CHAPTER IINTRODUCTION: SOCIAL FORCES

The story of intellectual pioneering, visualized with difficulty, has not the thrill of a Marco Polo diary, but to the intelligent it has a deeper fascination. Our records are, however, very brief, spanning a few thousand out of many hundred thousand years. What we can review is a small fraction of the whole story. If the human race is more than 300,000 years old, man’s artistic literature is less than 3000: our segment of sure knowledge is less than one per cent of the amazing tale. If the biologist is willing to pry into the strata of a hundred million years to trace the evolution of plant and animal life, it is hardly conceivable that the humanist should disregard any part of our pitifully meager record of spiritual endeavor. This is my excuse for inviting attention to the first efforts of the Romans to express themselves in literary form.

In attempting to tell a part of this story I have chosen to notice especially how the writers of the period responded to their environment, because this aspect of the theme has been somewhat neglected in recent studies of Roman literature. This is of course not a novel method of approach. Taine, for instance, drove the hobby of environmental determinism at a gallop that ought to satisfy the most optimistic behaviorist, and his immediate followersnever checked the rein. The method has since had its more deliberate devotees. English classicists in particular, who have usually studied history and literature together, have generally kept a sane and fruitful coordination of men and their milieu. During the last three decades, however, there has been so strong a trend toward deep and narrow specialization in our own universities that here the literary historian has been tempted to neglect social, political, and artistic history with unfortunate results. For instance, the scholar who studies classical prose forms has often kept his eye so intent upon the accumulation of rhetorical rules from Gorgias to Cicero that he has given us a history of a futile scholastic mechanism and not of an ever-vitalized prose which in fact re-created its appropriate medium with every new generation. The scholastic critics of the Roman lyric are sometimes so intent upon tracing external conventions through the centuries that they miss the soul of the poetry that assumes temporarily the mold of the convention. The same is true of all the literary forms. “Sources and influences,” as traceable in words, phrases, and literary customs, things which after all seldom explain creative inspiration, are rather attractive game to men of good verbal memories and are likely to entice them away from the larger work of penetrating comprehension. Beethovan’s fifth symphony receives little illumination from program notes pedantically informing us that the “fate motif” is a borrowed phrase.

Here and there a reaction against an exaggerated reiteration of literary influences has driven criticsinto the school of those who prefer to approach literature as a “pure” art. Such critics seem to justify their doctrine when they confine their analysis to the more transcendental passages of Shakespeare or Keats, Catullus or Sophocles. When dealing, however, with Dante, Goethe, Vergil, Milton, and in fact with most poets of generous social sympathies, they give a very inadequate account of the poetic product. Modern aesthetics have been teaching us how warm with subjective interpretation is that thing we call beauty. Apparently there is no such thing, even in poetry, as pure, objective, absolute art uniformly sustained. In fact no school of criticism has as yet formulated a doctrine wide enough to compass the broad ranges of artistic creation, nor need we expect an adequate science of aesthetics unless psychology can become scientific.

The protest on the part of one vociferous school of humanists that literary criticism must disregard history and biography is beside the mark so long as our prying minds insist on prying. Contemporaneous literature, of course, deserves first of all to be approached with the aesthetic perceptions all alert, and since the reader lives in the same world as the writer the scant exegesis that may be necessary can be absorbed unconsciously from the text itself. But any great literature of the far past becomes to us, in so far as we are normal humans, something besides art. It is also a body of documents that anyone at all interested in the progress of art, of ideas, or of society in any of its groupings, may find very precious, and he will persist in using it as documentary despite all the protests of jealousliterary criticism. For Greece and Rome our documents are none too abundant in any case. It is a very petty humanism that dares insist that no one may touch Vergil or Spenser except and only for aesthetic delight and judgments. It is of course wholly legitimate to read Dante for his haunting lines and his stupendous imagery, but many of us insist on the added privilege of transporting ourselves into his mysterious world of strange ideas if only to read him as did his contemporaries. The true humanist in any case is interested in more than artistic expression, and the humanist who deals with remote literature must be, perforce.

It is of course only fair to say that in calling attention to milieu we would not deny that the innate endowment of each author is and must be considered the prime factor in creative work, while admitting that it may be the most elusive item to analyze. Modern biology insists upon the reality of inheritance, though it also warns us that this inheritance is so complex that it has hitherto escaped analysis and predetermination. We all admit that the study of social or literary atmosphere or of individual training will not explain the passionate force of Catullus, the voluble humor of Plautus, or Cicero’s ear for harmony of sound. However, like Horace in hisArs Poetica, we can do little but admit the facts, recognize the qualities, and proceed to the study of the provocative stimuli.

