Studies in the Poetry of Italy, Part I. Roman

by Frank Justus Miller

All these characteristics made the Romanized Greek tragedies immensely popular; but, strangely enough, this did not develop a truly national Roman tragedy, as was the case, for instance, with epic and lyric literature. We have already seen how meager was the production of the fabulæ prætextæ. With the rich national traditions and history to inspire this, we can account for the failure to develop a native Roman tragedy only upon the assumption that the Roman lacked the gift of dramatic invention, at least to the extent of originating and developing great dramatic plots and characters, which form the essential elements of tragic drama.

We shall not weary the reader with quotations from the extant fragments of old Roman tragedy, fragments which, isolated as they are, can prove next to nothing as to the development of the plot or the other essential characteristics of a drama. A play is not like an animal: it cannot be reconstructed from a single fragment. It will be profitable, however, to dwell upon a few of these fragments, in order to get some idea of the nature and contents of all that is left of an extensive literature.

There is a very dramatic fragment of the Alexander or Paris of Ennius. It represents Cassandra, in prophetic raving, predicting the destruction which her brother Paris is to bring upon his fatherland. It is said that Hecuba, queen of Troy, before the birth of Paris, dreamed that she had brought forth a firebrand. Remembering this, Cassandra cries out at sight of her brother:

Here it is; here, the torch, wrapped in fire and blood. Many years it hath lain hid; help, citizens, and extinguish it. For now, on the great sea, a swift fleet is gathering. It hurries along a host of calamities. They come: a fierce host lines the shores with sail-winged ships.

Sellar.

Several of the fragments show a certain measure of descriptive power and poetic imagination in these early tragedians. The following passage from the Argonautæ of Accius shows this to a marked degree. It is a description of the first ship, Argo, as she goes plowing through the sea. It is supposed to be spoken by a rustic who from the shore is watching the vessel's progress. It should be remembered that the great boat is as strange a sight to him as were the ships of Columbus to the natives of newly discovered America. Hence the strange and seemingly strained metaphors.

The mighty mass glides on,
Like some loud-panting monster of the deep;
Back roll the waves, in eddying masses whirled.
It rushes on, besprinkling all the sea
With flying spray like backward streaming breath;
As when one sees the cloud-rack whirled along,
Or some huge mass of rock reft off and driven
By furious winds, or seething whirlpools, high
Upbeaten by the ever-rushing waves;
Or else when Ocean crashes on the shore,
Or Triton, from the caverns of the sea,
Far down beneath the swelling waters' depths,
A rocky mass to upper heaven uprears.
Miller.

Sellar, in speaking of the feeling for natural beauty, says of Accius: "The fragments of Accius afford the first hint of that enjoyment of natural beauty which enters largely into a later age"; and quotes the following passage from the Oenomaus as "perhaps the first instance in Latin poetry of a descriptive passage which gives any hint of the pleasure derived from contemplating the common aspects of nature":

By chance before the dawn, harbinger of burning rays, when the husbandmen bring forth the oxen from their rest into the fields, that they may break the red, dew-sprinkled soil with the plough, and turn up the clods from the soft soil.

When we read this delightful passage, and then turn to the exquisite and fuller pictures of natural beauty which Lucretius and Vergil have left us, we shall agree that Accius was himself indeed the "harbinger of burning rays."