Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

by Frank Justus Miller

Behold, O friends, old Ennius' carvéd stone,
Who wrote your father's deeds with lambent pen;
Let no tears deck my funeral, for lo,
My soul immortal lives on lips of men.

We have seen that the spirit of invective in Lucilius, which became in his hands the spirit of satire, is traceable to the old Greek comedy. The poetic form (the dactylic hexameter in which he wrote twenty of the thirty books of his satire) had already been naturalized in Roman literature by Ennius in his great epic poem. But to Lucilius is due the credit of being the first to incarnate this spirit in this form, and thus to establish an entirely new type in literature.

His satires contain invectives against luxury, avarice, and kindred vices, and prevalent superstitions; an attack upon the rich; ridicule of certain rhetorical affectations; grammatical remarks, and criticisms on art; observations upon the Stoic philosophy; the poet's own political experiences and expectations, also other anecdotes and incidents gathered from his own experience; an interesting account of a journey to Sicily, from which Horace probably obtained the model for his famous journey to Brundisium. These and many other subjects filled his pages, and suggest by their wide range the old-time medley-satire.

The poet lived in stirring times. Born in 180 B. C., eleven years before the death of Ennius, he died about 103 B. C., three years after Cicero's birth and the year before the birth of Cæsar. He was thus contemporary with some of the most important and striking events in Roman history—the third Macedonian War; the Third Punic War; the Numantian War, in which he himself served as a knight under Scipio Africanus in 133 B. C.; the troubled times of the two Gracchi; the Jugurthine War, and the rise of Caius Marius. He was of equestrian rank, and lived on terms of intimacy with some of the best men at Rome, notably the younger Scipio and Lælius. With such backing as this, of family and friends, he was in good position to direct his satire against the wicked and unscrupulous men of his time, regardless of their rank, without fear or favor.

What did the Romans themselves think of Lucilius? To judge from the frequency and character of their references to him, the poet must have made a profound impression upon his countrymen. A study of these references shows that in the main this impression was favorable. He is doctus, that is, profoundly learned in the wisdom of the Greeks; and, according to Aulus Gellius, he was equally well versed in the language and literature of his own land. He is to Juvenal the magnus, the "father of satire," who has well-nigh preempted the field, to follow whom requires elaborate explanation and apology on the part of the would-be satirist. He is to Cicero perurbanus, preëminently endowed with that subtle something in spirit and expression which marks at once the polished man of the world. He is to Fronto remarkable for his gracilitas, that plainness, directness, and simplicity of style which, joined with the "harshness" and "roughness" of his "eager" spirit and of his righteous indignation, made his satire such a formidable weapon against the vices of his day. Persius says of him that he "slashed the citizens of his time and broke his jaw-teeth on them." And the testimony of Juvenal is still more striking: "But whenever Lucilius with drawn sword fiercely rages, his hearer, whose soul is cold within him because of his crimes, blushes with shame, and his heart quakes in silent fear because of his guilty secrets."

Like those of so many of his predecessors in literature, the works of Lucilius remain to us only in the merest fragments. For these we are indebted largely to the Latin grammarians, who quote freely from him, usually in illustration of the meaning of some word which they may be discussing. A comparatively small number of the fragments have come down to us through quotations on account of their sentiment, as when Cicero says: "Lucilius used to say that he did not write to be read by either of the extremes of society, because one would not understand him, and the other knew more than he did."

We shall now examine a few of the more important of the fragments which have been preserved to us. The following has been thought to be a vivid picture of the unworthy struggle of life as he saw it in the Rome of his own time. Lactantius, however, whose quotation of the fragment has saved it, thinks that the poet is portraying in a more general way the unhappy, unrestful life of mankind, unrelieved, as Lucretius would say, by the comforting reflections of philosophy.

But now, from morning to night, on holidays and work days, in the same place, the whole day long, high and low, all busy themselves in the forum and never depart. To one and the same pursuit and practice have they all devoted themselves: to cheat as guardedly as possible, to strive craftily, to vie in flattery, to make a pretense of being good men, to lay snares just as if they were all the foes of all.

There was a certain Titus Albucius, who, it seems, was so enamored with everything Greek that he was continually affecting the manners and language of that country. Such running after foreign customs and speech has not yet wholly disappeared. This weakness is the object of the poet's wit in the following passage, in which he tells how Scævola, the proprætor of Asia, once "took down" the silly Albucius in Athens:

A Greek, Albucius, you would be called, and not a Roman and a Sabine, a fellow-townsman of Pontius and Tritanius, though they are both illustrious men, and first-rate standard-bearers. And so, as prætor at Athens, when I meet you, I salute you in the foreign style which you are so fond of: "χᾶιρε!"[A] I say; and my lictors and all my retinue inquire: "χᾶιρε?" Fie, Albucius! for this thou art my country's foe, and my own enemy!