Moreover, there are special reasons for attempting to place Roman writers in their environment. One is that the evidence regarding the status of Roman society is so scant and so scattered that thecasual reader cannot be expected to have a correct understanding of it, and even the specialist is apt to neglect the severe task of reconstructing the social staging. As a result the literary history of the classics too often leaves us with the incorrect feeling that we have there only cold impersonal conventions.

Another is that the milieu is so different from our own that the imagination when left unguarded is in danger of modernizing ancient life and ancient expression to such an extent as to distort both scenery and actors. This is not questioning the fact that the Greeks and Romans were precisely like us. Their bodies had the same capacities, needs, and passions as ours, their senses received impressions as ours, their brains met problems by the same logical processes as ours, despite the amusing claim of the pragmatists that they are just now teaching the true art of “operational thinking.” In these respects the advanced races seem to have reached full development very far back in prehistoric times, many millenia before Homer. The pseudo-anthropology which a few years ago assumed that the study of Hottentot psychology might be useful to the student of Plato joked itself off the stage. The critics who tried to persuade us that the romantic sentiment came into being less than a thousand years ago seem equally ludicrous now. We need not repeat the egregious error of Spengler in confounding mental capacities with temporary conventions of expression that tried to respond to environmental need.

But while granting that human nature was then what it is now, it is important to comprehend thediversity of the customs, fashions, traditions, conventions, and social needs which evoked an appropriate artistic expression that consequently differs from our own. Love and hate doubtless stirred very similar physical sensations in Catullus, in Dante, and in Tennyson, but the words which these three poets used to express those emotions in verses published for their own readers have very different connotations, because the conventions of their respective periods called for a different series of suppressions and revelations. None of the three can be translated directly into the language of any of the others without evoking erroneous impressions. The pagan directness of Catullus’ lines, the Platonic connotations of theNuova Vita, the Christian romanticism of Tennyson are worlds apart, not because the human being changes but because his environment does. The devotees of nudity who know only the idiom of their own day may accuse Thackeray of hypocrisy because they have not learned to translate him; but that is not literary criticism. Those who miss in Latin poetry the delight in the outburst of spring-time song and color common in medieval poetry from north of the Alps have been prone to assume a temperamental lack in the classical poet, whereas the simple explanation may be that in the north spring brings a sense of release that is hardly realized in Latium where roses linger on till January when the new crocuses and wind-flowers start into blossom. The love of the sea was hardly to be expected till seafaring became fairly safe; the discovery of the compass has a place in the history of romanticism. The romantic enthusiasmfor rugged mountain landscape could hardly arise in poets who knew only the placid hills of Italy and to whom the high Alps were known chiefly as the haunts of barbaric bandits.

Accurate interpretation of any author of the past, therefore, implies a complete migration into the time, the society, and the environment of that author. And herein lies the necessity of attempting the difficult task of placing the literary figures which we wish to discuss in their setting. In this first chapter, therefore, I shall attempt to sketch in outline the social changes that need to be kept in mind for the more detailed study of some of the writers of the Republican period.

Rome’s beginnings in self-expression are not so fascinating as those of Greece. The Greeks somehow outstripped all competitors. In mental vigor, in imaginative creativeness, in sureness of taste, they seem to have reached a point 2500 years ago that the more advanced of modern racial groups are still hoping to attain. The sudden flowering of literature as soon as the capacities of the recording art were realized can only be comprehended on the assumption that singing, reciting, narrating, and disputing had proceeded for ages among their ancestors before the alphabet came into use. One may readily imagine that some of the ancestors of the Greeks discussed the “idea of good” around the cavern fire thousands of years before Plato. Brains of that capacity do not suddenly pullulate. Language as supple and rich as Homer’s presupposes ages of keen perceiving and precise talking. But what conclusions those cavemen philosophers reached vanishedwith the smoke of the hearth fire because no man recorded them. The tale of what the Greek imagination accomplished after it could operate on accumulated records is one the like of which we shall probably never hear again.

Rome’s story is less startling, must perforce be, since like ours, it was subsequent. One does not discover the North Pole or Betelgeuse twice. When the Romans reached the stage of self-consciousness, when they felt the desire to express themselves they found in well-nigh perfect mold the natural forms of expression, developed with sure taste by the Greeks out of song, dance, march-hymn, devotional prayer, dirge, entertaining narrative, or mimic representation. Song, drama, and dialogue are inevitable forms, given human nature, and the forms were at hand and were taken over by the Latins, as they were once more by the Italians at the end of medieval days, when learning disclosed the worth of Rome’s literature.

