Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Latin Language" to "Lefebvre, François-Joseph" / Volume 16, Slice 3

by Various

While the imaginative and emotional side of Roman poetry was so powerfully represented by Lucretius, attention was directed to its artistic side by a younger generation, who moulded themselves in a great degree on Catullus. Alexandrian models. Such were Valerius Cato also a distinguished literary critic, and C. Licinius Calvus, an eminent orator. Of this small group of poets one only has survived, fortunately the man of most genius among them, the bosom-friend of Calvus, C. Valerius Catullus (84-54). He too was a new force in Roman literature. He was a provincial by birth, although early brought into intimate relations with members of the great Roman families. The subjects of his best art are taken immediately from his own life—his loves, his friendships, his travels, his animosities, personal and political. His most original contribution to the substance of Roman literature was that he first shaped into poetry the experience of his own heart, as it had been shaped by Alcaeus and Sappho in the early days of Greek poetry. No poet has surpassed him in the power of vitally reproducing the pleasure and pain of the passing hour, not recalled by idealizing reflection as in Horace, nor overlaid with mythological ornament as in Propertius, but in all the keenness of immediate impression. He also introduced into Roman literature that personal as distinct from political or social satire which appears later in the Epodes of Horace and the Epigrams of Martial. He anticipated Ovid in recalling the stories of Greek mythology to a second poetical life. His greatest contribution to poetic art consisted in the perfection which he attained in the phalaecian, the pure iambic, and the scazon metres, and in the ease and grace with which he used the language of familiar intercourse, as distinct from that of the creative imagination, of the rostra, and of the schools, to give at once a lifelike and an artistic expression to his feelings. He has the interest of being the last poet of the free republic. In his life and in his art he was the precursor of those poets who used their genius as the interpreter and minister of pleasure; but he rises above them in the spirit of personal independence, in his affection for his friends, in his keen enjoyment of natural and simple pleasures, and in his power of giving vital expression to these feelings.

Third Period: Augustan Age, 42 B.C. to A.D. 17.

The poetic impulse and culture communicated to Roman literature in the last years of the republic passed on without any break of continuity into the literature of the succeeding age. One or two of the circle of Catullus Influence of imperial institutions. survived into that age; but an entirely new spirit came over the literature of the new period, and it is by new men, educated indeed under the same literary influences, but living in an altered world and belonging originally to a different order in the state, that the new spirit was expressed. The literature of the later republic reflects the sympathies and prejudices of an aristocratic class, sharing in the conduct of national affairs and living on terms of equality with one another; that of the Augustan age, first in its early serious enthusiasm, and then in the licence and levity of its later development, represents the hopes and aspirations with which the new monarchy was ushered into the world, and the pursuit of pleasure and amusement, which becomes the chief interest of a class cut off from the higher energies of practical life, and moving in the refining and enervating atmosphere of an imperial court. The great inspiring influence of the new literature was the enthusiasm produced first by the hope and afterwards by the fulfilment of the restoration of peace, order, national glory, under the rule of Augustus. All that the age longed for seemed to be embodied in a man who had both in his own person and by inheritance the natural spell which sways the imagination of the world. The sentiment of hero-worship was at all times strong in the Romans, and no one was ever the object of more sincere as well as simulated hero-worship than Augustus. It was not, however, by his equals in station that the first feeling was likely to be entertained. The earliest to give expression to it was Virgil; but the spell was soon acknowledged by the colder and more worldly-wise Horace. The disgust aroused by the anti-national policy of Antony, and the danger to the empire which was averted by the result of the battle of Actium, combined with the confidence inspired by the new ruler to reconcile the great families as well as the great body of the people to the new order of things.

