Quem nemo ferro potuit superare me auro,
or—
Ille vir haud magna cum re sed plenu' fidei,
or the great—
Moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque
Ennius expressed, with even greater point and weight than Virgil himself, the haughty virtue, the keen and narrow political instinct, by which the small and struggling mid-Italian town grew to be arbitress of the world; not Lucretius with his vast and melancholy outlook over a world where patriotism did not exist for the philosopher, not Virgil with his deep and charmed breedings over the mystery and beauty of life and death, struck the Roman note so exclusively and so certainly.
The success of the Latin epic in Ennius' hands was indeed for the period so complete that it left no room for further development; for the next hundred years the Annales remained not only the unique, but the satisfying achievement in this kind of poetry, and it was only when a new wave of Greek influence had brought with it a higher and more refined standard of literary culture, that fresh progress could be attained or desired. It was not so with tragedy. So long as the stage demanded fresh material, it continued to be supplied, and the supply only ceased when, as had happened even in Greece, the acted drama dwindled away before the gaudier methods of the music-hall. Marcus Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius, wrote plays for the thirty years after his uncle's death, which had an even greater vogue; he is placed by Cicero at the head of Roman tragedians. The plays have all perished, and even the fragments are lamentably few; we can still trace in them, however, that copiousness of fancy and richness of phrase which was marked as his distinctive quality by the great critic Varro. Only one Roman play (on Lucius Aemilius Paulus, the conqueror of Pydna[1]) is mentioned among his pieces; and this, though perhaps accidental, may indicate that tragedy had not really pushed its roots deep enough at Rome, and was destined to an early decay. Inexhaustible as is the life and beauty of the old Greek mythology, it was impossible that a Roman audience should be content to listen for age after age to the stories of Atalanta and Antiope, Pentheus and Orestes, while they had a new national life and overwhelming native interests of their own. The Greek tragedy tended more and more to become the merely literary survival that it was in France under Louis Quatorze, that it has been in our own day in the hands of Mr. Arnold or Mr. Swinburne. But one more poet of remarkable genius carries on its history into the next age.
Lucius Accius of Pisaurum produced one of his early plays in the year 140 B.C., on the same occasion when one of his latest was produced by Pacuvius, then an old man of eighty. Accius reached a like age himself; Cicero as a young man knew him well, and used to relate incidents of the aged poet's earlier life which he had heard from his own lips. For the greater part of the fifty years which include Sulla and the Gracchi, Accius was the recognised literary master at Rome, president of the college of poets which held its meetings in the temple of Minerva on the Aventine, and associating on terms of full equality with the most distinguished statesmen. A doubtful tradition mentions him as having also written an epic, or at least a narrative poem, called Annales, like that of Ennius; but this in all likelihood is a distorted reflection of the fact that he handed down and developed the great literary tradition left by his predecessor. The volume of his dramatic work was very great; the titles are preserved of no less than forty-five tragedies. In general estimation he brought Roman tragedy to its highest point. The fragments show a grace and fancy which we can hardly trace in the earlier tragedians.
Accius was the last, as he seems to have been the greatest, of his race. Tragedy indeed continued, as we shall see, to be written and even to be acted. The literary men of the Ciceronian and Augustan age published their plays as a matter of course; Varius was coupled by his contemporaries with Virgil and Horace; and the lost Medea of Ovid, like the never-finished Ajax of Augustus, would be at the least a highly interesting literary document. But the new age found fresh poetical forms into which it could put its best thought and art; while a blow was struck directly at the roots of tragedy by the new invention, in the hands of Cicero and his contemporaries, of a grave, impassioned, and stately prose.