TENNEY FRANK

                                   LIFE
                                   AND
                                LITERATURE
                          IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

                      UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
                      BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES 1957

                      University of California Press
                   Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
                        Cambridge University Press
                             London, England

                           Copyright, 1930, by
               The Regents of the University of California

               Originally published as Volume Seven of the
                        Sather Classical Lectures
                             _Third printing_
              (_First Paper-bound Edition, Second printing_)

                 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS


       I. INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL FORCES               1

      II. EARLY TRAGEDY AND EPIC                   30

     III. GREEK COMEDY ON THE ROMAN STAGE          65

      IV. TERENCE AND HIS SUCCESSORS               99

       V. THE PROSE OF THE ROMAN STATESMEN        130

      VI. REPUBLICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LIVY      169

     VII. CICERO’S RESPONSE TO EXPERIENCE         197

    VIII. LUCRETIUS AND HIS READERS               225




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: 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 followers never 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 critics into 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 jealous literary 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 his _Ars 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 the casual 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 the diversity 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 the _Nuova 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 enthusiasm for 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 vanished with 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 other peoples 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.
In organizing 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 the early
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
more genial 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 name _satura_. 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 the times 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 attitude about 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 variety stage 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 between _Beowulf_ and Chaucer. Rome had a scanty
population of hard-working citizens constantly being recruited for war.
After the First Punic 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 cynical theology 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 was accordingly 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 them as 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 free middle 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 expanding western 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 larger number 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 history and 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 lend support 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 contemplative expression 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. That was 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 the _mos 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 the
_Annales 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] See _Class. 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.




CHAPTER II

EARLY TRAGEDY AND EPIC


Browning has recalled the story of how Greek war captives taken at
Syracuse in the Peloponnesian war earned their release by reciting
snatches from the plays of Euripides. It was a century and a half after
that siege that the Romans came to Sicily in the First Punic War, and
the city was still interested in the old drama, indeed was now taking
its part in producing tragedies. One of the last of the dramatists, one
of the so-called “Pleiad,” was a Syracusan of Hiero’s time, and King
Hiero was himself so devoted to the drama that he even built a theater
for Agyrion, a petty village on the border of his small kingdom. We have
noticed how the Roman youth who campaigned year after year in Sicily
learned something of the arts of civilization and on their return home
created a demand for the things they had come to enjoy while abroad.
The year after the victorious troops returned from Sicily, Livius, a
schoolmaster of Greek origin, staged a translation of a Greek tragedy
as a supplement to the annual chariot race. This production marks the
beginning of Rome’s education in letters. There must be some close
connection between this homecoming of the army, and the performance of
Livius’ play, for the change in character of a great religious festival
could not have been suggested by a freedman. The magistrates responsible
for the performance were senators and the senate had of course requested
the play. In all likelihood it was also the senate that invited King
Hiero of Syracuse to Rome to see the games; for he, if any one, would
have been asked to supply some actor to help stage the first play, and
it was only appropriate that he should come to inaugurate the new era of
culture.

From that time on plays were produced every year. Five years after the
first performance, Naevius, who had served in the Sicilian campaigns
(and had perhaps learned Greek there), began to help in the work of
adapting Greek plays for the Roman stage. Only brief fragments of those
early plays have survived and in reviewing the list of titles we might
wonder at the enthusiasm they reveal for plays shaped on the old Greek
mythology. But the predominance of titles derived from the Trojan cycle
explains this enthusiasm. It was in Sicily that the Roman soldiers had
learned the Greek story of how Rome had been founded by Trojan refugees.
The stories of Hector, of the Trojan horse, Achilles, Ajax, Iphigenia,
and the rest were therefore not without personal interest in the barbaric
city. The unlettered shoemakers, smiths, and carpenters at Rome, men
whose modern equals could hardly be expected to sit patiently through a
performance of Gilbert Murray’s _Trojan Women_, eagerly listened to the
half-comprehended lines of Livius’ translation. They had been told that
these were the stories of their long-lost ancestors.

Livius is merely a name, which is unfortunate, since we know that
he deserved well of Roman civilization. Naevius is less shadowy, a
personality whose creative work left an impress on such powerful men
as Cicero and Vergil two centuries later. He wrote not only plays, but
an epic, condensing Rome’s history in an annalistic poem, the climax
of which was the great victory over Carthage in which he had had a
share. From the sixty scattered lines of this epic rescued by late
lexicographers we do not quite find the justification for Vergil’s high
regard. There is no poetry in them. But grammarians pick their lines
to illustrate linguistic usage and not for effective phrasing. Even
Shakespeare becomes prose if judged by the citations found in Webster.
However, for the preservation of the metrical schemes employed by Naevius
we are grateful. Though he had used a large variety of Greek meters for
his drama, he did not in his epic. Here he preserves the native Saturnian
line that had been used in religious songs, and apparently in ballads.
That he did not adopt a standard Greek meter for his epic, as he did for
his tragedies and comedies, is proof enough that the old native narrative
verse was fully established in a well-known body of poetry which we have
lost.

In many respects this verse resembles the old English line that relies
upon alliteration and rhythmic ictuses which balance each other in the
two severed parts of the line:

    In a sómer séson whan sóft was the sónne.

But the Saturnian had six ictuses instead of four, and as Latin verse was
more aware of its quantities and less of its word stress than English
the ictuses, while somewhat regardful of word accent, were more attentive
to quantity. Finally, since alliteration is more effective when the ictus
falls on the first syllable, and since the Latin accent had to a large
extent shifted away from the first syllable by the time of Naevius,
the use of alliteration was somewhat less frequent in Naevius than in
_Beowulf_. In Vergil’s day the effect of this verse must have been
somewhat like that of Langland’s poems upon the Elizabethans. The shift
of the Latin word accent toward the penult was already destroying the
effectiveness of the verse even when Naevius wrote; and the break of the
line in the center rendered it ineffective for sustained narration. Its
halting movement may be somewhat inadequately illustrated by a paraphrase
of Naevius’ own epitaph:

    If death of any mortal     sadden hearts immortal,
    The heavenly Muses surely      Naevius’ death bemoan;
    For after he departed     to the shades of Orcus
    The voice of Rome is silent    music is forgotten.

Ennius abandoned the line, and it was eventually doomed, just as the
Anglo-Saxon meters in England began to disappear when the richer rhythms
of French poetry came to be appreciated.

It was Naevius also who broke away from Greek subjects in the drama,
though with what success we cannot say. He made what we may call a
“chronicle play” of the Romulus legend which disregarded the conventional
unities, and he also wrote a pageantry play to commemorate the heroic
single combat of Marcellus with a Celtic chieftain. He is therefore among
the first to stage contemporary drama and to disregard the restrictions
of time and place. That he made the same innovations in comedies like
his _Hariolus_ is probable but cannot be proved from the few lines that
remain.

An independent creator he was and might have carried progress far had
not so large a part of his activity fallen in the restraining period
of the Second Punic War. His end was in character. Accustomed to speak
his mind freely in his comedies, he vigorously supported the Fabian
policy when it was unpopular, and after the group supporting Scipio,
which demanded a more aggressive conduct of the war, came into power, he
continued his sarcastic criticism of the Scipionic group. Rome had always
tolerated free speech, but even at Rome patience was short in war time.
War censorship discovered an old law which, with a little imaginative
interpretation, could be stretched to cover the case of this satirist.[1]
Only one line has survived of the satiric comedy which referred to
the fact that Metellus, a friend of Scipio’s, had taken advantage of
a fortuitous circumstance to stand for the consulship. He was elected
through no desert of his own. The point of the line—Fato Metelli Romae
fiunt consoles—rests on a _double entendre_, because _fato_ may be
construed either as ablative or as dative, while _Romae_ may be genitive
or locative. The line therefore may mean either:

    “The Metelli became consuls at Rome by chance,”

which is hardly a flattering remark, or what is even less flattering:

    “The Metelli became consuls to Rome’s sorrow.”

The Metelli apparently thought Naevius meant to suggest both, which
is likely enough, and they succeeded in having him imprisoned, and
eventually banished. He seems to have found a home in Carthage, the land
of the enemy against whom he had once fought.

These two dramatists, for reasons which must be discussed later,
increased the use of musical accompaniment in tragedy and comedy. In
Euripides the body of the drama had been in recited trimeters. The
choral parts were of course sung to the accompaniment of rhythmical
movements called dance, and there was also music when the actors engaged
in dialogue with the chorus, as well as in some of their monologues. But
the musical element had been reduced very much during the century that
followed Euripides when the drama had gradually dispensed with the chorus
even in the staging of Euripides. Rome was then too primitive to provide
the twelve or more trained singers and dancers that even the later
Greeks had found beyond their resources. Livius indeed had experienced
such difficulty in securing actors with good voices that he himself took
the leading rôle, and, not adequately gifted for the singing parts, he
tried, we are told, the inartistic device (not unknown on our comic
stage) of placing a singer beside the musician to carry the melody of
the lyric parts while he acted and presumably recited the lines of the
songs. That was, of course, only a temporary makeshift, but it shows how
difficult it was to provide satisfactory artists at the time. It would
seem then that since these early writers found it impossible to produce
choruses adequately because these required the elaborate training of
many singers in intricate musical compositions, they compensated as best
they could by increasing the number of monodies in their plays, writing
them in a few well-defined meters, such as the septenarii, cretics, and
bacchiacs,[2] which were not too difficult to learn. Thus it was that
Roman tragedy became even more like modern opera than the tragedy of the
Greek stage had been. These early men of Rome, who mean so little to us,
had developed a form which was capable of carrying on the work of Greek
tragedy on a primitive stage, and capable also of growing into a richer
drama as soon as the resources of the small city should permit. They made
the drama possible for Rome.

As a composer of tragedies and epic verse, Ennius succeeded Naevius,
but, writing in an era of enthusiastic philhellenism, he came near
yielding too much to a great foreign influence. Had he not been a man
of remarkable poetic powers his example might well have quenched the
spirit of Rome in the rising literature. One of the first Latin authors
that we would ask the excavators of Herculaneum to restore to us is
Ennius. No single work of his has survived. Of his twenty-five or more
tragedies we possess only about four hundred lines; of the eighteen books
of _Annals_ a little over five hundred complete lines; of his satires,
his _Euhemerus_ and his _Epicharmus_, not enough fragments have survived
to give us a very clear idea of the scope of each. All in all we have
about three per cent of his work in scraps, but here at least there are
several connected passages cited in appreciation of something else than
the grammatical usages they illustrate.

Ennius too, like Naevius, told Rome’s story in verse. One’s impulse is
to discount the accuracy of any history that employs artifice. And one
must grant of course that a poet will select his incidents with a view to
their dramatic values and picturesqueness. One must remember, however,
that poetry had a serious place in all early literature for the reason
that, before the day of much writing, all teachable things, even history
and philosophy, were put into verse for mnemonic purposes. The works of
Solon and Heracleitus would not have contained different matter if they
had been put into prose. In Ennius’ day many national histories that
purported to be accurate were composed in verse. And Ennius probably did
not permit himself to include fictive incidents in his _Annals_, nor
has he been proved incorrect at any point.[3] Cicero cited him for the
gist of the famous speech of Appius Claudius, and added as a matter of
indifference that the original of the speech was in existence. Apparently
Ennius’ summary was accurate enough so that it was not necessary to refer
to the original text.

The influence of his _Annals_ was in its field comparable to that of
Homer. From Ennius all schoolboys got their first impressions of what
Rome’s great heroes had accomplished. He was unsurpassed as a painter
of character. With a few telling strokes he revealed the essential
traits of those strong, bold, tireless heroes who made the old Republic
irresistible in power, magnificent in tradition, and a saving inspiration
in the days of decadence. He was near to these men, and it was as he
saw them that they lived on in memory and still live on. He made Roman
character memorable in the two lines on Fabius Maximus:

    Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem:
    Noenum rumores ponebat ante salutem.

and in the single line on Curius:

    Quem nemo ferro potuit superare nec auro.

His epic was an exposition of the text he himself devised so effectively:

    Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque:

And it was Ennius who more than any one else kept Roman society upon that
foundation.

We happen to be able to test his influence by what he did with the
portrait of Pyrrhus. Only a generation before Ennius was born this
picturesque enemy of Rome had had a friendly alliance with the Messapian
tribe to which Ennius himself belonged. The poet, therefore, had heard
much about the king. Pyrrhus, in fact, had some very sympathetic traits
of character, a remarkable chivalry, and a certain sense of honor and
loyalty such as is often found in the chieftains of primitive folk. These
qualities stand out in the characterization of him that Ennius has left
us; and these are the outstanding traits that we find in all the later
Roman references to Pyrrhus. That Ennius should have responded to these
qualities is not strange, but that all the rest of the Romans should thus
enthusiastically have lauded an enemy who nearly wrecked Rome is less to
be expected. The explanation is of course that what Ennius wrote colored
the historic conceptions of all who followed. This becomes evident when
we read Plutarch, a Greek, and his biography of Pyrrhus. When drawing
upon Roman sources for the Italian campaign of the king, Plutarch paints
the same picture as Ennius, but when he draws upon Greek authors in
describing the Greek campaigns, he reveals the fact that the knightly
hero of the Roman historians had a less charming side which certain close
observers at home were well aware of. Like all historians Ennius had
his enthusiasms, and he had such power of portraiture that not a trait
blurred.

He was also fair. Pyrrhus got his meed of praise, but the opponents of
Pyrrhus, Fabricius and Appius Claudius, were characterized with equal
sympathy. Of his own contemporaries, Fabius the Slow-goer was effectively
portrayed as we have seen, and Cato “in caelum tollitur,” as Cicero
affirms, although Scipio Africanus, who was bitterly opposed by these
conservatives, became, as he deserved to be, the outstanding hero of the
book.

It was entirely appropriate that, for his heroic narrative, Ennius
borrowed the dactylic hexameter of the Greeks, but it was after all a
daring thing to do, since meters seldom transplant with success. However,
Naevius’ use of the native Saturnian had demonstrated its inability
to carry heroic narrative. Imagine _Paradise Lost_ crammed into the
primitive English rhythms of Langland! The dactylic hexameter was in
Greek regularly associated with the epic. It had one disadvantage in
its requirement of a larger proportion of short syllables than normal
Latin writing contained, but that was overcome by simply permitting more
spondees than Homeric custom had enjoyed. This resulted in a reduction
of tempo which after all suited Roman military movement. There was
another difficulty which was more serious. While Greek verse needed to
give little attention to word accent, the Latin word accent was jealous
of attention. With the relative fixity of the accent, it was impossible
to write Latin dactyls based both upon quantity and word-accent. Ennius
nevertheless ventured upon an experiment. That he had a very delicate
ear for the demands of the Latin language is proved by the careful
adjustments in his dramatic senarii, where adjustments were not easy to
make. He would not have foisted impossible dactyls upon Rome. The fact
that he wrote quantitative dactyls and continued to write them, and that
his _Annals_ lived for centuries is proof that he did not overstep the
bounds of good taste. The explanation of his success is probably that
the word stress in the Latin of his day was so moderate that a conflict
with the ictus was not fatal to aesthetic pleasure if only it fell
upon long syllables, and also that during the forty years of dramatic
performances at Rome, the ears of the audiences had become trained under
the influence of music to disregard such conflicts in the many lyric
rhythms, including dactyls. By his sensible modification of the Homeric
line, Ennius created as great a resource for Latin poetry as Chaucer did
for English poetry, and shaped for Vergil’s use “the stateliest measure
ever moulded by the lips of man.”

Ennius began to write tragedies about 200 B.C. at the very time when
philhellenism was at its height. Being a man of wide culture who knew
his Greek well he readily responded to the general demand for things
Greek. Though he produced one play (_The Rape of the Sabine Women_) on a
Roman theme, and a pageantry play called the _Ambracia_ to commemorate
the victory of a friend during the war with Aetolia, he seems to have
striven chiefly to reproduce on the Roman stage the effects of Euripides’
tragedies. And now that the restraints of poverty had become somewhat
relaxed, and the drama had continued long enough to foster a certain
amount of skilful talent for its interpretation, he was freer to present
his tragedies more nearly in the old Greek manner. It has accordingly
been plausibly conjectured[4] that it was Ennius who reintroduced the
chorus so that the Greek plays might be given without cutting. There
is no reason for supposing that the choral song in the _Thyestes_
(written in bacchiacs) or the one in the _Medea_ (octonarii) or the one
in the _Iphigenia_ (septenarii) were recited by a single singer. It is
clear from the fragments that in several of his plays, notably in the
_Achilles_, the _Eumenides_, the _Hector_, and the _Hecuba_, choral
groups were actually participants in the plays as they had been in the
Greek originals. And since in the plays of his successor, Accius,
it can be demonstrated that a chorus sang, we ought to accept the
reasonable interpretation of the Ennian fragments and attribute to this
philhellenist the importation of choral song into Roman tragedy. Ennius,
however, deferred to Roman taste so far as the rhythms were concerned.
He adhered largely to the lyric meters which Livius and Naevius had
popularized, and seldom attempted to employ the more intricate systems of
the Greeks.[5] That Ennius was as successful in his tragedies as in his
epic is adequately proved by the fact that many of his plays were still
being produced a century after his death and were avidly read by men like
Cicero.

Pacuvius, the nephew and successor of Ennius, did not write many plays.
From the little that remains of his work we should judge that he
preferred themes somewhat off the beaten track and that in choosing plays
that contained heterodox discussions of ethical themes, he, too, felt the
influence of the new Greek learning and kept in mind the interests of
the intellectualist at Rome. The grammarians have also noticed the fact
that his lyric meters paid more attention to Latin word stress than those
of his predecessors.[6] They cite particularly his care in composing
anapaests with caesuras in such a way that long initial syllables fell
under the ictus. These anapaests in fact read like dactyls with an
anacrusis of two shorts at the beginning. This innovation decidedly
proves that the poet had a precise ear and desired to attain harmonious
effects. His successors showed that they appreciated his innovation,
but they occasionally used the old turbid lines to express emotional
excitement.

The most successful of the writers of tragedy was Accius, a poet who
spanned the era between the Gracchans and the Social War. We have
fragments of more than forty tragedies from his busy pen, and many of his
plays were re-staged in Cicero’s day. He was the favorite of the great
actors, Aesopus and Roscius. He did not depart far from the customs laid
down by Ennius in respect to meters, music, and chorus, but the fact
that he freely readapted the Greek plays which furnished themes to his
predecessors can only mean that he used the same liberty in giving his
own interpretation to old plots that Euripides had used in treating anew
the myths that had been staged by Aeschylus and Sophocles. We happen
to know from the remarks of Terence that convention did not permit the
staging of more than one paraphrase of any given Greek play. When,
therefore, Accius writes plays upon familiar themes we must assume that
he is offering something essentially original in his interpretation of
the old plot. In fact we find good evidence of his original treatment
in the fragments. So, for instance, in his _Antigone_ he changed the
personnel of the chorus (as Ennius had done in the _Iphigenia_), which
implies that the purpose of the play was altered. It is also clear that
Accius made free to disregard the conventional unities of place and time,
for in the _Brutus_ there are scenes laid in Gabii, in Ardea, and in
Rome.

All these dramatists apparently altered their originals freely in order
to make the story and its meaning more plausible to a Roman audience.
The _Medea_ of Ennius reveals many changes of this kind. For instance,
the Latin author felt that he must prepare the audience early in the
play for the gruesome death of the children,[7] a detail unnecessary
in Euripides, who wrote for an audience that knew the plot. This kind
of thing must have occurred frequently. Again, Ennius had to alter
Medea’s long monologue, since before a Roman audience accustomed to
seeing a matron in public, there was no point in making her apologize
for appearing outside of the palace.[8] Ennius has here been needlessly
accused of misunderstanding the Greek original! Ennius knew his Greek; he
had learned it at school in Tarentum. His alterations were introduced to
suit the psychology of his own audience. Similar changes are numerous and
need not be dwelt upon.

The alteration of the very purport of the plays is of more importance to
us. For instance, Atreus, the old Greek tyrant of primitive brutality,
was calculated to offend Roman taste. It is apparent from the fragments
of Accius that it was the sufferings of Thyestes rather than the daring
of Atreus which received sympathetic attention—a fact not surprising in
a city where the word _rex_ was feared and hated. Euripides’ story of
Andromeda had a matter-of-fact plot in which Andromeda’s father begged
Perseus to slay the dragon and to rescue his daughter. This plot followed
the myth and was expected in Athens. But not so at Rome. In Accius’ play
Perseus is rather the chivalrous knight; he rescues the lady first and
then pleads for her hand. Similarly, in the _Clytemestra_ of Accius one
also finds a very modern note, for Accius suggests that if Agamemnon’s
inconstancy could be excused because of his long separation from his
wife, Clytemestra might possibly have the benefit of the same argument.
In the _Andromache_ of Ennius and the _Astyanax_ of Accius there is
an intense note of sorrow for the child of Hector and Andromache that
reminds one of Vergil’s lines in the third book of the Aeneid. This is
a Roman strain deriving from the Romans’ claim to be descended from
the Trojans. In the _Phoenissae_ of Accius the motivation of the whole
play is changed by representing Eteocles breaking a command rather than
a personal pledge. In the _Eurysaces_ of Accius we have a slightly
different reason for the use of Roman motive. This play was re-staged by
the great actor Aesopus when Cicero was in exile, because of its picture
of the unjust banishment of Telamon. The Roman audience appreciated the
possible allusion to Cicero’s suffering and cheered Aesopus’ lines to
the echo. Accius may well have written it originally and introduced the
changes in order to influence his audience and obtain the recall of some
political exile like Popilius, about 130 B.C. The lines have a genuine
Roman ring.

In our own day when every dramatist is compelled to create a new plot it
is easy to underestimate the originality of men like the Greek Euripides,
the Roman Accius, the French Racine, the English Shakespeare, who all in
varying degrees were satisfied to use old plots, even old plays, and to
give all their attention to a personal and original interpretation of the
inner meaning of a familiar story and of the motives that impelled the
characters. We may illustrate the old method of procedure by examining
Seneca’s _Medea_, since here we have a complete Latin play which shows
what even an uninspired Roman dramatist might do by way of re-reading an
ancient legend. Medea in the old unvarnished myth of the barbaric age
was apparently a bundle of natural passions, a savage creature gifted
with superhuman powers. Jason owed her his life, but since a Greek prince
could hardly wed a barbarian and make her his queen, he might reasonably,
according to Greek standards, abandon her when his “higher” duties to
state and position demanded it. In a rage of jealous hate, the creature
might then wreak her vengeance upon Jason and Jason’s children. Such
action was quite comprehensible to the semibarbarous age that shaped the
myth, but not to the more humane Athenians of Euripides’ day. The Greek
dramatist, accordingly, had offered a new explanation of the problem. In
his version Jason has disregarded the higher demands of humanity for a
selfish passion or a more selfish ambition. Medea, the woman, has been
infinitely wronged, and in her helplessness—it is not all jealousy and
hate—she slays her children to save them from a worse fate. But to the
Roman even this interpretation seems impossible, and the character of
Jason least comprehensible of all. A Roman nobleman could not so abandon
his sons, and the woman, if she was indeed human, could not slay her
children either in hate or in love. Seneca, therefore, while keeping
the main plot, seeks a new explanation for the woman’s act. Medea is
again painted as the barbaric witch that she was before Euripides
transformed her. Jason marries Creusa for the sake of his children—a
wholly comprehensible act to a Roman of Nero’s day—and the uncontrollable
Medea is driven into a rage that does not hesitate to commit murder.
But, however jealous she might have been, Seneca feels that she could
not have laid hands upon her own offspring. Yet the tale said that she
did. Seneca’s solution of the dilemma is simple. Woe has driven Medea
insane and the ghost of her brother hovers before her, a symbol of that
insanity. Accordingly, it is in a fit of madness that she does the deed.
In Seneca, as in Euripides, the action follows the ancient myth, but the
interpretation of that myth varies with the author, and in both cases
this reinterpretation is not so much an invention of the dramatist as
a reflection of the changed point of view of the society of his time.
The moderns have, of course, felt the same need for a re-reading of
the story as the widely differing versions of Grillparzer and Catulle
Mendéz demonstrate. This is but one simple illustration of how the
Roman dramatists could re-stage old myths and yet constantly invite the
audience to something new. The emphasis upon the interpretation rather
than upon the plot is precisely the same as it was in the days of Racine
and Shakespeare.

How far the Roman dramatists were indebted to predecessors for their very
striking employment of song is still a moot problem. Leo,[9] following
a suggestion of Crusius, held that the Plautine cantica followed the
manner of the contemporary music-hall lyrics of Greece as illustrated by
the then recently discovered “Grenfell song.” This theory was rejected by
Fraenkel[10] because he found no vital similarity between the Grenfell
fragment and the Plautine cantica. In his view the Roman predecessors of
Plautus—Livius and Naevius—who paraphrased both tragedy and comedy, had
probably developed the cantica in tragedy from Euripidean models and then
employed them in comedy as well. This theory has a certain plausibility
but cannot yet be tested because the cogent examples of cantica in
tragedy must be drawn from Ennius, who was not a predecessor but rather a
tardy contemporary of Plautus. The view of Leo has received some little
support from a brief and peculiar mime-fragment of the British Museum
recently published by Milne.[11] However this fragment is so late that
it may represent post-Plautine developments, and therefore cannot be
pressed into decisive service. It must also be added that recent studies
tend to show that Greek New Comedy of the time of Menander had not wholly
given up the use of strophic lyrics,[12] and that the Plautine and Ennian
cantica themselves seem to have retained not a few traces of strophic
structure.[13]

Without attempting to solve a problem for which too many of the
quantities are still unknown, I would only wish to suggest the need of
considering the practical factors of Roman experience and of Roman
exigencies when we try to explain the Roman trend toward an operatic
form. In the first place it is well to keep in mind that Naevius, who
dominated the Roman theater for thirty years of its formative period,
had campaigned in Sicily long enough to become the first annalist of
the Punic war. Practically every city of Sicily where Roman troops
were stationed had a theater, and in the days of Hiero the demand for
dramatic entertainment in Sicily was so vigorous that new theaters were
being built. We still have evidence[14] of Hellenistic theaters at
Syracuse, Tauromenium, Segesta, Tyndaris, Akrae, Catania, and Agyrion.
It is agreed that the Greek tragedies and comedies that were then being
produced—the plays that Naevius probably saw—were generally devoid of
choruses. The elaborate choruses of the tragedies had fallen away, partly
because of the cost of staging them, and partly doubtless because new
musical fashions had grown impatient of the somewhat academic formalism
of the strophic songs.[15] In comedy, considerations of the expense
and a desire for scope and freedom in choosing theme and form in song
worked toward the same end. There can be little doubt that in Sicily
Naevius saw performances of post-classical tragedies and comedies, not to
mention music-hall performances of mimes and farces, that gave him good
suggestions as to how the plays of Euripides could be staged without a
chorus, and how a paraphrase of a Menandrian comedy that had lost its
_entr’acte_ songs could be turned into something like light opera. And a
genius as inventive and independent as Naevius would soon break through
the limitations of the Roman stage and shape, with the help of such
suggestions, a performance suited to Roman needs.

But even if the Sicilian performances offered suggestions of how to
stage comedies and tragedies without choruses it seems to have been
the Romans who made the old classics conform to the new method and
in doing so greatly enlarged rather than diminished the scope of the
musical accompaniment. The second reason for this increase in songs
seems to me, therefore, to lie in the need for music to help carry the
new meters which dramatic writing demanded. Latin had been as poor in
meters as early English was later. The chief drudge of all work had been
the Saturnian verse, a form unfit for either sustained narrative or for
realistic dialogue. Its line was slow and reflective. It had been used
for ritual song, for funeral elegy, for lullabies, for gnomic poetry, and
apparently also for lampoons; but it was as unfit for the drama as Ennius
had found it to be for epic narration. There was also apparently a lively
marching verse, the quadratus, the meter with which we are familiar from
the trochaic tetrameters of the Greeks and from the lines of Tennyson’s
_Locksley Hall_:

    With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder storm.

At least critics are now ready to accept the remark of Horace that lines
like

    Rex erit qui recte faciet, qui non faciet, non erit,

were sung in the days of old Camillus. Whenever we happen to have a
fragment of a soldier’s song quoted in Latin it is in this quick step:

    Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat, qui subegit Gallias.

That meter had possibilities in the drama, and it was very freely used,
though it doubtless had to be weaned away from its boisterous military
associations. For rapid action and excitement it served well. It appears
that early tragedy felt that it belonged to music and used it in lyric
passages, in recitative chants as well as in dramatic speeches. Naevius
was very fond of it.

Tragedy, however, needed an easy line of moderate length for its ordinary
dialogues, and several meters in different moods to carry the monologues,
songs, and emotional dialogues. For these Livius and Naevius, as we have
noticed, had taken over and adapted a large number of Greek verse-forms.
Now the adaptation of a foreign meter is a very serious matter. It
took English poetry hundreds of years to merge French and old English
rhythms, as it took France centuries to find a satisfactory adaptation
of the medieval Latin systems. The labor of reshaping Greek meters for
use in Latin was all the more difficult at the time because the Latin
language happened to be just then at a critical point in its accentual
development. The Greek word-accent had but very slight stress, so that
quantity was permitted to determine verse-rhythm. In Latin, also, the
quantity of the vowel and the syllable was still the dominant element
at this time, indeed determined the position of the word accent, and
was responsible for the penultimate accent rule that prevailed in most
words during the century in which Naevius wrote. Latin must have been
nearly as precise in the observance of longs and shorts as Greek. But
the difficulty was that the stress of the word accent had also been a
marked factor in Latin pronunciation for some time. Now in forming or
introducing new rhythms the Latin poets would have to choose either
stress or quantity as the decisive element on which to build and force
the other element to comply. This is a choice that very few languages
have imposed upon their poets. In English there was of course no such
decision necessary since our accent remained a strong stress while our
syllabic quantities, in the mingling of Germanic and French, became
so completely confused that the values of half of them are hardly
determinable by ear. This difference between Latin and English has not
always been given due weight. When, for instance, the late Poet Laureate
of England assumed that the quantitative meters of Ennius and Vergil
resemble in effect the quantitative meters that he composed in English,
he disregarded the vital difference between the two languages.[16] While
in Latin quantities were readily distinguished even by the rabble, a fact
that is shown by the emergence of the penultimate law before there were
any teachers, in English it requires a laboratory apparatus to decide
what really is the length of certain syllables. On the other hand, stress
is dominant in English and unmistakable in all colloquial speech, whereas
in Latin it was so moderate in the new position it had recently acquired
that for many centuries after Plautus it had very little effect upon
the morphology of the language. Apparently the first Roman poets chose
as wisely as could be expected in determining to base their meters upon
quantity rather than upon word-stress. But in doing so they had to face
a serious dilemma: a stress-accent does not like to be disregarded, and
ultimately (six centuries later) it asserted itself and insisted upon
dominance. The quadratus, or trochaic tetrameter, which apparently grew
up before the Romans knew Greek or grammar, had made a compromise that
satisfied the ear. It looked to quantity as the dominant element, placing
the verse-beat invariably upon a long (or its equivalent), but it by no
means wholly disregarded word accent. In the lines of soldiers’ songs
that survived, it is not often that word accent is slighted more than
once in a line, and Ennius, Naevius, and Plautus in their plays seldom
permitted themselves to neglect it more often than twice in a spoken line.

In “Rex erit qui recte faciet, qui non faciet, non erit,” aside from
the last syllable which of course is hidden in a falling cadence, only
_erit_ at the beginning, an unemphatic word, gets what may be called a
mechanical accent. But this smoothness is natural chiefly in the trochaic
meter and it occurs here because the normal penultimate accent of Latin,
which stresses a long syllable next to the final, is by nature adapted
to a trochaic quantitative rhythm. Obviously an iambic line can take
advantage of all the qualities of the trochaic line if the poet will
so adapt the first word as to secure a trochaic swing in the rest of
the line. Livius was very skilful in adapting the Greek trimeter to the
spirit of the Latin trochaic. He increased the caesuras—that is he freely
cut the iambic foot in two—not for the sake of caesuras but in order that
by cutting iambic feet he could create a trochaic rhythm which would
operate easily with a penultimate accent; he permitted resolved longs
in any position except the last foot, because when the penult is short
the antepenult receives the accent, and a fair coincidence of accent and
ictus is again secured; finally, since there was no way of avoiding a
slight clash in the sixth iambic foot, he frequently tempered the fifth
foot by insisting that when it contained a single word, this word must be
spondaic. That is, by dwelling upon the first syllable of the fifth foot
he reduced the ictus on the second.[17] The result of this exceedingly
delicate modulation of the line by Livius—a modulation revealing an
astonishingly keen ear—was that the dramatic senarius in Latin had a
rhythm in which quantitative and accentual beats usually coincided, and
this rhythm served its purpose in Latin drama quite as effectively as did
the trimeter in Greek. Considering the gentleness of the accent in Latin
we may surmise that Latin dramatic senarii, when thus treated, ran at
least as smoothly as Browning’s blank verse despite the fact that they
had to give heed to accent as well as to quantity.

In teaching the rules of the Latin senarius it is a pedagogical mistake
to compare it with the Greek trimeter as Lindsay does in his brilliant
book, _Early Latin Verse_; indeed I am persuaded that it distorts
historical facts to do so. If Livius was the man who shaped this line for
Latin needs, we must remember that he had reached Rome as a mere child
and had as a youth grown accustomed to the swing of verse pronounced in
the Saturnian and the quadratus meters and that he would not have had
any occasion at Rome to learn to comprehend the amazing precision of
the Menandrian trimeter. And Naevius, the Campanian soldier, must have
had much the same experience. To such men the Greek trimeter could only
have suggested the possibility of writing a six-foot iambic line which
would carry through to the end, with the lightness of the quadratus, the
opening rhythm of the Saturnian. And the rules of the first hemistich
of the Saturnian must have been the determining regulations of the
senarius. Those rules had all to do with the purely Latin problem of
writing quantitative verse that should not overmuch offend the demands of
an accentual stress. Indeed it is fair to say that if Livius had never
seen a Greek trimeter but had undertaken to adapt a six-foot iambic line
on suggestions taken only from the Saturnian and the quadratus, he would
have arrived at precisely what he did. By failing to see this simple
historical sequence we have, from Bentley to the elaborate but misleading
statistics of Klotz, followed Horace in misconceiving the spirit of the
very worthy Latin senarius.

But there was more for the early dramatists to do than to shape a line
suitable for dialogue, for Greek drama had taught these poets that a
great variety of meters must be used to give the mood and tempo of
emotional scenes. The Roman writers of tragedy did not attempt to
reproduce the intricate polymetric and antistrophic Greek songs. However,
they adopted several very effective meters (perhaps also creating some)
which they used for massed effects, such rhythms as the cretic, bacchiac,
anapaestic, glyconic, and the longer iambic and trochaic lines, not to
mention various rarer forms. In a fragment of Ennius quoted by Cicero,
Andromache in distress runs from senarii through a passage of pleading
cretics:

    (Quid petam      praesidi aut      exequar      quove nunc      etc.)

then through excited narration in excellent alliterative septenarii:

    (Fana flamma deflagrata tosti alti stant parietes)

into turgid and wild anapaests:

    (Priamo vi vitam evitari etc.).

And Cassandra’s mad scene runs similarly from septenarii through dactylic
tetrameters, trochaic octonarii, and anapaests into iambic octonarii.
The tone of such cretics has been caught fairly well in Tennyson’s _The
Oak_,

    All his leaves, fall’n at length,

while the bacchiac rhythm is, if pronounced with care, conveyed by
Arnold’s

    Ye storm-winds, of autumn

These brief experiments on the part of English poets, which show an
observance of word-stress and also of quantity, will indicate the
nature of the difficult task which Latin poetry had to face in taking
over meters native to the Greek language, except that the Latin
poet, conversely, must place his verse ictus on a long syllable and
secondarily, if possible, observe the word stress as well. That was a
difficulty with which classical Greek did not have to contend, since its
word accent was musical and could easily be slighted. German and English
poetry—except in learned experiments—has refused to face the double task,
a task which has fortunately never been compulsory.

If we keep these facts in mind I think we may be willing to concede that
the Latin poets of the early time may have called in the extended aid
of the flute and of melody partly in order to obscure the occasionally
inevitable conflict between the word accent and verse ictus. The point
can be illustrated by a simple example. In Tennyson’s song “Blow, bugle,
blow,” the line

    And the wild cataract leaps in glory,

which falls unrhythmically in the midst of an iambic system, hides its
confusion when sung in regular three-fourths time. The flute or violin,
unlike any of the percussion instruments, does not convey a stressing
tone, it measures notes and carries a quantitative rhythm readily,
thereby obscuring any word accents that fall irregularly.

It is my belief that when the drama came into Rome and found the language
just at the point where the quantitative principle was having its
conflict for dominance with the accentual factor, a moment when the task
of shaping adequate rhythms for new forms would be very difficult, it did
the natural thing, accepted quantity as dominant, attempted at the same
time to observe the word stress, and then hid occasional discrepancies by
using song and recitative freely. And this, it seems to me, is one of the
reasons why Roman tragedy was the more willing to go in the direction of
modern opera.

If a recent theory concerning French verse be true, we may find there
an instructive parallel. It has been suggested that when medieval Latin
verse floundered between quantity and accent, early French verse, unable
to find usable quantitative distinctions and hampered by a monotonous
word accent, hesitated for a dominant principle, and allowed the singing
line with its counted notes to assume control. Whether or not this is
the reason, at any rate the French lyric emerged with its isosyllabic
lines and fluid ictus, and in so far provides a partial parallel to what
happened in Latin verse.

