Nævius blended the history of the most recent times with Greek mythology; in his great historical poem, for instance, he brought in the myth of the giants. Besides this, he wrote tragedies as well as comedies, as we may see from the titles. That he was a good poet, we may indeed believe on Cicero’s word, who, on the whole, found the old writers very little to his taste.
When Nævius was an old man, Plautus, who was undoubtedly one of the greatest poetical geniuses of ancient times, was growing up by his side. This poet takes Greek plays and treats them with a finished irony, not making a mere version from the original, but displaying in his characters the peculiarities of Roman life, which is that of the lower orders, freedmen, strangers, and naturalized citizens. The scene is at Athens, or Epidamnus, or elsewhere; but he has also Greek characters (for instance, the parasite is thoroughly Greek), and then one is again reminded that one is in the midst of Romans. The cleverness with which he managed this, and with which, on the slippery path where he might so easily have stumbled, he always hits the right point, is quite miraculous. We see how wonderfully rich and refined his language was, a proof that even before his time it had been very much cultivated, otherwise it would not have been changed so quickly. For we have a senatus consultum of the fifth century,[40] and the epitaph of Scipio Barbatus, with which we may compare his style, and we find a remarkable difference.
Livius was a foreign client; Nævius a moneyed man, a maniceps; being too bold for a foreigner, he was prosecuted because he had given offence to one of the Metelli.[41] Of Plautus, we do not even know whether he was a Roman citizen: he must have been poor; but the story of his having worked at a mill does not rest upon any trustworthy authority. The first who really was a Roman citizen, being somewhat younger than Nævius, but standing in quite a different position from his, was Ennius, a gentleman,[42] and certainly a member of the tribes: he lived with Scipio, Fulvius Nobilior, and the first men, and was treated with the highest distinction. It is he who gained for poetry and literature the respect and esteem of the Romans. Among his fragments, there are some very fair pieces; his poetry, however, was not directed to higher objects: in comedy he seems to have been weak, nor does he appear to have held it in particular regard; in epic poetry, on the other hand, he has decided merit. Some of his things were written in a purely Roman form,—this was probably the case with the Sabinæ,[43] and also with the Saturæ,—yet he followed out quite a different idea. Plautus’ metres are by no means thoroughly Greek, though they very often coincide with the latter: the scansion by long and short syllables is Greek, but the Romans were not so strict in their measures, not having the quick ear of the Greeks. A trochaic or iambic movement was of native use among the Romans, and was not measured in the same way as among the Greeks: so it is with anapæsts among the modern Greeks, and with all the metres among some of the Slavonic nations. The senarius may be Greek, and as little peculiar to the Romans as to us (Germans). Even as Plautus introduced the latter, so did Ennius the hexameter, which was quite foreign; and this brought about just such revolution in metres as with us. His hexameters were still clumsy and full of faults, and without any cæsura, or with a false one, though not so bad as in Klopstock. Much as I like the old numeri, the verses of Ennius have something in them which is unpleasing to me. Besides the metres which are properly lyric, he has tried all the rhythmi; and indeed he has done it with much greater trueness than the older dramatists. The senarius has already more of measured syllables, which gave it a firmer hold; but there is between the verses of Ennius and those of Virgil, as wide a gulf as between the first attempts of Klopstock and that height of perfection in metrical art, to which Count Platen has reached. A peculiarity of the old versification which as yet is far from being clearly made out, was the slurring of the short syllables (ecthlipsis): ego was pronounced as one syllable, like the Italian io; accipito, as a dactyl.
Ennius was not an original genius; yet he surely does not deserve the contempt with which Horace speaks of him. He had had a Greek education in Calabria; Greek was his second mother tongue, while the Roman was for him only an acquired language: he therefore wished to help the Romans to a translated Greek literature. If we compare it with what the Greek literature then was, that of the Romans was very brilliant. The Alexandrine period was now already past. Callimachus was dead, when Livius Andronicus began; Antagoras[44] and Aratus were dead; Eratosthenes was a mere versifier. On the other hand, the Romans had a great deal of freshness, and there would have been still more, had not Ennius caused the foreign influence to get so much the upperhand.
