Od. III. vi. 46.
But the people did not sympathize with these feelings: they delighted in action, not in contemplation and reflection. They did not look back upon their national heroes as demigods, or dream over their glories: they were pressing forward and extending the frontiers of their empire, bringing under their yoke tribes and nations which their forefathers had not known. If they regarded their ancestors at all, it was not in the light of men of heroic stature, as compared with themselves, but as those whom they could equal or even surpass: they lived in hope and not in memory.
These are not the elements of character which would lead a people to realize to themselves the ideal of tragedy. The tragic poet at Athens would have been sure that the same subject which inspired him would also interest his audience—that if his genius rose to the height which their critical taste demanded, he could reckon up the sympathy of a theatre crowded with ten thousand of his countrymen. A Roman tragic poet would have been deserted for any spectacle of a more stirring nature—his most affecting scenes and noble sentiments, for scenes of real action and real life. The bloody combats of the gladiators, the miserable captives and malefactors stretched on crosses, expiring in excruciating agonies, or mangled by wild beasts, were real tragedies—the sham fights and Naumachiæ, though only imitations, were real dramas, in which those pursuits which most deeply interested the spectators, which constituted their chief duties and highest glories, were visibly represented. Even gorgeous spectacles fed their personal vanity and pride in their national greatness. The spoil of conquered nations, borne in procession across the stage, reminded them of their triumphs and their victories; and the magnificent dress of the actors—the model of the captured city, preceded and followed by its sculptures in marble and ivory—represented in mimic grandeur the ovation or the triumph of some successful general, whose return from a distant expedition, laden with wealth, realized the rumours which had already arrived at the gates of Rome; whilst the scene, glittering with glass, and gold, and silver, and adorned with variegated pillars of foreign marble, told ostentatiously of their wealth and splendour.[[243]]
Again, the Romans were a rough, turbulent people, full of physical rather than intellectual energy, loving antagonism, courting peril, setting no value on human life or suffering. Their very virtues were stern and severe. The unrelenting justice of a Brutus, representing as it did the victory of principle over feeling, was to them the height of virtue. They were ready to undergo the extreme of physical torture with Regulus, and to devote themselves to death, like Curtius and the Decii. Hard and pitiless to themselves, they were, as might be expected, the same towards others. They were, in fact, strangers to both the passions, which it was the object of tragedy to excite and to purify, Pity and Terror.[[244]] They were too stern to pity, too unimaginative to be moved by the tales of wonder and deeds of horror which affected the tender and marvel-loving imagination of the Greeks. Being an active, and not a sentimental people, they did not appreciate moral suffering and the struggles of a sensitive spirit. They were moved only by scenes of physical suffering and agony.
The public games of Greece at Olympia, or the Isthmus, were bloodless and peaceful, and the refinements of poetry mingled with those which were calculated to invigorate the physical powers and develop manly beauty. Those of Rome were exhibitions, not of moral, but of physical courage and endurance: they were sanguinary and brutalizing,—the amusements of a nation to whom war was not a necessary evil or a struggle for national existence, for hearths and altars, but a pleasure and a pastime—the means of gratifying an aggressive ambition. The tragic feeling of Greece is represented by the sculptured grief of Niobe, that of Rome by the death-struggles which distort the features and muscles of the Laocoon. It was, if the expression is allowable, amphitheatrical, not theatrical.
To such a people the moral woes of tragedy were powerless; and yet it is to the people that the drama, if it is to flourish, must look for patronage. A refined and educated society, such as always existed at Rome during its literary period, might applaud a happy adaptation from the Greek tragedians, and encourage a poet in his task—for it is only an educated and refined taste which can appreciate such talent as skilful imitation displays; but a tragic drama under such circumstances could hardly hope to be national. Nor must it be forgotten, with reference to their taste for spectacle, that the artistic accessories of the drama would have a better chance of success with a people like the Romans than literary merit, because the pleasures of art are of a lower and more sensuous kind. Hence, in the popular eye, the decoration of the theatre and the costume of the performers naturally became the principal requisites, whilst the poet’s office was considered subordinate to the manner in which the play was put upon the stage; and thus the degenerate theatrical taste which prevailed in the days of Horace called forth the poet’s well-known and well-deserved criticism.[[245]]
It cannot, indeed, be asserted that tragedy was never, to a certain extent, an acceptable entertainment at Rome, but only that it never flourished at Rome as it did at Athens—that no Roman tragedies can, notwithstanding all that has been said in their praise and their defence, be compared with those of Greece, and that the tragic drama never maintained such a hold on the popular mind as not to be liable to be displaced by amusements of a more material and less intellectual kind. It was imitative and destitute of originality. It was introduced from without as one portion of the new literature; it did not grow spontaneously by a process of natural development out of preceding eras of epic and lyric poetry, and start into being, as it did at Athens, at the very moment when the public mind and taste was ready to receive and appreciate it.
Three eras, separated from one another by chasms, the second wider than the first, produced tragic poets. In the first of these flourished Livius Andronicus, Nævius, and Ennius; in the second Pacuvius and Attius; in the third Asinius Pollio[[246]] wrote tragedies, the plots of which, as the words of Virgil seem to imply, were taken from Roman history.[[247]] Varius either wrote, or, as some of the Scholiasts assert, stole, the “Thyestes” from Cassius or Virgil. Ovid attempted a “Medea,” of which Quintilian speaks, as being, to say the least, a promising performance; and even the Emperor Augustus himself, together with other men of genius, tried their hands, though unsuccessfully, at tragedy. The epistle of Horace to the Pisos shows at once the prevalence of this taste, and that general ignorance of the rules and principles of art required instruction. Ten rhetorical dramas, attributed with good reason to the philosopher Seneca, complete the catalogue of tragedies belonging to this era, but with the exception of these, no specimens remain; most probably they did not merit preservation. The tragedies of the older school were of a higher stamp, and they kept their place in the public estimation long enough to give birth to the newer and inferior school. Passages from the old Latin tragedies quoted by Cicero well deserve the admiration with which he regarded them; and a fragment of the “Prometheus” of Attius is marked by a grandeur and sublimity which makes us regret the almost total loss of this branch of Roman literature.
Pacuvius (BORN B. C. 220.)
The era at which Roman tragedy reached its highest degree of perfection was the second of those mentioned, and was simultaneous with that of comedy. Both nourished together; for, whilst Terence was so successfully reproducing the wit and manners of the new Attic comedy, M. Pacuvius was enriching the Roman drama with free imitations of the Greek tragedians. He was a native of Brundisium, and nephew,[[248]] or, according to St. Jerome, grandson of the poet Ennius. Although born as early as B. C. 220, he does not appear to have attained the height of his popularity until B. C.[[249]] During his residence at Rome, where he remained until after his 80th year,[[250]] he distinguished himself as a painter as well as a dramatic poet; and one of his pictures in the temple of Hercules was thought only to be surpassed by the work of Fabius Pictor.[[251]] He formed one of that literary circle of which Lælius was so great an ornament. The close of his long life was passed in the retirement of Tarentum, where he died in the ninetieth year of his age. A simple and unpretending epigram is preserved by Aulus Gellius,[[252]] which may probably have been written by himself:——