Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

by Frank Justus Miller

EPIC POETRY

Who
Show'd me that epic was of all the king,
Round, vast, and spanning all, like Saturn's ring?

1. CN. NÆVIUS—THE FIRST NATIONAL
ROMAN EPIC

We have already seen how the national pride of Rome was stirred by the completed subjugation of Italy and the first successful step in foreign conquest as the result of the First Punic War, and how this quickened national pride gave a new impulse to literature. We have seen how from this period under the powerful stimulus of Greek influence the drama sprang into being in its literary form. And it was in this same soil of awakened national consciousness, and in this same atmosphere of Greek thought and expression that the Roman epic had its beginnings.

The rude translation of Homer's Odyssey made by Livius Andronicus is not to be considered in this connection, for this was produced with no national feeling, but only that he might have a text-book from which to instruct his Roman schoolboys in their native tongue. The honor of producing the first heroic poem in Roman literature belongs to Cn. Nævius, to whom Mommsen accords the high praise of "the first Roman who deserves to be called a poet." He was a native of the district of Campania, of plebeian family, of most sturdy and independent character. The period of his life falls approximately between the years 269 and 199 B. C. We know that he was a soldier in his earlier life, serving in the First Punic War in Sicily, that he was imprisoned for his bold attacks from the stage upon the noble family of the Metelli, and afterward banished to Africa, where he ended his days.

The tragedies and comedies of Nævius date from his life in Rome, but the occupation, and we may well believe the solace, of his old age in exile was the composition of his Bellum Punicum, a heroic poem upon the First Punic War. This poem is a truly national epic written in the rough old Saturnian verse which came down from hoary antiquity as a native Roman metrical product. This verse has a jingle not unlike some of our familiar nursery rhymes, of which

The king was in his counting-house counting out his money,

is a fair sample. Roman in form, the epic of Nævius was also intensely national in spirit and content. It was written in seven books, of which the first two form a kind of mythological background or prelude, and the remaining five books tell the story of the first great duel between Rome and Carthage.

In the scanty fragments of this poem, especially in the introductory books, we are surprised to find ourselves upon familiar ground, until we discover that we are dealing with one of the great sources of Vergil's inspiration. For here in these broken scraps as in a shattered mirror we catch glimpses of Æneas and Anchises departing from Troy with their wives and treasure, and of the storm that drove the Trojans out of their course and wrecked them upon the shores of Africa; we hear snatches of Venus' appeal to Jupiter in their behalf, of Jove's reply promising to the Trojans a mighty destiny, and of Dido's request to Æneas for his tale of the Trojan War.