It is not improbable that, if the Romans had come in contact with
culture a century later than they did, so that the Latin accent might
have affected colloquial morphology unhindered by literature and
sophistication for another century, native poetry might have abandoned
its quantitative basis and frankly accepted word accent as the most vital
factor of its rhythm. It would perhaps have been a liberating influence
had this happened. As it was, by their use of music and by their
reasonable compromise with Greek meters, the early poets accustomed the
Roman ear to slight the claims of accent, and Ennius was able to compose
spoken lines in hexameters which almost entirely followed the dictates
of quantity. Once completely naturalized, this method was no longer
questioned, and Lucretius, Horace, and Vergil—except at line ends—could
safely disregard the word accents. It was the musical part of the drama
that had naturalized such principles of rhythm.

After Accius the writing of tragedy fell off as rapidly at Rome as it had
in Greece after the conquests of Alexander. How is this to be explained?
Why did not England produce great tragedies after the successes of the
Elizabethan stage, or France for a long time after the classical period,
or why did not America during the two centuries of play-writing before
1900 beget a single great dramatist? Recently there was published a list
of the American plays copyrighted in Washington between 1870 and 1920; it
contains over 60,000 titles. How many of these have become a part of the
world’s literature? Probably not one in 10,000. Can we explain why?

It is not well to be dogmatic in discussing the reasons for such a
phenomenon as the decline of tragedy at Rome, but we may be permitted
perhaps to repeat some conjectures. We have already remarked[18] that
the second century B.C. was a period of striking social changes, of a
decrease in the middle class native stock and a very remarkable increase
in the slave population, and from this slave population there grew up at
Rome the new generation of proletariat citizens that had to be amused at
festival seasons. It was a population that was probably as intelligent
as the old, but it had hitherto been brought up in slavery and in the
devotion to material advancement that slavery implies. These new Romans
could hardly be expected to concern themselves with the quality of the
entertainment provided, with civic ideals and artistic standards. In
Cicero’s day the games at festivals were more frequently gladiatorial
shows and wild beast hunts. To freedmen and freedmen’s sons these
seemed to provide what Aristotle called tragic purgation somewhat more
effectively than did representations of the _Medea_, _Orestes_, and
_Oedipus_. It is apparent that if society was to continue in its course
of degeneration the exacting tragedy of the old type was doomed.

Nevertheless, the old plays were being revived by men who were interested
in high standards, and when a famous actor played a part he would draw
large audiences. Aesopus and Roscius, the best actors of Cicero’s day,
were in great demand and both grew rich at their profession. Though
references to dramatic performances in Cicero’s day are casual, we hear
of not a few. We know, for instance, that there were reproductions of
Ennius’ plays a century after his death, and we find in the list his
_Andromache_, _Telamo_, _Thyestes_, the _Alcumeo_, the _Iphigenia_ and
the _Hector_. Of Pacuvius’ plays Cicero had seen the _Antiope_, the
_Iliona_, and a play about Orestes which he describes as a favorite of
the gallery. Accius was even more popular. Aesopus produced his _Atreus_
repeatedly. His _Eurysaces_ was given in 57 B.C., the _Clytemestra_ in
55, and the _Tereus_ in 44 after the authorities had suppressed the
_Brutus_ because of its political significance. And there were many more.

This success of the old plays—artificial though it may have been in some
instances—shows that respectable audiences could still be reckoned on so
long as the Republic lasted, and that the plays were attractive enough
to justify the aediles in presenting them. With the Empire, however, the
decline was rapid; the populace found the tragedies tedious, and when in
Horace’s day a popular actor discovered a way of cutting the plays and
presenting the more effective scenes in pantomime, with a lavish amount
of music and a gorgeous setting, legitimate tragedy gave way to something
resembling a Russian ballet. Old tragedies were cut and adapted for this
new kind of presentation and new ones were written that consisted chiefly
of scenarios and monologues. Even closet plays, like Seneca’s, were
shaped into a succession of recitations in the hope that they might sell
to the new industry. Literary tragedy, however, had come to its end at
Rome.

This process of decay was natural enough and was only to be expected,
given the changes in Rome’s society and with them the decline of Roman
ideals. But it is still somewhat of a riddle why at Rome as well as at
Athens good playwrights ceased to write a hundred years before tragedy
ceased to attract respectable audiences. It would seem as if the art of
writing plays lost its stimulus even before the plays themselves ceased
to please. The reason for this may well be that tragedy kept too long to
its convention of interpreting sacred myths. The themes were outworn, and
each myth had had every human interest exploited by the time that several
writers had given it their several interpretations.

Today it would seem quite the obvious thing to have dramatized fictitious
experience, even as comedy had long ago learned to do. But a moment’s
reflection will show that to assume that this might have been done
involves an anachronism. Greece did not take this step after Euripides,
for Agathon’s experiment was not followed, nor France for some time after
the classical period, nor England after the Elizabethan successes, and
conditions at Rome in the days of Accius were in many respects analogous
to those in the countries named. Though the dramatic instinct seems
always to be presumable, the drama depends upon social conditions and
must draw its life from that which society provides. Its evolution has
accordingly been a fairly consistent story. Early tragedy assumes the
rôle of interpreting the most sacred and time-honored of a nation’s
stories. The sufferings, thoughts, emotions of the great—heroes,
demigods, and kings—are worthy of presentation, and these alone. At
first the tale must not be altered, it must be told as nearly as possible
in the way that tradition has hallowed. As time goes on, however, and
men have changed, the tale thus told will seem inconsonant with human
nature; then the dramatist may re-tell it, suppressing what has grown
obsolete, emphasizing the elements that still seem true to experience.
A very daring realist will venture to present Telephus in tatters, but
the critics will be upon his heels immediately. For the hero will remind
you of a beggar, and it would be desecration to set mere man upon the
stage made for the demigods. Common man belongs in comedy; you may laugh
at him and with him, but life’s great lessons are illustrated only in
the characters of the great. And that is where Euripides stopped—was
doubtless compelled to stop. And it is nearly where Shakespeare found
the outward boundary of his tragedies. His tragic plots derive from old
Chronicles or from Ancient Rome, or from foreign lands sufficiently
removed from his audience by mists of unknown space to make them suitably
heroic. His tragic characters never represent the men of contemporary
England. They are as real and human as the man of the street, to be sure;
but that is after all not the same thing. Try to imagine the heroines
of Ibsen or Pinero or O’Neill upon the stage of the Globe Theatre in
Shakespeare’s day! The Elizabethan conception of the function of tragedy
makes such heroines unthinkable except in comic rôles.

Realistic tragedy is of course a thing of slow growth, or perhaps we
should say that a nation fits itself slowly for the reception of it.
Comedy paves the way somewhat. When the great may not be laughed at,
it is well that comedy should present the foibles and deformities of
the common man, if it be merely for ridicule. Slaves served the purpose
of comedy for Menander and Plautus, though they were careful not to
compromise the dignity of their art by giving title rôles to such humble
fellows. Yet as a matter of fact the study of mean subjects contributed
directly and very largely to the understanding of the ordinary character
as material for tragedy. Shakespeare’s portraiture of Shylock, for
example, carried him so far that modern critics do not know where comedy
ends and tragedy begins. In the _Andria_, the _Hecyra_, and the _Heauton_
of Terence the emotion shifts more than once from laughter to deep
sympathy. But something more was needed than the dramatist’s study of
the man of the street. Human society must itself change. It is not an
accident that genuine realistic tragedy failed to find its fully accepted
place upon the stage till the nineteenth century, in a word not till
thoroughgoing democracy, by preaching the equality of men, had persuaded
us of the dignity of the mere human being, and through the prose novel
taught the man on the street to concern himself with his fellows as
worthy themes of art. That was a stage of democratic realism which Rome
did not reach while the literary art was still creative. And therein
probably lies the final explanation of the slow failure of Roman tragedy.


FOOTNOTES

[1] _Am. Jour. Phil._, 1927, 105.

[2] Livius and Naevius were both very fond of the septenarii; the iambic
tetrameter appears in the tragic fragments of Naevius once; cretics are
found in the _Equos Trojanus_, and bacchiacs apparently in Naevius’
_Danae_ and in his _Lycurgus_. Fraenkel, _Hermes_ (1927), 357 ff., has
shown that the trochaic septenarius (quadratus) was an old Latin meter.
We need not, however, assume with him that it was derived from the
Greek. As a marching rhythm it is too natural to require explanation.
The assumption of an Indo-European _Urvers_ needs to be exiled from our
books. Song and dance are very old.

[3] See _Cambridge Ancient History_, VII, 644.

[4] See Duckett, _Studies in Ennius_, 56, who revises the views of Leo,
_De Tragoedia Romana_ (Göttingen, 1910).

[5] For a strophic system in Ennius, see Crusius, _Philologus_, Supp.
XXI, 114.

[6] _Gram. Lat. Keil_, VI, 77, 7; Vollmer, _Röm. Metrik_, in Gercke’s
_Einleitung_, I, 8, p. 6; however among the preserved fragments of
Pacuvius there are several anapaests that resemble those of Ennius.

[7] Ennius, ed. Vahlen, _Scaenica_, 272.

[8] See _Am. Jour. Phil._ 1913, 326.

[9] Leo, _Die plautinischen Cantica_ (1897).

[10] Fraenkel, _Plautinisches im Plautus_ (1922), criticized by Immisch,
_Sitz. Heid. Akad._ 1923.

[11] Milne, _Cat. of lit. pap. in British Mus._ 1927 (no. 52); cf. Wuest
and Croenert, _Philol._ 1928, 153 ff.

[12] See Marx’s ed. of _Rudens_, 254 ff.

[13] Crusius, _Die Responsion in den plaut. Cantica_ (1929).

[14] See Bieber, _Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen_ and Bulle, _Abh. Bayer.
Akad._ 1928.

[15] If Horace’s strictures on the new music of the drama in the
_Ars Poet._ 200-15 took a hint from Neoptolemus, we may suppose that
Hellenistic critics had objected to this change.

[16] Robert Bridges, _Ibant Obscuri_. Such hexameters as

    They were amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure
    Walking forth i’ the void and vasty dominyon of Ades:
    As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin’d—

do not represent what happened to Latin in Ennius, for the reason that
in Latin pronunciation the quantity was the dominant element controlling
even the accent. In English the reverse is true. Fraenkel, _Iktus und
Akzent_, has recently committed a similar mistake in judgment, influenced
apparently by the high respect that speakers of German must necessarily
have for stress. He has resorted to daring hypotheses in trying to
prove that Plautus always correctly observes a species of stress (see
Sonnenschein in _Class. Quart._, 1929, 81). It is significant that the
French, who feel little stress in their diction, go to the other extreme
and find stress insignificant in Latin. Latin in fact was like neither;
it resembled Hungarian in being primarily quantitative, and in its word
accent had a moderate stress not without a rather noticeable pitch such
as is found in some parts of Sweden.

[17] See Lindsay, _Early Latin Verse_, Leo, _Geschichte Lat. Lit._, p.
68. Fraenkel, _Iktus und Akzent_, seems to me only to have confused the
results that have been summarized with consummate skill and good sense by
Lindsay.

[18] In chap. I.




CHAPTER III

GREEK COMEDY ON THE ROMAN STAGE


The theme of Roman _gravitas_ has perhaps been overworked. The impression
seems to be current that Roman schoolboys cheered at the ball games
in periodic sentences, and that Roman babes begged for the moon in
quantitative hexameters. It appears to be difficult to imagine that the
Romans took a very special pleasure in rollicking comedy. Only twenty-six
of their comedies have survived, but it is safe to say that if we now had
all the respectable literature of the period before 100 B.C., including
the epics, the tragedies, the minor verse, and even the artistic prose,
the shelves that held the comedies would easily outnumber all the rest.
Of what other nation is that true? We have the titles of over four
hundred of these plays for the Republican period and there is no reason
to suppose that we have even an approach to the full list.

As we have said, the Romans, like all the peoples who followed the
Greeks, had to take cognizance of what had been done before. Livius and
Naevius were the first to adapt Greek comedies for the Roman stage, as
they had been the first to adapt Greek tragedies. Of their work, however,
we have again only fragments, saved usually by late grammarians to
illustrate archaic grammar. Of Naevius we know the titles of thirty-four
comedies, an average of one a year during his period of activity—but
since many of these have come to us by the merest coincidence we should
not assume that we know all the names of his comedies by any means. Most
of these thirty-four plays were adapted from the Greek, but not all.
The man who wrote the first Roman epic and the first Roman chronicle
play (praetexta) was probably never a slavish copyist. We have noticed
how he came to grief for his daring in attacking the powerful Metelli
during a critical period of the war. Such criticism would presumably
appear in Roman plays. The fragments of his comedies also show many local
references that are best explained as coming from plays purely Roman,
and such titles as _Hariolus_, _Tunicularia_, and _Agitatoria_ suggest
independent work. However, so long as we have only about a hundred
complete lines rescued from all the plays we can hardly speak with
certainty on this point.

In discussing tragedy we suggested that Livius and Naevius were probably
the men who shaped the “operatic” form of Roman tragedy, and it is likely
that they too were the men who carried this form into comedy, though
its final development seems to be due to Plautus. The distinctly lyric
lines are rare, to be sure, but the fragments are too few to permit us
to expect many. The majority are iambic, the Roman equivalent of the
Greek originals, and they have of course the free Latin form. One line
is anapaestic; the old Roman trochaic septenarius, well suited to song,
is frequent and so is the iambic octonarius, which Naevius seems to
treat like a septenarius with anacrusis. Indeed Cicero[1] calls it a
septenarius and indicates that it was sung to the accompaniment of the
flute.

These were the comedies which entertained the Romans at their festivals
during the gloomy years of the Punic war, those years that are so vividly
pictured for us by Livy. If we could recover these plays and interpolate
them between the harrowing scenes of Livy’s history we should know more
than we do of Roman society during that most critical epoch of the
nation’s history.

Plautus, from whom we have twenty plays, had staged a few of them before
Naevius went into exile, in fact in the _Miles Gloriosus_ he refers to
the imprisonment of his fellow-poet. In his plots Plautus kept rather
close to the Greek plays, translating, paraphrasing, and adapting as
suited his mood. We shall presently discuss his reasons for doing so.
What these themes were we need not repeat. The Greeks of Menander’s day
had shaped the comedies of intrigue and of romance fairly well on the
lines these have followed ever since. Shakespeare’s _Comedy of Errors_
is very close to Plautus’ _Menaechmi_, and though it departs from its
original in its search for further entanglements, the construction, the
type of humor, and the dramatic devices are the same. In the _Merry Wives
of Windsor_, Falstaff illustrates the Menandrian use of self-deception,
from his first boasting to his leap into the basket. The Wives are more
in evidence than they would have been in Menander but there is little
else to distinguish the play from the standard New Comedy. From the
Greek, via Plautus and Terence, came practically all the types and all
the tricks in which Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy delighted.

Here it is my task not to discuss Roman comedy as such, but rather to
indicate what in Rome’s life and experiences made itself felt through
these plays. In the Plautine adaptations of Greek comedies we find two
seemingly inconsistent purposes, one to rewrite in such a way as to make
the exotic comprehensible, the other to keep a Greek atmosphere in order
not to offend Roman taste by permitting the inference that the author
approved of the behavior which he presented. The first purpose required
simplification, the second avoided it. It is necessary to dwell upon this
distinction for a moment since historians frequently fall into error by
assuming either that Plautus reproduced a Greek milieu without alteration
or on the contrary that he represented Roman life as he found it. In
point of fact he did both or either, as best suited his purpose.

In technicalities of law, to take a simple illustration, Plautus’
procedure was to simplify with little regard for consistency. At times
when it did not matter he substituted Roman officials or institutions for
Greek ones without concern as to whether they were exact equivalents.
If in presenting the details of a lawsuit a literal translation of the
Greek would seem obscure to a Roman audience, Plautus substituted some
comprehensible point and reshaped the whole passage to conform to his
illustration. In short, he used mere common sense in adapting foreign
plays for stage production. Had Plautus been translating for a reading
public he might have given a literal rendering and inserted a note of
explanation. But plays written for a single presentation have no occasion
for employing explanatory notes.

Scholars have also been troubled by the fact that the plays of Plautus
bristle with Greek words. There is an average of about ninety occurrences
a play, counting repetitions of the same word. How would our comedies
fare on the stage if foreign words were used with equal lavishness?
Not a few of these words—like _amphora_, _ancora_, _epistula_—had of
course been acclimated through commerce, and would cause no trouble. A
few technical names that could not be translated—of Greek magistrates,
for instance—were illumined by the context. In a few instances Plautus
literally dumps in Greek words for amusement, as when an irate husband
reels off the items of the bill he has received from the modiste, or
reads the menu that will cost him more than he is able to pay. Such
words the audience were hardly expected to know. The very outlandish
extravagance of the list is intentional. But after we have made these
subtractions, the bulk remains.[2] Are we to assume that Plautus
addressed his plays to the score of cultured gentlemen who had had Greek
tutors? If he had, the aediles would hardly have gone to the expense
of buying the plays and presenting them, for the purpose of the games
was to attract and amuse the holiday masses. Can it be that Plautus
indolently neglected to invent Latin jokes in place of the Greek ones
of his models? That is hardly a satisfactory solution in the case of
a writer who inundates his scenes with rollicking fun. Another common
explanation—too frequently hazarded—that the streets were already
overrun with Greek captives who had spread a knowledge of Greek, will
hardly serve. In neither of the Punic wars had many Greek captives been
taken—the captives had been chiefly Carthaginian, and their Spanish,
Gallic, and Ligurian mercenaries—and these are not noticed in the
Plautine plays.[3]

The simple explanation is that most of the Roman populace had served in
many campaigns in Greek cities and with Greek contingents and had become
familiar with a great number of colloquial Greek expressions, in the same
way that American boys acquired not a few French phrases some years ago
in their one brief campaign overseas. The older generation had served in
Sicily in the First Punic War and had been billeted in Greek towns for
periods of from six to twelve years. The younger men had all served in
the Greek districts of southern Italy before Hannibal was finally driven
out in 203 B.C. Both of these wars strained Rome’s man power to the very
limit so that practically every adult male saw service in Greek-speaking
communities. And finally, during the last years of Plautus’ activity, a
dozen legions were sent across the Adriatic for the campaigns against
Philip and Antiochus. Plautus could probably assume therefore that at
least ninety per cent of the able-bodied men of his audience had served
in campaigns among and with Greeks. Those retired soldiers were happy
to be complimented with reminders of their services to the state, and
Plautus did it by frequent references to the language they had acquired
in the wars.[4]

The liberal use of military terms like _machaera_,[5] _ballista_,
_catapulta_, _phylaca_, _techina_, _machina_, even in all kinds of
figurative senses; of exclamations and terms of abuse that the soldiers
would hear when out prowling for extra rations: _barbarus_, _harpago_,
_dierecte_, _latro_, _morus_, _plaga_, _colapus_, _mastigia_, _ganeum
gerrae_, _apage_, _pax_, _papae_, _babae_, _eia_, _eugepae_, and the
rest; of canteen phrases convenient on pay-days in Sicily: _drachuma_,
_danista_, _trapezita_, _opsonium_, _cyathisso_, _crapula_, _oenopolium_,
_macellum_, _comissatum eo_ (and shall we add _gynaeceum_?), this tells
an unmistakable story. A large number of these expressions were little
used at Rome after the period of general campaigning among the Greeks.
Many point directly to Sicily. The word _lautumiae_, for example, reminds
us of the convict quarries of Syracuse, _basilike_ (“right royally”)
seems to betray the soldiers’ respect for the lavish court of King Hiero,
as _Siculi logi_ reflects their impression of a talkative people. A
large number of the words are Doric in formation, deriving apparently
from Sicily or Tarentum: _choragus_ (used in an un-Attic sense and
sound), _plaga_, _machina_, _zamia_, _catapulta_,[6] _colapus_, _ganeum_,
_gerrae_, _sumbola_, and many others. Not a few words were demonstrably
adopted by speakers rather than by writers, as _phylaca_, _gerrae_,
_balineum_, _lanterna_, etc.

This is but a brief indication of the linguistic evidence that the
soldiers returned home with a convenient Greek vocabulary of no small
scope. How freely Plautus could assume its ready use is revealed by
his lavishness in compounding such Greek words with Latin termination
as in _athletice_, _dulice_, _euscheme_, _inanilogista_, _morologus_,
_pultiphagus_, _pancratice_, _opsonari_, _plagipatidae_, _elleborosus_,
_ulmitriba_, and even in the use of Greek oaths (μὰ τὸν Ἀπόλλων) of
semi-Greek puns (_opus est chryso Chrysalo_, etc.), and Greek slang
(_argentum_ οἴχεται). But we may be sure that Plautus knew very well
the precise limits of this camp language. He does not venture to employ
the common colloquialisms of the literary Greek of Menander if they
are not a part of the military store of his day. For those he finds
Latin substitutes. Very likely Plautus had himself served as a soldier
in southern Italy during the Hannibalic war and had there acquired an
accurate knowledge of the diction that could be intelligible to his
audience of soldier folk.

There has also been much speculation concerning Plautus’ relatively
free use of Greek mythology, since the sophisticated new Greek comedy
rather avoided any reference to it.[7] In the _Bacchides_ of Plautus the
clever slave compares his exploits in detail with the devices used in
the capture of Troy (the theft of the Palladium and the building of the
Trojan horse); in the _Rudens_, Charmides promises a “feast of Thyestes”;
in the _Captives_, Tyndarus refers familiarly to Orestes and Lycurgus;
everywhere the names of Achilles, Hector, Medea, and the like are spoken
of as well known. This cannot be explained by recalling that the Odyssey
had been translated into Latin, since reading was by no means general,
nor by pointing to the use of these myths for illustrations on Etruscan
vases and mirrors. Not one in a thousand of the auditors had come into
contact with Homer or with such objects of art. But the crowds for whom
Plautus wrote had for thirty years had free seats on the holidays when
the tragedies of Livius, Naevius, and Ennius were played, and they knew
the characters of those tragedies as well as the laboring men of today
know the names of our baseball pitchers and cinema stars.

The Trojan cycle was particularly familiar from the theater because the
dramatists, exploiting the tradition that the Romans were descendants of
the Trojans, had presented all the good plays that they could find on
this theme. Livius had produced an _Equus Trojanus_, an _Achilles_, an
_Aegisthus_, and an _Ajax_, which must have told of every phase of the
subject, and the Livian _Hermione_ had familiarized them with some of the
aftermath of the war. Plautus’ ready mention of Procne and Philomela is
readily explained by recalling that Livius had presented the _Tereus_.
The impression made by the Trojan cycle of Livius had been deepened by
the several plays written on these myths by Naevius; the _Hesione_,
_Iphigenia_, _Hector_, _Equus Trojanus_, and _Andromache_ all dealt with
characters of the Trojan cycle, while the _Danae_ and the _Lycurgus_
supplied adjacent myths that the Plautine audiences evidently knew. These
plays—and of course there were many whose names have been lost—would
account for most of the familiar references in Plautus. Furthermore,
Ennius was producing tragedies at the very festivals for which Plautus
wrote, and here and there we can actually recognize in Plautus certain
lines that were spoken as parodies of Ennian lines.[8] We do not know the
chronology of the plays of these dramatists. If we could synchronize
them now we should probably find that the references to Andromeda,
Alcumeo, Thyestes, and other characters of the Greek myths would fall
in neatly with plays of Ennius on these themes which had been recently
produced.

It is quite beside the point to ask how much “literature” the Plautine
audience knew. They knew no literature as such, but they all attended the
festival shows which were free. There they learned the stories of a large
number of the plays of Euripides and Sophocles as easily as our working
classes learn, without opening a book, about Arab sheikhs, Long Island
drawing rooms, Roman chariot races, and Cleopatra’s wiles. To them in
fact a play of Euripides was often the latest popular sensation.

Many years ago when Max Reinhardt first staged _Oedipus_ in the Circus
at Berlin at prices that attracted hundreds of laboring men I overheard
these remarks: “This Sophocles, is he a Berliner?” “I don’t know; the
name sounds Russian; but he knows how to make a good show.” Those two men
had enjoyed the play all the more because they did not know they were
being educated in the ancient classics; and that is how Plautus’ audience
had innocently learned its Greek mythology. Naturally Plautus was too
wise not to exploit this rich vein of interest.

So thoroughly un-Greek is Plautus in his type of rollicking humor, in
his volubility, in his skurrying speed, and in his love for exciting
intrigue—if we may assume that the recently discovered plays of Menander
are typical of the Greek New Comedy—that we are surprised at his refusal
to write original and purely Roman comedies. He invariably keeps the
scene in Greece, dresses his characters in Greek garb, and gives them
Greek names. What is the reason? Naevius had written plays on Roman
themes. Why did not Plautus? That it was diffidence one can hardly
believe after noting the originality he displayed in adapting the plays
to musical settings and the success he achieved in writing the scenes
that are demonstrably his.

The secret of Plautus’ behavior in this matter seems to me to lie in
his appreciation of the fact that Rome was still too conservative to
accept as Roman the intrigues and plots that would make the richest
comedy. “Spoon River,” as we have learned, has its vices, but at Spoon
River they are studiously hidden under a cloak of Sunday respectability.
When a modern playwright wishes to add more piquancy to a play than an
American milieu will unprotestingly support he lays his scene in Paris or
on a South Sea island. There is enough human nature under the frown—or
smile—to comprehend what is presented, and sins can be the more openly
discussed and condemned—or laughed at—if the spectator is permitted
at the same time to express his puritanic superiority to the mores of
an exotic society admittedly going to its deserved ruin. This seems
to be the reason why Plautus lets his amusingly extravagant slaves,
demi-mondaines, and reckless young men play freely with moral values in
a Greek setting, usually with an explicit condemnation of the villain
at the end, and often with a reminder that “such things are possible at
Athens.”[9] The characters of Plautus, therefore, are never Roman in
outward appearance, and it is a mistake to assume that Roman manners are
depicted in his plays, even if here and there he is compelled to take
cognizance of Roman morals.

The spendthrift young men with the resourceful slaves who help them to
their desires by concocting astute schemes are Greek. The Athens of
Menander was sophisticated. There clever young men had penetrated beyond
Epicurus’ ethical sophistry to the logical naturalism of his premises;
they had even waved aside the forced idealistic definition of “nature”
which Zeno was teaching them to follow and had learned to give allegiance
to a simpler nature more responsive to immediate wishes. Pristine
authority, filial respect, and the compulsion of academic ethics were
all weakened by the prevalent discovery that no system of faith as yet
invented had withstood penetrating criticism. Young men saw no valid
objection in logic to doing as they liked. And many were in a position to
do as they liked, since theirs was the generation for which Alexander had
ransacked the treasures of the east, opened lucrative commerce to shrewd
traders, sent hordes of cheap slaves to do the hard work of a civilized
world, and caravans of music girls, dancers, and courtesans to entertain
a sophisticated city. The _jeunesse dorée_ of Athens, pleasure-loving,
undisciplined, helplessly inexperienced, epicures living to the ragged
edge of incomes and beyond, were fit subjects for a comedy whose god was
luck. They were not yet brutalized, they usually had a gentlemanly code
of a kind, and they were often generously devoted humans. But they had no
anchorage in principles. Such were the young men in Menander, and such
Plautus, who had an eye for color, preferred to keep them, despite their
non-Roman aspect. But he was very careful to keep them Greek.

At Rome at the end of the great Punic war a young man’s life was a very
different matter. For nearly twenty years the dreadful scourge of Punic
raids had impoverished the people. Every able-bodied man of military age
was in the trenches living on the most frugal fare; farms were mortgaged
and lying waste; war taxes were growing; the state was pressing down
with sumptuary laws that forbade luxury, limiting clothing to homespun,
and food to a few cents a day. And even when the Punic war was over, the
aftermath of campaigns against the rebellious Gauls, against Spain and
Macedonia gave no respite till near the end of Plautus’ life. Doubtless
the young men, who could see the Plautine plays on the three or four
holidays each year when they were given, enjoyed vicariously a release of
spirit which they could comprehend because they were human beings. But
not one of them had actually lived at home in the atmosphere reproduced
on the Plautine stage. It is not surprising, therefore, that Plautus kept
the Greek setting. There was little to draw upon from Roman life. Had he
put his people in Roman dress the incongruity would have been ludicrous;
and the censors would have realized the danger to morality and suppressed
the plays. As exotic myths they seemed less harmful—though the time was
to come and sooner than could have been expected when the characters of
these plays were to take on a semblance of realism even at Rome.

What is true of Plautus’ young _roués_ is also true of the Plautine
parasites and slaves. The amusing parasites, the Athenian wits who got
their bread by providing entertaining talk, were as useful in the New
Comedy as are the futile expatriate artists in the modern international
novel, but there is no evidence that these creatures had as yet made
their way to Rome. The Plautine slave is a mixed character. It has been
customary to say that Rome’s culture depended more heavily on slavery
than Greece’s and that therefore the comic slave is Plautine rather than
Greek. But that assumption disregards a century of economic change. The
slave of comedy usually is a very clever rascal, very loyal to his young
master for whose least pleasure he will trick parents and police; he
is amazingly resourceful, quick of wit, possessed of a sauciness that
we cannot associate with early Roman custom, and capable of enduring
blows if he has a good conscience from having successfully perpetrated
his crimes. In sophisticated Athens this character is wholly plausible;
at Rome in the day of Plautus he is not. It is true that Menander’s
fragments use slaves less than the Plautine plays; this probably means
that Plautus, in following some of the dramatists of the New Comedy,
avoided Menandrian plays because they had not enough boisterous fun for
him per page. It does not mean that Plautus in this respect is closer
to Roman life. We used to be told also that scenes of slave torture
in comedy were purely Roman, but we now have a scene in Menander’s
_Perinthia_ which goes so far in cruelty that Terence omitted this scene.
Here again, therefore, we have not a Roman characteristic. The fact is
that in Plautus’ day slaves were relatively scarce at Rome; the working
classes in the city were still largely free natives, the farms were
usually owned in small plots by working farmers, and the few slaves on
them were still treated in the way that single farm hands are usually
treated in our own simpler rural districts, that is, as members of the
household. Bound slaves were very rare, the _ergastulum_ was hardly known
as yet, and the slave when set free still became a citizen with the same
status as his master. It was not till the end of the Punic war that
Rome for the first time knew what it was to possess non-Italic captives
in considerable numbers—slaves who had to be bound and watched—and of
course it required a generation or two of slave culture on large villas
and estates before the saucy type could appear, the type familiar to us
in the comedies. No, this type would perhaps be plausible at Rome in
the Gracchan day, but not before. My feeling is that Plautus has not
only given us the Greek type as he found it, but, since the morality
of citizens was not involved in a slave’s rascalities, he has somewhat
padded his plays with slave intrigue in order to speed up his action. Not
from a single trait should we infer that he depicted the Roman slave of
his own day. It is significant that when true Roman comedies began to be
written the slave rôle was at once toned down because, as Donatus says, a
Roman master ought not be represented as outwitted by a slave.

In the treatment of female characters Plautus’ procedure is somewhat
different. Greek New Comedy had a type of woman in the rather respectable
hetaerae well adapted to its purpose, and in fact the only type usable,
since the Greek housewife was so bound to the dull routine of the
rear-of-the-house that she was too devitalized for literary treatment.
The metic companion—of Aspasia’s station and juristic standing—moved
about freely in the city, could be placed in almost any social group,
and could by an easy fiction and the proper birth tokens be discovered
to be an unrecognized citizen. Since this was the only respectable class
available for Menander’s intrigues, he naturally employed hetaerae for
his many plays that contained love scenes. Roman adapters, however,
encountering such heroines, who represented a social class foreign to
Roman society, found considerable difficulty in transplanting them to
Italian soil. It may be remembered that in the Victorian period the
plays of Dumas fils could not readily be transposed into English, just
as the romantic English plays of that day failed of comprehension in
France, because the relations between the sexes were based on different
customs in each country. What, for instance, would Plautus have done
on the Roman stage with Habratonon, the shrewd but generously human
hetaera of Menander’s _Arbitrants_, who, when she had to make her choice,
surrendered her own advantages over her lover and restored him to his
wife and child? Plautus if he had used such a play would have had to
substitute for her a Roman courtesan or else destroy the plot. And if
he did employ a courtesan, Roman realism would have demanded that she
be depicted without generosity, for at Rome it would not do to let a
woman of such a class seem virtuous. The matrons of Rome would have
objected.[10] In the Roman society of Plautus’ day family relations were
puritanic, divorce was almost unknown, and the Roman matron was her
husband’s equal in the home and in society. She was not relegated to the
spinning room in the back of the house as in Greece; she did not mope in
her chamber while her husband went to dinner parties and to the theater
with his boon companions. She was the companion. In such a society there
may be and were some “daughters of joy” for pagan youth, but they were
not spoken of, they did not appear, they were in the dark where generous
virtues do not grow. One might suppose that Plautus could have abandoned
the Greek scene, eliminated the demi-monde, and staged a normal Roman
comedy. But if he were to keep the love story he would have had to resort
to the postmarital triangle used in such circumstances by the French—a
device unthinkable in the social atmosphere of his day—or to the romances
of free adolescents—a theme not easily illustrated from the urban life
of southern countries where young girls are carefully cloistered. In
other words, Plautus was very nearly compelled to choose either to
abandon the theme of love-making in a comic setting, or to adopt the
Greek hetaera; and if he did the latter he was obliged to deprive her of
various pleasant qualities that might have been hers in Greece or incur
the enmity of Roman moral censorship. Plautus has been severely blamed,
especially by French critics, for making his women futile twaddlers with
no redeeming features. It is true that this description fits them well
enough, but what was he to do? Titinius seems to have found a way out
later, but it was not a very obvious way. The method of Plautus should
not be ascribed to a coarse grain in the dramatist. It grew naturally
from his comprehension of the real status of the Roman family. In
adapting Greek slaves, parasites, and young men with little or no change,
he might take a risk, but on the subject of Roman womanhood he could not
compromise.

It is noticeable that Terence could. Bacchis in the _Hecyra_, who harks
back to Habratonon in Menander, has an appealingly generous nature
despite her station, and even the morose old man of the play has to admit
it. But Terence wrote the _Hecyra_ more than twenty years after Plautus’
death, at a time when Greek customs had invaded Rome. Today Terence
receives the credit for a liberal humanity denied to Plautus, but it is
safe to say that Terence would not have ventured to present his Bacchis a
generation earlier. His respect for the position and the deserved rights
of the women of old Rome would have made him feel that it was a cheap
thing to do.

The most striking departure of Roman comedy from the Greek resides in the
omission of the choral interludes and the substitution of long lyrical
monodies in the place of spoken and recited lines. In the Greek plays
the acts were separated by choral interludes, dances, revels, and the
like. With the careful costuming as well as with the frequent doubling of
rôles in the Greek theater, much time was required for changes of garb.
Plautus had few trained singers available for an effective chorus, few
dancers, and he needed but little time between the acts, since there was
no scene-shifting and masks were not used in his day. A Plautine play was
almost a continuous performance, and a performance with an abundance of
music. The rapid dialogue that carried the most vital action was usually
spoken without musical accompaniment in six-foot iambics. This dialogue
usually constituted about a third of the play. Soliloquies, monologues
(except in prologues), and scenes of tense emotion were apt to be sung to
the flute in a variety of meters that kept changing to suit the mood and
the emotion. These parts, called _cantica_, were rare in some plays and
especially in the early ones, while in others they took up as much as a
third of the play. To these cantica we shall presently return. Certain
scenes composed of recitative were accompanied by the flute. Such scenes
we are accustomed to even now, especially in sentimental plays where
love-making and moonlight are signals for the muted violins to accompany
the spoken words with a soft obligato. In Plautus the meters of such
scenes, usually seven- and eight-foot lines, vary considerably from the
normal dialogue verse.

There is only one passage in ancient comedy in which we happen to have
the original Greek material re-cast into a Roman canticum. A late
critic, Aulus Gellius,[11] quotes a song of Caecilius, and with it
the original Greek to demonstrate what he calls the inadequacy of the
Latin paraphrase. Gellius, however, misses the point. The substance of
the Greek—the conventional complaints of a scold-ridden husband—was
deliberately changed. The smooth narration of the original was not
suited to song, and Caecilius wanted a text that would give the musician
a chance to bring out effectively the constantly changing emotions of
the speaker. In the Greek the husband simply informs the audience, with
suitable comment, that his wife, jealous of her slave maid, has had her
sold to get her out of the house. There is of course no great depth to
the husband’s emotions, though the range from pity to sarcasm is well
enough brought out. The Latin version stresses this variation of mood by
a constant shift of meters, the verse running speedily from the tripping
trochaic septenarii through cretics, bacchiacs, cretics again, and then
iambics. The man comes on shouting to music that changes its rhythm with
every line.

    (— ◡  ) Always scolding, nagging, dinning she compelled me to obey:
    (— ◡ —) Innocence goes for naught: the maid is sold.
    (◡ — —) Now gloating and boasting my good wife appears:
    (— ◡ —) Tell me pray, what am I? Who is master here?

The point made by the ancient critic that Caecilius did not adequately
reproduce the original quality is wholly beside the point. He was not
attempting to. He was making a plausible libretto for a brief song and
dance in which melody, pitch, tempo, and gesture should aid in the
expression of his varying moods. Menander indeed had written a readable
play—he always did, and paid the penalty by seldom taking the prize. But
Caecilius produced a musical comedy which, it is safe to wager, kept the
audience physically responsive.

