Life and literature in the Roman republic

by Tenney Frank

To complete the sketch we must also recall that this philhellenism was at first favorable toward eastern cults. The mystic cult of Bacchus, for instance, which apparently had its origin among the slaves brought to Rome from Tarentum and Locri during the last days of the Second Punic War,[4] was for several years allowed to spread undisturbed because so many of Rome’s citizens had become accustomed to such things in Greece and Asia. With all these changes came also a laxity in manners and customs. Young men began to keep companions openly in the Greek manner. The Greek tutors engaged to teach young men Greek literature, rhetoric, and philosophy did not always inculcate respect for old Roman customs. In the Roman family, where woman enjoyed a freedom not known in Greece, new ideas of morality began to affect women as well as men, and since marriage was a contract and not a religious sacrament, bonds were easily loosened and divorces came to be of frequent occurrence. The reflection of these experiences we may observe faintly in the later plays of Plautus and abundantly in the earlier togatae.

All this resulted of course in a severe reaction not unlike the puritanic wave that swept over England after the catalysis of Elizabethan prosperity. Cato supported by many of the conservative nobles undertook to lead the revolt against philhellenism on every possible score. He attacked the foreign policy of the Scipios, which in his opinion wasted Rome’s youth and resources without compensation for a sentimental cause, and the Scipionic group was accordingly stripped of political power. He attacked the returning generals for permitting the soldiers to be debauched by Greek vices; he directed an attack against the Bacchanalian cult till the senate passed a bill inflicting the death penalty upon those who persisted in furthering the cult; he used all the power of his censorship to degrade senators who had yielded to new customs and to conduct a rigid examination of the plate, furniture, and table expenses of his opponents.

Of course this drastic reform movement could not stop the cultural changes that were bound to come. Skepticism and sophistication can hardly be banished by legislation and law courts; but the outward signs of the new culture were for a season obscured. There is no doubt that Greek literature became less popular in the latter days of Cato. Such books as the “Sacred History” of Euhemerus were not again translated for a long time. Those who wished to read Greek poetry and philosophy had to confine themselves for many years to the originals; to put those things into Latin, to translate, paraphrase, or to write similar things in Latin, was not encouraged. Greek rhetoric might still be taught for the comprehension of Greek authors, but to put the Greek rules of rhetoric into Latin for general use was frowned upon. Greek tragedy in Roman adaptations—by Ennius and Pacuvius—had been established at the festivals so long that they remained, and, as adapted to the moral tone of the Romans by those dramatists, there could be little objection to them. But the efforts begun by Scipio Africanus to encourage such plays by making them as inviting as possible to senators bore little fruit. The permanent theater, for which a contract had been let by the censors ten years after Cato’s crusade, was not completed, and when another effort was made to complete it twenty years later the senate had it torn down. Translated Greek comedies were still permitted at the festivals, but it was necessary to indicate that the scene was Greek and not Roman. Latin comedies, togatae—from our point of view not a whit better in morals—then came into fashion. To draw the crowd the authors were permitted a certain freedom of expression but here at least the vices were Roman and hence pardonable.

Such were the effects of the puritanic, anti-Greek reaction supported by Cato. It doubtless did some harm to the drama by precluding the official recognition that might have encouraged better workmanship; it cast a shadow of disapproval over the more delicate forms of literature which were associated in thought with Greece; it must bear some of the blame for the fact that the century after Cato is a period of prosaic nationalistic literature in which no man of real genius appears. Direct contact with the decadent Greeks of the day soon destroyed the sentimental respect that the great literature of classical Greece had created.

Meanwhile, however, a social change was in progress which eventually affected literary production and the literary market at many points, and particularly the drama and prose. I refer especially to the silent movement which before the end of the second century had largely eliminated the free middle classes, substituting for them a slave economy of unusual proportions. When the Second Punic War began, though there were not a few rich nobles who lived in the city enjoying the fruits of country estates, the majority of the citizens were land-owning, working farmers of the type that we have known so well in our central and western states. At that time there was much free farm labor. Slave labor was also used to some extent, but since these slaves were usually of Italic race and thinly distributed they were well treated, indeed they were regarded as members of the family, as was customary with farm hands among the pioneers of our west. Such slaves usually were put in the way of some property with which they could buy their freedom; and with freedom came full citizenship.