Rome’s literature made generous use of that of Greece. How much time it saved by entering into such an inheritance we do not know. How much vigor and realism it lost by yielding to the overwhelming persuasion of Greek writers we cannot say. Dante and Petrarch drank from Latin to the point of quickening creation, too many others to the point of dazed intoxication. There were times when the Latin authors also drank too deeply. But what was important was that just when the first contact was made the Romans had reached the mental maturity and developed the capacity to comprehend and use. There were many otherpeoples of the same period on whom Greek culture was wholly lost because they were incapable of appreciating it. The Phrygians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, Galatians, Armenians, half a dozen Thracian tribes, Syrians, Egyptians, Sicilians, Carthaginians, Oscans, Umbrians, Etruscans, Celts, Iberians, and a score of other tribes contemporaneous with the Romans, and in outward appearances of about the same stage of culture, came into direct contact with the Greeks, some for a much longer period and more intimately than the Latins, and yet they remained unfruitful in literary production. The Romans in fact were the only folk of the scores of neighbors of Greece that as a nation assimilated and worthily carried on the new-found culture.

What were the Romans like at that time—at the beginning of contact with the older Greeks in the middle of the third century B.C.? They were a small group of a few hundred thousand souls, one group of several that had emerged from barbarous central Europe and pushed their way into Italy in search for land, and they had long plodded on in silence at the dull task of making the soil provide food. For a while they had been subdued by the Etruscans, but taught by their conquerors to use arms in strong masses, they had applied this lesson by driving off their oppressors and re-establishing their old independent town meetings, returning again to the tilling of the soil. A prolific and puritanic folk with a strict social morality they outgrew their boundaries and began to expand. In the contests that resulted the Romans came off the victors. Inorganizing the adjacent tribes into a federal union they revealed a peculiar liberalism—unmatched anywhere among the barbarians of that day—by abstaining from the exaction of tribute; they also betrayed an imagination of high quality in the invention of cooperative leagues, and unusual capacity for legal logic in the shaping of municipal and civic forms. The inventiveness of the barbarian federation-builders of the last fifty years of the fourth century B.C. still commands the admiration of historians, even though all this work was done silently and with so little consciousness of its high quality that no one even thought of keeping a record of it. One does well not to call such a people unimaginative.

To be sure the Latins apparently had few myths or fairy tales, such as have arisen to aid literary effort in certain other regions. Perhaps a penchant for silent doing, a respect for logic and fact may be posited to explain this lack—though such an explanation merely begs the question. We still do not know what is meant by the inheritance of mental qualities. What “myth-making” is we also do not know.

In Greece, where myths grew everywhere to clothe poetic invention, we know at least that the migrant tribes had come in and inherited from the peoples of the Aegean world scores of anthropomorphic deities and heroes that in time aggregated into cycles of more or less related groups. Hittite heroes emerge as Greek gods and Cretan gods as Greek heroes. I do not mean to imply that accident explains all of Greek mythology, for the Greeks enjoyed tales and preserved them. But where theearly contacts of the Greeks were fortunate, those of the Romans were not. The Romans on their arrival in central Italy knew no deities in personal form about which tales could gather, and when anthropomorphism came it was imposed by the Etruscans in connection with deities that were never wholly assimilated. The Romans stepped almost from primitive animism to sophistication, and presently to skepticism, and that experience denied them the poetic pabulum which has always been the most envigorating in early art.

Of primitive vocal expression in artistic form at Rome we know but little. It was as thoroughly obliterated by the onrush of Greek as was the native English epic and lyric by the Norman conquest; indeed more, since, not being written, it vanished, while the old English material survived at least in part in dusty archives. Old Romans later said they remembered having heard heroic ballads, and we believe them because the first Hellenizers found a native ballad meter (the Saturnian) which was so well established that they could use it for a translation of the Odyssey and for a native epic. Non-Romans like Livius and Naevius[1]would not have employed the Saturnian verse unless the popular ear had been accustomed to it and demanded it. There were also religious songs accompanied by dancing. A fragment of one of these songs in honor of Mars has survived in a late copy of an early ritual. In Greece a similar ritualistic song had the good fortune of being addressed to Dionysus, a moregenial deity, and it seems to have developed into the dithyramb and ultimately gave rise to the drama. On Mars, however, poetry was wasted.

Of a primitive drama we have a vigorous tradition. Simple comic farces were in existence in the village festivals both north and south of Rome—and likely enough at Rome too, though the city preferred to forget its primitive amusements as it grew into a metropolis. Unfortunately the tradition regarding the early Latin drama was vitiated by some early quasi-scholar—apparently Accius—who mingled futile hearsay with a line or two of an early record about Etruscan dancers and with the Aristotelian theory of how Greek drama grew up.[2]He mis-called this putative drama by the namesatura. His story unfortunately became orthodox and displaced what might otherwise have survived of a truer tradition. The story is attributed to the year 364 B.C., a time at which no historical records were kept except for the dates and occasions of official priestly sacrifices. That is to say, the story is not worth repeating because it is attributed to a date when no records were kept of such events. All we know is that towns not far from Rome—and therefore presumably Rome as well—had simple drama before Livius began to translate Greek plays.

