The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 06

by Unknown

Nor did the epic produce anything really great. Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro, born on the 15th of October, 70 B.C., died the 22nd of September, 19 B.C.) did indeed make an attempt to create a national epic in the Æneid. But it is no more genuine than its fundamental idea of connecting the founder of the new empire with the father of Italian civilisation. Virgil studied under the Alexandrians and all that was to be learned he learned. He created the language and the verse structure which remained the standard for many centuries, so long as and wherever Latin poetry was cultivated. The form is throughout noble, and the poet was thoroughly acquainted with Homer and the Greek epic poets, nor is it without taste that he, as a man of learning, has drawn on this treasure; his ideas are pure and noble and he had learned to know his country and the legends of his forefathers better than many before or any after him, so that a certain national colouring is to be found in his work. But there was one thing which he did not possess; the creative genius which divines rightly in the choice of subject and arranges and treats its material with a light but master hand; as the subject was ill-chosen, so the poet never felt any hearty enthusiasm for it; everything has been thought out and very coldly and soberly thought out; beautiful pictures and striking comparisons are indeed presented; but they are sentimental and studied, and often look strange in their setting.

In the first place the hero is no hero, and the Roman patricians of even the time of the Scipios would have been revolted by this weakling who is feeble and sentimental like the poet himself, and not much more than a puppet in the hands of his divine mother. Such a weak figure gives no opportunity for strength in the treatment, which is accordingly languid, and the twelve cantos are spun out with monotonous tedium, so that to every one acquainted with Homer the reading of them is a mere task to be got through somehow. And if, from the standpoint of learning, the language and verses seem irreproachable, classical, and even worthy of imitation, all pleasure in them is lost by the fact that we are continually aware of the trouble and labour which they cost the poet.

It is characteristic of the times that Virgil possessed a canonical consideration with high and low, and poets and prose writers vied with one another to steal from him. From this fact we may guess the rest, and the loss in this field which has been recorded can have been no great one.

But how rapidly literature declined at the end of the period is clearly shown by the epic of M. Annæus Lucanus, the Pharsalia. This poem was produced in the reign of Nero, and it is difficult to decide whether the choice of subject or his treatment of it deserves the greater censure. The hero of the poem is Pompey, the Pompey of the civil wars, a figure so little poetical that a more unfortunate selection could scarcely have been made; with the utmost poetical license even without any anxiety to keep to the facts there was nothing to be made of the subject. That the civil wars in themselves might be capable of being made the subject of an epic is indisputable; it is equally indisputable that this could be done only by a poetic talent of the first order. But even Lucan could do it in his way, though he is no poet but a scholar of the school of the rhetoricians and the Stoa. As in the school of rhetorics the energy of the scholar signalised and exhausted itself in individual feats of ingenuity, so the poem is divided into a number of scenes without much connection, but distinguished by a soaring imagination, sounding verses, and pompous tirades, and of course with many learned accessories, without which neither a great nor a small poem was conceivable in that period. Besides this haste, uneasiness, and want of discretion are everywhere apparent, and these, too, belong to the time. On the whole it may be said that this poetry is a true reflection of the society in which it originated, and if we had epics by Seneca they might probably resemble those of his nephew. Of such models there could not fail to be imitations; the attempts even extended to the schools, and the editing of the Iliad may well have been the work of industrious scholars, who knew something of Greek and had learned to imitate their Virgil.

Virgil had already directed his attention to the didactic poem, and the Georgics are in their way his best creation. Didactic poetry is not approached with the same expectation as in the case of the higher kinds of poetry, and it is scarcely possible to draw the line between instruction and amusement. When the existence of this monstrosity has once been justified it must be allowed a certain amount of free play. Virgil had here the great advantage of dealing with a subject in which he was really interested and into whose treatment he put his whole heart. A deep feeling for nature and really genuine human sympathy with the subject, which are precisely what is nowhere to be perceived in the Æneid, occasionally break forth in the poem on agriculture. An artificial shepherd’s life, much like the idyls of the eighteenth century, is delineated in the Eclogues, and its unreality is only surpassed by Calpurnius, an imitator of the age of Nero.

Whilst the didactic poem proper received no further attention worth noting during this period, the elegy was successfully dealt with. In Albius Tibullus (54-19 B.C.) it even acquired a characteristic, one might almost say more national form than is the case with its other representatives.

In his elegies, Tibullus is as essentially free from the Greek influence as is conceivable in an age which was steeped in Hellenism; he treated the few themes, which are to be found in his poems, entirely from the human standpoint, and it is only by this means that he tries to affect the reader. The sameness which is easily produced in such works—love and sentimental sorrows are constantly recurring—he has successfully avoided by an extraordinary elegance and charm of treatment. The reader willingly follows the dreamy thought of the poet without blaming him for having led him rather into a world of dreams than into one of living and strong feeling.

The productions of S. Propertius (49-15 B.C.) are already much inferior. He also had true feeling, and the thoughts which it awakened in him are for the greater part not borrowed from his models. But it is overloaded with the learned accessories of Alexandrian learning, and the deep feelings of the poet are unduly thrust into the background by blatant mythological embellishments.

Far more splendid and brilliant is the talent of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso, 43 B.C.-17 A.D.) who cultivated a wonderful borderland between didactic and elegiac poetry. But all his poems have one trait in common, although the Metamorphoses and Fasti may differ from the amatory poems, the Tristia and the Heroides; they, for the first time, display in a more and more decided fashion the arts of the schools of the rhetoricians.

Ovid was a talented poet, to whom verses and thoughts came rapidly and without difficulty, but he was entirely wanting in depth of feeling. Even the poems, which came most from his heart, those laments which he sang in his banishment at inhospitable Tomi, scarcely arouse true sympathy, for the intrinsic unreality from which the poetry of Ovid suffers even here forces itself upon the reader. He recognised the conditions of the new monarchy unreservedly, and no poet is so well qualified as he to give us a picture of the views and manner of thought of the circle which surrounded the imperial house. Sensuality and pleasure are the scarlet threads which run through the Ovidian poems, and the pain which tortures him in banishment is entirely the effect of being shut out from the luxurious way of life which prevailed in those circles whose conversations and intrigues were the very life of his poetry.