Latin Literature

by J. W. Mackail

Those years of the early Empire in which the names of Virgil and Horace stand out above all the rest were a period of large fertility in Latin poetry. Great poets naturally bring small poets after them; and there was no age at Rome in which the art was more assiduously practised or more fashionable in society. The Court set a tone which was followed in other circles, and more especially among the younger men of the old aristocracy, now largely excluded from the public life which had engrossed their parents under the Republic. The influence of the Alexandrian poets, so potent in the age of Catullus, was not yet exhausted; and a wider culture had now made the educated classes familiar with the whole range of earlier Greek poetry as well. Rome was full of highly educated Greek scholars, some of whom were themselves poets of considerable merit. It was the fashion to form libraries; the public collection formed by Augustus, and housed in a sumptuous building on the Palatine, was only the largest among many others in the great houses of Rome. The earlier Latin poets had known only a small part of Greek literature, and that very imperfectly; their successors had been trammelled by too exclusive an admiration of the Greek of the decadence. Virgil and Horace, though professed students of the Alexandrians, had gone back themselves, and had recalled the attention of the public, to the poets of free Greece, and had stimulated the widely felt longing to conquer the whole field of poetry for the Latin tongue.

For this attempt, tradition and circumstance finally proved too strong; and Augustan poetry, outside of a few definite forms, is largely a chronicle of failure. This was most eminently so in the drama. Augustan tragedy seems never to have risen for a moment beyond mere academic exercises. Of the many poets who attempted it, nothing survives beyond a string of names. Lucius Varius Rufus, the intimate friend of both Virgil and Horace, and one of the two joint-editors of the Aeneid after the death of the former, wrote one tragedy, on the story of Thyestes, which was acted with applause at the games held to celebrate the victory of Actium, and obtained high praise from later critics. But he does not appear to have repeated the experiment like so many other Latin poets, he turned to the common path of annalistic epic. Augustus himself began a tragedy of Ajax, but never finished it. Gaius Asinius Pollio, the first orator and critic of the period, and a magnificent patron of art and science, also composed tragedies more on the antique model of Accius and Pacuvius, in a dry and severe manner. But neither in these, nor in the work of the young men for whose benefit Horace wrote the Epistle to the Pisos, was there any real vitality; the precepts of Horace could no more create a school of tragedians than his example could create a school of lyric poets.

The poetic forms, on the other hand, used by Virgil were so much more on the main line of tendency that he stands among a large number of others, some of whom might have had a high reputation but for his overwhelming superiority. Of the other essays made in this period in bucolic poetry we know too little to speak with any confidence. But both didactic poetry and the little epic were largely cultivated, and the greater epic itself was not without followers. The extant poems of the Culex and Ciris have already been noted as showing with what skill and grace unknown poets, almost if not absolutely contemporary with Virgil, could use the slighter epic forms. Varius, when he abandoned tragedy, wrote epics on the death of Julius Caesar, and on the achievements of Agrippa. The few fragments of the former which survive show a remarkable power and refinement; Virgil paid them the sincerest of all compliments by conveying, not once only but again and again, whole lines of Varius into his own work. Another intimate friend of Virgil, Aemilius Macer of Verona, wrote didactic poems in the Alexandrian manner on several branches of natural history, which were soon eclipsed by the fame of the Georgics, but remained a model for later imitators of Nicander. One of these, a younger contemporary of Virgil called Gratius, or Grattius, was the author of a poem on hunting, still extant in an imperfect form. In its tame and laboured correctness it is only interesting as showing the early decay of the Virgilian manner in the hands of inferior men.

A more interesting figure, and one the loss of whose works leaves a real gap in Latin literature, is Gaius Cornelius Gallus, the earliest and one of the most brilliant of the Augustan poets. Like Varro Atacinus, he was born in Narbonese Gaul, and brought into Roman poetry a new touch of Gallic vivacity and sentiment. The year of his birth was the same as that of Virgil's, but his genius matured much earlier, and before the composition of the Eclogues he was already a celebrated poet, as well as a distinguished man of action. The story of his life, with its swift rise from the lowest fortune to the splendid viceroyalty of Egypt, and his sudden disgrace and death at the age of forty-three, is one of the most dramatic in Roman history. The translations from Euphorion, by which he first made his reputation, followed the current fashion; but about the same time he introduced a new kind of poetry, the erotic elegy, which had a swift and far-reaching success. To Gallus, more than to any other single poet, is due the naturalisation in Latin of the elegiac couplet, which, together with the lyrics of Horace and the Virgilian hexameter, makes up the threefold poetical achievement of the Augustan period, and which, after the Latin lyric had died out with Horace himself, halved the field with the hexameter. For the remaining literature of the Empire, for that of the Middle Ages so far as it followed classical models, and even for that of the Renaissance, which carries us down to within a measurable distance of the present day, the hexameter as fixed by Virgil, and the elegiac as popularised by Gallus and rapidly brought to perfection by his immediate followers, are the only two poetical forms of real importance.

The elegiac couplet had, of course, been in use at Rome long before; Ennius himself had employed it, and in the Ciceronian age Catullus had written in it largely, and not without success. But its successful use had been hitherto mainly confined to short pieces, such as would fall within the definition of the Greek epigram. The four books of poems in which Gallus told the story of his passion for the courtesan Cytheris (the Lycoris of the tenth Eclogue) showed the capacities of the metre in a new light. The fashion they set was at once followed by a crowd of poets. The literary circles of Maecenas and Messalla had each their elegiac poet of the first eminence; and the early death of both Propertius and Tibullus was followed, amid the decline of the other forms of the earlier Augustan poetry, by the consummate brilliance of Ovid.

Of the Augustan elegiac poets, Sextus Propertius, a native of Assisi in Umbria, and introduced at a very early age to the circle of Maecenas, is much the most striking and interesting figure, not only from the formal merit of his poetry, but as representing a type till then almost unknown in ancient literature. Of his life little is known. Like Virgil, he lost his patrimonial property in the confiscations which followed the Civil war, but he was then a mere child. He seems to have been introduced to imperial patronage by the publication of the first book of his Elegies at the age of about twenty. He died young, before he was thirty-five, if we may draw an inference from the latest allusions in his extant poems; he had then written four other books of elegiac pieces, which were probably published separately at intervals of a few years. In the last book there is a noticeable widening of range of subject, which foreshadows the further development that elegiac verse took in the hands of Ovid soon after his death.

In striking contrast to Virgil or Horace, Propertius is a genius of great and, indeed, phenomenal precocity. His first book of Elegies, the Cynthia monobiblos of the grammarians, was a literary feat comparable to the early achievements of Keats or Byron. The boy of twenty had already mastered the secret of elegiac verse, which even Catullus had used stiffly and awkwardly, and writes it with an ease, a colour, a sumptuousness of rhythm which no later poet ever equalled. The splendid cadence of the opening couplet—

Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis Contactum nullis ante cupidinibus—

must have come on its readers with the shock of a new revelation. Nothing like it had ever been written in Latin before: itself and alone it assures a great future to the Latin elegiac. His instinct for richness of sound is equally conspicuous where it is found in purely Latin phrases, as in the opening of the sixteenth elegy—

Quae fueram magnis olim patefacta triumphis
Ianua Tarpeiae nota pudicitiae
Cuius inaurati celebrarunt limina currus
Captorum lacrimis umida supplicibus,