Such were the germs of the lyric, epic, and drama, vital and capable of growth when and if thetimes should be favorable. But what is a favorable time? Why, for instance, had not literature come to life among others of the countless tribes about the Mediterranean except the Greeks and Hebrews? I ask, not to answer, but to emphasize the riddle. At Rome a few individuals were emerging from the group, the group was itself breaking out of its boundaries, but experiences were still modest. The citizens were chiefly quiet hard-working farmers who owned and tilled their plots; there was no seafaring commerce that brought tales of adventure from foreign lands, no colonizing beyond the seas, no traveling to foreign parts to bring the Latins a sense of awareness of their own place in the world. Society, as in any democracy where customs of the ruling clique are accepted by the rest, was passing through no strenuous changes, and no religious teacher from beyond the border was entering to shake tradition.

Then, in the third century B.C., came a very remarkable experience: the first great war with Carthage, fought for twenty-three years in Sicily, the victories of which compelled the whole civilized world of the day to recognize the existence of this hitherto unknown people and to invent plausible pedigrees for it. The construction of the first fleet and the sudden defeat of the greatest navy on the seas must have aroused the Romans to self-consciousness, as the Crusades aroused the French and the defeat of the Spanish Armada awakened Elizabethan England. This discovery of the Romans that they existed—that they were being watched and discussed—stirred them into a critical attitudeabout themselves. They saw that importance in the eyes of others implied expectations. And they discovered that, by the definition of the Greeks, they were barbarians and that the designation was deserved. They set about to learn avidly and to enter into the cultural occupations of the more advanced Greeks.

The first Messala, who had liberated Messana in the second year of the war, imported a painter to depict his victories on the walls of the senate house at Rome. Duilius who had defeated the Punic Armada was voted an honorary column with a long inscription modeled on the most verbose Sicilian laudations. But these are only some of the superficial effects of the new contacts. The Roman youth serving in Sicily was learning much more. Since the war lasted twenty-three years and since it required the services of practically all the able-bodied young men of Rome, these youths, who encamped some six years each in and about the Greek towns of Sicily, carried home an abundance of impressions that meant much for the future of Rome. There can be little doubt that the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Menander were still being played at Syracuse and even in the smaller towns. Indeed Sicily had dramatic writers for many years after Athens had ceased to produce them. Mimes had long been a specialty of Sicily, and Theocritus was still writing them. Rhinton, for a while residing at Syracuse, was producing his farcical parodies of tragedies. Songs, too, tragical, comical, and sentimental were being sung with gestures, with dance and musical accompaniment on the varietystage of Sicilian towns. It was doubtless to satisfy the desires of soldiers who had seen these things that Roman officials immediately after the war introduced the production of Greek tragedies and comedies as a regular feature of the Roman festival. That all important date for Roman and world literature is 240 B.C.

With the war and pride in victory came also the need to write the nation’s history in enduring form. In Sicily the Romans had discovered that they had become the object of wide observation. The Greeks, not knowing how to explain the amazing power of this small group of barbarians, had invented the legend that they must be a remnant of the Trojans. That legend had already found a place in the history of the Sicilian Timaeus, and the Sicilian city of Segesta, which claimed a similar pedigree, had made haste to assert cousinship with Rome, thus winning a favorable alliance with the victors. A pedigree at once so flattering to the Romans and so useful could hardly be disregarded. In less than a generation it came to be the accepted story at Rome—and Naevius, comprehending its literary purport, set out to write the epic of Rome with this legend as his preface. Rome had become conscious and expressive, the third of the western peoples to begin literary creation.

But progress in art is slow. In Greece there was a long silence after Homer. In England there were vast wastes with a few narrow garden spots in the five centuries betweenBeowulfand Chaucer. Rome had a scanty population of hard-working citizens constantly being recruited for war. After the FirstPunic War there were frequent conflicts with Ligurians, Celts, and Illyrians. Then in 218 B.C. came the dreaded invasion of Hannibal. Every able-bodied man took up arms. The devastation of crops, the neglect of fields, the burden of taxes, the distressing gloom brought by a succession of defeats precluded all progress in literature. Only the theater continued to give one or two performances a year to grace the religious festivals.