It has been usual to suppose that Plautus invented the musical comedy of
this type.[12] I have already referred to Naevius’ introduction of the
canticum into tragedy. It had the same function in comedy and I need only
repeat that Naevius served in Sicily as a soldier in the First Punic War,
and that in many of the Greek towns of Sicily where the Roman soldiers
were billeted, or at least resorted on furloughs, Greek tragedies and
comedies were being produced in the theaters, probably with reduced
choruses.[13] That is where Naevius may have found his model of the
canticum. It should also be remembered that a great variety of what may
be called music-hall singing and dancing went on in such places at that
time. If the Roman soldiers grew fond of such performances, it would not
be surprising if Naevius tried to supply in his comedies as well as in
his tragedies some substitute for what Rome did not have. Audiences may
make insistent demands: even Wagner was compelled to insert ballets in
his operas in order to satisfy the demands of his Parisian audiences. The
fragments from Naevius’ comedies are few, and in them there are none
of the purely lyrical meters so often found in Plautus—the cretics, the
bacchiacs, and the glyconics. But there is a large proportion of trochaic
septenarii, lines which are now assumed to belong to a native Latin song
meter.[14] Our evidence is slight as yet but it is perhaps sufficient
to support a suggestion that musical comedy may have grown up at Rome
through the gradual adaptation of Sicilian forms of entertainment by
Naevius and a constant improvement upon these innovations by Plautus. We
have also seen that song and chant were a decided aid in the attempt to
accommodate new meters to the Roman ear.

In observing how literature may be determined by externals we must not
omit to notice certain customs of staging that affected the plays. The
Roman _ludi_, at which the plays were first given, had formerly been
devoted chiefly to chariot races. These races seem to have come in at
first when, before and after campaigns, the army was purified. The
knights and charioteers took part in the lustration and used the occasion
to demonstrate the skill of their horses. At the _Ludi Romani_, held in
September, which grew out of triumphal processions to Jupiter’s temple,
the races were probably not considered in historical times as having any
religious associations. They were held for purposes of entertainment,
and the plays, the _ludi scaenici_, which were added to the races in
240 B.C., were also given for entertainment and had in themselves none
of the sacred associations so persistently connected with the Greek
performances.

Now these Roman games were directed by the magistrates, who used for
them an appropriation granted by the state, an appropriation, however,
which seldom covered the costs. The Senate in fact took advantage
of the knowledge that men who had reached the aedileship by popular
favor were likely to entertain the people well in order to hold that
favor at the next election. Obviously the aediles who paid the costs
would choose plays of a nature to please the average Roman citizen.
In saying the average Roman we mean that most of the men and women of
the middle and lower classes would expect to see the plays. Scipio,
to be sure, tried to attract the nobility by setting apart the first
rows for them, and he probably succeeded to some extent, at least when
good tragedies were given, if we may judge from Cicero’s familiarity
with the acting of Aesopus. However, had the majority of the senatorial
nobles been enthusiastic attendants, Rome would not have had to wait
nearly two centuries for a permanent theater. We must assume for most
performances a crowd of holiday idlers from the streets and shops who
looked for something at least as interesting as tippling at the bar,
and who were quite well aware that the aediles expected defeat at the
election if the plays were not satisfactory. We can therefore comprehend
why Plautus, who quite regularly succeeded in pleasing his audience,
packed a great deal more of joking, intrigue, and broad humor into his
plays than did Menander, for instance; why his plots are simpler, reveal
less characterization, and in general concern themselves less with the
artistic unfolding of a story than Menander’s and, finally, why the song
and dance scenes constantly increase in number in the late Plautine plays.

Conversely, when we think of the audience, and then compare these plays
with the cinema shows sometimes given to entice crowds of voters to
political gatherings, we can only be surprised at the relatively high
grade of entertainment that the Roman comedies contain. Rome’s holiday
crowds in Plautus’ day consisted of plain folk, but they must have been
intelligent and unspoiled. The mimes and farces of a century later
certainly reflect a decided deterioration in the theater-goers of that
time. Horace was not entirely fair when he accused Plautus of writing
down for the sake of filling his purse. Perhaps he did, but after all he
did not stoop to the kind of audiences that later entertainers amused for
profit. Horace in fact should have compared Plautus with Laberius and
Publilius and not, as he did, with the nicer closet drama of his own day
which never had a chance of being produced.

We may also recall that Plautus wrote for a single performance with
no thought of publication, of a reading public or even of a revival
of the play. He sold his manuscript and after the play was over the
manuscript was placed in the state archives, perhaps never to be seen
again. Plautus of course did not know that many of the plays would be
dug up for reproduction a generation later when there was a dearth of
good writers. We shall also do well to remember that there were no
programs distributed at the performances. These circumstances account
for the dramatist’s endeavor to make his plays self-explanatory and
self-contained, for his willingness to continue the old convention of
revealing the plot early, to keep its progress clear and explicit, to get
immediate effects and not to concern himself too much as to whether an
effective scene at the end is entirely consistent with the implications
at the beginning. The spectator could not refer to a published copy, nor
return next day to examine the play critically. Most scholarly guessing
as to whether blemishes may have crept into these plays by successive
revisions is based upon a minute analysis of them in the study, the very
kind of analysis that Plautus never expected to receive. Plautus counted
to a certain extent on the auditor’s capacity to forget as well as on
his ability to remember. One curious result of this habit of presenting
a new play at each festival was that a great many plays accumulated in
the archives, and so when, in the time of Terence, officials began to
resurrect old plays, the available stock glutted the market. At that time
the authors of new plays must actually have been hurt by the competition
of dead authors.

One of the greatest difficulties that the dramatists had to contend with
in the old day was the securing of good actors. Not only did Livius begin
without the aid of any trained actors, but for half a century at least
the profession was not attractive. Livius seems to have formed his own
troupe. Naevius may have depended somewhat on players from Campania who
were trained in giving Atellan farces. At least that seems to be the
implication of Festus in explaining the term “fabula personata,” and we
know that Oscan Pompeii had a permanent theater at that time. Polybius,
the Greek, found the acting in Roman tragedies very unsatisfactory. The
chief difficulty was of course that the games came so rarely that in the
early day no actor could possibly have made a living by the profession.
For the first twenty years it is likely that at most only two tragedies
and two comedies were produced a year at the annual Ludi Romani. In 220
a new festival, the Ludi plebeii, was added for November, but it is not
likely that at first plays were given there. At least none are recorded
till twenty years later. In 214 the plays were assigned four days of the
Ludi Romani, and in 212 games, including plays, were voted in honor of
Apollo. Hence we may assume that by the end of the Punic war there would
be about six days a year set apart for dramatic performances, that is,
about six tragedies and six comedies were played once each year.

Since the aediles (and praetors, in the case of the Apollo games)
selected a new play for each performance, the annual offering of plays
might be considerable, and some rivalries sprang up among the poets.
For instance, a Terentian prologue[15] reveals an amusing situation in
which, after the aediles had paid for the play and were inspecting it, a
rival dramatist gained admission to the rehearsal and suddenly started to
charge Terence with plagiary. In another prologue of Terence, Ambivius,
the producer, reminds his audience of how he had in his youth insisted on
re-staging rejected plays of Caecilius Statius till the audience learned
to like them, adding that Caecilius had suffered unjustly from the
criticism of rival poets. We may then assume a considerable activity and
a not unwholesome rivalry among the dramatists.

But the serious danger to the profession in the early days was the
rarity of the productions and the meager opportunity for good actors.
Six days of work a year is not apt to create or nourish a specialized
profession. Because of the scarcity of actors Livius, presumably Plautus,
and also occasionally Atilius, acted in their own plays—as had been
the old custom of the poets in Greece. Plautus mentions only one of
his actors—Pellio—and says unpleasant things about him. Who the other
actors were we do not know. Festus conjectures that Naevius had imported
Oscan players for the comedy called _Personata_ because of the scarcity
of talent. Before the death of Plautus, L. Ambivius Turpio came out as
actor-manager for Caecilius, and later we hear of Cincius, a Faliscan,
Atilius of Praeneste (perhaps the playwright of that name), and a
Minucius. Much later, in the time of Roscius, we know that the scarcity
of actors led to the custom of training clever Greek slaves to act, but
there is no evidence that slaves were used during the first hundred years
of the Roman drama. Very likely the author himself at first took a rôle,
brought in Oscan, Greek, and Faliscan actors to some extent, and induced
amateurs who made their living by other, occupations to help during the
festivals. It is quite certain that well into the second century B.C.
there were not enough performances to persuade many Romans to enter the
profession for a regular living, or to incur the expense of training or
keeping slaves for the occupation, as was done later.

We must also take into account the fact that the performances at Rome
were not, as in Greece, connected with old and sacred traditions, so that
men were not induced to take up the profession because of its glamour and
official honors. Plays were introduced at the games purely as an extra
entertainment. In Greece where plays had grown up to interpret sacred
myths, acting had some religious import so that the state was called upon
to give prizes and honors to the profession.

The economic and social factors that we have mentioned account for the
fact that Plautus had to continue the Greek habit of doubling rôles
even though he did not employ masks, and though he was not bound by any
old tradition as to the proper number of actors.[16] Of course the rule
of the three actors had broken down even at the time of Euripides, and
Menander probably allowed himself five actors at times. Plautus often had
ten or twelve characters, but he seems to get along with about four or
five actors and in several instances with only three. This accounts for
the somewhat artificial excuses that characters are constantly giving
for leaving the stage when the actor has to scurry off to dress for a
new rôle. Needless to say, this deficiency of actors must have exerted
a restraining influence upon Plautus which he had to bear constantly
in mind. It kept many scenes rather thin. When, for instance, in the
_Rudens_ after the young man has been searching for his sweetheart
through three acts, and after he has just learned that she has been
rescued from a shipwreck and a thieving slave-dealer, he suddenly comes
face to face with her at last, one naturally expects at least a cheerful
exchange of greetings. But he has not a word for her. It takes us aback
unless we notice that the girl must be represented on the stage by a
mute, because the actor who has been playing her rôle must now be engaged
in playing another part. Or again, in the _Pseudolus_, where Ballio
heaps abuse upon three characters, sends them off, engages in a futile
monologue, and then calls out three others and continues his tirade,
one comprehends the strange interruption by noticing that the second
trio cannot exist until the first three actors have gone in and changed
their garbs and voices. It will be remembered that Shakespeare suffered
from the same technical difficulty. At the end of the _Winter’s Tale_
we see far less of Perdita than we desire and we are hardly consoled by
the knowledge that the actor who has been playing her rôle is now busy
playing Hermione. Terence was not hampered to quite the same extent
as Plautus by a lack of players, but the Greek convention reasserted
itself later and was foolishly accepted in Horace’s _Ars Poetica_ to the
detriment of the later drama.

As we have said, the early Roman dramatists did not use masks and in fact
employed the most simple make-up in quickly adjusted garments and wigs.
With the extensive doubling and trebling of rôles there must have been an
uncomfortable amount of recognizing of the actors. The late scholiasts
like Donatus, who discuss these matters, wrote when masks were again
unusual but when actors were more plentiful. They are therefore somewhat
obscure about the earlier custom. Their guess that Roscius introduced
the mask[17] to hide an ineffectual countenance may be true, but it is
very likely that the Greek masks were introduced on the Roman stage—this
happened about the Gracchan time—in order to facilitate the doubling of
rôles and to remove the confusion that arose from the easy recognition
of the actors. By that time Rome was so large and the theater crowd so
extensive that the play of features would at any rate be missed by a
large part of the audience, and the well-marked masks served the useful
purpose of distinguishing the characters at a distance. Opera glasses
have now removed that necessity.

There seems to be some misunderstanding about the social status of the
Roman actors because our sources of information are late and do not
always distinguish between the various periods. The facts now available
seem to warrant the statement that slaves were not employed as actors
during the first hundred years of the drama when most of the great
comedies were written and produced. At that time the authors usually
acted themselves, and authors and actors were united in a common guild,
honored by the state in the Alexandrian manner by being assigned an
official meeting place at Minerva’s temple. Livius and Terence were
freedmen, to be sure, but out of respect for their art both were highly
honored by the foremost men of the senate. The day when slaves had
stigmatized the professions by their participation was still far off.
Even in Sulla’s time the great rôles of legitimate comedy and tragedy
were assumed by distinguished men like Roscius and Aesopus,[18] men whom
Cicero was pleased to number among his friends. Actors gradually lost
their position in society only by the deterioration of the drama—of which
we shall speak later. It was apparently when the standard plays had to
give way to farces and mimes that slaves had to be trained to take rôles
which self-respecting citizens refused to play. Then the social brand was
marked on the few who demeaned themselves by playing with the slaves.
And thus in the late Republic we hear not a little of the cheapness of
the actor’s profession. However, that stigma did not even then apply
to the great actors who confined themselves to the parts of the good
old plays. The exact story of the fall of the profession is lost to
us. Cicero is quoted as having said in his _De Republica_ that at Rome
actors and others who took part in a profession of entertainment were
deprived of their civic rights and had their names struck off the tribal
registration list by the censors.[19] These words are assigned to Scipio
in a dialogue whose dramatic date is 129 B.C. but, as in several other
instances, Cicero may be allowing himself an anachronism. Livy happens to
say, without specifying a date, that actors could not serve as soldiers
in the Roman legions.

Now there are two possible explanations for this censorial stigma. It is
possible that at one of the several puritanic assaults on the theater in
the second century B.C.—and during one of these periods of reform the
censor Nasica ordered a partly constructed theater to be torn down—a
censorial brand may have been placed on the actors in order to discourage
citizens from entering the profession. But it is quite as possible that
in the early days when actors were difficult to secure for the public
festivals some praetor in charge of the festival induced the censor to
excuse actors from army service and that, following the Roman practice
of using the military rôle for the voting list, he also struck the
names of actors from the lists of the tribus. Later when the state was
demoralized and slaves had filled the profession, the cancellation of the
name, at first effected for practical purposes, may have been continued
as morally appropriate. In Roscius’ day the stigma was associated not
with appearance on the stage but with playing for remuneration, so that
when Roscius ceased to accept a fee he could be raised to the knighthood
by Sulla. This fact proves how unstable the theory of the actors’
disability really is and rather supports the view that removal from the
tribal list was not at first intended so much as a stigma as an excuse
from performing service away from Rome. At any rate the social brand did
not apply to recognized actors in the standard drama.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Cic. _Tusc._ i. 106-7.

[2] Leo, _Plautinische Forschungen_, 106; Fraenkel, _Plautinisches im
Plautus_, 157; Kahle, _De Vocabulis Graecis Plauti aetate_: and Hoffmann,
_in_ Stoltz-Schmalz, p. 813, have made some interesting observations
regarding the use of Greek words in Plautus but have failed to note the
pertinent historical facts.

[3] The greeting _ave_ is a curious instance of borrowing from the Punic.
The word was perhaps brought back by the soldiers from their camps in
the Punic parts of Sicily. The Romans had besieged the Punic forts of
Lilybaeum for eight years.

[4] Plautus likes to address the soldiers of his audiences, cf. _Capt._
68; _Cist._ 197; _Cas._ 87; etc.

[5] It is difficult to say when the great vowel-shift took place
in Latin. It is clear that Greek words in Plautus like _calamus_,
_colaphus_, and _hilarus_ had not come under the influence of the shift.
Either they were very recent arrivals or had been used so little in
Latin folk-speech (like _barbarus_, a Greek term of abuse) that Plautus
could spell them in the Greek fashion. Words like _oliva_, _Hercules_,
_Massilia_, _Tarentum_ were of course acclimated long before and took
on the regular vowel changes of Latin. However it is probable that many
Greek words that were adopted during the Pyrrhic and first Punic wars
felt the full influence of the great shift. This shift seems to have
begun after the twelve tables and the Duenos inscription and it was by no
means over when Plautus wrote: cf. the inscriptional spelling _mereto_,
_soledas_, _Esquelino_, _Arimenese_, _popolom_, _saxolus_, etc. It is
difficult to see how _Acragas_ (Agrigentum) could have got into frequent
Latin usage before 262 B.C. It is highly probable that the vowel-shift in
Latin, like the similar change in English, marks a politico-social shift,
an emergence of a social group that pronounced certain vowels in a way
not considered correct in aristocratic Rome. We may possibly associate it
with the elevation of the plebeians after the Publilian and Hortensian
laws of 339 and 287 B.C., which made the tribal assembly supreme in Roman
legislation. The new tendencies in pronunciation would then be a strong
factor in speech during the First Punic War. Furthermore, the fact that
the dramatists could transform Δήμοφων to Demipho at one stroke shows how
quickly a word would adapt itself to Latin custom. I feel sure that we
have placed the arrival of most of the Greek words too early.

[6] _Catapulta_ was probably not very old in Latin since only the third
syllable shows a change, and that a relatively late one. In words like
_sumbola_ we doubtless have the Doric pronunciation of _u_; in the short
penult of _gynaeceum_, _balinea_, and _platea_, the cause need not lie
wholly in a Latin tendency to shorten one vowel before another but in
part perhaps to the similar tendency found in Greek and especially in
Sicilian. In Latin _latro_, _barbarus_, _choragus_, and the like we
certainly have not standard Greek meanings but such as might have been
heard in Sicily during the Punic war. Sturtevant’s interesting discussion
“Concerning the Use of Greek in Vulgar Latin,” _Trans. Am. Phil. Assoc._
(1925), quite misses the heart of the question when it speaks of the
“Romans consciously mocking the Greeks of the city.” There were very few
Greeks there then, and they were not significant enough to invite mocking.

[7] Fraenkel, _Plautinisches im Plautus_, chap. III; unfortunately he has
failed to comprehend the nature of the Plautine public. Legrand’s _Daos_
makes the more serious mistake of treating the Greek and Roman New Comedy
as a single phenomenon.

[8] Sedgwick, _Class. Quart._ 1927, 88.

[9] _Stich._ 448, _licet haec Athenis nobis: Men._ 7-9. At the end of the
_Bacchides_ Plautus becomes very apologetic for the immoral last scene.

[10] Selenium in the _Cistellaria_ and Adelphasium in the _Poenulus_ are
favorably portrayed so as not to disappoint the audience when they are
later to be revealed as freeborn.

[11] A. Gellius, II, 23, 6.

[12] Leo, _Plaut. Cantica_: Fraenkel, _op. cit._, chap. X, who, however,
draws upon Ennius more than the dates permit. The so-called epitaph of
Plautus apparently credited him with special praise for his elaborate
songs (_numeri innumeri_).

[13] There were theaters at least in Syracuse, Tauromenium, Segesta (the
seat of a Roman garrison throughout the period of the war), Agyrion,
Tyndaris, Akrae, and Catania; see Bieber, _Denkmäler d. Theaterwesen_,
50. _Choragus_ is a Doric form that might readily have come from Segesta.

[14] Cf. Fraenkel on the “Versus quadratus,” _Hermes_, 1927, 357.

[15] Ter., _Eunuch._ 20 and _Hecyra_, 14.

[16] Cf. C. M. Kurrelmeyer, _Economy of Actors in Plautus_. The
well-known Horatian rule was a later reversion to a Greek rule. Choral
singers were apparently imported from Greece in large numbers in the
days of Accius; there was a _Societas cantorum Graecorum_ at Rome then:
see _Raccolta in onore G. Lombroso_, 287. In England the early companies
that played the interludes seldom numbered over four, and yet they had at
times to take care of sixteen or more rôles. Doubling was less drastic
in Shakespeare’s theater but it sufficed to allow the dramatist the
privilege of producing diversified effects by using many rôles for only
one scene or act. In _Hamlet_ alone there are some ten rôles of this
type. Plautus and Terence do not hesitate to dismiss a character after
the first scene or indeed to introduce one in the last.

[17] Diomedes, in _G. L. K._, I, 489, _quod oculis perversis erat_. The
late commentators seem to have had very little information on the subject.

[18] On Roscius, see Von der Mühll _in_ Pauly-Wiss. _sub. voc._, 1123.
There is no evidence whatever for the traditional conjecture that
Roscius and Aesopus were freedmen. The sister of Roscius married into a
well-known family. Aesopus was probably a Greek who, like Archias, had
been given citizenship in some municipality as an honor. His position at
Rome was such that it is impossible to suppose that he had ever been a
slave.

[19] Cic., _De Rep._ iv 10; Livy VII, 2, is full of anachronisms. Cf.
Warnecke, _Neue Jahrb._ 1914, 94. However, Warnecke fails to note how
late the evidence is and how completely it disagrees with the known
circumstances of the early Roman drama. Plautus, _Cist._ 785, which
promises a flogging to the incapable actor, is of course one of the
jokes of the play. The ninth article of the recently discovered charter
of Cyrene excuses from certain public service various people (including
doctors and teachers of music) who are engaged in professions of public
welfare. Since the actors’ guild at Rome was based upon Alexandrian
models, it is not unlikely that certain Ptolemaic regulations were also
taken over.




CHAPTER IV

TERENCE AND HIS SUCCESSORS


Plautus lived in the most productive period of Roman comedy. He happens
to mention only one rival, the aged Naevius, but from later sources we
learn of Caecilius, Licinius, Trabea, Atilius, Titinius, and others who
apparently began to write before the death of Plautus. That all of these
actually staged plays we may be sure, since manuscripts had no chance of
surviving unless they came into the official archives by way of purchase
for production. So numerous were the old manuscripts in these archives
that Plautus, who could at most not have written more than thirty or
forty plays, was later credited with a hundred and thirty. Apparently
unsigned plays were attributed to him because of the commercial value
of his name. But the fact that so many stray plays were in existence is
significant of the activity of writers. It is not surprising therefore
that a guild of “writers and actors” flourished in the days of Plautus,
and that the state recognized it and assigned it quarters on the Aventine.

Of the earlier men from whose works we have fragments, only two are in
any way individualized in the scant remains. Titinius, who seems to have
been a late rival of Plautus, was so thoroughly lost to his successors
that Cicero seems not to have been aware of him. But Varro refers to
Titinius in high terms in his work on the Latin language, written
while he was gathering books for Caesar’s projected public library.
Varro probably was the man who ferreted out his plays and name from the
aediles’ archives. It is signal praise that Varro gives Titinius when
he places him by the side of Terence as a delineator of character. An
allusion to one of his plays by Horace seems to indicate that some of
his work was actually staged in the early Empire (more than a hundred
years after the dramatist’s death) for the poet refers to a scene that is
visualized rather than to a line read, and he assumes that Augustus will
recognize his allusion.[1]

What Titinius did was to follow a suggestion made by Naevius and write
original comedies (_togatae_) with native plots, scenes, and characters.
When we recall how Plautus found it prudent to cling to Greek plots for
social and moral reasons, we see that Titinius must have had a vein of
daring. That he was lauded among the very foremost for characterization
is the more remarkable since he did not adapt characters already well
outlined. It was no easy task to present before the old Catonian society
comedies revolving about Roman men and women, and to rival the plays of
Plautus which could legitimately appropriate all the attractive plots of
Hellenistic Athens. Donatus remarks naïvely that realistic Roman comedy
of the old day, unlike the Greek comedy, could not picture slaves as
more clever than their masters. This statement, of course, does not go
to the heart of the matter, but it is one way of saying that the Romans,
who insisted on social decorum in home life, were in no mood to see
themselves pictured as the gulls of spoiled sons and saucy slaves. If the
togata had to eliminate all such scenes, it must have altered the whole
tone of comedy. But that was not all. We have noticed how Plautus was
compelled to change and attenuate feminine rôles because the Romans had
nothing to put in the place of the semi-respectable Greek hetaerae with
whom the youth of Athens associated freely. What was there for Titinius
to do in writing Roman plays? It was out of the question to insult the
dignity of the noble household with stories of boisterous love affairs;
and yet he apparently did not wish to sacrifice such plots either by
avoiding the female characters or by using those that Roman society
disdained. He did want the love story and he wanted it both wholesome
enough to attract Rome and natural enough to give a free play of emotions
in an active plot, and he found it in a way that Plautus had not. He
abandoned the _jeunesse dorée_ of the standard Greek play and resorted to
the natural and free society of the Italian village communities outside
of the great capital, where, as in Italian villages of today, honest
young men and women of humble circumstances worked together at daily
tasks in shops, at counters, desks, and work benches. Titinius made a
real discovery when he left the artificial society of aristocratic Rome
because it gave no opportunity for treating of natural relations between
the unmarried young of both sexes and went out into the near-by villages
of Latium or the humbler streets of the city where more normal conditions
obtained. He was perhaps the first writer of Roman comedy who could
draw his material from life and still base his comedy on a love story.
Only fifteen titles of his plays have survived, but nine of these take
their name from the leading female characters in the plays: _The Maid of
Setia_, _The Lady of the Dye Shop_, _The Girl of Velitrae_, _The Twin
Sister_, _The Girl Who Knows Something about the Law_, _The Stepmother_,
_Pyrrha the Weaver_, _The Dancing Girl of Ferentinum_, _The Flute-player_
and _The Girl of Ulubrae_. These heroines are folk in humble life but
the fragments show that they are none the less sprightly, quick-witted
and interesting creatures. Today we are sadly at a loss in trying to
comprehend the life of the great masses of the people during the Plautine
period. Plautus in his re-shapings of Greek plots reflects it only in
his suppressions and intimations, and then very imperfectly. Livy in his
dignified and voluminous history of this period strides majestically
over it. We would gladly surrender much of both for the faithful and
sympathetic picture that a volume of Titinius could give us. If Varro’s
judgment was right in lauding the power of characterization of this
author we might, if he were rescued, find him a place by the side of very
modern realists.

Caecilius Statius is the other writer of comedy vying with Plautus of
whom something is known, and he too deserves to be remembered with a keen
hope that his works may some day come to light. He was more orthodox than
Titinius, kept, like Plautus, more or less close to his Greek models,
and obeyed the same social purpose of not offending puritanic taste by
dressing his players in Greek garb. Strange to say, he was a Celt, the
first in the history of literature. He had apparently been captured as a
boy somewhere near Milan when the Romans were campaigning there during
the Hannibalic war. That he was not a mere child at the time becomes
evident from the fact that he never wrote Latin quite well enough to suit
the discriminating ear of Cicero—who otherwise read him with pleasure.
Yet he somehow received a good education—as bright slaves often did—for
he knew Greek well. He also got his freedom somehow and became a close
associate of Ennius. He lived long enough to give aid to Terence in the
production of that young man’s first youthful play, the _Andria_, and was
generous enough to recommend the play to the aediles when they hesitated
to accept it. Ambivius, the loyal producer of Terence, remarks in one
of the prologues which he spoke for Terence that Caecilius had had a
discouraging series of rejections in his youth but that he, Ambivius,
confident of the poet’s worth, had persisted in presenting the plays till
success was assured.[2] A later critic, Volcacius—who, to be sure, takes
no account of the togatae in this particular list—places Caecilius at
the very head of the writers of comedy, giving Plautus second place and
Terence sixth. Unfortunately we do not happen to know whether this critic
was a man of sound judgment.

The plays of Caecilius were constructed much like those of Plautus, with
the same dependence upon the Greeks in plot, and with the same devotion
to Roman musical accompaniment and to arial monodies. His use of the
splendidly rhythmical trochaic septenarii is everywhere noticeable in
the fragments. Varro suggests that Caecilius was esteemed rather for
his melodramatic effects than for his ability to create characters, in
this matter regarding him less highly than Terence, and praises him
especially for the composition of his plots. Just why Varro admired his
plots he did not say, but if, as we may suspect, Caecilius was the first
dramatist to abandon the Greek and early Roman manner of disclosing the
trend of the plot in prologues and to focus the interest of his comedies
more upon suspense and surprise, Varro’s judgment would be justified.
We make this suggestion because, as we shall explain, Terence’s methods
were unconventional in this respect, and Terence in writing his comedies
had had the advice of Caecilius. If Caecilius was an innovator in this
matter, it would account not only for Varro’s high opinion of his plots
but also for the fact that Caecilius failed at first to attract an
audience used to explicit preparation. In the end, however, Caecilius
succeeded and it would seem that he wore well. Manuscripts of his plays
apparently were dug out of the archives early for restaging, and revivals
were frequent. Cicero knew his works well enough to quote from several of
them even when far from his library. Horace alludes to a character of his
in the _Ars Poetica_, and in the second-century craze for the early Latin
authors Caecilius kept his place among the foremost.

The six plays of Terence are so well known that little need be said by
way of general characterization. It is generally supposed that they are
more faithful paraphrases of Greek originals than any of the Plautine
comedies. This idea, based partly upon the fact that Terence used the
older Greek dramatic form instead of adopting the Plautine custom of
introducing cantica, and partly upon the fact that Donatus’ commentary
mentions relatively few departures from the Greek, is probably correct.
There is also good reason for supposing that Terence might care to
reproduce his Greek model with more fidelity than Plautus could. Society
had changed so much between 200 and 160 B.C. that the Greek plays could
be presented without alteration, even to the point of placing on the
stage attractive hetaerae. Moreover, education was general enough so that
cultivated persons desired more finished plays and an elimination of some
of the Plautine downrightness. The plays of Terence though less amusing
than those of Plautus are on a higher literary plane and much of their
beauty undoubtedly savors of the delicate humanity that may be found in
the recently discovered plays of Menander. Nevertheless we must wait till
the actual models of Terence’s comedies are discovered before we deny
these graces to Terence himself. We happen to know from Donatus that
three of the characters of the _Andria_ were introduced by Terence into
his paraphrase of a Menandrian plot. While the rôles are somewhat stilted
the characters give expression to some of those penetrating observations
that critics are wont to attribute to the original.[3] This proves that
Terence was himself capable of very delicate feeling, and until we find
his originals it is therefore scientifically defensible to acknowledge
Terence as the possible source of some of the best passages in these six
comedies.

It has frequently been noticed[4] that the writers of the New Comedy,
including Plautus, were far more generous than present-day dramatists
in “preparing” their audiences for every turn in the plot and that they
depended less for their effects upon the elements of “suspense” and
“surprise.” It is generally assumed that the expository prologue was
adopted by comedy from tragedy in order that the unlettered spectators
who crowded the theater at the festivals should not have any difficulty
in following the play. It has also been noted repeatedly that when the
interest of the play did not rest in comic situations, buffoonery,
ludicrous characters, and the like, but rather in an intricate plot that
was solved at the end by a “recognition” or some other unforeseen event,
it was necessary to introduce an omniscient “prologue” to explain the
situation in an expository monologue. Superhumans like Heros, Agnoia,
Elenchus, Tyche, Aer, Auxilium, Arcturus, Fides, and Lar were used, or
an abstract “prologus” who could be conceived of as knowing not only the
complete situation but also the outcome of the play. Only when the plot
was so simple that it unfolded without risk of misconception, could the
exposition be trusted to characters or expository dialogue within the
play.

Such observations may be accepted as correct so far as they go. However,
they do not sufficiently explain the controlling purpose of over-explicit
preparation, the consequences of it in dramatic effect, and a noticeable
endeavor in Terence’s day to break loose from the limitations of the
device. It is doubtful, for example, whether suspense and surprise were
avoided merely because of certain intellectual limitations on the part of
Menander’s spectators; indeed it is probable that explicit “preparation”
was a convention that held the boards without serious objection till
Terence experimented in a new method.

Greek New Comedy was shaped in the fourth century for audiences
accustomed to the dramatic technique developed upon the tragic stage.
Antiphanes reveals clearly in a well-known passage what the audience
expected (Kock, II, _Antiphanes_ 191): “Fortunate the task of the tragic
poet! Before a word is spoken, the spectator knows the theme ... at the
mere mention of the name Oedipus he knows the rest.” Then he proceeds
to say that the writer of comedy had to prepare the audience in every
detail, since if a single item was missed the spectator started to hiss.
This reveals the fact that in viewing a comedy the spectator expected
not only to know the situation but also to have a clear clue to the
solution, just as he had when viewing tragedies. The well-known prologues
of Euripides did not have to foretell as well as prepare; a prologue in
tragedy needed at most to remind the spectators of the main outline of
the tale and to show the point at which action started. Euripides was
well aware that most of his audience would at once know what the end
of the story would be.[5] Now if the outcome was foreseen, the ancient
dramatist, unlike the modern, could obviously not make free use of
suspense and surprise. The writer of tragedy had to draw his emotional
values from the pity of a well-informed audience viewing “with a sense of
fear or dread” the groping of characters involved in the meshes of fate.
Thus the obvious consequence of the use of a known plot was of course
dependence upon the theme of _fate_, the constant employment of gloomy
foreshadowing, the use with frequent reiteration of what has been called
“tragic irony.” There seems to be a feeling in Aristotle that “pity and
dread” are the essential elements of tragedy, but it is safe to say that
had Greek tragedy frequently used invented plots Aristotle would have
found that sympathetic suspense with catastrophic surprise would rather
have been employed to produce the tragic catharsis, and would have been
equally effective.

In studying the new comedy we may assume with Antiphanes, and on the
basis of Menander, that the writer thought out his plot in terms of this
well-established technique. In that case an omniscient prologue must
give the situation and give it more explicitly than in tragedy because
he had to do much more than remind. He must present the whole situation
and in addition he must give explicit hints of the solution, if the
spectator was to have the same advantage as he had in tragedy where the
solution was a matter of common knowledge. That is the new element forced
upon the writer of comedy by fifth-century convention. In Menander’s
_Perikeiromene_, for example, the deferred prologue, Agnoia, not only
gives the situation but adds: “this was done ... in order to start the
train of revelations, so that in time these people might discover their
kin.”

So in Plautus, wherever we have an intricate play that develops to a
conclusion which could not be revealed by the characters, the prologue,
if it has survived, discloses the outcome to the audience. In the
_Poenulus_ the prologus anticipates the solution when he says (line 245)
that the father will come and find his daughter. In the _Rudens_ the
North Star not only has seen all that has occurred before the opening
scene but he reveals the secret of the last act by saying that the girl
is the old man’s daughter, and that the lover will appear presently (33
ff. and 80). In the _Amphitruo_, Mercury, one of the actors, can serve
as prologue because he is omniscient. He tells the spectators how to
distinguish the characters and says (140-48) that _Amphitruo_ is about
to come. The rest was known to the audience because this play, like the
tragedies, was based upon a myth. In the _Aulularia_, the Spirit of the
Hearth narrates what it is necessary to know of the past and then adds,
“I shall make our neighbor propose marriage to the girl so as to compel
the young man to do so” (31 ff.). In the _Captives_ the prologue informs
us that Tyndarus is Hegio’s unrecognized son who will come into his own
presently and that the other son will also be found. The prologue of the
_Casina_ concludes the exposition by the revelation that the girl will
turn out to be a freeborn citizen.

And this regard for the fullest preparation of the audience goes far
beyond the prologue and the expository first act. Most of the intrigues
devised to further the action are first explained, or at least discussed
or suggested before they are actually carried out. Any student of Plautus
will think of scores of examples: of how Mercury tells the spectators
that he is going to climb to the roof to mock at Amphitruo (997), how in
the _Miles_ the plan to rescue the girl is explained before it is carried
out, how in the _Poenulus_ (550) the trick by which the slave-dealer is
to be imposed upon is worked out on the stage before it is played,[6] etc.

Now of course this sort of exposition is too explicit to satisfy modern
taste.[7] It is sometimes excused with the reminder that ancient comedies
were written for a single performance and must be understood at first
presentation without the aid of reviewers’ comments or playbills; and
it is sometimes explained as a concession to witless audiences—on whom
Horace, following Peripatetic critics, blamed most literary crudities.
Such explanations sufficed in the days when we could attribute this
undue explicitness to Plautus, but now that we have discovered Menander
given to the same type of technique we ought to look farther. The
important fact seems to be that the Greek audience was accustomed to
preparation and to the devices which the consequent construction of the
play demanded, and that the originators of the early New Comedy followed
custom. And since in tragedy the general knowledge of the myths used in
the plots obviated use of unexpected catastrophes and compelled writers
to find compensation in tragic irony, so the adoption of the same
method of plot construction for comedy eliminated the use of tension
and increased the employment of a kind of comic irony. The effects of
this comic irony range all the way from what Aristotle terms educated
insolence (πεπαιδευμένη ὕβρις) to genial and sympathetic fellow-feeling,
according as the victim of the delusion is a villain, a braggart, a
buffoon, or a harmless innocent. The foreknowledge which the audience has
of what the players are unconsciously stumbling into provides both the
“sense of superiority,” which Plato found to be an effect of comedy, and
the enjoyment of the incongruous which moderns have often considered its
chief ingredient. This comic irony, concocted like its counterpart in
tragedy, is a large part of the stock in trade of Menander and of Plautus.

In the _Captives_ of Plautus the audience knows that Hegio has his own
son before him in chains, and notices that, not recognizing his son, he
causes him much suffering. Throughout the play the attentive spectator
will watch for the very effective incongruities that arise from the
father’s ignorance. In the _Rudens_, Daemones, not knowing that the girl
who is trying to escape from shipwreck and the slave-dealer is his own
daughter, at first seems to the informed spectator extremely insensitive
to her suffering. The father’s sympathies are aroused only indirectly
by his religious respect for a suppliant at the altar, then by the
accident of being called in to arbitrate regarding her basket of birth
tokens. Only when he has established her civil status by this accidental
judgment does he learn the truth. In a more farcical form comic irony is
freely used in the plays of self-deception, for example in the case of a
bragging coward like the _Miles Gloriosus_, or in plays depending upon
mistaken identity or some similar delusion, as in the _Menaechmi_ and the
_Amphitruo_. And in very nearly all the plays of Plautus, if it be not
the chief mainstay of the plot, it appears at least here and there.

The new fragments of Menander prove that Menander had frequently
constructed his plays with this effect in mind. Indeed it is the
decisive factor in all that are extensive enough to permit of analysis.
In the _Arbitrants_ Smicrines all unconsciously arbitrates against his
own child. In the _Samia_ the old man is misled by a chance remark
into the belief that his son has betrayed him, and the resulting
irony runs through the central part of the play. And even when the
facts are disclosed the son immediately sets going another series of
misunderstandings (disclosed beforehand to the audience, line 432)
by threatening to go into exile. The _Perikeiromene_ is built about
the same device. Two men are in love with the same maiden. One is her
unrecognized brother, the other is jealous of her attentions to the
former. The girl knows that the former is her brother but may not reveal
the fact. However, the deity, Agnoia, has informed the spectators of the
relationship so that they are in a position to view the intricate play
at cross-purposes, but there is little of what we should call suspense
because they have also been informed that a recognition scene will end
the play satisfactorily.