Somewhat younger than Ennius was Pacuvius, his sister’s son, justly called the Deep. He scorned the pieces of Euripides, which Ennius had chosen, and only took those of Æschylus and Sophocles, thus putting himself altogether in opposition to the taste of the Greeks of that age.
Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus then wrote the history of their own nation in Greek. Dionysius, who finds fault with Fabius as an historian, has never made any objection against his language; on the contrary, the fact that Dionysius wrote his own history only down to the beginning of the first Punic war, when Fabius was getting to be more diffuse, proves that the latter was very readable. Of the same standing was Acilius. The great Scipio wrote in the form of a letter to Philip the history of his own wars,[45] and so did his son-in-law Scipio Nasica that of the war with Perseus. Greek grammarians, statuaries, and painters were brought in already by Æmilius Paullus for the education of his children.
WAR WITH THE LIGURIANS; WITH THE CELTIBERIANS. THE THIRD MACEDONIAN WAR. PEACE WITH THE RHODIANS. FURTHER WARS IN SPAIN. STATE OF AFFAIRS AT HOME.
During these changes, when on all points a sudden and thorough revolution had taken place in the manners of the people, the Romans were not backward in widening their sway: whilst the state was falling to pieces, they did not know what to do, unless they were making conquests. The evil had become so deep-rooted, that it could hardly have been got rid of; but as it was, nothing was done to heal it, and the degeneracy quickly increased.
The war against the Ligurians is not only insignificant, when measured by the standard of other wars, but it is also obscure, owing to our very defective knowledge of the geography of the country. It has some resemblance to undertakings against the Caucasian tribes of which we now (1829) read; and although the Apennines are not such a high mountain-range as the Caucasus, they yet likewise give great advantages to the inhabitants. As is always the case when a powerful state has once determined upon subjugating a people, the Ligurians also were crushed. Their tribes in fact had their abodes as far as the Rhone; but the Romans, who were chiefly anxious to secure the Tuscan frontier, reduced only the Genoese territory. These wars did not reach beyond the borders of Provence; the hostilities against the Salyans in the neighbourhood of Marseilles belong to a later period.[46] These tribes fought for their freedom with such determination, that the Romans had no other course but to drive them out of their fastnesses,—booty there was none to be got there,—and the consuls Cornelius and Bæbius[47] led away fifty thousand Ligurians from their homes into Samnium where Frontinus,[48] as late as in the second century met with their descendants under the names of the Cornelian and Bæbian Ligurians. The war was ended before that of Perseus. For the especial purpose of commanding Gaul, the highway of Flaminius, which went as far as Ariminum, was now lengthened as the via Æmilia to Placentia; and the whole country south of the Po was filled with colonies, so that the Celtic population disappeared.
All this time, the Romans were likewise establishing their rule in Spain, where they regularly kept troops. This beginning of standing armies had a decided influence, not only upon warfare, but also on all the relations of civil life. In former days, the real burthens of war had fallen upon all ranks alike: every one who was able to bear arms, had served for a time, and he became a citizen again, when the legion was disbanded at the end of the contest; which had this advantage, that the soldier was not separated from the citizen. But now the men remained for a long term of years in Spain, married Spanish women, and became estranged from Italy: many of them never returned. The Roman sway spread itself over Catalonia, Valencia, and Andalusia, as far as the Sierra Morena; for when they waged war with the Celtiberians, the latter had traversed the country of the neighbouring tribes. These wars were therefore not so much for acquisition as for consolidation. Their rule over the nations seems to have become somewhat slippery; but Cato, during his consulate in 557, gained them back by his uprightness. Roman generals who behaved in this way, always won the confidence of the Spaniards; and these would submit, until the injustice of the Romans again drove them to shake off the yoke: the people always appears in a very noble light. Cato, however, was also cunning, this being a feature in his character, as well as in that of the Romans as a nation. He strengthened the power of Rome by circulars which he sent to seventy or eighty Spanish towns, all of which were strongly fortified, and in case of rebellion hard to take, so that they were apt to combine with their neighbours. In these letters, which were all of them to be opened on one and the same day, as containing a secret of very high importance, was the command to pull down their walls forthwith under the threat of a siege and of bondage. The order was generally obeyed; and before they became aware that it was a stratagem, the work of demolition had already made considerable progress.