Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal

by Harold Edgeworth Butler

The drama proper had never flourished at Rome. The causes are not far to seek. Tragic drama was dead in Greece by the time Greek influence made itself felt, while the New Comedy which then held the stage was of too quietly realistic a type and of too refined a wit and humour to be attractive to the coarser and less intelligent audiences of Rome. Terence, the dimidiatus Menander, as Caesar called him, though he won himself a great name with the cultured classes by the purity and elegance of his Latin and the fine drawing of his characters, was a failure with popular audiences owing to his lack of broad farcical humour. Plautus with his coarse geniality and lumbering wit made a greater success. He had grafted the festive spirit of Roman farce on to the more artistic comedy of Athens. Tragedy obtained but a passing vogue. Ennius, Accius, and Pacuvius were read and enjoyed by not a few educated readers, but for the Augustan age, as far as the stage was concerned, they were practically dead and buried. The Roman populace had by that period lost all taste for the highest and most refined forms of art. The races in the circus, the variety entertainments and bloodshed of the amphitheatre had captured the favour of the polyglot, pampered multitude that must have formed such a large proportion of a Roman audience.

Still, dramatic entertainments had by no means wholly disappeared by the time of the Empire. But what remained was of a degraded type. The New Comedy of Athens, as transferred to the Roman stage, had given ground before the advance of the mime and the fabula Atellana. The history of both these forms of comedy belongs to an earlier period. For the post-Augustan age our evidence as to their development is very scanty. Little is known save that they were exceedingly popular. Both were characterized by the broadest farce and great looseness of construction; both were brief one-act pieces and served as interludes or conclusions to other forms of spectacle.

The Atellan was of Italian origin and contained four stock characters, Pappus the old man or pantaloon, Dossennus the wise man, corresponding to the dottore of modern Italian popular comedy, Bucco the clown, and Maccus the fool. It dealt with every kind of theme, parodied the legends of the gods, laughed at the provincial's manners or at the inhabitants of Italian country towns, or depicted in broad comic style incidents in the life of farmer and artisan. Maccus appeared as a young girl, as a soldier, as an innkeeper; Pappus became engaged to be married; Bucco turned gladiator; and in the rough and tumble of these old friends the Roman mob found rich food for laughter.[86]

The mime was of a very similar character, but freer in point of form. It renounced the use of masks and reached, it would seem, an even greater pitch of indecency than the Atellan. The subjects of a few mimes are known to us. Among the most popular were the Phasma or Ghost[87] and the Laureolus[888] of Catullus, a writer of the reign of Caligula. In the latter play was represented the death by crucifixion of the famous brigand 'Laureolus'; so degraded was popular taste that on one occasion it is recorded that a criminal was made to take the part of Laureolus and was crucified in grim earnest upon the stage.[89] In another mime of the principate of Vespasian the chief attraction was a performing dog,[90] which, on being given a pretended opiate, went to sleep and later feigned a gradual revival in such a realistic manner as to rouse the wildest applause on the part of the audience.

Both Atellan and mime abounded in topical allusions and spared not even the emperors. Allusion was made to the unnatural vices attributed to Tiberius,[91] to the deaths of Claudius and Agrippina,[92] to the avarice of Galba,[93] to the divorce of Domitian,[94] and on more than one occasion heavy punishment was meted out to authors and actors alike.[95]

Legitimate comedy led a struggling existence. An inscription at Aeclanum[96] records the memory of a certain Pomponius Bassulus, who not only translated certain comedies of Menander but himself wrote original comedies; while in the letters of Pliny[97] we meet with Vergilius Romanus, a writer of comedies of 'the old style' and of mimiambi. He possessed, so Pliny writes, 'vigour, pungency, and wit. He gave honour to virtue and attacked vice.' It is to be feared that such a form of comedy can hardly have been intended for the public stage, and that Vergilius, like so many poets of his age, wrote for private performance or recitation. These two writers are the only authors of legitimate comedies known to us during the Silver Age. But both fabulae palliatae and togatae, that is to say, comedies representing Greek and Roman life respectively, continued to be acted on the public stage. The Incendium[98] of Afranius, a fabula togata, was performed in the reign of Nero, and the evidence of Quintilian[99] and Juvenal[100] shows that palliatae also continued to be performed. But true comedy had been relegated to a back place and the Silver Age did nothing to modify the dictum of Quintilian,[101] in comoedia maxime claudicamus.

