Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

Rome’s beginnings in self-expression are not so fascinating as those of Greece. The Greeks somehow outstripped all competitors. In mental vigor, in imaginative creativeness, in sureness of taste, they seem to have reached a point 2500 years ago that the more advanced of modern racial groups are still hoping to attain. The sudden flowering of literature as soon as the capacities of the recording art were realized can only be comprehended on the assumption that singing, reciting, narrating, and disputing had proceeded for ages among their ancestors before the alphabet came into use. One may readily imagine that some of the ancestors of the Greeks discussed the “idea of good” around the cavern fire thousands of years before Plato. Brains of that capacity do not suddenly pullulate. Language as supple and rich as Homer’s presupposes ages of keen perceiving and precise talking. But what conclusions those cavemen philosophers reached vanished with the smoke of the hearth fire because no man recorded them. The tale of what the Greek imagination accomplished after it could operate on accumulated records is one the like of which we shall probably never hear again.

Rome’s story is less startling, must perforce be, since like ours, it was subsequent. One does not discover the North Pole or Betelgeuse twice. When the Romans reached the stage of self-consciousness, when they felt the desire to express themselves they found in well-nigh perfect mold the natural forms of expression, developed with sure taste by the Greeks out of song, dance, march-hymn, devotional prayer, dirge, entertaining narrative, or mimic representation. Song, drama, and dialogue are inevitable forms, given human nature, and the forms were at hand and were taken over by the Latins, as they were once more by the Italians at the end of medieval days, when learning disclosed the worth of Rome’s literature.

Rome’s literature made generous use of that of Greece. How much time it saved by entering into such an inheritance we do not know. How much vigor and realism it lost by yielding to the overwhelming persuasion of Greek writers we cannot say. Dante and Petrarch drank from Latin to the point of quickening creation, too many others to the point of dazed intoxication. There were times when the Latin authors also drank too deeply. But what was important was that just when the first contact was made the Romans had reached the mental maturity and developed the capacity to comprehend and use. There were many other peoples of the same period on whom Greek culture was wholly lost because they were incapable of appreciating it. The Phrygians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, Galatians, Armenians, half a dozen Thracian tribes, Syrians, Egyptians, Sicilians, Carthaginians, Oscans, Umbrians, Etruscans, Celts, Iberians, and a score of other tribes contemporaneous with the Romans, and in outward appearances of about the same stage of culture, came into direct contact with the Greeks, some for a much longer period and more intimately than the Latins, and yet they remained unfruitful in literary production. The Romans in fact were the only folk of the scores of neighbors of Greece that as a nation assimilated and worthily carried on the new-found culture.

What were the Romans like at that time—at the beginning of contact with the older Greeks in the middle of the third century B.C.? They were a small group of a few hundred thousand souls, one group of several that had emerged from barbarous central Europe and pushed their way into Italy in search for land, and they had long plodded on in silence at the dull task of making the soil provide food. For a while they had been subdued by the Etruscans, but taught by their conquerors to use arms in strong masses, they had applied this lesson by driving off their oppressors and re-establishing their old independent town meetings, returning again to the tilling of the soil. A prolific and puritanic folk with a strict social morality they outgrew their boundaries and began to expand. In the contests that resulted the Romans came off the victors. In organizing the adjacent tribes into a federal union they revealed a peculiar liberalism—unmatched anywhere among the barbarians of that day—by abstaining from the exaction of tribute; they also betrayed an imagination of high quality in the invention of cooperative leagues, and unusual capacity for legal logic in the shaping of municipal and civic forms. The inventiveness of the barbarian federation-builders of the last fifty years of the fourth century B.C. still commands the admiration of historians, even though all this work was done silently and with so little consciousness of its high quality that no one even thought of keeping a record of it. One does well not to call such a people unimaginative.

To be sure the Latins apparently had few myths or fairy tales, such as have arisen to aid literary effort in certain other regions. Perhaps a penchant for silent doing, a respect for logic and fact may be posited to explain this lack—though such an explanation merely begs the question. We still do not know what is meant by the inheritance of mental qualities. What “myth-making” is we also do not know.

