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.
COUNTER-REVOLUTION. LEPIDUS. SERTORIUS. POMPEY.
Sylla was still living when M. Æmilius Lepidus, as the head of the democracy, rose against Q. Lutatius Catulus, the head of the aristocracy. This movement was one of those convulsions which will always follow such great events, owing to the infatuation of those who do not understand the things which have happened. Lepidus was working acta Sullæ rescindere; this counter-revolution aimed at nothing less than drawing the legions out of the military colonies, dismissing the senators of Sylla, and putting into their places the children of the proscribed. (Of those who had been outlawed, hardly one had escaped.) Lepidus’ whole undertaking was an impracticable one; nor did either his abilities or his moral worth fit him for such a task. He had himself taken a part in the struggles of Sylla’s times; and, as we may gather from the fragments of Sallust’s History, he had purchased confiscated estates for a mere trifle, and thus enriched himself. In the French revolution, many people were forced to buy such estates, so as to bind them to the interests of the revolution; just in the same way, Sylla had gained over thousands who would otherwise have been hostile to him, by letting them have estates of the proscribed at a bargain. Lepidus, however, may have been a worthless man, in which case the split would be a matter of course: he set himself up as the avenger of the old Romans who had been ruined. Any party which rules by bloodshed, must necessarily split: many who had shared in the intoxication of the moment, were afterwards ashamed of it, and now banded themselves together in the cause of humanity. Catulus, the colleague of Lepidus, was an honest man, and devoted heart and soul to Sylla. He undoubtedly had approved of his atrocities in some measure; but he himself was a man of honour to whom no foul deed could be imputed; he had kept himself pure from the purchase of ill-gotten property. As he was a person of great experience, he was looked upon as a judicious adviser, and enjoyed on the whole a great deal of consideration; whilst Lepidus, on the contrary, was not respected at all.
Elements of agitation were not wanting. The old inhabitants of the military colonies were driven from their abodes, with the exception of those who, like Ofellus in Horace, kept their estates as tenants of the new colonus (of these there were probably a great number). Thousands from the Etruscan and Umbrian municipal towns roamed about as beggars, ready to fight at any time for whatever cause might engage them: many soldiers of Sylla, who had already run through the land which they had gotten, were likewise to be had. The senate, seeing in the enterprise of Lepidus the beginning of fresh misery, made Catulus and Lepidus swear not to take up arms against each other. This answered so long as they were in Rome. In those days,—owing perhaps to a regulation of Sylla’s,—it was the custom for the consuls not to leave Rome during their year of office, and it was only after its expiration that they went to their provinces. As soon then as his consulship was over, Lepidus betook himself into Gaul, and the war broke out; he himself in Etruria, and in Cisalpine Gaul M. Brutus, a kinsman of the last Brutus, had gathered together a great number of desperadoes. An attempt of his on Rome was foiled, Catulus having been wise enough to get reinforcements; and thus the whole undertaking burst like a bubble. After a slight engagement, Lepidus himself gave up all hope, and fled to Sardinia where he died. His soldiers at first roved about for some time in Gaul, under his lieutenant M. Perperna; afterwards, they went to Sertorius in Spain. M. Brutus was defeated by Pompey, and put to death.
Infinitely more important was the war of Sertorius, of which we should have been glad to have read a circumstantial account in Sallust. What was the number of books in his Historiæ, we can no longer tell exactly: we have many quotations from the first five; but these could by no means have been all. From the fragments of the speeches, we may presume, that they went down from the war of Lepidus, to which without doubt the history of Sisenna reached, to the end of the war of Pompey in Asia. In this work, Sallust may in some degree have adopted the form of annals, which otherwise he could not bear. It was the last of his works, the Catiline having been the first.
Sertorius was a Sabine of by no means high birth, of Nursia, a præfectura where Vespasian also was born, and which even long afterwards was proverbial for its old-fashioned sternness (durities Nursina). It is a kind of Alpine valley in the midst of the Apennines (val di Norcia), and it only lost its freedom owing to the French revolution, before which time it was a small democratic republic, which even had the right of judging cases of life and death without any further appeal to Rome. On the whole, the different parts of the States of the Church were quite on a different footing; thus also Tivoli had such a free municipal constitution.[111] There is no book which can give us any insight into this state of things in Italy; it is quite unknown. The papal legate, or delegate, arbitrarily interfered, just like the proconsuls of old, though he had no formal powers of government. Some states were under the sternest baronial despotism; others had wretched communal constitutions; others again were real republics. In the march of Ancona, the towns had a diet with great privileges, a system, under which the country was very well off; but there were other places indeed in which the magistrates did just what they liked, there being no check upon them. In the States of the Church alone, there were probably a hundred petty commonwealths whose only point of union was the Pope. All this was done away with by the Revolution, and remained so, the system of præfects being introduced instead.
To this very day, the people of the Val di Norcia are looked upon as rough mountaineers, and indeed also as what the Italians call facinorosi. When they come to other parts of the country, they are very apt, from their wild habits, to become malefactors and banditti; but in their own home they behave very quietly, as an old Roman Abbé has assured me. In Cicero’s day, they bore the character of having kept up the old Sabellian manners in their purest state, like the Marsians, Hernicans, and Vestinians.[112]