In conquering Macedon Rome had become acquainted with civilisation. At that date civilisation meant Hellenism slightly tinctured with Orientalism, a culture which, though still alive and still original and creative, was certainly past its prime. The Hellenistic period of Greek art has been unjustly depreciated in comparison with the more youthful and virile age of Pericles. But it could still boast of great scholars, scientists, and philosophers, both at Alexandria and Athens. Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus form a group of original poets who are really great, and an art that could produce the lovely Aphrodite of Melos cannot with justice be termed decadent. Politically, morally, and physically Greece was no doubt long past the vigour of her youth, but intellectually she was still well qualified to play the part of schoolmistress to the lusty young barbarian of the West. We have seen that in very remote times Rome had come under Etruscan influences which were closely akin to Greek. There had been some interchange, if tradition may be trusted, of Greek and Etruscan art and artists. Greek painters had worked in Rome at a very early date. Then came perhaps two centuries of relapse in the cultural sense while Rome was busy with warfare and conquest. In 300 B.C. she was almost entirely destitute of accomplishments, and even, if we may except law, politics, and military skill, of civilisation. The war with Pyrrhus, the conquest of Tarentum and then of Sicily brought in Greek slaves, and semi-Greek South-Italian citizens who were bound to have some influence. Then came direct dealings with Greece in the three Macedonian wars, and every Roman who had fought with Flamininus or Paulus returned to Rome if not an apostle of culture at any rate a man who had seen civilisation with his own eyes and could no longer regard old Roman ways as sufficient for man’s happiness. How could eyes that had seen the Zeus of Pheidias at Olympia glowing with ivory and gold be content with the old vermilion Jove of his native temple?
Nevertheless it was very slowly that culture filtered in. All through the third century and for the first half of the second Rome was still incessantly occupied with war. Her tastes were brutalised and demoralised by it. When drama painfully began, the dramatists sadly lamented that their audiences would desert the theatre for the sight of a rope-dancer or a beast-baiting or, better still, a pair of gladiators. From the first it was vain to attempt the creation of a national drama for a people whose craving was for the sight of blood. Gladiatoral combats are said to have been of Etruscan origin. They first appeared at Rome in the early part of the third century in connection with funeral displays. From every African expedition wild beasts were brought home to be slaughtered in the Roman amphitheatres. These bloody shows indicate the real tastes of the Romans from the earliest times. They are no spurious growth of the so-called “degenerate Empire.” On one occasion, when the music of some Greek flute-players failed to please a Roman audience, the presiding magistrate ordered the unlucky artists to fight one another, and the hoots of the crowd were instantly transformed to rapturous applause.
All the arts were held in contempt, all were entrusted to slaves or the poorest kind of citizens. Thus Hellenic civilisation was transported to Rome under a double disadvantage. Not only was Greek civilisation itself already past its prime, but it was interpreted largely by slaves. Every Roman of position had Greeks among his retinue—not, of course, the citizens of famous cities like Athens or Alexandria, which were still free, but low-caste, half-barbarian wretches from the great market at Delos or from the southern towns of Italy—for clerks, accountants, scribes, jesters, procurers, physicians, pedagogues, flute-players, philosophers, cooks, concubines, and schoolmasters. We may be sure that it was not the most favourable type of Hellenism that would creep into Rome by such channels as these. But it was precisely in this manner that Roman literature began. The noble general M. Livius Salinator brought from Tarentum in about 275 B.C. a Greek slave named Andronikos, as a tutor for his sons. This man received his liberty, and as Livius Andronicus set up a school. For his school he required books, and as there was no other text-book in Latin but the XII Tables, he undertook the translation of Homer’s Odyssey into the native Italian measure of Saturnian verse. His work was, of course, very indifferently performed, but it remained a primer of education down to the schooldays of Horace. Emboldened by this success he proceeded to supply the Roman stage with translations of Greek tragedies.
Such was the beginning; the sequel was not much more promising. Nævius was a Campanian who translated Greek comedies and tragedies. In the former he attempted the old Greek custom of political allusions, but speedily found that there was no such liberty of speech in Rome as had prevailed in the palmy days of Athenian comedy. An allusion to the Metellus family brought the famous and thoroughly old Roman poetical retort:
dabunt malum Metelli Nævio poetæ,
and was fulfilled by the imprisonment of the dramatist. Thus the beginnings of literature at Rome were by no means easy. The dramatists were hampered by severe police restrictions as well as by the barbarity of their public. It is interesting to note that both these poets also attempted the epic style. Livius Andronicus was actually commissioned by the priests to celebrate the victory of Sena in verse, and Nævius wrote an account of the First Punic War.