While the establishment of the empire produced a revival of national and imperial feeling, it suppressed all independent political thought and action. Hence the two great forms of prose literature which drew their nourishment from the struggles of political life, oratory and contemporary history, were arrested in their development. The main course of literature was thus for a time diverted into poetry. That poetry in its most elevated form aimed at being the organ of the new empire and of realizing the national ideals of life and character under its auspices; and in carrying out this aim it sought to recall the great memories of the past. It became also the organ of the pleasures and interests of private life, the chief motives of which were the love of nature and the passion of love. It sought also to make the art and poetry of Greece live a new artistic life. Satire, debarred from comment on political action, turned to social and individual life, and combined with the newly-developed taste for ethical analysis and reflection introduced by Cicero. One great work had still to be done in prose—a retrospect of the past history of the state from an idealizing and romanticizing point of view. For that work the Augustan age, as the end of one great cycle of events and the beginning of another, was eminently suited, and a writer who, by his gifts of imagination and sympathy, was perhaps better fitted than any other man of antiquity for the task, and who through the whole of this period lived a life of literary leisure, was found to do justice to the subject.

Although the age did not afford free scope and stimulus to individual energy and enterprise, it furnished more material and social advantages for the peaceful cultivation of letters. The new influence of patronage, which in other times has chilled the genial current of literature, become, in the person of Maecenas, the medium through which literature and the imperial policy were brought into union. Poetry thus acquired the tone of the world, kept in close connexion with the chief source of national life, while it was cultivated to the highest pitch of artistic perfection under the most favourable conditions of leisure and freedom from the distractions and anxieties of life.

The earliest in the order of time of the poets who adorn this age—P. Vergilius Maro or Virgil (70-19)—is also the greatest in genius, the most richly cultivated, and the most perfect in art. He is the idealizing poet of the hopes Virgil. and aspirations and of the purer and happier life of which the age seemed to contain the promise. He elevates the present by associating it with the past and future of the world, and sanctifies it by seeing in it the fulfilment of a divine purpose. Virgil is the true representative poet of Rome and Italy, of national glory and of the beauty of nature, the artist in whom all the efforts of the past were made perfect, and the unapproachable standard of excellence to future times. While more richly endowed with sensibility to all native influences, he was more deeply imbued than any of his contemporaries with the poetry, the thought and the learning of Greece. The earliest efforts of his art (the Eclogues) reproduce the cadences, the diction and the pastoral fancies of Theocritus; but even in these imitative poems of his youth Virgil shows a perfect mastery of his materials. The Latin hexameter, which in Ennius and Lucretius was the organ of the more dignified and majestic emotions, became in his hands the most perfect measure in which the softer and more luxurious sentiment of nature has been expressed. The sentiment of Italian scenery and the love which the Italian peasant has for the familiar sights and sounds of his home found a voice which never can pass away.

In the Georgics we are struck by the great advance in the originality and self-dependence of the artist, in the mature perfection of his workmanship, in the deepening and strengthening of all his sympathies and convictions. His genius still works under forms prescribed by Greek art, and under the disadvantage of having a practical and utilitarian aim imposed on it. But he has ever in form so far surpassed his originals that he alone has gained for the pure didactic poem a place among the highest forms of serious poetry, while he has so transmuted his material that, without violation of truth, he has made the whole poem alive with poetic feeling. The homeliest details of the farmer’s work are transfigured through the poet’s love of nature; through his religious feeling and his pious sympathy with the sanctities of human affection; through his patriotic sympathy with the national greatness; and through the rich allusiveness of his art to everything in poetry and legend which can illustrate and glorify his theme.

In the Eclogues and Georgics Virgil is the idealizing poet of the old simple and hardy life of Italy, as the imagination could conceive of it in an altered world. In the Aeneid he is the idealizing poet of national glory, as manifested in the person of Augustus. The epic of national life, vividly conceived but rudely executed by Ennius, was perfected in the years that followed the decisive victory at Actium. To do justice to his idea Virgil enters into rivalry with a greater poet than those whom he had equalled or surpassed in his previous works. And, though he cannot unroll before us the page of heroic action with the power and majesty of Homer, yet by the sympathy with which he realizes the idea of Rome, and by the power with which he has used the details of tradition, of local scenes, of religious usage, to embody it, he has built up in the form of an epic poem the most enduring and the most artistically constructed monument of national grandeur.