In the middle of this war, in order to keep the Macedonian king from aiding Hannibal, Rome had entered a Greek coalition of states which were at enmity with Philip of Macedonia, and had thus come into close contact with Athens. When, therefore, the Greek states later appealed for aid to save democracy, a strong “philhellenism,” aroused by such contacts and no less by the influence of Euripides and Menander on the Roman stage, brought about Rome’s entrance into the Second Macedonian War.[3]Several men at Rome began (doubtless with the aid of secretaries) to write Roman histories in the Greek language. This does not mean that many Romans could read Greek with ease. It expressed, in a way, a desire that the cultured world should have some knowledge of what this “barbaric” state was accomplishing, and it was a gesture of deference to the one literature then known in the civilized world. Ennius also began to introduce such Greek prose works as he thought the people were ready for, the saws of “Epicharmus” and the cynicaltheology of Euhemerus. The directest result of philhellenism on literature was the demand for a closer approach to Greek models in the drama. Ennius’ tragedies seem to have restored the Greek chorus, while in comedy men like Luscius and Terence presently vied with each other in claiming to be faithful translators of the Greeks.

In the early decades of the second century it appeared to some observers that Greek literature was about to overwhelm Rome. The younger nobility, led by Scipio Africanus, Flamininus, and their friends, was willing to employ all of Rome’s man power and resources for the liberation of the Greeks from Macedonian rule, and when the Seleucid kingdom began to take advantage of the defeat of Philip and to subjugate the Greek cities of the Anatolian coast, these Romans challenged the great king with the ultimatum: “No Greek shall ever again anywhere be subject to foreign rule.” Never has sentimentalism gone farther in foreign politics. It would not be an overstatement to find in the plays of Euripides produced in translation on the Roman stage the chief factor in this unreasonable wave of enthusiasm for a foreign cause.

But this love of things Greek—which resembles the English enthusiasm for French culture in the Restoration—overshot its mark. The armies that served in Greece and in Asia Minor learned foreign ways too rapidly and brought back too much. Livy (39.6), in a passage which accomplishes its purpose by a sarcastic juxtaposition of incongruous items, tells of the loaded trucks that the returning armies brought home.

There were couches with bronze frames, precious spreads, tapestries and other textiles, and whatever rare furniture could be found; tables with single supports and marble sideboards. Then it was that the Romans began to employ girls who danced and played bagpipes, and posturing houris to entertain guests at dinner. And the dinners were given with delicate care and expense. Cooks, who had formerly been the cheapest of servants, now gave way to expensive chefs, and a slave’s task came to be considered an art.

We have no remains of houses of this period at Rome, but at Pompeii, which went through the same transformation because that seaport town profited by the commerce which Roman armies opened up in the east, we still may see the effects on architectural decoration initiated by this new reverence for things Greek. The lofty atrium of the houses of “Pansa” and “Sallust,” roofed on splendid columns, the Basilica, the theater, and several temples about the Pompeian forum show what that contact with Greece meant to Italian architecture in the second century. Fresco painting had not yet come in, and it is likely that few houses used for wall decoration the oriental hangings mentioned by Livy. But the exquisite Alexander mosaic found in the “House of Pansa” reveals what domestic decoration could be, and the best furniture that has been found at Pompeii is made on patterns introduced from the Hellenized east at that time. In general, though not in all details, we can draw upon the second-century houses of Pompeii for a picture of a few at least of the new Hellenistic palaces that must have been erected at Rome after the Macedonian wars.

To complete the sketch we must also recall that this philhellenism was at first favorable toward eastern cults. The mystic cult of Bacchus, for instance, which apparently had its origin among the slaves brought to Rome from Tarentum and Locri during the last days of the Second Punic War,[4]was for several years allowed to spread undisturbed because so many of Rome’s citizens had become accustomed to such things in Greece and Asia. With all these changes came also a laxity in manners and customs. Young men began to keep companions openly in the Greek manner. The Greek tutors engaged to teach young men Greek literature, rhetoric, and philosophy did not always inculcate respect for old Roman customs. In the Roman family, where woman enjoyed a freedom not known in Greece, new ideas of morality began to affect women as well as men, and since marriage was a contract and not a religious sacrament, bonds were easily loosened and divorces came to be of frequent occurrence. The reflection of these experiences we may observe faintly in the later plays of Plautus and abundantly in the earlier togatae.

All this resulted of course in a severe reaction not unlike the puritanic wave that swept over England after the catalysis of Elizabethan prosperity. Cato supported by many of the conservative nobles undertook to lead the revolt against philhellenism on every possible score. He attacked the foreign policy of the Scipios, which in his opinion wasted Rome’s youth and resources without compensation for a sentimental cause, and the Scipionic group wasaccordingly stripped of political power. He attacked the returning generals for permitting the soldiers to be debauched by Greek vices; he directed an attack against the Bacchanalian cult till the senate passed a bill inflicting the death penalty upon those who persisted in furthering the cult; he used all the power of his censorship to degrade senators who had yielded to new customs and to conduct a rigid examination of the plate, furniture, and table expenses of his opponents.