The Second Punic War was the beginning of the end of this simple economy. Many small farmers went to the wall, farm labor became scarce because of the heavy casualties in the war. Hence investors often combined many small farms into large estates. At the end of the war, also, commissions were appointed by the State to draw in vast tracts that had been recovered from the Punic occupation in the south, and as colonists did not suffice for the settlement of these tracts much remained public land to be rented out in large estates for grazing. At the end of the war and during the next fifty years, hordes of war captives were brought to the block at Rome: Carthaginians, Iberians of Spain, Sardinians, Celts of the Po Valley, Macedonians, Illyrians, and Asiatics, and also many slaves that Greek owners were glad to sell on an expanding western market. These were bought cheaply, placed on the large estates and on ranches. With cheap labor it was possible to go into olive and vine culture and extensive cattle-raising. And with this capitalistic exploiting the small farmers found it difficult to compete. Many gave up the contest and moved to Cisalpine Gaul or overseas. The middle class of free folk began to dwindle. The few who knew how to adapt themselves to the new conditions acquired estates and lived in luxury. Naturally the hordes of slaves increased rapidly. In the cities also the slaves were increasing and driving out free labor, and they were slaves of foreign stock. Trained up to hard labor and an easy unconcern for morals, these slaves when they gained their freedom got the petty industries and shops in their control, and the citizen poor found it difficult to survive. This was a thoroughgoing social change that progressed silently and steadily through the second century and caused the Gracchi to launch a revolution in their vain attempt to bring back the conditions of a century before.

These changes—which in some respects remind us of conditions in our southern states before 1860—necessarily affected artistic production. At dramatic performances on Roman holidays the audience was of course gradually changing in type and quality and by no means for the better. The audiences to which public speeches were addressed—the speeches that had so much to do with shaping Latin prose style—were not the same in Caesar’s day as in Cato’s. And in view of the dwindling of the middle class, the class which usually provides the larger number of authors, we cannot be surprised if the dilettante production of the aristocratic writers and the hack work of servile producers fill a considerable space in the history of the late Republic. It is generally recognized, I think, that in our southern states between 1800 and 1860 literature fared badly, despite the orthodox argument that the existence of slave drudges gave leisure to genius to develop the nobler arts. Parasitic leisure has seldom employed its talents in artistic production.

This is one side of the social picture of the second century B.C.—the cheapening of the theatrical audiences at Rome which compelled a cheapening of the spectacles produced for them. At the same time, however, there was a rapid expanding beyond Rome of a reading public that spread with the gradual advance of the Latin language throughout Italy. For while in Cato’s lifetime Latin was read only in Latium and in a few colonies, in Sulla’s day the language was understood and used in almost every part of Italy from the Alps to the Greek cities of the southern coast. Hence while dramatic production was deteriorating in the theater at Rome, the non-dramatic literature of published books was winning an ever larger circle of readers. Furthermore, there was at the same time a deepening of cultural interests in the ruling class; for the nobles were becoming aware of their responsibilities as participants in world affairs, were finding a sounder education for their sons, were acquiring libraries and beginning to encourage literary effort. And since the nobles were constantly engaged in public service, their influence told especially in the field of history and forensic prose. This was in fact the period in which Rome’s prose expression developed into a magnificent art.

This is a very brief sketch of the social changes that especially concern the student of republican literature, the details of which we shall try to notice more adequately when we reach the precise problems of each period. To the direct literary influence of specific Greek authors we need only refer at present, for that is less intangible and has frequently been discussed. That influence must not be minimized, for the Romans were generally as devoted to their predecessors as the Italians of the Renaissance were to the Romans, and the English Elizabethans were to the Italians, and they were as frank in acknowledging their debt. If this were a full history of Republican literature, we should have to give very many of its pages to an estimate of the Greek influences.

On the large question of what is called the racial character that is supposed to emerge in Rome’s literature, I am convinced that it is too early to speak. Roman political, social, and religious behavior seem at times to justify the assumption of a certain homogeneity of mental and emotional traits in the Romans. Archaeology does not refute this assumption, for it sustains the view that the ancestral tribes invaded Italy in compact groups that may well have preserved inherited characters for a long period. Again the very fact that the Latin language had fairly well retained its very fragile declensional endings—which Latin lost quickly in the folk-mixture of the middle ages—would lend support to the theory that those tribes had long lived in groups relatively compact. Finally, anthropology seems ready to assume that in the later stone ages, before Europe was thickly settled by agrarians and before the arts of agriculture induced folk-movements in search of land, there was a slow emergence of several diverse peoples in different regions of Europe who, by processes of elimination and adaptation, had attained to what may fairly be called distinct racial peculiarities.[5] It is, therefore, scientific enough to assume the possibility of Latin or Italic traits of character, as distinguished, for instance, from Hellenic, Iberic, or Celtic.