I think that, thtilled with a patriotism the keener-edged because it was acquired, he went to work in this way:—He was going to make one of these long poems, like those (inferior) Greek fellows had; and he was going to make it in Latin. (I do not know which was his native language, or which tradition he grew up in.) He didn't see why we Romans should not have our ancient greatness sung in epic; weren't we as good as Homer's people, anyhow? Certainly we were; and a deal better! Well, of course there was our old Saturnian meter; but that wasn't the kind of way serious poetry was written. Serious poetry was written in hexameters. If Greek was his native tongue, he may have spoken Latin all his life, of course, with a Greek accent; and the fact that he was sitting down to make up his 'poem' in a meter which no native-born Latin speaker could hear as a meter at all, may have been something of which he was profoundly unconscious. But that is what he did. He ignored (mostly) the stresses and accents natural to Latin, and with sweet naivete made a composition that would have scanned if it had been Greek, and that you could make scan by reading with a Greek rhythm or accent. The Romans accepted it. That perhaps is to say, that he had no conception at all of poetry as words framed upon an inner music. I think he was capable of it; that most Romans of the time, supposing they had had the conviction of poethood, would have been capable of it. It was the kind of people they were.
But that was not all there was to Ennius, by any means. A poet-soul had incarnated there; he had the root of the matter in him; it was only the racial vehicle that was funny, as you may say. He was filled with a high conception of the stern grandeur Romans admired; and somehow or other, his lines carry the impress of that grandeur at times: there is inspiration in them.
And now comes the point I have fetched all this compass to arrive at. By Spenser's time, or earlier, in England, all traces of Chaucer's French accent had gone; the language and the poetry had developed on lines of their own, as true expressions of the national soul. But in Rome, not so. Two centuries later great Roman poetry was being written: a major poet was on the scenes, —Virgil. He, I am certain, wrote with genuine music and inspiration. We have accounts of his reading of his own poems; how he was carried along by the music, chanting the lines in a grand voice that thrilled all who heard. He chanted, not spoke, them; poets always do. They formed themselves, grew in his mind, to a natural music already heard there, and existent before the words arose and took shape to it. That music is the creative force at work, the whirr of the loom of the Eternal; it is the golden-snooded Muses at song. And therefore he was not, like Ennius, making up his lines on an artificial foreign plan; to my mind that is unthinkable;—he was writing in the Latin spoken by the cultured; in Latin as all cultured Romans spoke it. But, mirabile dictu, it was Latin as Ennius had composed it: he was writing in Ennius' meter. I can only understand that Greek had so swamped the Latin soul, that for a century or more cultured Latin had been spoken in quantity, not in accent; in the Greek manner, and with the Greek rhythm. Ennius had come to be appreciable as meter and music to Roman ears; which he certainly could not have been in his own day.
So we may say that there is in a sense no Roman literature at all. Nothing grew out of the old Saturnian ballad-meter,—except perhaps Catullus, who certainly had no high inspiring impersonal song to sing. The Roman soul never grew up, never learned to express itself in its own way; before it had had time to do so, the Greek impulse that should have quickened it, swamped it. You may think of Japan, swamped by Chinese culture in the sixth century A.D., as a parallel case; but no; there Buddhism, under real spiritual Teachers, came in at the same time, and fostered all that was noblest in the Japanese soul, so that the result was fair and splendid. A more cognate case is that of the Turks, who suffered through suddenly conquering Persia while they were still barbarous, and taking on, outwardly, Persian culture wholesale; Turkish and Latin literature are perhaps on a par for originality. But if the Greek impulse had touched and wakened Rome under the aegis of Pythagoreanism,—Rome might have become, possibly, as fine a thing as Japan. True, the Crest-Wave had to roll in to Rome presently, and to raise up a great literature there. But whose is the greatest name in it? A Gaul's, who imitated Greek models. There is something artificial in the combination; and you guess that whatever most splendid effort may be here, the result cannot be supreme. The greatest name in Latin prose, too,—Livy's—was that of a Gaul.
And herefrom we may gather what mingling of forces is needed to produce the great ages and results in literature. You have a country; a tract of earth with the Earth-breath playing up through the soil of it; you have the components or elements of a race mixed together on that soil, and molded by that play of the Earth-breath into homogeneity, and among them, from smallest beginnings in folk-verse, the body of a literature must grow up. Then in due season it must be quickened: on the outer plane by an impulse from abroad,—intercourse with allies, or resistance to an invader; and on the inner, by an inrush of Crest-Wave egos. There must be that foreign torch applied,—that spark of inter-nationalism; and there must be the entry of the vanguard of the Host of Souls with its great captains and marshals, bringing with them, to exhibit once more in this world, the loot of many lands and ages and old incarnations; which thing they shall do through a sudden efflorescence of the literature that has grown up slowly to the point of being ready for them. Such natural growth happened in Greece, in China; in our own cycle, in France, Italy, England: where the trees of the nation literatures received buddings and manurings from abroad, but produced always their own natural national fruit:—Shakespeare was your true English apple, grown from the Chaucer stock; although in him flower for juices the sweetness and elixir of all the world and the ancient ages. But in Rome, before the stock was more than a tiny seedling, a great branch of Greece was grafted on it,—and a degenerate Greece at that—and now we do not know even what kind of fruit-tree that Roman stock should have grown to be.
