CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL FORCES
The story of intellectual pioneering, visualized with difficulty, has not the thrill of a Marco Polo diary, but to the intelligent it has a deeper fascination. Our records are, however, very brief, spanning a few thousand out of many hundred thousand years. What we can review is a small fraction of the whole story. If the human race is more than 300,000 years old, man’s artistic literature is less than 3000: our segment of sure knowledge is less than one per cent of the amazing tale. If the biologist is willing to pry into the strata of a hundred million years to trace the evolution of plant and animal life, it is hardly conceivable that the humanist should disregard any part of our pitifully meager record of spiritual endeavor. This is my excuse for inviting attention to the first efforts of the Romans to express themselves in literary form.
In attempting to tell a part of this story I have chosen to notice especially how the writers of the period responded to their environment, because this aspect of the theme has been somewhat neglected in recent studies of Roman literature. This is of course not a novel method of approach. Taine, for instance, drove the hobby of environmental determinism at a gallop that ought to satisfy the most optimistic behaviorist, and his immediate followers never checked the rein. The method has since had its more deliberate devotees. English classicists in particular, who have usually studied history and literature together, have generally kept a sane and fruitful coordination of men and their milieu. During the last three decades, however, there has been so strong a trend toward deep and narrow specialization in our own universities that here the literary historian has been tempted to neglect social, political, and artistic history with unfortunate results. For instance, the scholar who studies classical prose forms has often kept his eye so intent upon the accumulation of rhetorical rules from Gorgias to Cicero that he has given us a history of a futile scholastic mechanism and not of an ever-vitalized prose which in fact re-created its appropriate medium with every new generation. The scholastic critics of the Roman lyric are sometimes so intent upon tracing external conventions through the centuries that they miss the soul of the poetry that assumes temporarily the mold of the convention. The same is true of all the literary forms. “Sources and influences,” as traceable in words, phrases, and literary customs, things which after all seldom explain creative inspiration, are rather attractive game to men of good verbal memories and are likely to entice them away from the larger work of penetrating comprehension. Beethovan’s fifth symphony receives little illumination from program notes pedantically informing us that the “fate motif” is a borrowed phrase.
Here and there a reaction against an exaggerated reiteration of literary influences has driven critics into the school of those who prefer to approach literature as a “pure” art. Such critics seem to justify their doctrine when they confine their analysis to the more transcendental passages of Shakespeare or Keats, Catullus or Sophocles. When dealing, however, with Dante, Goethe, Vergil, Milton, and in fact with most poets of generous social sympathies, they give a very inadequate account of the poetic product. Modern aesthetics have been teaching us how warm with subjective interpretation is that thing we call beauty. Apparently there is no such thing, even in poetry, as pure, objective, absolute art uniformly sustained. In fact no school of criticism has as yet formulated a doctrine wide enough to compass the broad ranges of artistic creation, nor need we expect an adequate science of aesthetics unless psychology can become scientific.
The protest on the part of one vociferous school of humanists that literary criticism must disregard history and biography is beside the mark so long as our prying minds insist on prying. Contemporaneous literature, of course, deserves first of all to be approached with the aesthetic perceptions all alert, and since the reader lives in the same world as the writer the scant exegesis that may be necessary can be absorbed unconsciously from the text itself. But any great literature of the far past becomes to us, in so far as we are normal humans, something besides art. It is also a body of documents that anyone at all interested in the progress of art, of ideas, or of society in any of its groupings, may find very precious, and he will persist in using it as documentary despite all the protests of jealous literary criticism. For Greece and Rome our documents are none too abundant in any case. It is a very petty humanism that dares insist that no one may touch Vergil or Spenser except and only for aesthetic delight and judgments. It is of course wholly legitimate to read Dante for his haunting lines and his stupendous imagery, but many of us insist on the added privilege of transporting ourselves into his mysterious world of strange ideas if only to read him as did his contemporaries. The true humanist in any case is interested in more than artistic expression, and the humanist who deals with remote literature must be, perforce.
It is of course only fair to say that in calling attention to milieu we would not deny that the innate endowment of each author is and must be considered the prime factor in creative work, while admitting that it may be the most elusive item to analyze. Modern biology insists upon the reality of inheritance, though it also warns us that this inheritance is so complex that it has hitherto escaped analysis and predetermination. We all admit that the study of social or literary atmosphere or of individual training will not explain the passionate force of Catullus, the voluble humor of Plautus, or Cicero’s ear for harmony of sound. However, like Horace in his Ars Poetica, we can do little but admit the facts, recognize the qualities, and proceed to the study of the provocative stimuli.
Moreover, there are special reasons for attempting to place Roman writers in their environment. One is that the evidence regarding the status of Roman society is so scant and so scattered that the casual reader cannot be expected to have a correct understanding of it, and even the specialist is apt to neglect the severe task of reconstructing the social staging. As a result the literary history of the classics too often leaves us with the incorrect feeling that we have there only cold impersonal conventions.
Another is that the milieu is so different from our own that the imagination when left unguarded is in danger of modernizing ancient life and ancient expression to such an extent as to distort both scenery and actors. This is not questioning the fact that the Greeks and Romans were precisely like us. Their bodies had the same capacities, needs, and passions as ours, their senses received impressions as ours, their brains met problems by the same logical processes as ours, despite the amusing claim of the pragmatists that they are just now teaching the true art of “operational thinking.” In these respects the advanced races seem to have reached full development very far back in prehistoric times, many millenia before Homer. The pseudo-anthropology which a few years ago assumed that the study of Hottentot psychology might be useful to the student of Plato joked itself off the stage. The critics who tried to persuade us that the romantic sentiment came into being less than a thousand years ago seem equally ludicrous now. We need not repeat the egregious error of Spengler in confounding mental capacities with temporary conventions of expression that tried to respond to environmental need.
But while granting that human nature was then what it is now, it is important to comprehend the diversity of the customs, fashions, traditions, conventions, and social needs which evoked an appropriate artistic expression that consequently differs from our own. Love and hate doubtless stirred very similar physical sensations in Catullus, in Dante, and in Tennyson, but the words which these three poets used to express those emotions in verses published for their own readers have very different connotations, because the conventions of their respective periods called for a different series of suppressions and revelations. None of the three can be translated directly into the language of any of the others without evoking erroneous impressions. The pagan directness of Catullus’ lines, the Platonic connotations of the Nuova Vita, the Christian romanticism of Tennyson are worlds apart, not because the human being changes but because his environment does. The devotees of nudity who know only the idiom of their own day may accuse Thackeray of hypocrisy because they have not learned to translate him; but that is not literary criticism. Those who miss in Latin poetry the delight in the outburst of spring-time song and color common in medieval poetry from north of the Alps have been prone to assume a temperamental lack in the classical poet, whereas the simple explanation may be that in the north spring brings a sense of release that is hardly realized in Latium where roses linger on till January when the new crocuses and wind-flowers start into blossom. The love of the sea was hardly to be expected till seafaring became fairly safe; the discovery of the compass has a place in the history of romanticism. The romantic enthusiasm for rugged mountain landscape could hardly arise in poets who knew only the placid hills of Italy and to whom the high Alps were known chiefly as the haunts of barbaric bandits.
Accurate interpretation of any author of the past, therefore, implies a complete migration into the time, the society, and the environment of that author. And herein lies the necessity of attempting the difficult task of placing the literary figures which we wish to discuss in their setting. In this first chapter, therefore, I shall attempt to sketch in outline the social changes that need to be kept in mind for the more detailed study of some of the writers of the Republican period.