearing masks of bark rudely improvised for the occasion. But this " Fes- cennine license," even when developed into the * : medley " which Livy describes at the beginning of the seventh book of his history, still wanted an essential quality of a play, namely, unity of plot, until it began to draw on the resources of the Greek drama. Thus, in the words of Livy a mere masque or revel gradually had become a work of art, 1 and a regular class of actors, histriones, arose. From improvised chants without dialogue or plot to a regular comedy such as those of Plautus and Terence is a very long step. Hampered as it was by police regulations, and laboring under the ban of public opinion, the histrionic impulse of Italy would never have taken this step by itself. It was forced to take its comedy straight from Athens, and to infuse into it a spirit distinctly antagonistic to the national mind of Rome. Perhaps it is in this quality in Roman comedy that we are to find a justification for the puzzling observation of Quin- tilian that " comedy is the weak point of Latin lit- erature." 2 Probably, however, it is safer to attrib- i " Ludus in artem paulatim verterat." 8 " In Comoedia maxima claudicamus." / 44 EARLY LATIN POETRY ute Quintilian's criticism to some revulsion of taste against comedy strictly so called which seems to have occurred under the Empire. 1 It is hard, of course, for us to institute a comparison between Latin comedy and tragedy, because while we have between twenty and thirty Latin comedies and not one complete Greek exemplar with which to com- pare them, in tragedy, on the other hand, we have an abundant supply of the Greek models, but not one single perfect, or even nearly perfect, Latin copy. The most remarkable feature in Latin comedy Characteris- is the fact that the scene was invariably of C La a tin res laid out of Rome, usually at Athens, and comedy. ^ Q d rama tis fersonae were Greeks, not Romans ; so are the costumes and the coinage. In all the plays of Plautus and Terence we do not find mention of a single Roman coin ; when Romans are mentioned they are called barbari, and Italy is 1 We recall how strangely Horace depreciates both the metrical skill and the humor of Plautus, and perhaps we can infer a preference on the part of Horace for the mime, which superseded the comic muse, when we remember that the mime had for its butt the oddities of provincial life, and that these moved the mirth of Horace and his friends on the journey to Brundisium, when they laughed at the decoration of the ex-clerk who was praetor of Fundi, and who was so proud of his purple robe, his broad stripes, and his pan of coals. Indeed, other writers under the Empire show their appreciation of this rather low form of humor. Persius (I. 129) and Juvenal (X. 101) laugh at the provincial magistrates, who are so proud of the office which gives them the right to break half pints if they are not of the statutable capacity. LATIN COMEDY 45 barbaria. Whether this was a police regulation which insisted that the scene should be laid abroad, lest Romans or Roman institutions should seem to be satirized, or whether it resulted from the inca- pacity of the Roman playwrights to rise from mere translation to adaptation, it is certain, at all events, that the Roman poets themselves accepted the situation and boasted of it. In the prologue to the " Menaechmi " Plautus declares : " We lay the scene of all the play at Athens, To make the drama seem more Greek to you." l But still they aimed at presenting Roman society as it unfolded itself to their eyes. Plautus makes the Grex at the end of the "Bacchtdes" protest that he would not have dreamed of making a son rival to his father in a disgraceful intrigue, were it not that such a case had come under his own per- sonal observation ; and Cicero 2 declares, " I hold the aim of the drama to be to hold up a mirror to our manners, and to give us the express image of our daily life." This attempt at the same time to give the piece a foreign character, and yet to bring the scenes home to the Roman audience, has introduced certain confusions which give consequent a very odd semblance to Latin comedy, confusions. Roman gods and ritual, Roman legal and mili- tary terms, find their way into this Greek world ; aediles and tresviri jostle agoranomi and demarchi ; 1 " Omnis res gestas esse Athenis autumant Quo illud vobis Graecum videatur magis." Rose. Am, XVI. 46 EA RL Y LA TIN POE TRY a speaker in a play in which the scene is laid in Aetolia, Ephesus, or Epidamnus will remark that he has just come from the Velabrum or the Capito- lium. We remember how, in " Hamlet," the grave- digger sends his fellow workman from Denmark to an English village to fetch him a stoup of liquor ; and how Shakespeare introduces English names and characters into Athens in the " Midsummer Night's Dream." But these lapses of memory, exceptional in Shakespeare, are the rule in Latin comedy, which addressed an audience by no means familiar with the foreign world which was its scene, though we must presume them to have had considerable fa* miliarity with the Greek tongue ; else surely Plautus would not have made puns unintelligible without a knowledge of Greek, or introduced three new words 1 coined from the Greek into one verse in the "Miles Gloriosus." Horace not only de- Horace's . J . criticism nies to Plautus humor and metrical skill, but he charges him with a desire to make money as quickly as possible, an indifference to the requirements of true art, and a consequent tendency to hurry with undue haste to the dtnoue- ment of his plays, a fault which he says he has in common with the Sicilian Epicharmus. It is true that the play is often wound up very suddenly. Indeed, in the "Casina" the epilogue naively in- forms us that the denouement will take place in- side. 2 But, on the other hand, the " Curculio " 1 II. 2. 58: Euscheme, dulice, comoedice. 3 The mention of the Casina suggests to me to bespeak MOTIFS OF PLAUTUS 1 PLAYS 47 is excellently constructed, and so are the "Epi- dicus," which he tells us he loved better than his own life, and the " Pseudolus " and " Truculentus," which Cicero informs us were the work and the favorites of his old age. It is curious that these are plays which turn on an attempt to Motifs of cheat or overreach (frustratio), not on h 18 ? 1 ^ 5 - the more familiar theme of love or gallantry (ama- tio). These two motifs> or a fusion of both, as when a man is deprived of his mistress by some clever stratagem, are by far the commonest in. Plautus. Two plays, the " Trinummus " and the " Captivi," strike out a new line, and depict, one, the noble love of friend for friend, the other the fidelity of slave to master. The " Rudens " turns on a shipwreck, and the right of asylum. The "Captivi" and "Bacchides" are perhaps the best constructed of the plays, and Plautus regrets that he cannot find more models for a play like the former, where the moral tendency is so excellent. attention to a passage in that play where the Ambrosian palimpsest has restored to us a text which probably conjec- ture would never have hit on, but which seems absolutely certain. The pretended bride, who was really a stout young slave in a woman's attire, is described as having put down her foot on the toe of one of her escort, institit plantamj but how does the verse go on ? " Institit plantam quasi jocabor." The words quasi jocabor could not be explained. The Am- Drosian codex gives us quasi Luca bos, ''like an elephant," {he very word which we want, and the very word which Lu- cretius uses for " an elephant." 48 EARLY LATIN POETRY The "Miles" is spoiled by the introduction of the speech of Palaestrio, explaining the plot in con- in the manner of a prologue, after the action has begun. So in the "Cistella- ria " the play opens with an admirable dialogue between the girls Silenium and Gymnasium and an old procuress, and it is only in the third scene that the goddess Auxilium speaks the prologue. Another great blot on the construction of the " Miles " is the very long though very clever dia- tribe of Periplecomenus on the blessings of celibacy and the hollowness of society, which for one hun- dred and seventy verses completely stops the action of the piece. We must, however, remember that these defects in construction would not be at all so noticeable in plays which really rather resemble our opfra bouffe than a modern comedy, plays in which by far the most of the scenes were sung to the accompaniment of an instrument of music, and in which there was no division into acts and scenes save where the exigencies of the plot re- quired that an actor should leave the stage at the end of one scene, and appear again at the begin- ning of the next, on which occasions a flute-player entertained the audience while the stage was empty. In some respects the "Amphitruo " is the most original of the plays of Plautus. Whether Amphitruo. r / it is to be classed as z.fabula RJnntomca or as a tXaporpaywSt'a (both have been suggested), it seems to demand some classification which will dis- POLITICAL LIFE IN LATIN COMEDY 49 tinguish it from the other plays. " A Roman tone pervades it," as Professor Palmer remarks. " In reading the account given by Sosia of the campaign against the Teleboae, we feel as if Plautus had versified a page of some old Latin Annalist. The ultimatum of Amphitruo, with its demand for resti. tution and threat in case of refusal, the pitched battle and crushing defeat of the enemy, the slay- ing of the commander-in-chief by Amphitruo's own hand, all these are in real Livian style." Alcmena is a high type of a Roman wife, and a risqut subject is treated with a delicacy which contrasts most favorably with the work of the modern imitators, Moliere and Dryden. It would be, of course, quite impossible, in the space at our disposal, to analyze, or even charac- terize, all the Latin comedies which have come down to us. We may, however, inquire in a gen- eral manner how, on the whole, they deal with the different factors of society which were presented to them, how they deal, that is, with political, civil, and domestic life. Political life is, owing to the circumstances which surrounded the composition and Political production of ancient comedy, but lightly life in Latin touched. We find references to the un- fairness of the aediles in awarding the literary prizes, and to the summary proceedings of the tresviri, or police of Rome. These, however, are chiefly in prologues, and we cannot be sure that all the prologues of Plautus are not quite post- 50 EARLY LATIN POETRY Plautine ; some of them demonstrably are. They are subservient to the explanation of the plot, like those of Euripides, but generally are disfigured by cumbrous bantering of the audience. The pro- logues of Terence, on the other hand, Prologues ofpiautus which are undoubtedly genuine, under- and Terence. , , , , r , , .. take the defense of the poet s own lit- erary views, and rebut the strictures of adverse critics, thus resembling rather the parabasis of Greek comedy than the prologues of Euripides. But much more indicative of the political views of Plautus than his gibes at aediles and triumviri is the bitter and sustained attack on the vices of the governing classes pervading his plays, in which we so often hear that the aged reprobate, who is as ridiculous as he is vicious, is a pillar of the state, a column of the senate, a protector of the poor. It is strange that such assaults on a class should have been permitted in a city where personal allu- sion of any kind was punishable by law. To pass, then, to the civil and domestic spheres, Civil and we have very little description of profes- domestic hfe. s i ona i or mercantile life as such. The mercator might just as well be anything else as a merchant ; we hear only of his amatory intrigues. We have, however, in the " Rudens " a description of the hardships of a fisherman's life which re- minds us of an idyll of Theocritus, and in the "Menaechmi" we have a physician. Here and elsewhere we find that physicians, then as now, were prone to use terms derived from the Greek. CIVIL AND DOMESTIC LIFE 5 1 In the " Curculio " 1 even the slave Palinurus has enough knowledge of the medical art to tell Cap- padox, who complains of an acute pain in his liver, that he is suffering from a morbus kefatarius. The letters of Cicero show us that in his time physi- cians wrote their prescriptions in Greek, as they now do in Latin, and that it was customary to speak of ailments and their cures by their Greek names. There is in the " Poenulus " a strange profession, that of the professional perjurer. The most common callings are those of the banker and money-lender, the parasite and the pimp, around whom cluster the professional beauties, who are by no means as good as they are beautiful. Ladies, on the other hand, ingenuae, whether matron or maid, are always virtuous, though often very disa- greeable, as Artemona in the "Asinaria." The picture of the girls who are in the train of the pander is very strange. Philematium in the " Mos- tellaria," though belonging to this class, is almost charming, with her girlish love for dress and her sincere affection for Philolaches. Philocomasmm in the " Miles " has enough grace to prefer Pleu- sicles to the wealthy captain, and to be faithful under strong temptation. Melaenis in the "Cis- tellaria," Philenium in the "Asinaria," and Lem- niselene in the " Persa " are all capable of a disinter- ested love. But other Plautine girls are redeemed only by their cleverness, and the candor (if that is a redeeming point) with which they avow their 1 II. 1.24. 5 2 EARL Y LA TIN POETR Y depravity. Plautus himself, both in the " Miles " * piautine and in the " Cistellaria," z dwells on the advTrseTo hcartlcssness of such women, and he morality. constantly moralizes on the wretched end to which a life of wicked indulgence leads,, with a moral fervor which probably suggested to Lucretius his terribly powerful treatment of the same theme in the fourth book (verses H2off.), Even in the case of abandoned girls whom we might almost regard as attractive, Plautus never lets us forget what they are. The atmosphere is not adverse to morality, as is that of the French novel. Such women are not intended to attract one, like the Dame aux Camellias or Ninon de 1'Enclos. There are slaves of all kinds, but, with the exception of Tyndarus in the " Captivi " and Stasimus in the " Trinummus," they are the vilest of the vile, and seek a revenge in the abasement of their masters for the ill-treatment and oppression which is their lot. Plautus is as ready as Cicero to apply to Rome Essentially the Frenchman's aphorism about Paris : urban. <( Qn ne vit qu'a Paris, et 1'on vegete ailleurs." He speaks in a tone of contempt of the Italian towns, and especially makes the Praenes- tines his butt for their habit of docking the first syllable of a word, and thus turning ciconia, "a stork," into conia. " Do you think you are in the country?" asks one slave of another, in the "Mo- stellaria," when the latter is making an unseemly uproar in the street. * III. i. 190. 2 I. i. 66. PLAUTUS AND TERENCE COMPARED 53 The late Professor Sellar remarks that Plautus could not describe a gentleman. " No- , , / Compared thing can be meaner than the conduct with , of the second Menaechmus, who is in- tended to interest us, in his relations with Erotion ; and this failure is equally conspicuous in another of his favorite characters, Periplecomenus " in the " Miles," whose indecorous geniality is to us some- what repulsive. In this respect, as in the gusto with which he dwells on the pleasures of good living, Plautus reminds us of Dickens more than of any other humorist. We cannot but think of the very thick strokes and glaring colors of Dick- ens's character-painting, of his Quilps and Peck- sniffs, when we find Euclio the miser, in the "Au- lularia," carefully preserving the parings of his nails, and regretting his tears on account of the waste of water which they entail. All these types which we have been examining are considerably different in Terence. J < t Compared The braggart captain is only vain, not a with fool, and is more like the Falstaff of "Henry IV." than the Falstaff of the "Merry Wives of Windsor." The parasite is simply a flat- terer. The slave is not an oppressed creature at war with society, but a well-treated domestic who puts his shrewdness at his master's service, and often shows devotion and honesty. There is no longer a sharp distinction between meretrix and ingemia, except in the unfortunate condition of the former. She is as refined in her manners as her 54 EA RL Y LA TIN POETRY more reputable sister, and generally an unexpected disclosure at the end reveals that she is really a lady, and had been changed at birth. The husbands of Terence are far better husbands, and the wives for instance, Sostrata in the '-'Hecyra " are more amiable than those of Plautus. His young men are rather lovers than libertines, and his old men show them a better example. Terence, it may be said, painted men as they ought to be, Plautus as they are. It is strange that Sedigitus places Terence only sixth in his list of comic poets, which he heads with Caecilius, Plautus, and Nae- vius. Cicero 1 refers to Terence as the true model of Latin ity, and allows that in this matter the authority of Caecilius is small. The ancients made Caecilius first in the choice of plot, Plautus in dia- logue, Terence in delineation of character. But so high was the estimate of the elegance of the Te- rentian style that a theory resembling that of certain ingenious American writers, concerning Shakespeare and Bacon, was actually broached in the ancient world about Terence, who was said to have been chosen by Laelius, or even Scipio him- self, as the vehicle through which their clever comments on society should be presented to the His refine- world. The refinement of Terence is certainly very marked. Naevius, for in- stance, makes a son frankly and brutally pray for the death of his parents : " I wish the gods would take my parents both." a Alt. VII. 3. * " Deos quaeso ut adimant et patrem et matrem meos." MEYERS VIEW OF TERENCE 55 How different is the tone of Ctesipho in the " Adelphi I " ! " Would that my sire would so f atigue himself So as to do his health, of course, no harm As for the next three days to keep his bed." Even the modern world has something to learn from the cultured African. Moliere, in his " Ecole des Maris," restores the Naevian brutality of the passage to which I have referred ; and Jonas Chuz- zlewit complains that his father, in living so long, is flying in the face of the Scriptures. The very refinement of Terence has, in the minds of some writers," been prejudicial to his fame. An ingen- ious critic, M. Meyer, thinks that Ter- - * Meyer's ence was spoiled by the patronage of view of Scipio and Laelius. His life was too easy and luxurious. The pampered freedman lost his powers of observation, and described a society such as existed only in his own enervated imagina- tion. The atrium is transported into Arcadia, and one might suppose it was the reign of Numa or Evander. It is, however, very doubtful whether an observer of society does not see better from above than from below, and it is a barren kind of criticism which, instead of asking what were the powers of the dramatist as revealed in his work, pursues rather the inquiry what his circumstances ought to have made them. We are told that the aediles had the right of refusing or accepting plays. There seems to have 1 IV. i. 3. 