Of course this drastic reform movement could not stop the cultural changes that were bound to come. Skepticism and sophistication can hardly be banished by legislation and law courts; but the outward signs of the new culture were for a season obscured. There is no doubt that Greek literature became less popular in the latter days of Cato. Such books as the “Sacred History” of Euhemerus were not again translated for a long time. Those who wished to read Greek poetry and philosophy had to confine themselves for many years to the originals; to put those things into Latin, to translate, paraphrase, or to write similar things in Latin, was not encouraged. Greek rhetoric might still be taught for the comprehension of Greek authors, but to put the Greek rules of rhetoric into Latin for general use was frowned upon. Greek tragedy in Roman adaptations—by Ennius and Pacuvius—had been established at the festivals so long that they remained, and, as adapted to the moral tone of the Romans by those dramatists, there could be little objection to them. But the efforts begun by Scipio Africanus to encourage such plays by making themas inviting as possible to senators bore little fruit. The permanent theater, for which a contract had been let by the censors ten years after Cato’s crusade, was not completed, and when another effort was made to complete it twenty years later the senate had it torn down. Translated Greek comedies were still permitted at the festivals, but it was necessary to indicate that the scene was Greek and not Roman. Latin comedies, togatae—from our point of view not a whit better in morals—then came into fashion. To draw the crowd the authors were permitted a certain freedom of expression but here at least the vices were Roman and hence pardonable.

Such were the effects of the puritanic, anti-Greek reaction supported by Cato. It doubtless did some harm to the drama by precluding the official recognition that might have encouraged better workmanship; it cast a shadow of disapproval over the more delicate forms of literature which were associated in thought with Greece; it must bear some of the blame for the fact that the century after Cato is a period of prosaic nationalistic literature in which no man of real genius appears. Direct contact with the decadent Greeks of the day soon destroyed the sentimental respect that the great literature of classical Greece had created.

Meanwhile, however, a social change was in progress which eventually affected literary production and the literary market at many points, and particularly the drama and prose. I refer especially to the silent movement which before the end of the second century had largely eliminated the freemiddle classes, substituting for them a slave economy of unusual proportions. When the Second Punic War began, though there were not a few rich nobles who lived in the city enjoying the fruits of country estates, the majority of the citizens were land-owning, working farmers of the type that we have known so well in our central and western states. At that time there was much free farm labor. Slave labor was also used to some extent, but since these slaves were usually of Italic race and thinly distributed they were well treated, indeed they were regarded as members of the family, as was customary with farm hands among the pioneers of our west. Such slaves usually were put in the way of some property with which they could buy their freedom; and with freedom came full citizenship.

The Second Punic War was the beginning of the end of this simple economy. Many small farmers went to the wall, farm labor became scarce because of the heavy casualties in the war. Hence investors often combined many small farms into large estates. At the end of the war, also, commissions were appointed by the State to draw in vast tracts that had been recovered from the Punic occupation in the south, and as colonists did not suffice for the settlement of these tracts much remained public land to be rented out in large estates for grazing. At the end of the war and during the next fifty years, hordes of war captives were brought to the block at Rome: Carthaginians, Iberians of Spain, Sardinians, Celts of the Po Valley, Macedonians, Illyrians, and Asiatics, and also many slaves that Greek owners were glad to sell on an expandingwestern market. These were bought cheaply, placed on the large estates and on ranches. With cheap labor it was possible to go into olive and vine culture and extensive cattle-raising. And with this capitalistic exploiting the small farmers found it difficult to compete. Many gave up the contest and moved to Cisalpine Gaul or overseas. The middle class of free folk began to dwindle. The few who knew how to adapt themselves to the new conditions acquired estates and lived in luxury. Naturally the hordes of slaves increased rapidly. In the cities also the slaves were increasing and driving out free labor, and they were slaves of foreign stock. Trained up to hard labor and an easy unconcern for morals, these slaves when they gained their freedom got the petty industries and shops in their control, and the citizen poor found it difficult to survive. This was a thoroughgoing social change that progressed silently and steadily through the second century and caused the Gracchi to launch a revolution in their vain attempt to bring back the conditions of a century before.

These changes—which in some respects remind us of conditions in our southern states before 1860—necessarily affected artistic production. At dramatic performances on Roman holidays the audience was of course gradually changing in type and quality and by no means for the better. The audiences to which public speeches were addressed—the speeches that had so much to do with shaping Latin prose style—were not the same in Caesar’s day as in Cato’s. And in view of the dwindling of the middle class, the class which usually provides the largernumber of authors, we cannot be surprised if the dilettante production of the aristocratic writers and the hack work of servile producers fill a considerable space in the history of the late Republic. It is generally recognized, I think, that in our southern states between 1800 and 1860 literature fared badly, despite the orthodox argument that the existence of slave drudges gave leisure to genius to develop the nobler arts. Parasitic leisure has seldom employed its talents in artistic production.

