There is a third consideration. Greek literature reached its perfection in the midst of free and stirring democratic activities; it was therefore addressed to the mind and heart of the people at large. At Rome, on the contrary, literature only reached its technical acme when freedom was practically extinct. The work of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, belongs already to a period of despotism. It is addressed first to imperial ears and then to those of an aristocracy more or less idle. It is in a large measure written by a coterie for a coterie, or by a dependant for patrons, its object being to entertain elegantly. For that reason it avoids emotional depths and altitudes, and shuns intellectual audacities. It seeks to say clever things, displaying culture and knowledge agreeable to a society which plays with such matters. It adheres to a certain ideal of “good form,” which, however, does not preclude plenty of such allusion as will show wide reading and social experience. Ardours for the vital interests of society, and the frankness of large natures communicating with their fellow men, are necessarily taboo. Whether these existed largely in Roman natures is, as has been said already, matter for doubt, but almost certainly they existed beyond the extent to which expression was countenanced. It is therefore with more justice than is commonly perceived that the “Augustan” age of English literature has received that name.

It seems not unjust to sum up Roman literature—allowing for the exceptions already made—as a literature largely imitative and secondary, highly polished and elegant in execution, but limited in its intellectual and emotional range as in its originality.

The influence, direct and indirect, of Latin literature upon English is perhaps best realized from the tabulations which appear in this volume. Nevertheless it may be helpful to make sundry notes upon certain more obvious debts taken in chronological order.

In and before the age of Chaucer the poems of Ovid upon love and its cure were much drawn upon by writers of romances and allegories. They were the direct inspiration of much of the troubadour poetry of Provence and thence of the mediaeval lyric verse of Europe in general. Ovidian borrowings are manifest in the Romance of the Rose. Chaucer himself was a student of Ovid, Lucan, Virgil, “Stace,” and also Livy. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses and love-elegies in particular he took much matter. His Knight’s Tale is ultimately from the Thebaid of Statius. The reading of his contemporary Gower, and of his successor Lydgate, was even more deep in the same authors. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Gawin Douglas translated the Aeneid, and soon afterwards Wyatt and Surrey show themselves steeped in Seneca and the epigrams of Martial; Surrey also translated portions of the Aeneid. Before Marlowe and Shakespeare the more scholarly pioneers of drama, such as Sackville, sought for tragic models in Seneca and for comic models in Plautus. Elizabethan readers ransacked all available Latin books. Spenser’s Eclogues follow Virgil’s, and his Faerie Queene is full of borrowings from the Aeneid and from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The effect of Ovid on Shakespeare himself is manifest in his Venus and Adonis. Bacon who, like all the great prose-writers of his time, could use both English and Latin, shows in especial the influence of Seneca. Ben Jonson, who translated portions of Horace and Martial, is an imitator of Horace in the way of poetical epistles and short lyrics, and of Martial in epigram. In the school of the “Sons of Ben” and the “Cavalier poets,” we meet with very distinct manifestations of the combined influence of the lyrists Horace and Catullus and the epigrammatist Martial. We know these to have been favourite poetic reading of the period. Simultaneously the general style of prose-writing, whether as in Milton or as in Jeremy Taylor, was imagined to be based upon the rounded periodic style of Cicero, and the language itself is deliberately Latinized to a remarkable degree. Milton, who wrote Latin poems as well as English, is greatly and openly indebted in his epics to both the matter and the manner of Virgil. The post-Restoration comedy derives itself through a French medium from that of Plautus and Terence. At the same time the second-hand critical principles of Rome begin to prevail in England. Roscommon translates the Ars Poetica of Horace; Dryden translates the Aeneid and passages of Ovid; he also writes powerful satire in direct imitation of Juvenal. Addison produced his Campaign under the influence of Lucan, and his Cato under the influence of Seneca. Pope begins with pastorals after the manner of Virgil and Theocritus, composes Imitations of Horace, and copies the Ars Poetica and Epistles and Satires in his own poetical essays on criticism and morals. His Messiah is a recasting of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue and his Eloisa to Abelard is based on Ovid’s Heroides. Samuel Johnson’s London and Vanity of Human Wishes are similar copies of Juvenal, while his prose seeks to model itself upon the Ciceronian. The great preachers and orators of the eighteenth century are Latinists in their rhetorical principles. During the same age the didactic poems, such as Dyer’s Fleece or Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, are the outcome of the study of Lucretius and the Georgics of Virgil. The letters of Pope or Walpole no less distinctly take their hint from Cicero and Pliny.