56 EARLY LATIN POETRY always been some one to whom they referred the Literary matter, and who did the part of the Lord un f der e t s he Chamberlain in England. Tarpa was the Republic. referee in Cicero's time, as we learn from a letter of Cicero to Marius. 1 Luscius of Lanuvium seems to have discharged a somewhat similar func- tion in the time of Terence, and to have regarded his young rival with jealousy, and accused him of plagiarism. The answer of the Latin dramatist is characteristic. He declares he has not used the works of his Latin predecessors. He does not even know them. He claims for himself the merit of complete originality, because he has taken his plays solely (and wholly) from the Greek. A well-known story records what a generous critic of his " Andria" Terence found in Caecilius. . Caecilius, who certainly had not much in common with Terence, and rather exaggerated than modified the coarseness of Plautus. Caecilius introduces a son declaring that it gives piquancy to an intrigue if one's father is a bear and a miser; it is no fun if he is generous and kind ; and he makes a husband say of his wife, " She ne'er was really charming till she died." 2 Other coarse and disgusting fragments express brutally that indifference to his wife which the Plautine husband thought it humorous to dwell on. But we can forgive Caecilius much when we 1 Fam. VII. I. 8 " Placere occepit graviter postquam est mortua." AFRANIUS 57 meet our old familiar gallery claptrap sentiment that " Many a good heart beats under a threadbare coat." 1 Afranius, the chief of the writers of the so- called togatae, is the poet most frequently Afranius. quoted, next after Plautus and Terence. Unlike Terence, he confesses that he draws on the Latin as well as the Greek drama, and of Ter- ence he declares that he has no second, 2 and that every word of his is genuine wit. 3 Cicero ascribes to Afranius that thorough knowledge of human life 4 which was so completely the appanage of Menan- der that a well-known verse declared it was hard to say whether Menander copied life, or life Me- nander. This is, perhaps, the meaning of the Horatian remark that the toga of Afranius fitted Menander. It is in his refined and tender view of the relation of father and son that Afranius most resembles Terence. A father, in the " Adelphi," 6 welcomes the faintest sign of grace in his son, and exclaims, " He blushes ! All will be well." So, in Afranius, when a son cries, "Miserable wretch that I am ! " the father comforts himself with the reflection that if his son expresses regret his shortcomings are more than half atoned for. 1 " Saepe est etiam sub palliolo sordido sapientia." 3 " Non similem dices quempian." 8 " Quidquid loquitur sal merum est." 4 " Illud a vita ductum ab Afranio." Tusc. IV. 45. 5 IV. 5. 10. 58 EARLY LATIN POETRY And he, like Terence, condemns those fathers who seek " to inspire their sons with fear rather than respect." 1 After Afranius, Latin comedy merged into the tabernaria, then the mime, then the revived Atel- lane play, which ultimately itself gave way to the mime again under the Empire. The remark of the judicious Quintilian, already quoted, makes it hard for us to feel sure that fortune, which has given us only fragments of tragedy, has done the best for us in sparing to us so many comedies ; but of one source of congratulation, at least, we may feel pretty certain, the portion of comedy which has survived is surely the fittest. 1 " Ubi malunt metui quam vereri se ab suis." Ill LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. EPICUREANISM is now no longer a hypothesis or a doctrine. It is a name given to a man's Epicurean- character, not to his beliefs. It is an doctrine elegant malady of the soul ; a laziness dead - and self-indulgence glorified by culture and refine ment ; a term devised to mitigate the word " sel ish " when applied to the well-to-do ; a euphemism for incapacity when it is not too ungraceful, just as " kleptomania " is a euphemism for dishonesty when dishonesty has plainly no motive. Epicure* anism now awakens no enthusiasm, and seeks to make no proselytes. But, though Epicureanism is dead, it by no means follows that the poem of Lucre- sources of tius is only a baseless fabric of errors, ^po^mof possessing an interest merely as an. ex- Lucretius - ample of a certain brilliant and highly interesting vagary of a very finely touched spirit. The part of the book that is dead is the system. The inner impulse which " rends the veil of the old husk," and comes forth as a living flash of light, is the enthusiasm of the poet, with his genuine pride in the "train of flowery clauses" in which he sets forth " The sober majesties Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life," 60 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM and his abiding awe for the unchangeable laws of Nature. But, above all things else, that which keeps the work instinct with life is the fine frenzy which clothes every argument, however dry or ab- struse, with all the hues of fancy, and which makes the poem like nothing else in all literature, if we except our own Tennyson's " Two Voices," which, though on a very minute scale compared with the six books " On the Constitution of Nature," yet shows as great and rare an aptitude for " shutting reasons up in rhyme, Or Heliconian honey in living words, To make a truth less harsh." Lucretius has exercised a powerful attraction, on the one hand, on students of language, Vaned . . attractions who find in his poem Latin at a most interesting epoch, before it has lost the insouciance of childhood, but after it has outgrown the helplessness of infancy. On the other hand, free-thinkers have congratulated themselves that they have found in Lucretius an ally, and have eagerly welcomed him into their camp. The phi- lologists, lost in admiration of the vase, have hardly tasted the strong wine which it holds. The phi- losophers have clutched the fruit because they thought it was forbidden, and have not paused to admire the stately branches or the lustrous leaves of the tree on which it grows. But, beside these, there is room for a greater interest, both literary and psychological, in this High Priest of Atheism, this Apostle of Irreligion, who thunders GOD AND RELIGION 6l against inspiration like one inspired, and who shows all the rapt devotion of a Stephen in his denial of immortality, all the fervor of a Bos- suet while he scatters to the winds the last per- ished leaves of human hope. We must, therefore, on the very threshold of our inquiry into the mind of Lucretius, investigate his relation towards God and Religion. I have called Lucretius an atheist. I am aware that technically this is a misnomer, for Lucretius provided in his system for the ex- istence of the gods. But why did he recognize gods ? What were his gods ? And what was the religion which he so bitterly assailed ? Epicureanism, which explained the origin of our ideas by the theory that material images Relation of of things (simulacra), disengaged from Lucretius external objects, struck our senses and God and thus became cognizable by us, was forced to rise from the idea of God which we find within us to the existence of gods themselves. Thus Lu- cretius was compelled, by his physical theories adopted from Democritus and Leucippus, to recog- nize gods. But nothing is more formidable to the mind than the conception of a Power which is out- side and beyond ourselves, which is malevolent to us, and which we cannot resist. Such a power were the ancient gods to Lucretius ; and the eagerness with which he goes out of his way to rail against their conventional attributes, and to protest against their supposed Providence, suggests to us, not so much a philosophic inquirer into the truth of a 62 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM dogma, or even a fervid preacher demolishing a heresy, as some medieval enthusiast who believes himself to be possessed by a devil, or to be in per- petual struggle with a devil for the life of his soul, whose reason is convinced that he is saved, but whose whole spirit shudders at the thought of dam- nation, a St. Simeon Stylites who strives and wrestles till he dies, or one of those whose curse it is to surfer " Half the Devil's lot, Trembling, but believing not." For Lucretius is ever and anon haunted by "the fear that we may haply find the power of the gods to be unlimited, able to wheel the bright stars in their varied motion." l The Roman religion, which was originally, as Roman in other Aryan nations, worship of the powers of Nature, never assumed the rich mantle of poetry and legend with which the Greek mythology early adorned itself. It took the stamp of the national character, and lay chiefly in rigor- ous observances showing much fear, little respect, and no love for the gods. The Roman legends are prosaic and monotonous, nearly always taking the form of a hero or benefactor who shows his super- 1 " Nequae forte deum nobis immensa potestas Sit, vario motu quae Candida sidera verset." V. 1209. In the absence of any really worthy metrical version of the poem, I have used nearly always the vigorous and literal prose translation of Munro. ROMAN RELIGION 63 human quality by a fire which plays innocuously about his head, as in the case of Ascanius in the Aeneid, and who finally vanishes, as Romulus dis- appeared (non comparuit} in the narrative of Livy. The sole discovery of Rome in religion is repre- sented by the Indigitamenta, or lists of gods at- tending every moment of man's life from the cradle to the grave. Vaticanus presides over the infant's first cry, and Fabulanus over his earliest attempt at articulate speech. Educa teaches him to eat, Potina to drink, and Cuba to sleep. His goings out and his comings in are the special care of Abeona and Adeona. The gods of the Roman Pantheon are inconveniently numerous. Petronius makes the witty, wicked Quartilla remark that " the place is so densely populated with gods that there is hardly room for the men." J Some of the deities are mere abstractions, like Salus Populi, Securitas Saeculi. Religio comes from the same root as diligentia, and means " regularity." There is no Greek for it. Certainly not Scio-tSai/Aovio, nor fva-e/Beia. The people would stone the gods if they offended them, like those savages who thrash their idols when they come home after an unsuccessful day's hunting. At the death of the beloved Ger- manicus, the people rose in fury and threw volleys of stones at the temples of the gods. Ovid tells us how Numa bargained so shrewdly with Jove 1 " Utique nostra regio tarn praesentibus plena est numini- bus ut facilius possis deum quam hominem invenire." So? tyricon, ch. xvii. 64 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM that the god at last smiled and gave him his way. Cicero relegates religion to the province of his wife, and Caesar the Pontifex Maximus denies be- fore the Senate the immortality of the soul. The " Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus " gives us a glimpse of the shocking immorality which some- times polluted the Roman ritual, and we even read 1 of human sacrifices after Cannae. Hence, perhaps, the terrible earnestness with which Lu- cretius reflects on the sacrifice of Iphigenia, "a fair maiden foully murdered by a parent, a maiden more meet for the marriage-bed than the bier, that the fleet might have good hap. Such crimes could religion prompt." 2 Against this shallow, barren, and sometimes horrible faith, what wonder that Lucre- Attitude of Lucretius tms should seize the first weapon that towards it. , , - . . came to hand, furor arma immstrat, against a theory of divine government which according to him had its rise, not in reason, logic, or instinct, but in disgraceful, groveling fear. This was the " foul Religion " under which human life lay crushed, " a horrid monster lowering over man- kind from the sky," against which " the Greek first dared to raise his head," and which now lies tram- pled under the feet of the Elect, "a victory," cries Lucretius, "that lifts man to the sky." What wonder that he should feel indignant that beings like the ancient gods should have assigned to 1 Livy, XXII. 57. 8 "Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum." I. 101. ATTITUDE OF LUCRETIUS 65 them such a stately home as the firmament, in which revolve " The Moon, and the Light of the Day, and the Night with its solemn fires ? " l Bound therefore, as we have seen, by his physi- cal theory, to find a place for the gods in his system, he gave them a lotus-land in the " Lucid interspace of world and world." He treated them, observes M. Constant Martha, as we treat the Nawabs and Nizams of India, whom we surround with all the means of luxurious self- indulgence, in the well-grounded confidence that they will accept that condition in lieu of real power. Lucretius is mistaken in praising Epicu- rus for his originality. Every one knows that Epi- curus borrowed his physics from Democritus and his ethics from Aristippus. His originality lay only in subordinating in his system physics to ethics, and abolishing Providence in the interests of hu- manity. Lucretius, following him, established a court of gods who reign but do not govern, to whom, when he addresses them in prayer, he whis- pers, as Voltaire said that Spinosa did, " Je soupQonne entre nous que vous n'existez pas." 1 This sublime verse (V. 1190), " Luna Dies et Nox et Noctis signa severa, '' one of the finest in Latin poetry, reminds us how in another philosopher, Kant, the Sage of Konigsberg, "the starry heavens above " shared with " the moral law within " the power to excite never-failing sentiments of awe and venera- tion. 66 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM These faineant gods are no gods, and it is but technically inaccurate to speak of Lucretius as an atheist. We shall see afterwards how some idea of Providence forces its way, in spite of his system, into his naturally religious mind. For the present we will leave this part of the subject, first quoting the splendid verses in which he gives to these gods lip-service in exchange for the ill-used powers which he has taken away from them : " The nature of the gods must ever in itself of necessity enjoy immortality, together with supreme repose, far removed and withdrawn from our con- cerns ; for exempt from every pain, exempt from all dangers, strong in its own resources, not want- ing aught of us, it is neither gained by favors nor moved by anger." 1 The spirit of this sublime re- nunciation of Providence in the affairs of the world, which I have given in the dignified prose of the great scholar Munro, is finely caught and blended 1 " Omnis enim per se divom natura necessest Immortal! aevo summa cum pace fruatur Semota ab nostris rebus sejunctaque longe ; Nam privata dolore omni, privata periclis, Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri, Nee bene promeritis capitur neque tangitur ira." II. 646-651. This grand passage was quoted some few years ago with great effect by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons. It will probably stand as the last specimen of that faculty for happy quotation from Latin poetry which once adorned the debates of that assembly, but which has of late become more and more rare in its manifestation, and now seems to have completely disappeared. ENTHUSIASM OF LUCRETIUS 6/ with a Homeric strain in Tennyson's "Lucre- tius:" " The gods who haunt The lucid interspace of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar Their sacred, everlasting calm." Ancient Epicureanism arose at a time when Poe- try, Art, Eloquence, and all free institu- Enthusiasm tions languished under the Macedonian ofLucretius - Protectorate of Greece. It lent itself to the ener- vated mind of that nation by the easiness of its acquisition and the simplicity of its tenets. Epi- cureanism actually discouraged learning, both lit- erary and scientific, and took no trouble even to defend its own doctrines. Its voluptas led merely to apathy. Its physical system excited no interest among its adherents, and was adopted only to facili- tate the denial of an overruling Providence and of a future life. Towards the end of the Republic, Epicureanism prevailed mainly among the upper classes. That thoughtless and voluptuous aristo- cracy which then was stepping so gaily to its de- struction grasped the system as a relief from the fear of death, but found that the philosophy which only promised annihilation instead had no power to give real comfort. Even Lucretius turns but a haggard eye on his heaven bare of real gods and peopled by indifferent voluptuaries. That is a despairing cry of his, that " there is nothing immor- tal but Death. " 1 When Lucretius took up this 1 " Mortalem vitam mors immortalis ademit." III. 869. 