This is one side of the social picture of the second century B.C.—the cheapening of the theatrical audiences at Rome which compelled a cheapening of the spectacles produced for them. At the same time, however, there was a rapid expanding beyond Rome of a reading public that spread with the gradual advance of the Latin language throughout Italy. For while in Cato’s lifetime Latin was read only in Latium and in a few colonies, in Sulla’s day the language was understood and used in almost every part of Italy from the Alps to the Greek cities of the southern coast. Hence while dramatic production was deteriorating in the theater at Rome, the non-dramatic literature of published books was winning an ever larger circle of readers. Furthermore, there was at the same time a deepening of cultural interests in the ruling class; for the nobles were becoming aware of their responsibilities as participants in world affairs, were finding a sounder education for their sons, were acquiring libraries and beginning to encourage literary effort. And since the nobles were constantly engaged in public service, their influence told especially in the field of historyand forensic prose. This was in fact the period in which Rome’s prose expression developed into a magnificent art.

This is a very brief sketch of the social changes that especially concern the student of republican literature, the details of which we shall try to notice more adequately when we reach the precise problems of each period. To the direct literary influence of specific Greek authors we need only refer at present, for that is less intangible and has frequently been discussed. That influence must not be minimized, for the Romans were generally as devoted to their predecessors as the Italians of the Renaissance were to the Romans, and the English Elizabethans were to the Italians, and they were as frank in acknowledging their debt. If this were a full history of Republican literature, we should have to give very many of its pages to an estimate of the Greek influences.

On the large question of what is called the racial character that is supposed to emerge in Rome’s literature, I am convinced that it is too early to speak. Roman political, social, and religious behavior seem at times to justify the assumption of a certain homogeneity of mental and emotional traits in the Romans. Archaeology does not refute this assumption, for it sustains the view that the ancestral tribes invaded Italy in compact groups that may well have preserved inherited characters for a long period. Again the very fact that the Latin language had fairly well retained its very fragile declensional endings—which Latin lost quickly in the folk-mixture of the middle ages—would lendsupport to the theory that those tribes had long lived in groups relatively compact. Finally, anthropology seems ready to assume that in the later stone ages, before Europe was thickly settled by agrarians and before the arts of agriculture induced folk-movements in search of land, there was a slow emergence of several diverse peoples in different regions of Europe who, by processes of elimination and adaptation, had attained to what may fairly be called distinct racial peculiarities.[5]It is, therefore, scientific enough to assume the possibility of Latin or Italic traits of character, as distinguished, for instance, from Hellenic, Iberic, or Celtic.

During the Republic there is a certain similarity between the Catos, Fabii, Claudii, Metelli, Scipios, and the rest. From such men we expect prudence rather than speed of thought, a respect for courage rather than dash, for puritanic conduct rather than for unconventionality. We know them as generals who stuck at a campaign “if it took all summer,” or many summers, as soldiers who refused to acknowledge defeat, as administrators who were sympathetic and patient with provincials but merciless to the disobedient, as lawmakers gifted with the knack of seeing the vital point at issue and reaching it in blunt phrases. They could be counted upon for sanity, stability, patience, and thoroughness.They expressed themselves better in architecture than in sculpture or painting; their lyricists and musicians were not numerous. They enjoyed comedy but it must be quick and pointed rather than subtle. They were peculiarly fond of tragedy but the theme must have dignity and purpose. Above all they loved good sound prose, in the histories of their nation told in periods worthy of the subject or in the long roll of the organ-voiced orator in the senate house.

It would, however, be misleading to stress these facts, which are more patent in public, social, and religious activity than in art. During the republic at least the literature is experimental, and it reveals many diverse tendencies, some of which did not survive in the Augustan day. While tragedy sought to continue the traditions of the best classical Greek work, it chose as its model the Euripidean tragedy with its more modern humanism rather than the older drama whose problems seemed to them archaic. Responding also to the social ideals of a more normal domestic life than old Greece possessed, Roman tragedy was somewhat more romantic in theme, and it broke up the Greek form in order to admit a larger space for the newer music. Comedy on the other hand neglected the Aristophanic type completely, building upon the social plays of Menander and his contemporaries. Rome took patriotism too seriously to care to have policies of state and august consuls ridiculed upon the stage. Yet the delicate art of Menander was not the goal of writers like Naevius and Plautus. His scrupulous respect for words, his fastidious striving toward a quiet contemplativeexpression of emotion, his insistence upon form, that directed its art toward the reader long after the first performance was forgotten, had made him more genuinely classic in effect than Aristophanes. The Roman dramatist wrote for a single performance, where effects must be translucent and immediate to an audience that was used to the robust fun of homemade plays. Plautus has no connections with rigorously classical ideals. He cares for spontaneous, natural, paganly human laughter.