As with comedy so with tragedy. Popular taste rejected the Graeco-Roman tragedy as tedious, and it was replaced by a more sensuous and sensational form of entertainment. The intenser passions and emotions were not banished from the stage, but survived in the salticae fabulae and a peculiar species of dramatic recitation. Infinitely debased as were these substitutes for true drama, the forms assumed by the decomposition of tragedy are yet curious and interesting. The first step was the separation of the cantica from the diverbia. Lyric scenes or even important iambic monologues were taken from their setting and sung as solos upon the stage.[102] It was found difficult to combine effective singing with effective gesture and dancing, for music had become more florid and exacting than in the days of Euripides. A second actor appeared who supplied the gesture to illustrate the first actor's song.[103] From this peculiar and to us ridiculous form of entertainment it is a small step to the fabula saltica, which was at once nearer the legitimate drama and further from it. It was nearer in that the scenes were not isolated, but formed part of a more or less carefully constructed whole. It was further inasmuch as the actor disappeared, only the dancer remaining upon the stage. The words of the play were relegated to a chorus, while the character, actions, and emotions of the person represented by the words of the chorus were set forth by the dress, gesticulation, and dancing of the pantomimus. How the various scenes were connected is uncertain; but it is almost a necessary inference that the connexion was provided by the chorus or, as in modern oratorio, by recitative. To us the mimetic posturing of the pantomimus appears an almost ridiculous substitute for drama; but the dancing of the actors seems to have been extraordinarily artistic and at times to have had a profound effect upon the emotions of the audience,[104] while the brilliant success in our own time of plays in dumb show, such as the famous Enfant Prodigue, should be a warning against treating the pantomimus with contempt.

This form of entertainment was first introduced at Rome in 22 B.C. by the actors Pylades and Bathyllus,[105] the former being famed for his tragic dancing, the latter for a broader and more comic style, whose dramatic counterpart would seem to have been the satyric drama.[106] The satyric element seems, however, never to have become really popular, the fabula saltica as we know it dealing mainly with tragic or highly emotional themes. Indeed, to judge from Lucian's disquisition on the art of dancing, the subjects seem to have been drawn from almost every conceivable source both of history and mythology.[107] Many of these salticae fabulae must have been mere adaptations of existing tragedies. Their literary value was, according to Plutarch, by no means high;[108] it was sacrificed to the music and the dancing, for the emotional effect of which Lucian can scarcely find sufficiently high terms of praise.[109] The themes appear to have been drawn from the more lurid passages in mythology and history. If the libretto was not coarse in itself, there is abundant evidence to show that the subjects chosen were often highly lascivious, while the movements of the dancers—not seldom men of the vilest character—were frequently to the last degree obscene.[110] Inadequate as this substitute for the drama must seem to us, we must remember that southern peoples were—and indeed are—far more sensitive to the language of signs, to expressive gesticulation and the sensuous movements of the body[111] than are the less quick-witted and emotional peoples of the North; and further, even if for the most part these fabulae salticae had small literary value, distinguished poets did not disdain to write librettos for popular actors. Passages from the works of Vergil were adapted for such performances;[112] Lucan wrote no less than fourteen fabulae salticae,[113] while the Agave of Statius,[114] written for the dancer Paris, is famous from the well-known passage in the seventh satire of Juvenal. Nothing survives of these librettos to enlighten us as to their literary characteristics, and the other details of the performance do not concern us here.[115] It is sufficient to say that the pantomimus had an enormous vogue in the Silver Age, and won a rich harvest by his efforts, and that the factions of the theatre, composed of the partisans of this or that actor, were scarcely less notorious than the factions of the circus for the disturbances to which they gave rise.[116]

Of the musical recitations of portions of existing tragedies or of tragic episodes written for the occasion we possess even less knowledge. The passages selected or composed for this purpose were in all probability usually lyric, but we hear also of the chanting of iambics, as, for instance, in the case of the Oedipus in Exile, in which Nero made his last appearance on the stage.[117] Of the part played by the chorus and of the structure of the librettos we know nothing; they may have been purely episodic and isolated or may, as in the salticae fabulae, have been loosely strung together into the form of an ill-constructed play. That they were sometimes written in Greek is known from the fact that the line quoted by Suetonius from the Oedipus in Exile mentioned above is in that language. Of the writers of this debased and bastard offspring of drama we know nothing save that Nero, who was passionately fond of appearing in them, seems also to have written them. (Suet. Ner. 39.)

The tragic stage had indeed sunk low, when it served almost entirely for exhibitions such as these. Nevertheless tragedy had not ceased to exist even if it had ceased to hold the stage.[118] Varius and Ovid had won fame in the Augustan age by their Thyestes and Medea, and the post-Augustan decadence was not without its tragedians. One only is mentioned by Quintilian in his survey of Roman poetry, Pomponius Secundus. Of him he says (x. 1. 98), 'Of the tragedians whom I myself have seen, Pomponius Secundus is by far the most eminent; a writer whom the oldest men of the day thought not quite tragic enough, but acknowledged that he excelled in learning and elegance of style.' Pomponius was a man of great distinction.[119] His friendship for Aelius Gallus, the son of Sejanus, had brought him into disgrace with Tiberius, but he recovered his position under Claudius. He attained to the consulship, and commanded with distinction in a war against the Chatti in A.D. 50. Of his writings we know but very little. Of his plays nothing is left save a brief fragment[120] from a play entitled Aeneas; whether it dealt with the deeds of Aeneas in his native land or in the land of his adoption is uncertain, though it is on the whole probable that the scene was Italian and that the drama was therefore a fabula praetexta. Whether his plays were performed on the public stage is not quite clear. Tacitus tells us of riots in the theatre in A.D. 44,[121] when 'poems' by Pomponius were being recited on the stage. But the words used by the historian (is carmina scaenae dabat) point rather to the recitation of a dramatic solo than to a complete tragedy of the orthodox type. Pomponius, dramatist and philologist,[122] remains a mere name for us.