68 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM dead-alive system, his eager spirit made the dry bones live. He breathed upon the system of Epicurus, and created a soul under the ribs of death. Enthusiasm, even when it takes the form of de- illustrated s P a i r > ^> tne key-note of the poem. Epi- by his curus discouraged the passion of love as attitude towards the tending to introduce an element of dis- quietude into that calm existence which is his ideal. Lucretius throws himself upon the passion with the fury of a wild beast, and seems to rend the limbs of some material victim. Nearly as fierce is his hatred of Ambition, and still more intense his loathing for Superstition. The feeling of conviction with which the early Christians heaped contempt on all foregoing systems seems cold and lymphatic beside the ardor of Lucretius in pro- claiming his faith, and contemning all other wisdom His worship as filthy rags. " He was a god, a very of Epicurus, god!" (Detts ille fuit Deus) he exclaims of Epicurus in the beginning of the fifth book. The fabled inventions of Ceres and Bacchus, the labors of Hercules, are as nothing. Man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of Epicurus. He discovered what is more sustaining than bread and wine. And what monster slain by Hercules was so foul and ugly as Religion ? The poet boasts that like a bee he sucks the honeyed words of Epicurus ; that it is his delight " to watch through calm nights " ! 1 I. 142. LUCRETIUS DELIGHT IN HIS WORK 69 over his master's scrolls, and in sleep to dream of them. 1 Even the poverty of his native tongue (patrii sermonis egestas) but seldom gives him pause. The rudest instrument is good enough for the miner who has just struck a vein of * . His delight' gold. Like a true enthusiast, he exults and belief in most in the dullest part of his work. When he treats of the atoms, their colors and movements, he is ecstatic over his discoveries "made by labor, oh, so sweet!" 2 He dismisses objections with disdainful curtness. "This is folly " (desipere est) is a common retort. 3 And he claims for the doctrines which he preaches a cer- titude greater than that of the oracles of Apollo. 4 The Apostle speaks of the " beauty of holiness," and the Christian hymn cries, " The veil that hides thy glory rend." But Lucretius goes beyond them. He even fears lest the dazzling radiance of Epicurean truth might blind those to whom it should be too suddenly revealed. He hesitates to rend the veil that hides its glory. He regards with trembling awe and half-averted face the transfig- uration of Epicurus through the medium of words. 5 When one reads the rapturous verses in which he describes his task of making a harsh , His truth less bitter, likening himself to one "towering who smears with honey the rim of the cup of medicine which the child must drink, one 1 IV. 965. 2 II. 730; 111.419. III. 802; V. 165, 1043. * V. 112. 6 II. 1033. cannot but be astonished at the energy of his con- viction. The language of Epicurus is as gentle as the life which it inculcates. Epicurus, as well as his successors, breathes the calm of Omar Khay- yam, the apathy of the East : " It is better to lie than to sit, it is better to sit than to stand, it is better to be idle than to stretch forth the hands to work." But Lucretius is like a physician who, in recommending his patient perfect rest, should rush at him, shake him, fling him on a bed, and shriek at him, " Don't stir ! " Lucretius puts himself into a violent heat with his exhortation to us to keep ourselves perfectly cool. Well did Statius l speak of the " towering passion of Lucretius " (furor ar- duus Lucreti). His book is indeed " a passionate scroll written over with lamentation and woe." The third book of the poem stalks through the The valley valley of the shadow of death. Its theme shadow of * s tne blackness of death (mortis nigror), death. from the fear of which he longs to eman- cipate man. Like the hapless author of " The City of Dreadful Night " he tells his fellow-men that, though the Garden of Life be wholly waste, the sweet flowers withered, and the fruit-trees barren, over its wall hang ever the rich dark clusters of the Vine of Death, within easy reach of the hand, which may pluck of them when it will. He prof- fers them " One anodyne for torture and despair, The certitude of Death, which no reprieve 1 Silvae, II. 7. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LUCRETIUS ?l Can put off long ; and which, divinely tender, But waits the outstretch'd hand to promptly render That draught whose slumber nothing can bereave." The good tidings of great joy, that there is no life beyond the grave, he announces in a The gospel spirit of exultation. "The walls of the toTS world part asunder. I see all the inmost tius - springs of nature," 1 cries Lucretius, in the rapt ecstasy of Rossetti's Blessed Damozel, who leaned out over the gold bar of Heaven and saw " Time, like a pulse, shake fierce Thro' all the worlds." The poet looks back in awe on what he has al- ready proved, a world composed by the fortuitous concourse of atoms, and utterly dissociated from the gods, who luxuriate in an idle beatitude. He revels in the thought of death and the grave, but he treats with all the scorn of a Hebrew pro- phet the carpe diem philosophy which Horace has taught us to regard as the natural expression of Epicureanism. Other Epicureans pass over the topic of death lightly, and bid us not to think of it, or to think of it as little as we may. Lucretius is enamored of it. There are who have, like the sad singer of the saddest and sweetest of odes, been " Half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme." But only one modern poet is the rival of Lucretius as a passionate lover of " lovely, soothing, delicate 1 " Moenia mundi Discedunt, totum video per inane geri res." III. 1 6. 72 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM Death." Walt Whitman alone rises to the rapture of Lucretius when he cries, " Praise, praise, praise, For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death ! " and again, " I joyously sing the dead Lost in the loving floating ocean, Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death." But it is not always by singing the praises of Death that he seeks to emancipate his fellow-men from the fear of it. The following verses, in which the Lucretius similarity of the theme suggested the on death. use o f t h e me tre of Tennyson's " Two Voices," show Lucretius in a less exultant mood, not crying, " O death, where is thy sting ? O grave, where is thy victory ? " not " putting under his feet," as Virgil sang, 1 " All forms of fear, inexorable doom, And all the din that rises from Hell's maw," but rather whispering, " Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people," owning its terrors, but gently consol- ing his fellow-sufferers, and proffering them quiet counsel : " ' No more shall look upon thy face Sweet spouse, no more with emulous race Sweet children court their sire's embrace. " ' To their soft touch right soon no more Thy pulse shall thrill ; e'en now is o'er Thy stewardship, Death is at the door. 1 Georg. II. 491. LUCRETIUS ON DEATH 73 " ' One dark day wresteth every prize From hapless man in hapless wise, Yea, e'en the pleasure of his eyes.' " Thus men bewail their piteous lot ; \ Yet should they add, ' 'T is all forgot, These things the dead man recketh not.' " Yea, could they knit for them this chain Of words and reasons, men might gain Some dull narcotic for their pain, " Saying, 'The dead are dead indeed ; The dead, from all heart-sickness freed, Sleep and shall sleep and take no heed.' ** Lo, if dumb Nature found a voice, Would she bemoan, and not make choice To bid poor mortals to rejoice, " Saying, ' Why weep thy wane, O man? Wert joyous e'en when life began, When thy youth's sprightly freshets ran? ** ' Nay, all the joys thy life e'er knew As poured into a sieve fell through, And left thee but to rail and rue.' " Go, fool, as doth a well-filled guest Sated of life : with tranquil breast Take thine inheritance of rest. tl Why seekest joys that soon must pale Their feeble fires, and swell the tale Of things of nought and no avail ? 74 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM " Die, sleep ! For all things are the same ; Tho' spring now stir thy crescent frame, 'T will wither : all things are the same." This minor chord of ennui, " all things are the same," and the sad, sad word, " in vain " (nequi- quam), which so often recur in the midst of his fervid and glad evangel, ever and anon intrude as uninvited guests at the poet's feast of reason, and cast ashes on the train of flowery clauses in which he enshrined his honeyed precepts. It was his fierce attack on the belief in a future Allusions to life which drew down on Lucretius the by^dent implacable enmity of the Christian writ- ers, and which whelmed him under a conspiracy of silence on the part of his Roman contemporaries and successors. Virgil and Horace make allusions to him which show that they deeply admired him, but they never mention his name. Ovid only says that his work will not be forgotten (to give the sense of the Ovidian passage in the words of Tennyson) till " this cosmic order everywhere, Shatter'd into one earthquake in one day, Cracks all to pieces." Cicero, indeed, wrote of him 1 that his work was _ . . . , marked by brilliant flashes of genius, and Criticism of ' Cicero on yet (a rare combination) by excellent art, a passage which shows Cicero's perfect literary judgment, but which his editors have for i Q.Fr. 11.9(11), 3- TALES ABOUT LUCRETIUS' LIFE 75 the most part perverted by inserting a non, and making Cicero thus deny either artistic finish or brilliancy of genius to his illustrious contempo- rary. The other writers and thinkers of Rome have regarded the poem (to use the image of Con- stant Martha) as some triste bidental, some spot blasted with lightning. As the ancient Ro- mans fenced off the place which Jove had smitten with his thunderbolt, lest some unwary footstep should trespass on a region accursed of God, so they kept aloof and closed their ears to the sombre strain which breathed the stern note of defiance of death. The statement of Jerome that Tales about Lucretius was maddened by a love-philter his life - and perished by his own hand, and the other record that he died on the day when Virgil assumed the toga of manhood, are myths of the kind so fre- quent in the ancient world, and have no weight save in so far as they suggest the wrath of the gods which ought to have pursued the author of the poem on the " Constitution of Nature," and mark the fact that Lucretius was, as it were, the literary godfather of the poet who wrote the " Georgics." We must call to mind certain points of view which greatly mitigate the audacity of the Lucre- tian assault on the doctrine of a future Doctrine of life. This belief was not firmly held ? f ^eiife * in the an- even by the most orthodox thinkers of dent world, his time. Cicero acknowledges that the letter 1 which Sulpicius sent him on the occasion of his 1 Fam. IV. 5. 76 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM daughter Tullia's death embraced every source of consolation which the case admitted ; yet there is no allusion in that letter to the comfort which would have been afforded by the belief in the happiness of Tullia in another state. " If," writes Sulpicius a sad " if " " if the dead have any conscious- ness, the girl will be grieved to think that you persevere in obstinate grief." In a letter written a few months after to Torquatus, 1 Cicero speaks of death, if it should befall him in that troublous time, as being after all only annihilation (sine ullo sensu}. Even Seneca, long after the time of Lu- cretius, calls the immortality of the soul a beauti- ful dream (pellum somnium}, and describes its ad- herents as asserting rather than proving a most acceptable doctrine. 2 The traditional pictures of the future abodes of the blest and the damned were universally discredited. Future life, even when regarded as possible, was the object, not of hope, but of fear. At best it was a sphere of ennui and inaction. The open rebels against Zeus had at least the dignity of suffering, but the rank and file of the dead languished in a world which was but a pale shadow of this, a world without hope or aim, a " land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness." Even the heroic Achilles 3 sees nothing comfortable in a future life : " Rather would I live upon the soil as the hireling of another, with a landless man that had 1 Font. VI. 4. 2 Ep. 102. Odyssey XI. 488. THE "ANTI-LUCRETIUS" IN LUCRETIUS 77 no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that are gone." Such was the pale realm whose walls Lucretius battered with such fierce exultation, walls to which no trembling hopes looked up as to an abiding city, or a treasure house where rust and moth corrupt not, and where thieves cannot break through and steal. A brilliant French critic, M. Patin, has used a striking phrase about the poet of Epi- The anti cureanism. He says there is in Lucre- Lucretius" . T . f in Lucretius. tms an anti-Lucretius which is forever pulling him back from the extreme consequences of his theory, and forcing him into conclusions more in accordance with his ardent and enthusi- astic temperament. It will be opportune here to glance at some of the manifestations of the anti- Lucretius in Lucretius. As Lucretius deprives the gods of all influence over Nature, he is obliged to account for the existence of Nature by the postu- late of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But here we are surprised to meet with expressions quite inconsistent with this cold materialism. What have principles, conditions, laws (rationes,foedera, leges), to do with the freaks of blind Chance ? How can Nature be called creatrix or gubernans, " creative " or "regulative," J if she is bound fast in the fetters of Fate ? We have even Fortuna gubernans in I. 1 08. What is this but a Deus (or Dea] ex mackina who brings about the denouement of a drama which else would have had a lame and impotent conclu- sion indeed ? 1 I. 680, v. 78. 78 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM In VI. 640 he ascribes to Nature those volcanic convulsions which he elsewhere expressly disso- ciates from divine influence. And what but divine influence is the hidden power (vis abdita) of which he says 1 that it "constantly tramples on human grandeur, and is seen to tread under its heel the insignia of human power, and make sport for itself of them " ? Nature, presented by Lucretius as a mother in II. 990, again appears as a cruel stepmother in V. 778, where she is described as casting the newly born infant, naked and weeping, on the inhospitable shore of life, more helpless than the brutes, and more able to feel and deplore its helplessness ; then fostering the growth of tares and all noxious weeds, and trying to wrest from wretched man the scanty portion of the earth which she has granted him wherefrom to extract a meagre sustenance with the sweat of his brow. Everywhere Nature has the attributes of will and personality. Again, he subtilizes the soul, the soul of the soul, up to the very verge of spirituality. It is from his vivid and beautiful illustrations of the interdependence of body and soul that Virgil has taken two fine passages, that in which Dido "sought the light of heaven and groaned when she found it," 2 and that in which the fingers of the dying man twitch with the longing to grasp the hilt of the sword again. 3 Above all, in the clinamen of the atoms, or the 1 V. 1230. 2 IV. 688. 8 X. 396. LANGUAGE OF LUCRETIUS RELIGIOUS 79 causeless deviation of the atom-stream from the right line, we have an active, intelligent principle thrusting itself in spite of his materialism into his system. In the words of De Musset, " Despite ourselves to Heaven we raise our eyes." (" Malgre' nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.") He is not a fatalist. He recognizes a nameless force (vis nominis expers) which he finely calls " an influence torn from the grasp of Necessity " (fatis avolsa potestas), and which is not unlike Matthew Arnold's postulate of a tendency " that makes for righteousness." The very language of Lucretius is tinged with a deep religious fervor which reminds us Language of of Milton. We recall the " hideous hum " Lucretius of the oracles when we read of " the awful state " in which the image of the divine mother of the gods is carried through the lands, and how she " mutely enriches mortals with a blessing not ex- pressed in words." * Indeed, if the philosophy of Lucretius can be described as a poisonous plant at all, it is at least one of those venomous flowers which supply healing influences, too. There is nothing in his system of morality which can shock us except some of his theories with regard to the passion of love, and in extenuation of them we must remember how coarsely the spirit of the time regarded womanhood. Moreover, we can hardly be wrong in seeing in the poet himself evidences of 1 II. 610, 624. 