In Greece, where myths grew everywhere to clothe poetic invention, we know at least that the migrant tribes had come in and inherited from the peoples of the Aegean world scores of anthropomorphic deities and heroes that in time aggregated into cycles of more or less related groups. Hittite heroes emerge as Greek gods and Cretan gods as Greek heroes. I do not mean to imply that accident explains all of Greek mythology, for the Greeks enjoyed tales and preserved them. But where the early contacts of the Greeks were fortunate, those of the Romans were not. The Romans on their arrival in central Italy knew no deities in personal form about which tales could gather, and when anthropomorphism came it was imposed by the Etruscans in connection with deities that were never wholly assimilated. The Romans stepped almost from primitive animism to sophistication, and presently to skepticism, and that experience denied them the poetic pabulum which has always been the most envigorating in early art.

Of primitive vocal expression in artistic form at Rome we know but little. It was as thoroughly obliterated by the onrush of Greek as was the native English epic and lyric by the Norman conquest; indeed more, since, not being written, it vanished, while the old English material survived at least in part in dusty archives. Old Romans later said they remembered having heard heroic ballads, and we believe them because the first Hellenizers found a native ballad meter (the Saturnian) which was so well established that they could use it for a translation of the Odyssey and for a native epic. Non-Romans like Livius and Naevius[1] would not have employed the Saturnian verse unless the popular ear had been accustomed to it and demanded it. There were also religious songs accompanied by dancing. A fragment of one of these songs in honor of Mars has survived in a late copy of an early ritual. In Greece a similar ritualistic song had the good fortune of being addressed to Dionysus, a more genial deity, and it seems to have developed into the dithyramb and ultimately gave rise to the drama. On Mars, however, poetry was wasted.

Of a primitive drama we have a vigorous tradition. Simple comic farces were in existence in the village festivals both north and south of Rome—and likely enough at Rome too, though the city preferred to forget its primitive amusements as it grew into a metropolis. Unfortunately the tradition regarding the early Latin drama was vitiated by some early quasi-scholar—apparently Accius—who mingled futile hearsay with a line or two of an early record about Etruscan dancers and with the Aristotelian theory of how Greek drama grew up.[2] He mis-called this putative drama by the name satura. His story unfortunately became orthodox and displaced what might otherwise have survived of a truer tradition. The story is attributed to the year 364 B.C., a time at which no historical records were kept except for the dates and occasions of official priestly sacrifices. That is to say, the story is not worth repeating because it is attributed to a date when no records were kept of such events. All we know is that towns not far from Rome—and therefore presumably Rome as well—had simple drama before Livius began to translate Greek plays.

Such were the germs of the lyric, epic, and drama, vital and capable of growth when and if the times should be favorable. But what is a favorable time? Why, for instance, had not literature come to life among others of the countless tribes about the Mediterranean except the Greeks and Hebrews? I ask, not to answer, but to emphasize the riddle. At Rome a few individuals were emerging from the group, the group was itself breaking out of its boundaries, but experiences were still modest. The citizens were chiefly quiet hard-working farmers who owned and tilled their plots; there was no seafaring commerce that brought tales of adventure from foreign lands, no colonizing beyond the seas, no traveling to foreign parts to bring the Latins a sense of awareness of their own place in the world. Society, as in any democracy where customs of the ruling clique are accepted by the rest, was passing through no strenuous changes, and no religious teacher from beyond the border was entering to shake tradition.

Then, in the third century B.C., came a very remarkable experience: the first great war with Carthage, fought for twenty-three years in Sicily, the victories of which compelled the whole civilized world of the day to recognize the existence of this hitherto unknown people and to invent plausible pedigrees for it. The construction of the first fleet and the sudden defeat of the greatest navy on the seas must have aroused the Romans to self-consciousness, as the Crusades aroused the French and the defeat of the Spanish Armada awakened Elizabethan England. This discovery of the Romans that they existed—that they were being watched and discussed—stirred them into a critical attitude about themselves. They saw that importance in the eyes of others implied expectations. And they discovered that, by the definition of the Greeks, they were barbarians and that the designation was deserved. They set about to learn avidly and to enter into the cultural occupations of the more advanced Greeks.