How, then, did this submersion and obliteration of the Roman soul come to pass? It is not difficult to guess. Greek meant culture: if you wanted culture you learnt Greek. All education was in Greek hands. The Greek master spoke Latin to his boys; no doubt with a Greek accent. So cultured speech, cultured Latin, came to mean Latin without its syllabic stresses; spoken, as nearly as might be, with Greek evenness and quantity.—As if French should so submerge us, that we spoke our United States dapping out syllable by syllable like Frenchmen. But it is a fearful thing for a nation to forgo the rhythm evolved under the stress of its own Soul,—especially when what it takes on instead is the degenerate leavings of another: Alexandria, not Athens. This Rome did. She gained the world, and lost her own soul; and the exchange profited her as little as you might expect.
Imitation of culture is often the last touch that makes the parvenu unbearable; it was so in Rome. One likes better in some ways Cato's stult old Roman attitude: who scorned Greek all his life for sheer foppery, while he knew of nothing better written in it than such trash as poetry and philosophy; but at eighty came on a Greek treatise on manure and straightway learned the language that he might read and enjoy something profitable and thoroughly Roman in spirit.—Greek artists flocked to Rome; and doubtless the more fifth-rate they were the better a thing they made of it: but it was risky for good men to rely on Roman appreciations. Two flute-players are contending at a concert; Greek and perhaps rather good. Their music is soon drowned in catcalls: What the dickens do we Romans want with such footling tootlings? Then the presiding magistrate has an idea. He calls on them to quit that fooler and get down to business:—Give us our money's worth, condemn you to it, ye naughty knaves: fight!—And fight they must, poor things, while the audience, that but now was bored to death, howls with rapture.
So Rome passed away. Where now is the simple soul who, while his feet were on his native soil and he asked nothing better than to hoe his cabbages and turn out yearly for patriotic throat-cuttings, was reputable—nay, respect-worthy,—and above all, not a little picturesque? Alas! he is no more.—You remember Kelly,—lovable Kelly, who in his youth, trotting the swate ould bogs of Cohhacht, heard poetry in every sigh of the wind,—saw the hosts of the Danaan Sidhe riding their flamey steeds through the twilight,—listened, by the cabin peat-fire in the evenings, to tales of Finn MacCool and Cuculain and the ancient heroes and Gods of Ireland?—Behold this very Kelly now!—What! is this he?—this raucous, pushing, red-haired, huge-handed, green-necktied vulgarian who has made his pile bricklaying in Chicago;—this ward-politician; this—Well, well; Sic transit gloria mundi! And the Roman cad of the second century B.C. was worse than a thousand Kellys. He had learned vice from past-masters in the Levant; and added to their lessons a native brutality of his own. His feet were no longer on the Italian soil; that was nothing sacred to him now. His moral went as his power grew. His old tough political straightforwardness withered at the touch of Levantine trickery; his subjects could no longer expect a square deal from him. He sent out his gilded youth to govern the provinces, which they simply fleeced and robbed shamelessly; worse than Athens of old, and by much. The old predatory instinct was there still: Hellenisticism had supplied no civilizing influence to modify that. But it was there minus whatever of manliness and decency had once gone with it.
Karma travels by subtle and manifold links from the moral cause to the physical effect. There are historians who will prove to you that the ruin of Rome came of economic causes: which were, in fact, merely some of the channels through which Karma flowed. They were there, of course; but we need not enlarge on them too much. The secret of it all is this: a people without the Balance of the Faculties, without the saving doctrine of the Mean, with but one side of their character developed, was called by cyclic law, while still semi-barbarian, to assume huge responsibilities in the world. Their qualities were not equal to the task. The sense of the Beautiful, their feeling for Art and Poetry, had not grown up with their mateial strength. Why should it? some may ask; are not strength and moral enough?—No; they are not: because it is only the Balance which can keep you on the right path; strength without the beauty sense,—yes, even fortitude, strength of will,—turns at the touch of quickening time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion, brutality; ay, it is not strength:—the saving quality of strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it: only the Balance is true strength. The empires that were founded upon uncompassion, through they swept the world in a decade, within a poor century or so were themselves swept away. Rome, because she was only strong, was weak; her virtues found no exit into life except in things military; the most material plane, the farthest from the Spirit. Her people were not called, like the Huns or Mongols, to be a destroyer race: the Law designed them for builders. But to build you must have the Balance, the proportionate development spiritual, moral, mental, and physical: it is the one foundation. Rome's grand assets at the start were a sense of duty, a natural turn for law and order: grand assets indeed, if the rest of the nature be not neglected or atrophied. In Rome it was, largely.
To be strong-willed and devoted to duty, and without compassion: —that means that you are in train to grow a gigantic selfhood, which Nature abhors; emptiness of compassion is the vacuum nature most abhors. You see a strong man with his ambitions: scorning vices, scorning weakness; scorning too, and lashing with his scorn, the weak and vicious; bending men to his will and purposes. Prophesy direst sorrow for that man! Nature will not be content that he shall travel his chosen path till a master of selfishness and a great scourge for mankind has been evolved in him. She will give him rope; let him multiply his wrong-doings; because, paradoxically, in wrong-doing is its own punishment and cure. His selfishness sinks by its own weight to the lowest levels; prophesy for him that in a near life he shall be the slave of his body and passions, yet keeping the old desire to excel;—that common vice shall bring him down to the level of those he scorned, while yet he forgets not the mountain-tops he believed his place of old. Then he shall be scourged with self-contempt, the bitterest of tortures; and the quick natural punishments of indulgence shall be busy with him, snake-locked Erinyes with whips of wire. In that horrible school, struggling to rise from it, he shall suffer all that a human being can in ignominy, sorrow and shame;—and at last shall count it all well worth the while, if it has but taught him That which is no atribute, but Alaya's self,—Compassion. So Karma has its ministrants within ourselves; and the dreadful tyrants within are to be disthroned by working and living, not for self, but for man. This is why Brotherhood is the doctrine and practice that could put a stop to the awful degeneratioin of mankind.