In the _Hero_ the expository prologue is lost, but we know that the
prologue was the omniscient _Heros_, who adequately prepared the audience
for what was to follow.[8] Here a husband (unrecognized), his wife,
their “exposed daughter,” not yet known as such, and two lovers of this
daughter, one a slave, the other a rich neighbor, all enter a tangle
of delusion to which the audience has the key. In the _Georgos_ a man
expresses to a woman his desire to marry her daughter. He does not know
that he is the girl’s father. As the woman—bound to secrecy—stands
wringing her hands in despair, the audience—apparently informed of the
secret—experiences a situation as poignant as that of the _Oedipus_. And
finally in the Petrograd fragment of the _Phasma_ we find a mother’s
furtive visits to her daughter, born out of wedlock, and an entangled
love affair, a situation which again involves the use of irony, since a
fragment from the prologue shows us that the audience has been informed
in advance.

It would be hazardous to say that Menander always lets the spectator
into the secret beforehand so as to make use of dramatic irony, but it
is striking that he does so in every instance where we possess enough
of his plot in the original to test his methods. It is apparently his
usual method of procedure. This is also in accord with his well-known
predilection for Tyche, the counterpart in comedy of tragic fate. We
need not suppose, as has often been done, that his constant reference
to Tyche springs from his own philosophical doctrine. Such well-known
passages as “Chance holds the helm; mortal forethought is but a delusion”
(_Frag._, Kock, 482), etc., are, of course, comments of characters in
the play. They need not be expressions of the dramatist’s own creed.
But such comments would naturally come frequently in plays built on the
conventional tragic form which required that the players grope their
obscure way through the action in front of an audience which knew the end.

Now these observations are not meant as an attempt to rehabilitate
Leo’s doctrine that the New Comedy merely borrowed all its devices of
prologue, fate, recognition, and the rest from tragedy. Prescott’s
incisive criticism[9] of that view must stand, with its insistence that
we take Sicilian antecedents, Aristophanes, and environment into account.
The new comedy was hardly as helplessly unoriginal as Leo held. The
problem we have raised should rather be approached from the viewpoint
of what the spectator expected and desired. It did not necessarily
arise in the construction of plotless farces, in the presentation of
ludicrous situations, buffoonery, and scenes centering about comical and
preposterous characters. When, however, the plot was involved and a long
consistent story was to be unraveled, the spectators, who knew nothing
of the story, desired to be put at the same point of vantage early in
the play that they naturally enjoyed when an _Oedipus_, a _Medea_, or an
_Orestes_ was presented.

When we turn to the Roman stage we seem to discover an attempt to break
away from this convention, if not in Plautus[10] at least in Terence.
We do not find conclusive evidence that Plautus seriously changed the
construction of the Greek plots which he used except to remove the choral
interludes and turn the plays into musical comedies, though it is likely
that he usually avoided plays that had very intricate plots, and chose
freely from those that contained laughter-producing situations. There is
no evidence that he sought for suspense, or revamped any of his originals
in order to attain it.

Terence, however, despite his fondness for the Greek originals and his
outspoken claim of fidelity to them, seems consciously to have striven
for a suspended dénouement. He does not entirely suppress dramatic
irony, but he reduces its scope, he eliminates the expository prologue
completely, he is chary about giving information to the spectator,
preferring to keep him under tension for a part if not for the whole of
the play.

A brief reference to the _Adelphoe_, his last play, will best reveal his
procedure. Here two brothers employ different methods in bringing up
their sons. Micio, who has adopted one of Demea’s sons, is indulgent,
Demea is severe. Both boys enjoy themselves, Micio’s confessedly,
Demea’s secretly. In fact the latter throws the burden of his escapades
on Micio’s son. Hence when the action begins (1. 182) Demea is found
scolding Micio because Micio’s son is setting a bad example to his
supposedly virtuous brother. This is completely in Menander’s ironic
style, for, as we shall see, Menander in the original had a prologue
informing the audience that Demea’s son was the rascal of the two boys.

In Terence’s version, however, there is no expository prologue; the
audience does not yet know the secret that Demea’s son is the source
of the mischief. The irony is not wholly lost to those who have a
good enough memory to recall half an hour later how misplaced Demea’s
rebukes actually were. Terence is accumulating effects by suspending
the revelation which Menander gave at once. But he goes even further
in increasing tension. The prologue of the original had explained the
bold deed that started the action, namely, that Micio’s son, in order
to aid his brother, had forcibly taken from the slave-dealer the girl
whom his brother loved but had not the money to buy or the courage to
steal. That fact had to be presented somehow, so Terence, according to
Donatus, inserts a scene in Act II which conveys the desired impression.
Characteristically Terence still withholds the crucial fact that the boy
is committing this crime not for himself but for his brother. Perhaps
the shrewder spectators would suspect the truth. In Menander’s play
they knew it from the first and laughed at Demea’s misplaced boasts. In
Terence’s adaptation, however, they continue in doubt. It is not till a
fourth of the play is over that Terence solves this mystery. He holds
it back so long indeed that there is danger that the spectator may go
too far on a mistaken clue. After the revelation, however, the audience,
acquainted with a situation that Demea still fails to comprehend, can
proceed for several scenes to enjoy the dramatic irony involved in this
circumstance.

But Terence has one more surprise in store at the very end, to which
Donatus again supplies the clue for us. At the end of the play Menander
had suggested a partial conversion of Demea, while Micio went smiling
to the final scene. Not so Terence. Writing for a more puritanic Roman
audience, he felt the need of giving an appreciable rebuke to Micio for
his lack of principle, and hence compelled him by way of consistency in
his easy generosity to marry an unattractive widow.[11] In other words,
with a minimum of changes in his paraphrase, Terence, without greatly
reducing the dramatic irony inherent in the separate scenes, has so
adapted a standard Menandrian plot based upon self-delusion (for which
the spectator is prepared) that the elements of suspense and surprise
have become vital factors. This seems to me to be Terence’s favorite
procedure.

In the _Andria_, which was Terence’s first play, he apparently reveals
the first hesitating attempt at this mode of constructing comedies. He
tells us in the preface that he used Menander’s _Andria_ in the main with
suggestions from the _Perinthia_, and the Menandrian fragments of these
two plays which can be identified in Terence are fairly well scattered
through the _Andria_. Donatus states that the rôles of Charinus, Byrrhia,
and Sosia were added by Terence. Charinus and Byrrhia are so involved
in the action of five central scenes that Terence must have re-shaped
the play very much in order to include these characters. Since in a
recognition scene near the end the heroine turns out to be a citizen
we now have a right to assume that Menander’s _Andria_ probably had a
prologue revealing this fact. Terence omits the prologue and, therefore,
the usual key. But he does not dare, as in the _Hecyra_, his next play,
to rely upon his audience’s being patient until the recognition scene.
In the middle of the second act (line 221) he drops the rather broad
hint in a monologue: “they have set the story going that the girl is an
Athenian.” That would be enough to prevent the spectators from following
false leads. The _Andria_, therefore, seems to reveal Terence’s first
attempt at constructing a play in which a deferred hint took the place
of full preparation. One wonders whether the aged Caecilius, who helped
Terence with this play, may have used the device before Terence and
suggested it to him.

In the _Hecyra_, the second play of Terence, there is no preparation,
and the delay in relieving the tension of the spectator is carried to
extreme lengths. The old story of a maiden violated at the festival
during a dark night provides the entanglement. In the end the guilty
father of her child turns out to be the very man she has married.
Even through the Latin text one can see that the early scenes of the
original[12] presupposed an informed audience enjoying the delusions of
characters working on mistaken suppositions. But Terence blotted out the
information by deleting the prologue of the original. The semi-expository
first act gives the immediate situation but reserves the key-fact for
line 829 near the end of the play. If that fact—that the unknown violator
was Pamphilus, the husband—had been revealed to the spectators at the
beginning they might have enjoyed the dramatic irony of the scene (II,
1) in which Laches scolds his wife for imagined wrongs, and especially
the incongruity of Pamphilus’ oath, by all that is sacred, that he is
not to blame for the separation (line 476). Terence has done a very
daring thing here in keeping the audience in doubt and in anxiety. He
has assumed that the audience will patiently bear in mind these puzzling
quarrels and asseverations and watch the mysteries accumulating without
any key to the solution for several hundred lines. A modern, used to
that kind of thing in detective stories, finds it less difficult to
do, but our students usually have to read the _Hecyra_ with unusually
alert attention, and it is certain that they would miss much of the
delicate play if they were to see it hurriedly acted on the stage without
previous preparation. In fact, Terence commits the sin of hinting at
incorrect solutions. Pamphilus (at line 260) learns of the child and only
betrays bewilderment, which is apt to mislead the spectator; at line
517 Pamphilus’ father also learns of the child but draws an incorrect
conclusion, giving a new starting point for a possible erroneous guess;
at line 577 his mother, half-informed, imagines that her son has deserted
his wife for ugly reasons. Only at line 827 does the resolution of the
intrigue take place. There is not one ancient play before the day of
Terence, so far as we know, where an audience was left in such complete
suspense before an accumulating mass of perplexities; and this was
an audience, it will be remembered, accustomed to be taken into the
confidence of the prologue. It is not surprising, therefore, that this
play—one of the most human in the classical repertoire—failed twice,
and that the spectators rushed away from it to see a boxing match. But
Terence apparently was proud of what he had done and insisted that the
play have its chance. Only after he had established his reputation by the
success of the _Eunuchus_ was it at last played with success.

The _Heautontimoroumenos_, produced two years after the failure of the
_Hecyra_, puts less strain upon the audience, since half the secret—that
Clinea’s sweetheart has proved faithful and worthy of him—is disclosed
fairly early (line 243). From that point the spectators are permitted
without too much anxiety to enjoy the dramatic irony involved in the
delusions of the over-confident Chremes who bestows on his neighbor the
pity that is his own due. Soon after the middle of the play (675 ff.) the
spectators are admitted to the last important fact, namely, that Clinea’s
sweetheart is freeborn, while the impossible courtesan seems likely to
become Chremes’ daughter-in-law. Since, however, Chremes refuses to
accept the evidence of his own eyes, the self-delusion only increases the
irony, and the play continues from that point in the Menandrian style.
The play is indeed one of the best in point of construction, since by
abandoning the expository prologue[13] Terence was enabled to accumulate
mysteries which he gradually solved in such a way as to substitute
Menandrian satire for tension.

In the _Eunuchus_ Terence for once shifts to the Plautine manner, resting
his play chiefly on buffoons, imposture, and ludicrous situations. Indeed
he borrows caricatures from another play in order to cram in the fun.
There is no prologue, but none was needed. Thais stands self-revealed
from the first scene, while Pamphila’s station is more than hinted at
in the second scene. The tricking of a braggart captain did not involve
much anxiety, even though the preparation is slight. The play is full of
fun and easy to follow. Terence had for once yielded to popular demand
and he was materially rewarded. It was the only play of his that was
immediately put on a second time, and the aediles paid for it what was
then considered the very high sum of 8000 sesterces.

The _Phormio_, like the _Heauton_ and the _Adelphoe_, employs a good
mingling of suspense and preparation. There is no expository prologue.
That one existed in the original is probable from the occurrence of such
unconscious allusions to actuality as the story concocted in court that
the girl was a kinswoman (line 117). The fact that Chremes has a daughter
like the one in question is not made known to the audience till half
the play is over—a restraint which is surpassed only in the _Hecyra_.
However, from line 570 the solution is surmised and it finally is evident
at line 755. Henceforth the interest is provided by a series of quick
though unprepared-for surprises.

Whether or not Terence should have all the credit for breaking away from
the old conventional construction imposed on tragedy by the accident
that the plots were known, we cannot say. It is not likely that Menander
introduced this innovation, since all the plots that have recently been
discovered seem to retain the older construction. Plautus, except in
plays subsequently revised, like the _Epidicus_ and the _Mercator_, is
true to the convention every time that his plot is intricate and ends
with an important “discovery.” We have suggested that Caecilius, who
was Terence’s critic in his first play, may possibly have shown the way
since he somehow gained fame for his plot construction. But we have no
definite evidence of this. At any rate the modernization comes after
Plautus and seems, therefore, to be a discovery of the Roman stage. It
might be claimed that the discovery was due to the accident that the
prologue was desired for the expression of the author’s personal opinion,
so that it was not available for exposition.[14] However, this would not
explain Terence’s procedure. In the _Adelphoe_, for instance, he seems
to transfer some of the exposition from the eliminated prologue to the
opening monologue of Micio. What is noticeable is that he here gives a
very chary exposition in the monologue, gives some more details in the
inserted kidnaping scene, and yet carefully withholds the secret—which
could so easily have been disclosed—that the girl was stolen for the
supposedly virtuous brother. In a word, Terence is conscious of what he
is doing. He has apparently eliminated the expository prologue purposely
in order to rid himself of an old convention and to intensify comedy by
injecting into his plots the elements of surprise and suspense.

After Terence the aediles seem to have saved money by resorting freely
to the archives and reviving old plays. At any rate many of the Plautine
comedies bear signs of having been tampered with at this time. Long
speeches were cut, explicit prologues were excised or reduced so as to
introduce the element of surprise. In other words, the comedies were
modernized in type and given speed. It is more than likely that this
refurbishing of old plays discouraged young writers, since the generation
following Terence left few names of dramatists to posterity. Only
Turpilius, who worked in the Plautine tradition, was well known later. He
died at a very old age about 103 B.C.

The togata, however, kept its place better through the voluminous
contributions of Afranius, whose _floruit_ was just before the Gracchan
day. Of his works, praised by such fair judges as Cicero, Horace, and
Quintilian, we have some seventy titles and over six hundred lines. By
mere chance, we hear of a revival of a play of his in Caesar’s day and
of another even in Nero’s time. Rome was now cosmopolitan enough so that
a writer of comedy need not limit his range. In matter and sentiment
Afranius reminded critics of Menander and Terence, yet his fragments show
that, like Plautus, he availed himself of the advantages of very generous
musical accompaniments. The most striking reference to him which has come
down to us is that of Seneca who says that Afranius blended the spirit of
comedy and tragedy in his work. If we may judge from this statement he
may in this respect have been a precursor of Molière. After Afranius came
Atta who has left us a dozen bare titles and little else.

But legitimate comedy was doomed at Rome. On festival days the populace
had to be amused, and the Roman populace was rapidly changing in
character as slavery was pushing out free labor. Even before the Gracchan
reform Scipio the younger could face the crowds of the Forum with the
remark that most of them had come to Rome as slaves. The Gracchans
did not improve the quality of those crowds when they instituted the
corn-doles. The free manumission of slaves was creating a polyglot
proletariat which corn doles now tended to keep in the city, where they
were fed and amused. In response to the desires of such folk, chariot
races were made more exciting and the gladiatorial shows, introduced
from Campania, became more frequent and more gruesome. Needless to say
the well constructed plots of Plautus and Terence could not hold such
audiences in their seats. The aediles and praetors, who wished to keep
the entertainment on as high a level as possible, still persisted in
producing some respectable plays at every festival, but to save their
popularity in view of future elections they were driven to admit an
increasing number of the more trivial plays as well.

After Sulla’s time, though great actors like Roscius still played old
rôles, the farce gained ground over the legitimate comedy. The farce, a
more or less extemporaneous form, like the _commedia d’arte_ shaped as
much by the actors as by the authors, had long been in use as a brief
epilogue to performances of tragedies. The form most frequently used was
the so-called _Atellana_, named from an Oscan village in Campania which
was captured by Rome during the Hannibalic war. At first Oscan players
had presented these farces in the Oscan dialect. It is very likely that
the many Campanians who were trying to make a living at Rome after they
had been driven off their lands in 210 brought these amusing plays along
to produce in the Oscan “colony” of Rome, and that in time the Romans
discovered how entertaining they were and began to employ the players at
festivals. One is reminded of how the producers of Vienna and Innsbruck
have frequently invited the village players from the Tyrolese hill-towns
to give their simple homemade comedies before sophisticated urban
audiences.

The Atellan farces were usually spontaneous bits of improvised fun in
which the witty players, unhampered by a fixed text, developed their own
parts. There was much sameness of plot and rôle, usually a ridiculous
situation at the expense of some extravagant character, the fat fellow,
the old simpleton, the self-deluded wiseacre, the country bumpkin,
or what not. There was also much display of countryside wisdom and
frequently of broad and coarse wit. By Sulla’s day various city-wits—we
know the names of some and have more than a hundred titles of their
works—exploited this old form and wrote Latin farces on the Atellan
models, obeying literary conventions so far as to employ verse instead of
prose. Even Sulla, who was a devotee of the theater, tried his hand at
writing this style of comedy.

But these plays also had to give way to something lighter, namely the
mime. Simple realistic mimes had appeared at unofficial folk festivals
for many years before literature became aware of them. They avoided such
artificiality as mask and extravagant garb. They alone employed actresses
for female rôles. They got their names from their special devotion to
mimicry and caricature, but they proceeded to invade the whole field of
comedy; and had the respectable togata not been bound by convention
to exclude actresses on the stage and to adopt the mask, there is no
reason why the two should not have merged. In fact the mime came to be
a more realistic togata, and as such might have played a dignified rôle
in literature. And in Cicero’s day there were writers like Laberius and
actresses like Arbuscula and Cytheris who revealed an ambition to elevate
the mime into the region of serious art. The fate of the mime, however,
lay at the mercy of the rabble who demanded ever cheaper amusement. And
the scenario writers of the late Republic and early Empire supplied it.
They wrote plots and created female rôles that not even Arbuscula would
play, and that self-respecting Romans would not go to see. And so the
mime—which indeed lived on for centuries—fell into the class of the
tawdriest performances.

The farces and the mimes, while incapable of embodying careful
characterization or lines of any real literary value, could at their
best provide a vehicle for current ideas and a fruitful entertainment in
skilful caricature and much rollicking fun. Their descent to the lower
strata of amusement was not so much the fault of the forms as of the
audiences that determined their content. It is not surprising, therefore,
that these audiences—eager for entertainment which might exclude all
possibility of having to exercise the intellect—finally demanded an
extravaganza that appealed solely to eye and ear.

Horace lived to see and bemoan the discovery of the pantomime which, as
its name implies, was wholly mimicry, with nothing to disturb a lazy
brain. What Pylades did with tragedy, Bathyllus of Alexandria did with
comedy. He silently acted his rôles using interpretative gestures to the
accompanying rhythms of seductive music. There at last the rabble found
supreme satisfaction. But Horace at any rate in reviewing the history of
the stage did not argue that every new change had marked progress. In his
opinion the stage had descended to the lowest depth of inanity.

At Rome, as elsewhere, the drama had proved to be a fairly accurate
barometer not of the culture of the educated classes but of the populace.
Nothing in the form of official censorship had at any time exercised
any serious effect upon the theater. The praetors and aediles were not
to blame for what happened. They had placed good plays on the stage as
long as could be expected at the risk of offending the masses. Time and
again, relying upon their convictions as to the worth of a comedy, they
had staged plays that had failed; they were willing to pay very high
salaries, partly out of their own purses, to great actors like Aesopus
and Roscius who tried to revive the best plays and to win back to the
theater an intelligent group of listeners; they had set aside reserved
seats first for the senators and later for the knights in order to secure
good audiences for literary productions of a high order. Nevertheless the
drama declined. What the people demanded had in the end to be provided.

Individual criticism probably served its purpose to some extent,
but could not prevent the ebb. Men like Cicero ridiculed the cheap
entertainments and refused to attend them, they went out of their way to
encourage the better plays, and they did everything in public speeches,
in their essays, and in their social functions to show their appreciation
of serious actors like Roscius and Aesopus. Young poets like Asinius
Pollio and Varius Rufus filed away at poetic dramas that were published
for library shelves but never reached the stage. Critics like Horace
wrote to prove that what the populace greeted at every change as a new
and remarkable advance was nothing but a new step downward. And down it
went. The drama in some form remained a necessity for the populace and
they kept it at their level. The intelligent, who had in themselves,
their companions and their libraries their own means of entertainment,
deserted the theater which had grown unendurable to them.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Horace, _Epist._ I, 13: he mentions Pyrrha’s posture on the stage.

[2] Terence, _Hecyra_, 15-20.

[3] See Wessner, _Aemilius Asper_. E.g., the refusal of Charinus to win
his love by unworthy threats (317), and Pamphilus’ refusal to take credit
for a deed which he says a gentleman could not fail to perform (330). It
should also be noticed that in the _Perinthia_ Menander had a scene of
brutal slave-torturing which Terence took the liberty of eliminating.

[4] Cf. especially Leo, _Plaut. Forsch._ chap. IV; Legrand, _Daos_,
490 ff.; Michaut, _Plaute_, II, 116 ff.; Wilamowitz, _Menander, Das
Schiedsgericht_, 142 ff. A part of this chapter has appeared in the _Am.
Jour. Phil._, 1928, 309.

[5] One may add that if he was more explicit than one would think
necessary he was perhaps giving aid to the many strangers that came to
the theater in his day.

[6] For other instances see _Miles_, 238, 381, 767, 904, 1170; _Pseud._,
725; _Casina_, 683; _Most._, 662; _Menaechmi_, 831; _Trin._, 1137; cf.
Legrand, _Daos_, 533 ff.

[7] The _Merry Wives of Windsor_, though it contains no prologue, is
fully as explicit in the preparation of every incident—even the two
basket-scenes—as any play of Plautus. Indeed most of Shakespeare’s plays
give more attention to preparation than is customary on the stage today
even though his plots were usually familiar ones. The _Romeo and Juliet_
even has a prologue which goes so far as to disclose the outcome.

[8] The expository dialogue between the two slaves gives the immediate
situation so plainly that a _Heros_ would hardly have been employed for
the prologue except to reveal the secret hidden to the characters.

[9] In _Class. Phil._ 1916, 125 ff.; 1917, 405 ff.; 1918, 113 ff.; 1919,
108 ff.

[10] The _Epidicus_ probably once had a prologue (Wheeler, _Am. Jour.
Phil._ 1917, 264). One may suspect that the play in its present
form—which requires as patient reading as the _Hecyra_—was due to a
post-Terentian revision. The _Mercator_ has a prologue that does not
reveal much of the plot but in the second act the outcome is hinted at by
way of a dream. The play as we have it is a revision.

[11] According to Donatus, Menander’s play also contained the marriage,
but without objection on the part of Micio. Since in Terence Micio is
represented as resisting, the marriage must have been considered as
punishment.

[12] The _Hecyra_ according to Donatus was modeled upon a play of
Apollodorus, but it is now clear that that play was in turn modeled
upon Menander’s _Arbitrants_. That Terence suppressed the prologue of
Apollodorus is apparent from the comment of Donatus (who had a copy of
the Greek play at hand) on 1.58: _Hoc_ (the use of _protatica prosopa_)
_maluit Terentius quam per prologum narraret argumentum aut θεὸν ἀπὸ
μηχανῆς induceret loqui_. Since the list of characters and the beginning
of Menander’s _Arbitrants_ are lost, there may be some doubt regarding
his use of preparation in this play, but since the whole play operates
with “dramatic irony” and since Apollodorus had a prologue, it is more
than likely that he “prepared” his audience here as elsewhere. At any
rate Menander’s audience discover the owner of the finger ring in the
second act.

[13] I assume that Menander had revealed something about the escapades of
Chremes’ own son in the prologue, since Chremes’ pretenses at knowing how
to bring up children (152 ff.) were doubtless written in the first place
to amuse an audience that foresaw his failure.

[14] Leo, _Gesch. Lit._, 218, assumes that Caecilius had used the
prologue for personal criticism; Euanthius III. 2 says _deos argumentis
narrandis machinatos ceteri Latini ad instar Graecorum habent, Terentius
non habet_, which of course does not exclude an occasional use of the
personal prologue. After Terence, Afranius sometimes employs superhuman
prologues (Priapus, Sapientia, and Remeligo), but he seems also to have
used the prologue for personal statements in the manner of Terence (lines
25-8).




CHAPTER V

THE PROSE OF THE ROMAN STATESMEN


“Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race,” says
Mackail, a critic who is unusually sensitive to qualities of style. In
saying this, he doubtless had in mind not only the orotund periods of the
_Pro Milone_, the elaborately rhythmical movement of the _Pro Archia_,
the vehement force of the first Catilinarian or the easy colloquialism
of the familiar letters. It was rather the lucid and copious exposition
of essays like the _De Oratore_ in which, without revealed effort, a
versatile mind found appropriate and dignified expression for all its
concepts and moods. How did such prose come to be?

Cicero worked incessantly for years to acquire his command of the tools
of expression. When very young he memorized the standard rules of
rhetoric that emphasized the need for clarity, arrangement, conciseness,
luminosity, and all the rest. Do such rules make great writers? On that
point Cicero did not deceive himself. He knew that adults did not need
them, but he recognized that schoolboys would save time by having their
attention called to what practice would eventually reveal. Such rules
might prove guide posts to intelligent beginners, but one has only to
read the three books of the _De Oratore_[1] to discover that rhetoric was
for Cicero a schoolroom crutch to outgrow and forget. Another device
much recommended by the Roman teachers of his day was imitation, the
study of the masters of diverse styles. It is a method that has recently
been employed to good effect in the classroom for the awakening of taste
and sharpening of critical acumen. Cicero did not scorn its use, but
he knew too well that style is personal[2] to attempt to acquire in
this way a garb that would not fit his own mental processes. When he
sought out Apollonius of Rhodes as a critic it was not in order to adapt
himself to that teacher’s mode of expression. He first decided what his
own taste and capacity needed, and what the Roman Forum and Curia would
require of him; then he sought for the teacher who could best help him
by his criticism. His complete independence is shown by the fact that
he traveled long, trying one after the other of the famous teachers of
the east, abandoning them one by one as soon as he discovered that they
did not suit his purposes.[3] Cicero did not impose the Rhodian style
upon himself. He made his own curriculum to fit his temperament and
sought out the tutor who could help him attain what he demanded. This
procedure seems to me characteristic of the great Roman stylists. Cicero
and Caesar, Sallust and Livy, Seneca and Tacitus, betray themselves in
their sentence structure. The secret of their expression will never be
disclosed by a search for their models nor in the rhetorical rules then
current.

The aim of this chapter is limited. It cannot even attempt the important
task of illustrating from a study of Cicero the valid rule that style is
the man. It will attempt only to sketch the growth of Latin prose up to
Cicero’s day in order to suggest how that prose became adequate to clothe
the varied expression of so versatile a genius.

Roman, like English, prose developed its sonority, dignity, and rhythm
in persuasive speech. As in England during the religious reformation,
pulpit oratory molded speech, so in Rome, during the period of political
reformation from Cato to Cicero, forensic contests in the senate house
and at the tribunals transformed Roman expression. This parallel may seem
obvious, but one offers it with hesitation because Roman oratorical style
is generally supposed to have been shaped by the study of Greek rhetoric
in the schoolroom. Quite apart, however, from the fact that true art
is seldom amenable to the compulsion of precept, chronology militates
against this theory. Roman prose had traveled far before it resorted to
any guidance from Greece.

Like the English of Wycliffe, early Roman prose was formless. It merely
followed the habits of unshaped spontaneous conversation. If anything
was to be recorded with care, it employed the forms of art, that is, of
verse. Naevius and Ennius wrote their chronicles in meter. Even Chaucer,
who is so luminous in his verse narratives, becomes involved and at
times almost incoherent in his few attempts to write prose, unless in
fact he yields to the temptation of admitting rhythm into his sentences.
But Chaucer is one of the last of the great writers to flounder thus.
The Wyclifite Bible marked the beginning of a religious contest that
continued for two centuries with more or less intensity, and finally with
passionate vehemence. It was a contest that, to many, involved a question
of life and death and to even more the problem of eternal salvation. The
gravity of the theme called for the noblest possible expression, while
the deep concern of all classes, even the most ignorant, required clarity
and directness of utterance. The temptation of the learned to exaggerate
rhetoric into Euphuism was immediately checked by the need of being
intelligible to the congregation, while the tendency of plain persons
toward colloquial formlessness was checked both by the deep respect for
the sacred theme and by the high level of cultural taste among the clergy
of the time. We need not deny the great influence of Ciceronian and
Augustinian models upon these learned men, and in Lyly’s courtly group
we know how ancient rhetoric ran pell-mell into preciosity. But that was
an aberration that affected only those who had a thin message to convey.
When men are intensely engaged in saving their fellows, speech will grow
clear, and when these men are at the same time persons endowed with great
intellects, their speech will take on dignity of structure and of sound.
Before that contest English prose had babbled thus:[4]

    And in that country is an old castle that stands upon a rock,
    the which is cleped the Castle of the Sparrowhawk, that is
    beyond the city of Layays, beside the town of Pharsipee, that
    belongeth to the lordship of Cruk, that is a rich lord and a
    good Christian man, where men find a sparrowhawk upon a perch
    right fair and right well made, and a fair Lady of Fayrye that
    keepeth it, etc.

This sentence rattles on unhaltingly through “and’s” and “that’s” for a
solid page before it falls down to a stop from sheer exhaustion.

After the battle was over we have the Authorized Version with its
magnificent directness:

    The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for
    brightness shall the moon give light unto thee; but the word
    shall be to thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.

Briefly, the parallel between early Latin and early English prose can
be indicated thus. The prose of Ennius, like that of Chaucer, was very
much inferior to his verse. Before Ennius died, however, the mighty
struggle of statesmen had begun in the polemics of Cato, a contest which
was destined to build up in time a dignified and versatile language.
Cato represented the native, middle-class, agrarian population of Italy
that feared the expensive and ambitious foreign entanglements which the
philhellenic party of Scipio had incurred and hated the foreign culture
which followed in the wake of philhellenism. Cato spoke incessantly.
A hundred and fifty of his speeches were available in Cicero’s day.
He attacked the Scipionic group in the senate, in public harangues,
and in court. And not only he but his lieutenants—and of course his
opponents—had constantly to be on their feet. This was the beginning of
the party divisions that led through the Gracchan reforms and through
the debating period of the civil wars to the final defeat of the Roman
Republic a hundred years later. The contest of words was as bitter as in
the England of Wycliffe, Tindall, Cranmer, Latimer, and Hooker. Here,
too, the best intellects of the nation were exercised in the debate;
here, too, the gravity of the theme and the demands of aristocratic
audiences required dignified expression, while the constant necessity of
winning the populace required entire clarity and lucidity of expression.
The struggle was not indeed for eternal salvation, but it often involved
the question of life and death, and always the future of the state. And
from men like Cato, the Gracchi, Cicero and Brutus, the state claimed and
won a devotion more intense than religion could. Thus there is a certain
similarity between the growth of Latin prose from Ennius to Cicero and
that of English from Chaucer to Hooker. And though Greek rhetorical
theory and models were factors in shaping Latin prose, as Roman theory
and models were factors in shaping English, it seems to me quite probable
that both languages would have taken the course they did without those
models, for both were determined by forensic expression, by great
causes, and by intense devotion to those causes on the part of the most
intelligent men of their day.

In following the evolution of Latin prose[5] we unfortunately have to
deal largely with fragments quoted by later writers, and we cannot always
be sure that these fragments are representative. For our purposes however
they may legitimately be considered so. Before Ennius’ time very few
speeches had actually been published. Cicero had at hand an old oration
of Appius Claudius of about 281 B.C. and some funerary laudations, but
he did not think either worth considering in a history of oratory. So
far as we know, written prose documents before these were confined to
laws, treaties, and meager official records. The fragments of the Twelve
Tables (450 B.C.) are too scanty to afford any basis for judging style.
Some of them are so wanting in lucidity, because of an ambiguous use
of pronominal subjects, that a modern lawyer might readily manipulate
them to prove any point. A few fourth- and third-century inscriptions
from headstones and votive tablets[6] contain only blunt sentences which
reveal chiefly an obvious desire to save the expense of stone-cutting.
They do however show the native Latin word order and its fondness for
the deferred verb. _Orcevia Numeri (uxor) nationu gratia, Fortuna Diovo
fileia primogenia donum dedi._ This is of course a tendency in all
inflected languages where the verb can be postponed till the subject and
object have been visualized, since the inflectional endings indicate the
direction of the verbal action. And in Latin, the hierarchy of _what
is important_ can be and was recognized by the word order. “Orcevia,
Numerius’ wife, for the gift of childbirth, to Fortuna, Jove’s daughter
the firstborn, this gift I give.” Strictly speaking Cicero’s best-shaped
sentence is not more periodic than that colloquial tablet of a humble
woman a century before any Roman scholar thought of studying style. It
was not the study of Greek that determined the form of Latin prose.

The Duilian inscription of 260 B.C.—doubtless authentic in the main
though found in an imperial copy[7]—is our only pre-Ennian fragment
of prose that contains several complete sentences. This inscription is
far more fulsome and boastful than the modest Scipionic epitaphs of two
generations later, a fact probably due to Duilius’ sojourn in Sicily
where he could see verbose honorary tablets at every hand. In spirit and
content it is Sicilian, but its phrasing and diction are normal Latin.
Its longest sentence is rambling, badly coordinated and illogically
constructed despite its periodic placement of the verbs. The man who
composed it had no feeling for lapidary style:

                      enque eodem mac [istratud bene]
    [r]em navebos marid consol primos c[eset copiasque]
    [c]lasesque navales primos ornavet pa[ravetque],
    [c]umque eis navebos claseis Poenicas omn[is, item ma-]
    [x]umas copias Cartaciniensis praesente[d Hanibaled]
    [d]ictatored ol[or]om in altod marid pucn[andod vicet]
    [v]ique nave[is cepe]t cum socieis septer[esmom unum quin—]
    [queresm]osque triresmosque naveis X[XX, merset XIII] etc.

    [—and in the same magistracy he was the first consul to fight
    successfully upon the sea with ships, and he first equipped and
    prepared a fleet, and by fighting on the high seas he with his
    ships overcame the Punic fleet and the very great Carthaginian
    forces commanded by their dictator Hannibal, and by force he
    captured their ships with their marines, one septereme, and
    thirty quinqueremes and triremes, and sank thirteen, etc.]

A man who composes thus is not only “hypnotized by the exuberance of his
own verbosity” but unpracticed in the art of logical expression.

Our first passage of continuous prose comes from Ennius’ _Euhemerus_,
quoted verbatim by Lactantius. A fair example is the following:[8]

    Exim Saturnus uxorem duxit Opem. Titan qui maior natu erat
    postulat ut ipse regnaret. ibi Vesta mater eorum et sorores
    Ceres atque Ops suadent Saturno, uti de regno ne concedat
    fratri. ibi Titan, qui facie deterior esset quam Saturnus,
    idcirco et quod videbat matrem atque sorores suas operam dare
    uti Saturnus regnaret, concessit ei ut is regnaret. itaque
    pactus est cum Saturno, uti si quid liberum virile secus ei
    natum esset, ne quid educaret. Id eius rei causa fecit, uti
    ad suos gnatos regnum rediret. tum Saturno filius qui primus
    natus est, eum necaverunt. deinde posterius nati sunt gemini,
    Iuppiter atque Iuno. tum Iunonem Saturno in conspectum dedere
    atque Iovem clam abscondunt dantque eum Vestae educandum
    celantes Saturnum. item Neptunum clam Saturno Ops parit eumque
    clanculum abscondit, etc.

For this passage I shall use Professor Rand’s translation though it
introduces a modicum of style into the expression:

    “Then Saturn took Ops to wife. Titan, his elder brother, wished
    to be king himself. Then their mother Vesta and their sisters
    Ceres and Ops induced Saturn not to yield the throne to Titan.
    Then Titan, who was not so handsome a man as Saturn, both on
    that account and because he saw that his mother and sisters
    were bent on having Saturn reign, allowed him so to do. He
    therefore secured an agreement with Saturn, that if the latter
    had any male offspring thereafter, he should not rear them.
    This he did for the purpose that the kingdom might revert to
    his own sons. Then a first son was born to Saturn, and they
    killed him. Then later twins were born, Jupiter and Juno. Then
    they openly showed Juno to Saturn, and hid Jove and gave him
    to Vesta to bring up, concealing him from Saturn. Likewise Ops
    bare Neptune unbeknownst to Saturn, and carefully hid him away.”

This Ennian passage is even more simple and devoid of stylistic qualities
than is the English of Wycliffe or Chaucer. The brief plodding sentences
are clear enough; in fact there is a dry legalistic explicitness in
phrases like _id ejus rei causa fecit uti_, and _deinde posterius_. But
the whole rattles to pieces like a mosaic set in clay. It is in the main
a string of coordinate clauses loosely hung on que, atque, ibi, tum, and
without any appreciation of the differences that we attempt to convey by
commas, semicolons and full stops. It has not even the normal feeling
for periodic structure which the epitaphs of the time reveal. It is
naïve, primitive prose, and the evidence that Ennius could drivel thus is
indeed illuminating to the student of literature. A nation which could be
satisfied with such a medium of expression had not been very verbose.

During the next few decades, however, there was much legislation, and
from the interesting Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus of 186 B.C.
we have considerable fragments which prove that the ambiguities found
in the Twelve Tables were being gradually removed and that there were
enough shysters at Rome to compel legislators to evolve the intricate
and all-inclusive “if-and-but style” which has ever since characterized
legal expression. To this source the great prose of Rome owed very little
except precision of diction. There was also not a little historical
writing, chiefly however in Greek, for the use of statesmen who needed
to know their precedents. But this type of prose, so far as we can judge
from the fragments preserved and from Cicero’s adverse judgments,[9] made
no appreciable advance upon the narrative manner of Ennius, illustrated
above. Nor did such commonplace textbooks as Cato’s _De Agri Cultura_.

As we have said, it was public speech that moulded prose style at Rome,
as in England. Among the first to make a marked impression was Cato,
whose great activity on the platform begins about the year of the decree
_de Bacchanalibus_. Nothing could be more innocent of form than Cato’s
_De Agri Cultura_. This however, is by no means true of his speeches,
several pages of which survive in the typical paragraphs quoted by later
writers. Cato had not taken any course in the art of eloquence, he had
not studied the Greeks to the point of appreciating stylistic qualities,
and there was no literary Latin prose published for him to study, but he
had, as a member of the senate, heard many elaborate arguments advanced
by the foremost statesmen of his day on such weighty questions as the
peace with Carthage, the proposed expedition into Macedonia in aid of
the Greek democracies, the terms of peace with Philip, and the proposed
war with Antiochus the Great. There can be no doubt that these debates
brought out many of the characteristic qualities of Latin style. The
men who argued these questions had to think soundly and to form their
arguments as clearly, as definitely, as incisively, and as persuasively
as they knew how. When scholastic students of style attribute Greek
learning to Cato[10] because he stops to make definitions, balance
arguments, and employ logical enthymemes, they astound us by their
naïvete. One might as well say that Confucius, Hesiod, and Isaiah had
studied Demosthenes. Indeed I doubt not the Aurignacian mother defined
words for her children and that the lord of the cave had often tried to
argue his wife into silence by conclusions _ex contrario_.

There has recently arisen another explanation for the occasional artistry
of the pre-hellenistic Roman writers which has been held to apply to
all of the early Latin authors including Plautus. This is that the
so-called “Gorgianic figures,” used by even the earliest Romans, are of
Sicilian origin, that the Romans must therefore have come into cultural
contact with the Sicilians through commerce two centuries before Plautus,
and that Latin prose may thus have taken on rhetorical devices in its
infancy.[11] I mention these entertaining conjectures only to guard
against any possible supposition that they may seem acceptable simply
because they have found their way successively into recent textbooks.
Cato was a man who, despite his faults, possessed a very keen and
versatile mind, a visualizing, picture-making imagination, a sharp
tongue, an agile as well as a retentive memory, and a penetrating power
of analysis. His style, to be sure, is not malleable; the clauses cohere
by logic rather than by the cement of conjunctions; he is repetitious,
chiefly because he likes to hammer his nails firm; his transitions are
blunt when he is impatient to be on with his argument; he does not take
time to modulate his phrasing and his style has little _chiaroscuro_,
because he is in deadly earnest all the way. His vocabulary is often of
the barn and field and his imagery is apt to draw from the farmstead,
as for instance when he shouts at Thermus: “You cut those ten worthy
men into strips of bacon.”[12] In his _Brutus_, Cicero somewhat slyly
likened Cato’s simple straightforward Latin to the style of Lysias.[13]
Cicero, of course, knew the difference, for he later permitted Atticus to
correct him on this point, but at the time he desired to recall Brutus
to the logical consequences of a contemporary doctrine which somewhat
naïvely overstressed the simplicity of the studied artlessness of Lysias.
Cato was, of course, conscious of his effects; he drove his arguments
home with intentional care, for he wrote out his speeches even though
he delivered them without notes. He published them of course not as
literary essays to be read by later students of oratory, but as documents
designed to carry on the battles that he had begun in the court or the
senate. Their art, such as it is, derives not from rhetoric but from his
temperament and his fiery conviction. His philosophy of style lay in four
words: _rem tene, verba sequentur_.

Cato’s prose was admirably suited to forensic attack. Its qualities,
however, were those that spring from a practical, quick-witted,
imaginative debater. Cato probably directed every word and every clause
toward the precise argumentative effect that he wished to obtain. He
did not pronounce them slowly in order to taste their harmony of sound
or to listen to their rhythm. If they had beauty, it was by chance or
by reason of the beauty inherent in the Latin of his day. He probably
deleted whatever created the impression of being far-sought. Spontaneous
imagery might stand if it made his meaning more clear. His antithesis,
anaphora, and balance therefore belong not to the schools but spring
from the instinct to strike quickly, often, and with both fists. During
his fifty years of strenuous speaking he did much for Latin prose,
by proving that it could be clear, pointed, and precise; that it was
adapted to senatorial deliberations over world politics, as well as to
legal battles in the courts and in the assembly. Cato did not have an
ear for the organ qualities of the language. Nor was the time yet ripe
for the elaboration of artistic effects. When Cato spoke with deepest
earnestness, he could hardly escape attaining to some of the dignity that
Latin speech so readily acquires, but his vocabulary was too fresh from
the soil to sustain that quality for long. However, it is likely that men
of taste and restraint even in his day were more concerned than he for
the proprieties of diction that belonged to themes of gravity. Nobles who
were learning to rule provinces the wide world over and to give commands
to kings did not have to go to Greek pettifoggers to acquire dignity of
address.

Toward the end of Cato’s period some nobles kept Greek teachers in their
homes to teach their sons the language and the literature that prevailed
in all the eastern half of the Empire. But the spirit of Rome was not
then very friendly toward such teachers. The interminable wrangling
of scores of Greek legations begging for favors, the disillusioning
visits of Roman statesmen to Greek cities, the demoralizing influence
of the country upon the soldiers stationed in Greece, the inane
display of logical antinomies in the philosophical disputations, and
the superficiality of a rhetorical doctrine concerned with adornments
superimposed upon vacuity, these very quickly disgusted Rome. Cato’s
friends succeeded in having the Greek teachers banished from Rome in 161
and again in 154.[14] It would be as great a mistake to attribute lasting
cultural effects to the ambassadorial visits of Crates and Carneades to
Rome as to assume that the American senate could have adopted continental
rhetoric and style from the exuberant prose spoken by the French and
Italian envoys, Viviani and Francesco Nitti, who were sent to Washington
in 1917 to present the cause of the allied nations.

After Cato’s death more Greek teachers came, and among these the stoic
Panaetius, who remained for some time and became a real cultural force in
the group that gathered about the younger Scipio. Some attempt has been
made to trace the Stoic rhetorical doctrine of the plain style to this
contact.[15] But it is difficult to see what lessons Rome needed after
Cato to illustrate the desirability of the qualities emphasized by stoic
teaching: (1) pure diction, (2) clarity, (3) precision, (4) conciseness,
(5) propriety. The first four of these qualities were the very spirit of
Cato’s practiced though untutored Latin. The last quality concerned Cato
very little in all probability, but other Roman statesmen knew the need
of sloughing off barnyard diction in speaking before the august senators
at Rome. Propriety of diction is after all a quality that could hardly
be foreign to a people who had for centuries respected the triumphal
garb, the fasces, and the august pontifical ceremonies, and it was not a
quality that could be acquired from foreign teachers who did not know the
tone of Latin words. We must also bear in mind that what Roman statesmen
were eager to learn from men like Panaetius and Polybius and what these
men desired to teach was not some clever trick of phrasing but the
essence of political philosophy and of ethics. Polybius’ sixth book and
Cicero’s _De Republica_ and _De Officiis_ are the real results of the
early Stoic teaching at Rome, and Polybius’ own unwieldy sentences should
warn us that contact with Stoic teaching could do little for stylistic
beauty.

As the Gracchan times approached, a new division of parties became
apparent at Rome. The senators were suspected of promoting expansion in
the provinces for the sake of their own profit and glory, and several
tribunes gained popularity by opposing the recruiting and by haling
nobles into court on the charge of maladministration. Piso devised the
first of the special courts, which Cicero considered of great importance
for the training of orators. Then for several years there was agitation
over ballot reform advocated by the populace who desired a secret ballot.
Many important speeches were delivered in the senate and before the
people on these measures, and if we may judge from the remarks of Cicero
regarding Galba,[16] Lepidus Porcina, and Scipio Aemilianus, all this
activity conduced to create a feeling for a smoother and more coherent
style. Aemilianus especially, who represented the finest aristocracy
in its dignity of birth and high accomplishment, spoke with that
_auctoritas_ and _gravitas_ that were the natural concomitants of great
empire.[17]

Then came the Gracchan proposals which shook the staid government to
its foundations. For a dozen years the keenest minds of Rome were
pitted against each other, and victory lay not in arms but in the power
of persuasion. There was much discussion in the senate, but Tiberius
Gracchus carried the battle directly to the popular assembly, and that is
where it was fought to the end. For the words of Tiberius we have to rely
chiefly upon the paraphrases of Plutarch, which are too general to permit
of accurate estimate. From the speeches of Gaius Gracchus, however, we
fortunately have some exact quotations.[18]

Gaius Gracchus did as much as any one man to increase the range of Latin
forensic prose. Reared in the center of the dominant aristocracy where
he imbibed the purest and most copious diction, trained by a mother
whose urbane language delighted even Cicero, he nevertheless espoused
the cause of democracy, and in the defense of this principle he acquired
a lucid directness that Cicero never tires of praising. Gracchus had
Greek teachers, who taught him to read and to speak Greek as well as not
a little about Greek political ethics, and doubtless also the textbook
rules of Greek style. Such stylistic rules, however, were not of much
worth in addressing Roman voters, and they are seldom in evidence in
the fragments which have survived. Cicero’s one criticism of Gracchus’
style is that he did not know how to modulate his prose so as to secure
rhythmical effects. Gracchus would not have attempted to secure them had
he known how. He was too concerned with the issues at stake, too fired
with zeal for the cause for which he was to suffer death, to worry about
the adornments of style. He published his speeches, and he doubtless
prepared them beforehand, because in the revolutionary reforms that he
proposed, errors of phrasing must be avoided, and the record must be kept
for the sake of impressing his arguments. He certainly did not issue his
speeches with a view to providing models of style.

In this period Latin prose acquired further versatility and range because
Gracchus was a man of genius, believed in a cause which gave full scope
to his great powers, and spoke before different audiences that required
of him widely varying types of appeal. His was the task of shattering
the power of the most stubborn aristocracy that the world has known, of
organizing a new democratic machinery of government, of extending the
suffrage throughout Italy, of saving the native stock by a vast scheme
of colonization. He was stirred by an unflinching devotion to his cause,
by bitterness at the murder of his brother, and by the knowledge that he
too was marked for death. It is blasphemy against the informing spirit of
great art to attribute his effects to rules, and not to acknowledge that
genius fighting in such a cause is an independent creative force. Cato
had already shaped his weapons for him. Gracchus, more richly endowed
with vision, with sympathy, with intellect and wit, filed and hammered
the weapons into a finished armory. There is no tool of persuasion that
he did not have to employ. He used a simple, rude, staccato narrative
when explaining before the rabble conditions that must be cured;[19] in
elaborate argument, where the light and shade must be exact, he employed
periods as well-packed, though not so musical, as those of Cicero.[20]
Before senators his diction was as grave and lordly as theirs, while in
the forum, though never coarse, he could be as colloquial as Cato. His
vituperation carried the deep thrust of the lance rather than the rapier
cut,[21] for he liked to play with lingering irony. His emotional appeal
reminds one of the language of Ennius’ tragedies.[22]

And yet Cicero was not quite satisfied with his speeches as works of art.
What was lacking was after all what Gracchus would have disregarded
even had he lived in Cicero’s day: a more careful modulation, a studied
use of rhythm, a concern for the collocation of sounds, a more elaborate
sentence structure, and a more apparent contrast of light and shade.
Those are qualities that do not belong to the expression of revolutionary
reformers who have but a year or two in which to perform a great
life-work. They must come with leisure and tranquility when men have time
to try the sound and taste of phrases in patient reiteration. Meanwhile
Latin prose had been fortunate in finding men like Cato and Gracchus to
make it vivid, clear, versatile, and vibrant. After these two men and
the scores of speakers that they drew into the arena,[23] no Roman could
again write Latin with the shambling gait of Ennius’ _Euhemerus_ without
serious apology. And it is safe to say that even writers of history and
autobiography, who became numerous in the Gracchan period and after,
comprehended now that sentences must have clarity, unity, logic, and
precision.

After the death of Gracchus there was a temporary lull in politics;
the victorious aristocracy, so nearly crushed, prudently decided to
compromise with the populace rather than to risk the awakening of another
Gracchus by exploiting their restored power. Young men who had heard
the brilliant reformer in their youth, men like Crassus, Antonius, and
Catulus, grew up to be distinguished orators. They inherited the results
of a great evolution of prose, they directly or indirectly received the
benefits of a deeper respect for elaborate style because of a new contact
with Greek teachers, and they were granted the leisure and tranquility to
consider the needs of a more artistic expression.

Licinius Crassus, in whose orations Cicero found the first mature Latin
prose,[24] began as a partisan of Gaius Gracchus and in his youth
doubtless imitated his hero’s fiery style. He also gave some attention to
the Greek rules though he held that rules did not create style but were
merely a collection of deductions drawn by analysts from the practices
of the eloquent.[25] He preferred observing Roman speakers to studying
the precepts of the Greeks,[26] and he thought Roman oratory sounder
than Greek because at Rome the pleaders were the foremost statesmen
whereas in Greece only hirelings practiced the art.[27] In these views
he was not far from representing orthodox opinions.[28] There were other
great men who gave even less credit to scholastic practice. Antonius his
rival—by many considered the more brilliant speaker of the two—claimed
that rhetoric was useless in that it only formulated the obvious;[29]
Scaevola pointed out that Roman statesmen who had brought Roman
government to the pinnacle of glory had nothing to learn in expression
from inexperienced Greek pedagogues;[30] and Cicero’s account of the
style of such great orators as Sulpicius, Caesar Strabo, and Cotta
reveals the fact that the oratory of these men was a home product.[31]

On the other hand there were men who tried to make up for the deficiency
in practical experience by drilling at doctrine, with the usual result
that their language became tangled in artifice. Men like Albucius[32] and
the first Curio remind us in type and experience of the courtly Tudor
wits who had little to do or say and ended in euphuism.

What was the admirable style of Crassus which Cicero now calls
mature? The samples that have been saved for us by the _Auctor ad
Herennium_ unfortunately were quoted to illustrate vivid and rapid-fire
argumentation, and Cicero’s longest quotation was made to indicate
Crassus’ power of spontaneous reaction to a surprising situation. While
these examples give proof of celerity of wit, of a forceful, picturesque,
and copious diction, of the pungent and concise phrasing for which
Crassus was noted, they are not normal forensic prose. They do not reveal
the dignity and harmony for which this orator was praised, and they give
no certain illustration of the prose rhythms that Cicero liked to find
in a “mature” style. From the passages that we have we should say that
Crassus spoke as a pupil of Gaius Gracchus, but with the mellowness of
age and in causes of less moment.

Perhaps the real reason why Cicero found Crassus’ style mature was that
the Latin language was now mature. Latin diction had now become fuller
and richer. Not only had the large bulk of Accian tragedy and of hundreds
of comedies enriched the language, but hundreds of speeches delivered by
men who had worked hard at the task of enlarging the resources of Latin
phrase and diction had now been published. The special court instituted
by Piso, the frequent cases before the plebeian assembly after the
Gracchan period, the new custom of attacking political opponents by means
of legal prosecutions had immensely increased the scope of oratory. The
factional strife introduced by the Gracchans had divided the senate
into debating groups, and brought fire into electioneering oratory and
into legislative discussions. Every phase of political philosophy and
expediency as well as of legal and moral principles was discussed day
after day. Accordingly, the Latin language matured quickly and its prose
was a finished product by the time that Cicero was born, although its
verse had to wait another century before attaining adequate expression.

This prose was fortunately a fairly musical thing by nature. In comparing
the earliest Latin word-forms with those of the Gracchan days we find
that they had improved very much in musical quality, due in part, no
doubt, to the fact that the Etruscans and Sabines, who had temporarily
dominated Rome, had slurred over harsh collocations of consonants till
they fell away, and partly to the fact that the plebeians, who were of
course less conservative in speech than the patricians, had won great
positions in the fourth century. _Jouxmenta_ of the Stele inscription had
now softened to _jumenta_; _stlis_ had become _lis_; _stlocus_, locus;
_forctis_, fortis; _scandsla_, scala; and so on, in hundreds of words.
In many positions the harsh sibilants had been eliminated: _cosmis_ had
become comis; _dusmos_, dumus; and intervocalic _s_ had become _r_:
_eram_ was better than _esam_. This elimination of harsh sounds had
wrought so effectively between 500 B.C. and 100 B.C. that a language
that was once as rough as Gothic had acquired the mellifluous quality of
Italian. Though it still contained too many sibilants for ideal speech
and the final _m_ occurred so frequently as to invite monotony, it had
few sounds that could jar upon the most delicate ear. The vowels were
relatively pure, and because of the abundance in inflections of the
sonorous vowels _a_, _o_, and _u_ (=_oo_), they gave the language an
orotund quality. The Indo-European _i_ is on the whole apt to be shrill,
and the great vowel shift of sixteenth-century England which altered
it to the much more musical _i_ (=_aye_) undid its benefit by raising
English _e_ to the thinner sound of the old _i_. Latin retained the old
sound, but in _i_-stems it frequently went over by analogy to _e_, and
the _a̅i̅_, _a̅ĭ_ diphthongs fortunately softened to the mellow _æ_. In
all this, mechanistic forces of the speech organs were at work, but one
cannot help thinking that a delicate auditory guidance helped select the
desirable sounds.

Another great advantage inherent in the Latin language from the beginning
was that quantities were carefully observed by it and were in fact the
determining factor in its rhythm; and since time rather than stress is
the guiding principle of music in human song, as in the flute and organ,
Roman speech was to an unusual degree suited to modulated utterance. To
be sure, in the century before Plautus, stress had threatened for a while
to gain dominance in vulgar speech—enough in fact to question the rights
of measured verse—, nevertheless the timely spread of the conservative,
aristocratic pronunciation through political and forensic oratory, as
it was heard almost daily in the open forum during the second century,
gradually checked the process and standardized a precise observance of
longs and shorts.

The emphatic dominance of quantity over speech went so far in controlling
word-accent that about two centuries before Cicero it had drawn the
accent to the penultimate vowel if that was long. Hence, in the sentence
endings which so often consisted of weighty words, word-accent to a
remarkable degree coincided with a natural quantitative utterance.
Latin, therefore, lent itself to a rhythmical close of sentences, often
combining word-stress and length of utterance in a way that Greek
prose rhythm did not. Cicero had studied Greek and had observed that
various writers advocated the use of iambs, dactyls, and paeans[33] for
clause-endings, and he labored somewhat confusedly to justify those
rhythms since Greek theory seemed to demand them, but modern analysis has
proved that his ear had shaped a truer Latin rhythm than his scholarship
or his logic. His favorite clausulae, though he was not fully aware of
it, were cretics and trochaics, producing a rhythm that adapted itself
excellently to the dominance of longs, to the penultimate law, and to a
strong close. As usual, a true appreciation of the genius of the Latin
language saved the art from the effect of rules that were made for
another medium. Here again Latin shows its independence.

But this is not all. Cicero’s books of rhetoric emphasize periodic
sentence structure with careful attention to a mobile arrangement of
clauses within the period. The Greek orators had of course practiced this
art, and the teachers had drawn up the rules of the game afterwards.
Cicero, for instance, often patterns his clauses with care in order to
reach a periodic climax. In the _Orator_[34] he quotes an example from a
speech of his own in which he follows two pairs of balanced phrases and a
pair of clauses with a tranquil dignified close.

    Domus tibi deerat? At habebas; pecunia superabat? At egebas;
    incurristi amens in columnas; in alienos insanus insanisti:
    depressam caecam jacentem domum pluris quam te et quam fortunas tuas
      aestimasti.

In such studied prose as in much of our free verse, the modulation
depends not only upon the measured clausulae but also upon the
parallelisms of phrase.[35] It is the two-fold rhythm that we so often
find in the Authorized Version, in Hooker and in Browne, before English
writers knew very much about the classical theories of prose rhythm.
Now the point that needs to be emphasized is that Cicero would probably
have written thus had he never known rules, had he only used with his
infallible ear the prose that came to him shaped by a hundred great
speakers. For, in the first place, the periodic structure was native
to Latin, as we have seen, from the time of the earliest inscriptions.
That structure is natural in highly inflected languages where the verb
can be deferred in order to make room early for the important words and
concepts, while unimportant phrases can be appropriately subordinated
because their inflectional forms keep them tethered in thought to their
owners even though separated by space. All this invites the service of
taste to provide the contrast and balance, to give light and shade, to
lift and to subdue, and then to bind the whole between introductory
subject and concluding verb. No speaker of taste, given leisure and rich
diction, could resist the temptation of thus elaborating such a language
as Latin. The sentence of the untutored Cato, quoted above, though
lacking in modulation, reveals a structural form not unlike the sentence
of Cicero just cited.

Cicero repeatedly calls attention to what he designates as the adornment
of good prose, adornments associated in Greek learning with the name
of Gorgias. These are the tropes, i.e., the figures of speech, and the
schemata, i.e., the patterned expressions of sentences. But he also tells
us, fortunately, that there were none of these adornments which could not
be found in the works of untutored old Cato,[36] and that even unschooled
rustics employed metaphor. We have already remarked how modern scholars
have sought to explain their presence. Explanations are of course not
necessary. Men used metaphor and simile in the caves of the Dordogne
20,000 years ago; language began in metaphor when the primitive savage
first called a dog “bowwow.” Half the words of any language are still
metaphorical. When a Roman tried to find some expression for thinking,
whether he used _puto_ or _intelligo_ or _concipio_ or _cogito_ or
_arbitror_ or _existimo_ or _opinor_ or _censeo_, or _sentio_, he had to
use a figure of speech. Men like Cato, Scipio, Gracchus, Cicero became
powerful because they had imagination, saw visions, and put their visions
into their words.

The same may be said of patterned phrases. Native Latin verse, shaped
long before Greek was known at Rome, was particularly fond of balance and
antithesis because it was a verse that rested on parallelism marked by
the strong caesura and bound together by alliteration. Such was the form
of the early prayers and proverbs of the Romans:

    Postremus dicas, primus taceas.
    Pastores, pecua, salve servassis.
    Eorum sectam secuntur, multi mortales (Livius).
    Immortales mortales, si foret fas flere (of Naevius).

This old, alliterative verse operated with antitheses, balance, contrast,
anaphora, and word-play. Cicero needed no more to go to the Greeks for
such simple devices than Cato, and I do not think that he did. If he
employs them with more delicacy and restraint, it is partly because he
learned with practice that his own youthful style had been prone to
over-use the obvious tricks of speech.

Cicero also calls attention to the Greek rules for the proper
organization of speeches, which must have (1) their introduction, (2)
their exposition of the case, (3) their panoply of proof, (4) their
refutation of the opponent, and (5) their conclusion. To Cicero this
is of course schoolboy stuff.[37] It might save time for a freshman to
have these obvious rules of composition called to his attention when
he begins, but Cicero did not for a moment suppose that an adult who
has had some practice needs instruction like this, or that men like
Cato and Gracchus and the hundreds of other statesmen battling with the
shrewdest minds of Rome needed to be told that the peroration belonged
at the end and not at the beginning of a speech. Roman oratory during
its hundred years of progress had never learned anything essential from
these precepts. Their purpose was simply to train the Roman schoolboy
to observe the processes involved in shaping speeches. The mistake of
our modern critics has been to suppose that such rules as these created
Roman prose. Nothing in Cicero’s writings or practices justifies that
assumption. Roman prose grew to full maturity from native roots, in
native soil, and with native nurture.

Ornate Latin speech reached its complete development in the orations
of Cicero. To modern Anglo-Saxon taste the more elaborate paragraphs
seem overwrought. Our busy courts and legislatures desire facts clearly
and compactly presented. This has made us impatient of the style of
persuasion in speech. When we have leisure for vacation reading we may
resort to polyphonic or imagist prose in essays and occasionally in
fiction. We still have a place for protreptic sound in well-written
paragraphs, but not during business hours. That is the chief reason why
some of the Ciceronian periods now seem misplaced. Another seems to lie
in a difference of temperament in the respective peoples. If the Latins
were in any respect like the modern Italians in their sensitivity to
dramatic utterance, they may have enjoyed emotional persuasion more than
some of the ultramontane peoples. The very fact that Cicero’s manner
so frequently carried conviction in the courts, in the senate, and on
the public platform removes him to that extent from modern ultramontane
criticism. But Cicero himself was in his day considered a moderate and
urged strongly that elaborate prose must never be used except for themes
that could carry its burden. He also knew that the study of rhetoric was
for young students only and not for mature statesmen. When in the _De
Oratore_ he represented Crassus and Antonius as giving such elementary
instruction to the young students, Sulpicius and Cotta, he carefully
dismissed the venerable Scaevola as being too dignified to participate in
such a conversation. His sense of propriety here reveals the true Roman
attitude toward Greek rhetoric.

To be sure Cicero was himself somewhat imposed upon by the claims
of rhetoric which Greek teachers had elaborated, or he would not
have written the _De Oratore_—even with apologies. The erroneous
belief was still current that some one some day might work out a real
science of style. Hence he wished to make his contribution to that
science by setting down his own precepts regarding prose rhythm,
composition, and figures of speech. But that he had doubts concerning
their validity appears in his insistence that the “grand manner”
is a gift of nature (_Or._ 99) and that Roman oratory owed more to
_ingenium_ than to _doctrina_ (_Or._ 143). However, in criticizing his
contemporaries—Calvus, Caelius, and Calidius—he always proceeds from the
point of view of their effect on him rather than from any reference to
rules of rhetoric.

Cicero in fact employed few of the figures of speech, the names of which
he felt that convention required him to list, and his modulations are
so intricate and varied that, despite a score of dissertations on the
subject, no one has yet succeeded in analyzing them according to the
standard scheme which he transmitted from the accepted authorities. For
Cicero himself, living prose had a native movement and a wealth of sound
that lay beyond analysis. His rules were for dull minds that required
the aid of rules. His own ear required none. The teacher who compels his
students to count the specific clausulae of an oration of Cicero commits
an unpardonable crime against the holy spirit of a great art. The student
must, of course, learn to read that prose with an accurate pronunciation
of the sounds and quantities, but after that the rhythm will take care of
itself.

Cicero speaks[38] of his own oration _Pro Caecina_ as an example of
the “plain style,” employed in explicative demonstration, and the _Pro
Rabirio_ as an illustration of the grave and lofty style employed in
compelling persuasion, while he cites the _De Imperio Pompei_ as an
instance of the “middle style.” He who has read these three speeches
conscientiously feels the difference between them, yet he will not be
able to convey that feeling by means of the traditional statistics of the
stylistic doctorand. There are quite as many examples of the favorite
rhythms (clausulae) in the _Pro Caecina_ as in the _Pro Rabirio_, a fact
that shows that Cicero’s ear was remarkably sensitive to this effect and
guided his vocal expression even when he was not consciously striving for
it. Even in metaphors and in such devices as the rhetorical question, the
_Pro Caecina_ does not differ materially from the _Pro Rabirio_.[39] And
this again shows that this orator was by nature luminous and aggressive
as a successful speaker must be.

In the final analysis, if we may take the cue from these speeches, it is
not the degree of consciously imposed rhetoric that differentiates their
styles for Cicero, but the nature of the issues and audiences involved
and the resultant quality of the speaker’s inspiration.[40] In the _Pro
Caecina_, an ordinary civil suit called for close argumentation before
a small jury of legal specialists. These facts determined the style, as
Cicero says. In the _Pro Rabirio_, which Cicero places at the opposite
end of the scale, the critic will not find many more of the standard
devices of rhetoric than in the other. But here it becomes apparent from
the first sentence that Cicero is tense, that standing at full height he
is battling with all his might for what seems to him a great principle.
The issue was as serious as any he had ever championed. That accounts for
the intensity of his utterance. But there are various ways of fighting,
and the audience as well as the theme must determine the manner. Cicero
had before him not only the voting public—which standing alone might
have tempted him into mere vituperation—but he had also before him the
aristocracy of the senate waiting to see whether the _auctoritas senatus_
would be betrayed by that day’s vote because of a possible failure on the
orator’s part. Cicero did not fail. The speech in its gravity and dignity
of word and period is worthy of the theme and adapted to the audience.
And these are the factors which Cicero felt had made that speech.
Scholars have catalogued externals in such oratory too assiduously, and
Cicero did so himself, because it had not yet been discovered in his day
that art is beyond the reach of science.

What we need to do in reading Cicero is first to comprehend the rich
endowment of the man: the vast human sympathy that brought him into
immediate contact with his audiences, be they ever so diverse, the
celerity of his thought, the constructive power of his imagination, the
close correspondence between his delicate sense of rhythm and sound and
his copious vocabulary, and above all his very sensitive response to the
issues of right and justice. Then we must bear in mind the breadth of his
studies in philosophy, dramatic literature, history, law, and politics
that enriched his mind with principles, illustrations, and points of
view.[41] Finally, we must picture to ourselves in each case the nature
of his audience, the issue at stake, and the intensity of its appeal
to him. When we have done this we shall feel, if we have the gift of
insight, and even if we cannot analyze it, the consummate art of Cicero’s
Latin prose. To attempt to express the secret of it in statistics of
tropes and meters is to miss it wholly.

Before his death Cicero saw the fate of his favorite literary creed
that prose should be a work of art. It is well to remember that as he
had adopted this creed from his teachers so had his literary opponents
adopted from their teachers at least the verbal expression of their own
creed, i.e., that it was the business of the speaker to do the task
before him simply and honestly without resorting to artifice. However,
I do not believe that the literary contest that cost Cicero so much
distress in his last days was essentially one of theory; it was rather
one that grew out of the milieu in which he lived. Long before Caesar’s
day, Cato had expressed his natural aversion to the artifices of Crates
and Carneadas when he said with his characteristic impatience: “Get hold
of your theme and the words will take care of themselves.” Cicero in his
youth had found the same antithesis expressed in Antonius and Crassus.
And he lived to see men like Caesar, Brutus, and Calvus win the young
men away from his own ideals to those of the matter-of-fact style. The
antithesis lies deep in human nature and crops up in the revolt that each
generation feels toward its predecessor. It is hardly sound to attribute
the dominance of such elementary creeds to schoolroom precepts. The
preceptor is usually a man who notes the requirements of his day and
tries to prepare his pupils for its needs. He follows more often than
he leads, as any one may observe who will examine any twenty standard
books on composition produced by teachers during the last fifty years in
America. They follow usage, they do not beget it.

Asianic rhetoric, with its advocacy of adornment, had come to Rome in
Cicero’s youth. It is true that its rules engaged his attention. But a
man as sensitive to artistic expression as Cicero, and as sure of the
spirit of his audiences, had little to learn from Anatolian pedagogues
who taught _Graeculi_ how to declaim to four walls. Those teachers would
hardly have recognized the _Pro Rabirio_ as a product of their precepts.
Similarly, Apollodorus came from Pergamum to teach the doctrines of a
Lysianic or Attic style. Youths like Calidius, Calvus, and Pollio favored
his method. But Apollodorus would have met with little success if so many
Romans had not been practical and if the senate, with its traditions of
dignity, had not already lost its prestige before the emerging democracy
led by Caesar. Apollodorus may have introduced the new style, but had
the times not been ripe for him he would not have been heard; moreover,
the part of his doctrine that Rome accepted, Rome had possessed already
in the 150 speeches of old Cato. It was Caesar’s sword that antiquated
senatorial oratory as it antiquated senatorial pretensions to govern
Rome. Foreign schoolteachers did not do it. The Greek observer, Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, who was an enthusiastic supporter of Atticism in the
Augustan day, realized that it was not the Greek schoolteachers but the
practical statesmen of Rome who in the last analysis required the new
prose to take the form it did. “It is my belief,” he says, “that this
great revolution [in stylistic matters] was originated by Rome, the
mistress of the world, who compelled entire nations to look to her: Rome,
I say, and her nobles, men of high character, excellent administrators,
highly cultivated, and of high critical intelligence.” Here we have a
keen insight into the fact that a powerful state generates a dominant
culture which easily drowns the feeble whispers of the cloistered
theorist.

The generation which followed Cicero, represented by Asinius Pollio
and Messala, revolted completely against Cicero’s ornate prose and
adopted the plain, matter-of-fact speech which was called Atticistic.
Again it seems to me not only incorrect but contrary to the penetrating
observations of Tacitus[42] to attribute this revolt to the victory of a
stylistic theory. Calvus, to be sure, represented the new style in a few
speeches as early as 58 B.C. when he was but twenty-four years of age;
Calidius began to speak earlier, but whether or not in the new manner
is unknown. Brutus, controlled by a temperamental bluntness, supported
the same tendency a few years later. But these men would not have been
able to undermine the power of Ciceronian style had not events worked
in their favor. It was the dominating political influence of Caesar
that did the work. The first blow was Caesar’s quiet introduction of
stenographers into the senate in 59. By publishing the minutes of the
senatorial proceedings he compelled the speakers to consider the outside
public, to drop the orotund periods addressed to their colleagues alone,
and to confine themselves to pertinent details. Caesar himself had no
time to waste on model orations. When opposed by the senate he carried
his bills to the assembly to which he put his arguments in plain and
pithy sentences. Cicero had scented the meaning of these effects enough
to feel the need of stating his doctrine in full in the _De Oratore_
published in 55, and Calvus and Calidius were quietly profiting by the
new trend. Presently, in 52, the triumvirs closed the second nursery
of ornate prose, by passing a bill which severely limited the time of
pleas in court. The purpose was, of course, to expedite the business
of the overburdened courts, but the act reveals once more that the new
politics were concerned with getting results, not with encouraging a
time-consuming oratory. Two years later Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
and thereafter, so long as Caesar lived, addresses in the senate all
partook of the nature of business-like reports in committees that met
before a curt presiding officer; and in the courts, whose judges were now
appointed by Caesar, persuasive oratory gave way to a rapid estimation of
facts.

Cicero was well aware of all this.[43] During the first few years of
Caesar’s dictatorship he complained frequently that there was no longer
a place in the state for his gifts, and that his influence had wholly
gone. However, hoping for a restoration of senatorial rule, he decided
not to yield without some effort. He invited the most promising young
politicians of Caesar’s circle to take practical exercises in political
oratory with him; in 47 or 46 he wrote a letter of gentle remonstrance
to Calvus, the most influential theorist of the “Atticistic school;” and
for Brutus, who rejected the means of artistic expression for reasons of
taste, he composed (in 46) a full history of Latin oratory in which he
tried to show that Caesarian administration threatened to suffocate a
great art, that the development of that art during more than a century
had demonstrated the correctness of his own doctrine, and that the
opposing theorists, men like Calvus and Calidius who had profited from
events, could not by their methods create an effective style. Brutus,
who of course comprehended the animus of the volume, responded with
little enthusiasm and avoided the burden of arguing by asking for a more
explicit statement of Cicero’s position. Cicero responded at once with
the brilliant brochure called the _Orator_. But though Cicero sent out
many presentation copies the book met with general silence. No one was
interested in tropes and prose rhythm at a time when Cato was taking his
own life as an offering to the dying Republic. For the next two years the
business of state rested on the brief staccato orders of a tyrant. At
Caesar’s death the senate came to life again for a brief period and the
fourteen Philippics reveal the enduring power of Cicero’s oratory, an art
that had been well-nigh silent for ten years. Then Cicero, too, fell by
the assassin’s sword.

Presently Augustus established the throne and once more offered freedom
of discussion in the senate. But freedom had disappeared. Augustus’
trusted friends reported his views in the senate and before the people
in business-like summaries. Cicero’s very name was anathema as that
of a rebel to the new régime. Pollio and Messala, who represented the
opposition to the unpopular style, who practiced the arts of brevity and
directness suited to the needs of the new régime, were accounted the
models of Augustan Latin prose. Ciceronian ideals returned in time to the
schoolroom but only after the schoolroom had lost touch with politics.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Cf. _De Oratore_, I. 23; 52; 105; 146; 198; II. 50; 77; 100; 132;
III. 29-33; 48; 54; 93; 226; _Ad. Att._ iv. 16.3; _Brutus_, 263.

[2] _De Oratore_ iii. 29-33; _Brutus_ 202, 212, 276, 286, _Orator_ 99,
143.

[3] _Brutus_ 315, 316.

[4] Sir John Mandeville.

[5] Nettleship, _Essays Classical_, II, 93; Norden _Die antike
Kunstprosa_ (which seriously overestimates the influence of Greek
doctrine on Latin prose style). Cicero’s _Brutus_ is the indispensable
handbook.

[6] Cf. e.g. C.I.L. I. 60, 366, 561.

[7] The imperial copy is probably accurate except for a few words,
_Class. Phil._ 1919, 74.

[8] Ed. Vahlen. Professor Rand’s translation may be found in _Founders of
the Middle Ages_ (Harvard University Press, 1928), 56.

[9] _De Orat._ ii, 51, 59.

[10] As for instance Norden, _op. cit._ I, 164 ff.

[11] Leo, _Gesch. Röm. Lit._ 37 ff.

[12] _In Thermum._ Tuum nefarium facinus pejore facinore operire
postulas; succidias humanas facis, tantas trucidationes facis, decem
capita libera interficis, decem hominibus vitam eripis, indicta causa,
injudicatis, incondemnatis. The passage is packed with excellent examples
of anaphora, balance, metaphor, homoeoteleuton and alliteration. Had
this been written in 88 B.C. instead of in 188 we should take it as an
excellent illustration of the result of Greek rhetorical study. It is,
however, just native Latin speech afire with the most vehement Catonian
wrath.

[13] _Brutus_, 67 ff.; modified in 284-6. Cicero had noticed that Cato’s
orations were full of imagery; _Brutus_, 69.

[14] Suet. _Rhet._ I; _Athen._ XII, 547.

[15] Fiske, _Univ. Wis. Studies_, III, 62 ff.

[16] Cicero, _Brutus_, 82, credits Galba with a lofty style in speeches
which somehow failed to survive in the written copies, which reveals as
in several instances that Latin style was apt to be primarily pragmatic
rather than scholastic (_ibid._, 137, 138). To Aemilius Lepidus Porcina
(fl. about 140) he accords credit for smooth sentence structure (_ibid._,
131).

[17] Cic. _Lael._ 96; _Pro Murena_, 58.

[18] N. Häpke, _C. Semproni Gracchi Fragmenta_ (Munich, 1915). This
editor finds a few instances of prose rhythms in Gracchus. I do not think
that Gracchus was conscious of them, since they occur in about the same
ratio as in Sallust or Caesar, who could hardly be accused of encouraging
the rhythmic style.

[19] Meyer, _Orat. Rom. Frag._, 234.

[20] _Ibid._ 233.

[21] _Ibid._ 232.

[22] _Ibid._ 239.

[23] Cicero in his _Brutus_ mentions fifteen speakers of the Catonian
period, some twenty as being important between Cato and Tiberius
Gracchus, about thirty who belonged distinctly to the period of the
Gracchan reforms, and twenty more who gained distinction before the end
of the second century; that is, some eighty-five whose contributions
were worthy of mention before the fashion set in of studying rhetoric in
Greece.

[24] Cic., _Brutus_, 161.

[25] Cic., _De Orat._ i. 146.

[26] Cic., _De Orat._ ii. 4. The few orthodox clausulae found in his
fragments occur in about the ratio that one might expect in any normal
Latin prose.

[27] Cic., _De Orat._ i. 198.

[28] In the year 92 Crassus attempted with his colleague Domitius by
censorial pronouncement to discourage the growth of Latin schools of
rhetoric. It is difficult to take seriously the recent hypothesis that
this was an aristocratic attack upon democratic schools. Cicero’s
interpretation that the new Latin school was objectionable because
it trained speakers without the cultural education in literature,
philosophy, and history, which Greek rhetoricians usually required, seems
adequate. Our own insistence that law schools require a college degree
for entrance would then be analogous.

[29] Cic., _De Orat._ ii. 77 ff. Cicero, who dislikes to confess that
good oratory can arise out of native endowments, accords Antonius some
education, because he once conversed with the Athenian professors for a
few days on his way to the province! The _Brutus_, which attempts to give
genuine history, represents Antonius as a self-made man.

[30] _De Orat._ i. 105.

[31] _Ibid._, ii. 88, 97 ff. _Brutus_ 202, 276, 286, _Orat._ 99, 143, 214.

[32] _De Orat._ iii. 131 and 124.

[33] _Orator_, 191 ff. When in _Orat._ 213 Cicero attempts to analyze
the measures of Carbo his theory fails him. Again in 217, when he
enumerates the feet that Greek theory allowed he fails to notice that
his own feeling for Latin rhythms demanded a cretic before all of them.
Indeed his selection of passages from his own orations in 210 is faulty
(see Kroll’s commentary). In fact his usage is far truer to the genius
of Latin than his theory. It is probable that Tyrannio, with whom he
discussed Greek accents and rhythms during this period (_ad Att._ xii.
6, 2—about June 46) misled him. We need also to bear in mind Cicero’s
statements that the ear unconsciously operates in selecting good rhythms
(_Brutus_, 34) and that the tendency to seek balance—a very old quality
of native Latin verse—also produces rhythm (doubtless because of the
paenultimate law) (_Orator_, 167, 220). Needless to say, what compelled
Cicero to shape clausulae somewhat unlike those of Isocrates was the
stress-accent of Latin operating under the penultimate law.

[34] _Orator_, 224.

[35] This in turn tends to produce measured prose rhythm in Latin,
_Orat._ 167, 220.

[36] _Brutus_ 69. He adds that uneducated peasants often use metaphors,
_Orat._ 81.

[37] _De Orat._ i. 105 _non Graeci loquacitatem sine usu neque ex scholis
cantilenam requirunt_; ii. 77-84. Cicero made a summary of the rules in
his youth (the _De Inventione_) but none of his speeches follow these
rules closely.

[38] _Orat._ 102.

[39] Gotzes, _De Ciceronis tribus generibus dicendi_.

[40] _Orat._ 102 ff. and especially, _Orat._ 24, where he says
explicitly: _eloquentiae moderatrix fuit auditorum prudentia_.

[41] Hubbell, _The Influence of Isocrates on Cicero_, etc. (Yale, 1913).

[42] Tacitus, _Dialogus_ 19, 37, 38.

[43] Cicero is well aware of the fact that the suppression of the old
political freedom was endangering style: _Brutus_ 21, 324.




CHAPTER VI

REPUBLICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LIVY


The Romans, like all builders of empires, were avid readers and writers
of history. Their first two epics were the stories of the growth of
Rome; the numerous autobiographies of the Republican period were the
political _apologiae_ of public men like Marius, Sulla, Scaurus, and
Lucullus, who had given all their time to the affairs of state; before
Livy composed his great work, at least a score of historians had written
bulky accounts, now all lost, of the whole or some part of Rome’s amazing
story. Now that we have only fragments left of that splendid historical
library it is easy to fall into serious misconceptions regarding the
ideals and aims of those who wrote the nation’s history. To these errors
the Middle Ages contributed not a little by canonizing all the ancient
authorities so that when modern historical criticism came into vogue the
reaction against authority went too far and skepticism overleaped the
mark. Furthermore, a group of modern critics, who know little about the
past, impressed by the absence of rationalism in the medieval writers,
have invented a theory of progress which denies all intelligence to human
beings who lived before the eighteenth century. A recent book, misnamed
_The Making of the Modern Mind_, actually begins its account with the
dark ages, thereby succeeding fairly well in creating an impression of
consistent progress, but it wholly neglects the great civilization which
had reached the heights and fallen before the period discussed. One might
with equal fairness write a biography of Ruskin by ignoring his creative
early period and beginning with his emergence from his mental coma during
his old age.

As archaeological discoveries at Rome are confirming much of the
tradition which Mommsen and his successors rejected, it is becoming
necessary for us to revise our conception of the methods of the early
Roman historians. We now know that in its essentials the traditional
picture of a large and prosperous Rome at the end of the regal period is
correct.[1] We know something of its extensive walls, of its imposing
temples, and of its far-reaching commerce. We are gaining no little
respect for Livy’s conception of a strong Sabine element in Rome, of
the participation of Latins and Etruscans in the revolutionary wars
that ended the regal period, and of a temporary weakening of Rome
in the early decades of the Republic, when the Latins gained their
independent status and the Sabellic tribes threatened the existence of
the Latin League. If Mommsen were writing today, he would certainly
accept a large part of early political history, for he himself in his
_Staatsrecht_ rehabilitated much of the constitutional history which he
had previously excluded from his volumes. I do not mean that we are
ever going to reinstate the embroidery of fictitious battle-scenes and
long senatorial debates woven from family legends into the accounts of
the early period. Livy himself, who has left us the best account of this
picturesque tradition, warns the reader adequately when he explains why
he has freely included legend in the first part of his work. But with the
archaeological evidence before us, it is now possible to estimate what
knowledge of the earlier Republican period was available to the annalists
and to judge from this what use they made of their knowledge. We know,
for example, that they had access to large collections of laws, senatus
consulta, treaties, and priestly annals, and that they drew the correct
inferences from the extensive remains of the city about them, a city
which did not greatly change its ancient aspect until after the Second
Punic War. The fact that in the attempt to synchronize the consular list
with temple records which did not quite accord, they fell into a slight
discrepancy of a few years in the chronology of the early period does not
materially affect its value.

Various recent books on historiography[2] make little or no reference
to these revisions of our knowledge. They are being written as though
nothing had been discovered since Wachsmuth and the early critical work
of Pais. What is equally disturbing, they continue to assume that Roman
senators like Fabius and Cato, who constantly had to consult Rome’s laws
and treaties in order to direct senatorial debate on intricate matters of
international relations, immediately forgot the value of facts when they
undertook to write history. It is no longer justifiable, however, to
group all Roman annalists together in one category. If the early annals
of Rome tell practically the same story as the remains, there must have
been a great difference between the statesmen who first recorded the
facts and the romancers of Sulla’s day who wrote popular books for the
purpose of entertainment.

We may classify the historical writers of the Republic into three
distinct groups with reference to their methods and their employment of
their sources. In the century before Gaius Gracchus, we know of some
eight statesmen who told the story of Rome from the beginning up to their
own day. These are Fabius Pictor, senator and pontifex, who had served
in the army in 225 B.C., L. Cincius Alimentus, a praetor and general
in the Hannibalic war, Cato, consul and censor, C. Acilius, a senator,
Postumius Albinus, a consul, Cassius Hemina, Fabius Servilianus, consul
and commentator on pontifical law, Calpurnius Piso, consul, censor, and
reformer of the courts, and Sempronius Tuditanus, a jurist, who while
consul conquered Histria. They all wrote at a time when there were few
“general readers,” and their works were in the main intended for the
information of magistrates, senators, jurists, and a small circle of
readers closely connected with the ruling classes. These men were all
thoroughly acquainted with Rome’s laws and treaties.

After the Gracchan revolution we find a decided change in the tone and
purpose of history. The democratic upheaval had enlarged the circle of
readers by bringing large masses into the political arena, and had
created a demand for histories that were more easy to read and more
sympathetic toward the aspirations of the common people. In addition, a
diffusion of the knowledge of Greek, which made available the colorful
histories that Alexandrian culture had produced, and which fostered a
taste for a more florid style in written and spoken Latin, tended to
turn readers away from the dry factitive annals of the preceding century
and to encourage professional writers to satisfy the new taste. The
first story-teller to meet the new demand was apparently Cn. Gellius
of the Gracchan age, who seems to have filled in the meager outline of
early Republican history with an abundance of interesting legends. The
period that had been covered in seven rolls by the sober Piso required
ninety-seven in the library that Gellius produced.

This feat marks an epoch in Roman historiography. Where Gellius found
all his material we are not told, but we may surmise with some degree
of accuracy. He seems not to have added much to the legends of the
regal period, for even the earlier annalists had, with due warning to
the reader, repeated the household tales of that epoch. Most of the
padding appears in the section devoted to the first two centuries of
the Republic. In this portion the older statesmen-historians had shown
their restraint by excluding oral tradition and confining themselves
practically to the bare statements found in the priestly annals and in
the archives. Piso, for instance, gave only two books to the two hundred
years from 500 to 300 B.C., an average of about twelve lines a year. He
apparently adhered closely to archival material. Gellius devoted about
twenty books to this period. To do so he must have consulted heads of
old families and gathered up all the colorful stories they had to tell
of their ancestors for the period before the Third Samnite War. After
him Sempronius Asellio and Claudius Quadrigarius, although both were
popularizers, nevertheless reverted to a conservative treatment of the
semi-historical period, but Valerius Antias of the Sullan age, the most
successful of the romancing historians, followed the dangerous example
of Gellius. It seems to have been his ambition to retell in a more
persuasive form all the more interesting tales collected by Gellius.
Thereafter it was quite impossible to satisfy the general taste in
history without including the legendary stories of the middle period. It
was this group, writing for a large semi-educated public, and providing
patriotic, dramatic, and attractive volumes—in which vivid pen-pictures
served the purpose of modern colored illustrations—that destroyed the
taste for the sober old annals.

During the same period and catering to the same taste, many histories
of special periods and propagandizing biographies appeared. Caelius
Antipater, a professional writer, produced a history of the Second Punic
War in which dramatic composition and stylistic values counted for more
than accuracy. He wrote not for the information of statesmen but rather
for the delectation of the young and the leisured dilettanti. Some of
the autobiographies and histories of the time were produced by important
statesmen, but their value was in many cases marred by a willingness to
cater to the lower critical standards of the day and no less by a desire
to excuse their political behavior at a time when factional strife had
raised dangerous animosities. Fannius, indeed, seems to have written with
some sobriety regarding his part in the Gracchan struggle, but Aemilius
Scaurus, Sulla, Marius, and Catulus pleaded their cases with more or less
open partisanship. Of similar tendency, though more restrained, were men
like Licinius Macer, Cornelius Sisenna, and Sallust, who, having engaged
in the factional struggles of their day, wrote history with a political
bias, and furthermore, heeded the new demand for stylistic attractiveness
to the extent of disregarding now and then the requirements of accuracy.

The third group of writers, the professional researchers, appears during
the Ciceronian period. As the first extension of a superficial culture
had created a demand for easy and interesting general histories, so
the spread of a more thorough education produced a class of readers
who became suspicious of popular accounts and demanded solider works
on special topics. Furthermore, the increasing number of writers
desired reference books that presented details in more compendious and
reliable form than did the voluminous histories of the Sullan age. It
was in response to such demands that dry antiquarians now wrote their
crabbed commentaries and encyclopaedias. Aelius Stilo, best known for
his grammatical work, also delved in the sources of political history.
Varro, his pupil, compiled reference books on Roman law, on religious
institutions, on the Roman _tribus_, and on geography. The great jurist
Sulpicius wrote commentaries on the Twelve Tables and a history of the
praetorian edicts. Licinius Macer[3] and Aelius Tubero attempted to find
new archival materials in the priestly offices and financial bureaus,
various men made up convenient _libri magistratuum_, and even Cicero so
far entered the field of the specialist as to write a history of Roman
oratory, in the preparation of which he read hundreds of orations. Such
special studies naturally did not supplant the popular accounts—in fact
a score of less serious writers were busy at the same time—but their
influence upon historiography was abiding. Livy, for example, not only
used their digests of material but learned from them to be skeptical
of the Sullan romancers and to respect the data provided by the early
annalists whose books were no longer in general circulation. Hence, while
endeavoring to create a great work of art that might supplant the most
fascinating of his predecessors, he also attained to a higher standard of
accuracy than his rivals.

In this brief sketch of Republican historiography it becomes apparent
that it is in the second period, the time of popularization and of
Hellenistic influence, that the historical conscience weakened. We
must now revert to the earlier annalists to see how they worked and to
understand how it was that they succeeded in preserving the essential
basis of facts that modern discoveries are verifying. The field covered
by these annalists may be divided into three parts: (_a_) the regal
period (largely legendary); (_b_) the first two centuries of the Republic
(500-280 B.C.), for which some archival materials existed; and (_c_)
the period after 280 B.C., in which archival material could safely be
supplemented by reports of eyewitnesses, partly Greek, and later by the
native written records. Critics of the nineteenth century popularized
the view that Fabius Pictor must have worked with unsafe conceptions
of history because he told several of the early legends in full. This
criticism misses a vital distinction which the Romans themselves
recognized. The early annalists knew that the regal period provided no
reliable sources, but, with due warning to the reader, they reported
the legends for what they might be worth. Fabius[4] seems to have been
rather meticulous in giving these exactly as he had heard them without
any attempt to rationalize them, for Dionysius enjoys pointing out their
unplausible elements. Where we must test the scientific attitude of the
early annalists is in their treatment of the second and third periods.

As regards the second period, we have seen that Piso, the last of the
group—whose statements are as full as any—has in this portion an average
of only about twelve lines per year. There is for this second period
no trace of legendary material in the fragments of any of the earliest
historians, and we can well understand why Cicero constantly compares
the oldest accounts with the wiry _Annales Maximi_, why Dionysius says
that in this portion they touched only upon outstanding facts, and why
Asellio complains that no annalists before him had adequately discussed
the causes of the events which they recorded.

The archives had some material of value for the whole of these two
centuries. The high priests’ tablets of the Regia, though originally
intended only as a record of sacrifices to be performed, contained
many noteworthy items because the pontifex was usually one of the most
distinguished statesmen and accordingly interpreted political events
as of sacred importance. Each year’s tablet included the names of
the consuls, and contained references to the declarations of war, to
victories, defeats, famines, pestilences, destructive fires, earthquakes,
and eclipses, or other events that had called for expiations or
thank-offerings. We are told that when the contents of the _Annales
Maximi_ were published about the Gracchan time they filled eighty
volumes. Since the period covered was nearly four centuries we may
assume on the average a volume, presumably of about a thousand lines,
for every five years, or about two hundred lines a year. If only a tenth
of the material was of interest to an historian these annals would still
contain enough to fill the earlier books of a writer like Piso. In the
Capitoline temple were stored almost all of Rome’s treaties, engraved
upon bronze or stone. Since Rome’s fetial customs were carefully observed
during the long period of expansion, these treaties provided a dependable
record of her external history. Before Vespasian’s reign, as we happen
to hear, three thousand of these documents had accumulated. In Fabius’
day, judging from the extent of Rome’s federation, we may safely assume
at least a hundred. In the temple of Saturn were kept the laws passed by
the centuriate assembly, in the temple of Ceres the important decrees
of the senate. There were also temple records, inscriptions upon public
buildings and, furthermore, independent local records in Rome’s various
colonies, which in some measure provided a check for those at Rome.
And finally the existence of the old walls and temples up to the time
of these historians furnished visible evidence of what Rome’s ancient
culture was like.

We are, of course, constantly told that the Gallic fire of 387 B.C.
probably destroyed the old temples together with their records. This
is one of the assumptions that archaeology has disproved.[5] We now
possess a fairly complete analysis of Rome’s building materials and
we have discovered that in almost every instance the old walls of the
ancient temples remained standing into the late Republic and their
materials—being consecrated—were used again in the reconstruction of
those temples after the use of concrete had been discovered (about 150
B.C.). The original Capitoline temple with all its treaties survived
till Sulla’s day; the Regia, in which the pontifical tablets were
stored, remained intact till after the tablets were published; the
original temple of Saturn with its valuable archives stood till it was
rebuilt after Caesar’s death; the temple of Castor survived till it
was rebuilt in 117 B.C., and we know from Pliny that Ceres’ temple,
where the senate’s decrees were kept, remained intact till the Augustan
period. If the Gauls spared the temples in fear of divine vengeance—the
Celts and early Romans were equally religious—they would probably spare
the consecrated contents. There is no longer any excuse for repeating
the unfounded conjecture that all of the early Republican archives
were destroyed in the Gallic fire. The places in which they were kept
certainly survived and the fact that the early annalists to a remarkable
extent stand the test of modern investigation indicates that some of the
archives also survived.

Whether or not such material existed in the temples would, however, be a
futile question, if, as Mommsen held, the Roman historians neglected to
consult their archives. It is certainly true that after the Sullan period
we hear little of research among original documents. But quite apart
from the decay of historical standards, it is obvious that the desired
materials were then largely accessible in published form. After the
Sullan day every few years brought out new biographies and contemporary
histories which incorporated from daily observation the facts of
interest. Such sources became very numerous and men no longer needed to
go to the archives for the kind of material that was wanted in popular
histories. Hence it became customary to turn to books rather than to
stored documents.

The situation had been wholly different during the century before the
Gracchi. Then published source-books were just beginning to be made, and
there were no convenient libraries of extensive histories. There may have
been an anonymous digest of the priestly tablets before Fabius, but of
this we are not sure. A complete edition was not made till the Gracchan
period. An old code of sacred rules existed under the name of _Jus
Papirianum_, and Sextus Aelius (consul in 198) had put out an edition of
the Twelve Tables with a commentary and a list of the _legis actiones_.
That was all. And yet senators were expected to know all the important
documents that might be involved in senatorial debate. As Cicero[6] puts
the matter in his _De Legibus_ (III, 41), “It is necessary for a senator
to know the commonwealth—completely I mean—to know its military and
financial resources, what allies, “friends,” and subjects it has, and the
laws, terms, and treaties by which each attained to its position, and he
must also know the parliamentary rules of the senate and the history of
Rome.” To attain to such command of the archival material in the early
days necessitated much first-hand study and doubtless the making of
individual digests. We are reminded of the medieval law-men of Iceland
who conducted the “thing” in the period when no written codes existed
and when they were compelled to keep all the laws and precedents at the
command of their memories. Such senatorial practice was a preparation
for historical composition which was very different from that attained
by the professional writers of a later period. To assume that Fabius did
not know the source-material because Livy seldom refers to original
documents is to misunderstand the diverse methods that obtained in each
man’s day.

Roman historians of course knew the worth of Fabius Pictor. Livy went
to him to check up extravagant statements; Dionysius refers to his
conciseness and accuracy; Cicero, whose historical material in the _De
Republica_ and the _De Legibus_ was based upon Fabius, vouched for his
lack of rhetorical adornment, and Polybius followed him closely in
the story of early Rome, in the first ten and last two years of the
First Punic War, and in the Roman sections of the period from 241 to
the end of the Second Punic War. The most meticulous of historians,
Polybius, criticized Fabius only on the score of patriotic bias when
giving generalized judgments on recent events. Polybius was of course a
foreigner who could readily detect the nationalistic flavor, and after
observing the aberrations of history during the world war we can readily
comprehend that Fabius may have failed in objectivity in writing of
the wars in which he took an active part. But there is no reason for
supposing that he did not set himself a high standard in recording the
actual events of Roman history.

Polybius has received very great praise for his insistence upon accuracy.
Professor Shotwell[7] ends an enthusiastic chapter with the sentence:
“But as long as history endures the ideals of Polybius will be an
inspiration and guide.” The praise is deserved, especially when we
remember that Polybius had behind him in Greece nearly two centuries of
extravagant rhetorical history. But when we ask how it happened that he
turned his back upon all that tradition, no explanations are offered. It
is not an adequate interpretation to say that by living in banishment
he was removed from the temptations of historians writing the story of
their own people, for he usually succeeds in being quite objective even
when he writes of the Achaean League. Is it not likely that his contact
with matter-of-fact and legal-minded Roman senators induced him to adopt
some of their manners and methods? His respect for the integrity, sanity,
and uprightness of Roman senators of the Scipionic period he voices
repeatedly[8] in contrasting their qualities with the unreliability,
astuteness, and fickleness of his countrymen. It is also to be remembered
that the first part of his history is based upon Fabius, who therefore
was his first preceptor in historical writing. It would seem at least
worth considering whether Polybius did not owe some of his qualities as
an historian to the fact that he served his apprenticeship in history
among the early Roman annalists and that he adapted his work to the
public which had been brought up on those matter-of-fact books. At any
rate he is well-nigh unique among the Greeks who wrote history after the
classical period.

There is of course nothing to indicate that Fabius and his immediate
followers were in any sense great historians. Without any literary
background, with only such practice in writing as would come from
composing state documents, occupied every day with the concerns of a
rapidly expanding state, they recorded only public acts and public
discussions. What men did and strove for, outside of the voting,
legislating, and fighting groups, was not recorded. Not even within their
chosen field does there appear a penetrative analysis of senatorial
policy. Fabius, to be sure, enumerated the immediate causes of both
of the Punic wars but only with a jurist’s interest in deciding at
what point the enemy had committed the breach for which he deserved
punishment. As historians these men had the limitations of their
qualities and of their occupations. But on the other hand there is no
evidence that they knowingly garbled facts.

One may, then, be permitted to object to a common error of judgment
regarding the nature of what is called the “scientific method” in ancient
history. Students who have to deal with the gullible medieval chronicles
seem to assume that historical criticism has but recently succeeded in
creating a respect for objectivity and honesty in history, as though
the logical processes of the mind were not fully developed in the human
race twenty thousand years before the invention of the historical
seminar. The incubus of religious authority dominant for centuries in
the Middle Ages was a passing phase, as was the overweening respect
for dramatic values in the Hellenistic historians and the eagerness to
glorify families and the state in the Sullan romancers. But just as
Polybius, when transplanted into a soberer atmosphere of action, rid
himself with ease of the Hellenistic methods; as Julius Caesar, when
occupied with absorbing actualities, could free himself from the habits
of his day so far as to record the very crimes for which he was being
assailed by Cato in the senate; as Ari Frodi in Iceland escaped churchly
influence sufficiently to write the history of his island with the same
respect for truth that he used when judging a case at the “thing,” so
the early statesmen-annalists of Rome, when recording what was available
for the historical period of the Republic, employed documents and
personal observations with the same meticulous care that they used when
presiding as praetors in the courts or when as senators arguing cases
of international relations. Their brief historical notes are largely
preserved for us in Polybius, in Cicero’s _De Republica_, in Diodorus,
and in the central skeleton structure of Livy, and the continuous
existence of these notes in Roman times kept the legends from ever
straying wholly beyond the reach of actuality. This also explains why
it is that archaeological knowledge now coming to hand is so frequently
found to fit in with what we have been wont to call “tradition.”

The various currents of Roman historiography united in the vast work
of Livy, so that, Augustan though he is, he may be taken as a typical
product of the several Republican schools. There is no one formula by
which the historian may employ Livy without constant caution. Parts
contain unadulterated legend, parts that seem at first glance to be sound
record are based upon treacherous sources, much is first-rate history;
but who has the magic flail that will shell off the husks? There is no
more insistent problem in Roman history than the correct use of Livy,
for he is, over large areas, our only source, and over periods where he
parallels Appian and Cassius Dio he is generally so much sounder than
they that he must be threshed through.

In estimating the quality of the thirty-five books
extant[9]—unfortunately his early work and not the maturest product of
his mind—we must distinguish between the results that are due to his
own aims and capacities and those that are due to the nature of his
varying sources. Everyone now admits with Tacitus[10] that Livy was
scrupulously honest, that he was fair, that he did not permit himself to
fabricate—as Caelius and Valerius seem to have done—and that he chose
good sources when they were available; but a historian needs more than
these virtues. What we miss most in this respect is his failure to go
insistently to primary sources. To be sure, it was impossible for a man
who set out to write a vast popular history—about three times the size of
Gibbon’s great life-work—to delve in the archives. Those documents were
not then catalogued and classified as they now are. Cato the younger,
for instance, when he needed an abstract of the treasury office for a
relatively brief period had to pay his assistants some 30,000 denarii to
have it made.[11] Ten times the amount would not have sufficed for Livy’s
extensive needs. He accordingly made use of what had been published,
such things as the _Annales Maximi_, collected down to the Gracchan
period, the magisterial lists as they had been revised by various hands,
and collections of laws and senatorial decrees that had been made for
the use of lawyers and law-makers. And some of these skeleton bones of
history he took from conscientious annalists like Fabius and Piso, who
specialized on such matters because they wrote not for the public but
for members of the senate and the ruling nobility. Livy’s purpose seems
to have been to write a readable and full history of Rome which would
displace the unreliable fictionalized history of Valerius Antias by
being equally well written but far more reliable. But if he had insisted
upon primary sources only he would not have completed one-tenth of his
very extensive task. Given his aim and purpose, his duty was to find and
exploit the best published documents and histories for each period, and
with very few exceptions this is what he did.

It was also his purpose—which a modern historian might well deny
himself—to set down the early legends of Rome. Here there were no
historical sources, and the question was whether to omit the legends—as
Mommsen has done—because they could not be considered worthy of credence,
whether to rationalize them and attempt to rescue a kernel of fact
as Piso did, and as Pais and Beloch have recently attempted to do,
or finally to set them down as found, with a warning that they were
legends. Mommsen’s method was facile but we are glad that Livy did not
use it. The legends are good literature; they also have a great value
in revealing the temper of those who accepted them and passed them to
future generations as worth having. Finally they prove upon comparison
with archaeological facts to have a sounder basis in fact than Mommsen
thought. Even if all their details be legendary, they represent a Rome
that could not have been far from the actual state. In fact they prove
to be nearer the actuality than the strange and lifeless civilization
that Mommsen reconstructed for the early period out of unscientific
etymologies and stereotyped conceptions of late legal institutions.

We are also glad that he did not follow Piso’s lead in trying to use
them “critically.” Had he done so he would have transmitted them in
garbled form and spoiled them, and won nothing in the process. We have
learned from recent attempts that this method is a failure. A Charlemagne
reconstructed from medieval French epics or a Theodoric shelled out of
the Diedrek legend would at best not be accurate history. Thirty years
ago our hyper-critical historians tried it, and moved all the early dates
of Roman history down a century or two. Archaeology has at least proved
this a mistake, and we now are moving the dates back and most of the
critics have got into the moving van. After all is said Livy’s method
was the soundest. His procedure was the more nearly scientific. It is
with exceeding good sense that he says in his preface: “The early stories
regarding Rome’s foundation that are handed down to us in poetic romances
rather than in sound historical records it is not my intention to support
or to refute.” And again in the preface of the sixth book he warns us
that very nearly all that he had written in the preceding five books—up
to the burning of Rome in 387—rested not on acceptable records but on
legend. And even thereafter, throughout his work, whenever for any
incident he is limited to the authors who employed legend he is quick to
warn the reader of the nature of the source. These passages show that
Livy was a sounder critic of Rome’s legends than Polybius was in respect
to Homeric stories. Historians who scold Livy for his preservation of
legends have not only missed their value but have misunderstood Livy’s
cues.

We have perhaps a fairer quarrel with him for following the Greek
custom of inserting fictive speeches in the body of his work. To the
modern reader many of them are tedious and create a suspicion of being
unreliable. It is never quite safe to quote a line from these speeches
as indisputable evidence on any event, though most of them contain the
gist of an actual speech delivered on the occasion stated. All we can
usually be sure of is that they give Livy’s conception of what was likely
to have been said by the speaker in the situation. That is often worth
having, for Livy usually knew more of the pertinent conditions than we
do and he possessed a sympathetic penetration into pristine characters
and events that enabled him to make valuable reconstructions. One has
only to read the several speeches attributed to Scipio Africanus to see
that they make a consistent and vivid portrait. If we have the patience
to read these speeches with Livy’s purpose in mind we shall know how to
profit by them. The convention was of course understood, and was no more
misleading than the equally artificial convention of modern historians
who employ a kind of fictional mind-reading, a “stream of consciousness”
device, which may be found on almost any page of Mommsen or De Sanctis.
Mommsen could hardly have made a silent character like Caesar real
without constantly conjecturing as to his intentions and motives, as when
he writes: “Evidently here too it was Caesar’s intention,” or again “When
Caesar projected the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to divine
his intentions” (and he puts down a page of divining), or again, “So far
Caesar might say that his object was attained.” These musings of a great
historian of our time are cast in a different form from the invented
harangues of Livy and the Greeks, but we read them with the same caution,
knowing that they are surmises. The historian, who like Livy and Mommsen
must deal with tantalizingly fragmentary sources, must have the liberty
to bridge the lacuna by some such method. But we will be on our guard
when reading such matter.

Thus far I have spoken of Livy’s work as affected by his aims and
methods. What is even more important for the reader who uses Livy is to
comprehend the varying quality of the available sources. For the long
period before 200 B.C. there was of course no writing of history at Rome.
Very meager records existed for most of the obscure period, 500-280, and
these had been exploited by Fabius, but they made no story that could
be told in a consecutive form. Hence their data were welded together
with the help of legend during the second century before Christ. Of the
story of the Samnite wars the mere skeleton is all we can accept as firm
history. And that was as true before Livy wrote as after. Neither he nor
anyone else could mend matters. For the Pyrrhic and First Punic War
the sources were good but the corresponding part of Livy is lost. For
books 21-30 the sources were full. Here two responsible participants,
Fabius and Cincius, told the story from the Roman viewpoint, while
three companions of Hannibal told the same story as they saw it from
the Punic camp.[12] Any tendency to exaggerate on either side could
at once be checked from the reports that came from the other, and the
excellent Greek historian Polybius came soon after and did a great deal
of checking. Here Livy had only to be diligent, fair, and honest to
be able to write reliably. The third decade of Livy is accordingly as
dependable history as we have of any ancient war. It is only in the brief
Spanish portion, for which there was no Punic account, and where Polybius
himself had written too enthusiastically of Scipio’s work, that we touch
quicksands.

Books 31-45 are not quite so firm. The chief difficulty here is that
there was no contemporaneous historian at Rome for this period except
Cato, who wrote a very brief account of a part of it. Polybius was the
first to compose the whole story, but excellent as he was, he came some
years after the events, had observed, so far as he did, only from his
home in Greece, depended largely upon biased Rhodian writers, and knew so
little about Rome’s activities outside of Greece that he omitted much,
in fact all of Rome’s internal and western history. Campaigns in Gaul
and Spain, for instance, did not get recorded at all until they were
well permeated with legend, and there was no account available from the
opponent’s side. Hence it is that here Livy is of necessity exceedingly
uneven, treading on a fairly firm corduroy for most of the important
events in Greece, but on a marshy ground of semi-legend when he has to
deal with western campaigns. Fortunately the somewhat scanty documents
of the state archives had been well culled before him by reliable men
like Piso, and these usually kept the legends from dangerous extremes. It
is a complete misunderstanding of Livy to suppose that he did not know
the weaknesses of Valerius Antias when he used him. Livy knew them all
along, but in some portions of this period he had no good source, had
nothing available but Valerius and his kind, who had set things down as
they heard them, fables and all. Livy’s frequent citation of Valerius
Antias does not betoken a gullible love of this writer, but is intended
as a danger signal. Here there are several boggy spots. But fortunately
the period deals largely with eastern affairs and for that portion the
sources were fairly good. It is fair to say that Livy did as well as was
to be done in his late day with the material and time available, and that
nine-tenths of this portion is acceptable history.

The difficulties that an author of Livy’s day had in dealing with the
source-materials may be illustrated by a few examples. Hannibal’s famous
route over the Alps is still being discussed, though Hannibal had with
him on the journey three Greek reporters who described it. Since they
had no maps and no compasses, and names of rivers, tribes, and mountains
had little interest for them, their accounts were so confused that
Polybius and Caelius, who used them, fell into hopeless confusion. Their
routes are quite impossible despite the fact that Polybius claims to
have searched for the pass. Livy’s route (from the mouth of the Iserè,
to the headwaters of the Durance, thence across the passes and down
to Turin) betrays lack of autopsy, but it is apparently based upon an
identification of place-names mentioned in the sources by the use of
some map of the Allobrogic country made, presumably, during Caesar’s
campaigns. Thus by using geographical knowledge recently attained he was
able to hit upon a very probable solution that was hidden to earlier
writers.

In my second illustration, the account of the Scipionic trials, Livy
was less successful.[13] His record of the court procedure in the cases
in the 38th book is confused in the extreme; but it is doubtful whether
the facts were any longer available. No historian was writing at Rome
at the time of the impeachments, and even if there had been one he
probably would then have omitted mention of them as being outside the
true province of political history. Even Polybius, who was devoted to
the fame of the great Scipio, did not give any account of the trials,
merely referring to them casually when giving a brief character sketch
of Scipio. Nor would there have been any records in the archives, since
the trials were not completed and the archives kept only the results
of completed decisions. Finally, the affair fell at a time when it was
not yet generally customary to publish speeches. The two or three that
Livy found seemed to be of dubious authenticity and were harangues that
gave but few cues to the real facts. In fact no historian wrote up the
affair until long afterwards, when partisan legends, some favorable to
the Catonian position, and others to the Scipionic view, had obscured all
the facts. It seems today that Livy yielded too much to the pro-Scipionic
accounts, thereby undervaluing the opposite views, and many attempts
have been made to amend him with the aid of an excursus which he
inserted—perhaps in a second edition—and with the help of various casual
references. In this affair the facts are now beyond reach and probably
were so in Livy’s day. Here, then, Livy did not follow hazy sources
from choice. There were apparently no accurate records of the affair
available. They were all late, and packed with hearsay partisanship.

Finally, we may well take an instance in which political custom and
psychology were misunderstood by his predecessors so as to mislead
Livy as well. The Second Macedonian War was brought on by a number of
motives: fear of Philip, a desire for revenge, an enthusiasm for the
Greek republics which were being oppressed, and other similar factors.
The declaration, as such declarations usually are, emphasized not the
important psychological imponderables but “the obligations of Rome
to her allies.” Now in point of fact there was no legal obligation
that had to be heeded, and the states to be aided were _amici_ but
not permanent _socii_. But before any Roman historian—it was fifty
years later—undertook to record this war and enumerate its causes the
distinction between _amici_ and _socii_ had been virtually obliterated
and the writers listed the several states as _socii_, though in a strict
sense they were not. Had Livy tested these historians by reference to
the original treaties in the record office he might have found reason
to distrust them. But this of course was not his task. Now it cannot be
done, but it seems probable that in this case the historians who first
recorded the events were so far removed from them that they failed to
comprehend the precise factors that caused that war, explained it in
terms comprehensible in their day, and thus misled Livy.

It is my belief that modern emenders and critics who have not
sufficiently studied the various sources of Livy have gone too far in
assuming that Livy is untrustworthy in any and every portion of his
work. When the necessary distinctions have been made we shall learn
to use him to better advantage. De Sanctis[14] has shown that Livy’s
much criticized account of Hannibal’s march on Rome in 211 B.C. is
more reasonable than that of Caelius. Livy’s account of the battle of
the Trebia, which was formerly pronounced impossible, becomes lucid
if we correct our conceptions of the early geography of the region of
Placentia.[15] In 1926 while Beloch was pronouncing the Livian tradition
of the third-century Fasti impossible, an Italian scholar was publishing
a newly discovered fragment which proved the tradition correct. Beloch
had to retract in an appendix of his volume.[16] Editions of the fourth
decade of Livy have regularly tampered with a reference to the building
of the Apollo temple in 179 B.C. because they supposed the temple was
earlier. A recent examination of the materials of the temple proves
Livy’s text correct. We now accept Livy’s statement of Hannibal’s march
over the Alps as preferable to that of Polybius, as we know that his
topography of New Carthage is better though Polybius had visited the
place. By a simple emendation of one word Conway has revealed that Livy
was correct about Hannibal’s route into Etruria, though the account has
been severely criticized for a century. With Kromayer we also accept his
topography of the battle of Cannae and of Metaurus. And so the work of
recovery continues. The day is approaching when we shall be able to give
Livy his due for a good method, for honesty, and for fairness, as well as
for a lucid style.


