A History of Roman Classical Literature.

by R. W. Browne

Domitius Nero, by Maternus, in the time of Vespasian.

Vescio, by the Satirist (?) Persius.

Octavian, by Seneca, in the reign of Trajan.

Nor must it be forgotten, in comparing the influence which tragedy exercised upon the people of Athens and Rome, that with the former it was a part and parcel of the national religion. By it not only were the people taught to sympathize with their heroic ancestors, but their sympathies were hallowed. In Greece, the poet was held to be inspired—poetry was the voice of deified nature—the tongue in which the natural held communion with the supernatural, the visible with the invisible. With the Romans, poetry was nothing more than an amusement of the fancy; with the Greeks, it was a divinely originating emotion of the soul.

Hence, in Athens, the drama was, as it were, an act of worship,—it formed an integral part of a joyous, yet serious, religious festival. The theatre was a temple; the altar of a deity was its central point; and a band of choristers moved in solemn march and song in honour of the god, and, in the didactic spirit which sanctified their office, taught men lessons of virtue. Not that the audience entered the precincts with their hearts imbued with holy feelings, or with the thoughts of worshippers; but this is always the case when religious ceremonials become sensuous. The real object of the worship is by the majority forgotten. But still the Greeks were habituated unconsciously to be affected by the drama, as by a development of religious sentiments. With the Romans, the theatre was merely a place of secular amusement. The thymele existed no longer as a memorial of the sacrifice to the god. The orchestra, formerly consecrated to the chorus, was to them nothing more than stalls occupied by the dignitaries of the state. Dramas were certainly exhibited at the great Megalensian games, but they were only accessories to the religious character of the festival. A holy season implies rest and relaxation—a holiday in the popular sense of the word—and theatrical representations were considered a fit and proper species of pastime; but as religion itself did not exercise the same influence over the popular mind of the Romans which it did over that of the Greeks, so neither with the Romans did the drama stand in the place of the handmaid of religion.

Again, their religion, though purer and chaster, was not ideal like that of the Greeks. Its freedom from human passions removed it out of the sphere of poetry, and, therefore, it was neither calculated to move terror nor pity. The moral attributes of the Deity were displayed in stern severity; but neither the belief nor the ceremonial sought to inflame the heart of the worshipper with enthusiasm. Rome had no priestly caste uniting in one and the same person the character of the bard and of the minister of religion. In after ages, she learned from the Greeks to call the poet sacred, but the holiness which she attributed to his character was not the earnest belief of the heart. The Roman priests were civil magistrates; religion, therefore, became a part of the civil administration, and a political engine. It mattered little what was believed as true. The old national faith of Italy, not being firmly rooted in the heart, soon became obsolete: it readily admitted the engrafting of foreign superstitions. The old deities assumed the names of the Greek mythology: they exchanged their attributes and histories for those of Greek legend, and a host of strange gods filled their Pantheon. They had, however, no hold either on the belief or the love of the people: they were mythological and unreal characters, fit only to furnish subjects and embellishments for poetry.

Nor was the genius of the Roman people such as to sympathize with the legends of the past. The Romans lived in the present and the future, rather than in the past. The poet might call the age in which he lived degenerate, and look forward with mournful anticipations to a still lower degradation, whilst he looked back admiringly to bygone times. Through the vista of past years, Roman virtue and greatness seemed to his imagination magnified: he could lament, as Horace did, a gradual decay, which had not as yet reached its worst point:——

Ætas parentum pejor avis tulit

Nos nequiores mox daturos

Progeniem vitiosiorem.