80 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM some physical defect or mental craze animating him with a furious hatred of the passion itself. His master Epicurus looked on it but as a disturbing influence. Lucretius assailed it as a bane and a curse. Not his the "tears that love can die ; " his rather to heap " shards, flints, and pebbles " on the grave of love. He has a delight like Lucretius compared that of Dean Swift in showing the seamy with Swift. . , , , , . i i . i side 01 the passion, and indeed in this respect strongly reminds us of the great Irishman whose bones moulder in St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, whose heart, in the desperate words of his epitaph, " cruel indignation now no longer rends." J " What a vulture," writes Thackeray, " it was that tore the heart of that giant ! " 2 1 " Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit." 2 The following passages from Thackeray's admirable Lectures on the English Hicmorists of the Eighteenth Cent^iry will suggest to readers of Lucretius that the comparison with Swift is not merely fanciful : " As is the case with madmen, certain subjects provoke him, and awaken his fits of wrath. Marriage is one of these ; in a hundred passages in his writ- ings he rages against it, rages against children." Again: "And it was not merely by the sarcastic method that Swift exposed the unreasonableness of loving and hav- ing children. ... In fact our great satirist was of opinion that conjugal love was unadvisable, and illustrated the theory by his own practice and example, God help him ! which made him about the most wretched being in God's world. ' My health is somewhat mended,' he writes in May, 1719, 'but at best I have an ill head and an aching heart.' " In another trait Swift resembled the Latin poet : " Swift ORIGINALITY OF LUCRETIUS 8 1 The true charge against Epicureanism is not that it debases morality, or " makes divine Philosophy Procuress to the lords of Hell," but that it tends to extinguish energy by enfee- bling the springs of action. According to it, pas- sion and action are alike folly ; there is no virtue but egotism ; the true wisdom is apathy, originality The extraordinary originality of Lucre- fLu -etius. tius is shown in the strenuous spirit which he breathes into this flaccid and lymphatic creed. We seem to see a St. Anthony fiercely fighting the passions that fiercely tear him, a St. Simeon Stylites who has not succeeded in quenching his ambition, but only in giving it another object, pas- sionate in the vaunting of his victory over himself, and leaping with all the ardor of a young lover into tne arms of his "passionless bride, divine Tran- quillity." It may seem strange that Lucretius should have chosen verse as the vehicle of his teach- vehicle of ing, especially as Epicurus wrote in prose histeachin g- and condemned poetry on principle. However, he had the precedent of Xenophanes and Empedocles, and among his own countrymen that of Ennius, who was a reverent, was a pious spirit. . . . Through the storms and tempests of his furious mind the stars of religion and love break out in the blue, shining serenely, though hidden by the driving clouds and the maddened hurricane of his Ufe," 82 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM translated Epicharmus. He tells us that his design was "to make a harsh truth less bitter." Do we not find in our own time the novel forced into the service of some particular school of religious thought ; and do we not meet even certain purists who condemn novel-reading as a practice, but make an exception in favor of such works of fiction as embellish and promote those particular church prin- ciples which they themselves affect ? In the poem of Lucretius, beside certain amus- ingly naif and (one might almost say) speculations puerile speculations, we find real contri- butions to knowledge, which science now accepts, and which were truly remarkable discover- ies in the time of Lucretius. Among the most crude is his theory of the causes of sleep, in the fourth book (910 sqq.}, to which he carefully be- speaks the attention of his readers in some very fine verses. According to him, " sleep mainly takes place when the force of the soul has been scat- tered about through the frame, and in part has been forced abroad and taken its departure, in part also has been thrust back and has withdrawn into the depths of the body ; after that the limbs are re- laxed and droop. For there is no doubt that this sense exists in us by the agency of the soul ; and when sleep obstructs the action of this sense, then we must assume that our soul has been disordered and forced abroad : not indeed all, for then the body would be steeped in the everlasting chill of death. If no part of the soul remained behind EPICUREANISM THOROUGH-GOING 83 concealed in the limbs, as fire remains concealed when buried under much ash, whence could sense be suddenly rekindled through the limbs, as flame can spring up from hidden fire ? " Another passage of amusing naivett is his way of accounting for the terror manifested by the lion in the presence of the cock. 1 " Moreover, ravenous lions cannot bear to face and gaze upon a cock with flapping wings putting night to rout, and summoning the morn with shrill voice. In such wise the lions at once bethink them of flight, because sure enough in the body of cocks are cer- tain seeds, and these, when they have been dis- charged into the eyes of lions, bore into the pupils and cause such sharp pain that, fierce though they be, they cannot continue to face them." We are reminded of the attempts of the Royal Society in the time of Charles II. to account for a non- existent phenomenon. The theories explaining the greater weight of a dead than a living fish were not less far-fetched and fanciful than the hypothesis of Lucretius to account for the imagi- nary tremors of the king of beasts. Epicurus is contented with any explanation, pro- vided that it does not postulate divine or Epicurean- spiritual agency. In fact he often gives his reader two incompatible theories, and be " ef - bids him take whichever he pleases. A good Epi- curean does not hesitate in his choice between science and his system. Polyaenus, on his conver- 1 IV. 706. 84 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM sion to Epicureanism, declared his conviction that there was no such thing as geometrical proof. Catholicism was once as thorough-going. I have myself seen an old edition of the " Principia," by a learned abbe, who took care to explain in his preface that, though the conclusions of Newton constituted a good discipline for the exercise of the mental faculties, and therefore might be stud- ied with profit, yet they must not be regarded as true, inasmuch as a Bull of the Holy Father had spoken of the sun as revolving round the earth ! In a similar spirit Lucretius, after setting forth l a theory of the antipodes with amazing scientific ac- Reiationof curacy, rejects it as "a fond thing vainly theOTies^o invented " (vanus error). The same the- reiigion. or y was afterwards repudiated by the Christian church. It is remarkable, as M. Con- stant Martha has well observed, how speculative beliefs sometimes, so to speak, change sides. Here we have Epicureanism and early Chris- tianity ranged hand in hand against history and science. So, again, Lucretius believes in a final destruction of the world, while the religious of his time held that it would be eternal. It is now the orthodox who maintain the Lucretian view, and the free-thinkers who take the other side. These considerations should teach us that we ought not either to embrace a scientific theory because we think we recognize in it an ally to religion, or to reject it as a suspected foe. Ajax tells us in a 1 I. 1053. ANTICIPATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE 85 pathetic passage of the play of Sophocles, how a sad experience has taught him that we should look on our friends as those who may one day be our ene- mies, and on our enemies as those whom time may yet draw to our hearts. Such ought to be the attitude of the true friend of religion towards scientific theories. He should consider onlj their absolute worth. About their relation to religion he may be mistaken, or the friend of yesterday may be the foe of to-morrow. To set against the absurd speculations which we have been considering, it will be inter- Antid ^ estinsr to point to places in which Lu- tionsof modern cretius or his predecessors have really science in anticipated modern scientific research : Lucretius recognizes that in a vacuum every body, no matter what its weight, falls with equal swift- ness; 1 that _the atmosphere is material; 2 that in youth the repair of the tissues is greater than the waste, the contrary being the case in old age ; 3 the circulation of the sap in the vegetable world is known to Lucretius ; 4 and he describes falling stars, aerolites, etc., as the unused material of the universe. 5 But, far above and beyond these par- ticular anticipations of modern thought, we have in the whole atomistic theory what is now the basis of the molecular hypothesis, which latter only adds the existence of chemical as well as mechanica/ changes among the atoms, but leaves the general 1 II. 237. 2 I. 27. 3 II. 1122. * I. 347- c n. 547. 86 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM conception the same. Snow and fire, according to Lucretius, come from different combinations of the same atoms, just as a tragedy and com- edy are made of the same letters differently dis- posed. 1 Finally, the Darwinian natural selec- tion, struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest are distinctly adumbrated, in Book V. 873 : "They doubtless became the prey of others, unable to break through the bonds of fate by which they were confined until Nature caused that species to disappear." 2 It is, indeed, food for deep reflection when we intense observe the intense interest and confi- Lucretius in dence which this mighty intelligence his work. f ee i s } n t h e childish physical theory which he has embraced. It is to him a source of ever new and ever present delight. The pool of water in the street fills him with wonder and awe. It is but a few inches deep, yet to the eye its pro- fundity is that of the reflected heavens. Like this is the mind of Lucretius himself. The most trivial things become invested with a sombre sublimity, an august bigness, as soon as they begin to reflect his majestic spirit. Decidedly the most remarkable feature in the whole poem is the solemn beauty of Beauty of . . J imagery and imagery and language into which he bursts in unfolding his thorny specula- tions. Examples of this are abundant, and an excellent instance is the passage so exquisitely 1 I. 824. 2 V. 875-877. BEAUTY OF IMAGERY AND DICTION 8,7 reproduced in Tennyson's " Lucretius," where he celebrates " The all-generating powers and genial heat Of Nature when she strikes through the thick blood Of cattle, and light is large, and lambs are glad Nosing the mother's udder, and the bird Makes his heart voice amid the blaze of flowers." I know of no other poem except Tennyson's "Two Voices" in which the same wealth of poesy is enlisted to explain and beautify abstruse argu- ment. Nearly every verse of the " Two Voices " illustrates this exquisite marriage of poetry and logic. This passage will serve as an example as well as another : " Again the voice spake unto me : ' Thou art so steep'd in misery, Surely 't were better not to be. " ' Thine anguish will not let thee sleep, Nor any train of reason keep : Thou canst not think, but thou wilt weep.' " I said : ' The years with change advance ; If I make dark my countenance, I shut my life from happier chance. " ' Some turn this sickness yet might take, Ev'n yet.' But he : ' What drug can make A wither'd palsy cease to shake ? ' " I wept : ' Tho' I should die, I know That all about the thorn will blow In tufts of many-tinted snow ; 88 LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM " ' And men, through novel spheres of thought, Still moving after truth long sought, Will learn new things when I am not.' " Yet,' said the secret voice, ' some time, Sooner or later, will gray prime Make thy grass hoar with early rime. M ' Not less swift souls that yearn for light, Rapt after heaven's starry flight, Will sweep the tracts of day and night. " ' Not less the bee will range her cells, The furzy prickle fire the dells, The foxglove cluster dappled bells.' " We may observe a very similar faculty in the Latin poet in many places, for instance in II. 576- 580 : " With death there is ever blending the wail of infants newly born into the light ; and no night has ever followed day, no morn ever dawned on night, but hath heard the mingled sounds of feeble infant wailings and of the lamentations that follow the dead and the black funeral train." The whole thought is but a step in his ratiocination, but it insensibly clothes itself in images, and brings pic- tures before our eyes. And we see the born word- painter in such expressions as " the wiles and force and craft of the faithless sea, the treacherous, allur- ing smile of the calm ocean;" 1 "the shells that paint the lap of Earth ; " 2 " and now, shaking his head [a fine touch], the aged peasant laments that the toil of his hands has come to nought ; " 3 " then MI. 555. 2 II. 374. 811.1164. PLACE OF LUCRETIUS AMONG POETS 89 all these vapors gather together above, and, taking shape as clouds, on high weave a canopy beneath the firmament." 1 Lucretius has now won his place among the great poets of the world. He has survived the , Place of anathemas of pious zealots and the plau- Lucretius r i r 11 r i iii-r among the dits of the enemies of all faith and belief, poets of the We now see how religious is the irreligion of this Titan. We hear in his sombre strains not the sneers of the encyclopaedist, but the high words of Prometheus on the Caucasus. At last the world has learned that intrepid audacity combined with noble sincerity may have a beauty which is like the beauty of holiness. At last Lucretius " Lifts His golden feet on those empurpled stairs That climb into the windy halls of heaven." We see in him a sage who dwells on the lofty vantage-ground of science, and from his philosophic observatory looks down with disdain on the petty interests of the world. But he looks down on the world with a godly joy (divina voluptas) and a holy awe (horror). And we see in him an eager student of Nature, who has been raised by a natu- rally religious cast of mind, through cold and in- tangible abstractions to which he tried in vain to cling, raised out of Nature and up to Nature's God. i V. 466. IV. CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION TO THE AUGUS- TAN AGE. PASSING from the ghosts that haunt the early prime of Latin literature and, in fragments which often the merest chance has preserved for us, " come like shadows, so depart," we have reached a firm land, with living and breathing poets, a land that echoes to the cries of two great spirits, Lucre- tius and Catullus, the one tormented by the pain- ful riddle of the earth, the other by the pangs of disprized love. We have seen Lucretius Lucretius * and Catullus in his austere, almost religious, seclusion, contrasted. , ,. . hardly glancing at any passing event, looking down with the pity and disdain of an anchorite on the struggles of fashion and ambi- tion, and scowling with the fierce indignation of a Swift on the joys and pangs of love. In him the man was nothing, the philosopher was every- thing. In Catullus we meet one for whom philoso- phy was nothing, and the keynote of whose song is man and man's heart. Catullus had studied Greek sympathetically and well, but it was only for liter- ary purposes. The Greek philosophy which was so attractive to his contemporaries, especially Cicero, was to him only words " and the chatter of solemn graybeards." 1 A lecture on Lucretius pursues the 1 " Rumoresque senum severiorum." V 2. THE HISTORY OF A HEART 91 history -of the poet's mind ; a lecture on Catullus pursues the history of his heart. It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the importance, as an influence on a man's life, of that The poem train of emotional experiences which we th^hteto^y call love ; but in the case of Catullus it of his heart was all-powerful, his love was his life. Since this is so, and since the history of the poet's heart has been set forth by himself in that mar- velous series of poems tracing 'his infatuation for Lesbia from its rapturous beginning to its early estrangement ; thence to that reconciliation which shows something of the sweetness of lovers' quar- rels composed, but more of the bitterness of re- membering happier things ; and finally to the furi- ous scorn with which the lover " tears his passion from his bosom, though his heart be at the root," is it not marvelous that not a single editor, down to Mr. Postgate, whose recent and scholarly edition has done so much for the text of Catullus, should have given us the poems in the order in which they must have been written ? Yet such is the case. Editors continue to present us in the eleventh ode with the final repudiation of Lesbia, while we have in the fifty-first the rapture of reciprocated love, in the sixty-eighth the first beginnings of suspicion, in the seventy-sixth settled despair, in the eighth the vain effort to forget and passion- ate longing for the past which can never come again, and in the eighty-third hopeful auguries drawn from the unfriendly demeanor of Lesbia 92 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION toward her lover in the presence of her husband. The principle on which the poems are arranged in their present order is so utterly illogical and un- chronological that it has been surmised and, we could well believe, with justice that the juxtaposi- tion of poems written at widely different times, and under widely different influences, may have arisen from a merely mechanical principle of arrange- ment which bade the first copyists choose in each case such poems as would just fill up the page on which they were engaged, and not run over into the next. I will endeavor to rectify this error, and place beside each other in their right order a few of the poems in which Catullus has struck those terrible chords which have given us the very vibra- tions of his heart, chords as true as those of Burns or Shakespeare, and as artistic as those of Keats or Shelley. Catullus was a contemporary of Cicero, Lucretius, Position and C. Julius Caesar, and died most stanST" probably in 54 B. c. at the age of thirty. Catullus. All his poetry was written in the last six years of his short life, between his twenty-fourth and his thirtieth year. He had Celtic blood in his veins, coming from Verona in Cisalpine Gaul, which was then indeed meet nurse of poetic chil- dren, and was about to give to Rome Virgil and Cornelius Gallus, as well as the writer of what is perhaps the most perfect prose style ever achieved, the historian Livy. His intimates were all the most distinguished men whom the time and the CIRCUMSTANCES OF CATULLUS 93 town produced, the Metelli, Hortensius, Man- lius Torquatus, Memmius, the two Ciceros. The great orator, whom he salutes as " Most eloquent of all the line From Romulus who claim," l never actually mentions the name of Catullus, but the orator has undoubtedly borrowed from the poet two happy expressions which we meet in his correspondence : once when he says that a public man should be " more sensitive than the tip of the ear ; " 2 and again, when he echoes in " ocellos Ita- liae villulas " 3 the charming apostrophe to Sirmio in the thirty-first ode : " Thou of all isles and all peninsulas The very eye." The family of Catullus was old and high, though no member of it had attained that official rank which was the condition of nobility technically so called. Though he often sportively alludes to his 1 Carm. XLIX. Here and in some other places I use the often excellent but somewhat unequal translation of Sir The- odore Martin, sometimes venturing to remodel his version a little with the view of bringing out some point on which one may wish specially to dwell, but which naturally is not so prominent in his rendering. In some places where I could not take quite his view of the tone of the poem, as in VIII, beginning " Miser Catulle desinas ineptire," and in a few other shorter pieces, I have essayed a translation of my own. 2 " Auricula infima molliorem " (Q. Fr. II. 13, 4) ; cp. " mot lior imula auricilla " (Catull. XXV. 2). Att. XVI. 6, 2. 