The second great poet of the time—Q. Horatius Flaccus or Horace (68-8) is both the realist and the idealist of his age. If we want to know the actual lives, manners and ways of thinking of the Romans of the generation succeeding Horace. the overthrow of the republic it is in the Satires and partially in the Epistles of Horace that we shall find them. If we ask what that time provided to stir the fancy and move the mood of imaginative reflection, it is in the lyrical poems of Horace that we shall find the most varied and trustworthy answer. His literary activity extends over about thirty years and naturally divides itself into three periods, each marked by a distinct character. The first—extending from about 40 to 29—is that of the Epodes and Satires. In the former he imitates the Greek poet Archilochus, but takes his subjects from the men, women and incidents of the day. Personality is the essence of his Epodes; in the Satires it is used merely as illustrative of general tendencies. In the Satires we find realistic pictures of social life, and the conduct and opinions of the world submitted to the standard of good feeling and common sense. The style of the Epodes is pointed and epigrammatic, that of the Satires natural and familiar. The hexameter no longer, as in Lucilius, moves awkwardly as if in fetters, but, like the language of Terence, of Catullus in his lighter pieces, of Cicero in his letters to Atticus, adapts itself to the everyday intercourse of life. The next period is the meridian of his genius, the time of his greatest lyrical inspiration, which he himself associates with the peace and leisure secured to him by his Sabine farm. The life of pleasure which he had lived in his youth comes back to him, not as it was in its actual distractions and disappointments, but in the idealizing light of meditative retrospect. He had not only become reconciled to the new order of things, but was moved by his intimate friendship with Maecenas to aid in raising the world to sympathy with the imperial rule through the medium of his lyrical inspiration, as Virgil had through the glory of his epic art. With the completion of the three books of Odes he cast aside for a time the office of the vates, and resumed that of the critical spectator of human life, but in the spirit of a moralist rather than a satirist. He feels the increasing languor of the time as well as the languor of advancing years, and seeks to encourage younger men to take up the rôle of lyrical poetry, while he devotes himself to the contemplation of the true art of living. Self-culture rather than the fulfilment of public or social duty, as in the moral teaching of Cicero, is the aim of his teaching; and in this we recognize the influence of the empire in throwing the individual back on himself. As Cicero tones down his oratory in his moral treatises, so Horace tones down the fervour of his lyrical utterances in his Epistles, and thus produces a style combining the ease of the best epistolary style with the grace and concentration of poetry—the style, as it has been called, of “idealized common sense,” that of the urbanus and cultivated man of the world who is also in his hours of inspiration a genuine poet. In the last ten years of his life Horace resumed his lyrical function for a time, under pressure of the imperial command, and produced some of the most exquisite and mature products of his art. But his chief activity is devoted to criticism. He first vindicates the claims of his own age to literary pre-eminence, and then seeks to stimulate the younger writers of the day to what he regarded as the manlier forms of poetry, and especially to the tragic drama, which seemed for a short time to give promise of an artistic revival.

But the poetry of the latter half of the Augustan age destined to survive did not follow the lines either of lyrical or of dramatic art marked out by Horace. The latest form of poetry adopted from Greece and destined to gain and permanently to hold the ear of the world was the elegy. From the time of Mimnermus this form seems to have presented itself as the most natural vehicle for the poetry of pleasure in an age of luxury, refinement and incipient decay. Its facile flow and rhythm seem to adapt it to the expression and illustration of personal feeling. It goes to the mind of the reader through a medium of sentiment rather than of continuous thought or imaginative illustration. The greatest masters of this kind of poetry are the elegiac poets of the Augustan age—Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid.