LITERATURE. MANNERS AND MODE OF LIVING.
With the consulship of Lepidus and Catulus began the History of Sallust, the loss of which, to judge from the fragments, is one of the most painful of all those which we have to mourn over in Roman literature, not only on account of the matter in it, but above all, because of its value as a work of art. The history of the Social War was written by Sisenna, who was in some measure a forerunner of Sallust: he was also an earlier acquaintance of Cicero’s, who does not speak over favourably of the literary merits of his writings. Yet I am inclined to think that here we should not blindly follow the opinion of Cicero: for Sisenna’s manner was one which he did not like; it was the horridum of the ancients, an imitation of Clitarchus.[109] He wrote quite differently from his predecessors, in reading whose fragments we can hardly believe that any one could ever have written in such a way. At that time, the whole style of literature was changed. It was as in Germany about the period of the Seven Years’ War; and just as there were then some stragglers in our republic of letters, thus was it also in Rome. Among these I class Claudius Quadrigrarius, who has still the stiff, uncouth, quaint manner: the want of refinement in the whole of his performances is quite astonishing.
Pacuvius, who was somewhat younger than Ennius, and very much younger than Plautus, ranks very high among the poets; he was exclusively a tragic writer, and undoubtedly a very good one: not a trace, however, is to be met with among the Romans of anything like the Satyric plays. In the beginning of the seventh century, Terence introduced quite a different manner, which, if compared with Ennius and Pacuvius, and Plautus above all, is infinitely more modern: he is already quite free from the πῖνος of antiquity, as there are good grounds for believing that his writings have never been revised.—Somewhat younger was Cæcilius Statius, a Campanian, whose comic skill and playfulness are praised by Cicero, who, however, finds fault with his language: his fragments, especially a larger one in Gellius, give us no great idea of him. A far greater poet was L. Attius (not Accius, nor Actius either), who lived to so great an age so that even Cicero still knew him. His was a truly tragic genius; and he not only composed after the Greek models, especially after Æschylus,—what we have left to us in this style is so beautiful, that it may very well be placed by the side of what the Greek has written,—but he also wrote prætextatæ, that is to say, historical pieces in the manner of Shakspeare, which are not tied down to the unities of time or place. He came much nearer to the form of the Greek dramas than his predecessors had done; at least the anapæsts of four feet in his choruses were strictly according to the rules of Greek verse: in his own tragedies also, the senarii and anapæsts seem to have been the prevailing measures, and not the long verses of Ennius and Pacuvius; and though indeed the senarii are not formed quite so accurately as in Greek metres, they are much more so than in Terence. His anapæsts are already metrical, and not merely rhythmical; whereas, on the contrary, the prætextatæ were composed in long rhythmical octonarii, part of which were iambic and part trochaic. In him we have a proof how much quicker the ear of the Romans had already become. It was not so with his contemporary Lucilius, from Suessa Aurunca, who indeed made use of a hexameter of dactyls and spondees, but with much greater licence than even Ennius had done, as the hexameters which can only be scanned according to rhythm, are really sermoni propiora: of the laws of Greek versification, he either had no knowledge whatever, or he entirely set them at naught. Most of his books were written in hexameters, some of them in trochaics. Wit and raciness his satires must have had in a high degree; we might indeed have been reconciled to his slovenly manner and have enjoyed him, instead of scornfully turning up our noses at him, as Horace did.—About the same time, the lyric poet Lævius may have written, who perhaps reached the highest point of gracefulness and sweetness in the native style.
Prose was still in a quite neglected state; a fragment of C. Lælius,[110] which has lately come to light, shows how uncouth and harsh it then was, even harsher than in the times of Cato: only C. Gracchus wrote prose in measured periods, which nearly approached perfection. The orators of that age either did not write at all, or they wrote in a dreadfully stiff style, much worse than they spoke. The historians before Sisenna had as little claim to the name of writers, as our knightly authors of the sixteenth century, Schärtlin von Burtenbach and others. The Roman historians were yet inferior to them; for the knights were men of action, whilst these were men of the school, and even then not worth much.
The manners and mode of life had but one aim, that of making money: even before the civil wars, people had become exceedingly immoral. The immense riches which had been heaped together by means of plunder and robbery, were squandered in luxury; the old ways having been abandoned in everything, Greek fashions were copied as much as possible. The orator L. Crassus was the first who sent for marble pillars from Greece, though indeed he had only four set up in his house; before that, the houses were built of brick plastered over, or of peperino: the furniture was equally mean. The condition of Italy was wretched beyond description. Samnium was a wilderness, and Strabo says that even as late as in his day, no towns there were able to thrive. And yet the misery had not reached its greatest height, but things were still to become much worse.
Cicero was in his eight and twentieth year when Sylla died; he had already made several speeches, and awakened great attention. Older than he, and not altogether free from envy, but rather inclined to keep down the younger man, was Q. Hortensius. The latter was in no way to be compared with Cicero, and being fully tainted with the villainy of his age, he was ever ready to sell his convictions for money. Among Cicero’s contemporaries, in those awful times, a number of able men of very different kinds sprang up. Such upheavings of party spirit generally have this effect: the Ligue indeed quite blighted the study of antiquity in France; but it sharpened the wit and quickened the minds of the people; the Thirty Years’ War did nothing but destroy, whilst the Seven Years’ War gave a new impulse to Germany, and awakened the Muses. Sallust was a great deal younger than Cicero, being as yet a mere boy; but he was a full-grown man when Cicero was still in the pride of his strength.