94 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION want of money, as when he tells one friend that his "purse is full of cobwebs," 1 and another that his house is exposed to the worst draught he knows, namely, a draft of fifteen thousand two hundred sesterces' morgage on it, 2 yet he cannot have been what we should call poorly provided for. We know that he had two country-houses, one near Tivoli and another on the Lago di Garda, to which he often retired, and which he describes as delightful retreats ; moreover, he could afford to keep a pri- vate yacht large enough to carry him from Bithy- nia to Italy. His intimates and associates in Rome were the highest in rank, birth, and distinction. The woman to whose fascinations and falseness we owe much of what is best in the Clodia, the Lesbia of poetry of Catullus, the belle dame sans merci who first made him a poet and then a corpse, was, as is now generally admitted, Clodia, the sister of Cicero's enemy, wife of the great noble the Consul Metellus, and consequently about the grandest lady in the world. Rich, highly cultivated, witty, very beautiful, and conscious of the " aspiring blood " of the Claudii in her veins, the Palatine Medea, as she was called, seems to have had for the Roman youth of her time an ab- solutely irresistible attraction. When she turned the head of Catullus, a brilliant youth of two- and-twenty, she was herself past thirty years of age, with her ruinous charms in the full luxuri- 1 "Plenus sacculus est aranearum." XIII. 8. 8 Carm. XXVI. CLODIA, THE LESBIA OF CATULLUS 95 ance of their poisonous bloom. For her beauty was of that Junoesque type which even in South- ern Italy requires time to enable it to expand to its full flower. Known to us as she is only from the railings of her bitter enemies, perhaps the three greatest masters of the art of invective that ever wrote, Cicero, Caelius, and Catullus, she ap- pears, indeed, as a monster of almost incredible pro- fligacy, but also as a great and well-marked person- ality in her generation. We must of course make allowance for the manners of a time when no limits whatever were set to the license of abuse, a time when no one thought it indecorous in Cicero to apply such terms as " swine," " ordure," " carrion," to his political opponents in the Senate, and when such was the standard of manners in that " assem- bly of kings " that Cicero, in a letter to his brother, 1 relates as an every-day incident how rival orators spat in each other's faces ; a time when, if a mag- istrate wanted to address the people, he was obliged to carry the Rostra by assault, and to maintain his occupancy at the risk of his life. It is true that in the period of Catullus we begin to see the rise of something which we should now call society, the dawn of the beau monde. But the society of which we catch glimpses in the poems of Catullus and the letters of Cicero is still very rudimentary. Catullus thinks it a good joke to accuse a guest of stealing the napkins ; and the comparatively refined Cicero banters Atticus about the poorness of the fare 1 Q. Fr. II. 3 , 2. 96 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION which he serves up on such expensive plate of the fern-pattern, and wonders what it would be if the service were earthenware. 1 .In such an age it is not surprising that the license of personal invective should be really unlimited. Furious and now un- utterable charges were publicly made against every public man by his opponents, and against private enemies by the man who could win the ear of the public. The assertions of Cicero and Catullus, that Clodia reached the last and most public stage in the career of infamy, we need not believe, any more than we believe that Caesar was addicted to every unspeakable vice. To impute such crimes was the fashion of the time. Different ages do not understand each other. 2 But we have good grounds for looking on Clodia as being a woman of daemonic fascination and cruelty, and a great social force in Rome at a time When society was beginning to form itself in a city to which for centuries the home-keeping aristocracy had failed to give the semblance of a social centre and seat of fashion and gaiety. When we think of Clo- dia with her large, burning eyes, now overflowing 1 " Sed heus tu ! Quid cogitas? in felicatis lancibus et splendidissimis canistris, olusculis nos soles pascere : quid te in vasis fictilibus appositurum putem ? " Att. VI. i, 13. 2 Expressions in constant use by the Puritans and Cove- nanters would now afford a presumption of imbecility, or at least gross insincerity. Therefore the Puritans are often spoken of as hypocrites and fools. But they were nothing of the kind, only subsequent ages did not understand their modes of expressing themselves. CLOD f A, THE LESBIA OF CATULLUS 97 with tears over the death of her sparrow, now flash- ing with malicious joy as she and her boy lover, in fulfilment of a sportive vow, commit to the flames, with expressions certainly not too weak, the feeble work of a rival literary aspirant, the Annals of Tanusius, whom Catullus after his fashion pillories under the metrically equivalent name of Volusius, 1 we feel that we are in the presence of a very wo- man, who had also many of the qualities which in Bohemian life knit man to man. Her sensuous exuberance of form is conveyed to us by many a dexterous touch : " Therein my lustrous goddess with soft step Enter'd, and 'neath her glistering foot the sandal Creak'd as she trod." 2 Here is no "airy, fairy Lilian," no Titania, no poet's unsubstantial dream, but a ripe and real wo- man of warm flesh and blood, such as Rubens painted. Though Clodia was woman enough to weep over her dead sparrow till her lovely eyes were red and swollen, she had enough of the man in her to take a deep interest in politics. It is surely more than a coincidence that the liaison 1 " Annales Volusi, cacata charta, Votum solvite pro mea puella . . . At vos interea venite in ignem, Pleni ruris et inficetiarum, Annales Volusi cacata charta." Carm. XXXVI. 2 " Quo mea se molli Candida diva pede Intulit, et trito fulgentem in limine plantam Innixa, arguta constitit in solea." LXVIII. 70-72. 98 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION between her and Catullus was uninterrupted until the conservatives to whom belonged Catullus, like Cicero, Hortensius, Lucretius, Nepos, Varro, and others highly distinguished in literature and oratory felt forced to break with Caesar and the democratic party. In the year 62, when Catullus came to Rome from his native Verona, Cicero was still on friendly terms with Clodius. That feeling was soon turned to one of bitter hostility ; but for a considerable time after this Cicero endeavored to maintain amicable relations with the revolutionists, and he succeeded in doing so until the establish- ment of the first Triumvirate. This was just the time when Clodia began to cast off Catullus. Her husband the Consul was now dead, poisoned (said common report) by the hand of his wife, and the latest victim of her deadly M. Caeiius kisses was M. Caelius Rufus, the friend and correspondent of Cicero. He was a brilliant young man, especially famed for the witty and satirical character of his oratory. Cicero writes to him : " In the whole course of my life I have never found any one more aufaitm politics," 1 and he was on the democratic side. He was tall and handsome, with a keen wit, and one of the best dancers of the day, an accomplishment which gave him a start in the race for the favor of Clodia, who was herself passionately fond of dancing. This was the Rufus whom Catullus calls 1 " no\iTiK " about to refer is duly noted kept him right in a splendid line which he borrowed from the " Attis " for his " Tithonus." I refer to the noble passage where the horses of the Sun " Shake the darkness from their loosen'd manes, And beat the twilight into flakes of fire" Surely Tennyson had in his mind the passage in the "Attis " where Catullus says of the rising Sun, " And he smote on the dim dawn's path with the hoofs of his fiery chariot-steeds." * A less learned and accomplished scholar than Tennyson might have supposed that Catullus had present to his fancy the much less striking figure of the Sun "driving away the darkness of night ; " but the Latin is fortunately decisive and inexo- 1 "Pepulitque noctis umbras vegetis sonipedibus." LXIII. 41. The magnificent phrase, " the dim dawn's path," for " the morning sky," reminds us of Milton's " Thither came Uriel flying through the even," where Bentley, with such strange lack of poetic feeling, wished to correct " even " to " heaven." Il6 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION rable : pellere in Catullus never mearis " to drive away," always "to smite," "to strike." An igno- rance of the usage of the poet would rob him of a most magnificent piece of imagery. This delicate touch has been missed by Mr. Grant Allen, who thus renders the sunrise passage : " But when golden-visaged Phoebus with radiant eyes again Surveyed the fleecy ether, solid land, and roaring main, And with mettlesome chargers scattered the murky shades of night, Then Attis swift awakened, and Sleep fled fast from his sight." Though some of the poems of Catullus dance Sadness of ^^ e those waves of the Lago di Garda Catullus. which he calls "merrymen," yet we have in him, as in all the great Latin poets, a prevailing chord of sadness, a mournful minor key. Even his gay dedication of his yacht, which "declares no pinnace could outstrip her," ends with the sad reflection, "portion and parcel of the past." 1 As Dante in his " Vita Nuova " tells us with what agony the thought came to him that Beatrice could die, so Catullus even in his wildest rapture cannot put aside the thought of the darkness of death, " Into whose maw goes all that's prettiest," 2 and the certainty that " Suns will rise and set again : But for us, when once doth wane x " Sed haec prius fuere." IV. 25. 8 " At vobis male sit, malae tenebrae Orci, quae omnia bella devoratis." III. 13, 14. THE LINK WITH AUGUSTAN POETRY This poor pageant's little light, We must sleep in endless night." * Lucretius and Catullus we have already found coupled together by Cornelius Nepos as Catul]us the representing the culminating point of connecting link with Republican poetry. And Nepos was Augustan right. " When we find," writes Momm- poe sen, 2 " not merely his contemporaries electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art critics of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries as well as his successors were completely right. The Latin nation has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection as in Catullus. And in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show." Catullus is, moreover, the connecting link between the Republican and the Augustan school. The " Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," his longest piece by far, has been shown by Munro to be the work of his last year of life, and it dis- plays unmistakable signs of a perusal of the poem of Lucretius. It is elaborately, one might almost say awkwardly, constructed on the Alexandrine model. But we cannot help feeling that the word 1 " Soles occidere et redire possunt : Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux Nox est perpetua una dormienda." V. 4-6. a Roman History, iv. 591, Eng. Trans. Il8 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION " awkward " is ill-associated with such a poem, even though the laws of art cry out against the long epi- sode which in a not very long poem tells so beauti- fully the sad tale of the desertion of Ariadne. To take the least enthusiastic view of it, it is interest- ing as the earliest specimen in Latin of a careful effort to construct a really epic poem in hexameters. It is the first example of that thoroughly diligent elaboration which Horace enjoins on his contempo- raries, and of which Virgil and Ovid had conceived so high an ideal. It is from this point of view that Catullus has been well called by M. Patin " La Preface du siecle d'Auguste." The successive stages in the elegiac poetry of Elegiac the Augustan age are marked by Pro- the e A y u- f pertius, Tibullus, and Ovid. The early gustanage. Greek elegy was as opposite as possi- ble in its spirit to the elegy of the Augustan age. Callinus and Tyrtaeus employed it to rouse their countrymen to patriotism and heroism ; Solon made politics its theme ; and Theognis and Pho- cylides enshrined in it their proverbial philoso- phy and shrewd moralizings on life. Mimnermus is the only early Greek elegiac poet whose muse is associated with love. It is the Alexandrine poets, Philetas, Callimachus, and Euphorion, to whom Cicero refers as the models of " the new school " (01 i/ewre/3iovTes), and who really gave its tone and scope to the Latin elegy. With Proper- tius love is still ardent passion, but the character- istic reverence and seriousness, the gravitas of the PROPERTIUS Roman character, has deepened into gloom ; in Tibullus love is tender affection mixed with melan- choly, and there is still strong sympathy with the grandeur of the Roman character and state ; in Ovid love is mere pleasure, intrigue, gallantry, and all gravitas has completely disappeared. Love is with him merely physical desire, and the lover aspires to nothing better than tonne fortune. The poet has forgotten how to suffer like Catullus, and has learned how picturesque it is to souffrir like Alfred de Musset. Ovid prepares us for the state of morals which called forth the sarcasms of Tacitus and the execrations of Juvenal. The late Professor Sellar, in his valuable volume on Horace and the elegiac poets, which appeared after his lamented death, has happily remarked that readers of Propertius in the present day will be disposed, according to their temperament, to apostrophize him in one or other of two verses from his own poems. Those who feel neither his own personality nor that which he has imparted to his Cynthia to be very congenial, and who think that it is possible to have too much of lovers' quarrels and reconciliations, that love is, after all, only the flower of life, not its root or even its fruit, will shut up the book of his poems, exclaiming in his own words, " Maxima de nilo nascitur historia." The more sympathetic readers will say with a sigh, " Ardoris nosti\magne poeta jaces." 120 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION To the one the four books of elegies will be " much ado about nothing ; " to the others Propertius will ever be " the bard that lent love's passion words." I belong to the latter class, and that is the reason why I have put him before Tibullus, to whom chronologically he is somewhat posterior. When we leave Propertius, we abandon really ardent sin- cerity in the expression of the passion of love, never again to meet it in Latin poetry. The poetry of Tibullus is to his " As moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine." The characteristic of Tibullus is not ardor, but tenderness and self-abnegation. He writes to Delia with apparent sincerity : " I am not worth a single tear of hers ; " 1 and after she has proved faithless to him, he can express a grateful and affectionate re- Tibullus. membrance of her mother/ He depre- cates the life of a soldier because he prefers the peaceful joys of the country, not for the reason of Propertius, that time is wasted which is not spent in love. Tibullus might have written sincerely : " I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more." 1 " Non ego sum tanti ploret ut ilia semel." 2 " Vive diu mihi dulcis anus : proprios ego tecum, Sit modo fas, annos contribuisse velim : Te semper natamque tuam te propter amabo : Quidquid agit sanguis est tamen ilia tuus." I. 6. 63. PROPERTIUS AND OVID COMPARED 121 To Propertius such a sentiment would have been a blasphemy against love, on whose shrine every- thing, even honor, ought to be sacrificed. Propertius does not seem to have been congenial to his contemporaries. Horace sneers at Propertius him more than once, and it has been sug- and Ovid gested that Propertius was the bore whom he met on the Sacred Way. 1 But, whatever were the personal characteristics of Propertius, he was undoubtedly a great poet. If one had to select the finest poems written in Latin elegiacs, perhaps one would not err in choosing that poem in which Propertius describes the ghost of Cynthia appear- ing to him immediately after burial, 2 " Sunt aliquid Manes : letum non omnia finit," and the address 3 of Cornelia to her husband begin- ning, " Desine, Paulle, meum lacrimis urgere sepulcrum." Aeacus, in an admirable passage in the " Ranae " of Aristophanes, suggests that the question of su- periority between Aeschylus and Euripides might be decided by placing verses of each poet in a bal- 1 Mr. Bury, in his masterly history of the Roman Empire to the death of M. Aurelius, pointedly writes of him : " He seams to have been a man of weak will, and this is reflected ij his poetry. It has been noticed by those who have stud- ied his language that he prefers to express feelings as possi- bUe rather than as real; his thoughts naturally run in the potential mood." 2 IV. 7. 3 IV. II. 122 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION ance and weighing them by butcher's weight. 1 Tried by this test, his pentameters would make those of Ovid kick the beam. In Ovid the penta- meter always "falleth in melody back." In Pro- pertius it often soars above the " silvery column " of the hexameter, and dominates the couplet. Ovid would probably have thrown into the scale the fine pentameter which is engraved over the cemetery in Richmond by the banks of the James River, the cemetery which contains all that is mortal of the Southern victims of the American civil war : " Qui bene pro patria cum patriaque jacent." But Propertius would have been able to choose one of half a dozen pentameters laden with weighty meaning to set against it : perhaps the pentameter admired so much by Dean Merivale, " Jura dare et statuas inter et arma Mari ; " or the proud boast of Cornelia when she pointed to the blameless life of Paullus and herself from their marriage to her death, " Viximus insignes inter utramque facem ; " or the verse wherein the poet, thinking of the " vast and wandering grave " which whelmed the young life of his friend Paetus, exclaims in that elegiac ode which Sellar aptly compares to the " Lycidas," "Nunc tibi pro tumulo Carpathium omne mare est." rt 8e ; /ieio-ywy^croutri r^v rpayifiSiav. Ran. 79^ OVID 123 Ovid never even attempts to deal seriously with love except when he describes the pas- , . ,. Ovid. sion of a woman for a man, as in his "Heroides," and there we meet a quality in his style which at once marks him out as the herald of the Silver Age, the rhetorical tinge with which the letters from the heroines are imbued and which recalls to our minds the suasoriae of the schools of rhetoric. This defect is less seen in the poems in which Ovid was more sincere, as in the "Art of Love," which was justly regarded by Macaulay as the greatest of Ovid's works, and which reminds Sellar of Byron's-" Don Juan," as a poem in which a true vein of real poetry occasionally mingles with cynical worldliness and warm sensuousness. But the rhetorical strain is very present in the " Meta- morphoses," for which the poet himself claims the palm, and to which he trusts for his immortality. The attractiveness of this work lies in its descrip- tions, another mark, as we shall see, of the Silver Age ; but the attempt to divest it of the char- acter of a Dictionary of Mythology by interweav- ing the stories after the fashion of the " Arabian Nights " is only partially successful. Sellar points out how his gods are emptied of all dignity and grandeur, adding the just and acute remark, " Though in no ancient poem do the gods play a larger part, no work is more irreligious." If any one desires to see how a dainty conceit may be made not only gross but grotesque by a foul im- agination, let him compare the fifteenth poem in 124 CATULLUS AND THE TRANSITION the second book of 'the " Amores " with the " fool- ish song" in "The Miller's Daughter," begin- ning, " It is the miller's daughter, And she is grown so dear, so dear, That I would be the jewel That trembles at her ear ; For hid in ringlets day and night I 'd touch her neck so warm and white." In the "Tristia" and " Ex Ponto " we have an at- tempt to misapply the elegiac muse, and to force her whose song should be of " The hope, the fear, the jealous care, The exalted portion of the pain And power of love," to record the petty troubles of nne Ame d&orient/e, a soul ill at ease amid its surroundings. We could have well spared the " Fasti," a mechanical effort to produce the effect of a patriotism which the writer did not feel, and to efface the inefface- able impression of lightness and insincerity which his poetry leaves. We should have been fortunate if we had preserved in its place his tragedy, the " Medea," which ancient critics pronounced to be his masterpiece. In the " Remedia Amoris " and the "Medicamina Facie" we have an example of the most impossible of all feats which a writer can essay the attempt to imitate his past self. Many writers have achieved amazing imitations of others, but those who have tried to reproduce the pecul- iarities of their former selves have always failed OVID 125 pathetically. Nevertheless, no other classical poet has furnished more ideas than Ovid to the Italian poets and painters of the Renaissance, and to our own early poetry from Chaucer to Pope, who, like Ovid, ** Lisped in numf TS, for the numbers came." V. VIRGIL. No poet or writer of antiquity, we may safely af- firm, no uninspired writer except perhaps Aristotle, T . has had a greater influence on the world Influence of Virgil on of thought and letters than Virgil. Aris- thought and totle, of course, in the hands of the school- men was for centuries the only study of Europe ; his philosophy has thus usurped a very undue share of the attention of civilization, and has through the Latin impressed its mark on all the languages which have a Latin basis. To it, and to it alone, we owe such common words as "ac- tually," " habit," " predicament," " energy," " mo- tive," "maxim," "principle," and many others. The peddler who recommends the "quality " of his wares, and offers a reduction on taking a "quan- tity," little thinks that he is using words which, but for the philosophy of Aristotle, would never have found their way into his language. But the influ- ence of Virgil on posterity, though not so direct, is perhaps quite as marked, and is the more wonderful as exercised, not by a teacher, but by a singer. The impression produced by him was as imme- diate as it was intense. Horace said of him that nature never produced a fairer soul, and Propertius prophesied that his coming epic would surpass the IMMEDIATE AND ENDURING SUCCESS 127 "Iliad." When he entered the theatre, an awk- ward, slovenly youth with toga all awry, His success the house rose to do him honor. The ^ ediate " Aeneid " furnished the text-book which enduring, taught Seneca, Petronius, and Juvenal what per- fection was possible for their native tongue. Taci- tus conned it till the Virgilian diction so colored his style that a Virgilian parallel often dispels the obscurity of a corrupt passage in the " Annals " or " Histories," and still oftener decides the question between two rival emendations. St. Augustine often refers to Virgil as the highest bloom of pagan art. A legend of the Middle Ages relates how St. Paul, coming on the tomb of Virgil, exclaimed, " What a man I should have made of you if I had met you in your life ! " J From the mists of the Middle Ages he peers out at us as the mightiest of magicians who have " Learned the art that none may name In Padua far beyond the sea; " and in a mediaeval romance, " Reynard the Fox," Virgil and Aristotle are coupled together as en- chanters. Dante took him by the hand to lead him from the ancient to the modern world. " Or se' tu quel Virgilio," these are the words of awe and veneration with which Dante in the " Divina Commedia " greets his immortal predecessor in Ital- 1 " Quern te, inquit, reddidissem Si te vivum invenissem, Poetarum maxime ! " 128 VIRGIL ian poetry. The modern world at once welcomes him through the mouth of Bacon, who calls him " the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known." The very stones cry out. Scratched on the baths of Titus have been found the words tantae mo Us erat, and on a wall in Pom- peii is scribbled conticuere omnes. From his own time to the present century, Virgil has been recog- nized as the type of perfection in poetry. Before the year 1 500, ninety editions of his work had been published, and so many since the revival of letters that there are said to be as many editions as the years that have passed since his death. The reaction against Virgil which the presen'- century has witnessed may be said to Reaction * * against date from the epoch-making lectures of the^reTent Niebuhr ; and since that time the ques- tion whether Virgil deserves a place among the great poets of the world has been a duel between France and Germany, in which all the cunning of fence has been on the side of France. His ascendency in France was early and complete. Scaliger ranked him above Homer and Theocritus; and Voltaire said, " If Homer is the creator of Virgil, Virgil is certainly the finest of his works." Voltaire, according to M. Renan, understood nei- ther the Bible, nor Homer, nor Greek art, nor the ancient religions, nor Christianity, nor the Middle Ages, yet is a most instructive writer, for he had the courage of his convictions and always spoke out. " Virgil," writes Sainte-Beuve, " the COMPARISON WITH HOMER I2Q moment when he appeared, became at once the poet of all the Latin races." On the other hand, Ger- many has followed the lead of Niebuhr : Bern- hardy and Teuffel deny him all creative power ; and Mommsen classes the " Aeneid " with epics like the " Henriad " and the '' Messiad." The English school has been nearly as enthusiastic as the French, and has recently made a splendid contri- bution to the fame of Virgil in the magnificent ode of Tennyson, to which I shall have further occasion to refer. Undoubtedly Virgil has suffered most from a comparison with Homer, and especially comparison since the quite recent awakening of im- with Homer - aginative interest in periods of nascent and imma- ture civilization. The critics of the last century felt an interest in past ages only in so far as they presented points of similarity to their own ; hence they delighted in the subjectivity and the con- scious power of the Latin epic, and failed to find any attraction in the insouciance, naivete", and child- like simplicity of the Greek. Time, it may safely be anticipated, will still more completely confirm the primacy of the Greek epic ; but in the mean while it may be interesting to point to certain fea- tures in the Latin poem which present a strong contrast to the Greek. It has been denied that the " Aeneid " is an epic poem at all. This question is not very important. The " Aeneid," like the rose, " by any other name will smell as sweet." Undoubtedly it endeavors, 130 VIRGIL and with but moderate success, to reconcile two conflicting elements a traditional epic The Aeneid as an epic framework, and the feelings and manners of Virgil's own highly artificial age. No one can fail to observe at once the prevailing effort to reproduce Homer externally. His char- acters are borrowed, his similes, his incidents, even some of the most trifling, as when Nisus in the "Aeneid" 1 loses the race in consequence of precisely the same misadventure which befell Ajax in the " Iliad." 2 But when we look for in- ternal resemblance, when we view the poems as it were from within, and ask how each poet looked at the world, the contrast is what strikes us. Wherein ought two epic poets to agree more closely than in their way of regarding war ? Here we find the difference between Homer and Virgil most marked. No sooner is the Greek Contrast . with the poet m the meUe of the combatants than Greek he is drunk with the joy of battle ; it is his delight to chronicle the most ghastly wounds, and to tell how the victor jeers at his prostrate foe. The Latin poet, in the tenth book of the "Aeneid," forces himself to sustain for a while this uncongenial strain. But his heart is not in it. He gives us, as in duty bound, the arm hang- ing from the shoulder by the sinews, the thick blood vomited from the dying mouth, and tells how the slayer, V.333- 2 XXIII. 774- GENTLENESS OF MOOD " Tugging hard with labor wrenches back The weapon striking deep amid the bones." * But he turns even more gladly than the reader from the sickening scene, and takes refuge in & mere list of killed and killers : 2 " Caedicus Alcathoum obtruncat, S aerator Hydaspen ; Partheniumque Rapo et praedurum viribus Orsen ; Messapus Cloniumque Lycaoniumque Ericeten." In VII. 481, he speaks of "the cursed lust insane of war and blood." 3 Even in the very Gentleness thick of the fight, instead of luxuriating of mood - in the carnage like his Greek master, his mood is so gentle that when he relates the painful incident of the death of the twin sons of Daucus by the hands of Pallas, his first thought is what a joy the twins must have been to their parents, who, " Sore perplext, each for the other took, Nor wished the sweet uncertainty resolved." * When Aeneas 5 thrusts his spear through the tunic of Lausus, we read how it " rent the vest His mother's hand had broidered o'er with gold." 1 X. 383. This is the version of Canon Thornhill, which, with other recent versions, is further considered in an Ap- pendix on recent translations of Virgil. Meantime I will give his, Conington's, or Morris's renderings of passages from Books VII.-XII., and Sir C. Bowen's for Books I.-VI. 2 X. 747-749. 8 " Scelerata insania belli." 4 X. 302. 6 X. 8 1 8. 132 VIRGIL His heart is not in the battle ; he is really on the Contrast side of the mothers who curse it. 1 He rnjiymeTof tells US > nOt h W the braVCS reveled in battle. th e delight of the approaching conflict, but how the mothers felt its horrors, " And trembling caught their children to their breasts." 2 Homer's Zeus can afford to neglect the murmurs of the other Olympians, so long as he can feed his eyes on the sight that he loved : " Apart from the rest he sate, and to fill his eyes was fain With the gleam of the brass and the fate of the slayers and them that were slain." 3 We sometimes meet a passage in the " Iliad " which makes us feel uncertain whether we are in presence of the childhood of the world, or of some- thing more like its modern barbarism, in myth- land or in Zululand. When Iphidamas falls under the sword of Agamemnon, 4 the poet commiserates his fate in perishing, " Or e'er he had joy of his bride and the gifts that he gat her withal," and then goes on to detail the valuable considera- tion, one hundred beeves, one thousand goats, and so forth, which he had given for a bride he was never to possess : the pity of it was that he had had no return for his expenditure. If this way of look- 1 "Bellaque matribus detestata." Hor. Od. I. i. 25. 3 " Et trepidae matres pressere ad pectora natos." //. XI. 75. * //. XI. 240. VIRGILIAN CATALOGUES 133 ing at wedded love is essential to the true epic vein, we have something to console us for the absence of the epic spirit in the anima cortese Manto'vana. It is probably to this reluctance to deal with scenes of carnage that we owe a very , J Virgihan charming feature in the "Aeneid." It catalogues .... compared is because he feels constrained to look with for other means of interesting his read- ers in the war that he gives his picturesque and elaborate descriptions of the gatherings of the leaguered clans, with their arms and accoutre- ments, which, in the magic use made of historic names, remind us of like qualities in Scott and Milton, and which transcend in affluent detail and poetic coloring the meagre catalogues of the " Iliad," as much as the Homeric battle-pieces surpass the Virgilian. In Homer the different Greek peo- ples are all exactly the same, and differ very little from the Trojans ; in Virgil some dozen tribes are minutely differentiated. Moreover, those same catalogues have enabled him to give detailed ex- pression to his enthusiastic invocation in the " Georgics " of his native land : l " Hail, clime of Saturn ! mighty mother of tilth, Mighty mother of heroes ! " 1 G. II. 173. On the subject of Virgil's catalogues, Mr. Gladstone observes: "Virgil, in his imitation of the Homeric catalogues, . . . with vast and indeed rather painful effort, carries us through his long list at a laboriously sustained elevation." Nettleship has admirably shown that the cata- 134 VIRGIL All this is, of course, conscious art, and brings be Conscious ^ ore us an a & e which looks behind and art of Virgil. aroun( j itself like a man, not straight in front like a child. Thersites is as hideous as the spiteful sister, or the wicked uncle, or the bad giant must be perforce in the child's fairy tale, which can see no goodness in things evil, and does not care to make any appeal to experience to correct the exu- berance of fancy. Here, as a contrast, is the tem- perately drawn picture of Drances, the Thersites of the "Aeneid": 1 " True to his wont, unfailing. Drances rose, His spiteful soul by Turnus' glory vexed, And thwart-eyed envy's bitter-rankling stings, Rich, nor withal a niggard of his wealth For party needs ; ready and shrewd of tongue, logue is an essential and integral part in the design of the Aeneid, which puts before its readers an Italy infested by savages, and even monsters, but finally, through the agency of Aeneas, subdued and civilized. In addition to this, the cata- logue is highly interesting as an instance of the first attempt to enlist archaeology in the service of imagination, an effort which has, " with, indeed, rather painful effort," been made by M. Flaubert in Salammbo. Other statements of Mr. Gladstone concerning Virgil, in his Homeric Studies, show a curious inaccuracy, combined with a defmiteness.of language which experience has since taught him to avoid. When he wrote (vol. iii. p. 532) that Virgil "has nowhere placed on his canvas the figure of the bard among the abodes of men," it is strange that he should have forgotten not only Cretheus (IX. 774), but even the bard lopas, who occupies such a prominent place at Dido's feast, fully described at the close of the first book of the Aeneid. 