Latin Literature

by J. W. Mackail

In the Metamorphoses the elaboration of the new style culminates. In its main substance this curious and fantastic romance is a translation from a Greek original. Its precise relation to the version of the same story, extant in Greek under the name of Lucian, has given rise to much argument, and the question cannot be held to be conclusively settled; but the theory which seems to have most in its favour is that both are versions of a lost Greek original. Lucian applied his limpid style and his uncommon power of narration to rewrite what was no doubt a ruder and more confused story. Apuleius evidently took the story as a mere groundwork which he might overlay with his own fantastic embroidery. He was probably attracted to it by the supernatural element, which would appeal strongly to him, not merely as a professed mystic and a dabbler in magic, but as a décadent whose art sought out strange experiences and romantic passions no less than novel rhythms and exotic diction. Under the light touch of Lucian the supernaturalism of the story is merely that of a fairy-tale, not believed in or meant to be believed; in the Metamorphoses a brooding sense of magic is over the whole narrative. In this spirit he entirely remodels the conclusion of the story. The whole of the eleventh book, from the vision of the goddess, with which it opens, to the reception of the hero at the conclusion into the fellowship of her holy servants, is conceived at the utmost tension of mystical feeling. "With stars and sea-winds in her raiment," flower-crowned, shod with victorious palm, clad, under the dark splendours of her heavy pall, in shimmering white silk shot with saffron and rose like flame, an awful figure rises out of the moonlit sea: En adsum, comes her voice, rerum natura parens, elementorum omnium domina, seculorum progenies initialis, summa numinum, regina manium, prima caelitum, deorum dearumque facies uniformis, quae caeli luminosa culmina, maris salubria flamina, inferorum deplorata silentia nutibus meis dispenso. It was in virtue of such passages as that from which these words are quoted that Apuleius came to be regarded soon after his death as an incarnation of Antichrist, sent to perplex the worshippers of the true God. Already to Lactantius he is not a curious artist in language, but a magician inspired by diabolical agency; St. Augustine tells us that, like Apollonius of Tyana, he was set up by religious paganism as a rival to Jesus Christ.

Of the new elements interwoven by Apuleius in the story of the transformations and adventures of Lucius of Patrae (Lucius of Madaura, he calls him, thus hinting, to the mingled awe and confusion of his readers, that the events had happened to himself), the fervid religious enthusiasm of the conclusion is no doubt historically the most important; but what has made it immortal is the famous story of Cupid and Psyche, which fills nearly two books of the Metamorphoses. With the strangeness characteristic of the whole work, this wonderful and exquisitely told story is put in the mouth of a half crazy and drunken old woman, in the robbers' cave where part of the action passes. But her first half-dozen words, the Erant in quadam civitate rex et regina, lift it in a moment into the fairy world of pure romance. The story itself is in its constituent elements a well-known specimen of the märchen, or popular tale, which is not only current throughout the Aryan peoples, but may be traced in the popular mythology of all primitive races. It is beyond doubt in its essential features of immemorial antiquity; but what is unique about it is its sudden appearance in literature in the full flower of its most elaborate perfection. Before Apuleius there is no trace of the story in Greek or Roman writing; he tells it with a daintiness of touch and a wealth of fanciful ornament that have left later story- tellers little or nothing to add. The version by which it is best known to modern readers, that in the Earthly Paradise, while, after the modern poet's manner, expanding the descriptions for their own sake, follows Apuleius otherwise with exact fidelity.