FOOTNOTES

[1] Inez Scott, _Early Roman Tradition in the Light of Archaeology_,
Memoirs Am. Acad. in Rome, VII (1929). The archaeological evidence
referred to in this chapter may be found in my _Roman Buildings of the
Republic_ (Rome 1924), and in an essay on the “Early Temple of Castor,”
Mem. Am. Acad. in Rome, V; a part of this chapter has already appeared in
the _Am. Hist. Rev._ (1927).

[2] E.g. Rosenberg, _Einleitung und Quellenkunde_, and J. T. Shotwell,
_Introduction to the History of History_.

[3] See art. “Licinius Macer,” by Münzer, _in_ _Realencycl._, XIII.

[4] Cato’s first three books of _Origines_ similarly recorded the legends
of other Italian cities without pretending to judge their historical
value, but in his history of his own day he proved himself a very
accurate observer. However, he seems to have treated only episodes that
interested him. Piso, the last of the early annalists, introduced the
unwise method of rationalizing the early myths in order to make them more
plausible.

[5] Some of the evidence may be found in my _Roman Buildings_, 53, 78, 83.

[6] Cicero, like many a modern statesman, desired a favorable
presentation of his deeds in history and biography. However, when it was
not a question of his own deeds, his historical ideals were very high. In
his _Brutus_ (292-4) he insists that history requires the same accuracy
as testimony given in court under oath. In the _De Oratore_ (ii. 62-3)
he says that the first requirement of the historian is to have courage
to tell the whole truth and never to deceive. He consulted the archives
even to get an accurate setting for his fictitious dialogues (_Ad. Att._
xiii. 33, 3; xiii. 3, 3; xii. 5, 3). Some modern critics have found heart
to suspect Cicero’s historical ideals because he insisted that history
should be well written!

[7] _Op. cit._, 201.

[8] Polybius VI, 56; XIII, 3; XVIII, 35; XXXII, 8-9.

[9] Cf. Klotz, art. “Livius,” _in_ Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll, XIII, 816 for a
critical bibliography.

[10] Tacitus, _Ann._ 7, 34: _fidei praeclarus_.

[11] Plut. _Cato minor_, 18. On Roman archives see art. “Archive,” _in_
Pauly-Wissowa-Kroll, II, 560.

[12] Silenus, Sosylus, and Chaireas; Eumachus of Naples may also have
been a contemporary. The explicit details of the battles in Campania may
well owe something to him.

[13] Livy, 38, 50.

[14] De Sanctis, _Storia dei Romani_, III, 2, 338 pp.

[15] See _Jour. Roman Studies_, 1919, 202.

[16] Beloch, _Röm. Geschichte_, 89, 629.




CHAPTER VII

CICERO’S RESPONSE TO EXPERIENCE


A shelf of books has been written upon the Greek sources of Cicero’s
ideas, and if one were to discuss the manner in which Cicero’s own
experiences modified those ideas before he accepted them for his own
use one would ask for a second shelf of at least equal length. Cicero’s
political works, like the _De Republica_ and the _De Legibus_ were
written after an extensive perusal of Greek political masterpieces, but
they are not, like many of the philosophical essays, paraphrases. The
author betrays the fact that he has been in politics for a long time,
that he has in fact been a party leader and has held the highest offices
of state. He does deference abundantly to Plato, Polybius, and Panaetius
for good suggestions, but it is an experienced Roman statesman who has
the last word on every issue at stake.

Cicero’s various political works are not all in agreement with each other
nor with the utterances upon the same themes found in his letters and
orations, nor do his political acts follow an unbending course. He lived
in fact through a long period of revolutionary changes in politics, when
consistency through a life-time would have betokened either inability to
learn or stubborn intransigence. Drumann set him down as a turncoat, a
judgment which Mommsen reiterated in a great variety of phrases. Heinze,
in a mistaken attempt to rescue Cicero’s reputation, tried to prove that
he had been a fairly consistent conservative through life. Zielinski, on
the other hand, endeavored to show that Cicero’s theories could be traced
to his reading, and that a search in these sources would explain Cicero’s
somewhat wavering course.

All these views seem to me to emerge from cloisters that are very
far removed from the kind of democratic politics that Cicero lived
through, a kind of politics not entirely unfamiliar to some of us from
daily observation. Drumann and Mommsen wrote in an atmosphere where
firm and consistent loyalty to the existing régime was expected of all
gentlemen and where firm independence and detachment were taken as
marks of vacillation; and even Heinze’s apology breathes some of the
same spirit.[1] As for Cicero’s dependence upon the theories of his
predecessors, it must be admitted that no Roman knew them better or
received more from them. But professors who delve in books all their
lives are apt to over-estimate the effect of written theory and of
tralatician ideas, and to under-estimate the momentum of facts that
compel practical men to take quick and unpremeditated action. Very often
Cicero saw the value of an idea in Plato or Panaetius only after an
experience of his own had thrown him pell-mell upon the realities that
disclosed the meaning of their abstract ideas. I wish here very briefly
to outline his changes in political thought against the background of his
experience and his reading.

In speaking here of Cicero’s party affiliations we must recall that
political parties remained rather amorphous at Rome, since all citizens
could cast their votes directly in the legislative assemblies without
using representatives elected by means of well-organized party machinery;
since labor, confined largely to slaves, had no voice in politics, and
finally since commerce and industry, which are usually very powerful
factors in legislation, never became strong enough at Rome to formulate
an effective program. In the fourth century B.C. the plebeians had
struggled to win political equality with the patricians; in the second
century an era of good feeling reigned in which Polybius was aware only
of a well-balanced coordination of functions between the executive,
senate, and popular assembly acting in self-restrained rivalry; after
the Gracchi the party issues, when at any time they became acute, could
usually be formulated in terms of the question whether the assembly was
sovereign or whether the aristocratic senate had the right to direct or
check its operations. The special questions that arose during the period
and that invited a frequent shifting of party loyalties were numerous,
as for instance, the disposal of public lands, the constitution of the
law-courts, the enfranchisement of the allies, the special ambitions of
men like Marius, Sulla, Caesar, and Pompey, the power of the tribunate,
and the legality of the _senatus consultum ultimum_. During this period
the knights, the propertied middle-class, were usually found to be
aligned on the democratic side because they could more readily secure
what they desired by such a coalition; but whenever the populace showed
an inclination to threaten the rights of property they quickly shifted
toward the senate.

Cicero’s father was a knight from the municipality of Arpinum, and a
neighbor and distant relative of Marius. The old gentleman had marked
leanings away from the theories of pure democracy; nevertheless in
practice his relationship with Marius, his residence in a municipality
where sympathies with the Italian allies begging for the franchise were
strong, and his status as a knight were factors that at times drew him
toward democracy. It is not surprising therefore that the young Cicero
was placed in tutelage under Scaevola the augur, one of the liberal
senators who presently showed his courage by refusing to vote Marius a
traitor at Sulla’s orders. We can also comprehend why the young student
eagerly followed the speeches of Sulpicius, the tribune who tried to
secure a practical franchise for the Italians, and in order to do so
placed Marius in command of the army by removing Sulla. In the years 88-7
it is clear that Cicero lived in a very liberal atmosphere where optimate
politics were not in favor. During the domination of Cinna, Cicero, who
was then diligently studying philosophy, took no active part in politics,
but it is apparent from his later judgments that he bore no love for
this brutal leader of the democracy,[2] though the knights in general
continued to support him. On the other hand, when Sulla returned, seized
the dictatorship and executed sixteen hundred knights, Cicero acquired
for this aristocratic leader an aversion that left its mark throughout
all his later writings. Through these years of revolution, therefore,
Cicero’s sympathies were determined chiefly by antipathy to the
respective leaders of both extremes rather than by any party allegiance.

But when the courts were finally revived in the year 80, Cicero soon
appeared in the defense of Roscius, whom no speaker of distinction had
dared defend because a creature of Sulla had suborned the attack upon
him. We may freely admit that Cicero did not take this case in order to
reveal the venality of Sulla’s régime. He would have betrayed his client
if he had used this opportunity to attack Sulla, for he spoke before a
jury of senators. It is of course quite apparent that if up to this time
Cicero had been an outspoken opponent of the aristocracy, the friends
of Roscius would not have risked employing him in the presence of that
jury. But it is equally certain that Cicero would not have taken a case
that was sure to lead to the exposure of Sulla’s favorite, Chrysogonus,
if he had been a confirmed follower of Sulla. In the speech he made one
definite statement of his political sympathies: “Those who know me, know
... that, after the peaceful settlement, which I especially desired,
could not be consummated, I favored the victory of the side that has
conquered.” This admission, that Sulla was not his first choice, made
before a jury of senators at a time when few men dared speak against
Sulla, can hardly be used to prove Cicero a supporter of Sulla. It is
in fact clear evidence that his disapproval of Sulla’s use of military
force was so well known that it had to be admitted in court and, for
the sake of his client, excused so far as possible by an emphasis upon
a later course of acquiescence. The peroration of the speech, a very
courageous exposure of the brutalities of the Sullan régime, which gives
evidence of a keen insight into social psychology, proves that Cicero
fully understood the evils of the dictatorship.

    There is not one among you who does not comprehend that the
    Roman people, formerly humane even in the treatment of enemies,
    is now suffering from a wave of cruelty here at home....
    This not only has resulted in the utterly brutal murder of
    many citizens, but has destroyed in our people, once so
    compassionate, the capacity to feel any pity.[3]

When we consider these two passages in connection with the fact that
Cicero—without pay of course—took a case which none of the distinguished
men of his day dared touch, we can only reach the conclusion that
Cicero’s aversion to Sulla and his crew was at this time the dominant
influence in his life. This does not indeed prove Cicero a democrat, but
it does go far to explain why Cicero did not for the next sixteen years
reveal any sympathy for the senatorial cause, and why during that period
he frequently criticizes Sulla and his policies,[4] while mentioning the
Gracchi in terms of high praise.[5] Cicero was still a moderate liberal.

Cicero was in Greece when Sulla died and therefore had no share in the
abortive revolution of Lepidus. On his return he took few political
cases, giving a large part of his time to practice in civil cases (Verr.
II, 181), through which he won enough distinction to secure election to
the questorship and aedileship.

In the first Verrine oration Cicero inveighed bitterly against the
past venality of the senatorial courts, instituted by Sulla, and the
selfishness of the oligarchy. This was of course in part due to his
plan to frighten the jurors into a severe judgment, for he went on to
remind them that a reform of the court had been proposed and indeed
was probably imminent. However, it is clear that Cicero was eager to
take the onerous case. He fought for the privilege, he spent months of
expensive and unpaid effort in the midst of the canvassing season upon
it, he went out of his way to reveal the sins of the senatorial misrule
of the provinces, and to speak with high respect of democratic heroes
like the Gracchi, and of democratic proposals like the return of the
tribunate. All these things prove that Cicero could not at this time have
been considered a supporter of the aristocracy. The equestrian order,
with which he was still closely identified despite his entrance into the
senate, had strongly supported Pompey and had united with the populace
in electing him on a moderate democratic program. There can be no doubt
that Cicero had voted wholeheartedly for Pompey and that he supported the
equestrian-democratic _bloc_ and program. If in the Sullan days he was an
independent liberal with aversions to both Cinna and Sulla, he was now
willing to work with the liberal group, even if a somewhat independent
adherent who was waiting to see whether the party made good before
committing himself definitely.

With Pompey’s accession to the consulship the fortunes of the knights,
who had suffered untold disasters under Sulla, reached a turning point.
The restoration of the censorship meant among other things that the
equestrian corporations were again to be assigned provincial contracts;
the restoration of the tribuneship meant that they would not have to
appeal to the hostile senate for desired administrative measures; the
revision of the court panels gave back to them both power and prestige.
Since Pompey proved to be their friend they determined to honor him and
use him further. In 67 they demanded that the seas be cleared of pirates
so that the commerce in which they were interested would be protected;
and they demanded that Pompey be placed in command of the war with
extraordinary powers. When the senate objected, the knights, resting
their arguments upon Gracchan precedents, took the bill directly to
the assembly. The senate considered this revolutionary. The populace,
flattered by this appeal to their assembly and favorably disposed to
Pompey, supported the knights. When the senate induced a tribune to veto
the measure, Gabinius, assuming the validity of the Gracchan theory of
“recall,” threatened to present a bill to depose this tribune, thereby
forcing him to desist. This was tantamount to accepting the democratic
theory of popular sovereignty in its extreme form, and Cicero seems to
have acquiesced. At any rate when Cicero mentioned the incident in the
_Pro Cornelio_ two years later, he raised no objection to the procedure,
and afterwards when he quarreled with Gabinius he did not cast this act
in his teeth.

In the year 66, when Manilius introduced a proposal to place Pompey
in command in Asia, the same coalition of knights and populace again
insulted the senate by taking the bill directly to the assembly. On this
occasion Cicero was the principal speaker for the coalition; and he spoke
as a full-fledged democrat, unashamed. One may of course suppose that
Cicero was largely influenced by life-long connections with the knights
and by a deep devotion to Pompey, apparently dating from the time when he
served under Pompey’s father in the Social War. One also realizes that
the Manilian law had a very great practical appeal, and that a rising and
ambitious young statesman like Cicero would see the advantage of being
chosen as the spokesman for such an important measure of the party then
in power. Be that as it may, the speech of that day is the speech of an
important and accepted member of the popular-equestrian party.[6]

This was the year of Cicero’s praetorship in which he had to serve as
judge in the trial of Licinius Macer, a radical democrat, who was accused
of misappropriation. Cicero mentions the case to Atticus immediately
after the trial, remarking—though a judge had but little discretion in
such matters—that he had been favorably disposed to the culprit in his
management of the case, and had received much favorable comment from the
people for his attitude.[7]

A democratic attitude is again shown by Cicero in his defense of
Cornelius the next year (65). Cornelius in his tribuneship had angered
the senate by proposing several radical plebiscites and especially by his
disregard of a tribunician veto. When the herald had been forbidden by a
tribune to read the bill of Cornelius in question, Cornelius himself had
read it to the assembly, thereby not only breaking an old law but also
in a new manner putting into effect the Gracchan theory of the “recall”
which would strip the senate of its power to interfere in legislation.
When Cornelius was haled to court by some senators on the charge of
_lese majesté_ Cicero undertook to defend him; in this defense Cicero
confined himself to minimizing the charge of the actual breach of a law,
but did not offer any apologies for the attempt of Cornelius to apply
the radical theory of “recall.” Indeed he actually defended that part of
the procedure by referring to the precedent set by Gabinius two years
before.[8] Here then he accepted again the Gracchan theory of popular
sovereignty. In the years 66-5 at least Cicero behaved like a confirmed
democrat.

In July of 65, about the time of his speech, Cicero wrote to Atticus that
he had begun to think of his canvassing for the consulship and that he
was certain of the support of all but the nobles, that is to say, he knew
that the equestrian and democratic groups would vote for him. A few days
later he still felt himself so closely allied with the democratic group
that he was considering giving legal aid to Catiline. That however he did
not do. A careful investigation into the merits of the case was probably
enough to dissuade him.

This year in fact proved a new turning point in Cicero’s politics. Pompey
had now been absent for two years and his coalition lacked effective
leadership. The democrats had suffered in prestige by electing to the
consulship Autronius and Sulla, who were presently convicted of bribery
and deposed. In the reaction against the radicals two conservatives had
been elected. The deposed candidates made matters worse for their party
by entering into (or so it was widely rumored) a conspiracy to seize
power, only to fail again. Catiline, one of their aides, continued the
agitation with more and more questionable proposals, and the party was
so far discredited that the soberer element began to look for saner
leadership. The party itself, under such leadership as Catiline could
give, drifted far toward the left, and among the stronger men only
ambitious politicians like Caesar and Crassus—who hoped to use its
fortunes to their advantage—remained in nominal allegiance. Cicero of
course could not follow such guidance, and it is probable that most
of the property-owning knights had drifted rightward before the year
was over. These men of the middle class had been willing to support
the Gracchan theory of popular sovereignty because it seemed to insure
the possibility of progressive legislation; but when the more radical
democrats began to talk of using the assembly for monetary inflation and
moratoria on private debts, the knights were of course frightened. Caesar
and Crassus added to their fears by proposing to ask for imperialistic
commands for themselves and to check the power of Pompey who had been
winning provinces which the knights hoped to exploit under a stable
régime. Unfortunately none of Cicero’s utterances have survived from this
momentous year (July 65 to July 64) when, like the rest of the knights,
he must have drifted steadily away from the old coalition, or rather
when he saw the left wing of the party drifting steadily away from the
time-honored Roman devotion to law and property rights.

Before the election of 64, in which Cicero stood for the consulship,
Catiline became ever more a demagogue and made an alliance with the
unprincipled Antonius. These two men received the support of Caesar and
Crassus, but of course not of the moderates. The conservative element
of the state disliked to vote for a _novus homo_ like Cicero, but the
only other sound candidates were Cornificius and Galba, who were little
known and fairly sure of defeat. Cicero was certain to get most of the
equestrian vote, he would draw heavily from the popular vote because of
his well-known liberal connections, he had the favor of Pompeian soldiers
and adherents, and on economic and social questions he could be trusted.
The optimates therefore decided to support him although he was not one of
them. But the veering was not all on their part. Cicero also had learned
from the talk of Catiline, Caesar, and Crassus that the Gracchan theory
of popular sovereignty without a senatorial check might lead to dangerous
economic and imperialistic legislation. He accordingly abandoned the
theory that the senate had no constitutional right to interfere in the
popular will, a theory which he had supported in 66 and 65. He doubtless
said so in the senate before election day, when saying so would count.
At any rate very soon after he assumed office, when the question of the
senate’s _auctoritas_ came up in Caesar’s prosecution of Rabirius, he
threw all his energy into the defense of Rabirius and the senate’s right
to proclaim martial law,[9] and he did so by reminding the people that
their great leader Marius, contrary to his party politics, had recognized
the authority of the senate when a great crisis came. This served well as
an apology, if one were needed, for his own abandonment of the central
democratic doctrine when his eyes had been opened to its dangers. Cicero
thus led the knights into a coalition with the optimates and continued
through the year to cement a _concordia ordinum_.

During the summer the second violent canvass of Catiline on a reckless
program of revolution only made Cicero a more confirmed conservative. To
save the state from revolution he had himself to propose a senatorial
order of martial law in October, a measure he would doubtless have fought
three years before, and under its provisions he had the conspirators put
to death, an act which made him the prime defender and advocate of the
central optimate theory, and later caused his banishment at the hands of
Caesar’s democratic coalition. Thus experience and circumstances had in
three years turned the avowed democrat into an extreme optimate. It is
needless to follow his career in detail: the desertion of his coalition
by the knights because Caesar offered them what they desired, his
banishment, which only confirmed his convictions that he was right, his
failure on his return to undo Caesar’s popular legislation because the
senate feared Caesar and dared not follow Cicero. He still clung for a
while to his new doctrine of the senate’s importance, as the _Pro Sestio_
proves, but it was a futile policy. The senators, fearing Caesar, failed
to respond. He saw then, if not before, that the senate could not rule
Rome.

Cicero now retired from active political life and found time to think and
draw conclusions from his experiences for a carefully considered review
of Roman political needs. In the _De Republica_, which he wrote in 54-1,
shortly before the Civil War, he carefully reviewed the history of the
Roman constitution in order to lay a sound foundation for a durable and
reasonable program in case the senate and people should ever regain the
freedom of action which the first “triumvirate” had taken away. There was
some hope that such a program might have a chance, for Crassus was out
of reach and Pompey and Caesar were noticeably falling apart. In this
book he shows that Rome had definitely rejected autocratic government,
and that, as Polybius had already seen, it had combined the machinery of
popular sovereignty with aristocratic checks under strong but short-term
executives. In showing that this form was historically based and that it
had operated well in the happiest days of Rome, Cicero became convinced
that he must give a larger place in his book to the popular assembly than
he had been willing to accord it since the days of Catiline. He says with
rather surprising firmness that the populace must have liberty of action
or they will revolt, and that liberty was a natural right that no man of
intelligence could propose to destroy. This is virtually a confession
that he had gone too far toward oligarchy in his own consulship. He knew
now that if the nobles had been more friendly to the populace, Caesar
would not have been able to seize control. He therefore admits the theory
of popular sovereignty which could not be denied after the events of 59,
but he also seeks for some method by which to check the danger of such a
concession. His new theory is that the body politic should be educated to
accept the leadership and advice of some strong person who might, like
the revered _princeps senatus_ of old, be honored as guardian (_rector_
or _gubernator_) and whose considered advice would be respected by all.
He says explicitly that he has in mind such a man as Scipio Aemilianus,
who at times served in just such a capacity even when he held only the
honorary designation of _princeps senatus_.

In the fragments that we have the precise intention of the great office
does not come out clearly. One scholar believes that Cicero had Pompey in
mind, and that Augustus later tried to put the program in action under
his own régime.[10] A few years later Cicero in a letter to his most
trusted friend says that Pompey had never measured up to the height of
his ideal rector,[11] which seems to be a confession that Cicero had had
Pompey in mind as a possible candidate though fearing that Pompey would
prove deficient as a leader. It can hardly be doubted that Cicero must
have had moments of regrets that the state had not accepted him, Cicero,
for such unofficial leadership after his consulship. It is quite clear
that if Cicero had at that time proved himself a man of outstanding
qualities of leadership he might have become for many years a rector of
the type that he describes. At any rate in 43, after Caesar’s murder,
Cicero assumed for himself the position of rector and gubernator, though
he held no office.[12] However, while writing the _De Republica_ in 54-1,
Cicero could hardly have supposed that his day of influence would return
so long as Caesar or Pompey continued in power.

Another possibility is that when Caesar appeared to be aiming at some
form of autocracy, Cicero entertained the hope of converting that
powerful man by his monograph on government to accept a constitution of
good old traditions and to assume under that constitution a legal and
dignified position such as Scipio had for a while enjoyed. There is at
any rate a significant passage in the _De Provinciis Consularibus_,[13]
written in the year 56 (two years before he began to write the _De
Republica_) in which, after much flattering of Caesar, he suggested that
since Caesar was as moderate as he was wise he would be willing to accept
a constitutional position and act in harmony with the senate, if the
senate would act in a conciliatory manner. That passage may be the safest
clue to follow in trying to fathom the intentions of the _De Republica_.

Cicero’s hopes, however, were shattered. Pompey continued to fall short
of deserving full confidence, and Caesar grew into a politician bent on
his own advancement. The civil war and the victory of Caesar antiquated
the doctrine that Cicero had preached in the _De Republica_, and he
had to revise his program once more. Caesar’s dictatorship temporarily
destroyed the republic, but Cicero could not avoid hoping that there
might be a day of recovery. When he wrote the _De Legibus_[14] a few
years later, Pompey was dead, Caesar was playing the tyrant and Cicero
himself had little hope of gaining the helm of influence. He therefore
abandoned the idea of a _rector_, and yet he knew that if Caesar should
die or be removed the state would again need a constitution. In this new
work accordingly he reverts to the historical tradition of the Scipionic
republic, but openly assigns to the senate the leadership that it tacitly
had had before Scipio’s day, by proposing to allow the senate to control
legislation by the requirement of a vote of ratification (_eius decreta
rata sunto_). This proposed change, which would eliminate the dangers
inherent in the tribunate, shows that Cicero had learned from Caesar’s
career that a rector might become too powerful, that while popular
sovereignty must be recognized as a safety-valve in legislation, the
senate must be given a firmer hold on legislation so that it might check
both the assembly and the magistrates at critical moments. He was once
more, and for reasons easy to comprehend, an advocate of aristocracy.

Cicero had only one brief opportunity to take the helm once more, and
then, in the war against Antony, during the last year of his life, the
state was in such confusion and under such stress of compulsion that
it is not easy to say what theory of the constitution Cicero actually
followed. During his unofficial leadership (he probably had frequent
occasion to think of himself as the _rector_ of his _De Republica_) the
senate carried on the war under a senatus consultum ultimum, which was
regular enough at times of internal disturbance. When it was necessary
to impose a direct tax upon all citizens—which had not been necessary
since 167—the senate seems to have voted the measure without reference
to the assembly. But this also, illogical as it may seem,[15] followed
precedent. Finally, it was the senate that annulled the legislation of
Antony, for which there was also an abundance of precedents. There was,
however, one piece of legislation during this period which betrays the
direction of Cicero’s thought. The _lex Vibia_,[16] an act to confirm
the legality of Caesar’s deed, was ordered to be submitted to the
_centuriate assembly_ on an _auctoritas senatus_, and this shows clearly
that the democratic constitution of Caesar’s régime was now out of favor.
The plebeian assembly could hardly have been slighted in this instance
through fear of the lower classes, for the measure was popular enough. It
was clearly a procedure which could only have meant that Cicero intended
the senate to control legislation by use of the most conservative
machinery provided by the old constitution of Rome. Cicero’s last acts
therefore reveal him even farther away from the democratic policy than
those of his consulship.

This review reveals Cicero as inconsistent in party loyalty; it shows
that he began as a moderate, then, forced by hatred of Sullan tyranny
and induced by immediate practical needs, that he plunged well into
democracy, only to be driven by the democratic excesses and the offices
of responsibility deeply into conservative sympathies. Experience and
observation next led him to revise his theories, first in the direction
of liberalism, then, reacting to Caesar’s errors, toward conservatism.
Yet we need not, with Mommsen, call Cicero a turncoat. He generally
followed a straighter course than the parties that shifted all about him.
Nor need we, with Heinze, insist that he was consistently an optimate all
the years before his consulship, for he was always willing to seek new
theories of government when experience proved the old ones inadequate.
Finally, Zielinski’s view that he acted generally on theories found in
his reading is perhaps less justified than any other. Cicero read widely
and certainly gained some of his ideas from books—the source-hunter may
find parallels in abundance—but when Cicero acted it was not merely
because of what he had found in a book, but because he had had actual
experience and was feeling his way to the logical conclusion of his
observations.

Here we have attempted to illustrate very briefly how Cicero reached his
conclusions in political theory through experience, as in a preceding
chapter we stressed forensic experience as the chief formative factor of
Ciceronian prose. In both of these fields Cicero wrote not primarily as a
well-read man transmitting the views of others, but rather as the chief
authority of his day by virtue of his own accomplishments. In tracing the
body of philosophic essays which he compiled with amazing speed during
the six months of retirement in the year 45, we find a very different
product, for, as he told Atticus, who was surprised by this prolific
output, these are and purport to be merely paraphrases and translations
from the Greek.

In a sense, of course, we find the fruit of Cicero’s experiences in
these also, since he usually chose for paraphrasing what he felt to be
significant, and in each work he omitted what met with his disfavor,
expanding and illustrating the ideas which appealed to him. Furthermore,
since he was concerned rather in presenting clearly the points that
interested him than in giving a faithful translation of the Greek, the
resultant essays often, even when they are to some extent mosaics,
give us very precisely the Ciceronian pattern. Large parts of his
philosophical compilations may therefore be taken to illustrate Cicero’s
own convictions reached through his own experience; and when we deal with
such work it may be more fruitful to consider Cicero’s own contribution
to the final design than to hunt the original quarry from which he drew
each _tessera_.

Let us turn to another illustration of how Cicero’s views altered and
enlarged through personal experience until at last, even though he
expressed himself through paraphrased passages, he succeeds in making us
feel that he is giving us an epitome of his own personal convictions. For
this purpose we may consider his statements about the survival of the
soul after death.

In his youth, especially during the civil wars when a public career
seemed for a time closed, Cicero had devoted much time to the study
of philosophy, and, being a normal Roman of the old type, to whom the
actualities of life meant more than metaphysical speculation, for whom
the world of realities was too full of interest to allow any time for
mystical contemplation, he had naturally accepted the agnostic attitude
of the New Academy toward the “unknowable.” With the New Academy he
was theoretically ready to admit “probabilities,” even to act on
probabilities, but epistemology had no appeal for him. Of course there
are degrees of likelihood and the degrees are apt to vary with mood and
occasion. When Cicero spoke before the populace he could see enough
plausibility in the argument for Divinity to assume its existence for
the time being. But when he wrote to his intimate friends the likelihood
did not seem pressing enough to receive mention. He supposed with
many other agnostic statesmen of his day that official worship of the
gods was useful in the maintenance of the social system,[17] and this
explains why, when he stood before the people, giving official advice,
his faith seemed to expand. We need not take such faith very seriously.
With the problem of the survival of the soul—except for a brief toying
with a Platonic Myth in the _De Republica_—Cicero did not concern himself
till very late in life. Like most Romans he explained to himself the
phrases of the Greek mystics in a simple formula of “Gloria,” which,
when analyzed, resolved itself into something like the “immortality of
fame.”[18]

We all know how great a rôle the insistence upon fame and reputation
played in the education of the aristocracy at Rome. Since parents and
teachers had no religious authority and no fixed ethical sanctions
to which to appeal in presenting the claims of duty, the examples of
ancestral heroes and the _mos majorum_ came to be their decalogue. In
their own homes children were shown the _imagines_ of their famous
ancestors and taught to read the inscribed _tituli_ of their honors and
triumphs. “Go thou and do likewise” was the obvious inference from daily
lessons. It is safe to say that the constantly instilled respect for
heroic ancestors was the most powerful factor in ethical teaching that
ancient Rome knew. When Cicero so readily drops into the remark that
what concerns him is what posterity will say of him a thousand years
hence, he reveals the effectiveness of this moral pedagogy. Again and
again in his speeches he frankly admits that _Gloria_, the immortality
of fame, is what spurs him to incessant activity. The immortality of the
“Choir Invisible”[19] was the only survival that the normal Roman of the
cultured classes of the time expected.

Cicero, who read very widely in Greek writers, had of course come in
contact with many mystics. He had enjoyed the poetry of Plato’s myths; he
was a good friend of Neo-Pythagoreans like Nigidius Figulus, with whom he
had long conversations on this very subject at Ephesus in 51; he had also
conversed with and read the works of Posidonius, who interpolated much
oriental mysticism into his Stoicism. But all of this had left few traces
in Cicero’s utterances, until a very great grief overwhelmed him.[20] In
February of the year 45, two years before his death, his daughter Tullia,
his one deep passion, died after years of suffering. Cicero gave in
completely to his sorrow and withdrew to the forest of Astura, where he
walked alone and communed with himself for several weeks. All his friends
sent him letters of consolation, but they were typical Roman letters that
gave little cheer, only reminding him that it was the duty of a Cicero
to be strong, that life had little of value now that liberty was lost,
that his own life was near its end. What he wanted was some ray of hope,
and he sought the books of the mystics to give him what he needed. He
read and pondered and temporarily accepted a “probability” that he had
occasionally used in speeches to the populace, but never considered of
use to himself. And he wrote it out in a _Consolatio_ in order to make
it more persuasive. The basis of this pamphlet was Crantor’s argument,
taken from Plato, that the soul reveals capacities that imply eternal
existence.[21] But Cicero carried the argument to a conclusion that
neither Crantor nor Plato would have accepted, the conclusion that Tullia
still lived, would live eternally as a divine being, and if divine must
have a shrine. This means that Cicero’s new faith, though suggested by
reading which had hitherto had no appeal for him, was vitalized now
through his deep love for Tullia, that it took its meaning from his own
experience, and must reach the conclusion that his love for her dictated.
We know, of course, that he sought justification for this conclusion in
whatever authority he could find. He says so explicitly in a letter to
Atticus:[22]

    In trying to escape from the painful sting of recollection I
    take refuge in recalling something to your memory. Whatever you
    think of it, please pardon me. The fact is _I find that some
    of the authors over whom I am poring consider appropriate the
    very thing that I have often discussed with you, and I hope
    you approve of it. I mean the shrine._ Please give it all the
    attention your affection for me dictates.... I shall use all
    the opportunities permitted in an age as erudite as this to
    consecrate her memory by every kind of memorial borrowed from
    the genius of all the masters, Greek and Latin. Perhaps it
    will only gall my wound: but I consider myself pledged by a
    kind of vow or promise; and I am more concerned about the long
    ages when I shall not be than about my short day, which, short
    though it is, seems all too long to me. I have tried everything
    and find nothing that gives me rest.

In Greek writers, who justified the apotheosis of Hellenic rulers by
appealing to the cult of “Heroes,” he could find such arguments and he
seems even to have employed Euhemeristic writings, for he ended the
strange _Consolatio_ with the words:[23]

    If the children of Cadmos, of Amphion and of Tyndarus were
    carried to heaven in glory, she too deserves this honor. This
    I shall accomplish and with the approval of the immortal gods
    shall declare and consecrate you before all the world ... as
    one of the immortals.

His well-stocked library of Greek books was full of such mystical ideas,
but they had had no meaning for him till this moment. Now he seized
the idea with determination, and to Atticus, who doubtless thought it
a passing whim and gave him no encouragement, he wrote almost every
day urging him to find a suitable spot for the shrine he proposed to
consecrate, and to engage an architect who should plan its erection.

This mood of mysticism probably lasted only a few months. The reading
he went through in seeking justification for his conclusions led him to
write the _Hortensius_, that enthusiastic eulogy of philosophy which
converted St. Augustine to a new mode of life. In its fragments we find
traces of the same un-Roman mysticism. Then in the first _Tusculan
Disputation_, which he wrote in May of the same year, he repeated the
gist of the argument which he had used in the _Consolatio_ and with
nearly as much assurance. However, in this same month he began his first
draft of the _Academica_, a careful review of epistemological theory, and
this brought him back to his earlier agnosticism. His letters now show
less interest in the proposed shrine. In July they cease entirely: it
would seem that the “apotheosis” of Tullia was abandoned.

Let us take one more illustration. James Bryce once reckoned that Roman
law was still influential in the courts of about three hundred million
people; and he pointed out that it had gained this capacity because the
jurists of the Empire had based every paragraph of the statutes upon the
general principle of equity. Stroux, in his brilliant monograph entitled
_Summum jus summa injuria_, has recently demonstrated that Cicero,
employing Aristotelian rules of rhetoric, exerted a powerful influence
upon the reform of Roman Law by emphasizing in his rhetorical treatises
the claims of equity as against statute, and of intention (_voluntas_) as
against the literal interpretation of the word. This is all to the good.
But the process was hardly as simple as that. The Aristotelian rules of
rhetoric had worked no vast reforms in Greece, and at Rome they were
not likely to prove less arid in practical life if left to the mercy of
text-books. Ideas do not readily revive in that impersonal fashion.

There are two very definite reasons why the ideas of equity and intention
had a fair chance to grow into importance in the Ciceronian court. The
first is the existence of the peregrine court. As early as 242 B.C.
the senate had created a special court for strangers to use in their
litigation with Romans. This was, of course, devised in order to attract
traders to Rome with a guaranty that they would be dealt with fairly, and
it could only be a tribunal of arbitration seeking to reach equitable
decisions regardless of Roman statute and by formulary procedure. We
know how this court familiarized the Romans with the standard practices
of commercial peoples, how it created a respect for _jus gentium_, how
in time it accustomed the Romans to respect equity as a thing more
sacred than local law and how it trained them to use the formula,
until, by about 150 B.C., even the urban court could abandon the rigid
_legis actiones_ in favor of the formulary procedure, and the praetor’s
edict was given standing by the side of statute. It is, of course,
inconceivable that phrases advocating a free interpretation of law,
translated from rhetorical school books, could have won any response at
Rome unless the courts had been ready for them.

But there is another item in the reckoning. Cicero, who studied law at
the time when this revolution was taking place in the native courts, set
out on a long and influential career of forty years as a lawyer for the
defense. In that career he had a greater need than anyone else for what
we may call the humane and sociological interpretation of law. He seized,
of course, with eagerness upon the rhetorical distinction, provided by
the Greeks, between the word and the spirit, between law and equity, but
this distinction had already been recognized at Rome by the creation of
the peregrine court, had in fact been latent in the long series of laws
that brought the plebeians their rights during the several centuries of
bloodless compromises of the early Republic. Indeed it is safe to say
that Cicero without the aid of alien ideas would necessarily have evolved
his enthusiasm for equitable interpretation during his long career as a
defensive advocate, using as his tool the Roman court with its formulary
procedure, its _jus honorarium_, and its respect for _aequitas_ and _jus
gentium_.[24] In a word, a reform already in progress at home gave Cicero
an excellent opportunity to develop his legal practice on the principles
of a liberal interpretation of law and to draw upon Greek authors for
useful support for his contention, and thus aid in formulating general
principles that made the civil law the text-book of the world.

Cicero was a wide reader, and he appropriated ideas from far and near,
but he appropriated and applied what he read at the points where he
was doing his own thinking, and he applied it creatively. Such was,
throughout his life, Cicero’s response to experience.


FOOTNOTES

[1] The prefaces of Tyrrell and Purser, and the brief biographies of
Strachan-Davidson and of Boissier are models of sane judgment regarding
Cicero’s political behavior.

[2] Throughout his life Cicero found no good word for Cinna, though he
was fair enough to democracy to praise the Gracchans even during Sulla’s
ascendancy, _De Invent._ 1. 5.

[3] _Pro Roscio_, 136.

[4] _In Caecil._, 70; _In Verr._ i. 37; iii, 81; _Pro Caec._ 69; _Pro
Cluent._ 151; _In Toga Cand._, ed. Stengl., 68; _Lex Agr._ ii. 81.

[5] _Pro Cluent._, 151; _In Toga Cand._ 69; _Lex Agr._ ii, 10; 31; _Pro
Rab._ 14, 15. In the days of his most pronounced sympathy for the senate
he refers to the Gracchi with less deference and at times goes so far as
to justify their execution.

