Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

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.