For comedy the Romans appear to have had some natural taste. It seems that a very rude and barbaric form of dramatic dialogue mixed with buffoonery was native to Italy in the Fescennine Songs, though even these are said to have been of Etruscan invention. So the Romans at their festivals were content to listen to comedies if the humour was obvious enough, if there was plenty of horseplay. The setting was wretched indeed. Instead of the magnificent marble theatres of Greece, wooden booths were temporarily erected in the amphitheatre, and a noisy disorderly audience listened with good-humoured contempt to the efforts of the actors who tried to amuse them. Sometimes the chorus would be sung by trained musicians, while the actors on the stage illustrated the inaudible words by pantomimic gestures. It was utterly crude and inartistic from beginning to end, and in deplorable contrast to the beginnings of Drama in Greece. There it had been a national service of worship to the gods. Here it was a trivial amusement in the hands of slaves and foreigners.
Of the three great comedians, Plautus, though a genuine free Italian of Umbria, had been reduced by poverty to the position almost of a slave; Cæcilius was a prisoner of war from the neighbourhood of Milan, who had been brought to Rome as a slave and then set free; Terence was a Carthaginian by birth, belonging as a slave to the Senator Terentius Lucanus, and subsequently being liberated became a friend of the younger Scipio. Ennius, the “father” of epic verse and tragedy, was a client of the elder Scipio and a Greek-speaking Calabrian by birth. Pacuvius, the best of the early tragedians, was a native of Brundisium, and therefore more Greek than Roman; he too belonged to the Scipionic circle. The activity of these writers belongs mainly to the first half of the second century. Not one of them was a Roman by origin, still less was there anything distinctively Roman in their work. Except from the linguistic point of view there is little to be said about any of them. The comic dramatists were engaged in translating the work of the Greek comedians of the third phase, especially Menander and Philemon. To meet the demand for more plot, more action, with less dialogue and less poetry, they would generally make a patchwork of two or three Greek plays. From the artistic point of view the work was clumsily done. There was little pretence of Romanising the characters or the scenes, generally they were frankly Greek with strange intrusions from Roman life. The source from which they drew was by now a stereotyped comedy of manners with stock characters—the heavy father, either an indulgent debauchee or a stingy curmudgeon; the old woman, generally a procuress; the gay and profligate young hero; the fair heroine, generally a meretrix, and a background of parasites, bullies, pandars, slave-dealers, and scoundrelly slaves, who came in for recurrent beatings to the great entertainment of the audience. The situations are also “taken from stock,” facial resemblances, disguised strangers, mistaken identities, veiled women and so forth. The “love interest,” such as it is, almost invariably centres round the desire of a young profligate for a courtesan. The atmosphere is generally brutal and immoral. There is often a ludicrous want of dramatic imagination in the stage management. Yet the comedies of Plautus and Terence have played a larger part in monasteries and schoolrooms than any other literature in the world, and through Shakespeare and Molière have had a decisive influence in the history of the drama. We do not possess enough of the original Greek sources to say very definitely how much was contributed by the Roman dramatists of their own. Where we do get passages for comparison the Latin version has generally lost a great deal in wit and neatness of expression. The prologues, so far as they are genuine, are at any rate in the case of Plautus extremely bald and crude. “Now I will tell you why I have come forward here and what I intend in order that you may know the name of this play. For so far as the story goes it is a short one. Now I will tell you what I was anxious to inform you of: the name of this play in Greek is Onagos—Demophilus (or Diphilus?) composed it, Maccius turned it into Latin. He wishes it called Asinaria, if you please.” And so he proceeds to unwind his plot and relate how the young spendthrift Argyrripus won the favours of the courtesan Philenium by duping her mother, the procuress, and cheating his mother, a shrew, out of twenty minæ by the co-operation of his immoral old father who hoped to secure the young woman for himself.
It would be wrong, however, to underrate the literary merits of Plautus and Terence. These authors reveal to us something of the natural speech of the Roman—Plautus in particular, for Terence is already far more “classical” in his language. It is not always easy to say how far the amusement which we get from them is legitimate, or how far it is laughter at the expense of their antique artlessness and clumsiness. But Plautus has a rich vein of simple humour and an irresistible sly appeal to his audience which often makes one unconscious of the garbage in which he is dealing. Terence has a polish, a graceful way of putting the obvious, and a purity of diction which sometimes makes his young men seem almost gentlemen and his young women almost virtuous. There is a great deal of sound worldly morality in Terence and some pure sentiment. But it is necessary here to lay stress upon the fact that the literary arts of Rome never possessed the fresh innocence or even the simple coarseness of youth. It was little harm, perhaps, that the gladiators, the rope-dancers, the bear-baiters, and the charioteers won the day in the affections of Roman audiences.
Father Ennius, too, in his tragedies was little more than a translator. He was employed consciously by the great Scipio to educate and broaden the Roman taste. He had learnt of the Greek philosophers to disbelieve in the gods, or rather he had learnt the deadly Euhemerist doctrine that the gods of Olympus are but the memories of long dead human heroes, or that they sit, as Epicurus also taught,