[6] _De Imperio Cn. Pompei._

[7] _Ad Att._ i. 4; Plut. _Cic._ 9.

[8] _Pro Corn._ ed. Stengl. p. 57.

[9] Hardy (_Jour. Phil._ XXXIV, 16) denies that the question of the
senate’s _auctoritas_ was at stake in this trial, since Sallust’s
_Catiline_ and Caesar’s _Bell. Civ._ admit the constitutionality of the
_Sen. Cons. Ult._ But Sallust and Caesar wrote almost twenty years later,
after Caesar had packed the senate for use in any measure he chose.
The question was then no longer of any importance. Cicero’s speech,
_Pro Rabirio_, definitely says that the issue at stake was the senate’s
authority.

[10] E. Meyer, _Caesars Monarchie_: a thesis questioned by Heinze. Sabine
and Smith, _Cicero on the Commonwealth_ (1929), keep their attention too
closely to the Greek sources.

[11] _Ad. Att._ viii. 11.

[12] He does, however, not use those terms: cf. _Fam._ xi. 6: _adpetam
huius rei principatum_; _Fam._ xii, 24, 2 (Jan. 43): _me principem
senatui populoque Romano professus sum_; _Fam._ x. 28: _totem rem
publicam sum amplexus_.

[13] _De Prov. Proc._ 38 ff.

[14] See C. W. Keyes, “Original Elements in Cicero’s Ideal Constitution,”
_Am. Jour. Phil._, 1921, 309 ff. A part of the _De Leg._ was written
before Pompey’s death.

[15] The senate, though not a representative body, had voted all tax
bills before the tribute was abandoned in 167 B.C. There is little doubt
that the Gracchi would have altered this illogical procedure if the
tribute had remained in their day. In 43 Cicero probably followed the
only ancient precedent there was without considerations of political
theory.

[16] Cic. _Phil._ x. 17: _legem comitiis centuriatis ex auctoritate
nostra laturus est_ (Vibius Pansa).

[17] _De Natura Deor._ i. 3, written during the summer of 45.

[18] On Cicero’s use of Gloria see _Pro Rabirio_, 29-30; _Pro Archia_,
28; _Pro Sestio_, 47; _Ad Att._ ii, 5. Late in life Cicero wrote a
treatise in two books on this subject.

[19] George Eliot used as a motto for her poem on this theme the very
words of Cicero written when he proposed to erect the shrine to Tullia:
_longumque illud tempus cum non ero_, _Att._ xii. 18.

[20] Warde Fowler, _Religious Experience_, 385, has seen the significance
of this experience.

[21] He quotes it in the Tusculans, i, 68.

[22] _Ad. Att._ xii. 18; it is curious that in this very letter he still
reverts when speaking of himself, to his old agnosticism in longum illud
tempus _cum non ero_.

[23] Quoted by Lactantius, _Inst. Div._ i, 16.

[24] For Cicero’s attitude on _Jus gentium_, see _De Off._ iii. 17; i.
23.




CHAPTER VIII

LUCRETIUS AND HIS READERS


In the third century B.C. we find evidence that some of the Romans had
begun to doubt the current religious beliefs. During the Second Punic
War, the exaggerated superstition among the lower classes, induced
apparently by a series of military disasters, led to a pronounced revolt
against religion among the more enlightened element.[1] Ennius, though
he reveals a strain of Pythagorean mysticism, natural enough in one
educated at Tarentum, aided this movement by translating Euhemerus, whose
work seems to have been a utopian romance that incidentally interpreted
the gods of Greek myths as human beings honored after death. If we may
judge from later quotations from this work it was the incidental element
which especially attracted the attention of the Romans. Of course, the
Euripidean plays presented by Ennius and Pacuvius familiarized the
audiences with the phrases of skepticism, and some of the later Greek
comedies, written when faith in the Olympians had virtually gone, were
shockingly disrespectful of religion. The _Amphitruo_ of Plautus is a
case in point. It could hardly have been produced except in Greek dress,
but for all that such plays tended to undermine respect for the state
cults. The actor’s garb was, to be sure, Greek, but the deity ridiculed
was called by his Latin name, Jupiter, not Zeus.

Unfortunately a satisfying philosophy did not emerge to take the place
of the departing devotion—which though of no great moral worth had
possessed a certain constraining influence. The soundest Greek philosophy
was itself out of date at home and was nowhere taught abroad. Plato’s
great faith in ratiocination had created a highly imaged idealism of
exceedingly great beauty—moral as well as aesthetic. But it had not
withstood the prying curiosity of his sophisticated Greek pupils.
Aristotle, afraid of the imagination, had set out almost at once to
build science upon a foundation of careful and minute observation before
trusting to imagination again. Epicurus, without sufficient equipment
in science but stirred by a healthy respect for nature, had evolved a
materialistic system on the theories of Democritus and Leucippus, which
assumed an evolutionary process of creation without divine intervention.
The system was attractive, but so full of inconsistencies and untested
hypotheses that it led the shrewder young men of Athens into complete
agnosticism. Those who were inclined to mysticism took refuge in Zeno’s
equally facile pantheism. By the time the Romans were ready to delve into
metaphysics, the logical flaws in all systems had been pointed out by the
Greeks themselves. The world of thought was in confusion. Men had lost
faith in their power to solve the riddle of the universe. Professional
philosophers were quarrelling, and the rest were turning away in dismay
to nearer tasks.

Rome’s introduction to Greek philosophy came at this unhappy moment,
and through the tutelage of the most pitiful representatives of Greek
metaphysical eristic, which had nothing of value to offer to Rome. In
the year 155 Carneades, while serving on an Athenian embassy at Rome,
gave a demonstration of his dialectic ability by lauding justice one day
and the next proving with equal facility the futility of the preceding
speech. The third book of Cicero’s _De Republica_, has preserved the
gist of his argument. Young men were delighted with the show, but
the aged shook their heads. The pragmatist argument seemed to them a
dangerous introduction to ethics. Carneades, being a state envoy, must be
respected, but Cato insisted that the senate finish its business with him
speedily so that he might the sooner be sent home; and when during the
next year two Epicurean teachers came to Rome to display their doctrines,
the authorities ordered them to leave.[2] Roman cultural history might
have been very different if the first philosophers had come with a
positive message, if the Platonic dialogues had still been in vogue, or
if the minds of the slow-moving Romans had been gradually prepared for
the incoming skepticism by proofs that this new philosophy was itself
but a transient phase. As it was, the leap from old-time orthodoxy to
untrammeled agnosticism was too great. The danger to political and civic
stability was fully sensed by the cautious senators. The demonstration
of the ridiculous futility of the new learning, if culture produced men
like these prattling Greeks, was all too patent. Rome was projected
into a fear and hatred of metaphysical dialectic that a century of
similar experiences hardly removed. Only Panaetius, the Stoic, had better
success, for, concerning himself less with metaphysics, giving more
attention to ethics of a type that justified Roman ideas of jurisprudence
and political activity, he was welcomed by the small circle of men
who acknowledged the leadership of the younger Scipio. Stoicism thus
gained respectability, but it was Stoicism prudently narrowed to ethical
dogmatism.

After a generation or two of hesitation young men of family began to
attend lectures in Athens. They were almost all sons of senators who
were themselves preparing for public life, and they chose their teachers
and courses accordingly. They needed familiarity with Greek not only
because of its great literature but because Greek was the language of
a very important part of the now expanding empire. They sought tuition
especially with the rhetoricians who taught the art of Demosthenes,
the art of public address and debate—all-important in the senate and
the courts. What system of philosophy students happened to imbibe was
determined by this fact, since the professors of philosophy were the
heads of the scholastic hierarchies and each style of speech had a
direct connection with an appropriate school of philosophy. It was not
accidental that the young man who preferred a matter-of-fact style found
himself also imbibing stoic philosophy, and that the one who desired a
more florid manner got his philosophic needs satisfied in the circles
of the New Academy. This union of rhetoric and philosophy will in
part explain why Epicurean materialism was somewhat slow to reach the
attention of the Romans, since the school of Epicurus gave little time
to rhetoric and therefore caught few of the young men who were training
for statesmanship. Furthermore, it is not difficult to comprehend why
in these circumstances and in view of the fact that philosophy was
no longer progressive or fruitful it continued to remain a matter of
minor importance at Rome. Rome’s young nobles were going to Athens for
political training, not for a general education, and their teachers
accordingly gave out their philosophical lectures as ancillary to
rhetorical studies.

So much must be kept in mind by way of an introduction to the work of
Lucretius, the friend of Cicero, who was the first of the Romans to
present a philosophic theme in an attractive literary garb. In speaking
of him here we shall not be primarily concerned with Lucretius as a
poet, for the art of Lucretius springs out of an inspiration not to be
explained by sources or environment, nor shall we speak primarily of
the philosophical system of the _De Rerum Natura_—for he invents his
philosophy as little or as much as did Milton or Tennyson or Browning
their theology or their social philosophy. We wish rather to dwell upon
Lucretius in his Roman setting, his response to it, and its effects upon
him.

Of Lucretius himself we know very little, and that we owe chiefly to a
few strange remarks of St. Jerome, who disliked materialism as did all
the fathers of the church. The dates are probably 99-55 B.C. If so
Lucretius was slightly younger than Caesar and died eleven years before
Caesar’s assassination. He was old enough to have observed with full
comprehension all the wretched cruelty of the civil wars between the
Marian and Sullan factions, and that would have been enough to turn a
sensitive man away from political life. Lucretius speaks repeatedly of
Latin as _patria lingua_ which implies that Rome was the native city of
his family, and he also reveals a certain Roman pride in his reference to
foreigners as well as a sympathy with the aristocracy in his slighting
references to the crowd.[3] The life of Rome was familiar to him. His
name was well known from the day of Lucretia, the insult to whose honor
had stirred the riots which led to the expulsion of the tyrant Tarquin.
At least thirty-six men bore the name with sufficient distinction to earn
space in the modern classical encyclopedia. But whether the poet belonged
to one of the nobler branches of the family we do not know. If, as is
quite possible, he was a son of the general who was murdered by Sulla
because of his independence we would comprehend his horror of warfare.
His cognomen, Carus, is somewhat less usual in early records than his
nomen, but it was in good standing from its first occurrence some two
centuries before the poet’s time till late in the Empire.[4] From the
manner in which Lucretius addresses Memmius, a man of some family and
distinction, Munro reasonably assumed that the poet was on a footing of
equality with this member of the minor nobility.

Lucretius’ great poem, _On Nature_, was apparently being written during
the middle decade of the last pre-Christian century. It was not quite
complete when the poet died; the preface addresses Memmius as one who is
in the midst of danger and apparently in arms,[5] a reference perhaps
to Memmius’ governorship of Bithynia in 57. But the preface assumes
the present arrangement of books, which was not established till books
1, 2 and 4 had been written. Perhaps this foreword was thrown in for
an incomplete presentation copy to accompany Memmius when he sailed to
Bithynia in the spring of 57. Of the legend that the poet experienced
intervals of insanity I need only repeat the judgment of the noted
physician Dr. Osler:[6] “Of love-philtres that produce insanity we may
read the truth in a chapter of that most pleasant manual of erotology,
the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. Of insanity of any type that leaves a mind
capable in lucid intervals of writing such verses as _De Rerum Natura_ we
know nothing. The sole value of the myth is its casual association with
the poem of Tennyson.” This of course does not preclude the possibility
that Lucretius committed suicide in a fit of madness, though what a
father of the church reports about a member of the Epicurean sect must
not be taken too seriously. Wishful thinking often ends in the misjudging
of sources.

The poem of Lucretius may be classed with Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ as a
purposive work of art. Milton set out to “justify the ways of God to man”
in verses that should carry the reader by their sheer emotional beauty;
Lucretius, while equally aware of the demands of art, proclaimed his
chief purpose to be to remove fear of the gods by describing creation as
natural and independent of divine intervention. Milton is one of the last
of the didactic poets; Lucretius wrote while the didactic tradition was
still generally accepted. He wrote in verse because his predecessors, the
earlier philosophers had done so, had indeed composed wholly in verse at
a time when reading and writing were not general, when teaching was by
word of mouth, and rhythm seemed a legitimate aid to memory. Didactic
verse, at first a necessity, had established itself by its very bulk,
and was accepted as a customary form by Ennius and Vergil as well as by
Lucretius. The effort that the modern reader finds in adapting himself
to imaginative and highly colored phraseology employed in scientific
arguments need not be strenuous if one accepts the tradition as then
vital and unquestioned.

Lucretius’ argument in briefest form is this: Crimes that disturb society
are due to fear—fear of death. This fear grows out of an apprehension of
what the gods may do to one’s erring soul. The desire to avoid death and
the dreaded hereafter drives men to accumulate wealth and power by evil
means. Obviously the way to reach a life of peace, is to believe that
death is simple dissolution and that the gods are not concerned in the
least about human behavior. The proof that this belief is well founded
lies in the atomistic philosophy of Epicurus, which explains the creation
of the universe from a concourse of atoms, without divine activity, and
considers living things, including man, as atomic, and which interprets
human progress not in terms of divine interference but in terms of a
theory of the “survival of the fittest.” Such is Lucretius’ argument.
It is full of fallacies, as science has always been. Our generation
was brought up on Dalton’s solid, immaterial molecule which now seems
as antiquated as the Lucretian atom. The Curies shattered that, and we
accepted in its place the electron of Rutherford; then five years ago the
Quantum theory led to Bohr’s kaleidoscopic atom which has since given
way to the new theories of Schrödinger and those who vigorously question
the material atom. In 1907 Ostwald called the law of conservation the
greatest discovery of the nineteenth century, but by 1924 scientists
doubted whether it was a law at all. That has happened in one brief
lifetime. We do not ask for finality in science, though like Lucretius
the young scientist of each new generation seizes upon the latest
hypothesis and assumes it to be true. The theory of electrons, whether
right or wrong, seems to some of us to have justified itself not only
because of its power to awaken the imagination, but in its capacity as a
solvent that could disintegrate preceding dogmatism by seeming to prove
itself more efficacious. Such was the beauty which Lucretius discovered
in his new-found science. To him personally it meant release, romance,
and poetry, and he spent all his energy trying to give to others what he
had found. He assures us that his whole being is pierced with a thrill
when he lets his mental eye see the vision of creation.

                      Moenia mundi
    discedunt, totum video per inane geri res.

He becomes so absorbed in his work that he sits the night out phrasing
what he has beheld, and finally when he drops to sleep his dreams are
still of the vision of creation.

At the very outset however, we stumble upon a deep puzzle in attempting
to picture the man in his setting. How could he suppose that fear of
punishment after death was the determining factor in social ethics, when
the Romans of this period had not yet developed any clear eschatological
system, and when only the learned had begun to read the Platonic myths
and Stoic fancies regarding a possible future life? Cicero in his old
age, when after utter defeat and a very deep personal grief he needed
faith in a doctrine of compensation, tried to find arguments for a theory
of the soul’s survival. But the _Tusculans_ do not represent Cicero in
the heyday of his powers when, like other cultured Romans, he thought
of immortality only in terms of surviving fame. Caesar assumed when
he spoke in the senate that his audience accepted death as final, and
Catullus gave the common view in his _Nox est perpetua una dormienda_.
The tombstone inscriptions of the Republican period are quite reticent on
the point, whereas the more garrulous ones of the Empire that teem with
mystical phraseology belong largely to slaves from Asia. The epitaphs of
genuine Romans are silent about future punishments and rewards.

It does not suffice to say that the central argument of the _De Rerum
Natura_ comes from Epicurus. The language of Lucretius is so vigorous
and goes so much farther than Epicurus that we may be sure that some
personal experience inspired it. Now the Etruscans, north of the Tiber,
had long ago developed a very definite picture of what life after
death was like. The wall-paintings on Etruscan tombs give delightful
pictures of the banquets of the blest—but also gruesome portraits of
Charon and of Tuchulcha scourging the souls of the damned. Giotto’s
frescoes and Dante’s pictures of the lost souls in hell give almost as
true an interpretation of Etruscan as of Christian conceptions. If we
had a biography of Lucretius we might perhaps find that he had spent
some years of his boyhood among the Etruscans or that he had had an
Etruscan nurse who filled him with un-Roman superstitions which only a
carefully considered philosophy could dispel. To a poetic imagination as
sensitive as his, such childish beliefs might have occasioned moments
of excruciating pain. We do not know the explanation. All that I would
suggest at this point is that the poet may well have had some experience
in his youth which gave a color to the poem that surprises us in a
contemporary of Cicero and which made the new Epicurean faith of special
value to him.

It is just possible that an incorrect analysis of instincts led him to
stress this point. Taking a suggestion of Epicurus that fear is the
cause of abnormal behavior, he drove it hard. He seems not to have
surmised that fear of death was readily to be explained as an inheritance
from those who had most successfully shunned death; instead he sought
to explain the instinct for self-preservation by superstition and to
blame that superstition for the acts that are in fact induced by a
powerful instinct. How he asks, could a man let greed so dominate him
that he would steal, deceive, and even murder, unless he were driven
by an inordinate desire to escape the want which might bring death and
suffering after death? Such is the argument which seems to be largely his
own.

In his purpose then, he is wholly sincere, whatever we may think of
the logic of his argument. However, he betrays in his enthusiasms the
fact that what inspires him is not a negative missionary spirit, but
the desire to let every man know the beauty of science. Plato spoke of
the hypnotic vision of “ideas”—the ecstatic thrill that came to the
philosopher who penetrated into divine knowledge. We know with what
enthusiasm Sir Isaac Newton’s announcement of the laws of gravitation was
greeted, with what joy scientists in our own day heard of the breaking-up
of the atom and of the cosmic rays that penetrate our atmosphere. Similar
must have been the exaltation of this Roman when he felt that he could
lay aside childish superstitions, suddenly pierce the confines of the
universe and behold the nebulae shaping into planets, when he realized,
as he thought, that energy lived forever, that matter was eternal, that
the universe was infinite, that in the survival of the fit there were
promises of eternal progress, that law and order ruled the universe.

    His ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas
    percipit atque horror.

It amazed him to find himself so carried away that he could not sleep,
that he must sit the whole night through satisfying his soul with the
vision he had caught. Materialism has been called an unpoetic theme. To
us it may be, but to a Roman brought up in the dull mazes of polytheism
and the ludicrous nursery-tales that masqueraded as cosmology, it was
a sudden liberation. He had found a theme of the highest poetic worth,
the epic story of the origins of life; and Vergil who half rejected his
arguments still was poet enough to see that Lucretius had discovered the
sublimest of all poetic themes—_Felix qui potuit_.

The young men who were growing up when Lucretius’ poem was published
turned quickly to his faith, despite the fact that the Athenian garden
had till then been unpopular. It could hardly have been the doctrine of
hedonism—which Lucretius almost disregards—that enticed the youth. After
all the hedonistic calculus was as exacting in its morality as was the
stoic argument of obedience to nature. More probably it was the appeal
to the imagination and the aesthetic vision disclosed by Lucretius that
swept the younger generation of that time off its feet.

There is another fruitful idea, the idea of progress, which first
entered Roman consciousness through the work of Lucretius. Our modern
belief in mechanistic progress, made into a fetish as it was after the
acceptance of Darwinism, at times obstructs self-criticism and encourages
fatalism to such an extent that its value as a stimulant may be almost
completely negatived. A generation that could rush thoughtlessly into
the most stupidly criminal war of all ages—and still blandly insist that
it was the supreme fruit of civilization—has surely been gulled by a
fallacious evolutionary _post hoc ergo_. It is a wholesome reminder to us
post-Darwinists that the Athenians of Pericles’ day had in many respects
attained to a creative culture which no nation has since succeeded in
reaching. Yet read with a careful attention to all its implications, the
evolutionary doctrine of progress is productive of envigorating optimism.
Before Lucretius wrote—and the poet himself had not entirely shaken
himself free from old beliefs—the Romans looked upon the golden age as
past, and they were therefore too much reconciled with the fatalism
inherent in the conviction that further deterioration was only to be
expected.

The belief in a golden age of the past had come from several sources:
from Hesiodic genealogies of gods and “heroes,” from an early naïve
faith in the actuality of Homeric descriptions, from the tendency of
parents to contrast the morals of a new generation with the refurbished
and selected memories of their youth, and from the utopian pictures of
romances conveniently placed in the far away and long-ago. All these
things and others begot the “golden age” of Chronos’ day. The Romans
had found such tales plausible. They too had a splendid tradition of
ancestral heroes who had undoubtedly possessed the sterling qualities of
a simple puritan-agrarian primitivism—capacity to endure hardship and
pain, family devotion, loyalty, and abstinence—that later Romans admired
but too often missed in contemporary life. In their conquests of the
world they had come into contact with many uncivilized peoples and had
had occasion to note these very qualities in all unadvanced peoples.[7]
They had evidence in the ruins of the decayed villages of Latium that
the soil no longer bore the population it once had, and the conclusion
was ready at hand, as Lucretius himself points out, that mother earth
was not so fruitful as she had been in her youth. Furthermore, when they
happened upon the tombs of the prehistoric age,[8] especially the vaults
of Etruscan princes, they found in many of them the lavish furniture of
gold and silver and bronze-ware that led them to accept the Hesiodic
chronology—doubtless based in part on similar observations in Boeotia—of
a seeming succession of gold, silver, bronze, and iron periods.

Accordingly, there were reasons enough for accepting the well-known
utopian fancies of the Greek poets. Lucretius himself did not wholly free
himself of these beliefs. The Ennian portraits of the ancient heroes, and
the description of primitive simplicity appealed strongly to him. He did
not think that the Romans he had seen in the days of the Sullan massacres
and the Catilinarian conspiracy were the moral equals of those of an
earlier day. In point of fact they were not. There had been a noticeable
decline.

Nevertheless, as we have seen, the theory of evolution which he adopted
made it possible for him to observe that in some respects civilization
had actually meant progress, that in the arts, in the domain of thought,
in the institutions of government and law there had been a real advance.
In his fifth book[9] he remarks in an intimate note that betrays his own
personal observations:

    Wherefore even now some arts are receiving their last polish,
    some are even in course of growth: just now many improvements
    have been made in ships; only yesterday musicians have given
    birth to tuneful melodies; then too this nature or system of
    things has been discovered lately, and I the very first of all
    have only now been found able to transfer it into native words.

Lucretius’ whole sketch of social evolution (V, 1011, ff.), though
replete with regret at the errors committed, reveals a strong conviction
that on the whole the trend had been toward betterment, and this view is
clearly stated at the end (Munro’s translation):

    Ships and tillage, walls, laws, roads, arms, dress and all
    such like things, all the prizes, all the elegancies too of
    life without exception, poems, pictures, and the chiselling of
    fine-wrought statues, all these things _practice_, together
    with the acquired knowledge of the untiring mind, taught men
    by slow degrees as they advanced on the way step by step. Thus
    time by degrees brings each several thing forth before men’s
    eyes, and reason raises it up into the borders of light; for
    things must be brought to light one after the other and in due
    order in the different arts, until these have reached their
    highest point of development.

It is sometimes said that Lucretius did not make the final fruitful
deduction that progress might continue in the future—which is the
dominant note in modern evolutionary literature. It is true that the
poet, whose task was to describe rather than to prophesy, does not
emphasize the note of optimism, but when he says explicitly that some of
the arts “are even now in the process of growth” he has committed himself
to the full theory. And if one is convinced that the creative process
has on the whole been one of progress, the rest follows, and the theory
of the Social Contract to which Lucretius so fully commits himself rests
in a deep faith that the best men have aided and will continue to aid
progress by their efforts. Vergil, a close reader of Lucretius, was able
in the fourth _Eclogue_ to shift the golden age into the future, and in
the _Georgics_ he reveals the conviction that men have themselves, aware
of their needs, improved the arts and crafts. Here we see immediately
the consequences of the new evolutionary idea. Cicero also exhibits a
practical optimism that is ready to undertake the labor of bettering
conditions. While he never explicitly discusses the question he traces
in his _Brutus_ the evolution of Roman oratory showing its successive
improvement, and in the _De Republica_ and the _De Legibus_, where he
accepts the evolutionary theory of social progress, he asserts again and
again that it is the duty of statesmen to contribute their efforts to
aid this advance. Finally, Seneca has also caught the full import of the
gospel of progress. As a Stoic he should have consistently held to the
discouraging theory of cycles. That he did not is doubtless due to his
great fondness for Epicurean science.[10]

    I respect the discoveries of wise men and do reverence to the
    inventors ... but let us also act the part of good parents: let
    us increase the inheritance of these things; let the property
    go to our successors with some increment. Much still remains to
    be done and will remain; nor will the man born a thousand years
    hence lack the opportunity to add to what he has received.

Surely Bury has quite missed the point when he holds that the ancient
idea of progress failed to look to the future.

Lucretius also responded to Roman temperamental inclinations when he
stressed the importance of observation and inductive logic in philosophy.
The Romans of the Republic disliked mysticism and were ripe for a
cosmology that substituted sense perception for vague mystery. They
were also impatient of abstractions, and made little progress with such
deductive sciences as mathematics. Their immense experiences in practical
affairs of government had accustomed them to the habit of organizing
committees to gather data on which to base charters for cities, treaties
with neighbors, and forms of government for provinces. Formal plans
shaped on a priori ratiocination they had learned to distrust. They
always felt their way slowly through experiments to generalizations. It
is characteristic of them that without formulating a general principle
of equity they shaped a court of equity for the cases of foreigners a
hundred years before they found that they were putting into practice the
principles that Greek theory had deduced from philosophy without the
ability to realize them in actuality.

Democritus had long ago proposed the hypothesis of natural creation, and
Lucretius accepted the theory from Epicurus. What Lucretius himself saw
was the need of emphasizing to the Romans the approach by induction from
observable data to the theories, and the need of presenting these data in
a succession of arresting pictures. In his first book, when arguing that
there is no creation by miracle, he leads up to the generalization by a
series of carefully established facts that give a sound basis for the
final induction:

    Plants germinate from seeds, they always require time for
    growth, they require plant-food and the cultivation of the soil
    that makes that food available, and they invariably grow into
    the same species as that of the parent plant.

Beneath every statement of this series there lies a mass of careful
observation, tested by what John Stuart Mill calls the method of
“agreement and difference,” and these valid conclusions are in turn used
for the final induction that creation by miracle is unknown. Similarly,
in the third book, he demonstrates by use of the same logical process
that, since sickness, coma, age, poison, and whatever affects the body,
also affect the mind, the mind has actual contact with the body. The
standard method of “concomitant variations” is also used frequently as,
in the second book, where the argument runs thus: since heavy and light
bodies fall more nearly uniformly in thin air than in heavy water they
would fall at the same rate of speed in a vacuum. Except in the sixth
book, which follows sources closely, Lucretius’ wealth of examples seems
to come largely from his own store.

In truth, most of Mill’s categories of inductive methods are implicit in
Lucretius, for the Epicureans were in his day busily defending their
use of induction against the attacks of Stoics. The logical treatise
of Philodemus,[11] which of course Mill did not know, seems to have
been written very shortly after Lucretius’ death, and it is not at all
improbable that Lucretius had heard the lectures of Philodemus before
they were finally given to the public. In those lectures the author
dwells much on the validity of carefully chosen analogy, for in the
field of the unobservable—in evolutionary cosmology, in atomic theory,
and in psychology—metaphor and simile have always been and will always
be fruitful tools of science. But Philodemus finally insisted on the
necessity of basing all inductions on extremely careful observation,
of using only essential similarities and pertinent comparisons, and he
implied, even if he did not explicitly state it, that every test of
“agreement,” “difference,” and “residue” is necessary. Of course the
Epicureans fell into the fallacies of incomplete data, as all science
based upon inductive methods must, and as beginners they were obviously
impatient of delay and over-optimistic; but the correct forms of the
inductive processes were all in daily use and if Bacon and Mill had
known the treatise of Philodemus, which so well explains the picturesque
arguments of Lucretius, they would have shown more respect for the
“wisest of the ancients.”

It is in the service of inductive logic that much of Lucretius’ startling
imagery is invented. The poetic quality of the book is in no sense
“purple-patch” work; it is not an adjunct like the Corinthian columns
pasted on Roman concrete walls for ornamental purposes. The pictures
will always be found to derive from unusually accurate observations of
nature so that they may serve their purpose as the starting points of
the induction, or, when induction was impracticable, as a basis for some
significant analogue. They are so indelibly presented that the argument
which they carry cannot be forgotten. To realize their vital function
in the argument one has but to recall a few instances of them: the
race-horse leaping forward at the gong, the birds that start singing with
the first ray of morning light, the flock of pasturing sheep that from
a distance seem not to stir, the particles of dust flitting in a shaft
of sunlight, the sudden glory of the dawn, the sea gulls screaming over
the whitecaps, the cow in the pasture distraught when her calf is taken
from her, the fishes swimming about in the yielding water, the gnat that
is so light that its weight is not felt, the dog barking at dreams or
deceived by an imagined scent. The science is no less precise in such
passages because of the vivid naturalism of the descriptions. It is
indeed adapted to the Roman mode of thought, for the dry unimaged style
of Epicurus, all too readily satisfied with dogmatic abstractions, would
have made little impression upon the Romans.

One may wonder why it is that, although Lucretius possessed such a clear
conception of the processes and tools of inductive logic, so little
time was spent in the laboratory experimentation desiderated by Bacon.
Our books of logic often assume that man’s processes of thought were
recent inventions, as if no one argued deductively till Aristotle, or
inductively till Bacon. One might as well assume that no human being
used the lens of the eye until some one discovered its existence by
dissection. Indeed Nausicaa’s remarks to Ulysses are as well packed
with the fruits of penetrating reasoning as the pleas of a Philadelphia
lawyer, and the paleolithic savages who made stone axes and fire pistons
in the primeval forests employed the same forms of logic as the modern
chemist in his laboratory. Lévy-Brühl’s conclusion that the “prelogical
man” lived just beyond protohistory is not very convincing to the
classicist. What is sometimes called a history of logic is of course not
a history of the acquisition of the logical capacity, but a history of
the conscious analyses of the processes that have long been in use.

The early Greek writers naturally struck out toward the great engrossing
questions of God and the universe. Here analogy and deduction could
get quicker results than induction because the problem lay beyond the
reach of direct observation. Furthermore, mathematics could then proceed
upon a few seemingly universal maxims that had come to be considered
self-evident from ages of human experience. Here all progress happened
to lie in the deductive forms of thought. However, when advance stopped
in this direction, after making the most rapid progress that the history
of science can record, and when _a priori_ ratiocination was found to
lead no farther, then the atomists began at the bottom again with minute
observation and patient induction. They used a laboratory method, though
it was not at first necessary to make an artificial laboratory, since
nature had provided one near at hand with untold data still unrecorded.
What need was there of planting seeds and observing the laws of creation
in a garden-box until nature’s vast gardens had been studied? The method
was just as sound and for the time being far more fertile. It was at this
point that Lucretius came into the field. Scientific experimentation
indeed had already begun at points where nature did not seem to give
sufficiently precise results—one recalls Aristarchus and Archimedes—but
it had not proceeded far; not however from lack of scientific curiosity,
or from failure to appreciate the value of experiments, but because
quicker results were still to be had by exploiting nature’s abundant
store of data.

The appreciation of induction and the employment of the scientific
processes by Lucretius must of course not be overstressed. Some of the
large gains of formal logic have never been more highly valued than by
him. In Epicurus and his predecessors, for instance, the concept of
infinity had been arrived at deductively and skilfully employed in order
to provide time, space, and material for the evolutionary assumption.
Lucretius fully appreciated the value of that concept, realized indeed
that the creative process of natural evolution could not for a moment be
assumed, for the amazingly intricate Nature which had to be explained,
except on the hypothesis of infinity. And infinity was to him not merely
a logical necessity, it was a stimulating concept that lifted the
imagination of man into the realms of high poetry:[12]

                        For my mind-of-man
    Now seeks the nature of the vast Beyond
    There on the other side, the boundless sum
    Which lies without the ramparts of the world,
    Toward which the spirit longs to peer afar,
    Toward which indeed the swift élan of thought
    Flies unencumbered forth.

It is also characteristic of Lucretius as a Roman that while he accepted
a philosophy that made all creation kin—in this respect Lucretius may be
considered the founder of philosophic Romanticism—he refused to abandon
the classical humanism that insisted upon seeing in man the master of his
own destiny. There is no doubt about the strong drift toward romanticism
throughout the poem. Man is here inseparable from nature. The fiery
temper of a choleric man, like the ferocity of the lion, is traced to
the atomic composition of the soul.[13] The cool-tempered ox partakes
of elements that predominate in men of prudence, and cowardice in man
is explained physically as akin to the trembling of the deer. In all
this, man is removed from the pedestal to which idealistic philosophy
had elevated him, and by a back door, as it were, brought back again
into Pan’s forest where in the past humans had played with Satyrs
and quadrupeds in the happy days of Mythopoeia. That Lucretius fully
comprehended the poetic importance of this scientific kinship of all
living things is apparent from his proemium where spring is pictured as
the mating season, the season of song and joy, for all creation without
distinction:

    Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres—
    Amor omnibus idem.

    For soon as the vernal aspect of day is disclosed, and the
    birth-favouring breeze of Favonius unbarred is blowing fresh,
    first the fowls of the air, O Venus, show signs of thee and
    thy entering in, thoroughly smitten in heart by thy power.
    Next the wild herds bound over the glad pastures and swim the
    rapid rivers: in such wise, each made prisoner by thy charms,
    follows thee with desire, whither thou goest to lead it on.
    Yes, throughout seas and mountains and sweeping rivers and
    leafy homes of birds and grassy plains, striking fond love into
    the breasts of all thou constrainest them each after its kind
    to continue their races with desire.

Here first in literature we get, emerging out of atomic science, the
spring poetry of Troubadour song. Lucretius drew out of his science the
full value of Romantic poetry.

But when he had done that he did not forget that he was a genuine
Roman and that man must be accorded the dignity due his commanding
independence. At this point he took full advantage of the Epicurean
_clinamen_ and asserted man’s power of self-mastery. In the finest
soul-atom lies the germ of a free-will. “Whence I ask, has been wrested
from the fates the power by which we go forward whither the will leads
each?” And even after explaining temperament by reference to atomic
make-up, he hastened to qualify his statement by adding: “traces of the
different natures left behind, which reason is unable to expel from us,
are so exceedingly slight that there is nothing to hinder us from living
a life worthy of the gods.” Indeed his whole life-work was a mission that
revealed him a thorough humanist. The man who devoted his days and nights
to expel from society the palsy due to superstition, to induce men to
use reason in order that they might gain a “life worthy of the gods” was
not devoted to naturism in the modern sense of the word. Indeed in some
passages Lucretius seems willing to accept human nature at a very high
valuation. The ugliness of life is not primarily due to its flaws, but
to nature perverted by imposed fears, unreasoned desires, and artificial
institutions that enlightened reason might readily dispose of.[14] There
is of course in all this some inconsistency, for there lies lurking
beneath it all the age-long battle between Determinism and Freedom, and
the inconsistency is made the more apparent because, curiously enough, in
Lucretius the poet supports the scientist against the humanist. But when
one has finished the poem one leaves it with the conviction that, while
the poet has not been repressed, the Roman who was conscious of his moral
responsibility has held the pen. In that respect the atomic theories of
recent years have not demonstrated that Lucretius was in error.



FOOTNOTES

[1] W. Warde Fowler, _Religious Experience_, chap. XV.

[2] _Athenaeus_ xii. 68.

[3] _Patria_, iii. 260; iv. 970; i. 41. See the introduction of Merrill’s
excellent edition of Lucretius, pp. 13-14.

[4] Marx was of course in error in stating that the name Carus implied
humble ancestry. See “The Name T. Lucretius Carus,” in _Studies in Honor
of Hermann Collitz_ (1930); p. 63.

[5] See _Class. Phil._ XIV, 286.

[6] Dr. Osler’s Presidential Address to the Classical Association
(England), 1918-19.

[7] Lucr. v. 17.

[8] Lucr. ii. 1168; v. 800, on the decay of agriculture. Most of the
magnificent early tombs excavated during the last century were found
already rifled; some of these had evidently been found by the Romans and
must have yielded wares as rich as those of the Regolini-Galassi tomb.

[9] v. 332 ff. (tr. Munro).

[10] Seneca, _Epist. Mor._, 64. 7; 104. 16; _Quaest. Nat._ 1 pref., vii.
25-31.

[11] Philodemus, περὶ σημείων, ed. Gomperz, 1865, with additional
readings from the papyrus by Philippson in _Rhein, Mus._ (1909).
See Weltring, _Das σημεῖον in der Aristotelischen, Stoischen und
Epikureischen Philosophie_ (Bonn, 1910). Philodemus anticipated some
of the difficulties that later troubled Mill, noticing that in some
inductive problems a single observation provided valid conclusions,
whereas in others very many were required (Gomperz, 19, 13); he knew that
many fallacies were due to the use of insufficient instances (Gomp. 30,
2; 35, 15), that it was well not only to observe nature but to conduct
systematic research and to employ the observations of others (Philippson,
_loc. cit._, 13), that the observer must choose essential similarities
in using the mode of “agreement” and must exclude conclusions as soon
as a refuting instance appeared (Gomp. 13, 1; 17, 30; 20, 32), and he
emphasized the need of employing the principle of difference (Gomp. 18,
15; Phil. p. 28). This treatise which probably draws lavishly on Zeno,
has not yet been fully restored, and being a defense against Stoic attack
it is not to be considered a formal and complete exposition of inductive
logic. But in germ it contains most of the essential observations of J.
S. Mill.

[12] _Trans._ W. E. Leonard.

[13] iii. 290 ff.

[14] ii. 23; iii. 57; v. 1105.