1 XI. 336. VIRGWS CONSCIOUS ART 135 But cold and spiritless of hand for war ; No mean adviser deem'd at council board ; A deep intriguer, versed in all the arts Of faction and cabal." Exaggeration Virgil is studious to avoid ; yet he will actually reverse the truth in the interests of art. What could be more charming than the pic- ture which he draws of the fleet of Aeneas gliding up the Tiber : " So grateful now with shouts auspicious raised They speed their way begun, the well-pitched keels All slipping lightly through the shoaly flood, While woods and waves with utter wonder see The shields of warriors flashing far ahead, And painted hulls afloat upon the stream ; With beat of oars they wear out day and night, And, mounting, leave full many a bend behind And lengthy reach, with varied foliage fringed, And, pictured in the river's stilly depths, Cleave the green forests 'neath the grassy plain." * His learning told him that, at the time of Aeneas' supposed arrival in Italy, and long after, the banks which bordered the river near its mouth were a waste of sandy flats. 2 But no frowning scene should meet the eyes of the fated author of the Roman race. He describes the Ostia of his own day, with its charming environs, with the banks of the river dotted with villas and gardens to the very city, VIII. 91. 2 Servius tells us that the historian, Fabius Maximus, de- scribes the region bordering the mouth of the Tiber as " agrum macerrimum litorosissimumque." 136 VIRGIL while its surface is gay with a flotilla of pleasure- boats. But we must remember that we are not reading in the "Aene'id" a modern romance. The Aeneid not to be treated character of Aeneas has been condemned as a romance. . / , i> i i i t as imperfectly realized, and as cold and unfeeling ; even his good qualities, such as his filial piety, have been ridiculed l as un-epic. But one charge has been brought against the treatment of his character which rests on a completely modern conception. It is alleged that the real hero of the poem is Turnus, who is ready to die for the woman whom he loves ; and Mr. Gladstone especially dwells on " the superior character and attractions of Tur- nus." On this point I would quote the acute and decisive comment of the late Professor Nettle- ship : " When Aeneas lands in Latium to seek the alii- ance of Latinus and to found his city, divine oracles, widely known throughout the Italian cities, had spoken of a stranger who was to wed Latinus' daughter, and to lay the foundation of a world- wide empire. Aeneas, through his ambassador, announces his landing, and asks for a simple alli- ance with Latinus ; Latinus offers this and the 1 Among the pictures found at Pompeii is one which cari- catures the flight of Aeneas from Troy. It represents an ape in armor carrying an aged ape on its shoulders, and lead- ing a young one by the hand. Compare also Ovid, Trist. II. 533> 534) where he cannot resist a jest at the expense of the immaculate Aeneas. AENEID NOT A ROMANCE 137 hand of his daughter besides. The king can in any case bestow his daughter as he chooses ; and in reading Virgil it must be remembered always that Lavinia is never really betrothed to Turnus, who is only a suitor among other suitors, and dif- fering from the rest in nothing but his ancestry and his beauty, and in having the favor of the queen-mother Amata on his side. To stir up a war for the sake of mere personal inclination against a cause manifestly favored by the will of the gods would, from the point of view of the ancient reli- gions, as surely have been thought impious and perverse as, from a modern point of view, it ap- pears natural to centre our interest on the adven- turous warrior who is ready to sacrifice his life for his love. But Virgil is not to be read as if he were a modern writer of romance, but to be inter- preted according to the ideas of his time. We find in the ' Aeneid ' no genuine trace of sympa- thy either for Turnus or for the cause which he represents. Such sympathy is a feeling induced by the spirit and associations of modern literature. When the treaty between Aeneas and Latinus is apparently concluded, it is the element of obstinate female passion, represented among the gods by Juno, and among men by the queen Amata, joined to the headstrong violence of Turnus, which con- founds the peace and embroils all in a long series of discord. The queen of heaven, unable to bend the gods above, stoops to move the powers of hell." We must not expect in Aeneas a character with 138 VIRGIL whom we can sympathize from a romantic point of view. He is the Man of Destiny, manners of and must go where the Fates lead him. But he has all the high qualities which may belong to the Man of Destiny. His manners are always princely ; even in the scenes where he is forced to cast off Dido, impelled as he is by a higher will than his own, he preserves the grand air, a mien worthy of Aristotle's Megalopsyche. The episode of the death of Lausus strikes the note of mediaeval chivalry; the noble words ad- dressed by Aeneas to the dying boy might have been spoken by Sir Launcelot, or shall we say Sir Percivale or Sir Galahad ? . For the character of Aeneas, as has been observed by Sellar, " is more like that of the milder among the spiritual rulers of mediaeval Rome than that either of the Homeric heroes or of the actual consuls and imperators who commanded the Roman armies and administered the affairs of the Roman state. It has been said of him that he was more fitted to be the founder of an order of monks than of an empire." But the mission of Aeneas was no quest of the Holy Grail, but to carry out the divine decree by which Rome was to rule the world for the world's good. Virgil showed great judgment in his choice of Aeneas as his hero. He was determined to aban- don the mythological epic handled so skillfully by the Alexandrine school of poetry. Varro Atacinus, Cornelius Gallus, Calvus, and Catullus the last CHOICE OF AENEAS AS A HERO 139 with distinguished success had worked this vein ; and Statius and Valerius Flaccus were , ... Choice of destined afterwards to achieve with it a Aeneas as success which we now find it difficult to understand. In the beginning of the third Georgic, however, Virgil declares his belief that that vein is exhausted, omnia jam vulgata, and he resolves not to adopt it. On the other hand, the historical epic had been successful in the hands of Ennius and Naevius, and was destined again to win laurels for Silius Italicus and Lucan. Even in his own time, poems were constructed on the defeat of Vercingetorix and the death of Caesar. Neither of those two schools of poetry did Virgil propose to join. He wished to take a middle course, and to write an epic which should re- semble one school in taking for its plot the for- tunes of Rome, and the other in linking itself with the cycle of Greek mythology. In the " Eclogues " and " Georgics " he had begun by seeking his in- spiration from Alexandria; and in the "Aene'id" we often find him walking in the steps of the Alex- andrine poets, especially Apollonius Rhodius. Yet in the same poem so close a follower is he of the old singer of his country's weal and woe that Seneca calls him an Ennianist, no term of praise in his mouth. Indeed, as a poem which, while professedly relating the adventures of an individual, really has for its hero the poet's own nation, the "Aene'id " resembles no work of imagination so closely as it resembles the series of Shakespeare's historical plays. 140 VIRGIL Virgil found the required link between the two kinds of epic in the person of Aeneas, and he had in him a hero in every way fitted for his purpose. Aeneas is invariably put by Homer in a most dig- nified light. He is coupled with Hector as one of the two great champions of Troy ; it is to him that appeal is made in time of trouble, and he never fails to answer it. His first appearance in the " Iliad " 1 has little to suggest to us the re- served and somewhat stilted hero of the " Aeneid." He comes out " like a lion," and rushes on Dio- mede with a terrible roar. Diomede smites him on the hip with a huge stone which he hurls at him. But here, as elsewhere, Aeneas is under the special care of the gods, and escapes the hu- miliation of defeat. His appearances are few and short, and invariably excite the interest of the gods. If Virgil had chosen a hero more promi- nent in the "Iliad," he would have exposed him- self to a dangerous comparison with Homer ; a less dignified hero would not have been a worthy ancestor of the Roman race. The "Aeneid" is addressed to patricians, to the Trojugenae of Rome. Its most striking char- acteristic is the prevailing distinction of Distinction of tone in its tone. The poet seems always to have before his mind's eye the homes, the lives, the habits of the great and noble. A curious instance of this is afforded by VII. 379 ff- where the frenzy of Amata's wanderings is illus 1 V. 299. SIMILES COMPARED WITH THE GREEK 141 trated by the gyrations of a top whipped by boys "round great empty courts." The simile one of the few of which Virgil seems to have been the creator, not the bor- the Greek, rower is far from happy, indeed is almost gro- tesque ; but it suggests that the scene of the boys' play, is some great noble's palace. The same re- mark applies to another of his similes, one which perhaps comes next to this in its far-fetched oddity, and which the poet borrowed from Apollonius Rho- dius. A ray of light reflected from a tub of water is by the Greek compared to the fluttering heart of Medea, by the Latin to the fluctuating mind of Aeneas. The allusion to the princely mansion is quite peculiar to the Latin poet ; there is not even a hint of it in the Greek : 1 " And turns to every side his shifting thought : E'en as in brazen water-vats the beam Of trembling light reflected from the sun, Or radiant image of the silvery moon, Keeps ever flitting every place around, From wall to wall, and upward darting now Plays on the fretwork of the paneled roof." Here the poetry of the simile in the Greek poem has evaporated in the Virgilian reproduction of it. But conversely in the fine verses : 2 " Through shadow the chieftain soon Dimly discerned her face, as a man, when the month is but young, Sees, or believes he has seen, amid cloudlets shining, the moon," 1 VIII. 21-25. 2 VI. 453. 142 VIRGIL the whole poetical power of the passage consists in the application of the image to the sudden recognition by Aeneas of the pale and shadowy form of his forsaken love, dimly discerned through the gloom of the lower world. In the Greek 1 nothing is denoted but the indistinctness with which Lynceus discerns the distant Heracles. So, too, in a fine passage 2 in the sixth book, Virgil breathes pure poetry into the verses of Apollo- nius Rhodius, which merely compare a concourse of people, " thick as leaves in Vallombrosa," to the forest foliage scattered by the breath o\ Autumn ; in Virgil, the withered leaves are the pale ghosts, and the frost is the chill touch of Death : " Down to the bank of the river the streaming shadows re- pair, Mothers, and men, and the lifeless bodies of those who were Generous heroes, boys that are beardless, maidens unwed, Youths to the death-pile carried before their fathers were dead. Many as forest leaves that in autumn's earliest frost Flutter and fall, or as birds that in bevies flock to the coast Over the sea's deep hollows, when winter chilly and frore Drives them across far waters to land on a sunnier shore." Conington has on this passage a note of charac- teristic fineness of perception : " The well-known reversal of the comparison in Shelley's ' Ode to the West Wind,' where the ' leaves dead ' are compared to * ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,' and desig- nated as 1 Ap. R. IV. 1479. 2 VI. 309. THE TWO PARTS OF THE AENEID 143 ' Yellow and black and pale and hectic red Pestilence-stricken multitudes,' will illustrate what was in Virgil's mind." Was it this passage which suggested to Dante Gabriel Rossetti these lines of Shakespearean big- ness of conception and Tennysonian perfection of execution ? " How then should sound upon life's darkening slope The ground-whirl of the perish'd leaves of Hope, The wind of Death's imperishable wing?" But I have already, perhaps, said more than enough on the general characteristics of . First six a poem which, more than any other great books of the ....... , Aeneid com- work of imagination in any language, pared with really depends for its interest rather on st suc " its episodes, and on the brilliancy of verses taken here and there apart from their context, than on our grasp of the poem as a whole. It is this feeling which has dictated the barren-seeming yet withal fascinating discussion as to the relative merits of the first six books of the "Aeneid" and the last six. It is at once apparent that the "Aeneid" falls into two halves, and that in the first we have an "Odyssey," and in the second an " Iliad." The one contains the adventures and wanderings of Aeneas till he reaches the mouth of the Tiber ; the other his struggles to win his way by the sword in the promised land. The first half has generally been greatly preferred. It has been held that, having gained the dizzy altitude of his 144 VIRGIL midflight, it was inevitable that he should " stoop from his aery tour." The terrors of the siege of Troy, the adventures of the voyage which finally led him to Carthage, the passionate love-tale of which Carthage was the scene, the descent into Hell, all this had beggared the resources of im- agination. Voltaire made himself the champion of this view, while Chateaubriand espoused the other side. The latter maintained that the most tender and impressive utterances of the poet are to be found in the last six books. Even if this were true, it would hardly prove his case ; but it seems to me that by far the larger number are to be found in the earlier books, which, moreover, are much more impressive and picturesque. There is no other female character in the poem which can compare with Dido in delicacy and vigor of portrait- ure ; and the second and third books hang like a gorgeous drop-scene before the tragedy enacted in the fourth. Yet, on the other hand, one can see that the poet's task was far harder when he left the scenes glorified by all the prismatic hues of Greek imagination, and turned to the yet unsung shores of Italy. Was he conscious of an inferi- ority in the execution of the latter portion of his work ? I think not. At the beginning of the seventh book, in invoking the Muse, he exclaims, " A grander scene is opening on my view, A loftier chord I strike ; " l 1 " Major rerum mihi nascitur ordo; Majus opus moveo." FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL 145 and it is in a passage in the ninth book that he contemplates for Nisus and Euryalus an immortal- ity to be conferred by his poem : " Blest pair ! if aught my verse avail, No day shall make your memory fail From off the heart of time, While Capitol abides in place The mansion of the Aene'id race, And throned upon that moveless base Rome's father sits sublime." Juvenal selects the description of Allecto in the seventh book as the highest specimen of Virgil's inspiration ; and Dante seems to have been most deeply moved by the closing scenes of the work when he speaks of Italy as the land " Per cui morfo la Vergine Cammilla Eurialo et Turno et Niso di ferute." The discussion to which I have referred suggests to me that it would be interesting here to advert to a few places in Virgil's poems which de- . Famous rive a peculiar interest either from their passages in own perfect beauty or from some pleas- ing historical association. I do not desire to point to whole passages of sustained beauty or grandeur, but merely to put before your eyes a few of the jewels of Virgil which can best shine with little or no setting in the way of context. The poetry of Virgil lends itself to this kind of treatment. From the earliest times the literary merit of isolated pas- sages was a theme of discussion. Seneca 1 thought 1 Ep. 79, s- 146 VIRGIL that no human skill could surpass the description of Aetna in the third book, 1 while Aulus Gellius 2 considered it too elaborate. Tennyson gave a crowning instance of his marvelous insight into the character and genius of Latin poetry when in the poem to Virgil he sang of ** All the chosen coin of fancy flashing out from many a golden phrase," and again of " All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word." Let us here consider a few of those golden phrases. 3 Macaulay thought the finest passage in Virgil was that where a boy's love at first sight is told in the "Eclogues," VIII. 37-41 ; I give Sir C. Bowen's version of it, though it is hardly adequate : " 'T was in our crofts I saw thee, a girl thy mother beside, Plucking the apples dewy, myself thy pilot and guide : Years I had numbered eleven, the twelfth was beginning to run : Scarce was I able to reach from the ground to the branches that snapp'd. Ah, when I saw how I perish 'd ! to fatal folly was rapt ! " In this exquisite passage the most exquisite touch, " Scarce was I able to reach from the ground to the branches that snapp'd," i III. 571. 2 XVII. 10. 