The Roman lyric of the Republic also rejects classification. Before the Greek lyric reached Rome the great singers of Greece had already been forgotten by decadent Athens as thoroughly as seventeenth-century England had forgotten Chaucer. When the Romans began to study lyrical forms they apparently did not even hear the names of Sappho and Alcaeus; they were told about the dainty epigrams of Alexandria, and they began to copy these. Aedituus and Laevius might as well have lived at Samos. Catullus at first fed on the same fare, but one stirring experience set him free. Thereafter he wrote songs that no Greek could have claimed. They have the lilt, beauty, and precision of his models, but a natural freedom, a lucidity, and a convincing passion that make the epigrams of the Garland seem lucubratory. They obviously spring out of a society that is less artificial and out of a life that grows in a young world.

Lucretius again refuses to fall into a conventional pattern. He has no standards, no proportions, no models. The early Greeks had staidly versified science so that it might easily be memorized. Thatwas not Lucretius’ purpose. Alexandrians had versified science again because the interest in the subject had become general. Lucretius wrote for a public that had cared little for science, but he wrote with the zeal of a prophet because he could not keep silent, and his voice was heard. His work has no unity, no controlling plan or single mood. He hurls his bald facts, his images, his logic, and his pleas indiscriminately. There is nothing else in Greece or Rome like him. And so we might go on.

What are the Romans of the republic? When we read their political history we feel a unity of spirit and are prone to say that we understand them. This may be because of a certain racial trait or perhaps because a certain limited aristocracy set the traditions early which became so binding that political activity followed themos majorum. But the men who entered literature were not of one class nor did they express the ideals of any one group. They came out of different strata of different localities and spoke for different mores. Whatever we may say we must admit that the really personal literature of the republic was neither conformist nor monotonous, neither Greek nor classical in spirit. It was frankly experimental, but it always proves to reflect some phase of Roman life.

FOOTNOTES[1]The tradition regarding early bards can be traced to the elder Cato. It is therefore not contaminated by the scholastic traditions which later vitiated the story of the drama.[2]See Hendrickson, “A Pre-Varronian Chapter of Roman Literary History,”Am. Jour. Phil., 1898, 285. Of the famous chapter in Livy (VII, 2) I should attribute only a scanty line regarding the Etruscan ludii to theAnnales Maximi. The rest is unreliable reconstruction, since it refers to a period that antedates historical records by over a century. Many attempts have been made to enucleate the kernel of a dramatic history from the passage, but no one who has dealt with the historical sources of the fourth century can accept such attempts.[3]Historians who read only Polybius and Livy persist in denying that philhellenism was a factor in Roman politics. If they will but study the fragments of early Roman poetry they will emend their histories.[4]SeeClass. Quarterly, 1927, 128.[5]History has nothing to do with racial types classified by cranial measurements, for such typology deals with races that were mixed scores of thousands of years ago. The so-called Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic groups have for ages inherited the mixed nervous systems of each and all. The typology that concerns the historians of the ancient Mediterranean world is rather one of temperament and the various types grew out of segregated groups that shaped themselves during the few thousands of years that preceded the great European migrations of the second millenium B.C.

[1]The tradition regarding early bards can be traced to the elder Cato. It is therefore not contaminated by the scholastic traditions which later vitiated the story of the drama.

[2]See Hendrickson, “A Pre-Varronian Chapter of Roman Literary History,”Am. Jour. Phil., 1898, 285. Of the famous chapter in Livy (VII, 2) I should attribute only a scanty line regarding the Etruscan ludii to theAnnales Maximi. The rest is unreliable reconstruction, since it refers to a period that antedates historical records by over a century. Many attempts have been made to enucleate the kernel of a dramatic history from the passage, but no one who has dealt with the historical sources of the fourth century can accept such attempts.

[3]Historians who read only Polybius and Livy persist in denying that philhellenism was a factor in Roman politics. If they will but study the fragments of early Roman poetry they will emend their histories.

[4]SeeClass. Quarterly, 1927, 128.

[5]History has nothing to do with racial types classified by cranial measurements, for such typology deals with races that were mixed scores of thousands of years ago. The so-called Mediterranean, Alpine, and Nordic groups have for ages inherited the mixed nervous systems of each and all. The typology that concerns the historians of the ancient Mediterranean world is rather one of temperament and the various types grew out of segregated groups that shaped themselves during the few thousands of years that preceded the great European migrations of the second millenium B.C.

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