Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

The first Messala, who had liberated Messana in the second year of the war, imported a painter to depict his victories on the walls of the senate house at Rome. Duilius who had defeated the Punic Armada was voted an honorary column with a long inscription modeled on the most verbose Sicilian laudations. But these are only some of the superficial effects of the new contacts. The Roman youth serving in Sicily was learning much more. Since the war lasted twenty-three years and since it required the services of practically all the able-bodied young men of Rome, these youths, who encamped some six years each in and about the Greek towns of Sicily, carried home an abundance of impressions that meant much for the future of Rome. There can be little doubt that the tragedies of Euripides and the comedies of Menander were still being played at Syracuse and even in the smaller towns. Indeed Sicily had dramatic writers for many years after Athens had ceased to produce them. Mimes had long been a specialty of Sicily, and Theocritus was still writing them. Rhinton, for a while residing at Syracuse, was producing his farcical parodies of tragedies. Songs, too, tragical, comical, and sentimental were being sung with gestures, with dance and musical accompaniment on the variety stage of Sicilian towns. It was doubtless to satisfy the desires of soldiers who had seen these things that Roman officials immediately after the war introduced the production of Greek tragedies and comedies as a regular feature of the Roman festival. That all important date for Roman and world literature is 240 B.C.

With the war and pride in victory came also the need to write the nation’s history in enduring form. In Sicily the Romans had discovered that they had become the object of wide observation. The Greeks, not knowing how to explain the amazing power of this small group of barbarians, had invented the legend that they must be a remnant of the Trojans. That legend had already found a place in the history of the Sicilian Timaeus, and the Sicilian city of Segesta, which claimed a similar pedigree, had made haste to assert cousinship with Rome, thus winning a favorable alliance with the victors. A pedigree at once so flattering to the Romans and so useful could hardly be disregarded. In less than a generation it came to be the accepted story at Rome—and Naevius, comprehending its literary purport, set out to write the epic of Rome with this legend as his preface. Rome had become conscious and expressive, the third of the western peoples to begin literary creation.

But progress in art is slow. In Greece there was a long silence after Homer. In England there were vast wastes with a few narrow garden spots in the five centuries between Beowulf and Chaucer. Rome had a scanty population of hard-working citizens constantly being recruited for war. After the First Punic War there were frequent conflicts with Ligurians, Celts, and Illyrians. Then in 218 B.C. came the dreaded invasion of Hannibal. Every able-bodied man took up arms. The devastation of crops, the neglect of fields, the burden of taxes, the distressing gloom brought by a succession of defeats precluded all progress in literature. Only the theater continued to give one or two performances a year to grace the religious festivals.

In the middle of this war, in order to keep the Macedonian king from aiding Hannibal, Rome had entered a Greek coalition of states which were at enmity with Philip of Macedonia, and had thus come into close contact with Athens. When, therefore, the Greek states later appealed for aid to save democracy, a strong “philhellenism,” aroused by such contacts and no less by the influence of Euripides and Menander on the Roman stage, brought about Rome’s entrance into the Second Macedonian War.[3] Several men at Rome began (doubtless with the aid of secretaries) to write Roman histories in the Greek language. This does not mean that many Romans could read Greek with ease. It expressed, in a way, a desire that the cultured world should have some knowledge of what this “barbaric” state was accomplishing, and it was a gesture of deference to the one literature then known in the civilized world. Ennius also began to introduce such Greek prose works as he thought the people were ready for, the saws of “Epicharmus” and the cynical theology of Euhemerus. The directest result of philhellenism on literature was the demand for a closer approach to Greek models in the drama. Ennius’ tragedies seem to have restored the Greek chorus, while in comedy men like Luscius and Terence presently vied with each other in claiming to be faithful translators of the Greeks.

In the early decades of the second century it appeared to some observers that Greek literature was about to overwhelm Rome. The younger nobility, led by Scipio Africanus, Flamininus, and their friends, was willing to employ all of Rome’s man power and resources for the liberation of the Greeks from Macedonian rule, and when the Seleucid kingdom began to take advantage of the defeat of Philip and to subjugate the Greek cities of the Anatolian coast, these Romans challenged the great king with the ultimatum: “No Greek shall ever again anywhere be subject to foreign rule.” Never has sentimentalism gone farther in foreign politics. It would not be an overstatement to find in the plays of Euripides produced in translation on the Roman stage the chief factor in this unreasonable wave of enthusiasm for a foreign cause.

But this love of things Greek—which resembles the English enthusiasm for French culture in the Restoration—overshot its mark. The armies that served in Greece and in Asia Minor learned foreign ways too rapidly and brought back too much. Livy (39.6), in a passage which accomplishes its purpose by a sarcastic juxtaposition of incongruous items, tells of the loaded trucks that the returning armies brought home.

There were couches with bronze frames, precious spreads, tapestries and other textiles, and whatever rare furniture could be found; tables with single supports and marble sideboards. Then it was that the Romans began to employ girls who danced and played bagpipes, and posturing houris to entertain guests at dinner. And the dinners were given with delicate care and expense. Cooks, who had formerly been the cheapest of servants, now gave way to expensive chefs, and a slave’s task came to be considered an art.

We have no remains of houses of this period at Rome, but at Pompeii, which went through the same transformation because that seaport town profited by the commerce which Roman armies opened up in the east, we still may see the effects on architectural decoration initiated by this new reverence for things Greek. The lofty atrium of the houses of “Pansa” and “Sallust,” roofed on splendid columns, the Basilica, the theater, and several temples about the Pompeian forum show what that contact with Greece meant to Italian architecture in the second century. Fresco painting had not yet come in, and it is likely that few houses used for wall decoration the oriental hangings mentioned by Livy. But the exquisite Alexander mosaic found in the “House of Pansa” reveals what domestic decoration could be, and the best furniture that has been found at Pompeii is made on patterns introduced from the Hellenized east at that time. In general, though not in all details, we can draw upon the second-century houses of Pompeii for a picture of a few at least of the new Hellenistic palaces that must have been erected at Rome after the Macedonian wars.