During the Republic there is a certain similarity between the Catos, Fabii, Claudii, Metelli, Scipios, and the rest. From such men we expect prudence rather than speed of thought, a respect for courage rather than dash, for puritanic conduct rather than for unconventionality. We know them as generals who stuck at a campaign “if it took all summer,” or many summers, as soldiers who refused to acknowledge defeat, as administrators who were sympathetic and patient with provincials but merciless to the disobedient, as lawmakers gifted with the knack of seeing the vital point at issue and reaching it in blunt phrases. They could be counted upon for sanity, stability, patience, and thoroughness. They expressed themselves better in architecture than in sculpture or painting; their lyricists and musicians were not numerous. They enjoyed comedy but it must be quick and pointed rather than subtle. They were peculiarly fond of tragedy but the theme must have dignity and purpose. Above all they loved good sound prose, in the histories of their nation told in periods worthy of the subject or in the long roll of the organ-voiced orator in the senate house.
It would, however, be misleading to stress these facts, which are more patent in public, social, and religious activity than in art. During the republic at least the literature is experimental, and it reveals many diverse tendencies, some of which did not survive in the Augustan day. While tragedy sought to continue the traditions of the best classical Greek work, it chose as its model the Euripidean tragedy with its more modern humanism rather than the older drama whose problems seemed to them archaic. Responding also to the social ideals of a more normal domestic life than old Greece possessed, Roman tragedy was somewhat more romantic in theme, and it broke up the Greek form in order to admit a larger space for the newer music. Comedy on the other hand neglected the Aristophanic type completely, building upon the social plays of Menander and his contemporaries. Rome took patriotism too seriously to care to have policies of state and august consuls ridiculed upon the stage. Yet the delicate art of Menander was not the goal of writers like Naevius and Plautus. His scrupulous respect for words, his fastidious striving toward a quiet contemplative expression of emotion, his insistence upon form, that directed its art toward the reader long after the first performance was forgotten, had made him more genuinely classic in effect than Aristophanes. The Roman dramatist wrote for a single performance, where effects must be translucent and immediate to an audience that was used to the robust fun of homemade plays. Plautus has no connections with rigorously classical ideals. He cares for spontaneous, natural, paganly human laughter.
The Roman lyric of the Republic also rejects classification. Before the Greek lyric reached Rome the great singers of Greece had already been forgotten by decadent Athens as thoroughly as seventeenth-century England had forgotten Chaucer. When the Romans began to study lyrical forms they apparently did not even hear the names of Sappho and Alcaeus; they were told about the dainty epigrams of Alexandria, and they began to copy these. Aedituus and Laevius might as well have lived at Samos. Catullus at first fed on the same fare, but one stirring experience set him free. Thereafter he wrote songs that no Greek could have claimed. They have the lilt, beauty, and precision of his models, but a natural freedom, a lucidity, and a convincing passion that make the epigrams of the Garland seem lucubratory. They obviously spring out of a society that is less artificial and out of a life that grows in a young world.
Lucretius again refuses to fall into a conventional pattern. He has no standards, no proportions, no models. The early Greeks had staidly versified science so that it might easily be memorized. That was not Lucretius’ purpose. Alexandrians had versified science again because the interest in the subject had become general. Lucretius wrote for a public that had cared little for science, but he wrote with the zeal of a prophet because he could not keep silent, and his voice was heard. His work has no unity, no controlling plan or single mood. He hurls his bald facts, his images, his logic, and his pleas indiscriminately. There is nothing else in Greece or Rome like him. And so we might go on.
What are the Romans of the republic? When we read their political history we feel a unity of spirit and are prone to say that we understand them. This may be because of a certain racial trait or perhaps because a certain limited aristocracy set the traditions early which became so binding that political activity followed the mos majorum. But the men who entered literature were not of one class nor did they express the ideals of any one group. They came out of different strata of different localities and spoke for different mores. Whatever we may say we must admit that the really personal literature of the republic was neither conformist nor monotonous, neither Greek nor classical in spirit. It was frankly experimental, but it always proves to reflect some phase of Roman life.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The tradition regarding early bards can be traced to the elder Cato. It is therefore not contaminated by the scholastic traditions which later vitiated the story of the drama.
[2] See Hendrickson, “A Pre-Varronian Chapter of Roman Literary History,” Am. Jour. Phil., 1898, 285. Of the famous chapter in Livy (VII, 2) I should attribute only a scanty line regarding the Etruscan ludii to the Annales Maximi. The rest is unreliable reconstruction, since it refers to a period that antedates historical records by over a century. Many attempts have been made to enucleate the kernel of a dramatic history from the passage, but no one who has dealt with the historical sources of the fourth century can accept such attempts.
[3] Historians who read only Polybius and Livy persist in denying that philhellenism was a factor in Roman politics. If they will but study the fragments of early Roman poetry they will emend their histories.
[4] See Class. Quarterly, 1927, 128.