8 Many of these passages are brought together in a very eloquent and appreciative paper on Virgil by Mr. F. Myers, first published in the Fortnightly Review several years ago, and now included among his collected essays. FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL 147 is quite the poet's own. The rest is from Theo- critus. We often see how Virgil can turn dross into gold, but here greater marvel still we find him gilding the refined gold of the Greek poem, and in the process making it more lovely and precious. In a future lecture I shall put before you a certain verse from Statius, which I think is the worst verse in Latin poetry. Many would be disposed to quote as the best verse in Latin poetry Virgil's " Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." It does, indeed, strike one with a sense of wondrous beauty and pathetic dignity. But I am not sure that all its meaning has yet been fully unfolded. Sir C. Bowen translates it, " Tears are to human sorrow given, hearts feel for mankind." And such is the accepted view of the meaning of words which have always seemed to me to come bitter from that wellspring of sadness which made the poet marvel why the dead should desire to live again. It was this minor key in Virgil's poetry that was ringing in Tennyson's ears when he apos- trophized him so beautifully as " Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of humankind." Surely, in this famous verse, sunt lacrimae rerum, Virgil meant more than Wordsworth in the " La- odamia" when he wrote " But tears to human suffering are due." 148 VIRGIL Surely these words, which seem full of a natural magic, come to us with a diviner air and a grander message than this. Dr. Henry, one of the very greatest of modern Virgilian scholars, has greatly added to the impressiveness of the verse by a re- fined and scholarly interpretation of the word rerum as meaning "in the world," just as in the phrase dulcissime rerum. The meaning would then be, "There are such things as tears in the world," " tears are universal, belong to the constitution of nature, and the evils of mortality touch the heart." This is a great improvement on the ordinary expla- nation of this celebrated and oft-quoted verse. But may not the words, which cannot but strike one as fraught with some new and exquisite fancy, bear a meaning far more definite, weighty, and distin- guished ? Aeneas is gazing at the picture of the Trojan war in the temple of Juno in Carthage. As he looks he weeps, and cries, " E'en things inani- mate (res, the material picture) can weep for us, and the works of man's hands (mortalia) have their own pathetic power." That is, " Here in a strange land, where men knew me not till but yes- terday, I find a painted picture to accord me sym- pathy and call forth my tears." The verse which follows falls in with this view : " Then on the lifeless painting he feeds his heart to his fill." ' [nani, as Conington observes, is not a mere gen- eral epithet, but has a pathetic sense, implying 1 " Sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani." FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL 149 that the subjects of the picture are numbered with the lost and past. Rerum is the lonely word in which flowers all the charm of all the muses. I should add that, in another passage in the "Aene'id," 1 mortalis means "the work of man's hands." There is one verse in the fourth book in which all the pathos of Dido's abandonment may be said to be concentrated. It is when she addresses Aeneas as hospes, " guest," and adds, " Since Fate but that cold name allows To one whom once I call'd my spouse." 2 Servius tells us that when Virgil was reading aloud the "Aeneid" to the emperor and his court, the poet's voice faltered as he pronounced those pa- thetic words. A natural magic touches another passage in the same book, which depicts the sense of utter loneliness which haunts the dreams of the de- * serted queen. This is Sir C. Bowen's rendering of it: " In all her visions the fierce Aeneas appears, Hounding her ever to madness, and she seems left evermore Desolate, traveling always a long, lone journey with tears, Seeking her people of Tyre on a silent wilderness shore." Her lover is gone, and with him everything, even her subjects, whom she has offended by giv- ing herself to a stranger. In her waking hours she never contemplates such a thing as abandon- 1 XII. 740. 8 " Hoc solum nomen quoniam de conjuge restat." 150 VIRGIL ment by her subjects. Only her hopeless dreams present her to herself as deserted by him who was to her all the world, and therefore utterly alone. If Ilia's dream in Ennius at all suggested this exquisite passage, then Ennius has done at least one great thing. Perhaps the oftenest quoted passage in Virgil is " Varium et mutabile semper Femina." It is curious that the translation of these very familiar words in Conington's prose version far surpasses in poetical color not only his own met- rical rendering, but also those of Sir C. Bowen and Canon Thornhill. "A thing of moods and fancies is a woman " admirably brings out the characteristic use of the neuter in the Latin, and is far more expressive than Conington's " A woman's will Is changeful and uncertain still," or Bowen's "Woman is ever fickle and light," or Thornhill's " A changeful thing at best, From love to hate soon shifts a woman's heart" The perfect description of the dying Dido ends with an immortal line, ** Quaesivit caelo lucem, ingemuitque reperta." FAMOUS PASSAGES IN VIRGIL I$I Here is Sir C. Bowen's version of the scene : " Thrice on her couch with an effort she raised her ; pillowed her head Thrice on the elbow beneath her, and thrice fell back on the bed. Upwards she lifted her wandering gaze, and above and around Sought in the heavens for the light, and groaned when light she had found." She groaned, the sight of the light bringing back vividly to her mind the troubles she had endured in it. So rapidly does the poet pass from point to point that the reader is left to make out for himself the delicate connections. Tired and dis- gusted with the world as Dido is, she cannot die without taking a last look at the light in which she had once been so happy. But the sight of the light serves only to bring back with increased dis- tinctness the recollection of her misery, and with a deep groan she closes her eyes again and dies. It is the dying human being who " Upwards lifted her wandering gaze, and above and around Sought in the heavens for the light." It is the woman Dido, deserted and betrayed, who " groaned when light she had found." "There is no so touching word," writes Dr. Henry, " in the whole ' Aene'id ' as this one word ingcmitit, groaned, placing as it does before the mind capable of such sympathies the whole heart- VIRGIL rending history in a single retrospective glance. Show me anything at all like it in the ' Iliad.' " Another famous verse introduces us again to the scene when Virgil read his poem to the court. We are told that he read with "a magic fascination," lenociniis miris. Augustus and Octavia burst into tears when he came to the words, " Child of a nation's sorrow ! If thou canst baffle the Fates' Bitter decrees, and break for a while their barrier gates, Thine to become Marcellus." 1 I have already quoted the verse " And trembling mothers caught their children to their breasts." 2 It is adapted from Apollonius Rhodius, but the Greek poet takes three verses to express the idea, and then only says that the mothers embraced their children, \i\pressere, " caught them to their breasts," we have again the charm flowering in a single word. F6nelon could not read or repeat without tears those high and dignified words in which Evander welcomes Aeneas to his rustic palace : " Dare thou as nobly too, my honor'd guest, To spurn at pomp, and, rivaling the God, Set in thy foot, nor scorn our poor estate." 8 1 " Heu miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, Tu Marcellus eris." VI. 883. 8 " Et trepidae matres pressere ad pectora natos." VII. 518. 8 " Aude hospes contemnere opes et te quoque dignum Finge Deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis." DEFECTS OF THE AENEID 153 Dryden writes of this passage : " For my part I am lost in the admiration of it. I contemn the world when I think of it, and myself when I translate it." . Having dwelt at some length on certain pas- sages in the " Aeneid " which have most deeply moved mankind through the successive genera- tions, one feels that this is perhaps the fitting time to point to some of its defects. I would say at once that the fifth book is all bad. Not only is it an excrescence on the natural body of the poem, but it contains the worst examples of Virgil's slav- ish adherence to the text of Homer. There is in it, too, some very un-Virgilian coarseness. Me- noetes sitting on the rock, and discharging from his stomach the salt water which he has swallowed, is a disgusting picture ; the prayer of Cloanthus to the sea-gods is worthy only of burlesque ; in- deed, the book has scarcely a redeeming feature. Next in order of demerit comes the tenth with its endless battle - scenes, which were evidently as wearying to the writer as t^iey are to the reader. Doubtless this is the reason why we find Virgil's mechanical execution to be at its worst in this book. The task was uncongenial, and the words and numbers refused to flow. Probably the fee- blest verse in Virgil is as Mr. Myers observes - " Sed non et Troius heros Dicta parat contra, jaculum nam torquet in hostem ; " * 1 " But not the Trojan hero, too, essays A speech ; for at the foe his lance he hurls." 154 VIRGIL a verse which suggests a modern exercise painfully achieved by a schoolboy and inspired by a gradus. The tenth book, however, has fine passages, and, so far as it is an evil, it is a necessary evil, for battle-scenes are, we may suppose, de rigneur in an epic poem. But the fifth might have been omitted with great advantage, and Varius and Tucca would have consulted their friend's reputation if they had excised it. It has passages which are inconsistent with the rest of the poem. To take only one, Nisus and Euryalus appear in the fifth book, yet in the ninth they are introduced as if for the first time. The fifth book was certainly an after- thought, and was probably constructed with a view to impart a certain symmetry to the whole work. When one thinks of the very uncharacteristic in- stances of bad taste which it supplies, and of its inconsistency in some places with confessedly authentic parts of the poem, one is tempted to hazard a conjecture that Virgil left behind him only eleven books, and that Varius and Tucca wrote or procured another book to raise the num- ber to twelve. Virgil is essentially a religious poet. The fourth Virgil a re- Eclogue has been held to derive its inspi- Ugious poet. ra ti O n from the expectation of a coming Messiah. But, however that may be, the child shadowed forth as the king of the peaceful world is essentially the product of a deeply religious spirit. The motto of the Georgics might well be said to be Ora et labora; and the " Aene'id " is above all things A RELIGIOUS POET 1 55 a religious poem. This, indeed, largely accounts for what is unheroic in the character of Aeneas. Evander is perhaps the most pleasing as he is cer- tainly the most characteristic of Virgil's creations. He is a perfect example of a good old man of the good old type. Virgil might be described, as Dante has been described, as a " theologian to whom no dogma was foreign " (thcologns nullius dogmatis expers). The duty of Aeneas is to bring the gods into Italy : the glory of the victory may fall to Lati- nus ; his own aim is to fulfill his destiny. From this point of view Gaston Boissier selects, as the verse which unfolds the whole plan of the " Aene'id," a line in the twelfth book (192), " The gods and worship I shall claim to give ; Let sire Latinus bear the sword of war." x The real defect in the character of Aeneas, from the point of view of art, is that it occasionally slips into the Homeric mould. On the side of Turnus are the bolder spirits, and the characters drawn with a freer hand. Of these Mezentius is the most daring. But even here the religious spirit is present. When the body of his son is brought in, what is the instinctive gesture of this athe- ist prince, this contemptor divum ? He raises his hands to heaven. 2 Whenever Virgil recounts any incident of a barbarous type, such as the murder of Misenus by Triton through jealousy, or when 1 " Sacra deosque dabo : socer arma Latinus habeto." 2 Aeneid, X. 845. 156 VIRGIL he records a very crude tradition, like the transfor- mation of the galleys into goddesses of the sea, he adds some such phrase as, " if we can believe it," or, " I tell an old tale as 'twas told to me;" and he cannot suppress an exclamation of astonishment at the vindictive temper of Juno, " Can wrath so dire abide in heavenly minds? " 1 The religious aspect of Virgil naturally leads us up to the strange circumstance, already mentioned, Virgil as a tnat tne Middle Ages glorified Virgil into samt, a sam t an( j degraded him into a wizard. He was placed among the Prophets in the Cathe- dral of Zamorra, and invoked as Prophet of the Gentiles in Limoges and Rheims. The rubric of Rouen directed that on Christmas Day the priest should say, " Maro, Maro, Vates Gentilium Da Christo testimonium," to which Virgilius was to reply, " Ecce polo demissa solo nova progenies est." I have already referred to the mediaeval romance and as a which couples Aristotle and Virgil as magician. magicians. Gower, in his "Confessio A mantis," tells us how Virgil "A mirrour made of his clergie 2 And set it in the townes eyes Of marbre on a pillar without," 1 " Tantaene animis caelestibus irae ? " 8 Learning, skill. A SAINT AND A MAGICIAN 1 57 that the Romans might behold if there were any enemies within thirty miles. But by far the most interesting account of Virgil as a magician is to be found in a very rare romance, of which an English version was printed at Antwerp in 1510, under the title : " This boke treateth of the lyfe of Virgilius, and of his deth, and many marvayles that he did in his lyfe tyme by whychcraft and nygromancie thorowgh the helpe of the devylls of hell." J We read in the second chapter of this ro- mance how "the son of Remus, that was also named Remus, slewe his unkell Romulus, and was made emperoure, and so reyned emperoure." In his reign Virgil was born. His mother was " one of the greatest senyatours dawghters of Rome, and hyghest of lynage." When Virgil was at school in Toledo, he was initiated into the secrets of necromancy in a way which reminds us of a well-known tale in the " Arabian Nights." " One day when the schollers had lycence to go play and sporte them in the fyldes after the usaunce of the olde tyme, he spyed a great hole in the syde of a great hylle." Going into this hole, he wandered on till he saw " a lytell bourde marked with a word," and heard a voice calling him, which said, " I am a devyll conjured out of the bodye of a cer- tayne man, and banysshed till the day of judemend, without that I be delivered by the handes of men." Virgil agreed to release the devil if he would show 1 Sir Walter Scott made copious extracts from this ro- mance in the notes to the Lay of the Last Minstrel. 158 VIRGIL him how to get the " bokes of nygromancy" that he possessed. The devil consented, whereupon " Virgilius pulled open the bourde^and there was a lytell hole, and thereat wrange the devyll out like a yeel, and cam and stood byfore Virgilius lyke a bygge man. Thereof Vir- gilius was a stoned, and merveyled greatly thereof that so great a man myght come out at so lytell a hole. Than sayd Virgilius, Shulde ye well passe into the hole that ye cam out of ? Yea, I shall well, sayd the devyll. Than said Virgilius, I hold ye the best plegge I have that ye shall not do it. Well, sayd the devyll, thereto I consente. And than the devyll wrange hymselfe into the lytell hole ageyn ; and as he was there in, Virgilius kyvered the holt ageyn with the bourde close, and so was the devyll begyled, and myght nat there com out ageyn, but there abydeth shutte styll therin. Than called the devyll dredfully to Virgilius, and sayd, What have ye done ? Virgilius answered, Abyde there styll to your day apoynted. And fro thensforth abydeth he there. And so Virgilius becain very connynge in the practyse of the black scyence." When he came to be old, Virgil resolved to re- new his youth by his magic arts. So he took with him a trusted man to a " castell that was without the towne," the entrance to which was guarded by " coper men with flayles in their handes sore smy- tinge." Then he ordered his man to slay him, and hew him in pieces, and salt him in a barrel under u a lampe, that nyghte and day therin may droppe and leke, and thou shalt ix days longe fylle the lampe and fayl not ; and whan this is all done, than shall I be renued and made yonge ageyn." After much persuasion the trusty servant was pre- vailed on to execute his master's will. When seven SADNESS OF LATIN POETRY 159 days had elapsed, the emperor missed his counselor, and finally frightened the trusty man into guiding him to the place where the body of Virgil was : "And whan they cam afore the castell and wold enter they myght nat because the flayles smyt so faste. Than sayd the emperoure, Mak cease this flayles that we may cum in. Than answered the man, I know nat the way. Than sayd the emperoure, Then shalt thou die. And than thorowgh the fere of detJie he turned the vyce and made the flayles stande styll, and than the emperoure entered into the castell with all his folke, and sowghte about in every corner after Virgilius ; and at the laste they sowghte so longe that they cam into the seller where they saw the lampe hang over the barrill where Virgilius lay in, deed. Than asked the empe- roure the man, Who had made him so herdy to put his mays- ter Virgilius so to dethe ; and the man answered no word to the emperoure. And than the emperoure with great anger drew out his swerde and slewe he than Virgilius's man. And whan all this was done than sawe the emperoure and all his folke a naked chylde iij tymes rennynge about the barrill saying the words : Cursed be the tyme that ye cam ever here. And with these words vanyshed the chylde away, and was never sene ageyn ; and thus abyd Virgilius in the barril deed." The great Latin poets are all profoundly sad. Catullus, Lucretius, and Virgil look on life as a place " where men sit and hear each other groan." The Greek epic now and then strikes a chord in a minor key with that exquisite truth and fullness which it achieves without an effort, as in " Even as the leaves, such is the race of men ; " l 1 ailr] vep > ylip Moipai 6vfi,bv Btffav Iliad, XXIV. 49. 3 ov yap TIS 7rp7){is ire \erai Kpvfpow yAoio. &s yap (ireK\eaaavro Oeol 5eiAo?