It is unnecessary to elaborate further a bare catalogue of such obligations. It is, perhaps, more useful to emphasize one consideration which should bring home the vast, if undefinable, influence necessarily exercised by Latin thoughts and Latin expression upon English writers. Before the days of Alfred and the days of Chaucer the chief writers of prose in England composed in some sort of Latin. They knew Latin, and read such Latin books as they could get. From the Revival of Learning Latin came more and more to be studied as modern languages are studied now, for the sake of actual speech, correspondence, or controversy. The pens of Englishmen like Sir Thomas More, Bacon, and Milton, were fluent in Latin. Ben Jonson, Cowley, Addison, and Samuel Johnson were great Latinists among a society in which Latin knowledge was general. Landor and De Quincey were no less great. There are few writers in the English language who have not received at least some tinge of Latin education. Familiar as all these generations have been with Latin books, practised in the imitation of Latin diction, filling the language with Latin terms, it is quite impossible to determine how deeply we are steeped in the influence which has passed through them. During the last century it is true that education has not cultivated that fluency in spoken Latin which marked the two or three centuries preceding. Latin is no longer necessary as a medium for the interchange of thought, and the increasing number of arts and sciences restricts the prominence of any one study. On the other hand it is no less true that almost every considerable writer and speaker of the century had received that more recent form of Latin education which consists in an accurate and tasteful study of the words, styles and thoughts of the best, or most classic, of the Roman writers—Catullus, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Ovid—rather than Lucan or Statius. The influence of Roman literature during that period has been more wholesome than during the later period of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century, an epoch in which English writers delivered themselves over to almost as servile a subjection to Latin (or rather Latin-French) patterns as the Romans had once, with more reason, assumed towards the Greeks. That era, the era of Dryden, Pope, Addison, Johnson, is in this sense the most Roman period of our literary history. To it, unfortunately, we owe all that personification of abstract qualities by the simple device of a capital letter; all that use of “nymph” for “woman” and “fire” for “love”; all that stereotyped phraseology, such as “reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire” for the “sun is rising,” from which we were delivered by Burns and Wordsworth. To the Romans themselves these terms were artificial enough, to the English they were doubly artificial.

CONSPECTUS OF LATIN LITERATURE

Transcriber’s Note: An image of the original table is available by downloading the HTML version of the book from Project Gutenberg.

DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE. CHIEF REPRESENTATIVES. DATE. CHIEF WORKS. THEIR RELATION TO GREEK LITERATURE. SOME INFLUENCES ON FOREIGN TRIBUTARIES TO ENGLISH LITERATURE. SOME EFFECTS ON ENGLISH WRITERS.
LATIN NAME. ENGLISH NAME.
Tragic Drama Gnaeus Naevius Naevius fl. 230 B.C. Tragedies (only fragments extant). Crudely translated from the Greek, chiefly Euripides.
Quintus Ennius Ennius fl. 200 B.C.
Lucius Annaeus SENECA SENECA ob. A.D. 65 Tragedies, e.g., Medea, Hippolytus, etc. Imitating Greek subjects, metres, and treatment (chorus, etc.); but more rhetorical, epigrammatic, and moralizing. Served as type for Italian Renaissance drama and for the French declamatory tragedy of Corneille, Racine, etc. Little effect on English drama. Addison’s Cato the best instance of attempt at the Roman “classical.”
Comic Drama Titus Maccius PLAUTUS PLAUTUS fl. 210 B.C. Comedies, e.g., Aulularia, Menaechmi (20 extant). From Middle and New comedy, chiefly Menander; almost mere adaptations, but broader and rougher. The scene is always in Greek cities. Type for Italian comedy of Renaissance. Great influence on Molière, whose L’Avare is from the Aulularia, and his Amphitryon from Amphitruo. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is from Plautus’s Menaechmi. Dryden’s Amphitryon through Molière from Plautus. So Fielding’s The Miser = L’Avare from Aulularia. French comedy of intrigue (from Plautus and Terence) reproduced in Congreve, Farquhar, etc.
Publius TERENTIUS Afer TERENCE fl. 160 B.C. Comedies, e.g., Phormio, Adelphi, etc. (6 extant). As with Plautus, but less boisterous. As with Plautus. Molière’s École des Maris is from the Adelphi, and Les Fourberies de Scapin from the Phormio. English comedy of intrigue, after the Restoration.
Epic Verse Quintus Ennius Ennius fl. 200 B.C. Epic (on Roman history and legend) called Annales. Copies the Homeric hexameter and borrows the Olympic deities. Called the “Roman Homer,” but crude and inartistic.
Publius VERGILIUS Maro VIRGIL lived 70-19 B.C. AENEID (epic of Aeneas, legendary founder of Roman people). Copies Odyssey in first six books (wanderings), and Iliad in last six (battles); borrows images and incidents from all Greek writers. But more descriptive, philosophical, and fastidious of expression. The basis for subsequent epics. Utilized by Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, etc., in Italy. Model for the French epic, e.g., Voltaire’s Henriade. Translated by Gawain Douglas (1513), Dryden, etc. Very important for Milton’s Paradise Lost, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and to all modern poets of classical training. See Tennyson’s poem, “To Virgil.”
Marcus Annaeus LUCANUS Lucan lived A.D. 39-65 Pharsalia (epic of civil wars between Caesar and Pompey). Departing further from Greek directness. Cleverness in rhetoric, epigram, description, satire, etc., aimed at. Fondness for details of horror. Two favourite writers in the early middle ages. Statius affected by Dante and Boccaccio (who founds his Teseide upon him). Lucan and “Stace” were among the chief Latin reading of Chaucer’s day. [The Knight’s Tale (of Palamon and Arcite, modernized by Dryden) is from the Thebaid.] Comparatively little read in modern times. Addison’s Campaign has clear traces of Lucan; so has Drayton’s Barons’ Wars.
Publius Papinius STATIUS Statius (“Stace” in Chaucer) fl. A.D. 70 Thebaid (epic of Thebes and its heroes). Clever and facile verse: elegant simile, etc., of more importance than the matter.
Lyric Verse Gaius Valerius CATULLUS Catullus lived 84-54 B.C. Poems (odes, epigrams, and occasional pieces—especially love-poems to “Lesbia”). Imitates metre and style of Greek lyrists (Sappho, etc.) and Alexandrian elegists (Callimachus, etc.). Most Greek of all Romans in his simplicity and spontaneity. His works lost during Middle Ages, and always less read than Horace. These combined are the type for all such English odes and short pieces as are addressed to “Lesbia,” “Delia,” “Celia,” etc. (Ben Jonson). Horace in particular was imitated by the seventeenth-century “cavalier” poets (Suckling, Herrick, etc.), and (unconsciously) guides later writers of pièces de circonstance.
Quintus HORATIUS Flaccus HORACE lived 65-8 B.C. ODES AND EPODES (love, politics, vers de société, moralizings). Avowed imitation of Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar, Anacreon. Adapts Greek lyrical metres. Deft but unimpassioned. The model for lyrists and writers of social verse in France and Italy.
Elegiac Verse Albius Tibullus Tibullus fl. 20 B.C. Elegies (of affection and sentiment). Direct imitations of Alexandrian Greek elegists. Exerted an influence similar to that of Ovid, but in a less degree.
Sextus Aurelius Propertius Propertius