In the more highly wrought episodes, like the Cupid and Psyche, the new Latin of Apuleius often approximates nearly to assonant or rhymed verse. Both rhyme and assonance were to be found in the early Latin which he had studied deeply, and may be judged from incidental fragments of the popular language never to have wholly disappeared from common use during the classical period. Virgil, in his latest work, as has been noticed, shows a tendency to experiment in combining their use with that of the Graeco-Latin rhythms. The combination, in the writing of the new school, of a sort of inchoate verse with an elaborate and even pedantic prose was too artificial to be permanent; but about the same time attempts were made at a corresponding new style in regular poetry. Rhymed verse as such does not appear till later; the work of the novelli poetae, as they were called by the grammarians, partly took the form of reversion to the trochaic metres which were the natural cadence of the Latin language, partly of fresh experiments in hitherto untried metres, in both cases with a large employment of assonance, and the beginnings of an accentual as opposed to a quantitative treatment. Of these experiments few have survived; the most interesting is a poem of remarkable beauty preserved in the Latin Anthology under the name of the Pervigilium Veneris. Its author is unknown, nor can its date be determined with certainty. The worship of Venus Genetrix, for whose spring festival the poem is written, had been revived on a magnificent scale by Hadrian; and this fact, together with the internal evidence of the language, make it assignable with high probability to the age of the Antonines. The use of the preposition de, almost as in the Romance languages, where case- inflexions would be employed in classical Latin, has been held to argue an African origin; while its remarkable mediaevalisms have led some critics, against all the other indications, to place its date as low as the fourth or even the fifth century.

The Pervigilium Veneris is written in the trochaic septenarian verse which had been freely used by the earliest Roman poets, but had since almost dropped out of literary use. With the revival of the trochaic movement the long divorce between metrical stress and spoken accent begins to break down. The metre is indeed accurate, and even rigorous, in its quantitative structure; but instead of the prose and verse stresses regularly clashing as they do in the hexameter or elegiac, they tend broadly towards coinciding, and do entirely coincide in one-third of the lines of the poem. We are on the very verge of the accentual Latin poetry of the Middle Ages, and the affinity is made closer by the free use of initial and terminal assonances, and even of occasional rhyme. The use of stanzas with a recurring refrain was not unexampled; Virgil, following Theocritus and Catullus, had employed the device with singular beauty in the eighth Eclogue; but this is the first known instance of the refrain being added to a poem in stanzas of a fixed and equal length;[11] it is more than halfway towards the structure of an eleventh-century Provençal alba. The keen additional pleasure given by rhyme was easily felt in a language where accidental rhymes come so often as they do in Latin, but the rhyme here, so far as there is any, is rather incidental to the way in which the language is used, with its silvery chimes and recurrences, than sought out for its own sake; there is more of actual rhyming in some of the prose of Apuleius. The refrain itself-

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet—

has its internal recurrence, the folding back of the musical phrase upon itself; and as it comes over and over again it seems to set the whole poem swaying to its own music. In one of the most remarkable of his lyrics (like this poem, a song of spring), Tennyson has come very near, as near perhaps as it is possible to do in words, towards explaining the actual process through which poetry comes into existence: The fairy fancies range, and lightly stirr'd, Ring little bells of change from word to word. In the Pervigilium Veneris with its elaborate simplicity— partly a conscious literary artifice, partly a real reversion to the childhood of poetical form—this process is, as it were, laid bare before our eyes; the ringing phrases turn and return, and expand and interlace and fold in, as though set in motion by a strain of music.

Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet;
Ver novum, ver iam canorum, ver renatus orbis est;
Vere concordant amores, vere nubunt alites
Et nemus comam resolvit de maritis imbribus:
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet—

in these lines of clear melody the poem opens, and the rest is all a series of graceful and florid variations or embroideries upon them; the first line perpetually repeating itself through the poem like a thread of gold in the pattern or a phrase in the music. In the soft April night the tapering flame-shaped rosebud, soaked in warm dew, swells out and breaks into a fire of crimson at dawn.

Facta Cypridis de cruore deque Amoris osculo
Deque gemmis deque flammis deque solis purpuris
Cras ruborem qui latebat veste tectus ignea
Unico marita nodo non pudebit solvere.
Cras amet qui nunquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet.

Flower-garlanded and myrtle-shrouded, the Spring worshippers go dancing through the fields that break before them into a sheet of flowers; among them the boy Love goes, without his torch and his arrows; amid gold- flowered broom, under trees unloosening their tresses, in myrtle-thicket and poplar shade, the whole land sings with the voices of innumerable birds. Then with a sudden sob the pageant ceases:—