Publius OVIDIUS Naso OVID fl. 43 B.C.-A.D. 17. Various Poems, e.g., Heroides (in the form of letters). Tristia, Amores, etc. The Greek models are less epigrammatic. Ovid affects pointed couplets (compare Pope). Ovid was a favourite author even in the early Middle Ages. His love-elegies were particularly affected (as in the Romance of the Rose), and are best represented (in a shorter form) by the sonnet of the Italians and of the sixteenth-century English. The Italian painters and poets of the Renaissance made great use of him, and Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope are much indebted to him. The favourite work, however, was his Metamorphoses, which is not in elegiac, but in heroic verse, being narrative.
Satiric Verse Gaius Lucilius Lucilius fl. 120 B.C. Satires on politics, literature (fragments), etc. A native Latin growth (Greek satire takes a different form and medium). Models for much Italian satire (Aretino, etc.), and French (Regnier, Satyre Ménippée, Boileau, etc.). In English the best examples out of many are the Moral Essays and Imitations of Horace by Pope, his Dunciad, and the satires of Dryden (MacFlecknoe, etc.). Compare Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Johnson copies Juvenal in London and Vanity of Human Wishes.
Quintus HORATIUS Flaccus HORACE 65-8 B.C. SATIRES AND EPISTLES (genial).
Aulus Persius Flaccus Persius fl. A.D. 60 Satires (crabbed style)
Decimus Junius JUVENALIS JUVENAL fl. A.D. 120 SATIRES (polished, terse, trenchant).
Didactic (and “philosophical”) Verse Titus LUCRETIUS Carus LUCRETIUS fl. 60 B.C. DE RERUM NATURA (“the Constitution of Nature”). In form follows old Greek philosophical poets, and in matter expounds the philosophy of Epicurus. Seen directly in the philosophical verse-essay (Pope’s Essay on Man, Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, etc.): but Lucretius has also been the favourite reading of many poets, e.g., Shelley. Compare Tennyson’s Poem on “Lucretius,” Wordsworth’s Excursion.
Publius VERGILIUS Maro VIRGIL lived 70-19 B.C. GEORGICS (poems on husbandry). The idea taken from Hesiod. [See Hesiod in the Greek Table.]
Quintus HORATIUS Flaccus HORACE lived 65-8 B.C. ARS POETICA (an essay in literary criticism). An ill-digested rechauffé of Aristotle and later Greek critics. The source of the shallow criticism of Boileau and his school. And of Pope and his school.
Pastoral Verse VIRGIL BUCOLICS (or ECLOGUES). From Theocritus, but moralized and sometimes artificial. Imitated by Mantuan and Sannazaro in Italy, and Marot in France. Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender etc. [See [Greek Table]: Pastoral.]
Epigram Marcus Valerius MARTIALIS MARTIAL fl. A.D. 90. EPIGRAMS (various subjects). The conception of Greek epigram is polish and delicacy. Of Latin it is chiefly point and sting. The modern conception of epigram is entirely taken from the Latin form. Martial is the one model.
History Gaius Julius CAESAR CAESAR lived 100-44 B.C. COMMENTARIES (on the Gallic and the Civil Wars; simple, straightforward narrative). It is impossible to estimate the great influence of these writers on later historians. Livy (with Cicero) is the model (in point of style) followed by Gibbon. [Compare remark in [Greek Table]: History.]
Gaius SALLUSTIUS Crispus Sallust fl. 45 B.C. Catilina and Jugurtha Attempts to imitate Thucydides. A commonplace moralizer.
Titus LIVIUS Patavinus LIVY Ob. A.D. 17 HISTORY (of Rome); (rich style, ample, pathetic). Adopts the Greek custom of putting verbatim speeches into the mouths of his characters.
Gaius Cornelius TACITUS TACITUS fl. A.D. 100 HISTORIES and ANNALS (of Emperors); (epigrammatic, terse, satirical). Aims at the condensation of Thucydides.
Oratory Marcus Tullius CICERO CICERO (and “Tully.”) lived 106-43 B.C. Speeches (59 extant, e.g., Philippics, Against Verres, etc.). Follower of Demosthenes, but in a more rotund and loaded style. The model of most French oratory and preaching (Bossuet, etc.) (Otherwise Seneca is followed). The model of speakers and preachers of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Jeremy Taylor, etc., to Burke, etc.). The “Johnsonian” style is based on Cicero.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus Quintilian fl. A.D. 100 The Training of the Orator.
Letter-Writing CICERO 106-43 B.C. Letters (“To Atticus,” “To Friends”). A specially Roman department of literature. Type followed in France (Madame de Sévigné, etc.). The model for published letters like those of Horace Walpole and Pope.
Gaius PLINIUS Secundus Pliny (the Younger.) fl. A.D. 100 Letters (to friends, to Trajan, etc.).
Philosophy CICERO Academica, De Officiis, etc. A reproducer of Greek systems in popular expositions.
SENECA A brilliantly epigrammatic moralizer on old lines of thought. Seneca was favourite reading of moralizers of all European countries after the Renaissance.
Fable Phaedrus Phaedrus fl. A.D. 15 Fables Reproducer of Aesop See “Aesop” in [Greek Conspectus].
Encyclopaedic Gaius Plinius Secundus Pliny (the Elder.) fl. A.D. 70 Natural History Storehouse of mediaeval science.